Are arms warriors a good starter class for arena??

[Zophiel]

Warrior have lots of things that are really neat, but fact of the matter is: warriors don't need them and do well without them. Additionally warriors don't have *that* many hotkeys. comparable to a mutilate rogue, a LOT less than a shadowdance rogue and about half as many as a priest.

Have you ever played a Warrior? From the above statement I'm going to go with no. Even if the answer was a yes you must fail horribly at it.

To the OP, be used to using EVERY ability you have if you plan on playing arena. Also plan on being focused in every battleground ever by anything that can attack you.

[K4ge]

I got S3 shoulders on my warrior before going inactive with him and rerolling rogue.
Anyway: I was talking about starting arena. Thus I'm not going into detail about 2300+. Of course you need good timing with alle of your skills there, there's no doubt (although warrior is still considerably easier than most other classes), but when starting arena and playing up to 1800... you don't need any of it. It'll help, but it isn't necessary. Fact of the matter is 90% of all warriors in the 1800 brackets (haven't played there for a while, because I had enough gold and didn't need to boost scrubs) die without correct use of intervene/shield wall/shield block/spell reflect.
It's a lot like playing rogue: carry around 2 regular offhand and 2 more for poisons and a macro to put a non damaging poison weapon in my mainhand to cs/garrote over sap.

[lizard]

Warrior have lots of things that are really neat, but fact of the matter is: warriors don't need them and do well without them. Additionally warriors don't have *that* many hotkeys. comparable to a mutilate rogue, a LOT less than a shadowdance rogue and about half as many as a priest.

doing drugs much? i've got 15 keybinds on my mouse alone and i wish i had room for more... a buddy of mine is playing both rogue and priest as main. he started levelling warrior and was complaining about too many abilities by the time he hit 65.

[K4ge]

He doesn't play rogue very well then.
Sure warrior has a lot of keybinds (as I said, about the same in arena as a mutilate rogue), but the perfect use of cooldowns is less pivotal than, say, a rogue or a mage. Using them correctly is a HUGE asset but, unlike other classes, not an absolute necessity.
I have everything bound on my warrior including focus charge/intercept, intervene on target, intervene on name, pummel/shield bash/overpower focus, disarm focus etc.

[lizard]

probably YOU are not playing warrior very well then. i highly doubt that you get far over 30 pvp relevant key binds on a muti rogue whereas a warrior can hardly cope with 40.
and as for necessities: the grass is always greener on the other side. if you think that bladestorm alone wins games, you probably have never been on a warrior beyond 1800.

[Eastn]

WTF

I apologize, let me fix this.
Protret and ret are useless compared to holy.

[K4ge]

My friend, I've played rogue at a 2300+ level and warrior above 2000.
We
are
talking
about
low
bracket.
Warrior is, even if it has a decent amount of keybinds, not one of the most difficult classes to play.
I'll quickly talk about my keybinds (I'm only going into class abilities, I also have mount up, eat, bandage, will of the forsaken, engineering etc):
mutilate
shiv
evi
rup
ks
envenom
kick/ focus kick
fok
wotf
stealth
evasion
cold blood
snd (focus snd)
ea
distract
deadly throw (focus dt)
throw/shoot
vanish
sprint
trinket
blind/ focus blind
gouge/ focus gouge
dismantle/ focus dismantle
second trinket
cloak
offhand 1
offhand 2
offhand 3
mainhand 2
as dance:
shadowdance
shadowstep/ focus shs
shd sap/shd focus sap
shd cs
shd garrote
shd premed/focus premed (from 3.0 times, focues premed, focus dt was epic for ranged interrupt on a healer)
ghostly strike
tricks of the trade
shd disarm trap (godly when hunters try to scatter => trap your partner)

at the guy above me: holy is also borderline op as of now.

[Avalanch]

I'd probably say arms warrior would be a good choice.

If you choose to make a paladin and wish to arena with it, I would advise going holy. Retribution is "meh" in arena.

[lizard]

My friend, I've played rogue at a 2300+ level and warrior above 2000.

last time I checked, you were 2276 with a RMP (which is horrible).

We
are
talking
about
low
bracket.
Warrior is, even if it has a decent amount of keybinds, not one of the most difficult classes to play.
[...]

i knew you would brag with your keybinds because you'd think that ~30 for mutilate is A LOT. I've just taken the time and counted mine and came down to 43 warrior-specific arena-relevant binds (+ eating, healthstone, mount etc.). I'd rather have more but I have the disadvantage of relatively short fingers so that stuff like shift+6 or shift+j is not practicable any more.

as for low brackets: please tell me with a straight face that a rogue desperately needs all his cooldowns and needs to use them right to score a kill on bads. the fact of the matter is that the sheer amount of cooldowns they have to sit out tends to be overwhelming for the rogue's opponents. they make mistakes which they cannot recover from whereas the rogue can literally shrug off mistakes by using cloak, evasion or vanish (we're still talking lower levels here).

[K4ge]

No, my point is, that warriors don't die in a 3 second stun, because they tend to have roughly 6-7 thousand hp more than rogues.
Well, I did forget a few, I jsut noticed (feint and prep, but otherwise I think it's all there).

And please, 2200 is probably more than ~95% of players in this forum and less than 1% of the total wow population. and ratingflame without armorylink... well frankly, it doesn't make you look any better.
In all seriousness though: every top player I know, that has ever played one or both of the above classes agrees, that rogue has a noticeably higher skillcomp than plate melees.
Oh, and you clearly didn't count mine. I'm over 50 with shadowdance and somewhere around 70 with my disc priest (who isn't even level 80 yet, although I played one on the TR for a short while.

[Balduvian]

I apologize, let me fix this.
Protret and ret are useless compared to holy.

Ahh, guess I'll have to agree then but still you make an OP spec (Protret) and a fine and viable spec (Ret) look bad when saying it's "useless" compared to anything at all. :P

[Riek]

Ahh, guess I'll have to agree then but still you make an OP spec (Protret) and a fine and viable spec (Ret) look bad when saying it's "useless" compared to anything at all. :P

i wouldnt think ret is viable in 2's... maybe bit different for 3's?

and for the OP, I think holy paladin would work decently in addition to resto druid in 2's, I personally recently tried that out and it didnt take us long time/effort to hit 1800 (not as hard as it took me when I was ret). as long as you know when to blow your cd's (shield wall, etc....) and holy paladin doesnt screw up in interrupts/silences, you'll be good.

[Balduvian]

i wouldnt think ret is viable in 2's... maybe bit different for 3's?

We're talking about being viable, and Ret for sure still is in 2's. They're no where near underpowered yet. They're probably not the best 2v2 class you can have at the moment, but they're still very viable.

[Proletariat]

We're talking about being viable, and Ret for sure still is in 2's. They're no where near underpowered yet. They're probably not the best 2v2 class you can have at the moment, but they're still very viable.

Ret's not viable outside of pretty much one comp (ret/rogue), even ret/disc is very uncommon nowadays, the only one I met in a very long time had a ret in a good amount of pve gear, and relied on their opening burst similar to ret/rogue actually, now that I think about it.

[Balduvian]

Ret's not viable outside of pretty much one comp (ret/rogue), even ret/disc is very uncommon nowadays, the only one I met in a very long time had a ret in a good amount of pve gear, and relied on their opening burst similar to ret/rogue actually, now that I think about it.

Ret is viable. You just don't see alot of them because all of them are Holy/Protret. Still, Ret is perfectly viable.

[Saldivar]

Warriors in most comps are extremely easy to play and succeed with. Out of all of the high-rated arena players that I socialize with, and I'm just being honest, the warriors are among the ones who know the least about pvp. They don't know what feint does or why rogues use it when they bladestorm. When I play against them, almost none of them ever do things like intervene or focus charge. A VERY few ever interrupt when the situation requires it (i.e. when I'm going for a kill on someone, almost no warriors actually pummel me, and the ones that do are very noticeably harder to beat). Moving down to lower rated warriors who I play against on my alts, you'll see ones at 2100 who still don't mortal strike before bladestorming. You'll see even more who do have mortal strike up but allow it to fall off mid-bladestorm. And I'm not taking a jab at anyone, that's just the nature of the class right now. The class does have a respectable skill cap, but, like resto druids in BC, you simply do not need to make good use of that almost at all to be fairly successful with it.

The class is also just not very clutch at all except when in the most expert hands; you have very little control over what's going on, as opposed to say a mage or even a feral druid.

[Proletariat]

Ret is viable. You just don't see alot of them because all of them are Holy/Protret. Still, Ret is perfectly viable.

Okay, so I've provided empirical examples and supporting arguments to supplement my argument. You've simply restated what you've said before, and basically argued "Ret is viable because no one is ret."

Care to try again?

[Ethanlien]

Arms warrior is great, especially on the low end. Charge, Mortal Strike, Slow, Bladestorm, .. profit.

If we look at:

the top 50 EU 5v5 teams, 20 teams have a full time arms warrior with some teams running 2.
the top 50 EU 3v3 teams, 14 teams have a full time arms warrior
the top 50 EU 2v2 teams, 9 teams have a full time arms warrior

so we can see that because the role of an arms warrior is quite one sided (strong sustained damage, limited crowd control and defensive), they tend to be used as a wrecking ball in 5v5s, 3v3s more, allowing extra team members to fill the roles of crowd control, healing and utility.

As for spec, Arms make up 94% of all arena warrior specs, with 3% fury and 3% protection

the basic spec can be found here, but variations obviously differ according to one's own style and experience, as well as composition

http://www.arenajunkies.com/talents/warrior/57_14_0/

[Ajax]

Arms warriors are a nice class for starters. Easy to play, potent damage, pretty endurable, 'arcade' style playing (like a ret pally). And not frustrating to play. BC times are over, you have two short CD gapclosers, low-rage spell reflection, fear immunity usable in ALL stances (stance bonuses are also better then they were), you're rarely rage starved, and can go immune to CCs with bladestorm (while doing heavy damage if your opponent stays in it) considerable ranged burst (shattering throw + heroic throw). Oh, self healing. No real need to get out of battle stance to pummel, or equip a shield to interrupt heals while you can just press overpower for an added 25% magic damage/healing reduction. Shield wall is now a 5 minute CD, and doesn't share cooldowns with retaliation. And they have much better burst/damage overall. Unfortunately you don't really have damage sources that ignore armor but your ArP values easily make up for it anyway.

Only thing frustrating in warriors is to play against them :-X

This is how I feel it, too:

Warrior have lots of things that are really neat, but fact of the matter is: warriors don't need them and do well without them [...]

[Balduvian]

Okay, so I've provided empirical examples and supporting arguments to supplement my argument. You've simply restated what you've said before, and basically argued "Ret is viable because no one is ret."

Care to try again?

You really contradicted yourself here. You said "even Ret/Disc is very uncommon nowadays" but this doesn't make Ret not viable. Rogue/Ret, FrostMage/Ret, basicly every healer/ret team are all viable. (A good Shaman is not worse then a DiscPriest)

Everyone is Prot or Holy, and just because they are that doesn't mean that Ret is not viable. It just says that Prot and Holy are probably better. (And in this case, OP). Also, if no Resto Druid (for example) wants to play with a Ret Paladin that doesn't mean it's not a fine combo either. Resto Druids just prefer going with a Rogue/Warrior/DK/Hunter.

Ret. Is. Viable.

Nothing more then that perhaps, but they ARE viable.

"Care to try again?"