When will hybrid tax apply to fury warriors?

Q u o t e:
Can only be fixed by normalizing rage. Warriors are balanced around NOT being able to spam cleave/heroic strike every auto attack yet rage generation scaling with gear allows it to happen. If chain lightning had no cooldown and its mana cost decreased to near 0 at top level gear elemental shamans would do pretty crazy DPS on fights with adds too.

Yeah, pretty much this.

Heroic Strike is supposed to be a rage dump and in an environment where you are converting every swing into a Heroic Strike, it's a safe assumption that rage isn't really a resource anymore. The decision is supposed to be "Do I have enough rage to Heroic Strike?" vs. "If I don't Heroic Strike now, am I wasting rage?" Warriors need to be balanced around doing some Heroic Striking -- not converting every white swing to a HS and not so rage starved that they can never hit it either.

I've been hinting that we're likely to change rage in Cataclysm, and I'll do so again in the hopes that some smart players will come out and defend that decision when we get a lot of "You can't change rage!" posts. :)

Q u o t e:
HS usage is by far the least important factor in warrior scaling. You could cut our rage generation by 75% and it would only drop warrior dps by a couple hundred. I look forward to the exciting changes in store.

I think you misunderstand my point. HS use is a symptom not the actual problem.

Q u o t e:
Just please don't make similar changes that you guys made in early burning crusade, it really gimped warriors for a while until you guys fixed it. Perhaps all the damage flying around is helping to feed us rage. Maybe a change to the way we receive rage from damage, or the way armor pen scaling works would be a decent fix. That being said, I have been chasing everyone on the damage meters since ulduar, and finally I feel like warriors are pretty even with a lot of damage classes. Who is top 3 in our ICC's depends totally on the fight. To me, that's working as intended or damn close to it.

The problem with BC was that the rage solution we implemented felt like rage starvation and rather than adjust the model we kind of threw in the towel. I agree that having no rage and no way to get rage is frustrating. Part of our plan is to give warriors (and bears) more control over it.

It’s really not a damage issue so we don’t even need to get into whether warriors are doing too much damage in ICC or not. (Though I’d argue on some fights they are.) The real issue is that their damage doesn't stay in proportion with the other classes and is even more gear dependent. Until they have adequate rage coming in, they can’t use enough abilities. Once they have enough rage coming in, they can mash their buttons continuously. We don't want rage to be something you graduate from. It is the entire core of the warrior class, along with stances.

Q u o t e:
here is the flaw with that design, what other DPS classes have to really manage their resurces now? Why should warrior be the exception?

All other dps classes have to manage their resources. The closest exceptions are Retribution and Enhancement, because their resource is mana, and they are designed to have small pools and regenerate it quickly. Their damage is still held in check by other mechanics though, principally cooldowns. Energy and rune users don’t ever run out of resources for very long, but then again neither do rage-users. Mana-users won’t run out of mana for short periods of time, but generally will over longer fights (Elemental may be an exception). They have systems to get their mana back when that happens though, and as I said, we think warriors need more of those too. Look at how the DK "shout" actually generates resources....

Q u o t e:
so warriors can essentially look forward to being worthless for all of cata while you try to balance it right?

These are the kinds of posts we’re going to be seeing a lot of, sadly. You should look around at what some of your fellow warriors who understand the problems with the mechanic are saying though. Players who equate any potential game change with a nerf aren't going to be able to contribute much to the discussion I'm afraid. (And before you try it, saying that you've come to expect it after years of mistreatment at the hands of the malicious devs doesn't change that.)

Q u o t e:
I was reallyhoping heroic strike in it's "on next swing" would be completely going away in Cataclysm.

Next swing attacks are all going to die. The experience of using them is underwhelming, their mechanics are confusing, and they might even cause real world pain. :(

Q u o t e:
Sorry to say but as fury you can easily just spam heroic strike, over and over and over... With little regard to rage.

Yes, as several players have pointed out, PvE Arms does have more rage management than Fury or Protection, and perhaps Arms would be more competitive in PvE content if Fury had to manage rage as well.

Q u o t e:
Well GC, even when we know that fury is the top dps in warriors I still play my warrior as arms in ICC. I do really like the mechanic, and as you said, you have more rage management than Fury. That's the reason why Arms is left behind in dps and fury is ahead.
Soo.. lets say that you make fury to work like arms, well fury dps will be low as arms leaving the warriors behind in dps. The only solution is to make rage work differently cuz it seems that when you try to impulse the "rage management" it just doesn't work, example arms dps.
I would love to see some posts reflecting the current ideas your team have :)

I am already regretting having made that quote up above. I was acknowledging that Arms doesn't necessarily have infinite rage. The point I wanted to address was the mechanic for rage, not to discuss Arms to Fury dps comparisons. (That's a fine topic if you want to discuss it, but that wasn't my specific purpose posting here.)

Q u o t e:
First - wut? You mean to say that warriors are meant to change stances in PvE?

Not really. But the two mechanics that really make warriors unique are rage and stances. Stances are already pretty shallow gameplay in PvE. When rage doesn't matter either, then you're not really playing a warrior, at least the way we intended for them to be played.

You guys nitpick too much. :)

Q u o t e:
GC, i think your statement is inconsistent with what you've said in the past regarding healers and other dps. In fact, a huge concern with holy paladins was that mana wasn't an issue anymore. Mana is so easy to replenish and heals are so efficient/large that holy paladins simply don't run out of mana. Similarly this applies to druids and resto shamans. It's kind of unfair to make that broad statement in light of your previous statements that have expressed concern over mana being a meaningful resource.

Resources for all classes are supposed to matter. If they weren't supposed to matter then we could certainly simplify the game by removing them all. For some classes or specs, the actual resource is GCDs not a bar that fills up.

Rage, energy, runes and soon focus are essentially infinite. You only risk running out for short periods of time, but they'll be back eventually.

For mana-using dps specs, the gameplay is similar but the time slice is broader. A mage isn't going to run out of mana in the first few seconds of a fight. She might run out later, particularly in a longer fight, but she also has ways to get that mana back, and then using those at the right time becomes some of the skill of playing that class.

Healers all use mana, and they are supposed to run out of mana if they make bad decisions. That isn't currently happening, but it will in Cataclysm. Healers feel singled-out by that design, but we believe that when healers have infinite mana that we lose controls in designing an encounter. We have to rely on killing characters faster than healers can respond, punishing players dramatically for doing or failing to do some key event in the fight, or relying on dps checks with berserk timers and the like. Healer mana is a tool we had in BC and lost in LK. When the raid takes too much avoidable damage, then the healers eventually gas out (after using their own tools for mana restoration, like Divine Plea and Innervate) and the group then dies. Put another way, the game is just too easy when healers can just rely on their most powerful spell all of the time (many of us also think the healer gameplay is a little boring when you arne't using all your spells).

I'm not trying to derail the topic from rage, but I did want to explain why we think it's okay for some characters to have infinite resources and some to risk running out. But the resource itself still needs to matter even if it is effectively infinite.

Q u o t e:
so why are healers the only classes that're exclusively mana based, and singled out for bad decision making?

They're not. Berserk timers, for example, penalize bad decision-making among the dps specs. We just don't want every single fight to be balanced around a tight dps check. The encounters end up with a certain amount of sameness.

Likewise, tanks getting blow up when they fail to use cooldowns at the right time or position or trade-off the boss the right way are the skill checks for tanks. Preventing dying from standing in void zones is a skill check for everyone, depending on the encounter.

Healers running OOM can mean they used the wrong spell, or made poor gearing or talent decisions, or that the tank (or sometimes dps) made poor gearing or talent decisions.

Q u o t e:
With no rage dumps like HS/Cleave, Warrior runs the risk of playing VERY similarly to a Ret Paladin.

There are ways to implement rage dumps without on-next swing attacks.

Q u o t e:
But having to sit and drink for a very long time is not fun for the healer nor the people waiting for the blue bar to fill. In cataclysm, make food restore mana at a much more reasonable rate, or do away with the '5 second rule' and just make a 'in combat' rule. I don't want to sit at full mana all the time, having to use Mana Tide, Hymn of Hope, etc, on bosses is 100% acceptable. Having to use mana regen abilities on normal, well controlled trash? Bummer.

Two changes we're considering are combining all food and drink into food+drink and getting rid of the five-second rule in exchange for an out of combat rule. We're going to start talking a lot more about Cataclysm changes soon.

The FSR provides some interesting gameplay (but at a pretty high complexity cost). We think we can engineer similar gameplay where choosing spell A over spell B is a mana-based decision rather than casting vs. standing still doing nothing is a (less fun) mana-based decision.

Q u o t e:
So in the grand scope of things, how does this all relate back to the PvP setting since as far from what I've understood in your posts you want players to actually care about their mana? Does this foreshadow a return to the trend of arena games being more grindy with an emphasis on outlasting the other team or does it simply become a game of actually choosing the right spells at the right time instead of the rush down theme that Wrath has been?

Ideally you'd go into an Arena game and not know immediately whether it was going to be an outlast game or a fast game. We don't have a problem with either case, but we think the overall experience is less fun when it's always and predictably one or the other (and in LK too often it's the latter).

We're not really interested in over-emphasizing mana draining as a dominant strategy, but running someone out of mana by causing a lot of damage seems perfectly reasonable. If you can't run the healer OOM then really your only options are to blow someone up while the healer is controlled or blow someone up so fast the healer can't respond. Again, those need to be valid strategies. They just can't be the only strategy.

Q u o t e:
The part I bolded and underlined is what I am most curious about. If you remove the infinite mana, won't it just go back to being like Vanilla WoW, where people would bring more healers than they needed for every fight? If there are no DPS Checks and Berserk Timers, then the best healing strategy is just to bring extra healers. That way, when a healer runs out of mana, they can go hide somewhere, and not cast anything, and let a "standby" healer come take their place.

There will be dps and berserk timers too. Maybe not every boss, but they won't all go away. Likewise, you can have a boss where one phase is the outlast phase and another is the dps timer phase (so it isn't really favorable to swap healers in and out). Having one healer occasionally change spec to dps or tank depending on the encounter isn't the worst thing int the world either, as long as we don't overdo it.

Q u o t e:
Imagine the alternative. If you have long stretches in a combat rotation where there is absolutely nothing you can press or no decision you can make to increase your performance, is that a rewarding experience? Does it properly distinguish players who approach their game play as optimally as possible against those wing it? Does it offer enough potential reward such that they find it engaging in the long run?

Now, one thing I will give Enhancement Shaman is that the complexity of their gameplay is not rewarded enough relative to some specs that have painfully straightforward 'rotations' but produce fantastic results. THAT is a bummer.

Yeah, while Ret and Enhancement generally work out okay as cooldown-limited specs, we think we need to juice up the gameplay of both just a little bit so there are more opportunities to screw up, so that when you don't, you feel really awesome. Removing the chance of failure doesn't really make for compelling gameplay.

Q u o t e:
Honestly, in a lot of cases I think we'd be better off without a resource system cluttering up GCD or cool down limited game play. It's largely been designed out of some class/specs like Prot War, Prot Pally and Ret Pally anyway. Personally I find resource systems largely unnecessary constructs and prefer an engaging CD/GCD/Timer management game.

The design isn't for Prot warriors to be in that same bucket though. Part of the reason why we try to have different resource mechanics is so that A) players can gravitate towards the play style they enjoy the most, and B) when they reroll they feel like they're seeing something new and potentially interesting rather than just the same dude with different art.

Q u o t e:
Vanilla: Mana matters, so much so that we have to have healing rotations. Healers sitting out not casting while they regen mana and all the fun of not playing a game to play the game.

BC: Mana matters, but we have downranking so we have many options as to what spells we can cast to fit various situations.

Wrath: Mana doesnt matter. Down ranking is evil! Bring the player not the class gets replenishment all over the raid. So in all of your efforts of Wrath you turn Healing into a game against the GCD rather than mana.

Cata: You want mana to matter again. Yet it has mattered in the past...but you didnt like that either and then we ended up at Wrath. You want us to cast more spells, but some healers are usnig many spells while others are only using a few, so that broad statement doesnt seem to hold water.

We want to shoot for a BC style model, except the choice will come from spell A vs. spell B instead of rank 3 of spell A vs. rank 9 of spell A. Downranking had some serious gameplay problems, most notably being an unintutive mechanic for new players and letting players in general cheese coefficients of lower ranked spells. The actual decision that downranking offered of efficient vs. big vs. fast is an interesting one though, and one we think is missing for too much of LK.

To get there, many healers will need a new spell B or A, except potentially druids, who just need the numbers tweaked on some existing spells so that they have more defined niches.

As someone who has spent a lot of time healing, I *think* it's going to be a pretty fun time for healers, though I'm sure it will take some tweaking before it feels exactly right.

Q u o t e:
When you make these broad statements about things you want to do for Cata, and they are dramatic changes, but then have no information more than that it just sends the community into a frenzy. Bring us more information rather than firing everyone up like that. Unless you like sitting there with your mug of ale and just laughing at us.

SOON, EXECUTUS.

Q u o t e:
Thanks for your replies GC. As a general question, what are your plans for the hybrid tax system in the future?

We'll continue to polish it, but we're not fundamentally changing the design. We think there is plenty of evidence to suggest that pure dps would die off if more flexible classes could do everything they could do and more. Again though, in most cases gear or skill will have a much bigger influence on your performance than the potential maximums we engineer into the classes. While the averages more or less follow our general design (with some exceptions that we need to address), you can find plenty of individual parses where a hybrid "wins" or a pure "loses."

I really don't want to turn this into another hybrid tax debate though, so please reference the sticky above and forgive me if I don't touch the topic again in this thread.

Q u o t e:
Any chance of some neat new mechanics for healing. Cone of Healing, Rain of Healing, possibly a more refined version of light well or more channeled type abilities like penance?

SOON, EXECUTUS.

Q u o t e:
Players gravitate to the play style that does the most damage, not the one they enjoy the most.. I like playing Arms, but I love being able to actually beat the enrage timer you mentioned earlier. The fact that you let some specs get so bad that they don't contribute to a successful raid is shameful.

Actually, the evidence suggests otherwise. Rogues for example have been in a pretty good spot for most of the expansion in PvE and PvP but are one of the least popular classes. If anything I suspect there aren't that many true FotM rerollers probably because they imagine after they've put in all that effort to reroll that we will have adjusted the status quo in the meantime. If players really swapped classes with reckless abandon, I further suspect you'd see a lot fewer "buff me plz" posts. I also suspect it's more likely that players play the classes they like and then get frustrated when they think we aren't holding up our end of the bargain (which is a pretty reasonable response when you think about it). If the motivation was just to go where the damage is, there would probably be fewer passionate pleas to get everything so close.

I don't know if shameful is the word I'd use. That's a pretty heavy one. DPS across the board is pretty close, certainly relative to where it has been in the past. We can still probably do even better, but let's keep things in perspective. Every class has multiple viable specs in PvE and in most cases if they have a spec that is lagging behind it's because it's dominant in PvP so we don't have a lot of room to just tweak up the damage. That's small consolation if you just love the Arms playstyle, but it's better than Arms being a completely dead tree (as Subtlety was close to being). In the meantime, if dps really matters to you, the Fury tree doesn't require massive regearing or relearning. It's not as bad I'd argue as a Shadow priest who has no option but to heal if he's not competitive, or a Balance druid who has to start over with gearing up in order to go kitty.

I'd say it's close, but we can do better.

Q u o t e:
In the sake of curiosity, what will you be doing to Fury Warriors to set them apart from these classes? You mentioned at Blizzcon'09 that 1-hand Fury is dead and gone, so how will you make Fury Warriors a fast paced class to play again? It seems like the majority of Warriors I talk to point out how slow and lackluster Fury has been since the implementation of Titans Grip. Do you have plans to implement talents that will speed up the Fury game style or are you happy with the rather large change to Fury gameplay that took place with WotLK?

SOON, EXECUTUS.

We totally hear where you're coming from though.

Q u o t e:
Getting rid of HS will save me (and my 2 key) a huge hassle but with how GCD capped Fury Warriors are at the moment without doing a complete overhaul of the class I don't really understand what getting rid of Heroic Strike and Cleave will do, could you elaborate a little bit on your plans?

We're not getting rid of Heroic Strike et al. We're just making them instant attacks instead of on next swings. The nice thing about on next swings is that they could consume rage without sacrificing a GCD. In reality though, I don't think that benefit is worth their downsides. A new player for instance hits Heroic Strike and doesn't really notice anything different happening. Not a great introduction to the warrior class. :(

Q u o t e:
Second, the game benefits from offering classes which accommodate beginner and intermediate players. Now, Blizzard has never officially characterized any class as difficult or easy — I understand why, if the decision is a conscious one, and respect that policy if it will continue through Cataclysm. But the disparities between ease of use are obvious; and a challenge is one of the reasons why players re-spec, level alts or even re-roll their main. Contrariwise, new players may need some guidance — and if dropout rates were high enough to warrant increasing regeneration below Level 15, noting difficulty levels on the character screen (even down to the talent tree) is probably not deleterious, either. So a largely cooldown-based DPS class would carry value.

This is a valid viewpoint and it's one that gets brought up a lot. There's a problem with it though. If you have the "easy to play class" then you probably need to target it to sub-par damage compared to a great player playing a challenging class. Otherwise, why play the challenging class at all? A more satisfying model, we think, is one in which say 90% of players can get 90% of the effectiveness out of class, but the remaining 10% of the players can do a little bit more to eek out that extra 10%. (I'm just using these numbers as examples. You don't need to tell me about the guy in your raid who does 10% more dps than you.)

Just to make sure everyone perusing this thread sees it, we have announced the rage design for Cataclysm up above.