Season of Discovery Arms Warrior DPS Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities

We will present the skill rotation of a Warrior damage dealer as a priority list. This is not an exact sequence in which abilities should be cast. Instead, what it means is, whenever you must choose between using different skills, try to use the one at the top of the list first.

Our list assumes you are running one of the recommended builds from the talents page and are playing a maximum level character. If you are still leveling, please refer to the leveling page for a leveling-specific rotation.

While they are extraordinarily powerful, explosives such as Heavy Dynamite will not be detailed in the rotation. Usually, you will want to use them as soon as the tank has solid threat on the target. The main exception is when you are facing multiple or particularly dangerous (such as enraged) enemies at some point in the fight. Saving explosives to carry you and your group through these moments (and possibly do a ton of AoE damage in the process) is probably worth it. The usage of potions, such as Mighty Rage Potion, will not be specifically detailed in the rotation either.

If it is safe to do so, attempt to open with Charge to generate some Rage, at which point you can begin the normal rotation outlined below.

Also, whenever you finish a fight with a significant amount of Rage, try to carry it to the next fight, using Bloodrage if necessary to keep yourself in combat and generate even more Rage!

1. Stay in Berserker Stance as much as possible;
2. If raiding, help your group maximize Sunder Armor stacks on the boss unless your group has a Priest with Homunculi;
3. Cast Battle Shout if missing its buff, and consider using Demoralizing Shout or Thunder Clap on particularly dangerous enemies if they are not debuffed by these effects yet;
4. Use Execute to continually dump Rage once the boss is almost dead or with any Sudden Death procs;
5. Cast Slam whenever it is made instant by Precise Timing;
6. Cast Overpower while wasting as little Rage as possible on stance dancing with the help of this Weak Aura;
7. Cast Mortal Strike on cooldown;
8. Cast Whirlwind whenever possible;
9. Cast Quick Strike with excess rage to fish for Wild Strikes or Windfury Totem procs;
10. Heroic Strike to dump extra Rage.

When facing multiple targets, use the single-target rotation but replace Heroic Strike with Cleave as your excess Rage dump and give Sweeping Strikes and Whirlwind usage maximum priority.

As a Warrior, you have various offensive and defensive cooldowns at your disposal. Using your offensive cooldowns properly is often the difference between topping damage or just being average, and as such, you should learn how they work and how to optimize their usage.

Sweeping Strikes is a dead talent in single-target encounters, but it shines when attacking two or more enemies at once, as it will essentially duplicate your heavy hitting attacks five times every 30 seconds for only 30 Rage!

Recklessness provides an incredible DPS increase for 15 seconds, but has a huge 30-minute cooldown, so make sure to make its usage count!

Rampage is a small, but also short cooldown DPS boost you can activate whenever you are Enraged.

Demoralizing Shout is much more powerful against most bosses than it is against players, as bosses gain damage much faster per point of Attack Power they have. If you have the Improved Demoralizing Shout talent (at the request of your raid group), make sure to keep its debuff on enemies.

As a flat 10% swing speed reduction, Thunder Clap is weaker, especially considering its Rage cost, than Demoralizing Shout. Regardless, it might still be worth applying, especially to faster swinging bosses who might otherwise land three hits on a Warrior tank before Shield Block can be refreshed, opening the possibility for a devastating critical strike.

Taunt is your single-target taunt ability. Casting Taunt instantly makes the enemy focus on you exclusively for 3 seconds, and increases your threat threshold to be equal to whoever had aggro when you taunted. While this is not an ability you usually want to use, consider doing it if it will save a squishier class from being melee hit from loose enemies.

Intimidating Shout should be used for crowd control purposes or survivability purposes. Be careful with this ability, though, as the fleeing enemies can run into another pack of enemies and pull them, possibly resulting in a wipe.

Many players simply do not use their interrupt unless specifically instructed to. Interrupting enemies can stop potentially deadly casts from going out. Identify those dangerous casts and use your interrupt to prevent them.

In this section, we will dive a bit deeper into the core mechanics and various abilities of Arms Warriors. Understanding these topics is an important step to truly mastering the specialization.

Warrior's primary resource is Rage. It is important that you understand how Rage is generated, so you can effectively manage and use it.

Rage has a maximum capacity of 100, and is empty by default. Rage decays at a rate of 3 per second while out of combat. In combat, Rage does not decay and may even slowly tick up, if you have the Anger Management talent.

You generate Rage in two main ways, by hitting enemies with auto-attacks (white hits), and by being hit by enemies. The amount of Rage you generate depends on the damage dealt, and on the damage sustained.

It is important to understand that you do not have to spend Rage as soon as you get it. Pooling your Rage in order to maximize damage or survivability is an important aspect of playing a Warrior. For example, if you are in a fight and trying to maximize boss damage by keeping your Rage bar empty at all times, you might not have enough Rage to quickly swap to and destroy priority enemies, causing trouble for your group.

You can, however, also lose potential damage if you cap out on Rage. Once you hit the max of 100 Rage, any further Rage generation is lost.