Warrior. The worst soloing class?Follow

Is the warrior the worst class overall when it comes to solo questing and grinding? In a comparison of the best levelling / grinding specs of each class, i.e. BM hunter, shadow priest, etc., is the arms or fury warrior at the bottom of the heap?

Hunters, and to a lesser degree warlocks, have pets which make soloing a very efficient affair. Rogues, and also cat druids, burn mobs down more quickly than warriors and take less damage in the process. Priests start off weak, possibly worse than warriors, but when they get shadowform their soloing capability goes up several notches. Paladins deal less damage than warriors, but have many more ways to stay alive, and are incredibly tough to kill off. Mages and shamans.. well to be honest, I don't know anything about them, so maybe some one else can chime in. :P

Warriors can dish out a fair amount of damage, but as they need to get in close with the mobs, take a lot more punishment too. This leads to more time spent bandaging and eating. Their 30-min "panic buttons", especially retaliation, are reliant on the warrior staying alive long enough for the ability to run its course. The other "fear bomb" panic button is situational and can sometimes make things worse instead of better.

For the record, I love my warrior. I love teaming up with a priest or pally and downing three or four quests at a time with no downtime. I love taking obscene, inordinate amounts of damage in instances and coming back for more. It's just slowly dawning on me that warrior soloing is not their strongest point.

Compared to other classes with better CC,I would agree with you. However,at lvl 70,with decent/good gear,a competent Arm or Fury warrior can handle at least 2,perhaps three mobs of his/her own level without retaliation,provided it's a melee battle and the warrior starts it off with a charge or intercept. Try fishing the big lake in Skettis if you want to see what you can survive,solo,number wise :)


Otis

I've pretty much solo'ed my way to 69 (going to push that last bit for 70 tonight!) and really don't think that warriors lack in the solo department...at least 2h Arms/Fury anyways. No real experience with Protection, so not sure how well they fare. The only quests I ever focused on were yellow, as greens just didn't provide much of a challenge.

Sure, we have to bandage/eat every now and then, but I can ususally burn through a good number of mobs before that's necessary. Sweeping Strikes, Mortal Strike, Imp. Overpower, and Cleave provide great offense against multiple mobs, and Imp. T-Clap works extremely well to help mitigate damage. If you really wanted to focus on PVE, Imp Cleave would not be a bad choice as it greatly increases the damage bonus (and when used with Sweeping Strikes and chunck off huge amounts of mob hps quickly).

Retaliation is great as a last resort for multiple mobs, and using Intimidating Shout on a single mob can give you enough time to bandage up a bit (just don't damage the mob), but as you said, can really backfire if in a crowded area. If those are both down, Hamstring or Piercing Howl and run away until you loose aggro. I've really noticed a difference after maxxing out Enrage and picking up Deathwish. Makes soloing quite a bit easier.

The only time I really had issues soloing was when I hit 58 and went through the portal. Pre-BC gear (I didn't have any epics, mainly quested/instance blues) just was not enough. However, after upgrading my gear with quest rewards (constantly complaining about the amount of paly plate offered), the balance started swinging back into my favor.

Yeah, there'll always be a bad pull, sudden spawn, pather, etc. which will get you killed. BUT, that is going to happen with pretty much every other class as well.

Once I ding'd 70 I changed over to a Prot spec (5/5/51). Trying to quest now is a pain in the butt. The only thing stopping me from spec changes every week is I have a hunter to grind with to get money. Would be expesive re-specing every week to tank then quest...etc.

It's not that warriors are bad at soloing. The thing I love about WoW is that every class has a good, proven soloing build, and you don't need to rely on others to quest and level. But when compared side-by-side to every other class's best grinding build, the warrior falls short.

Levelling some alts has really demonstrated this for me. My priest hit 40 and I wanted to test drive his brand new shadowform talent. Headed to the badlands and grinded on rock elementals for an hour, and to my utter amazement I had _zero_ downtime the entire excursion. No drinking. No eating. No bandaging! If I was low on HP, I tossed out a renew or VE going into the next fight. Granted, this was an ideal grinding scenario (low HP mobs, no runners, individual pulls). But I recall running my warrior through the same gauntlet at that level, and needing to eat / bandage every few mobs. He wasn't in the same league for efficiency.

Even though my hunter is only 14, the class has already blown me away with its soloing capability. I can take on camps of four same level troggs / gnolls without breaking a sweat, five if I pop a potion. My warrior had to completely avoid the camps and pick off the mobs strolling around (though I imagine most classes would too).

I completely agree that if you love your class, you can put up with its weaknesses and enjoy it for what it is. Magic spells are wonderful, stealth is exciting, and healing often saves the day. But nothing gives me more satisfaction than swinging an oversized two-hander and hearing that "plugh" crit sound effect. Makes me smile just thinking about it. Still, if the soloing capability of all the classes were ranked, my guess is the warrior would come in at #7, 8, or 9.

Very true Synn, point noted. Completely forgot that I hate elementals on my warrior. :P

No doubt we do have to eat more than some other classes. But in response to Scolariman, I to leveled as arms/fury then specced prot at 70. I read a post of getting dual weapons and sunder/devastate. That does work nice, and killing speed goes way down, but you are still gonna be eating again after mob 2-3(if they are 70s). I found a good middle ground. First, I put on all my DPS gear I stopped using a while ago (DPS gear doesnt keep you alive in an instance as a prot guy). I use my shield with all my dps gear. Shield slam doesn't just generate threat as we all know, but it has great damage. Now the crits arent as high as with all the shield value tanking gear, but with the crit gear on the crit rate is way up there. I get regular 900 shield slams when soloing. I also use this setup for pvp. The shield slam damage and shield bash ability rocks. And the trick with the elementals is we gotta get into them and interrupt the casts. They are very easy with the interrupts. Of course when you got multiples on ya it gets ugly quick. Patience is key to get then one at a time. Bottom line is for us to give damage, we put oursleves in the position to take damage. BTW I never leave Shat with anything less than 40 bagels, 60 preferably.
Also for devastate to work the best, you want a slow hard hitting weapon.

Prot warrior is just fine leveling in outlands. I went there as a 60 wearing Imperial Plate set. I thought it was going to be big trouble but not even. Played it like a tank in an instance and all was good.

Didn't kill fast but didn't die much.

I also ended up wearing pally plate for a while but hey, they wore our crap forever so its all good.

For new prot tanks out there, I'd say get your Sporeggar rep up enough to get their shield that does DOT damage every time you block. I'm still using that baby to grind at 67 and love that extra damage tic.

Edit: for those saying higher level mobs are no-no. I'm taking down lvl 70's just fine now at 67...as full on prot spec.

Edited, Jul 12th 2007 9:28pm by kindgreen

Hi here is my opinion on the matter for what its worth.

I have levelled up a 70 warrior, a 70 priest and a hunter to 66 (but i'm not addicted!)

Of the three the hunter was by far the easiest class to solo and level which is no suprise given that they are designed to be that way.

Priests are pretty useless at soloing until you can get shadow form, comparitively speaking but as previous posters have stated, get a lot stronger as they get higher but still use a lot of mana in fights where you are up against more than one mob especially if they are more than 2 levels higher. (I am referring to shad spec priests here not holy)

Warriors...I love my warrior, he was my first toon and I still class him as my main even tho my priest is probably higher specced now and more in demand for raids as my guild have an abundance of tanks.

My view is that warriors are fine to level with but they do have their limitations. For ease of questing and grinding post lev 60 I found that Fury spec was the way to go ( and i respecced on several occasions to arms and prot)
The key to fury is getting together good +strength gear and just as importantly good +hit gear to minimise misses with the OH weapon. I was lucky in getting some good armour drops which have good AP stats, less so in weapons and I actually used my level 60 GM Axe and GM swiftblade until nearly level 70. In terms of a tanking role I found that putting spare talents into prot to get three points in defiance allowed me to hold aggro in pre raid instances. I have only respecced to full Prot since starting raiding.

At the end of the day there's nothing like standing toe to toe slogging it out and seeing the (imagined) fear in the eyes of your target!!!

I don't consider hunter and warlock solo classes, because after reaching level 10 they both get pets to take the beatings.

Warriors can solo just fine. If you stay on top of gear from 1-70, you'll be fine.

At 70, my war only has to stop to bandage every 20th mob or so. Grinding anything 65-70ish. My armor takes like 1% damage every 10-20 mobs... I dunno about ya'll, but with the way money drops in outlands, I make about 15-20 gold an hour just from coin drops, AFTER repair bills. Then the gray drops and white drops noone buys sell for a lot more. ::edit:: to the npc.

l2p, use food, use bandages. Warriors need gear. One of the weakest classes when undergeared. But one of the strongest, when decked out.

*cough* fury was nerfed because the top .1% of warriors where OP. Out dpsing, rogues, *pshaw* how dare they!

Edited, Jul 16th 2007 4:12pm by devioususer