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

As TBC brought in the new epic BoP blacksmithing items (lionheart blade, thunder, lunar crescent), many players have been asking which of the new badass 2-handers they should craft.

I personally dropped engineering, which I was using for bombs in pvp (stunning that pyroblast while stuck in a nova was priceless every time I did it) and repair bots in pve, to start blacksmithing from scratch when the expansion was released. The simple fact being that the new engineering items were very underwhelming while it was hard to find an easier to get 105 dps weapon than the smithing t1 weapons, and the t2 weapons trumped the only obvious contenders: gorehowl, fel iron axe, and khorium champion.

Obviously some warriors will prefer to grind out arenas and pvp for the weapons available there. But for those who choose to go the blacksmithing route the question remains: which weapon should I craft?

The simple answer is: whichever you prefer. That is, none of them are bad, and none of them are vastly superior to the others. They all have advantages and disadvantages that more or less balance out. Perhaps the most important part of the decision is the complimentary weapon spec from the arms tree. In my opinion the benefits of the spec outweigh the differences between the weapons themselves, and if you really love your axe/mace/sword spec then stick with that.

However as a general guideline, Mace is for those who mostly pvp, Axe is for those who mostly pve and have points into flurry, and sword is for those who mostly pve but do not have points in flurry (probably because you pvp enough to need TM and 2^nd wind).

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Veritas