Pre-Raid Gearing Guide

I put together this guide to help out new warriors looking to gear up as quick as possible to start raiding. All of these pieces can be obtained from 5-man heroics and triumph badges.
I recommend getting your 4-piece Tier 9 set bonus, regardless if your a Fury or Arms warrior. At minimum the 2 set bonus. Just make sure you have at least 8% hit and 5-6.5% Expertise.

Slot	Piece Name	Source
	Hellscream's Helmet of Conquest	50 Emblems of Triumph
	Skeleton Lord's Cranium	Scourgelord Tyrannus - Pit of Saron (Normal)
	Barbed Ymirheim Choker	Forgemaster Garfrost - Pit of Saron (Heroic)
	Hellscream's Shoulderplates of Conquest	30 Emblems of Triumph
	Pauldrons of the Devourer	Devourer of Souls - Forge of Souls (Heroic)
	Accursed Crawling Cape	Devourer of Souls - Forge of Souls (Normal)
	Hellscream's Battleplate of Conquest	50 Emblems of Triumph
	Frost Wyrm Ribcage	Scourgelord Tyrannus - Pit of Saron (Heroic)
	Malykriss Vambraces	Forgemaster Garfrost - Pit of Saron (Heroic)
	Weeping Gauntlets	Bronjahm - Forge of Souls (Heroic)
	Hellscream's Gauntlets of Conquest	30 Emblems of Triumph
	Bent Gold Belt	Ick - Pit of Saron (Normal)
	Hellscream's Legplates of Conquest	50 Emblems of Triumph
	Minister's Number One Legplates	Bronjahm - Forge of Souls (Normal)
	Grinning Skull Boots	Lich King - Halls of Reflection (Heroic)
	Band of Stained Souls	Scourgelord Tyrannus - Pit of Saron (Heroic)
	The Lady's Promise	Lich King - Halls of Reflection (Heroic)
	Dexterous Brightstone Ring	35 Emblems of Triumph
	Bloodshed Band	35 Emblems of Triumph
	Needle-Encrusted Scorpion	Devourer of Souls - Forge of Souls (Heroic)
	Mark of Supremacy	50 Emblems of Triumph
	Tyrannical Beheader	Scourgelord Tyrannus - Pit of Saron (Heroic)
	Orca-Hunter's Harpoon	Marwyn - Halls of Reflection (Heroic)
	Papa's Brand New Knife	Bronjahm - Forge of Souls (Heroic)
	Felglacier Bolter	Ick - Pit of Saron (Heroic)
	Crimson Star	25 Emblems of Triumph

The Art of Speccing

"How do I spec? Should I use this talent? Which spec does more dps?"
Shut up and I'll tell ya! This post is long over due. Before you can figure out which spec is best for you, you need to ask yourself one question; What content are you doing? There are talents that work better for certain instances, and at the same time pretty lousy for raid bosses. So without further adieu, the chart-o-specs!

Click the picture for its corresponding talent tree.

Arms for Heroics
Starting out as a fresh 80, you're going to be in pretty crappy gear. You're running heroics until your eyes bleed, gathering up those badges. This spec is designed to make those heroics go by as quickly as possible. This spec is centered around Bladestorm. Heroics are designed with groups of mobs. You will be charging in hit Sweeping Strikes, then Bladestorm. Clear them out quick and build up your badge count.

Fury for Heroics
Now I don't recommend going fury when starting out as a new warrior. Your attacks will miss and be dodged constantly. You will feel rage starved, and your DPS will suck. I built this spec to help with the rage issue. Going 2/2 into Improved Berserker Rage and putting your final point into Improved Bloodrage will help during those times where your rage bar is drained. As you build up your gear set, the rage will build as well, as well as the DPS.
This spec also beefs up Cleave. Talented and glyphed, this ability will hit an additional target, and makes this ability hit even harder than normal. You could essentially just Cleave and Whirlwind your way through heroics if you have the rage.

Arms for Raiding
Ok hotshot. You've got the gear, and you're ready to tear up Icecrown Citadel. This spec changes a few arms talents around, putting a focus on maximizing dps on a single boss target. All of the Icecrown bosses released so far are single target encounters. You will be on that boss almost the entire fight. So this build maximizes your Execute's power. The 25man Festergut encounter requires you to do a constant 7.5K DPS by yourself to beat the encounter before the enrage! Flasking, potting, and being geared and specced right is crucial to victory, along with many other encounters within ICC.

Fury for Raiding
This spec drops the battleshout improving talents, and puts those points into maximizing single target DPS. This spec beefs up your Execute, and reduces your cooldowns through the Intensify Rage talent. Most boss fights last between 5-7 minutes. Speccing into this talent will allow you to use Death Wish 3 times during the course of the encounter rather than 2. The first 3 tiers of the fury tree and be specced many different ways, and it depends entirely on your raid composition, and your rage generation. If you never run out of rage and heroic strike non stop, go ahead and take points out of Unbridled Wrath and put them into Booming Voice and Commanding Presence. That will provide your raid with a 5 minute buff with around 560 more HP than the regular version. And for you more adventurous few who run with a feral druid and trust he will never go down, you could drop your point in Rampage and shift it over to Heroic Fury for tons more maneuverability during the fight, or put it into Anger Management over in the Arms tree for even more rage generation.


Conclusion
Speccing these ways is a great start to your path as a warrior. But they are no means best for everyone. It depends on your gear, raid composition, and play style. There is no one spec for everyone. Any questions, feel free to drop a comment below.

Soon I will make a post about speccing your warrior while leveling, making this task as painless as possible.

Rend Timing

Keeping your rend up at all times as an arms warrior is vital. And in the heat of battle, looking up and finding that little icon in a shifting list of 25 others, then squinting to see how much is left... frankly is just annoying.


Well say no more, I found a great lightweight addon called ClassTimer that fixes this problem. It has great applications for fury warriors too! It moves those debuffs (and your buffs if specified) down to a scalable, movable bar. You can stay on top of them and never let those vital ones fall off.

My Arms setup. I only have it displaying Rend. And as big as possible!

I recommend arms warriors turning everything off except rend, to keep from cluttering up your window. Or keep sunder armor on as well if you don't have a warrior tank in your group.

As for fury warriors, you can add in your trinket procs, and when they pop up, hit your Death Wish! Combining your cooldowns together is what separates good fury warriors from great ones. To add in your trinket procs, find name of the buff it gives you when it procs, then add that name (CaSe SeNsItIvE!) to the extras tab under timers in the addon's options menu.

Example showing your buffs and target debuffs in one window. Icy rage was a trinket proc I added in.

So grab this addon over at Curse.com And if you have any questions how to use it, feel free to post them here.

Theorycrafting 102!

Landsoul's new edition of his spreadsheet is out, and now covers everything from the new Icecrown patch up to the first 4 bosses, and even a little beyond that, using some test realm data. The look-up feature has changed a little, but follow the guide on the first page and you should be fine.

If you don't know what a spreadsheet is, refer to my previous post about Theorycrafting here.

Anyway here is the link to the official forum post with some important info.
http://elitistjerks.com/f81/t37462-warrior_dps_calculation_spreadsheet/