You left off the part where I state rage is resource to be managed…
If charge, blood rage and the initial white swing aren’t enough to get off a shout or two I would be surprised.
Not to mention Berserker Rage. You’re going to be in defensive stance (our should be), most of your rage gen is from taking damage.
Stance dance is where its at. Also Tactical Mastery and Anger Management are amazing, especially for leveling.
Absolutely. With the /sit auto-crit bug being fixed and not proccing Enrage, there’s no reason to go Fury anymore to level.
Keep a good 2H (or offhand weapon) and a good mainhand+shield. If you’re not taking much damage and having a hard time with threat generation or rage, use the DPS setup in defensive stance. If you’re getting trucked and your healer is struggling, equip the shield. You should have a button or macro set up for both on your bars anyway. Just read the situation and respond accordingly.
Yeah, I think Arms is generally supposed to be the classic Warrior leveling spec.
My understanding is that until max level content, you can tank well enough as Arms provided that you carry around tanking gear (1h + shield for those shield blocks and armor, keeping your heavy armor and not using DPS leather etc).
2h tanks are fine, but once you get past SM if you don’t have the spinning axe (Ravager?) then you’r really going to just have a difficult time tanking.
A lot of this comes down to your healer to be honest.
If you have a pocket healer who is ok with 2 hander tanking, go for it and enjoy.
Apart from that, sword and board isn’t just about taking less damage, it’s also tied to some abilities. Once you have enough talent points to spend in the prot tree, shields can be really beneficial, but it can also turn your leveling life into complete hell due to taking forever to solo anything.
Best I’ve found to use while leveling ( in Vanilla and now in Classic ) is a frankenstein aka hybrid build of sorts, open up just enough of the prot tree to give you what skills you feel are most relevant to your personal situation in game, then maximize the damage output with other talents so you don’t totally gimp your soloing. This will give you enough agro hold and damage mitigation in dungeons, while not shutting down your leveling.
The tank won’t do enough damage early on to justify 2 handing. Low level tanking involves a lot of demo shouting, battle shouting, sundering, and revenge. Because damage isn’t really a factor sword and board is more efficient.
As you get geared through the game people might find this may change, but definitely start as sword and board. If you’re trying to keep threat through damage early, you’ll be in for a rough time.
EDIT: And try to drag about 3-4 or even 5 mobs at a time if you’re feeling confident, don’t pull one or two mobs. It’ll improve your rage (along with anger management will improve it a lot) which helps just spamming demo shout… I mean sundering.
I’d say go all the way to 50.
At 40, you can still be making good use of Ravager to AoE tank really well.
Really depends on your healer. One that knows what they’re doing, with decent gear shouldn’t have an issue until after sm cath.
But someone new to healing and/or bad at it, or someone in a dps spec with all strength gear or something might struggle with a 2h tank.
Sub 40 ish, I’d say go 2h unless the healer is struggling, try to keep both skills leveled up.
I do this currently on high end dungeons, Lbrs, ubrs, strat, scholo ect. It depends on a couple of things. How geared you are and how skilled you are. Very little does it depend on healer and there gear. But if you’re not geared, then the healer plays more of a part and their mana pool. Im almost full raid BIS and use the obsidion blade from mc. I 2h tank all the time and loving it. Im usually 1st or 2nd on dps details. My build consist of deep arms and the rest in prot. I still have the necessitys of prot and really only lose 4% armor, sheild slam, and concussion blow for the trade off of ALOT more deeps. I still have shield and sword for raids. My gear consist also of “to hit” and “to crit” gear With a mix of tank gear (+ defense and hit points) . It works good.
The most important thing is your spec and your current weapon skill.
Secondly you’ll get a few mobs here and there that mandate a shield, but 90% of mobs don’t really hit much harder without one.
Many people while leveling will not keep their 1h sword/mace/axe/etc skill leveled up because they only use their 2h while solo. If you then try and use a 1h in an instance keeping aggro will be rather hopeless. So if your 1h skill is behind the level of the mobs you are tanking you’ll have better luck just using 2h.
If you are MS spec then for sure, you’ll want to use a 2h most of the time. Swap to a shield on pulls that dictate it. When SS is available (30 sec cooldown) not only will your tank have solid aggro he’ll also be top damage so it’s a win/win. Often healers are far from stressed too so the added damage makes things a bit more interesting for them too.
I did run in to a fair amount of warriors leveling prot spec though, and of course, they wouldn’t use a 2h at all.
The first real mobs that dictate the use of a shield are:
- Veridan the everliving in WC, has “thrash” and hits like a truck
- Edwin van Cleff, hits fast and has 2+2 (+2) adds
personally I go 2H all the way (lvl50 now), never had an issue. I’m offsetting the increased damage taken by joining dungeons a few level later and my groups are just destroying those dungeons. so yeah… if you want to tank say ZF at lvl 42, i would say bring a 1h. I just go at 46-47 with a 2h.
I think level has alot to do with choice . If you out level the content a bit you can use 2h easily. But why even discuss this … every just pays mr mage to boost
you dont need to be prot, but you should at least have a shield on you for the harder hitting packs unless you are over leveled
Arms + 2h up till about st/brd.
Charge, sweeping strikes, ww, cleave. Big damage and threat.
After you have some better gear fury/prot is the way to go.
2hand is the correct way to play warrior and fulfill the powerful barbarian fantasy
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Do what works for you.
Both is the correct answer.
Level as arms build
Have macros to switch 2h and 1h+shield
Use shield when you are taking too much damage, and use 2h when threat is more important than mitigation