Warrior Group PVE Technique

Group PVE Technique

A warrior’s primary role in a group is to tank, or to hold aggro from a monster so that it doesn’t decide to head off and attack your weaker teammates like mages or priests. The defensive stance is usually best for this, as it makes it easiest to taunt enemies and hold their attention, and will let you take more damage without needing to be healed. Given the versatility of the warrior’s battle stances, though, you can also become a balanced tank/damage dealer with the battle stance, or a pure damage machine with the berserker stance. You should discuss your role with the rest of your group before heading out, especially if there are multiple tanks in the party.

If you do become the primary tank, and you often will, that role will often include pulling duties. Again, though, coordination with your party is a must, especially when you’re dealing with rogues and mages, who both have their own crowd control techniques. In these cases, it’s very useful to have a set of bound party macros to let everyone know which target they should be focusing on. For example:

/point
/p Rogue, sap %t!

/point
/p Mage, sheepify %t!

This works best when you’re dealing with mobs of different names, of course; if you’re going up against a party of three Defias Wizards, you’ll probably have to engage in a bit more talking to coordinate your efforts. But you really do need to make sure everyone’s on the same page; if you wind up breaking your teammates’ carefully-planned crowd control by attacking a Sapped target, for instance, you’re going to generate a lot of ill-will towards yourself within the party. By the same token, though, make sure your party members are using their /assist command to focus on the mob that you’re tanking and taunting; if your mages are blasting away at the wrong target, they’re going to get hit much more often than they should.

When you do need to perform a pull, though, it’s always useful to have some kind of ranged weapon available to you. You don’t have to buy the best gun available to you; whatever you can use at level one will be sufficient to cause a pull throughout the game, although it won’t do much damage on the level 60 elites you’ll eventually be facing. That’s all right, though; the point of a ranged weapon on a warrior isn’t to deal an insane amount of damage, but rather to get the monster’s attention, which it’ll do regardless of whether you hit them or miss them, or indeed deal any damage to them at all.

When pulling, though, you’ll need to give your teammates clear instructions on where to stand, especially when they’re of lower levels than the enemies you’re facing off against. Players are able to draw aggro from much further away when enemies are higher level than they are, so don’t hesitate to tell everyone to hang back while you run ahead and pull enemies back. The easiest way to screw up a carefully-planned pull is to have a teammate get too close to another enemy without realizing it.

Tips

Be sure to coordinate with your party members, especially when you have abilities that overlap. You may want to create macros that let your teammates know when you’re using abilities like Bash or Pummel, so that your teammates don’t inadvertantly use their own interrupts on your target at the same time.
If your party is getting overwhelmed, use Challenging Shout to refocus their attention on you. You have a long cooldown for this power, but it’s worth using if it’s going to save the lives of your party members.
Intimidating Shout can be a good last-resort ability, but can sometimes make a bad situation worse, since feared enemies can wake up nearby group.