Addressing the State of Fury Warriors Pre-ICC

WoW Classic Mists of Pandaria Classic Discussion
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I commend Blizzard for their recent actions and extremely fast turnaround in reverting the nerfs to feral druids based on player feedback. This shows that the devs listen and care about the integrity of the game and the voice of their players.

Based on these recent actions, I really think that the devs should take another look at fury warriors and consider making adjustments–just as they did with ret paladins and feral druids–to make the spec more viable pre-ICC. Clearly the players do too. Just look at the number of topics on the front page asking Blizzard to make changes to fury.

If I understand things correctly, the rationale behind Wrath Classic buffs to ret paladins and feral druids were partly because the devs (and players who provided feedback) felt that they weren’t performing as intended prior to having access to their ICC gearsets.

The same can be said for warriors. Warriors were nerfed over the course of WOTLK with the introduction of the 10% damage penalty to Titan’s Grip and a reduction to the effectiveness of armor penetration, culminating in the final 3.3.5 patch.

Wrath Classic is based on 3.3.5. Unfortunately, because we do not have access to the 3.3.5 gear, this has left warriors in a state of feeling severely underpowered. Given warrior’s lack of utility to a raid (unlike what paladins bring with a resurrection, numerous stat buffs, defensive raid cooldowns, and crucial boss debuffs such as 3% increased crit; and druids with a resurrection, combat resurrection, innervate, the same buff that furies give, increased damage to bleeds, etc), there doesn’t seem to be much reason to bring a fury to a raid right now. Other classes can bring the same buffs and debuffs as warriors while doing better damage and bringing greater utility. Specifically, after the recent buffs, feral druids do everything a fury warrior can do, but better (aside from sunder armor, but normally this is done by either the prot warrior or combat rogue).

Fury warriors were told that “our time” would already be here with the Ulduar ilvl buffs and once we got our 252 pieces. Unfortunately, the data from Wowhead shows otherwise. Every class has a dps spec that is doing better than warriors (see: https://www.wowhead.com/wotlk/news/wotlk-classic-phase-2-dps-rankings-week-11-ulduar-332291).

Additionally, this tale of “insane” warrior scaling come ICC that everyone seems to be parroting seems to be, unfortunately, just a tale. ICC class sims are showing that other classes are scaling just as much if not more than fury warriors, even when a fury warrior has Shadowmourne (which goes without saying, not every player will have access to).

In conclusion, warriors feel undertuned, underpowered, and underwhelming at the moment. Blizzard’s recent actions in reverting the nerfs to feral druids based on player feedback demonstrate their commitment to listening to the player community and maintaining the integrity of the game. Similar attention needs to be given to fury warriors as well. Based on player feedback and data from sources like Wowhead, it’s clear that fury warriors are currently struggling in terms of damage output and utility compared to other classes. The adjustments made to ret paladins and feral druids show that the rationale behind these changes was to ensure that these classes perform as intended prior to obtaining ICC gearsets, and the same logic can be applied to fury warriors.

Fury warriors aren’t seeking an overpowered buff, but rather a fair adjustment that would make them more viable pre-ICC and bring them in line with other classes in terms of utility and damage output. We want to feel heard and listened to, just as Blizzard has demonstrated with their actions towards feral druids.

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In before someone tells you that warriors are 12 percent behind affliction warlocks. On god, there’s an 80 resto Druid hellbent on telling everyone warriors are good. Be warned, he pops in on every forum to educate people.

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Cheers to this

/char10

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Agreed, I had to reroll because of the state of warriors. It’s really sad that the class feels practically abandoned by the classic team at this point. The class doing well in bis gear during the final phase of the expansion isn’t a valid reason to leave it in such a terrible state for the other 90%. Even if it were true that warriors will be smashing everyone with shadowmourne.

While I think the class will do better due to a combination of 100% passive armor pen sets, shadowmourne and more fights that favor warriors (more consistent cleave fights), even in original wrath there were a lot of specs that kept up with warriors on single target. I had shadowmourne, and even back then ferals, rogues, fire mages, hunters, etc. all definitely pumped and kept up. It’s going to be worse in classic, and every phase prior to ICC having warriors be total garbage is just unacceptable.

Edit: Even if the Titan’s Grip penalty is left in place, I’d like to see adjustments to sunder and shattering throw to make the class more user friendly and eliminate the need for trinket swapping. A glyph to make shattering throw instant and apply 5 sunders would do wonders for our opener, and making shattering throw usable in berserker stance for fury would be an awesome quality of life change. And of course fixing munching would be great too, I’m sure mages would agree on that as well.

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Hate to say it, but warriors are likely to remain low on the totem pole.

Grab Shadowmourne and PVP is basically all you can do at this point. Shadowmourne at least will make warriors passable at the very end of the expansion in PVE as well.

No real game changers coming down the line; munching would be a nice slight fix, but nothing major.

I think those of us that played warriors knew this was the expansion where it all sort of falls apart for warriors in PVE.

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It wasn’t nearly this bad in retail wrath though, because a lot of the changes that warriors are dealing with in classic didn’t come until the final patch. Warriors were much stronger in retail wrath at every point of the expansion so far.

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Even something along the lines of a new glyph that allowed bloodthirst/whirlwind to apply sunders. Having to use your first five GCDs and having your trinkets proc while sundering just feels bad and really hurts your overall damage.

Sure, one solution is to swap your trinkets just before pull to put them on a 30 second timer, but it doesn’t feel great that we have to resort to that.

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Yup my solution is just to add a glyph that makes heroic strike apply sunder armor, or have one that makes shattering throw apply 5 sunders. Either one would be a huge QoL buff.

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warriors are actually insane, stop being bad and ride the gear train to the top

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you cant read, can u brother? nor do you know that every class dealt more dmg then “scaled better than warriors after us getting the largest ilvl jump this entire expac, despite us being the (scaling) class”, do you brother?

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It’s funny they keep talking about us scaling so well when we aren’t even the best scaling class in ulduar so far :joy::joy::joy:

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Logs don’t like.
You got an objective figure to look at, but you choose to ignore it, because it doesn’t fit your narrative. There are warriors who are pulling 9k+. Just not you. You’re a good warrior. High parses. Top 15% even. (yes, I looked, and you can see mine)

Like I’ve said previously, I’m not against buff to fury, but all means, go be S-tier. This will only help my raid team. I simply think it’s not necessary.

Here is an example. A very very high parser. To demonstrate the capabilities of warrior.
https://classic.warcraftlogs.com/character/us/faerlina/ahlaundoh

If warriors get buffed, you will do more damage indeed, let’s 10% more damage. But that warrior I linked above will do 22% more damage. And your parse will go down overall.

That’s what happened with Ferals. Damage went up, parses went down. Casual ferals damage went up by like 5%, top 0.1% bumped it to 15-20%

I think our main disagreement is that you think buffs/changes should occur per median bases, and I think buffs/nerfs should occur per top 0.1% bases, as those players demonstrative the real capabilities of the class

PS. I do think, however, munching should be “fixed”, as it was in OG Wrath. I think I understand what it is, and if I do understand it correctly, it will actually end up buffing overall damage. This will also buff Fmages and MM too though.

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So your point is that warriors shouldn’t get buffed because the top 0.1% of warriors are able to pull huge numbers? Players like ahlaundoh who are good, but also centre their entire raid around improving their own parses, are not a reason to buff or nerf warriors. The kill times are so insanely quick that he has huge up times on his major cooldowns. For other classes kill times might not be a big factor. But for fury warrior they are were you are going to do most of your damage. If ahlaundoh was placed in a dad guild he would not be able to get anywhere near the DPS numbers he is getting in this guild.

The buffs and nerfs aren’t there to serve the 0.1% that can down a boss in 2 mins or less. If you aren’t in the top 1% of guilds, regardless of how good you are you would never even have a chance to do the numbers ahlaundoh does. Again, not saying he isn’t an amazing player, because he is, but he wouldn’t have a chance in hell at any of these numbers if he was in a dad guild. So you’re essentially saying that every fury who isn’t in the best guilds in the world is a bad player no matter how good they actually are.

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i dont think that there’s a world where a company should balance the game because of the performance of 10 people when 990 others are playing the video game. That guys guild is going to have the best parses regardless because its a group of the best players that play the game. Im pretty sure the guy who calls wipes and stuff like that when a pull isnt going his way. Regardless, look at his dmg dealt compared to the highest dmg dealt ever by every other class, its still booty cheeks.

There is about 10 specs that currently need buffed, not just warriors, but warriors problem now is they bring nothing that a feral doesn’t bring besides commanding shout.

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If your example of why warriors don’t need a buff is Ahlaundoh, you don’t understand parsing at all and should probably stop talking.

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Right, so not only are Fury balanced around an end game legendary weapon but they’re also balanced around completely degenerate play. The kicker being that no other spec or class is being held to that standard.

IDK, I don’t think Fury need a buff to be viable, but if we’re taking votes on who “deserves” one then a list that doesn’t include Fury is pretty biased.

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I love that he literally selected the best fury parser in the world and thus every single other fury warrior player is not playing their class properly apart from one person :joy::joy::joy:

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Bro, how come no one jumps quick to talk about how casters are going to scale with DFO, or super strong tier sets. Everyone is so quick to talk about warrior scaling the classes that are scaling the best are mages/locks/dks/rogues.

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Oh, I agree. People’s fear of Fury scaling is not well evidenced and is basically a phobia.

I just think the game would have been fine if no class had a buff - they were all viable. But if we’re dishing out buffs for okay performing specs (like Feral) then Fury has every right to expect to be on the buff list.

I am just pretty conservative about Blizzard doing buffs and intervening in the meta. There has to be a very strong justification for it imo. Like a spec being very close to unviable.

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It’s like that person using a warrior in his guild as an example, even though that warrior never presses sunder or shatter ever and has almost entirely p2 bis gear.

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