I used to main Warrior through BCoB 1 & 2 before swapping to main Ninja for FCoB, but, I figure my knowledge is still relevant here, so I'll throw down what I know. I still play Warrior quite often anyhow. o/
Massive wall of text incoming.
If we want to talk real warrior finesse, there's actually an opening rotation and an actual rotation you can follow through with for the most part. In most content, it's fairly irrelevant what you do so long as you hold aggro. The only real places that a proper rotation matters is endgame, and these days, that means FCoB and Savage.
The thing with being a tank is it's half knowing your abilities, half knowing the dungeon you're running. Knowing the encounters you're doing. Once you run things enough, you know what abilities the bosses are going to use. You even start to know more or less when they're going to use them, and what you need to use to counteract them. I'll start with rotation things before I get into the finer points of cooldowns, as well as tips and tricks you can do to mix and match certain abilities. For me, Warrior is about doing as much damage as humanly possible while using my cooldowns to mitigate when necessary. Once you reach a certain gear threshold, vitality becomes 100% irrelevant in anything except FCoB and Savage Coil. Your gear will provide more than enough to let you survive anything. That being said, I play my warrior with 30 points into STR, and full STR accessories. This isn't for everyone, though, and my playstyle will differ largely because of it. I do have vitality accessories that I throw on if I'm doing large pulls in dungeons, but, outside of that it's all STR all the time.
Under the right conditions, (Potions, food, party buffs, trick attack, etc) you start seeing numbers like this, and well... ...it's just gravy.
![[Image: ZnnDlPW.png]](http://i.imgur.com/ZnnDlPW.png)
That being said. Warrior opener for bosses. Infuriate before you pull. This is key. Infuriate is an ability you want to get on cooldown and keep on cooldown unless you're undergeared and need to hang onto it as a defensive cooldown. Either way. Infuriate from the start. Run in, pull with tomahawk. I generally close the gap before my GCD is up and immediately go into brutal swing if the boss doesn't need to be stunned later (as it is an off the GCD ability, so you can use it between GCDs.), and then build into heavy swing.
Heavy swing generates no stacks of wrath. This is important. Think of it as filler. Part of the finesse of warrior rotation is setting yourself up to maximize offensive uptime during your cooldowns durations.
Heavy swing will proc your Skull Sunder / Maim combos. But, before you even think about going into Maim (which should be your first priority), you're going to pop two abilities. The first is Unchained, followed immediately by Berserk. If you hit them both immediately, you can activate them both before your GCD is up. Berserk generates one stack of wrath, so it's important to use unchained beforehand as to not waste that stack.
Once that's done, you build into maim, followed internal release and bloodbath in the same GCD, followed by storm's eye. Then you'll swap over into your butcher's block combo, inner beast when that's said and done, rinse repeat alternating butcher's block and storm's eye unless you need path up. With proper skillspeed, think it's around 415 or something, you can fit one extra GCD into your berserk duration which is nice as it lets you get one more butcher's block in. Fracture is, for the most part, an entirely worthless skill as a MT. It's potency is awful with defiance up, and any of your normal combo abilities will usually out parse is by a safe margin. Doubly so when you have berserk and unchained up. The only real time fracture has any use is if you're breaking off from the boss for whatever reason. It's just not worth the GCD. Outside of that, key thing to remember is you can fit about two butcher's block combos in before you need to re-apply maim and storm's eye. I just build the rest of my rotation off that.
So, the short version of that is--
Infuriate -> Tomahawk -> Brutal Swing -> Heavy Swing -> Unchained -> Berserk -> Maim -> Internal Release -> Bloodbath -> Storm's Eye -> Heavy Swing -> Skull Sunder -> Butcher's Block -> Inner Beast -> Heavy Swing -> Skull Sunder -> Butcher's Block (If your skillspeed is high enough) -> Pacified.
I made a quick video here to demonstrate, as that's generally better than a bunch of jumbled words. You can see what I mean by doubling up on the GCD as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NfBjg1k...e=youtu.be
Cooldowns. Lots of Warrior Cooldowns feed into eachother, and have great perks when mixed together with certain combos. I'll start by listing off your cooldowns, what you should use them for, and what they can be combo'd into.
Vengeance: Vengeance is your best cooldown. It's 30% damage reduction, and it's beast. You also gain a stack of wrath, which means if you're sitting at 4 wrath and pop this, you're now at 5 wrath and can use Inner Beast. Cool stuff. It also deals an attack with a potency of 50 to any enemy that strikes you while it's up. Because of this, Vengeance combos with Bloodbath in an amazing way. If you're doing a large pull and you pop the two together, every attack vengeance makes on your behalf will benefit from bloodbath and return HP to you.
Thrill of Battle: Increases your maximum HP by 20%, and heals you for the amount increased. This is a good "Oh shit" button. It also makes any stoneskins cast on you for it's duration 20% stronger, which is nice. This combos well with Convalescence as a cooldown, as you have a bigger HP pool and bigger heals coming in to top it off.
Convalescence: Yes, you should have this set. It's a very, very nice cooldown despite not having any inherent damage reduction. It mitigates via healing instead of damage reduction.
Foresight: Just a simple boost of your defense (not actual damage reduction, just defense) by 20%. It's nice. Good to toss on if you're taking a healthy bit of damage and need to soften it up some.
Inner Beast: 20% damage reduction, and beast damage to boot. Unless you know a big hit is coming up, it's better to just blow this as soon as you can. In almost all content outside of FCoB and Savage, I just blow it whenever it's up without question.
Holmgang: Best skill ever. So many clutch uses of this. In late endgame, it's actually used to cheese certain mechanics (I'm looking at your Ahk Morn), but for casual play it's basically just a glorified "Oh shit" button. Think you're gonna die? Know you're gonna die? Holmgang. It also has a bunch of little tiny uses. For example, if you need to interrupt an ability a mob is doing and it can be normally interrupted? If you make range it and holmgang, you'll actually pull the mob to you and interrupt it's cast bar. I have a lot of glory stories of Holmgang. Like, when Titan EX was new, I remember a kill where we got him to 1% and he jumped after superbomb. Everyone in my group had died, and I had about 500 HP left. I holmganged one of the bombs before they all exploded, survived his jump, and landed the killing blow. Totally have an entire party who can back me up on that~
It's soooo good.
AoE pulls? Overpower. Infuriate + Steel Cylcone. Alternate your butcher's block combo on mobs to keep solid aggro on them all. More Steel Cyclone and Overpower. Flash if you're low on MP and it's set.
And lastly, to answer some of your questions.
-- Provoke puts you one point of enmity above the highest on the mob's threat table. If you provoke something far away, you're going to have to tomahawk it until it reaches you in order to keep aggro on it unless everyone else in your party stops doing what they're doing. Namely your healers. So yes, tomahawk.
-- Overpower is great for large pulls. Butcher's block is better for smaller pulls. That's the short of it, really.
-- Fracture is worthless, IMO. It's potency is garbage, doubly so with defiance up. Unless you're peeling off a boss, I wouldn't bother.
-- Convalescence, yes. As mentioned earlier, it's one of your better cooldowns.
-- Thrill of Battle? When you need it. Gonna die? Great cooldown. Not feeling comfortable with your HP and heals aren't incoming as quickly as you'd like? Pop it.
-- Berserk should be used on cooldown. It's too good to let sit idle. If my unchained is off cooldown when berserk is up (Which will happen for your first berserk after your opener) I pop defiance off for it's duration to maximize on it's potential.
-- If you aren't main tanking, defiance should be off and you should be wrecking face. 'Nuff said there. I actually turn defiance off when I'm main tanking after my initial berserk + unchained combo, but, that's because I play Warrior as a glorified pseudo-DPS. Haha. If I'm playing with healers I know can handle it, of course.
-- I ask for goad because Warrior too stronk. Almost any fight in the game outside of endgame won't see anyone TP starved, so, goad is just kind of a thing.
Disclaimer: As mentioned in the post, this is my own personal playstyle. It won't jive well with everyone, but, I love ripping things to shreds on my Warrior. ♥
Massive wall of text incoming.
If we want to talk real warrior finesse, there's actually an opening rotation and an actual rotation you can follow through with for the most part. In most content, it's fairly irrelevant what you do so long as you hold aggro. The only real places that a proper rotation matters is endgame, and these days, that means FCoB and Savage.
The thing with being a tank is it's half knowing your abilities, half knowing the dungeon you're running. Knowing the encounters you're doing. Once you run things enough, you know what abilities the bosses are going to use. You even start to know more or less when they're going to use them, and what you need to use to counteract them. I'll start with rotation things before I get into the finer points of cooldowns, as well as tips and tricks you can do to mix and match certain abilities. For me, Warrior is about doing as much damage as humanly possible while using my cooldowns to mitigate when necessary. Once you reach a certain gear threshold, vitality becomes 100% irrelevant in anything except FCoB and Savage Coil. Your gear will provide more than enough to let you survive anything. That being said, I play my warrior with 30 points into STR, and full STR accessories. This isn't for everyone, though, and my playstyle will differ largely because of it. I do have vitality accessories that I throw on if I'm doing large pulls in dungeons, but, outside of that it's all STR all the time.
Under the right conditions, (Potions, food, party buffs, trick attack, etc) you start seeing numbers like this, and well... ...it's just gravy.
That being said. Warrior opener for bosses. Infuriate before you pull. This is key. Infuriate is an ability you want to get on cooldown and keep on cooldown unless you're undergeared and need to hang onto it as a defensive cooldown. Either way. Infuriate from the start. Run in, pull with tomahawk. I generally close the gap before my GCD is up and immediately go into brutal swing if the boss doesn't need to be stunned later (as it is an off the GCD ability, so you can use it between GCDs.), and then build into heavy swing.
Heavy swing generates no stacks of wrath. This is important. Think of it as filler. Part of the finesse of warrior rotation is setting yourself up to maximize offensive uptime during your cooldowns durations.
Heavy swing will proc your Skull Sunder / Maim combos. But, before you even think about going into Maim (which should be your first priority), you're going to pop two abilities. The first is Unchained, followed immediately by Berserk. If you hit them both immediately, you can activate them both before your GCD is up. Berserk generates one stack of wrath, so it's important to use unchained beforehand as to not waste that stack.
Once that's done, you build into maim, followed internal release and bloodbath in the same GCD, followed by storm's eye. Then you'll swap over into your butcher's block combo, inner beast when that's said and done, rinse repeat alternating butcher's block and storm's eye unless you need path up. With proper skillspeed, think it's around 415 or something, you can fit one extra GCD into your berserk duration which is nice as it lets you get one more butcher's block in. Fracture is, for the most part, an entirely worthless skill as a MT. It's potency is awful with defiance up, and any of your normal combo abilities will usually out parse is by a safe margin. Doubly so when you have berserk and unchained up. The only real time fracture has any use is if you're breaking off from the boss for whatever reason. It's just not worth the GCD. Outside of that, key thing to remember is you can fit about two butcher's block combos in before you need to re-apply maim and storm's eye. I just build the rest of my rotation off that.
So, the short version of that is--
Infuriate -> Tomahawk -> Brutal Swing -> Heavy Swing -> Unchained -> Berserk -> Maim -> Internal Release -> Bloodbath -> Storm's Eye -> Heavy Swing -> Skull Sunder -> Butcher's Block -> Inner Beast -> Heavy Swing -> Skull Sunder -> Butcher's Block (If your skillspeed is high enough) -> Pacified.
I made a quick video here to demonstrate, as that's generally better than a bunch of jumbled words. You can see what I mean by doubling up on the GCD as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NfBjg1k...e=youtu.be
Cooldowns. Lots of Warrior Cooldowns feed into eachother, and have great perks when mixed together with certain combos. I'll start by listing off your cooldowns, what you should use them for, and what they can be combo'd into.
Vengeance: Vengeance is your best cooldown. It's 30% damage reduction, and it's beast. You also gain a stack of wrath, which means if you're sitting at 4 wrath and pop this, you're now at 5 wrath and can use Inner Beast. Cool stuff. It also deals an attack with a potency of 50 to any enemy that strikes you while it's up. Because of this, Vengeance combos with Bloodbath in an amazing way. If you're doing a large pull and you pop the two together, every attack vengeance makes on your behalf will benefit from bloodbath and return HP to you.
Thrill of Battle: Increases your maximum HP by 20%, and heals you for the amount increased. This is a good "Oh shit" button. It also makes any stoneskins cast on you for it's duration 20% stronger, which is nice. This combos well with Convalescence as a cooldown, as you have a bigger HP pool and bigger heals coming in to top it off.
Convalescence: Yes, you should have this set. It's a very, very nice cooldown despite not having any inherent damage reduction. It mitigates via healing instead of damage reduction.
Foresight: Just a simple boost of your defense (not actual damage reduction, just defense) by 20%. It's nice. Good to toss on if you're taking a healthy bit of damage and need to soften it up some.
Inner Beast: 20% damage reduction, and beast damage to boot. Unless you know a big hit is coming up, it's better to just blow this as soon as you can. In almost all content outside of FCoB and Savage, I just blow it whenever it's up without question.
Holmgang: Best skill ever. So many clutch uses of this. In late endgame, it's actually used to cheese certain mechanics (I'm looking at your Ahk Morn), but for casual play it's basically just a glorified "Oh shit" button. Think you're gonna die? Know you're gonna die? Holmgang. It also has a bunch of little tiny uses. For example, if you need to interrupt an ability a mob is doing and it can be normally interrupted? If you make range it and holmgang, you'll actually pull the mob to you and interrupt it's cast bar. I have a lot of glory stories of Holmgang. Like, when Titan EX was new, I remember a kill where we got him to 1% and he jumped after superbomb. Everyone in my group had died, and I had about 500 HP left. I holmganged one of the bombs before they all exploded, survived his jump, and landed the killing blow. Totally have an entire party who can back me up on that~
It's soooo good.
AoE pulls? Overpower. Infuriate + Steel Cylcone. Alternate your butcher's block combo on mobs to keep solid aggro on them all. More Steel Cyclone and Overpower. Flash if you're low on MP and it's set.
And lastly, to answer some of your questions.
-- Provoke puts you one point of enmity above the highest on the mob's threat table. If you provoke something far away, you're going to have to tomahawk it until it reaches you in order to keep aggro on it unless everyone else in your party stops doing what they're doing. Namely your healers. So yes, tomahawk.
-- Overpower is great for large pulls. Butcher's block is better for smaller pulls. That's the short of it, really.
-- Fracture is worthless, IMO. It's potency is garbage, doubly so with defiance up. Unless you're peeling off a boss, I wouldn't bother.
-- Convalescence, yes. As mentioned earlier, it's one of your better cooldowns.
-- Thrill of Battle? When you need it. Gonna die? Great cooldown. Not feeling comfortable with your HP and heals aren't incoming as quickly as you'd like? Pop it.
-- Berserk should be used on cooldown. It's too good to let sit idle. If my unchained is off cooldown when berserk is up (Which will happen for your first berserk after your opener) I pop defiance off for it's duration to maximize on it's potential.
-- If you aren't main tanking, defiance should be off and you should be wrecking face. 'Nuff said there. I actually turn defiance off when I'm main tanking after my initial berserk + unchained combo, but, that's because I play Warrior as a glorified pseudo-DPS. Haha. If I'm playing with healers I know can handle it, of course.
-- I ask for goad because Warrior too stronk. Almost any fight in the game outside of endgame won't see anyone TP starved, so, goad is just kind of a thing.
Disclaimer: As mentioned in the post, this is my own personal playstyle. It won't jive well with everyone, but, I love ripping things to shreds on my Warrior. ♥
![[Image: 7Ho5y7x.png]](http://i.imgur.com/7Ho5y7x.png)
