Protection Warrior PvP Guide — 12.1

Season 2 brings with it many changes to Warrior, primarily for how Rend operates. Many passive or permanent uptime slows in the game have been adjusted down to a more baseline value, so 70% slows like Chains of Ice have been reduced to 50% or Curse of Exhaustion from 50% to 30%. This is a major buff to Warrior in general, as Hamstring has retained its power, which makes the playing field a lot more even now.

• Rend is now an Arms only ability, and costs 10 Rage to use.
• Blood and Thunder is a new talent and applies Rend.
• Devastating Focus now also increases the damage of Execute.li>
• Fueled by Violence now heals for 125% of bleed damage up from 110%.
• Ignore Pain absorbs 25% more damage.
• Brutal Vitality adds 10% of damage dealt to Ignore Pain up from 10%.
• Ravager now deals 50% more damage, no longer increases the damage of Thunder Clap and Revenge and causes targets hit to take 25% more damage from your bleeds.
• Demolish is now 30 seconds cooldown and no longer has cooldown reduction.
• Tide of Battle now also increases the damage of Execute.
• Thunder Blast damage increased by 40%.
• Crashing Thunder increases the damage of Thunder Clap by 10% down from 30%.
• Piercing Howl has been reduced to 50% slow in PvP.
• Storm of Destruction has been reduced to 50% slow in PvP.

Midnight is here and with it, a whole bunch of changes to Protection Warrior. Midnight reduced the amount of button bloat across most classes in the game, and Protection Warrior is no different, but also hardly affected by it.

Fundamentally, Protection Warrior remains the same, still having access to the same CC, utility, mobility and rotational buttons, with only a few button bloat removals like Thunderous Roar. Additionally, the hero specializations Mountain Thane and Colossus function almost the same, but have a new branch of talents that you will fill out as you level.

Important Note

Midnight also introduces Apex talents, with Protection Warrior getting Phalanx, a minor damage increase that does not really interact with your rotation all that much.