What spec for BG?Follow

I don't do arena, too complicated, no time for that, don't care. Only BGs, so you can skip over all the annoying details of team composition and get into the partially stand alone completely random and anarchic area of BGs.

I got my warrior to 80 only recently. The gear sucks but it's usable, a few honor-reward items from BGs and a few PvE tanking items from doing the old heroics the tanking set.

Arms:

I've been trying this and I may be doing things wrong a lot. I get killed too fast mainly from overwhelming ranged DPS while attempting to kill someone in melee range. Ignore that, still get killed kind of fast when in 1v1 against a DPS class.

The DPS seems to be very dependent on a rend-overpower mechanic which forces you into Battle Stance. This makes arms very awkward in that it's designed for 2-hand weapons but the spell interrupt only works with a shield equipped. I don't want to be macroing stuff, it annoys me.

The other problem with arms seems to be the timer on charge. Some classes (hunters, mages, locks) now seem to have a number of break free / break away moves which outnumber 1 charge + 1 intercept on thei Arms spec cooldown.

I had expected Arms would be good against rogues but it seems they just stun me and I'm below 30% hp and dismantled by the time I break out of the stun. This is not very good.

Prot:

The DPS isn't great but survivability feels better it has a much easier feel overall. I can manage to survive longer, can actually kill healers due to the abundance of interrupts and stuns and the convenient fact that shield slam also has a purge-spam side effect. But when I'm in a BG people keep telling me to switch to another spec.

And I do better than arms even against rogues. Because I can stun them back and disarm them back so I can get even with the stuns and disarms. Actually I have found that rogues are impossible to kill with arms because even if you get a few lucky crits they just vanish/sprint/CC and escape but with Prot I can stun them when they are low so that I can kill them.

Fury:

From what I'm told it's totally broken and specially pointless for PvP. If things haven't changed it should be playable in Zerker stance allowing antiheals + interrupts + intercepts in the preferred stance.

Also I'm wondering what kind of effect is the succubus charm. I thought zerker rage would remove it but it doesn't.

Overall I'd have to agree that prot is more forgiving until you've built up a decent PVP set. Arms can be a beast though, if used properly (and with a healer ideally). The best way to get this in a BG is to tail a healer and attack people that try to hurt him. And like that, you're getting heals for most of the BG. :)

In general, run with groups of people. Don't expect to get ANYWHERE in a BG solo, particularly as a warrior.


You're in trouble if you don't like macros, like ArtemisEnteri said. Dealing with casters, both Spell Reflect and Shield Bash require a macro to use effectively. That being said, once you develop (or steal from the internet) a good macro, it's like any other keybind.


There are some tricks to dealing with rogues. Save your trinket for Kidney Shot (expect a blind after KS, and expect a rogue to get a 2nd opener from this is he can). Use a weapon chain. If you're dismantled, I'm 99% sure that you can still pop defensive stance and disarm the rogue. You could also pop Intimidating Shout if it's up and you're in danger of dying. Surprisingly enough, Thunderclap is somewhat effective at reducing damage taken, and is not a bad move to hit during Dismantle.

The crappy thing is that a rogue with all of his CDs up is a ***** to kill. The nice thing is that if you catch a rogue in a BG with his CDs down, you should basically turn him into puree. Also, your bleeds can prevent him from re-stealthing, and demo shout can break stealth.


I personally enjoy PVPing as prot - have a trashy PVE DPS set that I throw on and still have decent survivability. I'll also swap into (better) tank gear and run the flag in WSG - a 50+k HP flag running with high armor, mobility, an AoE snare, defensive CDs, and Improved Spell Reflect makes an amazingly effective flag runner (which is, after the point of that BG). With any support, I've almost never been taken down while running the flag.

It's a fairly junky build that I made up (read: I'm sure there are better ones out there), but this is it. I pretty much only use it for battlegrounds, as I don't do Arenas.

Improved Spell Reflect, Improved Disarm, and Safeguard I really like. Piercing Howl is awesome. Vigilance is highly debatable, but I picked it up so I can toss an extra 3% DR on a druid / paladin healer at a node. Tactical Mastery I picked up so I can Stance Dance -> Shattering Throw a Paladin. :)