Warrior leveling guide: Part II
I’ve gone over tradeskills in the last post, now let’s roll our warrior and get rocking.
You start as a piddly level 1 warrior with your bread and butter skills: auto-attack and Heroic Strike. Until you get more interesting options, Heroic Strike will be your ‘yellow’ main attack form. It’s not too exciting, but also not too bad. It costs quite a bit of rage, and rage will be your most precious commodity. While leveling we will focus on getting very rage-friendly talents.
At level 2, you learn your first new skill, your first shout: Battle Shout. More attack power means more damage means mobs dead faster. Throughout your warrior career, keep Battle Shout up at all times. Level 4 finds you with one of the most defining warrior skills: Charge! This is usually the point where you first say ‘Zomg, this is awesome!’ At least I hope you do. 
Your playstyle will change from body-pulling to charging into mobs, for extra-rage. Be careful when you charge though, multiple mobs standing closely together make for a very dead promising warrior. You also get Rend, a very underwhelming DoT effect, but because you have nothing else, you’ll want to use it.
At level 6 you get Thunderclap, at level 8 Hamstring. Basic play-style at that point will be to Charge, Rend, Heroic Strike and if it’s a runner Hamstring. Use excess rage for refreshing Battle Shout after the mob is dead to keep it up on you. If you fight more than one mob, use Thunderclap to slow their pummeling of you down a bit.
At level 10, a new chapter in the life of your warrior begins: you will receive Defensive Stance, and all the tanking skills that come with it. It also means that at this time, you will be able to slap sword and board on and tank in groups. For solo-utility, you will continue to use Battle Stance, and the biggest 2-H weapon you can find. Warriors are very gear-dependent, so try to have max-damage weapons appropriate to your level. While you’re in the capital city of your choice, make sure to visit the weapon trainers and learn all weapons. You can learn all of them, and there will be a time you will find a use for them. Make sure that you know Thrown/Bows/Guns and get ammo if necessary, you will need to be able to pull. As much fun as Charge is, it can get lethal charging into groups.
Talents from 10-19:
10-14 Cruelty – the one talent that warriors of all specs have maxed. More crit = more damage = dead mobs.
15-19 Unbridled Wrath – A chance to get extra rage when hitting a mob. Every little point of rage matters.
While you will still learn a lot of new abilities on your road to 20, few of them have real solo-utility while leveling. Overpower can only be used when your mob dodges. If you miss too many Overpower situations, try using something like Scrolling Combat Text, which will pop up an Overpower message on your screen when it’s available. Use it, it’s nice when you get the opportunity to use it. You also learn Shield Bash. When fighting caster mobs, slap on a shield and bash them to interrupt casting. Every warrior should own Sword&Board, despite leveling Arms or Fury. Get used to lugging different sets of gear around. Demoralizing Shout is a helpful debuff, just like Thunderclap apply it in situations when you are facing multiple mobs, otherwise, save the rage for more offensive skills.
Talents from 20-29:
20-24 Commanding Presence – You want this for its AP boost for Battle Shout. Of course that’s only useful if you keep Battle Shout up at all times. You know you want to.
25-29 Enrage – A must talent as pre-req for Flurry. Again, it boosts your damage, because mobs will crit you while you’re on your own.
Level 20 is a real landmark for the leveling warrior. Dual-wield will become available! Toss out the slow 2-H weapon and get two weapons. Slow speed works better for one-hand weapons for fury warriors, but anything will do to start out with. Don’t be discouraged when DW doesn’t seem like a huge damage-boost right from the start, your miss rate will be fairly high. You will push the DPS once you get to the appropriate talent in the fury tree. More offensive goodies are Cleave, which replaces Heroic Strike when you’re fighting multiple mobs, Retaliation for those moments when you’re really desperate (30 minute cooldown). Intimidating Shout is another useful solo-skill for desperate moments. Got jumped by four mobs? Fear three of them, kill one, run away. Last but not least, you get Execute at 24, another of those skills you never want to be without again. Once the mob is under 20% health, you get to use all of your current rage in a very powerful attack that’s often enough to kill the mob.
Talents from 30-39:
30-34 – Dual Wield Specialization for a major boost of your offhand damage, a no-brainer for fury warriors
35-39 – Flurry is often considered the defining skill of a fury warrior. You will be very crit-heavy (even my prot warrior has over 30% crit), and crits will make you attack faster. Snag it!
Once you’ve made it through the dark and death-heavy 20s, a new dawn is ahead of you, the age of the berserker. At level 30 you will receive a fun quest that sends you to Fray Island off the Ratchet coast, where you will have to best a few fighters in a fight club style setting. As reward you will receive berserker stance. Also, you will receive the Whirlwind warrior weapon quest, which disappointingly favors the 2H weapon warriors, which if you use this leveling guide won’t be of any use to you.
All the new abilities you receive in your 30s are berserker stance abilities. Along with the stance you will receive Slam, the only warrior ability with a cast time. There are some powerful Arms/Fury builds out there that utilize a mix of Mortal Strike and Slam, but for DW-warriors, Slam is less interesting. I might be wrong on that account, I just never played around with it. You will also receive Intercept. Think of Charge but mid-fight, that’s what Intercept does. At level 32, you will learn Berserker Rage. It will make you generate more rage from damage, and you’re immune to fear et al. More rage is a good thing, and the fear immunity makes this very powerful for PvP. At level 36 you will receive Whirlwind, another bread and butter skill for any fury warrior. At level 38 you will receive Pummel which finally means you won’t need a shield for interrupts any longer.
Basic playstyle in your 30s: Charge, Thunderclap, Demoralizing Shout if necessary. Then you switch to Berserker Stance, Heroic Strike, Whirlwind whenever it’s up, all the good offensive abilities. This will get even easier in the 40s, but for now, it’s already quite the nice boost. Combat will feel more fast-paced. Just be careful. Fighting in berserker stance also means you take more damage.
Part III of this guide will cover levels 40-70. Don’t be shy with questions, comments or pointing out blatant misconceptions on my side.
Lovely, very informative guide, thank you for writing it. I will certainly be referring to it many times when I start seriously playing my baby warrior again (after I get my healer to endgame… I really want to the tank up there
)
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Thx! now i’m tempted to start up my 54 warrior again as an alt tank (my main is a druid tank) – looking forward to part 3
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Looks similar to how I leveled my warrior for that bracket — other than the fact that I switched from a horrible Protection-Fury hybrid to pure Fury once I hit the 30s. I’m currently hovering at 50, so I’ll be looking forward to the next part!
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“Charge! This is usually the point where you first say ‘Zomg, this is awesome!’”
Hell yeah. I still get childishly excited (or simply smug) when I can charge a mob on top of a near-vertical incline… especially when other party members have to take the long route round.
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I leveled up pretty much the whole way as Prot. Sure, it takes longer to kill mobs but I didn’t have very many ghost runs. Having a mage with me a lot of the time helped though.
Piercing Howl is another good talent for Fury.
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Personally I’m a huge fan of leveling as 2H fury. At level 30 you can do the quest to get a 2H sword, axe or mace which tend to be much better than anything else in that level range. The quest starts here ( http://www.wowhead.com/?quest=1718 ) aka the berserker stance quest.
A level later you’ll have enough talent points to max out improved slam. With a mod to show your swing timer ( like quartz) plus imp slam and hopefully a decent amount of crit you’ll be dropping mobs in seconds. But unless they’ve nerfed that quest line you’ll probably need help doing all of it at level 30 but it is definitely worth the effort.
Again from experience here since I have leveled 2 warriors, one dual wielding and one using a 2H. The switch from dual wielding to 2H is worth it because my screen wasn’t being spammed with “MISS MISS MISS MISS”
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admin Reply:
July 24th, 2008 at 9:19 am
@Skaze – I should find a link somewhere, but I read a guide on Tankspot where a guy leveled three warriors simultaneously, logging everything. One warrior was Arms, another 2H fury, and another DW fury. DW fury won as fastest spec for leveling.
That said, the 2H Whirlwind weapons are pretty impressive, if you can find a 40+ person to run you through it. I just always thought it was a shame they don’t offer something for DW people. You’ll probably think I can’t call myself a real warrior, but I never tried a Slam build.
Good to see you commenting, Alan.
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Did the guy note what type of gear he was using while leveling? When I leveled Skaze up he was always twinked out from twinking in mostly every PvP bracket on the way up to 60. Hence I always had high crit and hit rather hard.
My original warrior was twinked out also but not as far as Skaze was and I died plenty of times both from leveling and pvping simply due to the fact I couldn’t actually HIT anything when it mattered.
Mostly it’s just a personal taste thing, the fact I missed so often made me nerd rage until I picked up a shiny 2H axe.
Should also note for people who level as fury in WOTLK, SUPPOSEDLY bloodthirst will recover a percentage of HP, not sure on the exact value. But I’m sure it’ll be better than the current 35hp per hit that it currently heals for at level 70…
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admin Reply:
July 24th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
@Skaze – I’ve actually found the posting that details the adventures of the brothers Smith: Warrior Leveling Demystified
I have also read MS specs are stronger for twinked characters whereas lesser geared people benefit from Bloodthirst. I’ll try to cover some of that in part 3 of my guide.
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I read that post about the 3 warriors leveling and can’t say I was terribly surprised at the results once I looked at the type of equipment the DW fury warrior was using. Other than that it was a good read. :>
Though if you’re leveling with say, a healer or someone capable of healing, either 2H fury or arms (when you’re high enough to have MS+Sweeping strikes at the same time) will probably be quite a bit faster due to charging in rounding up a ton of mobs and using sweeping strikes+cleave+whirlwind spam.
That’s what I did with Erin eventually and it worked pretty well until she whined she wanted to do instances to level once we hit outland and made me spec prot.
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You have to consider something for the DW Fury warrior in the Warrior leveling demystified guide.
He’s got Crusader on both hands. From what I understand he has it the whole time he’s leveling. And he’s got the best gear, all the time.
Though i feel like DW Fury would still be the faster leveling spec, i dont feel it would be AS big a gap between it and 2h Fury if the gear was a little more normalized.
I prefer 2h Fury just because its a little more engaging and PVP encounters are much easier to manage.
I hate missing.
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admin Reply:
September 4th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
@Rxn: I prefer DW Fury, because I find it more engaging, more fast-paced. 2H weapons have always seemed so slow to me.
To each their own, I know that both ways to play are fun. In all seriousness, the little DPS difference between the different specs probably won’t matter that much while leveling, it’s a matter of playstyle.
I can see how PvP would be easier to handle as 2H Fury. I tried PvP as DW Fury, and it’s very messy.
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