World of Warcraft™

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This is not a post about talent suggestions or even how to "fix" MOP talents, just a primer for those of you that care.

I don't typically grace these forums much nowadays, or any forums for that matter. But when it gets close to Alpha/Beta time, I like to break out old writing pen and just talk to my fellow Warriors. I've played a Warrior since release, hell since before release, since beta. Emeraude has always been my main. That will not change, until the day I leave WoW behind. Some of you might know me, most of you probably don't. :) That's fine. I just have a message for the new generation and that's about how to approach Alpha/Beta in the next coming months, so HOPEFULLY the class is stronger as a whole before that 5.0 patch hits live servers.

So first of all, let's get this out right away, Blizzard's track record with Warriors out of the beta gate isn't exactly great. In Burning Crusade it was Rage Normalization, in Wrath it was Death Knights/Paladins invalidating anything that made Warriors decent, in Cata it was us being built around a gimmick ability(I refer to C. Smash) that ended up getting us some pretty severe Quality of Life nerfs before finally being adjusted separately for PvP(I miss you charge->intercept).

I could go further with this if I really think about it off the top of my head, does anybody remember the awesome that was Endless Rage 2.0? No? Me either, I never speced into it. How for the entire expansion nobody went 33-35 points past Arms? That was cool. I loved keeping Rampage up every 30 seconds, that was a blast. And the awesome evolution of the Protection tree, and by evolution I mean switching out Sunder with Devastate. >.> Oh or when they tried to put Tactical Mastery out of reach when stance dancing was relevant(I had a really fun 200+ page thread about that one).

This is the most important thing to recognize when you're approaching beta, something you have to keep in mind about any class changes is that...Blizzard thinks their class changes are downright awesome to start out with. I know, crazy right? But they're Blizzard, they have the right to be confident about any changes they make to the 10 million+ subscription based game.

The reality though, is that some of their changes just downright suck, or sometimes the changes don't really get you excited to play your class again for the coming expansion. This was never more apparent to me then in Wrath of the Lich King's beta where I saw Death Knights get so many of the changes I had literally DREAMED about for Warriors while we got Titan's Grip with a hit tax followed by a damage tax. Now granted Titan's Grip was a cool talent in itself, but when you looked across the yard at the Death Knight with his magical damage that ignored armor, spell immunity, defensive cooldowns without a shield, health regen strikes, no stance penalties....ugh, I don't need to really go down that route again. :p I got Gladiator face rolling a DK for 2 seasons on my DK alt Deathraude and felt dirty for it.

Point I'm trying to make here is, when it comes to Warrior beta, you need to reach for the sky, you can't settle on "This looks good enough." You need to point out class comparisons, yes, Blizzard frowns on this, but the reality is this game has seen alot of homogenization over the years, and some classes have benefited from this more then others. You need to point out if you're weak in a pvp situation, you need to point out if you're too strong in a pve scenario, look at everything and anything, and say it loudly.

Warriors don't lend themselves to creativity, we have no magic, we don't believe in the light, nature, shadows, demons, sneaking in the shadows, we run around with a weapon and/or a shield and hit things while yelling really loudly on occasion, so creative abilities and skills mostly have to come from your imagination(And Blizzard's). Think really hard about what would make the class more FUN, while also thinking about what we're lacking against our competition in the other 10 classes. Your feedback in beta can very well last an entire expansion.

I think that in terms of creativity Blizzard has done an excellent job with Warriors. Abilities like Blood and Thunder, Victory rush, Shockwave, and Inner Rage are all examples of abilities that are fun and interesting to use. I have no doubt that Blizzard will keep Warriors a fun and exciting class to play in MoP

I'd like to remain optimistic and hope things turn out good for MoP. What I don't want to see is this huge swinging effect where we receive numerous nerfs and changes that cause us to completely rethink how we should play our class like with previous expansions.

I'm actually a little excited by what has been shown in our talent trees so far, even though other players do a great deal of complaining. There's certainly some changes I'd like to see though, particularly in ways of self healing and survivability. There's also a few ancient mechanics that still need to be fixed as well (namely our shield requirements to use certain cooldowns).

I don't PvP because it frustrates me, but the warrior class itself probably has a lot to do with that. I'll definitely be giving them feedback in terms of PvE issues though.

Honestly, what I would most like to see fixed in MoP is outdated stance/survivability mechanics. In comparison to other melee we feel very weak and clunky, and it is quite frustrating. I enjoy most of our PvE DPS mechanics, so I can't think of much to change there. Except maybe fixing our scaling so we don't receive huge damage nerfs each tier to "keep us in line" with other melee.

Yeah, stance/survivability CDs is one of those things I'm definitely going to bring up in beta.

Do I really need to throw on a shield for Spell Reflect at this point? 25-second cooldown as it is.

My only caveat with these new talents is that while offering interesting choices for PvP, the choices from a PvE standpoint seem more clear-cut than I would like. For instance, I suspect there will be a clear winner for the last tier as soon as the math geeks do the number crunching.

Eventually, there's going to be a consensus like "Hey, Deadly Calm does more overall DPS than Bloodbath", and all the PvE players will flock to Deadly Calm. Blizzard claimed that these talents weren't designed to be quantifiable in some way, yet it seems that's exactly the case for some of the tiers.

As it stands, I could see Storm Bolt being a DPS loss even with the "300% damage to immunes" bonus, and being relegated to a utility talent solely for tanks and PvP'ers. While I'm excited about the talent from a PvP standpoint, no PvE DPS warrior is going to choose utility over damage if they can help it.

I'm pretty sure that MoP will ruin warriors if blizz persists in their moronic notions about changing rage. The whole idea of building resources from special attacks then expending them on other ones is NOT what this class is about. Thats some ROGUE bullsh*t. Bad enough that they gave it to retardins.

I have played my warrior for 5 years for exactly 3 reasons:

1) High mobility -- gimped now with removal of intercept, constant nerfs of any good talents (old warbringer)
2) RAGE system -- part-gimped in TBC, fully gimped in CATA with normalisation, on track to be ruined in MoP
3) No f*ggy magic. Still have this, thank god

The very idea of turning rage into a "builder-finisher" resource system makes me want to puke. Both in PVP and PVE

To the OP, how did you get that transmog sword? :O So pretty.

We !@#$ lightning.. Nuff said.

Uh. We dominated early Wrath. Like, pretty much crushed Naxx/Sarth 3d/Maly, which is why Fury was heavily nerfed going into Ulduar..

02/22/2012 05:57 AMPosted by Quinik

To the OP, how did you get that transmog sword? :O So pretty.

60 naxx it looks like

02/22/2012 08:11 AMPosted by Brakthir

Uh. We dominated early Wrath. Like, pretty much crushed Naxx/Sarth 3d/Maly, which is why Fury was heavily nerfed going into Ulduar..

Arms was terrible in both PvE & PvP and we were close to the worst pvp class in the game.

Prot was the 2nd worst tank behind DKs(Maybe worse if you considered how good DKs were @ tanking Sartharion).

Fury did well in PvE....this has been pretty consistent through WoW's history save for 4.3, but having 1 worthwhile spec out of 3 for trivial content that promptly got nerfed once the harder content came out leaving us with nothing is not a good trade off(They had to hotfix Bloodthirst's cooldown to get us back up to par).

We did not "dominate" early Wrath, we had 1 truly functional spec that happened to put up decent numbers in one aspect of the game(PvE) and was still worthless in the other(PvP).

You do not want to come out of beta with DPS 10k ahead of every other spec, you will get nerfed, hard, and they won't fix it for a while.

You do not want to come out of beta on the other side of the spectrum, too weak with no creative or new abiltiies, if you do Blizzard is more likely to only tweak the abilities they've given you then scrap the ones you initially had.

In beta, abilities do get scrapped and replaced, which is why it's far more important to get that foundation straight there.

i think we should get an awesome new ability thats called something along the lines of "seismic Wave".

Seismic Wave: range 30 yards maybe? 30 rage cost

the warrior swings his weapon with such force it blast a giant shockwave of brute force and earth tawards the target hitting everything in the straight line.

this spell could be counted as magic damage and therefore go through armor and be a 2nd range move for us.

Why would we want a second version of shockwave that has a target limitation? The best part about current Shockwave is that it doesn't need a target.

just throwin out ideas this would be another ranged move and it could do decent dmg as magic i like the idea personally

Hi Emeraude.

Yeah, stance/survivability CDs is one of those things I'm definitely going to bring up in beta.

Do I really need to throw on a shield for Spell Reflect at this point? 25-second cooldown as it is.

This is a big one. Even if Shield Wall only reduces damage by 20% without a Shield, or Spell Reflect without a shield only deflects it, they'd be pretty big QoL changes. Drop Shield Wall to a 2 minute CD baseline, akin to IBF or Divine Protection. You can still throw a shield on for that extra reduction, but now you've got an easy-to-use DR CD. It's not dumbing the game down if the mechanic is bad to begin with. You can change the name if it's an issue; I'm sure people wouldn't have a huge issue with that.

I'm excited for the beta. I think what they've got for warriors is a good baseline. Getting rid of the CSmash mechanic and giving warriors some passive ArP on the main strikes (MS and BT at the very least, Raging Blow for Fury) is one thing I'd do. You can keep CSmash as an ability, but make it just flat out ignore armor by itself and hit like a truck. This actually ties in well with Sudden Death, as having a chance to proc an attack that ignores armor completely feels more like something Sudden Death would proc. It could still keep the 4% phys dmg debuff though.

Stuff like that needs to happen. Rage will likely be changed a bit thanks to the changes (well, especially thanks to the changes), and while I think they got it pretty well in Cata, there's probably some room for improvement. Fury needs help with RNG woes; Enrage needs to have a damned high uptime for Fury, at least where Flurry was, for the spec to really operate at all. No rage from damage taken for Prot will be... interesting, especially with the 60 rage costs on Shield Block/Barrier. Storm Bolt's place in the tiers might be a bit off. Something like Avatar would really go well there, but Avatar works damned well where it is now.

I dunno, there's work to be done.

just throwin out ideas this would be another ranged move and it could do decent dmg as magic i like the idea personally

We're warriors. We have enough ranged moves in Heroic Throw and (kind of) Shockwave, and we don't need magical damage. That's not our style. All we do is hit stuff hard. That's it. No relying on the light, arcane, holy, shadow, or the elements. Just a big honking weapon (or two, or a shield) and our physical prowess.

What up emeraude, you probably don't remember me, but I was there with you crying foul when rage was normalized in 2.0 and my warrior went from doing 900dps on patchwerk to 500, then again when enrage was nerfed down from 40% to 25% and again when TM was place in fury so arms couldn't reach it. I remember 33/28 because the 41pt talent in arms was garbage. I was there for s5 when the best spec was TG with double death's bite. I was there for the retardedness that was prot pvp in s7. I was there for kfc s9 and then gimp s10-11.

Throughout all these years and all these changes to the game the one thing I've learned is that blizzard doesn't listen to individuals. You have to have thousands of posts in multiple threads to have anything changed. So I wish you good luck with your goals of changing warriors for MoP but after these long years I'm finally done.

02/21/2012 03:50 PMPosted by Emeraude

we don't believe in the light, nature, shadows, demons

If you don't believe in half that stuff, I am curious what the hell you are fighting half the time

02/22/2012 10:48 AMPosted by Samayael

Fury needs help with RNG woes; Enrage needs to have a damned high uptime for Fury, at least where Flurry was, for the spec to really operate at all.

Honestly Sam, I think the enrage will probably end up fine, I have a decent feeling we are going to get a pretty crit chance.

Enrage seems to proc off crits from special attacks, and unshackled fury boosts the damage those do. Zerker Rage is still zerker rage, which means a light cooldown on that part.

Still agree with you on your C Smash, but honestly I would just prefer it straight up removed. It feels like that specific ability was their justifcation for half of the nerfs warriors got in Cataclysm.


Also lol, just read some of the early cata interviews on Rogues, said the Recup was supposed to be a low level ability for single player experience.

Honestly Sam, I think the enrage will probably end up fine, I have a decent feeling we are going to get a pretty crit chance.

Enrage seems to proc off crits from special attacks, and unshackled fury boosts the damage those do. Zerker Rage is still zerker rage, which means a light cooldown on that part.

I hope it will too, but we'll see.

BRING ON THE BETA PLZ

Still agree with you on your C Smash, but honestly I would just prefer it straight up removed. It feels like that specific ability was their justifcation for half of the nerfs warriors got in Cataclysm.

It likely was, but I think the ability, reworked, would still have a place in our repertoire.

looking at the MoP warrior's talent calculator i try to use my imagination to guess how its going to be there and all i can say its IT DOESN'T LOOK GOOD ENOUGH


now to make warriors fun again i suggest to:
- war banner is carried in our backs, like a blademaster, i don't care what it does just let me carry it in my back

- in the avatar tool tip says " u transform into an unstoppable colossus, makes u immune to movement impairing effects" but it wont make u immune to stuns and loss of control which is implying " no ur not unstoppable" so really blizzard is making claims in the tool tip which are lies, and not just there but also heroic leap says" u leap toward a location with DESTRUCTIVE FORCE" and in fact the damage is not like that at all, so my point is either don't misdirect people with tool tips or make our abilities really do what the tool tip claims.

- remove all warrior downsides once and for all, i hate to recklessness because i will take 20% more damage, and i hate to shield wall because then i wont make any damage, and every good enemy player out there will exploit this vulnerabilities.

what do we lack?
just that all of our abilities are for one purpose only, COMBAT but the funny thing is that every single mage, rogue, hunter, priest or whatever is more ready for a fight than a warrior
specially rogues. man i remember a time when the only thing i could do against a rogue was spam overpower, and i actually had a better chance back then than nowadays.

i know what changes could make us better right now in cata but is useless to think about them now when MoP is coming and who knows what horrible things await us there.

im gonna go level up my rogue just in case.