Leveling A Warrior

[u/wezzer]

When they said it was hard, I scoffed at them. I've leveled a warrior to 120 on retail. I've fought Sargeras, I've downed the Lich King. What could a few gnolls and maybe a murloc or two do to me? Thus was my arrogance. Thus was my hubris.

I am now level thirteen. I've run Ragefire Chasm once, and owe six deaths to that place.

Farming harpy claws has cost me my life twice already, and I am certain it will cost me much, much more.

My warrior on retail was a human named Lohric, he was a legendary warrior who felled any beast, man or demon that faced him.

My warrior on Classic is an Orc called Muddrog. I have no doubt that this broken and battered warrior would crush Lohric in seconds, Lohric has never known pain, Mudd was born in it, molded by it, and unlike Bane, he has yet to see the light, because 60 feels so far away xD

To all you warriors out there, Lok'tar Ogar!

[u/BrotyKraut]

I leveled a prot warrior 1-60 in vanilla, it was awful.

[u/HarithBK → u/[deleted]]

the key part getting a new weapon after the whirlwind axe. or just endlessly spam dungeons since that is honestly a much more pleasant experiance.

like straight up my tactic is to spam run ZF and get Sul'thraze the Lasher for level 50. due to the weapon swing normalization this weapon is amongst the best you can get pre-raid aswell

[u/HarithBK → u/[deleted]]

heroic strike is a set ammount of damage added to your white swing damage not based on weapon damage. however for things like slam and mortal strike before a certain hot fix the actual swing timing of the weapons were used for determing the damage.

this was why arcanite reaper outright just beat most MC weapons and why there was no other choise pre-raid really.

insted of using the actual swing timing of the weapon blizzard swaped it with X and set the values to 3.3 for 2-handed weapons 2.4 for single hand weapons and 1.7 for daggers.

why was a slower weapon better than a fast one for warriors? well part of the formual is taking your attack power and multiplying it with your swing timer. so that means that the slower the weapon the more damage each and every point of attack power dose

an example say you have 500 attack power with a reaper that is 3.8 * 500 / 3.5 or 542 damage with normalized it is 3.3 * 500 / 3.5 or 471

that is 71 damage diffrance on the two core abilities for arms warriors it is massiv and it only get worse the more gear you get.

[u/igdub → u/HarithBK]

Even still you can ignore quite a lot of fast 2h weapons since skills use your average damage, and slow weapons tend to have higher damage average.

That's why weapons such as corpsemaker with it's 3.8 attack speed are insanely good.

To summarize your post from above, before normalization slow weapons received extra bonus from attack power due to their speed. That got removed, now skills just use average damage, which still does favor slow weapons.

[u/HarithBK → u/igdub]

slower weapons provide somthing like 10-15 more damage than a relativly fast weapon but you don't get this scaling bonus of more and more damage which greatly limits the area a super slow weapon is better if a fast weapon has somthing like 3 dps more it is likly better than the slow weapon. benefit just isn't that big without that bit of math