Warrior Best Warrior Leveling Spec?

[PlanB900]

Hi everyone,

I've played retail WoW for a pretty long time, but I'm completely new to vanilla. I'm going to be playing as a warrior, and I want to be able to tank dungeons decently but also be able to solo mobs pretty quickly (from what I've heard, warriors can tank pre-60 instances even if they are arms/fury). What is the best spec for this?

Thanks for the help!

-PlanB900

 

[vido]

At a glance:

- MS > BT

- weapon specs+AM =~ flurry (assuming ~10% crit i.e. ~35% uptime)

- TM >> imp.slam, Tactical mastery is usually overlooked, but it becomes a huge talent at lv36+ since you can stance dance whirlwinds without wasting rage and sit in battle the rest of the time for overpower procs and 10% less damage intake. Whereas a fury warrior in single target is going to be forced sit in battle and rely on imp. slam which does less DPR than WW. In multi target, you're getting raped in berserker stance since you need to WW and you can't overpower either.

- DW + Impale + imp. OP <<< Enrage (by around 12% DPS bearing in mind you can't get perfect enrage uptime and bearing in mind that given a ~12s kill time deep wounds DPS is valued at 50%)

- imp. rend + deflection < cruelty

- going by the way I framed it: death wish, booming voice, piercing howl, blood craze are the defining fury talents

- sweeping strikes is the defining arms talent

- arms weapon specs can be limiting so be prepared to potentially shell out a tiny bit of gold for respecs, also mace spec is just bad



Imo the most reasonable approach would be going fury for enrage and then a respec at lv 30 for sweeping strikes. When you spec SS, you grind 2 mobs at a time which is certainly more efficient than fury if you can kill mobs with those 5 charges and synchronize your downtime with the SS cooldown.



Talent builds for reference:

Arms:http://db.vanillagaming.org/?talent#LMuxdAio0z

Fury:http://db.vanillagaming.org/?talent#LZE0zu0voVo



If you're still wondering why 2h fury is superior to DW it can be boiled down to a few things:

- Slam. If you're fury specced before you get tactical mastery, battle stance is ideally the way to go due to overpower. If you want to sit in battle you need an ability to burn your rage with that isn't heroic strike, imp. slam fills that void.

- Cleave is far superior with a 2h

- A 2h is slow, so you will get roughly 20% higher flurry uptime due to the low crit chance that you will have while leveling

- Due to the speed you can achieve higher enrage uptime since you will have more time between swings to sit

- People mention hit rating, but in reality this doesn't come into play at all

If you're worried about tanking dungeons, it comes down to how much you value tactical mastery compared to piercing howl and slightly better tps thanks to enrage and flurry. Prot spec is not required by any means, it's hardly relevant for UBRS even.

 

[PlanB900]

Thanks for the detailed and helpful response, vido!

So, once I hit 30 and respec into arms for SS, where should I spend the rest of my points as I level up to 60? Should I just put them into the fury talents that you linked, or something else?

Thanks again for the advice!

 

[vido]

Since you're new I should mention that you need sit on bind and the strategy with enrage is to press that bind ideally between swings and instants so that they're not delayed. This way you can guarantee that you get hit by a crit and proc enrage.If you're going that far into arms, it would make no sense to go into fury talents. You will want mortal strike and weapon specs asap so go 31 points into arms before you branch out to fury. Check out the talent build links in my earlier post.

 

[PlanB900]

Awesome, thanks again vido.
That /sit strategy is really interesting, I'll definitely be using that as I level. I appreciate all your help!

 

[vido]

After leveling again and with the low cost of respecs in place I've tried out a few different builds on my way to 60.

I wouldn't go sweeping strikes until you train whirlwind at 36. Once you get sweeping strikes up after farming rage on your first single mob, when you pull the second mob you need an instant like WW to eat through the procs and burst your initial mob down otherwise if you're just cleaving to get charges off you'll take too much damage in the process and you'll end up with too much downtime.

At 40 fury once again becomes a nice spec, since you can dump rage with BT in battle stance so the lack of tactical mastery isn't that big of an issue. Also DW/2h stops to matter since you won't be using slam anymore, though it's still nice to have a 2h in your bags for those 2 mob pulls.

At 45+ you start packing points into tactical mastery and you can grab a thrash blade, at this point fury becomes truly optimal. Even with a stoneslayer playing arms spec, I have to regen everytime I kill 2 mobs with sweeping strikes whereas with a thrash blade playing fury spec you can kill 10 mobs 1 by 1 before you need to regen. You do have to be more careful with pulls however since you can't handle multiple mobs effectively.