Warrior Tricks and Theory

[Pirlz]

I’m going to try to write out and explain most of my mindset while playing warrior and write out some neat little tricks I’ve picked up along the way.

Disarm (what’s it for, when and how to use it).
This skill is essential and it is important to make proper use of it. First of all it can only be used in defensive stance, and because of that most people bind it to a hotkey in their defensive stance hotbar. That’s great, however I sincerely suggest you place a second copy of the skill (along with intercept, intervene and any other cooldowns that you key inside your main hotbar) on a bar that doesn’t get changed (like top right bar) so you can consistently keep track of the cooldown..

While peeling a melee class you are going to be using disarm. Make sure you use disarm when you are BEHIND your target to avoid fun rng.


No class will dodge you from behind even if it’s a rogue with evasion, so lets say this rogue is chasing your druid. Get behind the rogue and disarm him, or make sure you disarm during intercept stun.

In a warrior vs warrior duel.


I don’t think most warriors realize this but disarm is a rage reset tool.
Take this instance for example. I got a lucky mace stun, used it to intercept and blew most of my rage. Now I’m sitting at 10 rage while the stunned warrior I was attacking is at 100 rage. Now is the perfect time to disarm him. Once that warrior gets disarmed he’ll have 2 choices: a) stay in zerker stance and wait out the disarm (and lose the duel) or b) swap to defensive and disarm you as well (yes you can disarm WHILE disarmed). Basically you force him to swap stances and this kills off his rage.


Warrior vs Druid.

Chasing a druid: manage your global cooldowns so that he cannot get away. You can hamstring him as he swaps into travel and literally stay on him forever. If I know the druid still has barkskin/nature’s grasp I use auto-attack and hamstring with an eventual MS (to keep up the debuff). But I only use MS when I’m sure that he cannot slip away due to GCD(ie mace stun proc).


Nature’s grasp.
You can spell reflect it, when you see the druid get the buff on himself put on spell reflect and auto attack him. If you macro spell reflect properly it’s not very hard

After the druid has used his barkskin/nature’s grasp you want to apply pressure to a target (not the druid) while being out of LoS with the druid (for example a warlock’s pet). When the druid comes nearby to keep that target alive blow your deathwish+trinket and go ape**** on the druid. Always run on top or ahead of the druid (although good druids will ******* juke you and run the other way ranging your hamstring so on top is the best idea).


The druid’s best form of survival at this point is feral charge, have your partners aware of this and they should LoS it or stay too close to druid for it.

Warrior vs Rogue
Rogues take it from behind as much as they do it from behind.

When you are peeling a rogue just make sure you use disarm/hamstring from BEHIND the rogue.

A super ****ty situation is when rogue pressures a warrior when his evasion is on, thus warrior cannot get the rogue’s back and is just taking a beating aside from the overpowers every 5 seconds. A good strategy vs this is to have your partner position himself such that you can intervene him, the intercept rogue. This will allow you to apply hamstring and get some big hits in there(during the stun).

Just remember whenever you have 30+ rage you want to be queued up for heroic strikes on every attack.


Macros + Focus.


I use the following (and love em to death)

/startattack
/cast mortal strike


/startattack

/cast hamstring



Fairly simple stuff, it’s really clutch being able to intervene your partner and just spam hamstring without having to actually click on the rogue.



/cast [target=yourpartner] intervene

^

makes using intervene very easy, reduces a lot of the time spent clicking on your partner or looking for him. Also doesn’t force you to lose your target, which is great for things like intercepting the rogue you were on right after (as I mentioned before).

Theory:
Warrior’s simplicity when it comes to the amount of abilities they have and the difficulty of using them is made up with the complexity of being a GOOD warrior.


The warriors who stand out of the crowds are the ones who have really good situational awareness and thus can determine what they should be doing.


Sometimes it’s better to find the weakest target and put as much damage on it as possible, sometimes it’s better to stay on the warlock and not even use whirlwind so that you have your GCD and rage to pummel the fear.

Warriors are all about target swapping and situational scenarios. I get a lot of comments at the end of matches like “that fear was clutch”. While fear can be used any point in the game the same effect, knowing when to use it is beastly. I’ll provide an example.


Warrior/Druid vs Druid/Rogue.


I get on their druid and their rogue gets on my druid. While sticking to my druid I watch my druid and his fight vs the rogue. At some point I notice his grasp got resisted and his barkskin is down. He got stuck in caster form in a 5point kidney shot. So I intercept/disarm and then run around the pillar (to avoid getting entangled cuz I got off their druid so he’s free to CC). When I Intercepted my druid was at 50% health looking good, but actually he was getting raped.

^100% situational awareness, communication helps a lot so develop good communication with your partners.



As a rule of thumb, (this should apply to every class…) you don’t have the right to comment on how your partner played or call him out on mistakes you think he made unless you know exactly what cooldowns he blew, when where and how your opposing team played against it. After you lose a game relax and try to think about what happened, if there are blurry moments where you have no idea what happened then you need to work on your communication or your ability to watch the game.


You will develop a sort of natural instinct about what is happening after playing warrior for long enough,

[Fudgey]

This was actually quite a nice guide

+rep

[Pwntzyou]

Nice guide!! +Rep

[Machfly]

great guide, would rep if i could