Warrior Q&A - Blue Tracker

#0 - July 16, 2009, 11:07 p.m.

I would like to start by saying that I've been playing my warrior for the better part of four years now. From weapon normalization to rage normalization, we've been here and it's really never been that bad. At one point I'd say we were definitely broken due to a design flaw, nerfing rage gen at the beginning of TBC. As a 60 warrior back in Vanilla I was fine with my TUF on rage and never had an issue, but Blizzard in their infinite wisdom decided to nerf it across the board due to a very select group of people (see: top 2%) in extremely good raiding gear having limitless rage. This caused everyone else to have nigh unbearable rage generation and to be quite honest, I don't know how most of them leveled.

Then we had our days as equals on the DPS field with rogues, the other melee combatant. No, we could not tank that boss in dps gear if it decided to kill our tank. But what's this? A rogue can? Evasion tanking and the rogue tanking build made it a very interesting concept. Tanking Gruul or Mother Shaz, it was unheard of and to be quite honest a pretty unfair way to tank. But I didn't think much about it, warriors were still considered DPS OR Tanks. Not both.

Then we have WotLK, where there's only 4 pure classes and the rest are hybrids. It's quite funny, there is no pure tank or pure healer. Any class who has the ability to do that function are ultimately paying the price by lowering their ability to DPS; this is true until we get to feral druids. Because they have such a 'complex' rotation, they are allowed the ability to be on top regardless of them being a hybrid or not. This is utterly against your design policies according to what you have told us and you are lying to the rest of the hybrids. Arms warriors have no rotation, it's a priority system. Prot warriors have no rotation, it's a priority system. Given that we have no rotation, shouldn't we get a special consideration as well like the Feral Druids do? I don't think so, and I especially don't think a class should be the clear cut top just because their rotation is a little bit harder.

Tanking in WotLK is also a major issue. You've said in our Q&A that paladins are behind a little bit, warriors are equal with druids, and Death Knights are a little bit ahead. Honestly I would like to know how you rank them as tanks, because currently warriors have 1 cooldown more than paladin tanks and that's it. They have superior threat by far and far more utility due to being able to AOE tank. Feral druids are ahead of warriors as well due to mitigation and their massive health pool. They're behind in the cooldown department only in damage reduction, but made up for with their massive health pool. Then we have the end-all be-all kings of tanking, Death Knights. Amazing, short cooldowns. Great scaling for stamina. Great AOE tanking. Great survivability. How could you not say that they're ahead? So far with 3.2 we've seen very little in the department to help prot warriors with both their DPS and TPS.

If I were to suggest anything I would suggest converting Armored to the Teeth from giving 1/2/3 attack power for every 108 armor to 1/2/3 strength for every 108 armor. It would give us the buff in DPS and tanking that we need for the time being. It wouldn't be a major change, but honestly it would be big enough to show a difference to all of us.

Then comes a few of the more... inane quotes from Ghostcrawler.

Q u o t e:
The warrior class has been a very tricky one to balance, largely due to the way rage converts into damage (which converts into rage, which converts into damage...), and we haven’t completely nailed that design just yet.

I know you have your plate full with so many class changes, but that quote isn't true. There is no attack which you use rage for that will give rage back. Getting rage and using rage are two different systems, one uses white(normal) attacks, and the other uses yellow(special) attacks. Special attacks do not give rage. White damage converts to rage. Rage converts to yellow damage. End. There is no backwards conversion unless this is something that you are planning, which I highly doubt.

TL;DR Warriors are not fine, I know you gave everyone the "we're looking into it" but honestly, can you give us more than telling us we're supposed to be equal with the other hybrids when we aren't? Can you actually give us equality instead of saying we should be? Take a "good hard look" at fury and arms now, not in the future.

#1 - July 17, 2009, 12:43 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Q u o t e:
The warrior class has been a very tricky one to balance, largely due to the way rage converts into damage (which converts into rage, which converts into damage...), and we haven’t completely nailed that design just yet.

I know you have your plate full with so many class changes, but that quote isn't true. There is no attack which you use rage for that will give rage back. Getting rage and using rage are two different systems, one uses white(normal) attacks, and the other uses yellow(special) attacks. Special attacks do not give rage. White damage converts to rage. Rage converts to yellow damage. End. There is no backwards conversion unless this is something that you are planning, which I highly doubt.

It is true. If you have no rage, you can't hit your special attacks and your damage is lower. If you get a little bit of rage, you can hit your attacks sometimes. This is how warriors are designed to work -- you have a resource and it's limited. You are not designed to be able to hit your buttons just as fast as you can. However, at some point in gear, warriors can hit for so much damage that they have virtually infinite rage and can't spend it fast enough. At that point rage no longer becomes a mechanic. You don't need to even have the bar.

Now, the situation would be worse if your yellow attacks also generated rage -- that's a positive feedback loop, and what I fear a lot of players interpreted my comments to mean. I just meant that having more rage increases your damage (through specials) and having more damage increases your rage (through gear). As a result, well-geared warriors are much better than poorly geared warriors, much more so than the gear stats themselves would account for. We don't think that design works well because we have struggled with it since WoW's launch.