#23 - Nov. 12, 2010, 7:25 p.m.
Q u o t e:
I'm a little confused here... You wanted to change how rage worked due to scaling, now you're saying that we need gear to allow us to maintain our rotation. Now I can kind of see this working but, I don't foresee it working when a player like myself (almost bis) is struggling to even us slam to begin with.
It's a delicate explanation and one that is easy for players to misread.
We felt that for the high-end Lich King PvE warrior that rage was largely irrelevant. You could hit whatever buttons you wanted to when they were off cooldown. If you put electrical tape over that red bar, your gameplay wouldn't change much.
In Cataclysm, we want rage to matter. We want you to have the gameplay of managing a limited resource. We want the electrical tape scenario to make the game almost unplayable for you.
It's easy to take that to extremes. We do not want warriors to hit say Mortal Strike then have to autoattack several times before they have enough rage to hit Mortal Strike again. Standing around waiting too long isn't managing your resource -- it's just standing around (assuming you didn't blow your rage through poor decisions generally involving Heroic Strike).
However, when I write stuff like that, it's easy for players to then say "Aha! Any time I can't hit my abilities on cooldown, then my rage income is too low," meaning that they are trying to get back to their existence not being limited by rage again.
That's why I said "nearly." Are there going to be moments where you avoided a lot of damage or had your damage avoided or were in the middle of moving or (heaven forbid) wasted rage on something that you shouldn't have? Most likely. In those moments, use something like Berserker Rage, Deadly Calm or Battle Shout to get a little rage. But you shouldn't ever feel like you're in a position to take say Slam off your bar because you can just never afford it.
Slam's balance is also tricky. We nerfed its damage at a time when beta warriors were considering not using Mortal Strike at all. But Heroic Strike should never look more attractive than Slam for Arms. Heroic Strike is for times when you've hit every button and still have rage. We realize with certain amounts of haste that Slam may eventually fall behind, but we don't think we'll be there in the first tier of content so we have time to evaluate how the rest of the mechanics and abilities are working before we make any changes there. If we're wrong, and Heroic Strike does fall higher in the priority than Slam for Arms, then we'll nerf one or buff the other.