Classic Warrior PvP Guide

Being a Warrior in PvP is a delicate balancing act between aggression and caution. You are able to charge in and burst down enemies down in seconds, through heals if need be with Mortal Strike, but this will also put you at a huge risk, as you will be sitting in the middle of the enemy team, who can crowd control or focus you down quickly.

Thus, you are the most team reliant of WoW Classic classes, especially where healers are concerned. They will keep you mobile through Blessing of Freedom and Dispel Magic, healed through enemy focus fire and generally allow you to achieve your PvP potential. In a solo environment, Warrior is one of the weakest classes, heavily relying on bursting enemies down before being controlled and finished off.

Knowing what to to expect from other classes is key in order to avoid becoming a sitting duck. Engineering can also help you overcome many of your natural shortcomings with its unique gadgets.

We would recommend that you use an Arms Mortal Strike build, as its debuff is invaluable against healers, and Arms lends itself well to dealing large bursts of damage, while having better utility and defensive powers than Fury builds.

You can see this build in action on this PvP video, by AndrewJRT, full of huge critical strikes and memes!

For this build, you want to use the highest damage range two-handed weapon you can find. That will ensure high burst damage from Mortal Strike, Whirlwind, Execute,and Heroic Strike, all of which you should dump on the target as soon as possible, whenever you can reach melee range.

Since it will probably take you a while to land all of those attacks, you should almost always begin by using Hamstring on the target, after using Charge or Intercept to close the distance. That will ensure that they stay long enough in your melee range for you to finish the job.

Due to the strict talent tree required to get Mortal Strike alongside Enrage, your preference points consist of maximizing Two-Handed Weapon Specialization at the expense of some points in Improved Overpower and / or Improved Hamstring, and maximizing Improved Battle Shout at the expense of Blood Craze (do not drop Piercing Howl for PvP).

You can find our recommended macros and addons for Warrior PvP in the links below.

You can find our recommended gear for PvPing as a Warrior in the link below.

Consumables are an important part of PvP in Classic. While using as many as possible will quickly get you to 0 gold, you should always have some on you for the fights you cannot afford to lose. We made a list of the most important consumables to have as a Warrior in PvP (look here for a complete list of consumables):

The potions listed below have a 2-minute shared cooldown.

• Major Healing Potion
• Free Action Potion
• Living Action Potion
• Swiftness Potion
• Invisibility Potion
• Limited Invulnerability Potion

Noggenfogger Elixir is also a popular consumable used for PvP. When you drink it, it will do one of three things: make you smaller, turn you into a skeleton, or cast a slow fall spell on you. The shrink effect can be useful to make it harder for players to see and target you, and the slow fall can allow you to jump off high places and not die, while attackers will not be able to follow.

A special remark must be made for Free Action Potion. This potion is absolutely top-tier for Warriors, making you immune to most crowd control effects for a whooping 30 seconds! Use it when engaging into enemy players and enjoy the carnage that ensues.

After using a bandage, you cannot do so again on yourself for 1 minute.

• Heavy Runecloth Bandage

These consumables have a 1-minute shared cooldown.

• Magic Dust
• Clutch of Foresight
• Wail of the Banshee

Most of these are very annoying to farm, so use them only in the case of an emergency.

Engineering is a great profession in WoW Classic, as it creates a lot of useful consumables and trinkets. Some of those are especially strong in PvP, but most of them have a 1-minute shared cooldown, unless otherwise specified:

• Goblin Sapper Charge (5-minute cooldown, triggers 1-minute on rest)
• Goblin Land Mine
• Thorium Grenade
• Dark Iron Bomb
• Iron Grenade
• Dense Dynamite

Warriors looking to do well in PvP usually invest deeply into Arms for Mortal Strike. While this is the icing on the cake, Arms has a lot of nice talents for PvP to pick up along the way:

Tactical Mastery is required for stance swapping to work. Without points in it, you would struggle to retain any Rage when stance swapping to Defensive Stance for Disarm and back to Berserker Stance, for example.

Anger Management generates 1 Rage every 3 seconds, which is not clear at all from reading its tooltip. This makes it a fairly good Rage generating talent that works even while you are crowd-controlled (as long as you keep yourself in combat) and, combined with Bloodrage, enables you to jump into a fight with a decent amount of Rage already.

Improved Overpower makes your Overpower skill critical strike much more often, and since it cannot be dodged, it will go right through a Rogue's Evasion.

Deep Wounds causes opponents to bleed for 12 seconds when you deal a critical strike. This can be used along with Rend to keep Rogues or Druids from re-entering stealth.

Impale is a major (burst) damage contributor for Warriors, and should always be taken.

Improved Hamstring allows you to sometimes root your target for 5 seconds. This can be very useful, both to prevent an injured target from escaping and to allow you to deal damage while taking none, by weaving in and out of melee range against other melee enemies.

Mortal Strike is the PvP Warrior's number one ability. It deals massive damage (especially with a slow two-hand weapon, which you should be using) and leaves a 50% healing debuff on the target for 10 seconds. This debuff makes healing against any group with a Warrior much weaker and allows for kills to happen.

While Cruelty is a staple of all kinds of Warriors, it is especially powerful in PvP, as burst damage is the name of the game.

Piercing Howl provides a reliable source of soft crowd control and can be used to catch up to enemies who are out of Hamstring range, or to take enemy Rogues or Druids out of stealth and slow them in a single button press.

Blood Craze allows you to regenerate a decent chunk of health after being hit with a critical strike, which is very likely in PvP scenarios.

Enrage improves your damage significantly after being hit with a critical strike, which, as we have discussed above, is very likely to happen while PvPing.

While Iron Will could be useful in PvP, having to spend 5 useless talent points to get there prevents the Protection from being of much use.