Feb 22, 2009

On Warrior PvP


Last night (in the late hours of course), I had a rant-session on my guildchat about how I feel warriors are left behind in the stone age compared to all other classes and how they have become less and less viable for PvP.

It should come as no surprise I had just been to a series of disasterous BG's prior to my outburst. I went in first with a pvp tweaked fury build which was total humiliation, then again with a pvp oriented prot build, with no sign of improvement.

Now there's no hiding if you armory me, that I havent done a whole lot of pvp since WotLK launced but before that I used to be quite active, playing weekly on 3 teams in fairly ok teams, so I have a fairly good idea on how to kill other players dead. Being on a rp-pvp server also forces reminder lessons daily. ;)

Anyway! Its a common trait among WoW players to always consider their own class underpowered and I am no exception, but the kind of response I recieved was mildly shocking. I had 4-5 guys playing different classes telling me that prot warriors are so unstoppable and can kill anything, this was just after I had been kited around by a mage in EotS while a druid was healing me for a couple minutes, couldnt touch the bugger at all.

I replied that yes, 1v1 protection warriors are strong against certain classes, funnily enough arms and fury warriors, enhancement shamans, warlocks and priests. I also said that protection dps requires that I take a heavy beating, in group pvp people have to be idiots to feed me rage while there are easier targets to wear down. And some other mumbo jumbo, if you play a warrior as well you will know all the arguments.

But still, they wouldnt budge and were adamant in saying prot warriors are awesome for bg, arena, you name it and that was when I took them on their word, and offered them a chance to do some arena with the awesomeness that is Prots. Two death knights took the bait, which led to the birth of.. The Muscleteers! (2v2) We did some initial rounds last night and ended on 3 win - 7 loss, but there is room for some improvement on teamplay and we're going to play a lot more hopefully. So we now got a fabulous tank team running around on Rampage battlegroup with unholy and blood death knights, and me.

What we noticed right away is that it takes them some time to figure out which of us to go for. I'm obviously prot with my shield out but have limited self healing and deal considerable oomph if focused, and my death knight mates are quite resilient too with self healing and high damage. On most of the matches they went for me, which in double dps teams meant we won the match. We had as expected great trouble with healer teams though, especially with a paladin involved. I have really no idea how to counter the absorb shield, high armor, heavy healing.. Advice welcome.

At any rate, this should mean for some amusing evenings between raids, will post stories of great victories and defeats, possibly or most likely with a dash of whine!

5 comments:

Unknown said...
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Anonymous said...

I seem to recall that Paladins were pretty rough as healers when Season 1 came out as well. There's really two things I can think of:

1. If the DPS with the paladin goes after you first, have your death knight use Death Grip and Chains of Ice to get him out of healing range. Without other CC I'm not sure what else to say to try to get him to blow his bubble as early as possible.

2. You can't do this through the bubble obviously, but between the two of you, there are four potential spell interrupts (five if you count death grip). Might be enough to get him down if you're 2 on 1.

Vads said...

First off, thanks for the comment, Tarsus, appreciate the spark of discussion over in my quiet corner of the interwebs :)

I have worked a lot on harassing healers and found that as long as they are casting heals, a well timed shield bash (+silence talent), heroic throw, concussion blow, shockwave, shield bash again and charge/intercept more or less in that order does one hell of a job in denying non-instant healing, works great against paladins, shamans and to a degree priests as long as I have some dps backup.

The trouble starts if I at the same time have to wittle the buggers down myself, as you know rage is a precious resource in pvp and this string of interrupts will need most of my rage, if i can pull it off at all. Even then, if I won't really have hurt them much once my tricks have been spilled. :/

I see definate possibilities with this kind of caster harassing coupled with improved disarm for focus dps and safeguard+intervene glyph for 3v3 or even 5v5 though. Working on getting acceptance into some open minded arena teams ;)

Anonymous said...

Well, for rage efficiency, charge and heroic throw (talented) can interrupt spell casting and are effectively net neutral/positive rage.

They're clearly taking a serious look at rage mechanics again in 3.1, so maybe some of these issues will be addressed. Good luck in the meantime!

Warrior PvP said...

when do people will get that this game is unbalanced when it comes to 1v1. then tell me, why do some warriors are on top of arena ratings.