Warriors, the truth part 2 (Cata)

Q u o t e:
1) On next swing attacks:
Who was it that determined that warriors were not fond of this mechanic ... personally I loved said mechanics as they added a fuid way to convert rage into damage without having to expend an ever so precious GCD that warriors just do not have the luxury of waisting (namely arms).

We weren't fond of the mechanic. It wasn't up to a vote. But we also know a lot of warriors didn't like it either. It takes the most visceral moments of combat -- hitting a button and seeing damage -- and turns it into an autoattack, probably the least exciting moment of combat.

Q u o t e:
2) AoE and splash damage:
Why is it that whirlwind is being treated like an AoE attack that should only be used on large pulls yet unlike all other AoE abilities in the game is bound to a cooldown ? Also how will the change to whirlwind impact the functionality of Bladestorm ?

You'll do fine on AoE, which will be more rare in Catalcysm regardless. The change to Whirlwind will not affect Bladestorm.

Q u o t e:
With cleave becoming an instant attack with rage mechanincs similar to execute and whirlwind no longer being in our single dps rotation we just lost an area of dps that we used to excel in... and that was doing well at dpsing smaller groups of pulls

That's not really a great niche though. Nobody says "we need more warriors to handle these smaller group pulls." You'll do fine on AoE fights.

Q u o t e:
4) Mortal Strike
Once the coveted and iconic warrior ability now handed out like candy to toddlers crying to their parents. It was eluded that strikes would be hitting much harder as a result of loosing on next swing attacks which seems reasonable but why is that with the changes to healing and health pools that classes like shadow priests and frost mages will have an equally powerfull ability when it was intially given to these classes in a WEAKER form as a bandaid fix to help their PVP represnentaion ?

How does it make sense to make all MS debuffs physical damage? Can warriors expect to see some glory returned to our spec defining ability ?

I agree with this. The problem of course is that if only you get the debuff or if only you get the best debuff then warriors are mandatory for anything PvP which might be fine for you but doesn't really feel fair to everyone else. Sometimes I wish we'd just remove the debuff because it's almost impossible to balance around both having and not having it. We can make sure Mortal Strike hits hard but we're unlikely to do anything that improves the debuff.

Q u o t e:
5) Core problems:
Will some of the core problems plaguing the class finally be addressed?
-Clunky weapon swap macros subjected to weapon resets...

Keep in mind that swapping to a shield is supposed to be a decision. If we wanted it to be effortless we would not make those abilities require a shield. We don't want solving the puzzle to be coming up with a clever macro.

Q u o t e:
-Latency issues with ppl exploiting charge and intercept , landing 10 feet away from ppl.....

This is just the reality of a client - server based game. Sometimes the client and server don't agree about where you are. We'll keep trying to come up with technical solutions, but you shouldn't interpret it as our being lazy or certainly not because we're out to get warriors.

Q u o t e:
-Remain one of the most easily controlled classes in the game....
-Are becoming easy and primary focus targets to train in arena....

Not sure I'd agree with that and I'm pretty sure most classes would say the same thing about themselves.

Q u o t e:
*-By making sure warriors will no longer scale so much with gear as they have been since the conception of the game what is being done to make sure they stay competitive throughout the expansion from the begining to the end ???*

Scaling awesomely with gear as compensation for doing bad damage when undergeared is not good game design. Warrior damage with great gear is much too high right now, as it is at the end of every expansion. This isn't surprising to anyone really. The current rage model just doesn't work and we need something more consistent. Consistency is the way to make sure you stay competitive from beginning to end (rather than averaging out at competitive because you're too low at the beginning and too high at the end).

Q u o t e:
What does it say about the classes that don't?

Perhaps that players have a hard time being objective about their own classes? :)

Q u o t e:
Just some food for thought, I know that SOME blizzard employees watch MLG [Kalgan and probably neth] but I am not thoroughly convinced that you do.

We all watched MLG. I have refrained from commenting because all of the discussions in this forum seem to devolve into "my class didn't win, so clearly other guys are overpowered" or "GC loves whichever comp wins." Frankly, I thought it was one of the best tournaments I've seen in awhile. It's hard to argue that the guys who won did so because they chose the overpowered comp -- those guys are insanely skilled and played very well. We had pretty good class representation over all, but I still think it's a small sample size from which to draw a lot of conclusions about class balance. If Orange or someone had gone for a three healer comp would we really be here arguing that three healers are OP?

Yes warriors can be crowd controlled. They also have a lot of ways to get out of it or prevent it and they have enough mobility that when they aren't being CC'd they are probably on top of a target. If anything I'd argue the lack of warriors dominating the upper echelons of PvP has more to do with their lack of control, not their susceptibility to it.

Q u o t e:
The stances change what abilities are available to us. That is a good mechanic. The bad mechanic is when core utilities that are expected of a spec are placed in the stance used by the other. You don't frequently see a Arms warrior use revenge, or a Prot warrior use overpower. You don't see a Fury warrior thunderclapping or charging. The differentiation of the core attack abilities each spec uses is what the stances should be used for. There should be situations in which using some of the abilities from another stance is beneficial, or you want the buff from the stance itself.

I have no problem with defensive stance having more of the defensive utilities. The problem is it currently has -all- of it. In order for any warrior to use any sort of defense, he must swap to defensive stance first. And an arms warrior needing to swap weapons or stances to interrupt is just terrible. Imagine if the new feral druid equivalent of kick required the druid to shift into caster form to use it. Or if a ret paladin's new interrupt required them to put up seal of Justice to use. You'd have all sorts of crying about it. Yet for an arms warrior its fine, because it's what they've always dealt with.

Yes, PVP warriors have learned to cope with it, and a skilled warrior is something to be feared. However continuing to support clunky mechanics so a few people can feel better about themselves for mastering a clunky system isn't good game design.

We like stances. You seem to be arguing that stances are fine, but we should make it a little easier to be in whatever stance you want. For me this crosses over into one of those areas where players see a limitation to their class and know they have to overcome that limitation to perform well, but cross over from trying to master that tactic to lobbying us to remove it or chill it out.

Q u o t e:
I agree with you here. Plate classes, especially tanks, should not be close to other classes/roles in terms of HP and armor (mitigation). That's just absurd.

It may be "absurd" from a traditional fantasy RPG standpoint, but its necessary for game balance. Health needs to be a lot closer or we're going to have to penalize plate class dps more to compensate for their increased survivability, especially in a world without so much armor pen. Armor itself is going up but will in no way encroach on plate armor. Go look at the armor of a mage or warlock. It is much lower than yours. There is plenty of room for it to come up a little and still be far behind.

Q u o t e:
Why will AoE be more rare in Cata, exactly? What will take it's place?

The first things that come to mind are CC or emptiness.

Having to CC mobs and then pull them one at a time is not exciting.

I don't think using Volley and Blizzard on every encounter is exciting either. Classes have lots of abilities and we want you to use more of them. Crowd control asks a lot more of player skill than blitzing through a dungeon as fast as you can. Single target dps generally has a lot more depth, in terms of procs, talent synergies and ability rotations, than AE.

Q u o t e:
i think the concern lies in the collateral splash effect of WW. The effect is what made the ability fun. so what if it benefits from certain encounters? who said all encounters need be balanced? Should we eliminate flight phases of bosses simply because melee can't reach that far?

I'd argue it was "fun" because it bumped up your status on the dps meters without you having to do anything really differently. As far as who said all encounters need to be balanced... have you read our forums? :) In any case, not all encounters need to be balanced, but when the same classes keep showing up over and over for the same reasons, players start to feel like they just chose the wrong class. We don't want to see lots of raids with 5 dps warriors, and we don't want everyone else to feel like they are just there to buff the warrior.

Q u o t e:
why are you so hellbent on trying to balance our damage with MS? i mean other classes have their defining abilities that are similarly broken. Look at the latest MLGs, you don't really need a MS, Spellcleave is proof of that. I'm willing to bet that if you were to remove MS for all classes minus Warriors, Warrior comps would still fail to dominate. The problem with PVP balance isn't MS. The problem with your PvP balance is that you've given too much to too many.

Just think about it for a second. You really think it's okay for your class to be able to reduce healing by 50% and for nobody else to be able to do it? As far as balancing your damage with MS, what I meant was that MS is arguably the most iconic ability in the Arms tree. It should be a button that you look forward to hitting. It needs to do good damage regardless of the debuff, which is usually wasted in PvE anyway.

Q u o t e:
a decision is an affirmative choice, it doesn't entail a necessary trade-off in addition to the natural cost of taking an alternate opportunity.

That's not my definition of a decision.

Q u o t e:
Weapon swapping at present is CLUNKY and ANNOYING.
Please, please just move all the "decision making" to stance dancing
and spell/ability choice and everyone will be happy.

I'm not trying to say that clunkiness is a good cost for an ability. What I am trying to say is that if we just wanted Spell Reflect or whatever to be super easy to use that we would take away the shield requirement or just have it auto-switch to a shield. Being able to pull it off at the right time is the hallmark of a great warrior. If you watch some of these really skilled players play, yeah I'd argue their intuition does seem to border on ESP.

Q u o t e:
Some ideas would be increasing damage to the target for a duration like a "mortal wound" or
a free application of hamstring, or refreshing rend?

Yeah, stuff like that is cool and a possible decent replacement for Imp MS. The specific examples you mention might not work because Hamstring is only commonly useful in PvP and Rend just takes away one of the few buttons Arms really needs to push.

Q u o t e:
The questions: Are devs aware of it? Will you deal with it? (I think we don't need very specific details on how you will do it - we just want to know it will be taken care of. It is too early to have details about how. It would be nice just to know it is on your radar).

Yes, and it's easy to balance around. Part of the reason we allowed spell damage to get so high was because a lot of physical damage was ignoring armor anyway, so it wasn't really paying its price. Once more physical damage is mitigated then spell damage (including magic damage from melee attacks) can come down proportionately too.

Q u o t e:
No fury or arms warrior ever complained about "on next attack." Losing them means a dps loss for both.

That first part isn't true (in fact warriors in this thread disagree with you) and the second part doesn't need to be either.

Q u o t e:
In my opinion I believe this is a perfectly reasonable question which deserves a honest informative answer from a developer. I'll begin holding my breath now.

What you're calling a "discrepancy in logic between classes" we call "different classes work differently." It's very common for players examining weaknesses (perceived or engineered) of their class to look to other classes and say "Hmm. They don't have the same weakness. That's not fair." But it's more than likely they have other weaknesses to compensate just as you have other strengths. Almost any time you bring up an example of other classes working differently, we're going to respond "perfect." I realize that can be frustrating since looking at other classes provides easy examples of abilities or mechanics you don't have, but that's honestly the whole point.

Q u o t e:
When you say these things, what fights are you referring to? We do exceptionally well on Heroic DBS and Festergut, and normal LK (to a lesser extent Heroic LK). I can offer anecdotal evidence: I pull 14-16k (on average :: You can look at my armory to the left to draw a correlation b/w gear:DPS) on the above-mentioned fights, and I average out 5th in my guild. Beaten by Rogues (on DBS), Mages (on Festergut), or by any combination on hLK attempts (GG RNG). On other fights, I slip to 6th or 7th.

You should get beaten by a rogue if that player is as good or better than you and has gear as good or better than you. On the other hand, you are destroying Enhancement shaman and other melee classes. Warriors are at the top or near the top of nearly every Icecrown fight. You may not be, but many warriors are. If I was a frustrated player, the message I would get is that I should roll a warrior for Cataclysm because they tend to dominate damage done in final raid tiers. That's not cool.

Q u o t e:
stance restrictions
-weapon restrictions
-rage loss
-damage loss
-internet lag which takes many send/receive messages over TCP/IP due to stance and weapon switches
-Non-LAN based PING times increasing the delay in responses to commands.
-the speed at which casters can get off spells
-reduced time in which to react due to incredibly fast spell casts.

The stance, weapon and rage restrictions are all fine with us. That's how warriors are designed to work.

Lag is something we hate of course, but until data can move faster through wires there isn't a ton we can do to improve it (though we do work to improve it). While the game may be a bit too fast paced at the moment, we don't want it to have a very slow, turn-based feel either. Lag is just something we have to live with.

Casters cast too quickly. Haste has just gotten a bit out of control, which is partially the fault of overly generous talents and partially other stats on gear not being as attractive. Fear of being interrupted or needing to move has just led to too much reliance on very fast or instant spells, which are very difficult to counter. We need to back off of that.

Q u o t e:
What everyone want to know is: Will the whirlwind component of Bladestorm continue to cause 100% weapon damage?

The Whirlwind caused by Bladestorm is a different spell effect. We can adjust it independently. At the moment we have not lowered its damage because we want warriors to be able to use it on single targets as a dps cooldown.

Q u o t e:
Sorry next time I'll put up sarcasm tags when I say something that outrageous.

No, we are nerfing AE damage in most forms. Not all of them need cooldowns, since mana inefficiency is often enough to get casters not to AE in encounters that are not actually groups.

Q u o t e:
From the sounds of it, 100% ArP stacking and Shadowmourne is going to be the reasons Warriors receive a lot of unfair (nerf) adjustments to AoE, etc...

It's a trend, not a data point. Go back and look at ToC if you'd like. Nevertheless, I don't want to turn this into a thread analyzing meters. That's an exercise we are generally in favor of, but it will take over this conversation. Suffice to say we have sufficient evidence that warrior dps is higher than we would like once warriors are at high item levels. This happened previously at high ilevels per tier, so if you want to disavow it, know that you're going against a pretty solid set of data.

Q u o t e:
Im pretty objective, having played since before MC (Even if I can be abrasive at times) and I can tell you that there isnt a single class in the game that gets as penalized as much as Warriors do just to have access to abilities that makes them viable.

I don't find your argument that you are objective to be very compelling based on your examples. I'm not trying to pick on you, but think about what that really means. Do you think rogues would agree? Shaman? Or are they not looking at things fairly?

Q u o t e:
Reading a lot of these posts, not a lot of warriors are asking "more dps please". Instead they are asking for something to make them shine. Something to set them apart from the rest of the classes. Something they got that the others want.

Other classes would call that mobility. You have it. They want it.

Q u o t e:
What are you going to do differently? I mean, if you designed the gear / warrior abilities with the intention that they were balanced...and they ended up tending to be overpowered on the damage charts, what evidence is there that you can produce balanced gear / warrior abilities?

Normalizing rage for one. Getting rid of armor pen for two. Defining swings as AE or single target for three.

Q u o t e:
What boggles my mind is that, after seeing the DISASTER that rage normalization was in BC, they actually think that doing that again is a good idea.

I'll admit the developers backed off of that change pretty fast. But what happened in the interim? The problem of the rage design didn't get any better. Fear of change can't allow us to not attempt to fix problems. Posting "Sorry guys, we know warriors can get overpowered at the end of an expansion, but we're too nervous to try to fix it, so just live with it" wouldn't go over well.

Remember we're not trying to nerf warriors (which would be comparatively easy). We're trying to fix a problem. If your stance is that you don't trust us to do it right, well, you're entitled to your opinion but that's not enough to persuade us to throw up our hands.

Q u o t e:
I really really hope you aren't talking about Arms PVP here.

If MS refreshed Rend as was suggested, then nobody would push Rend more than once, minus some special case that would only allow for this to be the case for PvP.

Q u o t e:
We were developed with the MS effect balanced in mind, and if not, we've certainly been balanced with the MS effect in mind.

I would actually argue you haven't been. That may have been the case originally before even rogues had the debuff. Ever since that time we've basically assumed the debuff to be present in competitive PvP, minus a few unusual comps that were usually dependent on some tricky gimmick. You could put an anti-healing aura on an Arena and things wouldn't change that much. I think Charge and Intercept, and possibly Spell Reflect, have a lot more to do with warrior PvP balance than MS these days.