So i’m leveling as Arms, i just 40, and I’m curious, am I better off just staying Battle stance the whole time while leveling solo, or should i stay berserker? All the guides I read say to use Whirlwind on CD, since WW requires Berserker and constantly swapping stances is bad for rage, it would seem berserker is the stance to stay in. I know that if OP is procced you spend the next second or two to dump as much rage as possible before swapping to battle to use OP. Just seems like between sweeping strikes OP and Whirlwind, intercept, charge, berserker rage, and rend seems like a lot of swapping is needed.
I guess my overall question is, is stance dancing something you’re constantly doing in your rotation or is that a DPS loss? none of the guides talking about stances much.
rend is basically useless as it doesn’t scale one bit. i do stance dance based on the situation. i tend to stay battle stance for st or just cleaving but i swap to berserker if there are enough adds to bother using ww. keep in mind ww doesn’t add any damage, it just hits 5 things for weapon damage.
so i generally stay in battle stance but i also go defensive sometimes to taunt something off a healer or try to get rid of some pressure on a tank that seems about to die, etc.
edit: for reference with rend, my rank 5 deals 112 damage over 21 seconds. with one heroic strike, i deal an extra 80 instantly. rend is most likely a dps loss since i doubt anything will live that long. even on raid bosses that will, i don’t think it’s worth the rage and taking a debuff slot since only so many debuffs can be on a target.
Don’t theorycraft while leveling. It doesn’t matter a teeny tiny bit until raids, unless you really really need to be #1 DPS in Uldaman for whatever reason.
Stance dance based on the situation. That includes a macro to equip a 1h and shield and switching to defensive stance in the event of impending death.
You should have Tactical Mastery. With TM, you dont lose that much rage stancedancing. You want to dance as much as possible, ideally playing around your swing timer pretty heavily. The CD for WW ticks down in Battle, and Mortal Strike’s CD ticks down in Zerk. As long as you arent clipping your rage by dancing above 25 rage, you can stance dance for pretty heavy nuking.
I haven’t mained a warrior since wotlk, but did play one pretty extensively late in vanilla/tbc (the class didn’t really change dramatically from vanilla to tbc except their damage relative to everyone else and being able to take deathwish in pvp). Iirc I would charge, mortal strike then switch to zerker for ww and just stay in zerker until it died.
I was pretty bad then, so didn’t really know about the lancing/warrior kiting thing, but you could probably charge>hamstring>mortal strike>switch stances while running away>then come back in for the whirlwind. I’d recommend watching one of the actually good vanilla warriors like monkeynews on twitch. You’ll probably get a better idea about how good warriors are playing/changes to the warrior meta from vanilla to classic from watching him than you would here
you should have tactical mastery to get the guaranteed 25 rage when changing stances. whirlwind is worth it if you have the rage to use it and you are not prevent an as soon as possible mortal strike, assuming its just single target. I believe at 3 targets whirlwind become better than sweeping strikes + MS.
I spend most of my time in berserker stance usually. Charge in, rend, hamstring and berserker. The 3% crit is great when you are only trading one for one on auto attacks
Rend is not really what i’m worried about, and I would never use it on a raid boss anyway. i like using it while leveling because a lot of humanoids run away and that dot will kill them off usually. but like i said that is the last ability on the list because it’s the least important. I just meant in general.
Not to mention that SS is per hit, and will be used with both cleave and WW. So for example, if you hit 2 targets with cleave, that will be 4 hits, and 2 SS ticks. If you charge, pop SS, dance to berserker, and WW, you’ll use all your SS ticks if you hit enough mobs.
That’s actually a pretty typically opener for me while I’m tanking, and would be a great way to steal aggro if for some reason that was something you wanted to do.
I thought this had to do with the fact rend is technically more Damage per Rage. Heroic might give you 80 extra damage, but on your next auto you’re missing out on rage generation, and in the case of rend, the target needs to live for a minimal of 15 seconds to be more efficient?
Something like, yeah, you just spent 15 rage to do an auto with 80 extra damage, but at the same time you just missed out on anywhere from 5-20 rage generation.
I’m the weird one that solos as fury on my warrior (not going arms, as I don’t like that style tbh) who solos faster spending my rage on rend + sunders. But he’s only 30 atm
Ya, most people watch twitch for the personalities, but you can learn a lot by watching people better than you if you pay attention to stuff like their positioning, binds, globals, etc
i actually play dual-wield fury because thats my preference. i’m not sure if you are familiar with what an opportunity cost is. it basically boils down to what can i do with the resources have i and use them most efficiently. rend will deal more damage than heroic strike overall, if the dot gets more than 2/3 of the time through. heroic strike will deal 2/3 of the damage of a full rend but instantly.
now when we get to a more late game situation (like my 46 warr), you replace heroic strike with bloodthirst. bloodthirst doesn’t take up that swing that will generate rage, will do on par or more damage than a heroic strike would, but costs a bit more rage. one key thing that neither heroic strike or bloodthirst have to deal with is taking a debuff slot. since only so many debuffs can be on a mob, it’s better to just let that slot be taken by either a condition like sunder armor or a more powerful dot like serpent sting or corruption.
rend doesn’t look bad at first glance but it’s actually awful when you start getting into the details.
I wasn’t about raiding at all, so I’m not sure why the 16 debuff limit was brought in. This was strictly for soloing or doing dungeons, where the debuffs normally don’t matter. The reason I don’t use heroic strike right now and prefer to actually sunder/rend is because my autos actually go up pretty dramatically around 30. Can go from a white 80-90 to up to constantly 110s, and the offhand (using a dagger atm) goes from around 30-35 to up to 50.
I’m sure when I get bloodthirst, I’ll be using that on cooldown and might look away from rend. Right now I have almost infinite rage by just using 2 sunders a mob and letting autos do most of the work. Really helps with my downtime as, should need be, I can throw in a heroic strike, and once I get bloodthirst I know I won’t have this much rage to spare.
I really love lowering the targets armor and letting me hit them way harder, as from what I’ve seen most low level enemies don’t have a lot of armor, especially if they somehow allow you to land 3-4 sunders on them. It feels like night and day.
Edit: Sorry, my warrior is 26, not 30. I was thinking of my paladin.
