When installing Visual Studio 2017, choose the Desktop development with C++ option in the Workloads section. This option will install the necessary tools.
The location of vsvarsall.bat has changed in VS 2017.
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvarsall.bat
And the tool itself works in a slightly different manner. If you simply call vsvarsall.bat as before, when you load the command prompt you will be placed into a %somewhere%\source directory instead of W:. After digging around, I found an answer here. Either way when the command prompt opens, you will now see some output from vsvarsall.bat script reassuring you that the environment was initialized for: 'x64'.
The end result:
1 2 3 4 | @echo off set "VSCMD_START_DIR=%CD%" call "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvarsall.bat" x64 set path=w:\handmade\misc;%path% |