No, spell reflect is not useless in pvp contrary to what you’ve probably heard, read, or experienced. I had my doubts about this ability but recently discovered its niche - and it is a very important one for warriors.

Spell reflect exists to cancel out frost nova, thus giving us an even or better chance of beating mages in 1v1 combat.

The normal dynamic in warrior vs mage was mages using frost nova and blink to keep us out of range (and mana shield to prevent us from getting rage). Nova is on a 30s cooldown, blink is on a 15s cooldown. The warrior answers to these are intercept on a 30 or 20s cooldown and a trinket on a 2 or 5 minute cooldown. It doesn’t take much to see that with these numbers, you are looking at about a 10-15 second window of being able to hit the mage before you become perma-kited.

Spell reflect is the solution, but damn is it a clumsy ability. You have to equip your shield (which you aren’t using - especially if you know you’re up against a caster), you have to have 25 rage on hand, you have to be in battle or defensive stance, and you have to wait for global cooldowns to do your trick. Talk about complicated.

It is however much simpler than it appears. When a mage frost novas you he will try to get a good distance away, without using blink (hes saving that for when you intercept). These are the precious seconds you need to get into battle stance (if you’re not already there) and get your shield on. Don’t bother trying to equip your MH weapon, just the shield. Sit in your little ice cloud and wait. Picking when to reflect is really up to you. Personally I wait to see a fireball or frostbolt about half way finished and then put up my reflect. Usually it reflects, vs a very good mage he will notice and cancel, then eat the reflect with a weak spell, and go back to his original spell. Even in this case you’ve prevented a good chunk of damage and forced him to be on his toes.

When nova breaks, immediately get your 2her back on and march over to the mage and lay down piercing howl or hamstring, and do as much as you can to either damage him or force him to blink. If he blinks intercept immediately and enjoy your victory.

Because you’re either not taking any damage while nova’d, actually dealing damage through reflect, or reducing damage by forcing him to cancel a cast, cast something else, then recast the initial spell, you’ve basically eliminated the problem of frost nova, which is taking damage while rooted. Being rooted by itself doesn’t matter if you aren’t taking damage.

So where do you get the 25 rage to reflect? Well lucky you being 35/23/3 have such talents as improved charge, second wind, and tactical mastery. You’ve also got bloodrage. If charge lands and he novas immediately, you’re pretty much set. Improved charge yields 21 rage, AM is 1 rage per 3 sec, and the nova procs your second wind bringing you up over 25. If you had to run in without charging due to long range counterspell, use bloodrage as soon as you get nova’d (and switch to battle if you aren’t there).

As I said it’s a very specific application for spell reflect, but it is also one we desperately needed in order to close the gap between ourselves and mages. Before crying about this ability, practice using it. The biggest thing is mages don’t expect it to happen, so many times you will easily reflect their main spell.

Veritas

While arms warriors are generally creatures of the pvp world, most of us at some point in time get involved in pve at least a bit. Many times you will have to tank - it sucks, but often that’s the only way to get a spot in the group. However there are two exceptional instances that came in the expansion where the arms warrior absolutely shines in 5-man groups: Black Morass (caverns of time), and Shattered Halls (hellfire citadel).

Most don’t think of arms as being an AoE class, but effectively that is what we boil down to in pve. The big fat 2 hander with sweeping strikes, cleave, and whirlwind is how we pump out our highest damage. Most of us are spamming MS and Whirlwind even on single targets. Toss in a secondary target and we get more out of our whirlwind and can toss in cleave as another damage boost when rage is in excess.

Unlike a mage, where getting hit while AoE’ing is often disastrous, for an arms warrior its pure goodness fuelling our dps with more rage and enrage procs. While I don’t recommend trying to get hit in most heroics, in non-heroics the damage is low enough that the mitigation of your plate actually makes it not a bad idea.

Why these two instances in particular?

Black morass feels like it was built for an arms warrior specifically. There is NO crowd control involved in this zone. It’s a balls-out dps battle from start to finish. The reason you shine as an arms warrior is that 1 person needs to contain the adds that head for Medivh’s portal - and that 1 person is you. You can grab the trash with piercing howl, keep it next to the elite, and go to town with sweeping strikes, whirlwind, and cleave thus maintaining your dps on the elite AND the trash at the same time.

The main piece you want out of here is [hourglass of the unraveller]. There are also the [pauldrons of the crimson flight] which sadly are worse than [sylvanaar champions shoulders] (or at best a sidegrade).

Shattered halls is home to a lot of 5 and 6 mob pulls. You’re never going to CC them all, so the tank will be holding 2 or 3 mobs (sometimes 4). They hit weak enough that even if you end up with the agro of 2 of them its going to fuel your dps without putting a big strain on your healer. If you take on the adds on the final boss (kargath bladefist) you can again get them close enough to him to be able to whirlwind/cleave damaging both.

There isn’t much in the way of dps-war loot from shattered halls. The main thing you are doing this for is reputation to get you into the heroic hellfire instances. Some goodies to look forward to in those heroics include: [crimsonforge breastplate], [bloodlord's legplates], and [spaulders of slaughter]. There’s also [doomplate gauntlets] which can be good if you’re using them to get the set bonus.

Veritas

Should a warrior go for lots of stamina and resilience, or should attack power and crit be the priority for the arenas. The are two schools, one say there is no such thing as too much stamina or resilience, the other that warriors are not being targeted and focus fired first, so we should focus on dps stats above all.

From 1v1 perspective, stamina wins. If you do the math to figure out at which point the % increase in dps from strength = % increase of stamina, you will probably end up somewhere near 1.2k attack power and 14k hp - if you have higher attack power or less hp, then at this moment stamina will scale your survivability better then strength will scale your dps. And even then stamina is going to be a better choice, since it’s cheaper in itemization and since you got Second Wind and, probably, Blood Craze.

From 5v5 perspective, when warrior is not focus fired, you can focus on ap/crit more and be the damage dealer of your team. In theory, it’s better to kill faster when there is 5 of peeps on the arena, then to be last man standing against 4-5 people because your team didn’t manage to outdps the heal. This is going to change eventually, since casters get more and more stamina and resilience, while some warriors stay behind, we are not that far away from reaching the point at which it’s going to be easier to kill a pew pew warrior then a heavily sta/resilience geared mage, not even mentioning warlocks.

It’s psychology, since patch 2.0.1 warriors are not getting disarmed, because we are supposed to be immune, you can skip weapon mastery and chances are, quite high, that you are not going to get disarmed, because people will think you are immune, since you are wielding a two hander. We are not getting focus fired, because we are supposed to be tough, but when the other team has to kill the softest dps, and all they can choose from are frost mages with iceblocks and 11k hp, warlocks with 12k hp, voidwalkers with soullink and demonic sacrifice when the shit hits the fan, and 9k warriors with 10% more damage taken bonus - well, you get the idea.

Stacking stamina and resilience cost a lot of other stats - mostly attack power. Deciding on which stats you want to focus on depends on your battlegroup and teams you meet, but eventually you will enter a game where the fight will last until everyone is oom or you will enter a game where you will be taken down in seconds due to being ’soft’. We are there to make people panic, we are there to make casters cry and we are there to apply MS debuff, whenever you are a dps demon or not, you can’t do any of those things when you are dead.

Terhix

So, you are offspecing fury, you want to get enrage and stuff, and you need 10 points in fury to begin with. So you put 5 points into cruelty, and have to choose between 3 other 5-point talents and none of them seems to be vastly superior. Let’s see what we have got.

Unbridled Wrath - this talent, imho, should be named Unbridled Talent Waste. With recent change in patch 2.0.10, with slow 2h weapon you get about 90% chance to get 1 rage with a normal regular white hit. Comparing to Anger Management - a ONE point talent in arms - this thing blows. AM generate 1 rage every 3 seconds, ALWAYS, even when you are still running to your target, being rooted or whatever. 5/5 UW gives you about 1 rage per 4.2 second with 3.8 speed weapon (assuming 90% chance), so it’s 5 times more expensive, and still worse then AM. The only good thing about UW is that, if you already have AM, it does stack with it, and other choices for low fury talents are also not so uber, so if you are finding yourself to be rage-starving, it’s something you can pick.

Improved Demo Shout - everyone used to have it when it was required for piercing howl, then the requirement was removed and the talent got buffed to 40% increase. Demo shout untalented debuff 300 attack power - that means this talent reduce ap by another 120 to full 420 attack power - that’s god damn 30 weapon dps. Fully talented, you change a guy with Bloodmoon into a guy with Crow Wing Reaper, it’s very underrated talent, and is great to use on arena against a team with warrior+rogue where surviving is critical.

Booming Voice - a strong choice that gives you a bit of everything. It makes commanding/battle/demo shouts longer - saving you from reapplying them often (and thus saving rage and global coodown), it gives range for shouts so you can use demoshout as a great destealth or range-combat-apply (mostly anti-rogue-kite). Handy, worth it.

Whatever you choose, there will be someone who will say your choice suck. One thing you should know however - if you are arms/fury spec, have 5/5 UW but no AM from arms, put your WoW CDs back to the box, uninstall the game and sell your account to someone who has at least slightest skill in math.

Terhix

Ming did awesome job again, with counting reposted how many people of each class play in topping 5v5 teams. I’m not going to paste it all detailed here, as there is quite some of it, so if you want to get a full read, head over to his site. Going from most popular to least popular class, it goes like this:

1. Warrior (17%) - mostly arms
2. Paladin (17%) - mostly holy
3. Mage (14%) - mostly arcane or frost
4. Priest (14%) - mostly holy
5. Shaman (10%) - mostly elemental or resto
6. Warlock (8%) - mostly affliction or demo
7. Rogue (8%) - pretty much everything
8. Hunter (7%) - mostly marksman
9. Druid (5%) - mostly feral or resto

Warriors and paladins still on top. What changed drastically is the warlock position, imho we will be seeing more and more affliction specced warlocks as the arena teams progress with resilience gear - having dps that can totally ignore resilience is heavy. Druids at the bottom *sight*, those guys really need dispell magic ability or something.

Terhix