Warrior 6.0 Transition Guide

[ragebarr 153]

Following the numerous amount of changes Warriors have gone through during beta, here's what you need to know for 6.0:

 

Arms

 

• Berserker Stance is gone. No more clicking off PW:S and Spirit Shells to do more damage.
• Skull Banner effect has been merged with Recklessness, giving you a way less powerful version of both. Unless your gear is insane, you probably won't even notice the difference when you pop Reck. This is somewhat fixed by the Dreanor perk you'll get while leveling.
• Whirlwind has been added to Arms, and you're going to use it. A lot.
• Rend is back, as a dot that has no interaction whatsoever with the rest of your rotation. It does benefit from Pandemic, however therefore you can reapply it at any point in the last 5.4 seconds and the burst will still go off.
• The lvl 45 utility Talents have been removed and replaced by "rotation enhancing" talents. Right now, Slam is a DPS decrease over taking no talents. Taste for Blood seems like the best one of the 3 at the moment.
• The spec feels really brain-dead since it has no interaction between skills whatsoever. The lack of a Rage generator other than autoattacks also feels weird.
• Heroic Leaping out of melee range and charging back in *between autoattacks* for more rage is a DPS increase.
• T16 2p has been changed to 10% bonus damage on Mortal Strike.
• Shield Barrier is now available as an on demand damage reduction at the cost of rage, however using it will force you into Defensive Stance. It does not require a shield.

 

Overall, Arms will feel entirely different that how it does right now in MoP. You'll be using Whirlwind on ~50% of your GCDs, even on single target. Having Rend back is a nice touch, but it doesn't add much considering it is just a "reapply before last tick" DoT that doesn't have any interaction with your rotation.

 

TL;DR: The new arms rotation is completely different and super easy to learn, albeit very boring in my (and a lot of other warrior's) opinion. Yours may differ though, and the damage Arms does right now is very strong.

 

 

 

Fury

 

• Berserker Stance is gone. No more clicking off PW:S and Spirit Shells to do more damage.
• Colossus Smash is gone, and with it, all of Fury's gameplay. Be prepared to play an entirely different spec than what you're used to in 6.0.
• Skull Banner effect has been merged with Recklessness, giving you a way less powerful version of both. Unless your gear is insane, you probably won't even notice the difference when you pop Reck. This is somewhat fixed by the Dreanor perk you'll get while leveling.
• The lvl 45 utility Talents have been removed and replaced by "rotation enhancing" talents. They all seem somewhat balanced, though Furous Strikes leads to a very spammy playstyle. Unquenchable Thirst feels weird when you're used to hitting BT on cooldown, but is otherwise fine. Sudden Death is by a fair margin the most engaging of the 3.
• T16 2p has been changed to a 10% bonus damage to Bloodthirst. It will probably be worth it to take Mythic Warforged offpieces instead of every tier piece.
• Shield Barrier is now available as an on demand damage reduction at the cost of rage, however using it will force you into Defensive Stance. It does not require a shield.

 

Overall, Fury feels empty - as if it's missing something. The rotation comes down to keeping Enrage up, using RBs as you generate them and dumping rage with Wild Strike. There is no planning ahead required and you can't really pool resources other than 1 RB proc for an upcoming burn phase or trinket proc. I will admit that Sudden Death makes WoD's Fury somewhat fun, but nowhere near as complex or engaging as it is right now in MoP.

 

TL;DR: Like Arms, the new Fury rotation is completely different than it's MoP iteration. It is, however, not as engaging as it's current version. Fury's current damage is also pretty insane at the moment.

 

 

Protection

 

• Cleave is gone, but Heroic Strike can take its place with Glyph of Cleave.
• Skull Banner and Demoralizing Banner are gone. Protection no longer has access to Recklessness.
• Shouts no longer generate rage.
• Heroic Throw has no CD, but now has a minimum range.
• Shield Block now has a 12 second recharge instead of a 9 second recharge.
• All defensive CDs have a shorter duration (this change affects all tanking classes).
• Heavy Repercussion is now a talent. Incite no longer exists, but Unyielding Strikes is similar.
• Execute is no longer worth using.
• Multistrikes proc a 3%/3second HoT that can stack.

Overall, the feel of the prot playstyle has not changed much. The 2p set bonus for t17 compensates for the nerf on Shield Block and the change in length of our defensives is pretty unnoticeable. Resolve acts and feels a lot like Vengeance for our SBar size, but noticeably amplifies our Enraged Regen/Impending Victory/ etc healing. We'll need to use more SBars to compensate for the loss in uptime on SBlk, but that does little to change the overall feel of our rotation.

 

 

Because of the 50% nerf to SBar's scaling with AP, we will need bigger CDs to soak the same mechanics we could before. Mechanics that we used to soak only with SBar may be fatal now that SBar is much smaller.

 

Due to the low power of SBar, the priority is to keep SBlk up as often as possible. Fill in between SBlks with SBars of course, but your #1 priority is to keep SBlk up.

 

With SBar the way it is now, the stat priority is roughly:

 

Bonus Armor > Mastery > Crit > Versatility > Haste > Multistrike

 

If SBar gets buffed substantially (~30%-50% more than it is now), then crit will overtake mastery (fight depending).

[Moozedude 47]

When you do Prot, can you do a sub-section for the feel of Gladiator Stance?  That's completely new, and with no beta, I would really like a little info on my new DPS off-spec.  :P

[Estarriol 167]

Added the prot info to the original post.

[ragebarr 153]

Thanks Esta!

 

@Moozedude I won't add Glad to this post since I was mostly focusing at when 6.0 hits in 2-3 weeks, and Glad won't be available until you reach lvl 100. I'll make another post in a couple days/weeks about the state of the DPS specs at max level.

[Rendoras 0]

@ragebarr

 

I am a long time reader and first time poster.  I have been a DPS warrior ever since beginning of Cata and been playing WoW since Vanilla.  I would be interested to see your take and a guide on both Fury and Arms when you can put one together fo WoD.  This post is a great start but we need your guidance on what the new feeling of the specs will be like!  Thanks for all that you do to support this community!

[Sajakain 104]

@ Rendoras

 

When 6.0 drops live and in the beginning stages of WoD, you can expect to see some guides - especially here. This thread is more of a listing of what has been changed in what our warriors have now to what they have / don't have in 6.0.

 

Welcome to the Warrior boards!

[gonlaz 6]

Blizz has boned Warriors at the start of new major patches historically, do you think they will do more fine tuning?

[Krygan 1]

Why is nobody talking about Bloodbath for Fury single target? Let me know if I'm missing something since I've been somewhat out of the loop on beta, but won't it act as almost a simplified/gimped version of Colossus Smash? I feel silly for comparing the two, but I'm trying to find something redeeming about the situation we're in gameplay wise...

 

edit: For clarity, the comparison is to the peak/valley tendency that is seen in the sim graphs, also possibly a reason to save procs rather than playing whack the glowing button.

Edited October 6, 2014 by Krygan

[ragebarr 153]

It's going to do a peak/valley about as much as any other cooldown does. What makes CS peaks & valleys so intense is that you can afford to save RB procs and pool rage for 20 seconds. You can't do that for a whole minute. 

 

I'll admit that with the buff to Sudden Death, Fury isn't *horrible* to play, but it doesn't feel anything close to what we have right now.

[Krygan 1]

 I've heard that execute is hitting extremely hard for Fury. I'm thinking that an excuse to use the t16 4set might be cool since it adds a little variation w/ the proc, not to mention the BT changes somewhat nerf the extra crit you get from any hwf gear. It's hard to know right now, just seems like maybe it'd be worth checking out.

[nicarlitos 13]

Anyone else giving up their warrior in WOD? So gutted that both dps specs are 'brain dead' now....

[ShaneLedford 0]

Is the Colossus Smash removal going in for 6.0(pre expansion patch) or 6.1(actual expansion) ?

[Krazyito 521]

Is the Colossus Smash removal going in for 6.0(pre expansion patch) or 6.1(actual expansion) ?

 

6.0. 

 

The first number in every pacth indicates what expansion it is for (1 - vanilla, 2- TBC, 3- Wrath, 4- Cata, 5- MoP, 6 - WoD)

 

When that initial patch hits, its going to incorporate all the initial changes that happen for that expansion. 

[Krygan 1]

Anyone else giving up their warrior in WOD? So gutted that both dps specs are 'brain dead' now....

Warriors of all specs are actually extremely powerful right now, and the rotations (especially fury/glad, arms is a different story...) are actually better than most. There's absolutely no reason to give up on your warrior this expansion IMO. Yeah I'm sad about losing Colossus Smash too, but holy shit some other classes have it BAD.

[ragebarr 153]

I'm still bitter about the changes to the warrior's rotations, but I'll live with them.

 

I'm still expecting nerfs for warriors before next tuesday. Barring some awful RNG, warriors are by a fair margin the best DPS in WoD atm. The top few might look close in sims, however most of the close contenders are casters, which are way more affected by movement than we are.

 

TL;DR: Rotations have been dumbed down, but damage is insane for warriors atm.

[Oxithius 0]

Active Icyvein reader, first time poster ;)

I play warrior for about 7 years now (prot/arms) and they are pretty powerfull at the moment, bar tps gen on prot, other tanking classes are far more powerfull and easier to play/comprehend, but but but for me that makes it a challange to play ofc

 

 

Warriors of all specs are actually extremely powerful right now, and the rotations (especially fury/glad, arms is a different story...) are actually better than most. There's absolutely no reason to give up on your warrior this expansion IMO. Yeah I'm sad about losing Colossus Smash too, but holy shit some other classes have it BAD.

What i've seen in our raidteam is that when geared 560+ for some reason Arms seems more powerfull then fury, prolly depends on the players, but our arms war is topping 40k more then our fury one
 

When you do Prot, can you do a sub-section for the feel of Gladiator Stance?  That's completely new, and with no beta, I would really like a little info on my new DPS off-spec.  

I would love to see a section for this too, since i'm really curious about it :p

[Armuun 0]

As far as Tanking goes what will be our main stats? Crit/Haste or Crit/mastery,or a little bit of all 3?

[Sokotep 0]

Thank you so much for this guide. It summarizes in a nutshell the important changes and explains their effects on gameplay. It's the latter that is eye opening. I don't always see the consequences, you spelled them out for me! Thanks.

 

TL;DR: Rotations have been dumbed down, but damage is insane for warriors atm.

 

You might want to add this line into the guide though. My first reading made me think warriors were no longer good or fun. I think your message is that they are good (number wise) but that they are no longer fun (in terms of playing style).

[ragebarr 153]

I think even saying "no longer fun" is a bit of a stretch. Some players will like the new rotations. I personally dislike them, especially when compared to the current ones we have, and I know it shows in the way I worded the first post.

 

In my opinion, the right way to say it is that you're going to feel like you're playing a different class or spec altogether when you log in on Tuesday.

 

I added 2 TL;DR's to the first post though to hopefully make that a bit clearer.

 

I write something about Glad when we're closer to the release Nov 13th date, since we can't play it in 6.0 anyway. However, I don't expect to play it during progression (unless its DPS is much better than Arms/Fury, which it isn't right now) simply based on the fact that because Glad = Prot spec, you have no raid utility and don't have access to defensive stance for on-demand damage reduction.

[Metanor 0]

1st of all spot on guide, very well done and thank you for that

I do want to ask you however for single target fight what is the best combination of talents for fury and arms respectively in terms of damage output(if that s not too much trouble)

Also is SMF better then TG? If so by what margin?

 

Once again fantastic guide

[Veracity 0]

I had heard we were being forced back into stance dancing?  I didnt see any mention of that in your guide (s) so I am assuming my info/knowledge is wrong?  Thanks

[ragebarr 153]

1st of all spot on guide, very well done and thank you for that

I do want to ask you however for single target fight what is the best combination of talents for fury and arms respectively in terms of damage output(if that s not too much trouble)

Also is SMF better then TG? If so by what margin?

 

Once again fantastic guide

 

As far as I know:

 

Arms: 

Lvl 15 - Juggernaut (More rage gen in between autoattacks)

Lvl 30 - Enraged Regen or IV

Lvl 45 - Sudden Death on ST (By an incredibly small margin) / TFB on AoE

Lvl 60 - Damage is laughable. DR is the best, but it still hits like a wet noodle.

Lvl 75 - Vigilance for PvE

Lvl 90 - Bloodbath is better than avatar most of the time, Bladestorm on 6-7+ targets

Lvl 100 - not 100% sure on this one, but I think Ravager is still best.

 

Fury:

Lvl 15 - Double Time or Juggernaut

Lvl 30 - Regen or IV

Lvl 45 - SD for single target, probably UqT for AoE.

Lvl 60 - See Arms

Lvl 75 - See Arms

Lvl 90 - See Arms

Lvl 100 - See Arms

 

 

As far as SMF vs TG goes, they're really close to eachother, so just go with whichever you have the best weapons for.

[ragebarr 153]

I had heard we were being forced back into stance dancing?  I didnt see any mention of that in your guide (s) so I am assuming my info/knowledge is wrong?  Thanks

 

We were for a while, but Blizzard kinda half-backed up on their decision.

 

Some specific abilities defensive (Taunt/Shield Barrier/etc) will force you into Defensive Stance if you aren't, and some offensive abilities will put you in battle stance if you aren't. It's not nearly as bad as it was when they first added it to the beta though.

[Veracity 0]

We were for a while, but Blizzard kinda half-backed up on their decision.

 

Some specific abilities defensive (Taunt/Shield Barrier/etc) will force you into Defensive Stance if you aren't, and some offensive abilities will put you in battle stance if you aren't. It's not nearly as bad as it was when they first added it to the beta though.

Danke sir.  That sounds quite reasonable.  I remember before if I wanted to Disarm or use Beserker Rage I had to switch to Beserker.  If I wanted to Mortal Strike, back to Battle and so on and so forth.  I thought it was a giant pain the in the ....you know where.  Thanks for the info and help.

[lawrence131 0]

ragebarr - is your overall impression that Arms is currently doing more dmg than fury for WOD?  And REND seems so powerful - in a multi-target fight where the adds don't die in 3 secs, is it worth while to Rend multiple targets?