Warrior Guide for TBC Anniversary

Warrior Guide for TBC Anniversary Quick Summary:

• All warrior changes in TBC
• Warrior class Pros & Cons
• Explanation of the warrior’s combat loop
• The best races for a warrior are Humans, Gnomes, Orcs, Tauren, and Undead.
• The stat and attribute priority
• Two famous builds: Fury Warrior and Arms Warrior
• A list of BiS gear
• Best professions to pick up as a warrior.

If you’re looking to get the best gear for your warrior, you need a lot of gold. It’s very hard to get it in TBC, but with our TBC Classic Anniversary Gold, it’s easier than ever.

Warrior Changes in TBC Classic Anniversary

Warrior sees a lot of significant changes in TBC Classic compared to Vanilla. The biggest change comes in the talents:

• Blood Frenzy: Arms tree talent that increases all physical damage dealt to a target by 4%. While this doesn’t seem like much, it quickly stacks with other debuffs.
• Commanding Shout: A really good buff skill that’s unlocked at level 68. Increases yours and your party’s HP by 1080 within a radius.
• Endless Rage: Arms tree talent lets you generate 25% more rage from all the damage that you do.
• Intervene: Really cool talent that lets you rush to your friendly target and nullify the next attack that lands on them. Good for all content.
• Rampage: Important talent from the Fury tree that grants you a stackable bonus AP. The bonus caps at 5 stacks. Basically, a free increase for going through your rotation.
• Spell Reflection: It’s a counterspell. Kind of. You can reflect the next cast that targets you.
• Thunder Clap: Not a new talent, but a change to a pre-existing one. It could only be used in Battle Stance before, but now you can use it in Defensive Stance as well. In short, you deal damage to enemies around you, raise your threat level for up to 4 targets, and slow their attacks for 30 seconds.
• Victory Rush: This talent makes solo play so much more pleasant. Within 20 seconds after you kill an enemy, you can use this skill and attack the target. It deals significant damage and scales with your AP.

All these changes make the warrior more viable in group activities, but he’s still not as crazy strong as he was in Classic. All you Fury Warrior players shouldn’t be sad, as he’s still strong, but he’s not the killing machine he once was. Now let’s move on to the next part and see what actually makes the warrior worth playing and what downsides might be a dealbreaker for you.

Warrior Pros & Cons

Warrior is kind of a divisive class in The Burning Crusade. It hangs in this strange spot where it isn’t bad, but it isn’t so good that you want him to be present in every kind of activity. Let me break down the Pros and Cons of this class so that you understand what I’m talking about here.

Pros:

1. Character stays strong due to good gear scaling.
2. Great AoE Cleaves. The rotation the warriors usually do has good multi-target abilities.
3. Strong buffs and debuffs make your warrior shine in group content.

Cons:

1. The warriors need that good gear. The gear you need is usually in high demand, so getting it reliably is a problem. Warrior class shines with its progression, which means your early levels and empty gear slots will feel really bad.
2. It can be hard to get into serious raid lobbies. Blood Frenzy applies a significant debuff on the enemy, true, but it doesn’t stack. That means most raids will take one or two warriors and fill the rest of the DPS slots with other damage-dealing classes.

While warrior does huge, and I mean HUGE, damage the more it scales, it’s usually outperformed by someone like Hunter (LINK), which is an insanely strong class in TBC Classic. This class feels like a middle child (no shade) in how the developers treat it. It’s outperformed by Warlocks and Hunters in its DPS output, and Prot Wars are outperformed by Paladins and Druids as tanks. 

Still, warrior’s very fun and powerful, so don’t feel limited by sticking to meta. If people raise their eyebrows at you playing a warrior, know that their favorite pastime is playing with a calc. Calc is short for the calculator, btw.

How to Play Warrior in TBC Classic Anniversary

While your first idea of the warrior would be to go unga bunga on your enemies, especially when you don’t have traditional resources like mana that you need to restore, not with items, but with fighting and eating the punches, it’s actually a very careful class that plays the best when you understand its tempo. The more you play the warrior, the more you’ll understand how crucial it is to stay level-headed and not simply waste all your buttons. Your typical gameplay looks something like this:

• Pick a Stance: You have three to choose from, each of which provides various buffs I’ll mention later.
• Start Auto-Attacking: Auto attacks are really important for the warrior. They let you build your rage faster, and a lot of warrior buffs are tied to it.
• Control your Cooldowns and Rage: Warrior, as a class, is all about taming your inner monkey. Best warriors always manage their rage meter and cooldowns. I repeat: do not spam buttons. You want to build the momentum and keep it. One wrong move kills it.

Warrior is kind of a snowball, both in gearing and gameplay loop. It’s very hard not to snowball as a warrior, because if you lose your tempo in a fight, it can be really hard to get it back. Your tempo is more important than momentary damage, so do everything you can to keep it going. Trust me, I’ve lost my fair share of damage when it mattered the most.

Best Warrior Race in TBC Classic Anniversary

Warriors are really strong with Horde races, but they aren’t weak with Alliance either. Each faction has its own winners when it comes to the warrior class. So, who do you keep an eye out for when creating your warrior? Let’s find out.

In my opinion, Orc is the best warrior race in TBC Classic Anniversary. You just can’t go wrong with it. Axe specialization loses its shine in endgame content, but who needs it when you have Blood Fury and Hardiness? First increases your attack power by 6 while reducing your healing, the second gives you a 15% additional chance to resist any stun effect. It’s an insanely powerful package for a warrior, don’t miss out on it.

Warrior Stat Priority

While some people decide to use warrior as a tank, I think it’s always been a big disservice to this class. It’s a DPS class primarily, which is supported by the amount of damage-dealing skills compared to classes that are famous for their tanking. Here, we will focus on DPS Warrior stat priority, instead of Protective Warrior. Let’s look at the stats:

1. Hit Rating
2. Expertise
3. Critical Strike Rating
4. Strength
5. Armor Penetration
6. Haste Rating

Pretty basic set of stats for a DPS class. You want to reach the hit rating and expertise caps, which are 9% and 6.5%, respectively. As it comes for other stats, they’re secondary, but are very important nonetheless, so don’t ignore them.

Another thing that comes hand in hand with stats is the attributes. Out of 5 attributes, two of them are absolutely useless for warriors:

1. Strength: Primary stat that raises your attack power. Most important one.
2. Agility: DPS warrior benefits from Agility, as it is the main way to increase the crit chance, as well as some bonus armor and dodge increase.
3. Stamina: Pretty obvious. You’re gonna be in-your-face most of the time, so a bigger healthpool is necessary.
4. Intellect: You don’t need it.
5. Spirit: Useless stat for a warrior.

When it comes to attributes, it’s hard to go wrong here. It’s pretty obvious what you need to increase when playing as a warrior. For gearing, you’d want to hit the soft Hit Rating cap and only then focus on attributes.

Best Warrior Builds TBC Classic Anniversary

There are two main ways the warrior is built: Fury and Arms Warrior. Each has its own advantages. You have a total of 61 points to spread between three talent trees. Let’s be real, though. It’s between two talent trees. Nobody is touching the protective tree, even with a stick. Now let’s look at the first build.

Fury Warrior DPS Build

Fury Warrior is a 100% purebred DPS. You’re dual-wielding weapons, providing you with huge damage-dealing potential. It has great scaling with party buffs, and this build is one of the best to deal cleave damage. An obvious drawback is that, like any other DPS, this build doesn’t bring anything to the table apart from raw damage.

• Death Wish: We prioritize taking Death Wish over Rampage, investing in the Arms tree early on to reach it earlier. Rampage is good, but Death Wish is better.
• Unbridled Wrath or Improved Demoralizing Shout: Make a choice here. If you want your Fury War to be more useful for other people, pick IDS. It’ll help your tanks during boss encounters.
• Improved Overpower: While this talent is chosen, do not include it in your rotation. It’s a step on the way to reaching Death Wish. 
• Improved Thunder Clap: This can be helpful if you’re tasked with being a semi-tank occasionally.

The rest of the kit shouldn’t cause any questions. Our cornerstone here is Death Wish, which grants a huge boost to your physical damage. It’s kind of a hybrid build, but we put the majority of our points into the Fury tree anyway.

Arms Warrior DPS Build

Arms Warrior is kind of a support, in a way. His Blood Frenzy talent makes him so insanely useful in raids. This talent alone can reserve you a spot in a raid group. Going this route means that you decrease your direct DPS in favor of increasing it for the whole group, but that’s a small sacrifice.

• Blood Frenzy: The most obvious reason for this build to exist and the centerpiece of it. This talent increases the physical damage that your target takes by 4% after using Rend or Deep Wounds.
• Mortal Strike: Strong skill for your rotation. Considering you won’t take many DPS talents, this is one of the main sources of damage.
• Sweeping Strikes: Makes you a great trash remover in cleave encounters. It’s your best AoE skill in this build.
• Improved Demoralizing Shout: This skill really helps your tanks out, so considering the playstyle we’re going with, it’s an important one to take.

Overall, Arms Warrior is a more desirable member of a raid party, but he’s also good in other content like dungeons. Outside of it, this build can deal decent damage using its rotation and stay safe with its buffs.

Best In Slot Gear for Warrior in TBC Anniversary

Best-In-Slot gear is the best possible gear for your character. It varies from phase to phase. Since Phase 1 was released not long ago, we’ll provide the BiS gear for this phase. This is subject to change with future Phase updates. For now, this is the Best in Slot Gear for warrior in TBC Anniversary:

As you can see, most of the items are very similar for both of these builds, and no wonder, as they are basically the same build tree, but with a heavy skew into one or another. Most of the best items can only be found in raids, although there are some exceptions. Getting items from the raid is oftentimes a much easier task, though.

Best Warrior Professions in TBC Classic Anniversary

For warriors, there are two professions that are good for this class. You can choose either or both, depending on your goals and desire to invest enough time:

Blacksmithing

Blacksmithing is very useful, as you can craft BiS gear for your character and sell the one that you don’t need at the Auction House. If you decide to go with Blacksmithing, I heavily recommend pairing it with Mining, as it’s beneficial both for your pocket and for materials. Some of the BiS gear you can create with Blacksmithing is Dragonmaw, which is chosen as the best main weapon for Fury Warrior, or Lionheart Executioner, which is another good alternative for the main weapon.

Engineering

Engineering is more about useful utility items than gear. It can create powerful explosives like Super Sapper Charge. It can also create a unique trinket, Dimensional Ripper - Area 52. It’s also really good for money, as you can craft Zapthrottle Mote Extractor to harvest Motes, which sell for a high price. They are also useful for mastering this specialization. Finally, you can craft mounts, unique to this profession, which are the Flying Machine Control and Turbo-Charged Flying Machine Control. Both of them sell for a very good price, but are difficult to craft. Of course, you should also pair it with Mining for the same reasons as above.

Read our other TBC Anniversary guides:

• Tank Tier List
• DPS Tier List
• Healer Tier List

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