New player looking for advice.

[Thomasmgp]

I just recently came over from EQ after playing 8 years there. Decided that I will make a warrior. I figured I would post this here because the official forums seem to be nothing more than a nursery for QQ babies. Would it be OK to take up 1 hander and shield right away and level strictly as protection or will i want to /wrist?

[Fyran]

I just recently came over from EQ after playing 8 years there. Decided that I will make a warrior. I figured I would post this here because the official forums seem to be nothing more than a nursery for QQ babies. Would it be OK to take up 1 hander and shield right away and level strictly as protection or will i want to /wrist?

From my experience it's far more likely you're going to want to end yourself if you start out as prot. Since I'm leveling a second warrior right now as well, I figured I'd level as Arms and make the switch to prot when hitting 60 - at least that's my plan.

[anygenericname]

I've leveled two warriors, once as alliance and again as horde.

I leveled both times as protection spec from the get go.

I don't regret it.

It's not fast, you need to be ok with that. You wont have to stop to bandage / eat anywhere near as much as fury / arms though, but killing things takes longer.

You also will not die anywhere near as many times. There has been quite a few times while leveling that for whatever reason things have gone horrifically wrong and I've ended up with 6-7 mobs on me at once.. as protection in that scenario you wont die if you have cooldowns to burn.

The main trouble I have while leveling is that dying while soloing annoys me so much at times that I want to switch character for a while and play an alt.. so obviously protection was the best method for me.

You'll be fine jumping in to tank any instance though.. and you'll quickly make friends with people that realise you're leveling as a tank spec and invite you.

Properly glyphed while leveling though your dps wont be that bad and killing isn't insanely slow.

The first warrior I leveled was pre glyphs and pre 3.0 and that was painfully slow at points. The second was like a walk in the park by comparison.

[IceHaus151]

Im not an expert, and I not even a proc warrior now, but while leveling I decided to play with talent points a lot. I had a pretty terrible build by most peoples standards. I had no clue really, haha. But my DPS was okay but I had many proc tree talents that kept me alive longer. I dont think being a hybrid in the early going mattered, I could still tank instances pre BC, and solo leveling (which is all I did 90% of the time) wasnt as slow as all proc. Just play with it a little, as I really dont think it matters in the low to mid levels.