With sword and shield, you’ll face the biggest bosses, fend off the nastiest tricks and make sure that the rest of your party emerges from the fight with their skins intact. Or you can fight on the front line and beat up the bad guys. How to play protection and weapon warriors, which attributes are important, which talents are used and many more tips can be found in our current guide.
Warriors can only take on two roles. As a tank, they draw the attention of their enemies to themselves and protect the rest of the player group. As a damage dealer, they fight on the front lines and make life difficult for their opponents. With these two roles spread across three talent alignments, it’s not easy for new warriors to decide which path to take. That’s why we’ll start our guide to warrior classes with an overview of the available levels.
The different alignments
The Protection Warrior
Warriors are among the most versatile tanks, as they represent a completely different type of tank depending on their choice of attribute, skill, and glyph distribution.
On the one hand, there is (or rather, there was) the “aggro tank”, who puts less emphasis on defensive attributes and instead focuses on offensive stats such as hit rate (up to the upper limit of 8 percent) and weapon knowledge (from about 40 points, expertise noticeably reduces the parrying of the boss). With these tools, they aim to create as much threat as quickly as possible.
The “aggro tank” alignment is no longer effective since the hotfix of 08/16/2011, so it is mentioned here for the sake of completeness. In the course of this hotfix, the threat generation of tanks was increased so much that a focus on threat-increasing attributes only makes limited sense.
Then there’s the Avoidance Tank, which tries to withstand as much as possible to make life easier for healers. Most avoidance tanks try to achieve 102.4 percent damage avoidance ( also called “block cap” ). In plain English, this means: If you add the warrior character’s dodge chance, block chance, and parry chance with the base chance that a boss will miss the tank (5 percent), the result should be 102.4 percent. If this is the case, the warrior character should block, dodge, parry, or miss almost exclusively. They would suffer very little damage from melee attacks. Unfortunately, these stats often neglect stamina, so a boss can severely damage a dodge tank with high magic damage.
That’s why there is also a “combo tank”, as we will call this alignment. This alignment is a mix of aggro and avoidance tank, ergo a mix of stamina, endurance and aggro buildup. Since avoidance tanks mostly forgo stamina to reach the block cap, the combo tank focuses on socking mixed stones with stamina and also adds two stamina trinkets to give healers a little buffer. However, the hotfix mentioned above also affects the combo tank. With the change, the combo tank works towards the block cap, as does the Avoidance tank. However, when it comes to very high magic damage, you can still be healed thanks to the still quite high health values.
Which way you end up specializing is up to you, of course, and certainly depends on whether you’re the main or secondary tank in your raid, whether you’re tanking in a main or guild raid. The choice is yours!
The Weapon Warrior
As a Weapon Warrior (often called a MS Warrior), you are fortunately not spoiled for choice. From the start, there is a predetermined path. You can only wield two-handed swords and deal the most damage with a mix of melee attacks and bleeds. In addition, weapon warriors are true PvP talents. Weapon warriors are often found on battlegrounds and in arenas. This is only understandable, because properly played warriors can deal enormous amounts of “burst damage” (the term refers to the damage that can be distributed in a short time). So if you want to play your warrior offensively in both PvE and PvP, the MS Warrior is certainly a good choice!
The Fury Warrior
For Fury Warrior (often simply called Fury), it is very important to manage your Fury properly and show some timing. A well-played Fury Warrior offers high damage potential in PvE endgame and is also fun to quest with. However, you should avoid going into PvP as a Fury, as you don’t have nearly as many options for self-recovery as you do with an MS Warrior. Also, you should be aware that you can naturally only act with 2 two-handers or with 2 one-handers, anything else is pointless. You also need to know that Fury warriors play very fast with 2 one-handers, but can deal significantly more critical hits with 2 two-handers.
Aggro problems – what can I do about them and which stats should I increase to the desired equipment for now?
If you have insurmountable aggro problems despite the threat change since the hotfix, it could be due to several reasons.
For one, it could be because your equipment just isn’t good enough. This is quite easy to check in the arsenal, because with an average item level of 329 points you will be allowed to heroic instances. However, since all the items in the inventory belong to the so-called “GSS”, it is possible that the level of the equipped equipment is far below that. This can easily happen if, for example, the equipment of the second skill is significantly better. But you can see this directly in the character window of the arsenal under “Equipment level”.
As another measure, you can increase your hit rate to the 8 percent mark and improve your expertise towards 26 expertise. Note, however, that this isn’t really necessary anymore, as the base threat of a tank in his defensive stance has been increased from 300% to 500%. So make sure you prioritize your skills properly before reforging and socking everything.
It should also be mentioned that you can safely ignore Expertise and Hit Rating if you have current epic gear.
Rage – where does it come from and how do I use it properly?
Your rage resource is generated irregularly from about 70 percent of your attacks and about 30 percent of your damage taken, so an 8 percent hit chance (called the “hit cap”) is all the more important for damage dealers to ensure decent rage generation. Tanks, however, can ignore this advice, as described above. For sustained rage, make judicious use of the abilities “Command Cry”, “Battle Cry”, and “Berserker Rage” – the latter only generates 5 rage points with the corresponding glyph, but otherwise generates more rage from your attacks for the duration of its effect. Also, Battle Cry and Command Cry have a common cooldown, so you’ll have to decide which one to use before the fight.
What is WoW Classic?
World of Warcraft Classic is a true recreation of the original WoW as you know it from 2006. All parts of the game – from combat mechanics and talent trees to character models and zones – have been recreated, contributing to the authentic experience.
Getting Started
All players with an active World of Warcraft subscription or game time on their accounts have access toWoW Classic at no additional cost.
- Open the Blizzard Battle.net Desktop App and select World of Warcraft from the menu.
- Select World of Warcraft Classic from the Version menu. If you have more than one World of Warcraft account, you’ll see a second Account drop-down list. In this column, select the active account you want to play with.
- Click the Install button. The progress bar will tell you when your game is ready to play.
- Click the Play button when the installation is complete.
You will need to select the realm you want to play on from several different realm types. Make sure you choose the same realm as your friends – in World of Warcraft Classic, you can only group with characters that are on the same realm as you!
Heroes&WIKI, WoW Classic, World of Warcraft Classic, WoW Classic Guide, WoW Classic Guides