I see conflicting things about the safest route.
Some say prot.
Others say arms but others say fury 2h
Which is the safest?
Clearly levelling on the forums is safest
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Prot sucks for leveling and its not needed to tank. It especially sucks when you can’t spam dungeons. People who think its “good” just suck at the game, which is many people on the forums.
Fury and arms are about equal, it comes down to preference. Arms makes you better at killing multiple mobs at once due to sweeping strikes, fury is a bit more efficient if you’re pulling mobs one by one. Leveling arms is probably more common because DW doesn’t work as well with low hit, its easier to get one good 2H (such as WW axe), and multi-mob pulls are needed for many quests.
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no warrior worth his salt would recommend leveling in prot 
that’s just a meme personal challenge kind of thing.
both arms and 2h fury are good
level dual wield fury. be the change
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I would do arms to start. Fury doesn’t really start to shine till your mid 30s imo. Switch later if you want. Prot leveling is just…painful.
Keep a decent shield on hand for when you get in trouble and make a macro so you can switch to it while you are running away.
Here’s a link to a video with some macro information
I wouldn’t go too crazy with macros, it’s good as a warrior to build muscle memory for all your abilities but a macro for switching from 2 hand to sword and shield is necessary imo
I just rolled a warrior this morning so this thread is helpful. Thanks!
I went arms. I like the extra armour bonus with the shield.
I haven’t been very serious about HC, but I leveled two warriors during OG Classic, both deep arms and deep fury, and I found Fury to be faster/better overall, but that was my second warrior and forth max level in Classic, so 
Yeah, fury feels a lot smoother/faster on single pulls and has less downtime due to the healing, but it feels bad with multi-pulls compared to arms.
Does it? It’s been a couple of years for me, so I can’t say I have a clear memory, but would there be much benefit in going arms over say just slapping on Ravager for large trash packs if you’re not tanking?
And if tanking, won’t having faster hitting weapons be better for rage gen and threat?
What do you miss out on going deep fury, just Sweeping strikes? I guess Tactical Mastery is pretty big if you’re swapping stances.
Hmm… guess I should start leveling a warrior and test this out!
Yeah it’s mostly sweeping strikes, but sweeping strikes is very good with e.g. WW axe doing double pulls. I prefer 2h fury myself because it’s better on 80% of pulls and tanking, but the few quests with bigger pulls arms is nice (and tbh these are mostly what is “difficult” during leveling, fury just makes the easy parts chain pulling single mobs even easier). It’s mostly preference whether you want a bit more strength on the “hard” parts but slower “easy” parts, or if you want it to be smoother overall but a bit more struggle in places.
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Meh, is it? Wouldn’t you be better off with Ravager’s Bladestorm procs for larger pulls? And that’s a pretty specific scenario (large pulls in dungeons) to optimize your leveling talent build around for HC gameplay isn’t it?
That’s fair. I guess it also depends to an extent what gear you are able to get as well.
Not large pulls in dungeons, there’s lots of things with double or triple pulls. For example, the chicken escort quests where you get groups of ~3 mobs every 20-30s, perfect for SS. Or things like the winterfall runners. Or quests with camps where you can’t avoid double pulls. SS is nice for those, it can be a bit of a struggle in some places. Ravager helps, but you can’t target farm that easily on HC since you can only run it once a day and if you’re playing consistently you’ll outlevel it quickly. I mean we’re not disagreeing, we both like fury more, but arms is definitely better in some places because sweeping strikes is a 5x hit (plus whatever bonus for the abilities) for 30 rage, best efficiency in the game. It plays slightly differently also, with arms you do double pulls to maximize SS, with fury you chain pull singles. Overall I think fury is a little better, but many people like the arms style and it’s not that different. Both are vastly better than prot.
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Oh true!
I guess I could see that.
I’ll have to actually level a Classic Warrior again, and hopefully not die! 
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personally i would go arms, but the truth of the matter is all three warrior specs are bad at leveling the warrior class feels woefully incomplete until lvl 40 at a minimum.
protips:
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try to always be fighting mobs that are “green” to you. your chance to hit and crit are based on the difference between your weapon skill and your targets defense skill, and vice versa. fighting the lowest level mobs means you’ll be doing more damage and taking less so there less need to stop and eat between mobs which will be better xp in the long run.
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on a similar note play an orc with axes or a human with swords/maces their weapon skill racials means your chance to hit will be treated as if you’re one level higher than you actually are
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for most of the leveling process your weapon’s dps stat will be the biggest factor to your damage output. You may have heard that a slower weapon is better, this will be true when you have instant abilities that do “weapon damage” like whirlwind and mortal strike, so weapon speed really isn’t something to worry about 'til you’re close to 40. for the lower levels just higher dps on a weapon is better pretty much regardless of speed.
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related to the previous tip: try to keep your self with the best weapon you can for your level this is difficult because of the RNG nature of drops and the balance of trying to save gold to train your abilities.
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in combat avoid heroic strike unless you’re full on rage, you gain rage from auto attacks heroic strike costs rage and replaces an autoattack so its rage cost is actually higher than it seems similarly slam resets your autoattack timer, costs rage, and has a cast time so almost never worth using. in the early levels you probably want to limit your ability usage to battleshout, sunder armor, and rend (kinda sucks for damage but it’s decent damage per rage cost if you get the full duration of it, and of course if you proc and overpower go ahead and use that as well. Also if you’re fighting mobs that attack quickly consider hamstring kiting (hamstring and runaway until your swing timer finishes so you’re not taking extra damage between attacks)
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Yeah the <40 strategy is basically charge->rend->sunder/HS (depending on mob; sometimes you’re not going to get much benefit from sunder because it will die too quickly), while using overpower whenever it’s up. Demo/TC if there’s 2+ mobs. You do that until 36 when you can instant hit with WW. Once you get execute you can use that if needed, though it’s often better if you’re chain pulling to just hold rage so you can MS/BT every cd.
yeah i would avoid execute unless you’re one execute away from killing the mob you’re fighting AND you need to get out of combat quickly
using sunder instead of spamming heroic strike is huge, yes. i love seeing my white damage tick up after each sunder.
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Arms for sure, the majority of your time spend leveling will be solo play. Prot isn’t that great for solo gameplay. You can easily tank dungeons as arms with 2h, switching to occasional 1h and shield when necessary.
The one advantage I will say that prot has is holding aggro on single target (which can be stronger in hardcore environments where you pull small and slow, obviously take less damage too so easier on the healer.
But I don’t think prot in dungeons is necessary until level 50+ dungeons. You can easily hold aggro, and better by dealing more damage to hold aggro, rather than rely on talents like sunder armor etc.
Since you can’t really dungeon spam in hardcore than makes arms the most ideal leveling spec