How on earth do you deal with weapon swapping?

[Ebonheart]

I am quite surprised that I've never levelled a warrior sooner. However, I am having a blast and charge is definitely an amazing skill.

However, I often find myself not using the warrior's entire tool kit like shield block or whatever its called or spell reflect and more. I find it very annoying having to switch weapons. Also I've noticed that there are so many "filler" spells and abilities that I never find myself using or have too long CDs to find any space for them on my action bar.

How do you warriors deal with that? This is probably my only reason why I can't enjoy the class much. I love the entire class otherwise.

[Chaosturn]

What spells are you talking about? You don't have to name them all but an example would be great

[Onbeatable]

I'm going to give you a PvP example for Spell Reflection.

As an arms warrior you wear (ofcourse) a 2h, I name this set Arms.
I name my PvP gear with 1h + shield: ArmsDef
My macro with spell reflection is the following:

/equipset ArmsDef
/cast Spell Reflection

As soon as I reflected something, I switch back to my Arms set:

/equipset Arms, which I keybind (in my case to Shift-F).

That's how I do the weapon swapping, dont really need to swap more besides for Shield Wall, but basically replace /cast Spell Reflection with /cast Shield Wall and throw a line in there before with /cast Defensive Stance.

[Ebonheart]

What spells are you talking about? You don't have to name them all but an example would be great

Well you have Recklessness, then you have Deadly Calm, Sweeping Strikes if you are Arms, Shattering Throw, and a bunch of others.

---------- Post added 2013-02-25 at 07:02 PM ----------

I'm going to give you a PvP example for Spell Reflection.

As an arms warrior you wear (ofcourse) a 2h, I name this set Arms.
I name my PvP gear with 1h + shield: ArmsDef
My macro with spell reflection is the following:

/equipset ArmsDef
/cast Spell Reflection

As soon as I reflected something, I switch back to my Arms set:

/equipset Arms, which I keybind (in my case to Shift-F).

That's how I do the weapon swapping, dont really need to swap more besides for Shield Wall, but basically replace /cast Spell Reflection with /cast Shield Wall and throw a line in there before with /cast Defensive Stance.

OH geee. Thanks. How do I make these gear sets?

And will you know when you have reflected a spell?

[Onbeatable]

OH geee. Thanks. How do I make these gear sets?

Blizzard has a built-in gear set thingy, click on "C', should be there somewhere.
The set name in your macro has to be exact the same as in the gear set thingy, or else it won't work ofcourse

And will you know when you have reflected a spell?

Well, I use ClassTimer to track some of my buffs and debuffs from the enemy, (uptime of Colossus Smash on enemy, my Taste for Blood proc, my shouts etc.
Spell Reflection I have in this too, but you could ofcourse also look at your buffs if you see that your Spell Reflection 'buff' is gone (means it has reflected something or it expired)

[asharia]

i have spell reflect and shield wall macros to auto swap when i use them

to change back, i have my /equip 2hander function macroed into my stances. it's kinda left over from when they had stance requirements too, but it works just fine, and saves wasting another action bar slot and keybind on a weapon swap macro.

[Mormolyce]

If you're running out of room on your action bars as a Warrior then you probably need to use more bars in the options menu. My Warrior's bars are a little more cluttered than I'd like but nowhere near as bad as some other classes. Put anything that you would rarely use on the right side action bars. If that's not working out look into an action bar addon, I don't use any myself but they're quite popular.

[Deleted]

If you're running out of room on your action bars as a Warrior then you probably need to use more bars in the options menu. My Warrior's bars are a little more cluttered than I'd like but nowhere near as bad as some other classes. Put anything that you would rarely use on the right side action bars. If that's not working out look into an action bar addon, I don't use any myself but they're quite popular.

This. Organize it well, I use some kind of "system" for myself. Defensive abilties bind to ctrl+"x" buttons etc. It's all up to personal preferences.

[Deleted]

Warriors have a lot of abilities to keybind, and it can get pretty messy on the bars. A healthy amount of macros can help with this. If you don't want to bother with equipment sets (you probably should bother, they're useful), or don't want macros tied to them, you can use:

#showtooltip Spell Reflection
/equipslot 16 YourOneHanderHere
/equipslot 17 YourShieldHere
/cast Spell Reflection

And then another macro that has:

/equipslot 16 YourTwoHanderHere

Obviously put the name of your weapon/shield in where appropriate. You can shift click the item while writing the macro to put the name into the macro more easily (some have awkward spellings or symbols).

Type /m into the chat window to open the macro interface.

As for spells with long cooldowns that don't seem to do much that you mentioned...

Recklessness: Huge burst cooldown. Use this to put out a lot of pressure in PvP and strong burst phase damage in PvE. On its own, 50% extra crit doesn't really warrant a 5 minute cooldown, but it helps with enrage uptime (10% more damage, more rage for more abilities), and also synergises well with other cooldowns such as Bloodbath, and big damage skills like Execute.

Sweeping Strikes: Sadly a mere shadow of its former self, but still a useful spell. Use this pretty much any time you need to hit two targets, as long as you can avoid running out of rage. It costs 30 rage, so consider that you'll effectively be losing a Slam or Heroic Strike to use it, but it is a reasonably strong cleave skill nonetheless. You'll usually use it every time there are two targets in melee range.

Shattering Throw: Can be a raid DPS increase to use on a boss, at a personal DPS loss usually, but its use is pretty much for PvP mostly. It can remove Ice Block and Divine Shield, which is very useful. It has a very high rage cost and silly cast time that are relics from Cataclysm, but it can still be useful and removing a Paladin's Divine Shield early can secure you a kill.

Deadly Calm: This is being removed in a few weeks when the next patch hits. For now, just macro it with Heroic Strike:

#showtooltip Heroic Strike
/cast Deadly Calm
/cast Heroic Strike

and then just forget it even exists

Hope that helps you out a bit.

[Tearyn]

Have to admit i'm very glad I've played my warrior since vanilla, if i had start playing one now for the first time i think i would be struggling with all the abilities, as it is my bars are full and all key-bound and i suspect muscle memory is in large part what lets me keep track of everything.

I don't know if you are leveling a warrior with the aim of PvE, or PvP, or both, but either way I'd suggest you start with the basics, and leave out abilities that are too situational or otherwise rarely used. Maybe spend some time on a dummy just going through the basic rotation.

Once all of those core ability key-binds feel natural and your rotation is in your fingers, you can start adding new abilities that are not used as often, shattering throw might be a good example. When your not having to pay attention to your core abilities, focusing on learning new keybinds will be infinitely simpler.

You sound like you have a fair few other characters, perhaps try to place abilities on keybinds you use for similar abilities on those other characters, if you have a priest, maybe use the same keybind for your AoE fear on both characters. That sort of thing.

[Chaosturn]

Well you have Recklessness, then you have Deadly Calm, Sweeping Strikes if you are Arms, Shattering Throw, and a bunch of others.

Recklessness: You wanna use Recklessness with your other damage-increasing abilities such as bloodbath or avatar, trinkets etc. If you have any sort of "proc trinkets" (chance on hit to increase X by Y) Get an addon that can track the buff from that trinket, like TellMeWhen for example. When you pop recklessness you get a huge dps increase so in conjunction with bloodbath/trinkets it's amazing for doing big damage.

Deadly calm: just macro it together with heroic strikes and don't worry about it. It's getting removed anyway in 5.2. The macro looks like this:
#showtooltip Heroic strike
/cast Deadly calm
/cast Heroic strike

Sweeping Strikes: Amazing ability, makes you hit two targets at once. To have 100% uptime you need to use it as often as you can so try to use less rage with this up, because activating sweeping strikes itself costs 30 rage every 10 seconds. That's a lot of rage for an arms warrior.

Shattering Throw: This has 2 uses.
PvE: Reduces the armor of your target. It affects everyone, so everyone does more damage (if it's physical damage that is) to that target. Amazing cooldown for raids, best used together with skull banner which increases the power of EVERYONE's critical hits by 20%
PvP: It breaks immunity shields like paladin bubbles, mage ice blocks etc. So if a mage iceblocks on low health, you can just cast Shattering throw on him and the iceblock will dissapear.

I see you got some tips on spell reflect already

Intervene: Charge, but on friendly player. use it to move around quickly. It also causes the next melee hit to hit you instead of your friend, so not so well used on tanks in raids, if you don't have a cooldown up

[Rorke]

OP stole my last name. Yes, I am jelly.