Warriors are historically one of the slower and more difficult classes to level. As of Cataclysm, that isn’t strictly true. Warriors have a lot of tools to deal with various situations, and can handily take on small groups of enemies with little downtime. While Arms is still the preferred leveling spec, both Protection and Fury are absolutely viable. Players wanting to level in dungeons will see a lot of success as a Protection Warrior, potentially able to top the damage meters while leveling.
Leveling a Warrior is also a lot more involved than it once was. Arms Warriors focus on maintaining Rend and using Overpower. Fury Warriors are more direct, using Bloodthirst and Raging Blow while staying Enraged as much as possible. Protection Warriors squeeze most of their damage out of Revenge and Shield Slam, supplemented with fillers like Devastate and Heroic Strike.
All three specs will want to take advantage of Victory Rush while leveling. This allows you a fairly large self-heal after killing an enemy. This allows you to chain mob kills repeatedly for low downtime very efficient leveling.
- Comfortable chain pulling
- High passive mitigation
- Multiple playstyles
- Fun, punchy abilities
- Reliant on gear
- Rage can be frustrating to deal with
Avoid wasting Victory Rush. It is easy to find yourself distracted between packs, allowing Victory Rush to time out and losing the easy access to a self-heal you would otherwise have.
Don’t be afraid to use your cooldowns while leveling. Of course you want them for crucial moments, but the vast majority of your leveling is going to be going mob to mob killing them. Use Sweeping Strikes and pull an extra enemy or two. Use Bladestorm to decimate groups. Use Recklessness to blast! These spells are all there to be used!
Upgrade your weapons often. Weapon upgrades will improve your damage significantly, so making sure your weapon(s) are up to date can make or break your leveling experience.
Your #1 stat will be Strength, as it provides the majority of your damage. While leveling it is very unlikely that you will be able to maintain Hit or Expertise caps, so striving for them is generally not worth it. With that said, Hit Rating is rarely wasted even if it doesn’t get you to cap. A missed hit deals zero damage.
The three main secondary stats, Crit, Haste, and Mastery, are all valuable and can shift in priority as you level. Mastery isn’t available until the late stages of leveling, and because of this won’t be a priority throughout your leveling. Haste Rating is nice to have, but it won’t make or break your fights. Critical Strike Rating is generally our preferred stat while leveling, as it allows us more of those chunky hits we love so much, as well as generating more Rage.
- Strength
- Hit Rating
- Critical Strike Rating
- Haste Rating
- Mastery Rating
Most of your gameplay as a Warrior will be spent waiting for Rage and using it on the biggest hit you can. Typically Mortal Strike, Bloodthirst, or Shield Slam. Not all enemies will survive long enough to get far into your rotation, and a lot of the time it can be better to use a cheaper or less important spell to finish off an enemy, allowing you to have a big hit ready for the next pull.
Arms
- Keep Battle Shout active
- Victory Rush if you aren’t full Health
- Maintain Rend
- Colossus Smash
- Mortal Strike
- Overpower
- Execute when available
- Slam as filler
- Heroic Strike or Cleave if you have the Rage to spare
Fury
- Keep Battle Shout active
- Victory Rush if you aren’t full Health
- Colossus Smash
- Bloodthirst
- Raging Blow
- Slam with Bloodsurge
- Execute when available
- Heroic Strike as filler
Protection
- Keep Battle Shout active
- Victory Rush if you aren’t full Health
- Maintain Rend
- Thunder Clap if there are multiple targets
- Revenge
- Shield Slam
- Shockwave
- Devastate
- Heroic Strike or Cleave if you have excess Rage
Arms
Fury
Protection
Prime
Arms
Fury
Protection
Major
Arms
Fury
Protection
Minor
Warriors are able to use all weapons except Wands. This leaves you completely open to use whatever is available to you. Look for weapons with Strength, avoid taking weapons with Spell Power or Agility!
Weapon upgrades will often be the biggest damage increase while leveling. Every time you can upgrade your weapon(s), you should. A naked Warrior with a high level weapon will perform better than a fully armored Warrior with a low level weapon!
Warriors are able to use all armor types, but should prioritize Plate armor. While this does leave a lot of room to wear whatever drops, you want to focus on Plate armor to take advantage of Plate Specialization.
While leveling your professions will rarely come into play. If you want passive bonuses from your professions for the leveling process, I recommend Gathering professions such as Mining or Herbalism. These are a lot easier to keep up with while leveling, and you can always sell what you gather and reinvest that gold into leveling crafting later.
If you want to get ahead of your crafting earlier, I recommend grabbing Engineering & Mining. These two work well together and Engineering is one of your best choices for endgame. Leveling Engineering also allows you to create bombs and other useful toys & tools as you level, which can make things both more fun and easier.
There are generally very few macros that are useful while leveling. The main one that I would recommend every melee DPS class has at the ready is a startattack macro.
#showtooltip/startattack/cast ChargeThis functions as a regular Charge macro, but will also initiate your auto-attack on press. This is useful for a number of reasons, but the short version is that it guarantees you will never be caught with your auto-attack disabled for whatever reason.
