Know Your Enemy – Warriors

A quick guide to some of a warrior’s more painful/annoying abilities



Key Offensive Abilities

Bladestorm Bladestorm

A six second aoe whirlwind that deals massive damage (90sec cooldown). When bladestorming, the warrior is immune to all* forms of CC and disarms. As soon as the warrior casts this, use feint to reduce the damage done by 50%. If you have Glyph of Cloak of Shadow you can reduce the damage done even further. A good warrior will use this while your healer is CC’d, and since you can’t counter it with a gouge/blind/stun, all you can do is lower the damage it will do to you. Luckily, unless it’s combined with a stun, that’s something you can do.
*Update for 3.3.3* Bladestorm can now be disarmed (not 100%, still vulnerable to dodge etc). Whether you save disarm for their shield wall or use it on the disarm should depend on how much damage bladestorm is going to do. It’s a good idea to disarm when the warrior is bladestorming your partners – as a rogue you have enough defensive CDs to negate the damage it does to you, but a priest for example isn’t as lucky.

Retaliation Retaliation

12 seconds of pain – the next twenty of your hits will cause the warrior to immediately hit you back (for around 2000dmg). Either CC, swap target or take a single hit by gouging. It’s very noticable when they use it;

DO NOT TOUCH, OK?

Mortal Strike Mortal Strike

Wound poison for warriors. This is likely to be on you at all times if you play with a healer.

Key Defensive Abilities



Enraged Regeneration Enraged Regeneration

There’s nothing you can do about this self-heal, other than make sure that wound poison is applied at all times.

Intercept Intercept and Intervene Intervene

While these two abilities have different uses, they can be grouped together into “annoying movement buffs”. Intercept is used aggresively to either stun you, or to get away from you by charging your partner. Theoretically you can kite a warrior by staying between 4-8yards from them, but doing so is a lot harder than it sounds.
Intervene is another dual-use ability – can be used to either get away from you or to get close to you and take some of the pressure off their partner.

Berserker Rage Berserker Rage

This can be used to break an existing sap and will make the warrior immune to saps, gouges and other such cc effects. You can still cheap/kidney shot, but you will need to be quick as typically a warrior will try and get you out of stealth the second the sap breaks (often with Demoralizing Shout).

Disarm Disarm

Similar to dismantle (1min cooldown), but only affects your mainhand/ranged weapon. Continue to shiv though to build combo points and keep wound poison applied.