Is Drake Talon Cleaver ever better than Zin'Rokh (in PvP

Yeah, i used to play a warrior as well, and am currently in a guild with 2 high warlord warriors and premaded with many other now rank 14 warriors

Not a single one of the warriors uses axes over the sword, because they all know what they are doing

Well he is an orc. Now I doubt he’s utilizing it correctly (because 90% of rankers are actually trash at the game) BUT as an orc he could theoretically get more out of an axe than a sword because of the weapon skill but that’s only assuming he can actually gain stats elsewhere from dropping 3% hit off his gear.

it depends on the sword like I said, dtc is better than zinrokh but not ashkandi or bre

It’s not a gigantic difference but when you’re around 25+% crit chance as any well geared endgame warrior should be, 2H swords clearly outperform 2H axes for burst when you need it. Of course horde has windfury, but spamstring applies to both factions. I love seeing the extra melee hit pop up when I’m spamming hamstring on a druid trying to run away in WSG.

The marginal utility of 5% extra melee hit vs 5% crit is pretty clearly going to weigh on the side of the 5% extra melee hit given BG-centric PVP. When you have HoJ and sword spec, you see extra hits very often, especially in the group style battles of AB/WSG/AV.

Obviously, when AQ comes out, Dark Edge will be king for pvp, but if you compare equal weapons like the R14 sword and R14 axe for example, I’d go sword all the way even with Orcs having the racial benefit of needing less hit. Because we already have so much hit that it doesn’t matter and there aren’t that many great pieces to downgrade on hit from and get extra other stats.

The burst that you get out of swords is unreal and it happens often enough (especially with HoJ on as well), that there’s nothing else worthy except for Dark Edge and Might of Menethil given the gear we have available now.

I guess Hand of Rag as well for warriors that already have that.

I used the R14 sword in vanilla when I got that, and in classic I used Demonshear until I got BRE. As for the future, hopefully I’ll be able to use Dark Edge until Corrupted Ashbringer or Menethil.

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You get it.

Weapon skill only gives 3% hit in pve when it pushes you from 315 to 310…
Against a lvl 62 mob +5 weapon skill is just .5% hit.

So in pvp its a negligible increase if it even matters at all, Because in pvp weapon skill is treated as 300 regardless of what your skill actually is(however I do not know if that also affects when you have skill higher than 300)

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weapon skill doesn’t do crap in BG’s, because weapon skill is normalized to 300 in bg’s forcibly

You’re human, the choice should be obvious. Take the sword.

would you go so far as to say that runeblade of baron rivendare, or maybe even also demonshear, is better for PvP than drake talon cleaver?
the impression that I’m getting here is that the only damage that matters in PvP is burst damage because 100% of other damage will be healed through if a healer is present and unpeeled, therefore, if it isn’t a sword, then it sucks unless it has a crazy proc, drastically more weapon damage, or both

on a related note, a sword with 1-568 weapon damage would be superior in PvP to a sword with 284-285 weapon damage, and not just because AP would make your minimum damage be alot higher than 1 in the former case

It’s not normalized that way. All normalization does is bring you up to 300 if your skill isnt maxed not down.

But I see now what others are saying, weapon skill gives you much less hit vs a lvl 60 with no +defense. The +8 on my oeb would give me 1% hit after rounding vs a lvl 60 with no +def.

is hit chance from bonus weapon skill(when maxed) vs. same-level enemies not .04% per weapon skill?
also, iirc, its not the same vs. players as vs. npcs

Eh, most warriors are far too focused on damage in PvP. Your survivability is far more important as your real job is protecting healers by peeling other melee. NOT diving in and trying to 2shot a cloth wearer. You have a lot more leeway of course with faps and lips involved but at that point you’re sidestepping the competitive aspect of the game and paying to win so it’s all a moot point there.

In general your first goal for a pvp set is to have 5k+ hp. After that you can focus on damage.

As far as weapons go DTC is very good. Swords are generally better but between swords and axes I wouldn’t downgrade to a worse weapon for sword spec.

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Honestly theres a gaping hole in the information we have regarding that and I can never get a straight answer. I can say after much testing that weapon skill does give hit in PvP but how much I do not know.

that makes me think
i wonder if people who obsess over parses would spend money on microtransactions that make them hit harder
as bad as it would be for the game, blizzard would probably make a mountain of money from such microtransactions while causing no more than half of the remaining playerbase to quit over it, if even that many people(though it would’ve been something like 85% of the then-current playerbase quitting if it happened during p1)
but I digress; I’d like to see more opinions about downgrading your weapon’s average base damage per hit to make it be a sword instead of any other weapon type EDIT: by which I mean more replies to the post of mine 2 posts before this one

What weapons are you debating?

And what do you expect warriors to do to ‘peel’ melee from healers other than kill them? which takes damage. Reminder that Int shout is on a 3 min CD so that’s a once a fight or every-other situation, and most enemy warriors are immune to it along with disarm being a 1 min CD and any melee that really pvps also being immune. Taunt doesnt work in pvp. Realistically all you got left is hamstring and that only less-than equalizes the snares of half the other classes.

I agree survivability is important, but without DPS a warrior in PvP is about the most useless thing you can have… other than a ret pali. EDIT: No, even they have blessings

Weapon skill gives .04% hit and crit per level, so 5 gives you .2% hit and crit, which the game rounds up to .5 for the hit i believe.

Normalized up, not normalized down.

The difference between sword spec and axe spec is minor and really only worth considering if all else is equal, meaning you’re comparing an equal axe and sword:

The best example of that is R14 sword vs R14 axe. In that case yes the R14 sword is preferable to the R14 axe for sword spec.

Otherwise, the raw dps/damage range/speed/proc of the weapon is much more important in the comparison than axe spec vs sword spec unless they’re so close that the spec choice is what matters.

DTC is way better than Demonshear or any blue weapon; it’s even better than OEB for example for PVP. The damage difference is way more important than the spec choice in those comparisons.

But if you have a choice of endgame weapons, you should be replacing axes with BRE or Ashkandi at this stage of the game for PVP. And if you reach R14, then you should go R14 sword all the way for PVP.

Axe spec is certainly not bad, it’s just that the same way diminishing returns works, when you’re at 27% crit, going to 32% crit is not as good as adding 5% extra melee hit. If a warrior is undergeared and only at around 20% crit, then yeah axes is probably the better choice; sword spec really outperforms when a warrior reaches 25-30% crit or higher and you start seeing sword spec crits often enough.

That’s especially true when you consider that sword spec can crit, the rage generation from the extra hit, it can proc off hamstring, horde has windfury, you can add HoJ to go to ~7% chance of extra hit.

Disarm rogue piercing howl demo shout and thunderclap melee, isolate one, kill them. Already much better than a ret pally. But zug zug away.

Admittedly as horde you can dive much easier than alliance due to ele shamans doing way too much damage but even then that shouldn’t mean you dive all the time, which most warriors do.