Oh Noes, Wall of Text!

Ding 70.. again. The 5th time hitting 70 isn't as exciting as the first, second, third.. maybe as exciting as the fourth but by the time I had half a bubble to go I just wanted it to be over.

For the most part, I didn't enjoy leveling my Warrior at all. I'm glad shes 70 so I can start doing the PVP thing but the ride there was far from fun.

Don't get me wrong. I love my Warrior.. but man, I hated the grind to get there.

The night started out good. Farming for flasks on Mutoh I got 2 Fel Lotus in under 10 minutes & Jandrae's quest for a good Moonkin weapon ended last night in ZA when the Amani Punisher dropped.

No more than 5 minutes after hitting the big seven-o on Adiar, Call and my wife wanted to start our 3v3 arena team to get points for this week before Tuesdays restart. We named our team Good Eats because the three of us love the Food Network show of the same name, but that didn't stop us from going 0-10.



As you can see, Good Eats is 1337 according to our team rating. We did awful for the most part. I'm still wearing about 60% green quest rewards and had a whopping 13 resiliance thanks to the Thick Felsteel Ring. I hadn't had time to go pick up the 3 pieces of blue rep PVP gear but honestly we didn't care if we won. We just wanted our points.

Hopefully I'll have time to at least get the S2 shoulders before we try arena again.

Booty at the Dark Portal + Kara gets Stallowned.

I was dead set on reaching 70 last night with Adiar but I spaced that our normal weekly Kara run was moved ahead from Saturday to Friday night at 8:30 EST.

With the few hours I had before hand I got in to a group for Black Morass with Ash's Warrior and Munsond's Warrior. In the group was a Holy Paladin with an odd mix of Holy and Prot gear but he healed fine. Forsaken is desperate for a Healadin for our Kara group and after the run we extended an offer for him to run with us. Thankfully he took the offer.

We ran BM twice. Once for the quest and another to get Ash's Warrior, Devastator, enough rep for the helm enchant. Oddly enough, the Hourglass of the Unraveller dropped in both runs. I won the first one, along with the bow from the first boss and the legs from my Bold set. BM is nice and quick but sucks for XP. In the time it took us to do the 2 runs I could have gotten twice the XP from questing in Netherstorm.

Kara time came and the last 3 weeks have been awful for us. We've run in to a string of bad luck with healers no showing and when invites went out the new Pally was nowhere to be found. What our guild needed was a good solid Kara run and our only chance of saving this was a Paladin we had met 2 hours earlier in a PuG and he hadn't shown up.. yet. Thank Jeebus he finally showed up and in less than 4 minutes we had a full Kara group ready to go.

We blew through the bosses until we reached Aran. We had a hangup on him and wiped 3 times due to lack of spell interrupts and horrible luck during the elemental spawn phase. The first two times they spawned in the middle of an arcane explosion. While everyone was running out of the middle, the elementals picked off our raid group one at a time. The third time they spawned during a Blizzard so our melee was caught under it and died instantly.

At this point I was asked to bring in my Warlock, Veresitha, to help with elemental CC and we were doing Illhoof next anyway. They always need me to bring Vere for Illhoof since no one in our guild has a Warlock but me. We downed Aran and Illhoof, I logged back on to Jandrae and we cleared up to Prince. He was tanked a little to close so his aoe killed half of our raid during the first Enfeeble. We took him out the 2nd time, wiped on Netherspite and called it a night.

Overall it was NOT a bad Kara run. We wiped 5 times in total but the Paladin got at least 6 or 7 drops. We also cleared every boss but Netherspite and one shotted Nightbane which is normally difficult with new healers. What does this mean? He'll come back each and every week to get more gear and provide our DPS with Blessing of Salvation lol. We needed a Paladin and we got one. He even joined the guild!

Next week, hopefully we have enough DPS so I can bring Adiar. I'd love a shot at Despair or Gorehowl.

Warriors.. Come Out To Playyeeeyaayyyy *clank clank clank*

I respecced Adiar to the recommended Arena spec of 35-23-3 (minus that last point in tactical mastery) and hit level 69 last night. I have 95% to go until 70 and hopefully I can grind that out tonight.

Call's Warrior, Shimontka, is sword spec but said it never really procs but he's stuck since he dropped a crapload of time and money in to makeing Lionheart Executioner. I read that mace spec was getting a nerf and that it's really only good if you have Stormherald for the extra stun chance. I'm a fan of axes and since Poleaxe Specialization not only boosts two weapons, it's also getting a boost in WOTLK so I went for that.

Call is helping me learn the ropes of the "Slam rotation" and I'm impressed with the damage output when I'm not rage starved. The Slam rotation (SR from here on out) is situational in PVP since most players are moving around constantly but with a .5 second cast time it's still very powerful. Lots of casters have to stand still and casters are Warrior food.

In a nutshell, SR consists of building 45 rage any way you can (Bloodrage or Charge is the best start for quick rage), using a swing timer mod such as Quartz and using a 3.5 speed (or slower) weapon. As soon as your auto attack connects you use Slam, follow that up with Mortal Strike and after both hit (including your global cooldowns) your auto attack should be 1 second or less away. Repeating this looks something like this.



You basically get a normal swing, slam, MS, normal swing, slam and then a bit of dead time to wait for the MS cooldown. If you are in Berserker Stance and have enough rage you can Whirlwind during the second auto attack but it's better off to just wait and build rage to start up the next auto attack, slam, MS rotation.

I'm still getting used to the timing. Since Slam resets your swing timer you want it to connect the split second your auto attack does so you have less "dead air". If you wait for the auto attack and then use Slam there is .5 seconds of dead air and lost dps. This is where Quartz comes in. When you have .5 left on your swing you use Slam. Sounds easy but it's also easy to mess up while your paying attention to your health and other things.

If I don't care for how Slam works in PVP I can always spec out of it and put the points in to something else. No worries. It's just the highest burst damage Arms spec for PVP so I'll start there and work around it.

Warrior Arena - Tips & Tricks

I've been watching some Warrior perspective Arena videos online to see if there is something similar they are doing that I can pick up on.

I don't think 2v2 will be where I'm headed since the point value isn't that great so I'm trying to focus on 3v3.

Some things I'm noticing -

1) Get a healer! - Seems pretty simple but all of the higher rated teams had a healer of some sort. Warriors are nothing without a healer but with one, they're friggin panzerz! Find a high resil healer and make friends with them.

2) Learn LOS - Countless arena videos showed the Warrior and their melee partner luring in an opposing melee class and then pounding him behind their healers LOS. This also prevented opposing casters from sitting back and slinging spells at them non stop.

3) Sword & Board - Think arena is all about 2h? Think again. Use an "outfitter" type mod to swap out your weapons if you are fighting a mixed melee/caster group. While your team burns down the melee, keep your shield equipped and spam Spell Reflect every cooldown to mitigate the damage you take and deal some damage back. Against casters with the ability to heal (I.E. Moonkin, Elemental Shaman) this might even force them to stop casting to heal themselves or just stop wasting mana. Once the opposing melee is down, swap back to your 2h and swing for the fences.

4) Use Common Sense - Hamstring everything, Mortal Strike everything, Whirlwind everything.. Keep your anti-fear abilities active and be ready to use your trinket to get out of CC on a moments notice. Make an Intervene macro for your healer. Blah Blah Blah.

Sounds good on paper, lets see how it actually works when I get in to an arena team. This is a really nice 3v3 video I found over on vimeo.com called "Preach". I like that he lists the team he's facing and what their tactics were.


Preach - The Way of the Warrior pt 1 from Mike Lamb on Vimeo.

Blades Edge Mountowned.

Brandy is still pushing to get her little Dwarf Hunter to 70 by the weekend so last night we finished up Nagrand and started the hellish grind through BEM. This our least favorite zone in Outlands - I HATE building that costume.

We took out all of Sylvanaar and 95% of Toshley's Station before calling it quits. She dinged 69 and I dinged 67 on Adiar. 3 more levels to go until the mind numbing PVP grind!

I'm going through AtlasLoot to see what instance drops I could use that would help in PVP and making a list of how much honor/tokens I'll need for full S2. I need to see how my gear looks at 70 and then see which upgrades are bigger.

I also need some Arms PVP advice but I'm not sure where to look. I tried Arenajunkies.com but they don't give class specific advice, just advice against every 2v2 & 3v3 team possible. I checked the WoWhead forums as well but didn't find much of anything. I've got a spec but I need to know how to gem, what Meta to get, advice against classes 1 on 1, etc. I've been DW Fury since level 20 and have no Arms experiance at all.

The first week in Arena should be embarassing which should make for a good blog post.