So you are getting your PvP gear and started to wonder how to gem it and what trinkets should you use. The first thing I’m going to cover is the metagem + feet enchant choice. Why those two? I simply cannot imagine pvping without minor speed effect on my character, so you either get that from enchant or metagem.

FEET ENCHANT AND METAGEM:

1) [Powerful Earthstorm Diamond] + [Boar's Speed]

This configuration will give you a lot of stamina along with 5% stun resistance, which is good since it stack with Iron Will (and Orc Hardiness if you are an orc). Bad side of this is that you will have to change 3 red/yellow gems in your armor for purple/green ones for the meta gem to work (which will give you even more hp).

2) [Swift Skyfire Diamond] + [Surefooted]

This configuration won’t give you any stamina, but is very good for maxing attack power. Even if you don’t put any stamina gem in your gear and won’t have stamina enchant on legs or whatever, you will have over 12k hp in full S3 gear, which is very fine. Surefooted enchant will give you 5% snare resistance, which is nice (not very reliable tho, as we have no snare resistance talents), and 10 hit rating, and while hit rating might not be the sexiest stat ever, this enchant with full S3 gear and S3 weapon will give you pretty much enough hit rating not to worry about missing in arena.

3) [Relentless Earthstorm Diamond] + [Boar's Speed]

I’d never use this configuration for my arena gear, but some people do use it, so I feel I must list it :p.

ATTACK POWER VS CRIT:

When wondering if you should gear for attack power or crit as a warrior, there is only one answer: you need both. PvP gear have a lot of it’s item value spent on crit and have 3 red slots and 5 yellow slots, which makes it much easier to max crit rating as a pvp warrior. When maxing crit you can get 40 crit from [Battlemaster's Cruelty], 50 crit from 5 epic yellow gems and 15 crit + 30 attack power from 3 orange meta gems, giving you total 105 crit rating and 30 attack power. When maxing attack power you can get 80 ap from [Battlemaster's Determination], 60 ap from 3 red epic gems and 50 ap + 25 crit from 5 epic orange gems, giving you total 190 attack power and 25 crit rating. So all in all, the difference is that you will have either 160 attack power or 80 crit rating (3.63% crit). Which is better.

Using my axe vs sword calculator as a dps calculator tool for comparing the two, with base data being 1900 attack power, 31% crit, 134.2 dps 3.6 speed weapon hitting 400 resilience target, the results are:

Base damage: 178079 - no spec
Maxed crit: 183076 - no spec (2.8% dps increase)
Maxed attack power: 184853 - no spec (3.8% dps increase)

Maxing attack power will give you more dps over time than maxing crit. There are two reasons for that, one is that resilience cuts a lot of dps from crits, second is that pvp gear have tons of crit on it’s own. The difference is not very big tho and you can easly max out crit for having a bit lower burst damage, but have it more often.

Terhix

Personal rating - checked.
Team rating - checked.
No druid 2v2 ez mode - checked.
Arena points - 150 missing.

[Vengeful Gladiator's Bonegrinder], you are mine baby!

Terhix

Credits to Rurik of Auchindoun EU.

Awesome, just awesome :D.

Terhix

Execute has became a hot topic on EU warrior forums recently. At level 60 execute was a killer, when your enemy went below 20%, he died. TBC changed everything, facts:

1) People have a lot of stamina today, no one has less then 10k hp, not even mages, meaning that 20% execute range is at least 2k hp.

2) People have a lot of resilience, meaning your execute is going to crit for less damage and do so less often.

3) Execute don’t scale with gear.

Without taking Enrage or armor mitigation into account, execute does 925 damage + 21 per rage point, which means that non improved execute done with 30 rage will do 1240 damage. Full S3 geared warrior will have at least 2k attack power. For the same 30 rage Mortal Strike done with max weapon damage from S3 weapon will deal about 1261 damage (non crit, without enrage or other damage multipliers on 0 mitigation). On average MS still does a bit less damage then 30 rage execute, but come S4 and even better gear, and MS will exceed execute in damage / rage, while execute can become useless with people getting even more defenses and hp. Execute makes you loose all your rage, in arena, especially when you are the only dps, this often means that if your execute is not a killing blow, MS debuff will fade from the guy you are trying to finish and he is going to get healed for a large number, and you can’t afford that.

Execute is our eviscerate, but unlike Rogue’s constant-damage ability, Execute was not changed to scale with gear, which makes it really really bad the better gear everybody around have.

The question you might ask is - how do you scale damage/1 rage point not to make the ability overpowered. My answer is - you don’t. All that needs to be changed is the constant 925 part of execute damage, 925 is fine for blue geared warrior, an S3 warrior should do 1110 (20% more) + 21 / 1 rage damage executes. On the other side, this can be a problem with dps fury warriors, the better gear those folks have, the more rage they generate, so when the boss goes down below 20%, they technically do more damage with execute with better gear, as their rage generation goes up. In PvP it’s a different story, when we often struggle with rage and don’t have time to do 20 executes in a row before our enemy dies, it’s just not happening.

Execute is one of the things that needs to be improved come WotLK, as in my opinion, it’s one of the abilities that define the class and adds a lot of badass factor, it would be a pity for it to become a cosmetic ability that no one use because it’s damage / rage is not good enough to loose the debuff of our primary attack.

Terhix

To the tune of www.badgerbadgerbadger.com ;).

As I’m getting closer to putting my hands on dirty, ez mode, welfare, skillful and whatever you want to call it, S3 mace, considering I’m already 3/5 S3 with everything obtainable form honor already bought (ok, I still need to get the shield) it’s high time for me to complete my Ignore Armor Crab and get [Dory's Embrace].

First we tried Heroic Underbog, as a fresh Hunter from my guild and new 5v5 team (a lot of my ex-alliance guildies rerolled horde not so long ago) still needed cenarion rep for the head enchant. When a PvP warrior, a PvP S1 geared disc priest and a PvP S1 geared hunter with virtually no knowledge about instance begins to do heroics, a good laugh and repair bills are guaranteed. Coming with the idea that def gear is overrated and I don’t want to respec for one instance, we came with 0 defense and 0 protection talents tank into a heroic dungeon, backed up with a pvp priest with virtually no mp5 or whatever PvE stats you would like to see on a healer. We also got a random mage (can’t poly elementals, fun stuff) and PvP rogue (can’t sap elementals, more fun stuff). In result we had a long, dramatic but successful Underbog run and first 4 badges ever. Say whatever you say, but full 18 seconds of proper tanking (pain suppression followed by shield wall ;)) on a boss is better then nothing, actually, the only boss I died on was the first one. On the last boss we also got a pretty cool trinket for our priest, 33 or so resilience with 2% chance on struck to regenerate mana, don’t remember the name, sorry folks, PvE is a whole new world for me, something I didn’t intend to do at all since TBC.

Despite our initial success, we didn’t want to repeat that, especially since there are harder instances than underbog. Being the lucky bastard I’m, the pally who I 2v2 with is a raider, and with the access to PvE gear, he grabbed some tanking gear so he can do heroics with us. Our next goal: shattered halls (there was a daily quest and our priest needs the rep for his head enchant), so we went with pally tank, 2x PvP warriors, same PvP hunter and PvP priest. Trash packs in SH are pretty large, which was cool for us, aoe tanking prot pally and two warriors beating the hell of them with sweeping strikes + whirlwinds = win. The run was a blast and soon we all had 5 more badges + 2 more from the daily. Not to waste the pally’s respec money we also went into ramparts right after for additional 3 badges that day, if things are going to stay as they are, I’m going to have my cape in no time.

TS discussion highlight:

Pally: Hey, give me like 5 seconds to build agro before you guys charge in, it’s not like my consecration insta agroes them.
Me: Maybe because you don’t have Righteous Fury on?
Pally: Righteous Fury only redu… oh wait, you might have a point.

Terhix