What’s up skill-cappers! Thorrior the warrior here and I’m here to bring you my first written article. This particular one is about how to gem, reforge, and gear your warrior in the most recent patch, 4.3.

Gear

4.3 has brought the return of extremely strong pve gear in pvp… While this has never quite left, it is far more prevalent this patch than the last. As wearing the current season’s gladiator gear is a well known standard, I’m going to go over each interesting piece of pve gear and explain in detail why it is/might be useful.

Bone-Link Fetish

• [Bone-Link Fetish]
• [Bone-Link Fetish]
• [Bone-Link Fetish]

This trinket is utterly amazing… Not only does it scale for attack power, but it cleaves as a whirlwind. While this can have its negatives, (breaking nearby cc’s for one) the positives far overwhelm them. This trinket is essential for any comp that relies on burst, especially TSG or kittycleave. Get this if you can, as it can be easily obtained by raid finder.

Gurthalak, Voice of the Deeps

• [Gurthalak, Voice of the Deeps]
• [Gurthalak, Voice of the Deeps]
• [Gurthalak, Voice of the Deeps]

Not only does this sword have amazing damage to begin with, but it has a chance to proc a tentacle with 15,000 hp that does a 2 second mind flay for massive damage, upwards of 25k to a target dummy. This proc has no internal cooldown, and is absolutely deadly if it double or even triple procs. Use raid finder until t1/t2 cataclysmic, and if you can get your hands on a heroic version, I’d say it would be best in slot.

Eye of Unmaking

• [Eye of Unmaking]
• [Eye of Unmaking]
• [Eye of Unmaking]

This trinket, while I believe is inferior to the bone-link fetish, is still rather interesting. While not providing much burst, 780-990 strength is a LOT of strength to have up almost all of the time. Keep an eye out for this trinket if you don’t have bone-link fetish, and definitely grab it.

Rotting Skull

• [Rotting Skull]

For those of you with bad luck on rolling for gear, this trinket is a -really- good filler for the recently nerfed apparatus. The passive crit is nice, and the on use strength is extremely good, and on a very short minute and thirty second cooldown.

Gemming your gear

The priority system for gems is unchanged.  For those of you that don’t know:

• hit to 5% > expertise to 20 > Strength >Crit > Mastery

There are shiny new epic gems added to the mix! While these gems are rather difficult to obtain (can only be earned in normal mode or above dragon soul raids), and cost a pretty penny, they are something to look for for the richer WoW arena player who wants to take things to the next level and be extremely serious with their pushes. Due to the recent addition of epic gems, and no upgraded version of Chimera-eye gems from jewelcrafting, jewelcrafting is no longer a king profession for warriors… If you want to min-max, go Alchemy (+81 strength from mixology) and blacksmithing (2 extra sockets, now even more powerful thanks to the epic gems.)

Reforging

Reforging also stays the same in terms of the priority system, exactly as the gem priority system, however I will give a quick overview of what to reforge on each piece, if reforged. This is assuming you are wearing a full gladiator set, and only using a weapon/trinket for pve gear.

• Helm: Mastery—>Crit
• Necklace: Expertise—>Hit
• Cloak: Mastery—>Hit
• Legs: Haster—->Crit
• Crit Ring: Crit—->Hit

All unlisted items remain intact, and are not reforged. This particular setup is the most efficient, and will allow you to fill in whatever gaps you need with gems, while staying close to the sweet spot on hit and expertise.

Best of luck in season 11 guys, and stay tuned for more videos and articles!