[Tipps] Warrior Endgame Equipment Adjustment

[kuraiken]

Neither have I any experience in scamming, nor in (new) Exploits, Hacks and the like. (At least currently)

So for my first post I'd like to offer a bit of what I do have.
Experience in playing a warrior.
On my server back in my time I used to be one of the best, and people often asked me how they should gear up, what enchants would be best, etc.
(Back then, pre BC, there was nothing like resilience so a much wider arrey of equipment was available)

At first, it may seem obsolete to recieve advice on how to gear - since there isn't much choice to begin with. However enchants and gems do play a significant role in achieving the stats you need to perform well. Also keep in mind, equipment is achieved rather slowly - and sometimes you might wonder which item you should go for next, in order to improve not only in the amount of stat points distrubuted, but also in the qulity chosen.

It should be common sense, that something like focusing on one of your main attributes does not work well. So naturally, things have to be balanced.

But how?
----
As a warrior, you have 4 very important areas.

1. Health
2. Resilience
3. Attack Power
4. Critical hit %

These four are by far the most important areas to focus on.
Health and Resilience both work for the same goal - providing enough of a time margin for your friends to keep you alive or enough time to take down your enemies. As a warrior, there usually is no going back.
Attack Power and Crit both emphazise "killing more quickly".

Health
Health should always allow you to "live long enough and maybe survive".
As a guideline, you should focus on a health that manages to survive or be close to the damage of 3 major critical attacks of enemies.

For example on level 60 as a warrior, you should have focused on 5500-6000 HP.
Usual crits of mages, warlocks, warriors, etc. centered around 2k.
Today this estimation still works - but due to an increase of instant casts always add about 1k.
Recently a hard crit of casterclasses can deal about 3,5k damage.
So you should focus on at least 11,5k, with season 4 now the optimal value is around 12k-12,5k.

Resilience
Now Resilience is very important, as it greatly affects the crit damage recieved, reduces your opponents crit chance and the damage of dots recieved.
This is pretty common knowledge, your aim should be around 400 resilience
which gives about 10% crit chance reduction, 20% less critical damage recieved and 10% less dot damage recieved.
If you are new to PvP, try to get 200 resilience as fast as possible.
As you will notice under crit chance and attack power, if you do not adjust accordingly very fast, you will recieve outworldish damage that simply was never ment for you.

Critical Strike %
Now I want to do this first, because this is your *main* attack attribute.
As an Arms Warrior (which most Warriors are, Fury's follow the same rule, only prot works different) you will focus on fast, hard damage. This fast burst damage is very important for a team, and this is one of the reason why people will want you at their side.
If a player, for example, has 5k hp left, and heals 2k hp every 1,5 seconds, it's a great difference wether you deal the damage instantly or over a period of time.
If you deal 5k instantly - he dies or is very close to death. [One combination that I like is "normal attack" after a charge/intercept followed by Mortal Strike and a (improved 0,5 sec) slam, which even without crits often deals about 4k+ damage to average armoured targets.]
Now from 1-100% crit chance, what might be the best?
The best crit value you can have is around 28,5-33%.
This means, that about every third hit *should* be a crit, and I have been able to have many enjoyable crit series with this value.
If you go a bit lower 20-25%, only every fourth or fifth hit crits.
Now since you usually can only perform about 3-4 attacks instantly (roughly in this context -> below 2 seconds, usual Instants are normal attack, MS, Slam and Whirlwind), if your crit chance is too low, there is a far bigger chance to have no crit in a burst serie. If you also remind yourself that you will have far less melee crits that build up rage, you might come into situations where your rage supply is not enough to use your damage potential. You do NOT want that to happen.
And Paladins, Shamans with Shields, Priests in general, and mages have ways to disable your rage generation. [Manashield for example, or very high armour, that lowers the damage (or nullify it) and thus disturb your generation. This can be very annoying especially when people try to not target you.]

Now if you'd want every second attack to crit (the next level so to say) you would have to spend about 9-14 (resulting in about 43-47% crit) just to increase it that much.
That is very very expensive.
And like I always told my students:
"You can't do more then to crit."
If you crit, it does not matter wether it's 32% or 45%. A crit is a crit. And all the further stats for other attributes are lost. That bit more crit can never ever make up for it.

So: 28,5-33%. (Values I tested and found "comfortable".)
Actually with end of line gear rather easy to achieve (even with s1).
However: Since Resilience was implented, your crit chance will be reduced by that stat.
Now you can expect full geared PvP players to have about 400 resilience which reduces your crit by 10%.

So as a top player you will have to actually go for 37-42 crit. I found more then 42% crit strains your other stats and is very hard to achieve (especially should you choose a mace weapon which I recommend).
As you may notice, 37 minus 10 would be 27. This reduction had to be made, due to the fact that the equipment and hight of crit available are still a bit low, so even 37 is a "okay" value.

Should you be new to the high level PvP, your goal will be to get to 36/37 very quickly, if necessary by taking an axe or polearm until you can push further.

Attackpower
Now this is your second attack stat. Everything that doesn't go into crit should be focused on attack power. Where crit maxes out by actually criting, attack power has no such limitation. The more the better!
Even Resilience does not reduce the damage you recieve by normal attacks, so attack power bypasses resilience. This means that your 1/3 crit works very well in balance with attack power.
As a top level player you should aim for at least 2000 attack power, as someone getting started your first goal will be to reach 1700. (When talking about attack power, I ALWAYS assume that your Battleshout is up. *Never* run around without it.)
With that much attack power, even your uncrit attacks provide quite a bit of damage and your rage generation is increased. This is very important not only for fights against player who try to hunger you, but also to have a higher chance to destroy a powerword shield or manashield with one hit.

Also, this is the stat where you will focus everything that is not needed elsewhere. If you have a higher HP, you just increase your chance to survive more severe burst attacks, raise your own healing a bit and prolong your time by a second or so. This HP increase will not bring you any profit unless a situation occurs where it is needed. Attackpower will *always* provide a boost of damage and rage, no matter the circumstances. (Unless you manage to get yourself badly kited and contolled, but then it's almost game over anyway)



Summary
End level
Resilience: ~400
Health: 12,5k-13,5k (more is again too expensive on your other stats)
Crit: 37-42%
Attackpower: ~2000

To be more then cannon fodder
Resilience: ~200+
Health: 11,5k+
Crit: 36-38% (35% is already too low!)
Attackpower: 1700+ (remeber Battleshout!)


How to modify the equipment
Now since you know what to watch out for (and hopefully you understand why I have chosen the stats, as this will be of great help to always adjust to the currently best distribution) let's give you some general advice on how to modify your gear.

That for "PvP" arena items and pvp items can be gained by doing precisly *that* is most likely common knowledge. There are also countless guides on which enchantments exist and what gems are good for a warrior.

So I will be giving only a few advices:

- Try to keep to the color of the slot (and thus gain the bonus)
I found that usually you can work with pure gems as like +10 strength (or +20 attack power) and +10 crit gems for the corresponding slots. You usually can reach the health you need by using stamina enchants.
If, however, you would boost a stat that does not need any increase (for example you have 38.45% crit and one yellow socket.) then first check wether you can adjust your gem distribution on a overall scale, and if you can't change anything there (like removing a +4 strength +3 crit gem by a pure +10 strength and thus freeing the yellow socket) and sometimes might be more important to forget about the bonus and just put the wrong gem into the socket.
Base this decision also on how soon you will get a new item with which you might be able to overcome this problem.
Should you be far better at scamming and explointing then I am, chances are you can do whatever you want to make it always fit since you have the gold.

- Try to get the most out of every item-enchantment-slot. For example, there is no use for stamina on the hands, your wirsts are much better. Always check how many stats the enchantment can give you at best and then compare it with what other enchantments of other stats offer.

- Certain substats of less importance should nonetheless be fulfilled. For example to get 4-5% hit as a twohand fighter. This usually is almost completely fulfilled by the gear you can choose, but if you are still on the way, you might want to adjust the hit rating accordingly until you feel comfortable. It may be very frustrating to miss at a very critical moment.

- Certain choices on enchantments and gems (especially in the meta slot) are much discussed and usually based on your personal taste. If you don't want +9 stamina on the boots and choose Surefooted. If you already have minor speed increase (which I recommend to always have) choose +12 stamina.
Just play around a bit to find what you feel most comfortable with, and always try to balance things out a bit.

If you have any additional questions concerning equipment, I will answer them to the best of my ability. Hopefully this will help you, and fill the gap of "equipment based advice" that came to my attention.

[This guide has been written by me, right now, in the depth of the night. Please do not distribute this somewhere else. This is *my* personal gift to this community and it would be disrespectful towards the community to provide it elsewhere and disrespectful to me, if you would claim to be the author.]

Your, by now very tired and exhausted, kuraiken (Dàrius).

[pardalis1111]

not horrible. i too am a pre-bc warrior and know a lot too. you went into it with a lot of detail and im sure you could have left out a few things...
BUUUUUT you did contribute and tried to help and ill be nice and give ya some rep for effort...

[Happy2k]

Where did armor pene go? You know.. the stat that scales with all abilities..

[wouterflip]

mwah it''s a good guide

[kuraiken]

Where did armor pene go? You know.. the stat that scales with all abilities..

Well, armor penetration is already on all the PvP Items you take, so the only way to add more would be by choice of trinkets, thus it doesn't play a huge rule in modifying the equipment, but it's one of the more important sub-stats as it can improve the damage quite a bit.

Addition: rather well known, but maybe someone didn't know this:
chardev.org v4 - A World of Warcraft character planner -

On this site you can try out equipment combinations.

@pardalis1111
Yes, I could have left some things out. But I want people to know why I choose the stats the way I do, so that they can still find their way even when the a new season comes, an addon like WoTLK or anything that changes the equipment in general. So more then giving people "stats" to achieve right now, I want them to understand the mechanics of how you balance your character.