Updated for Cataclysm and Patch 4.3+

This guide is primarily for Warriors who are fairly new to the Warrior class or to PVP in general. It you are already the Warrior PVP god it probably won’t be much help, but everyone else should be able to learn from it. While the gems and builds are oriented to level 85 players, lower levels will be able to get some useful info.

If you want to skip the lower level stuff and blast your new Warrior to 85 ASAP then look into a serious leveling guide.

Contents Of This Guide:

1. Builds:
• Arms warrior PvP – Details specific to Arms
• Fury Warrior PvP – Arms is better, but here’s a build if you want a challenge.
• Protection Warrior PvP – Useful for specific jobs.
2. Basic and Arena PvP Tips
3. Warrior Races
4. Keybinds
5. Professions
6. Stats
7. Gems & Enchants
8. Macros

Warrior PvP Tips

The basic PVP tips:

• Tip #1 – Don’t Die! When your enemies are focusing their attacks on you, use your defensive abilities and your partner’s abilities to help you stay alive.
• Tip #2 – Don’t Let Your Teammates Die! Learn to be good at peeling attackers off of your teammates. Use Charge/Intercept and Hamstring to keep enemies off of your healer. Your general damage can force enemies to play defensively and temporarily reduce pressure on your teammates. Here is a video of an excellent example: Dahis 7: 2700+ War/Druid #1 BG9 By Dahis
  (Peeling refers to pulling an attacker off your teammate, just like your Tank might peel a mob off of the overly enthusiastic mage, or visa-versa.)
• Tip #3 – Don’t Let Your Enemy Get Away! With your Charges and Snares you should be able to keep your target within melee range.
• Tip #4 – Use Proper Key Bindings And Movement Keys! Use WASD for movement with A and D for strafing. Use your mouse to turn by holding down the right mouse button.
• Tip #5 – Burst When Your Target Can’t Get Healed. This is pretty self-explanatory. Don’t waste cooldowns on targets that you know won’t die, such as when they have a healthy healer keeping them up. When they are vulnerable, pop everything and force some real pressure.
• Tip #6 – Sustain Damage When You Know You Can’t Burst Them To Death. Continue attacking, but don’t waste cooldowns on someone who won’t die. At this stage in a fight gather Rage, wait for cooldowns to refresh, and refresh Rend.
• Tip #7 – Keep Your Character In The Center Of The Screen . . . This should be self-explanatory. (yes, it’s a joke.)

Click here to get better

Basic Arena Tips:

A good arena team has to communicate.

• Use macros to call out strategy and specific actions so that your teammates know what is happening.
• Healers should call out heals that are going out.
• Casters should call out crowd control (CC) that is going out, (such as sheeping the other side.)
• Call out CC that is coming in, damage taken, kill opportunities, as well as other important information.

Another important thing is to always know what’s around you. You should know where to line-of-sight your enemies, and know where they can line-of-sight you. You want to know where your enemies and teammates are at all times. Right clicking a portrait and using the raid symbols can often be a huge help to track movement. For example, put a star on your partner(s.)

Advanced Arena Tips:

You must find a perfect balance between doing damage, being aware of your surroundings, and not getting tunnel vision. If you focus on just one person to kill, CC, or heal, you often lose track of what’s going on around you. Try to be aware of everything that’s happening. Focus Frames and Unit Frames coupled with Healing/Damage Macros and Focus Macros will greatly aid you in this department.

Coordination between teammates is important, especially when quickly switching targets to exploit an enemy player who has gotten out-of-position or who has used a PvP trinket/large cooldown at a bad time.

Practice with your team and develop complex strategies. Simply using basic strategies like “attack the healer” will not get you to the top of the Arena ladder.

Again, the more you play together the better your reactions to enemy action will become. Just as in any other battle situation, having the ability and knowledge to counter an opponent’s attack is crucial to your success.

Use Focus Target to have a better idea of what is going on. Combine Focus Target with macros to play more efficiently.

Races

If you want to make a new Warrior for use in PVP there are some things to consider. The following lists some specific racial abilities that will be helpful to the PVP Warrior. Ultimately your skill and gear will count for more than any racial abilities. If you want to blast your new Warrior to 85 ASAP then look into a serious leveling guide.

Alliance:

• Dwarf:
  • Stoneform : Activate to gain immunity to poison, disease, and bleed (will also remove these types of debuffs); +10% damage reduction; Lasts 8 seconds. 3 minute cooldown.
  • The other racials are to snooze over, as far as PvP is concerned.
• Gnome: Size and Escape Artistare the reasons that some say the Gnome is the best of the Alliance PvP races.
  • Escape Artist : Escape the effects of any immobilization or movement speed reduction effect. Instant cast. 1 min, 45 sec cooldown.
  • None of the other racials are useful for warriors.
  • A Gnome’s small size is useful as it makes it hard on people who use the mouse to target their opponents.
• Human: The Human Every Man skill makes Humans a good PvP choice, since you can now have two DPS trinkets.
  • Every Man for Himself : Removes all movement impairing effects and all effects which cause loss of control of your character. This is very useful. It also allows Warrior to use two DPS trinkets in PvP.
  • Mace Specialization : Increases expertise with maces and two-handed maces by 3. Limited use.
  • Sword Specialization : Increases expertise with swords and two-handed swords by 3. Limited use.
• Night Elf:
  • Shadowmeld : Activate to slip into the shadows, reducing the chance for enemies to detect your presence. Lasts until cancelled or upon moving. Generally pretty useless in the Arena, but has its uses elsewhere when a rest is necessary or you’re able to set up an ambush from the shadows.
  • Quickness : Reduces the chance that melee and ranged attackers will hit you by 2%. This is more useful for tanking than PvP, but every little bit helps.
• Draenei:
  • A personal heal is always useful for a class with none.
  • +1 to hit makes end-game gear itemization a bit easier.
• Worgen:
  • Their Sprint-like ability has it’s uses.
  • +1% crit is a general DPS increase, so is always welcome.

Horde:

• Tauren:
  • War Stomp: “Stuns up to 5 enemies within 8 yds for 2 sec.” This is a very useful interrupt.
  • Endurance “Base Health increased by 5%” – More health is always good, but it doesn’t scale well at very high level. Still, it’s free HP.
• Undead:
  • Will of the Forsaken removes any Charm, Fear, or Sleep effect. This is the one useful PvP ability for the Undead, but it’s a nice one.
• Troll:
  • Berserking Increases your attack speed by 20% for a few seconds, which has some definite uses. Add it to the appropriate macros.
  • Da Voodoo Shuffle (Passive) “Reduces the duration of all movement impairing effects by 15%.” Any ability which reduces slows is a good one.
• Orc:
  • Blood Fury Increases attack power for 15 sec.” Very nice, even outside of PvP.
  • Hardiness “Duration of Stun effects reduced by an additional 15%.” Reducing stuns is always a good thing. It annoys the Rogues even more.
  • Axe Expertise – useful if an axe is the best weapon.
• Blood Elf:
  • Arcane Torrent is a very useful area silence and interrupt and restores some Rage.
• Goblin:
  • Rocket jump is almost another Charge. Also a good escape to reset your charge range.
  • 1% Increased Haste is useful.
  • Short size makes it a bit harder on clickers.

Keybinds

The use of keybinds allows you to react to situations far more quickly than with the mouse. Leave the mouse for turning and the occasional clicking.

• Use the W-A-S-D keys for movement with A and D for strafing (moving side to side.)  Some people will shift those keys to the right by one place and use E-S-D-F (S & F for strafing,) which opens up Q & A for more binds.
• Use your mouse to turn by holding down the right mouse button.
• Bind abilities to the 6 keys on the far left of the top keyboard row: `,1,2,3,4,5, and to Q,E,R,T,F, & G. When combined with Shift, Ctrl, and Alt you have a lot of buttons available to you for binding.
• Start with just a few binds, or even just one, and practice them relentlessly. Add more as you get comfortable with them. Your goal is to be a fast touch typist with your keybinds.

This is probably the single most important thing to do that will improve your PVP skill.

Of all the various classes warriors might require the most instinctive play as opposed to actual well-thought out strategies. How much time played seems to drastically improve my abilities as opposed to training myself for specific fights.

I sometimes use a Nostromo gaming pad, sometimes not, I’ve also experimented with special macro set-ups for specific classes, but either way I found that whether I could mash the required key before my opponent could react decided most fights before they even began.

Hitting charge before you’re forced into ‘combat’ status, mashing intercept to catch the sprinting rogue and following it up with hamstring, intervene a team-mate to gain ground or help them fight off another player, all these are determined by how well your hands know what you’re doing as opposed to conscious thought patterns.

Whether you’re Arms, Fury, or Protection, if you can master your keys and hit them in proper succession with your eyes closed, you’ve probably reached the level where you need to worry more about gear than experience.

Professions

Benefits from professions. These are the special benefits you get from having a high level in the professions and they’re significantly better than anything you will find outside of that profession. Note that, in most cases, you’ll lose those benefits if you lose that profession.

• Blacksmithing: 2 free sockets. Just the thing for two more +50 Str epic gems.
• Jewel Crafting: 3 BoP epic gems, +67 Str  – Not such a big thing with the introduction of the epic gems in patch 4.3
• Mining: +80 stam, not affected by percent based buffs.
• Leatherworking: Gives the option for 195 stamina or 130 Str to wrist.
• Enchanting: Gives ring enchants for 60 stamina each or 40 Str each
• Inscription: Shoulder enchant for 195 Stm or 130 Str
• Skinning: Gives 80 crit rating.
• Herbalism: Gives a heal and 480 Haste rating for 20 sec.
• Tailoring: Powerful cloak enchant (swordguard embroidery) which procs for 1,000 AP for 15 seconds.
• Engineering: Many useful gadgets. Synapse Springs adds 480 Str for 10 seconds, on use, with 60 sec cooldown. Very nice for when you just have to burst.

Stats

• Strength, Crit rating, and Stamina are your primary stats.
• Resilienceis something you will want to get alot of. PvP gear has this stat, PvE gear does not. So you will have to do some balancing between the better damage stats of PvE gear and the better defensive stats of the PvP gear. Resilience is useless outside of PvP.
  • Crafting skills allow people to create the entry level PvP gear. Make it (Blacksmithing 525) or buy it.
  • Honor gear is the next step up.
  • Conquest gear is bought via Conquest points primarily obtained from Arenas and Rated BGs.
• Hit Rating- You will need to get 5% hit rating to be capped for Arms PvP.

Gems

Arms and Fury should go Str, Protection might want to go with Stam or Mastery. Our suggestion is to skip socket bonuses and go for Str unless the bonus is big and juicy.

• Meta:
  • Effulgent Shadowspirit Diamond: 81 Stam, 2% less spell damage
  • Reverberating Shadowspirit Diamond: 54 Str, +3% Crit effect.
• Red:
  • Bold Chimera’s Eye +67 Str, self-only jewelcrafting enchant
  • Bold Queen’s Garnet: +50 Str
  • Bold Inferno Ruby +40 Str
• Blue:
  • Solid Chimera’s Eye +101 Stamina, +67 Str, self-only jewelcrafting gem
  • Solid Ocean Sapphire +60 Stam
• Yellow:
  • Mystic Chimera’s Eye – 67 Resilience., Jewelcrafting 500
  • Mystic Lightstone: +50 Res.
  • Mystic Amberjewel: +40 Res
• Green:
  • Steady Dream Emerald – 20resi/30stam
• Cogwheel:
  • Cogwheel socket: Mystic Cogwheel – 208 Reslience, Eng 525
  • Cogwheel socket: Smooth Cogwheel – 208 Crit rating
  • Cogwheels are loaded into sockets on Engie items, such as: Reinforced Bio-Optic Killshades

Offensive Enchants

Basically you should get your enchants based on the priorities above.

Short on gold? Most of the enchants below have similar enchants available, of lesser value, for less cash. We’ve linked to a couple of these. Check with the rep vendor or the Auction House for others. If you want to buy the best enchants, fund all of your alts, donate to the guild, etc., but don’t have the cash, then see what the Tycoon Addon can do about about fixing your poverty.

• Weapons
  • Enchant Weapon: Landslide: sometimes increases attack power by 1000 for 12 seconds. Procs do not stack unless you’re using two weapons, each with Landslide.
  • Enchant Weapon: Avalanche: often deals extra nature damage
• Head
  • Arcanum of the Wildhammer: +60 Str, +35 Mastery, Wildhammere revered (Alliance)
  • Arcanum of the Dragonmaw: +60 Str, +35 Mastery, Dragonmaw revered (horde)
  • Arcanum of Vicious Strength: +60 Str and 35 resilience
• Shoulder
  • Lionsmane Inscription: +135 Str, 35 Crit rating, self-only Inscription enchant
  • Greater Inscription of Vicious Strength: 50 Str & 25 Res.
• Chest
  • Enchant Chest: Peerless Stats: +20 to all stats
  • Mightly Stats: +15 to all stats
  • Enchant Chest: Mighty Resilience: +40 resilience
• Back
  • Enchant Cloak: Greater Critical Strike: +65 Crit rating. This is the best DPS increase.
  • Enchant Cloak: Critical Strike: +50 crit rating
• Glove
  • Enchant Gloves: Mighty Strength: +50 Str
  • Enchant Gloves: Greater Expertise: +50 Expertise
  • Socket Gloves: Blacksmithing, self-only, pop in a 40 (or 50) str gem
• Wrist
  • Draconic Embossment: Strength: 130 Str, self-only, Leatherworking 500
  • Enchant Bracer: Greater Critical Strike
  • Enchant Bracer: Greater Expertise
  • Socket Bracer: Blacksmithing, self-only, pop in a 40 (or 50) str gem
• Belt
  • Ebonsteel Belt Buckle: requires level 80, sockets your Cataclysm belt, pop in a 40 (or 50) str gem
• Legs
  • Dragonscale Leg Armor: Adds 190 AP and 55 Crit rating
• Boots
• Enchant Boots: Precision: +50 Hit rating
• Enchant Boots: Haste: +50 Haste rating
• Rings
  • Enchant Ring: Strength: +40 Str, Enchanting self-only