Warrior 3.1 stances, a crippling oversight; 2

#0 - Feb. 16, 2009, 9:38 p.m.

Continued from the post locked version.

Blizzard's heart is in the right place, the issue though is that tactical mastery needs to stay as is with this change going through.

Here is why.

In PvP, and thus assuming you already have tactical mastery, this change is amazing with high (35 or more) rage levels. Now instead of dumping all of that precious damage potential, you keep some!

However, this change is awful for low rage situations, and I spend the majority of my time in competitive PvP in those situations. Lets say I had 25 rage and wanted to disarm. Under the current system, I could swap to defensive, disarm for 15 rage, and swap back to berserker with 10 rage. Under the new system, I would swap to defensive, lose 10 rage, disarm for 15 rage, and swap with 0 rage. Under the old system, you were punished for swapping stances at high rage, under the new one you are punished for swapping stances at low rage; if you are simply reversing the punishment criteria, is this actually a positive change for the class overall?

This isn't to say that it's not GREAT to have 70 rage, swap to defensive with 60, disarm, have 45, then swap back to berserker with 35 rage where under the old system I'd of had 10 because rage was dumped. But you have to consider how much time a warrior spends at low rage levels compared to high rage levels.

If this is a buff at high rage levels and a nerf at lower rage levels... is that equaling itself out? If you can't easily answer that question, is this a change that should be made at all?

*EDIT:

Original Thread: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=14910422826&sid=1

Ghostcrawler

#24 - Feb. 17, 2009, 8:52 p.m.

We made those announcements to get a little bit of discussion going and give players some insight into the kind of changes we are looking into for the next patch. It's not a comprehensive list of patch notes and isn't even likely to match what you see on the PTR when it first goes up. It is something new we wanted to try.

I am not sure we will end up changing the way rage works with stance changes at this stage because I'm not sure we can solve the problems it causes without creating new ones. I could see a system where you always keep a minimum of rage and never lose more than a maximum of rage, but at that point the feature may be so convoluted that you have to ask why have rage change at all?

But I do want to thank those of you who engaged in the discussion exploring the pros and cons without just freaking out. :)

Ghostcrawler

#56 - Feb. 18, 2009, 7:14 a.m.

Q u o t e:
100 rage -> 50 rage
90 rage -> 45 rage
80 rage -> 40 rage
70 rage -> 35 rage
60 rage -> 30 rage
50 rage -> 25 rage
40 rage -> 20 rage (will always keep 20 rage upon changing stances if >= 20)

I understand that may get you what you want out of stance dancing, but it’s just not the kind of change we would be likely to do. Even if the tooltip was as simple as “divides your rage in half up to a minimum of 20,” that still requires a lot more quick calculation than just knowing “If I change stances, I will be at 10 rage.” We could probably make it work, but frankly, we’d rather just leave it as it is. We still want the foundation of the class to be changing stances to use specific abilities, but at the cost of most of your rage. I do think we can make stances more interesting though, and I've said that is something we are working on.

Q u o t e:
Going to try to be civil but GC's post pretty much summed up the problem with warriors right now. Blizzard just doesn't know. They didn't know how to fix the charge bug, they didn't know how to impliment heroic leap, they didn't know warriors needed to retain rage without TM and now they don't know how to fix the stance mechanic.

I am sure you would be just as civil when complaining about all of the Heroic Leap bugs (that strangely would have a lot of the same problems as the Charge bug). Quick positional movement of any kind is not a strength of most client – server based games. I will point out that it is typically the Charge glyph that causes most of the complaining because it adds just a little bit more distance.

Q u o t e:
Change heroic leap (I miss you!) to work like kitty leap ie. TARGETED, HOW FRIGGING HARD WOULD IT HAVE BEEN!

It would have been easy. We predicted that the response from the warrior community would be “Oh great, I get yet another charge with different art. Thanks Blizzard.” Kitty leap is valuable to druids because they had no other fast movement short of changing forms. Warriors already have 3 abilities to do that in different circumstances. Heroic Leap was interesting because it didn't require a target. Unfortunately, it also caused jumping through the world, cheating through walls, or getting stuck, none of which were worth whatever cool factor the talent would have brought. We might have the technology to do it in the future though. Pulling Heroic Leap doesn't mean we hate warriors or don't know what we want to do with them. It was just overly ambitious for the time.