If Rage Mechanic isnt fixed by next Expansion

We'd like to fix rage and we have a plan. However it's clear from the OP that he or she shares the view that a lot of warriors do, specifically that you don't have enough rage until you get epics at which point it finally "feels right." The implication is that our fix for rage should be that you always have the same rage you do in epics, or more to the point that you should always generally have enough rage to do what you want to do and lack of it never really holds you back.

If we changed rage to normalize it more, then it would mean that you would have say 60% of rage all the time instead of having 20% in green gear and 100% in purple gear (to use made up numbers).

Q u o t e:
Great, can't wait for the rage "fix" to happen so I can quit playing. Every single time Blizzard has even tried to "tweak" rage it's been an utter disaster that had to go through many iterations before it was back to being passable. Balancing towards the low end of the spectrum should never ever be a priority. I leveled my first Warrior in January of 2005 when it was an absolutely horrible experience, but once you hit 60 you no longer had to level and you no longer had to be stuck in leveling greens and blues.

A lot of our changes take some tweaking to get right. I don't apologize for that. We have an iterative design process and MMOs are very much "living" games.

However, it sounds like you think a system is fine where you struggle and struggle for rage in the lower end of gear and then are rewarded with infinite rage and massive damage in awesome gear. That's frustrating for warriors on the one end and then frustrating for everyone else at the high end.

Rage isn't an unalienable right. It's a resource. It has advantages and disadvantages. While you won't ever flame out the way a mage might run OOM in a long fight, you won't always have enough rage to do what you want at any given second (while the mage will probably have mana). Learning to manage that is the difference between okay warriors and great warriors.

But suffer, suffer, suffer then explode with great gear isn't a great design. Why haven't we changed it yet? Because as with many changes of this level if we were to do it tomorrow it would feel really harsh to a lot of warriors. We do care about how our changes feel to the community, even if we sometimes decide to make unpopular calls when we think they're necessary.

If your response to all of this is just "Great, Blizz wants to nerf warriors," then it sounds like you're not going to make the kinds of insightful, constructive posts we're really looking for in these forums and you might want to consider just reading more and posting less. :)

Q u o t e:

First off, I gotta say with all the nice, long, intelligent posts out there, that it's kind of silly that this is the one that gets the response.

Don't complain about where I post, please. It's not a contest.

[Not tracked]

Q u o t e:
Doing that would be an absolutely horrid idea. 60% of rage is not enough rage, period. As it is, Warriors are the only class with as much down time as they have...without perfect rage then, they're often stuck just sitting there doing nothing. From a Fury perspective, what's the point of a WW every 8 seconds and a BT every 4 (rather silly cooldown numbers, by the way, as they leave nice awkward second gaps all over the place,) a Slam that procs randomly with no scaling (gotta love that RNG, and how Ret Pallies got an ability with a similar premise, triple the buff duration, and a more predictable trigger), Sunders, cooldowns that TAKE RAGE (by the way, I absolutely love needing to blow a cooldown to change stances, a cooldown and 1.5 seconds to Shattering Throw, a cooldown to switch back, and two more cooldowns just to pop everything, when most other classes (all in my experience) can pop every important DPS cooldown in a single go,) and all these other things with cooldowns and limitations on them if we then don't have the rage to use them?

But it sounds like you are arguing “I shouldn’t have to worry about rage.” That’s not the design of the warrior class.

Q u o t e:
Progression is supposed to be just that: progression. So long as Warriors have the constant nerf bat looming over their head because they may have happened to out-damage the favored Rogue during a syzygy and lunar eclipse, at precisely 2:35 PM on a Friday during the Autumnal Equinox, when a herd of angry goats slammed into the rogue's power lines and caused him to drop off halfway through the fight, they'll continue to be discouraged, rerolling or quitting because it seems like no matter what we do, we'll only be punished for progression.

When you get better gear, you do more damage. That’s progression. Assuming things scale reasonably well (though we tweak things so often now, I think scaling is less of a concern than it used to be), you should be at the same relative position to other classes as you progress. It’s a bad model that warriors start out weak but get stronger relative to other classes with gear.

Q u o t e:
This is well and dandy, but when we are trying to keep up a rotation, that's problematic. Long-term systems like Mana, with ways of recovering big chunks of it at a time, allow nice coherent rotations and priority lists. Having to deal with second-by-second resource starvation is not equal to running the risk of running out of mana (which, honestly, I haven't seen a mana user risk going OOM on a fight outside of Vezax in a long time.) I have a Ret Paladin and a Death Knight, and neither class really has to concern themselves much with a resource system.

If you like the way mana works better, then you might enjoy a mana-based class more. We don’t want to turn warriors into Ret paladins. Rage is one of the things that makes them distinct.

Q u o t e:
To me it feels that if rage were further normalized, then it just becomes to close to energy which wouldn't be good, other classes have resources that scale with gear (mana regen) so its not like warriors are alone in that respect.

Totally agree. That’s why we haven’t ever pulled the handle on that particular change. “When I do damage, I gain resources” is at the high-level an intuitively interesting concept. However, mana regen isn’t nearly the power inflation that extra rage is. Mana regen only comes into play on longer fights when the caster starts to run out of mana. A closer equivalent might be haste or something that lets casters attack more in short intervals.

Q u o t e:
The thing that makes rage less fun for me is the waiting game. Waiting for a white attack to connect to get rage to be able to use abilities isn't "fun". I think it'd be more interesting if you had instant attacks that generated rage (probably doing less damage), and then instant attacks that consumed rage (the good ones). That way if you're in need of rage there's something proactive you can do, instead of just standing there waiting for that slow 2-hander to connect.

While that might be too dramatic a change, I agree that giving warriors more control over getting rage when they needed it might be a good idea. Imagine (I am totally waving my arms here and not announcing changes) an off-the-GCD Bloodlust with a much shorter cooldown.

Q u o t e:
I LOVE getting repeatedly nerfed the instant my gear starts showing improvements in my dps. GREAT system imo.

Again, if this is just going to be a “don’t nerf me, bro” thread, then I’m going to have less motivation to participate.

Q u o t e:
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Q u o t e:

He, and most of us, wants to balance all warriors regardless of gear...
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And by GC's proposal, doing that is a nerf to those in epics.

You’re focusing too much on your dps. This isn’t a “warriors are doing too good, let’s nerf them” discussion. Your dps should not be tied to infinite rage and incoming rage should not be so gear dependent.

Q u o t e:
While I can understand the philosophical/theoretical need to revamp rage generation mechanics, I sincerely hope that this is a change which will be put off for a minimum till 3.3, if not till the next expansion

This is not an upcoming change. It’s a philosophy discussion about how rage should work ideally. “Ignore it when I get purps” is not ideal.

Q u o t e:
As someone who plays his warrior fervently and loves the rage mechanic, I beg you to keep it unique no matter the design course you're going to follow.

/agree. We don’t want to turn it into energy.