Thinking of coming back to WoW after 2,5 years; Warrior perspective

[Grishnaar]

To start, I cant see how this can be a short post, so WARNING, TL;DR!

Ah yes, good ol' World of Warcraft. If I was to write my whole story, I don't think it would fit in one post, as I'm sure it's the same thing for many of you too

To (somewhat) summarise, I played Open Beta and then since 3rd day of US Vanilla, even though I'm from Europe (dont ask ). I didn't know much about the game, it was my first MMO (well, I *did* play UO for a bit, but still) and was insta hooked. I chose orc warrior and stick to the same race/class to this day (or should I say until I stopped 2,5 years ago).
I went through numerous patches, bug fixes, buffs, nerfs, etc. etc. Met lots of great people and all in all, WoW provided a certain online adventure mixed with RL people that I probably wont forget for the rest of my life.
I had a pause, then switched to EU servers and played with several friends from my country, etc. So that was like WoW adventure #2

But, as always, all good things come to an end.

As a lot of you, I felt burned out, even though I wasn't hardcore at all and mostly just PvPed.

I completely stoped playing in February, 2011. I don't know what patch that was, but I know Transmorgation wasn't in yet. Nor were the new style Talents.

Anyway, if I (try to) put nostalgia out of the way, would you guys, warriors (ok, others are welcome too :P) say it's worth coming back?

Mostly, I'm interested in few stuff:

1) How is the warrior class today? (I don't mind being hard, it always kinda was. I just need an honest, realistic opinion/answer whether we can hold our own in various situations, provided the players knows how to play)

2) How is the population on servers? Is it that dead as it seems or I lack info?

3) I assume everyone would recommend choosing a server where I have friends or can easily join a guild?

Any other information/suggestions are appreciated for a new(old) warrior like myself

[Deleted]

Feb 2011 was at the start of cataclysm I think? Damn, time goes fast. To answer your questions:

1) IMO warriors are great fun to play. I don't know if you were mainly dps or tank, but especially the tanking part has has greatly improved in MoP. It's a lot more active (as in, you have to generate rage trough abilities instead of getting hit) and there are now quite a few different viable gearing options. I'm not quite sure how dps was 2,5 years ago, but I don't think it has changed that much. We did "lose" some abilities like rend, but those are now baked into other abilities. So you won't have as much to worry about. This doesn't make dpssing boring though. I think it's pretty well done.

2) Population on servers varies greatly This is a list of the EU servers with their population. It only has the level 90 characters I think, and maybe not even all of them, but it's a nice guideline. If you decide to play on the highest population servers you can expect queues to login of up to 2 hours though. Blizzard is also implementing this thing called virtual realms which merges 2 (or more?) low population servers. So even if you decide to play on a relatively low population server, chances are that you will have more people around in a little while.

3) It's always nice to play with friends, that's why there is now a system in place where you can group up with your battle.net/battletag friends and do dungeons/raids together. There are a few restrictions though; you do have to be on the same faction and you can't run the latest tier normal/heroic modes together. So it's not that important to play on the same server as your friends, although it would be nice to be in their guild to use guild chat and stuff. That's something you can't do yet with the cross-realm system.

So my answers turned out to be pretty long too Anyways, welcome back!

[Grishnaar]

Ty for the input.
I mostly DPSed, but had my fair share of tanking. However, PvP is what I did the most. However, I think I'd enhoy PvE and PvP the same after so long.

Also, thnx for the server list. So sad to see Spinebreaker so low. I guess I would need to transfer.
Is it still like 20€ for transfer per char? or how does it work today?

[Deleted]

Yeah, transfers are still the same system. Very overpriced Can't really say that much about pvp. I rarely do that. I think there are some pvp guilds around that do rated battlegrounds (not sure if those were around when you quit, they are like normal battlegrounds but with a premade group). That would probably suit you well.

[Valech]

Warriors are currently in a good spot. Some decent buffs to all speccs and the naturally great scaling with equippment made is viable as tanks, dps and in PvP. Since I´m only doing PvE I cannot tell much about PvP, but a friend of mine told me, that you can chose between being more controlly or more bursty, just what is needed in your arena setup. In PvE I can tell, that tanking never felt greater before. Sure, I missed the Heroic Strike spam a lot in the beginning and you definitly have to educate your finger not to press that HS button until it glows, but taking a more active role in reducing your damage is for me a great improvement, since up to MoP the only way you could be a good tank is to stack stats and use Cooldowns wisely and hope that your dodge/parry/block will do the rest.
Fury provides the two things I like about damage the most: a ton of numbers and, from time to time, huge numbers. Extraordinarily high burst potential, decent cleave and decent single target. Sure, no warlock/mage, but since the warrior´s great package of utility is given to all speccs we are a more then viable option. In fact my current guild (10m) decided to take me instead of an slightly better geared drood for my utility package. Good times to return.

Edit: The current trend for servers is, that empty servers are getting emptier and full servers are getting fuller. spend yesterday full 40 minutes to log onto Blackhand-EU. My alt on Shattrath-EU on the other hand has problems to pug for flex. Thats all because amobitioned players and guilds need a bigger playerbase to sustain their raids and compensate drop outs and fluctuation and thus, go to a full server, leaving their old server empty.