All Things Warrior in TWW (Feedback Points)

Classes Warrior
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Currently not impressed or very excited about the class tree and spec trees for Warrior in TWW.

Here is a compilation of many thoughts, opinions and ideas I have for them.

The Warrior class tree feels off. The pathing feels bad and I always feel like I wish I had 1-2 extra points available for use. The capstone talents are all also uninspiring besides perhaps Avatar. The recent Blademaster’s Torment change is also sad to see but understandable in principle.

Thunderous Roar and Spear are both not that exciting. One is passive background damage and the other is a pain to use.

Ancient Aftershock over Spear perhaps?

I know Protection Warriors don’t have access to Bladestorm, but would it be possible to add Bladestorm/Ravager into the general class tree now and out of the spec trees for Arms/Fury/Prot now that Fury once again has access in TWW? This could free up some space in all three respective spec trees and help give us something worth building towards in the general class tree.

The end goal would be to have Avatar, Bladestorm/Ravager and Ancient Aftershock as our 3 general warrior capstone talents that we are building to.

Perhaps if also moved to the general warrior tree, we could see newly added drop-down talents for Bladestorm that allow us to Rampage, Mortal Strike and whatever would be equally as valuable for Prot during Bladestorm?

There are also a few too many 2-point nodes in the class tree that could be chopped down and the two handed weapon spec talent should be made baseline.

Removal of GCD from Hamstring? Feels awful to press in PvP. Couldn’t care less how that impacts Arms in PvE with tactician. Or bake it into Mortal Strike/Bloodthirst?

Is it possible to just have Demolish Replace Colossus Smash/Warbreaker after we press it? Similar to how Hammer of Light works with Wake of Ashes for Retribution.

Thunder Clap should be made baseline and honestly should be permanently merged with Whirlwind in some fashion.

Would also like to see a “Condemn”-type effect applied to Bloodletting for Arms and have Rend completely removed as a keybind as a consequence. So essentially, if the target is above 80% health or below 35%, pressing Mortal Strike auto applies Rend.

How does any of this sound to other Warriors out there?

Edits: A few edits for repositioning of information for a clearer read-through!

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If everything was to stay as it was right now with no movement I’d have the following changed personally.

Crushing Force and Overwhelming Rage reduced to 1 point talents instead of 2 points and Blood and Thunder / Crackling Thunder merged into one point with both effects for Arms/Prot.

This would enable at least an additional 1 point floater to pickup anything else in the first 2 portions of the tree for utility or self sustain, there are currently too many mandatory points to pick that you’re only really going to have 1-3 points to pick whatever utility you want in the first two sections you’re otherwise missing out on. So having 2-4 points free instead from Crushing Force and Overwhelming rage going to 2 pointers would allow for a lot less frustration when setting up a build.

Thunderclap talents merging would be ideal due to the sole factor that Crackling Thunder is a noob trap for Arms and Prot and is never going to ever be taken.

2 pointers can’t really be reduced in the class tree on the 3rd portion for the sole factor as it’s currently built since they’re gating you from taking more than 2/3 of the capstones and their augmentations that follow that actually make them worthwhile taking, especially when we have some of the lowest node counts of all specs when it comes to this part of the tree, hence the 2 point gates all over the joint.

Endurance Training has absolutely zero reason for being the only Stamina increasing class tree talent that’s in the 3rd rung, we’re second rate citizens in this regard to every other class that has it in their first or second portions (everyone else).

Overall there needs to be a major shakeup of this 3rd and final section. Which I doubt will happen at all before TWW, and would be surprised if we even got a glance at for a mid patch class tree rework more akin to other classes who get a lot more freedom in picking the right tools for the job.

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Many 2 points nodes need to be made 1 point.

And putting warrior back in the oven to cook longer would be nice.

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Another random thought for Fury Warrior…

Should Bloodthirst be reimagined to have 2 charges instead and Raging Blow be reduced to only 1 charge? Of course keep in the ability for Raging Blow to reset it’s own cooldown.

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Bloodthirst is fine as is, Fury’s gameplay that it’s changing to is going back to a 3 GCD cycle or BT-X-X as it’s also known as which honestly was the peak set-up for fury in terms of having all your attacks have a role in being pressed instead of being ignored.

Bloodthirst gaining extra charges would kinda nullify that feeling of pressing different attacks every GCD, and yeah I know there’s a double BT proc from lightning strikes for Mountain Thane which allows for a double tap of it, but that hopefully wont detract from the gameplay and make it too polarising since you’re already going to be reacting to Thunder Blast procs as well.

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The reason why there are 2 point nodes is to prevent players from getting every capstone. I think they should remove some of the damage nodes in the class tree, make thunderous roar/spear a choice node with the same two follow on talents that change tooltip depending on what you take. That way those two point nodes in the class tree can become 1 pointers, and that 5% damage node can be removed because it’s only purpose is for gatekeeping. And then utility and non damage nodes can be added in there place.

Warriors have the most damage point in there class tree out of any class. The average is about 15, with warriors having 26 (30 currently on live). I think most of the pain of the class tree is due to this.

I already wrote a lengthy post on all of my changes as well as a table comparing each classes’ class tree talent point distribution. (Here: Class Tree Issues)

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I think that adding more damage to the class tree is the last thing they should do. As I said above, we have more damage points in the class tree than any other class in the game.

I personally don’t have an issue with Roar, I think they could maybe adjust the cdr on it to line up better with other cool downs for each spec.

I spear had a bigger hit radius as well as a larger radius where you can maintain the crit buff, I wouldn’t have a problem with it. Similar to mage’s font of power that had a larger radius than the animation where you could maintain the damage buff, or the change to DK’s death and decay that allows them to maintain the buffs for a few seconds when they leave D&D so it is less punishing. I think they should remove Piercing Challenge and replace it with a cdr talent. This would make it actually useful in pvp since most classes can get out of the tether everytime you cast it at 1.5min CD. Since bladestorm was nerfed, this could be a warranted buff. In PVE it would create some different damage profile options.

I’m not opposed to Ancient Aftershock being added, but isn’t it similar to roar in being “passive damage”? You press it and it does initial damage and dot damage, similar to roar. It doesn’t have bleed synergy like roar, except roar is uncapped and has a larger radius than AA. AA does have a knockdown effect, however it isn’t necessarily useful since you don’t want to keep it off cooldown to wait for the right time to interrupt your target, you want to use it as a damage ability. It also has similar frustrations as spear since you want the tank to keep mobs in the ground effect to maximize it’s damage.

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Well the idea with adding Bladestorm/Ravager to the general Warrior class tree was to have it there in place of Thunderous Roar or Spear ideally. So overall, not directly adding more damage to the tree itself but rather giving warriors something universally more appealing that makes sense.

The spec trees could move to pick up interesting takes on the loss of Roar/Spear.

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This would reduce a major CD that warriors have, and would just allow for warriors to pick up every capstone in their spec tree. That doesn’t sound like a better option. Bladestorm is just as passive as roar except you can’t cast anything while doing it. Same with ravenger. Most of our cds are passive, if you define roar as a passive CD.

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I seriously doubt any of this is on the table for TWW at this point in its development cycle. But no this isn’t what would happen with my suggestion.

The idea is that Bladestorm/Ravager would replace Avatar’s current position for example. Then Avatar would shift over to take the position of Thunderous Roar. Then Spear could be replaced with Ancient Aftershock. These are all just random general ideas off the cuff.

The goal would be a better thematic flow of warrior capstones in the general class tree.

We wouldn’t lose a major CD as warriors, because for Arms/Fury, they would pick up something else unique to their specs in their spec trees. Prot would also gain BS/Ravager for example.

I PvP and don’t Pve, and Bladestorm is far from passive in PvP. It can be used very purposefully to avoid CC.

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You are suggesting shifting around the capstones with major CDs. If you only shifted the CDs in the general tree, you would still only be able to get 2 CDs. Except now instead of getting Avatar, BS/ravenger, and Roar/spear, you would just get Avatar, BS/ravenger. In the arms and fury trees, you already get most of the talents in your capstone area anyway.

I guess I’m having trouble not seeing your suggestion as a lateral change with little impact or even a negative change unless more is added to the spec tree in replacement of it.

Adding BS/Ravenger wouldn’t benefit prot necessarily, because they already have ravenger in their spec tree, and prot warriors wouldn’t take BS because of the loss of control when tanking.

Yeah BS is occasionally used to prevent knockbacks or CCs in pve, or at least more so in shadowlands where the signet legendary was still BIS in Single Target.

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Well sort of. This is an opinion piece, but I don’t believe that having current access in DF for example to Spear, Roar and Avatar is ideal. It should really only be 2 of the 3. In my example so far, you would likely go the route of every warrior having Avatar, with the choice of either BS/Ravager or Ancient Aftershock. I’m not opposed to Warriors having all 3 though like we currently can in DF or TWW beta in our class tree. I just personally would never play that.

But also keep in mind Colossus is picking up Demolish so it’s not like warriors are short on potential cooldown abilities for offense.

This is strong evidence that BS/Ravager should move to the general class tree is it not? If all of our warrior specs have the same talent option, it needs to be moved to the general warrior tree. Logically, its a general warrior ability if all specs have access.

I’m also not against buffing the functionality of BS is some way. Perhaps you could use Rampage, Mortal Strike and Shield Slam/Taunt/Shield Block during it. Could accomplish this through newly added extended talents to BS/Ravager if it was moved to the general warrior tree.

All of this is good to know because I seriously have no knowledge of PVE warrior or Prot warrior in general.

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Might be better to get rid of Slam and replace it with Cleave and leave Whirlwind alone.

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There’s a bit of an issue with that if you were just to make cleave your rage dump for ST and AoE.

Cleave would have to no longer be affected by Overpower stacks. It would also have to have it’s damage reduced per cast even further.

It wouldn’t allow you to hit your filler when strictly single target is required, causing you to not meet checks that require extra damage from classes that funnel much better into one target when multiple targets are alive, or causing a wipe due to mechanics requiring things die at set intervals.

Whirlwind vs Cleave and when to press either would be redundant because Cleave would just push it out of use entirely, sure WW could get a buff, but then if it ends up being a higher ap% since spenders now all flat 20 rage cost then it’ll just replace cleave’s use in ST as well. Unless you make arbitrary hit caps you can’t really balance no cooldown dumps in the same role together.

Then you’ve also got the gameplay aspect that comes with not having 2-3 attacks for AoE. You’ll bore your players to death if they’re spamming one attack over and over again, as opposed to pressing a few different attacks which each have a defined role (short cooldown/dump/debuff/buff etc) I’d say what we’ve got in terms if that has a nice feedback loop for live and TWW carries over it more or less.

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I don’t see the issue with stacks only affecting MS. About the damage reduction, I guess it’d be better to add charges, get less casts, but more powerful ones.

Main target could receive extra damage from cleave to keep its aoe portion from getting too powerful. Similar to how Blade Dance does it.

I guess something akin to Overpower stacks could be provived by Cleave to improve WW. That way, you cast a couple Cleaves then an empowered WW to justify having both skills.

Another thing is Rend. Perhaps arms could get a passive instead of Thunder Clap which makes one apply short-duration Rends while the other apply Deep Wounds. That way, alternating becomes necessary.

Cleave could even morph into WW. After 2 casts, the third one is a Whirlwind instead (this could help with button bloat without removing the ability entirely). Might fall into the “boredom” problem you mentioned, though.

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I really do believe the button bloat problem stems from Rend primarily, and then perhaps Whirlwind/Thunderclap/Cleave in some fashion. I do also think that Demolish will be a minor issue as well.

Rend no longer is a good button to press as it serves a seriously redundant purpose. Why do I press Mortal Strike, which applies Deep Wounds, to then only have to press another global, Rend, to apply essentially another Deep Wounds? Silly stuff.

Thunderclap should have been permanently merged with Whirlwind by this point. It makes way more sense to have Cleave and then also have either Whirlwind or Thunderclap.

I like your suggestion of casting a few cleaves to empower Whirlwind. That actually sounds really clever.

Demolish in my humble opinion should override Colossus Smash/Warbreaker after we press it. Similar to Hammer of Light replacing Wake of Ashes for Ret Paladins.

2 Likes
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Rend and Thunder Clap really aren’t really an issue anywhere but on paper. The direct damage of Rend is very low, typically contributing less than 0.8% of your damage in single target. Thunder Clap now has the same rage cost, and is only around 18% weaker, which means you’re only losing ~0.15% single target damage by using it instead; over the course of a heavy multitarget dungeon, that is going to be reduced to an absolutely trivial amount.

  • In single target content, just press Rend.
  • In multitarget content, just press Thunder Clap.

You could conceivably keep Rend bound so that you can use it instead of Thunder Clap when you inevitably reach a single target Mythic+ boss, but the damage difference just isn’t worth the extra keybind to even the most serious players.

As far as Rend being button bloat… I mean kind of? But you could make that point about a lot of abilities - like “Slam is just button bloat because we could use Whirlwind instead” is also technically true, but not really an idea many people are going to get behind (they previously tried both of these ideas, removing Rend in MoP and Slam in WoD, and it was pretty well disliked both times). When I think of bloat, I tend to think about things that don’t provide gameplay value, and while Rend’s isn’t particularly high, it does provide Arms with another mechanic to engage with.

This gets into the greater topic of “how many buttons is too many buttons?”

  • Fury has Bloodthirst, Raging Blow, Execute, Slam/Whirlwind/Thunder Clap, Rampage, Onslaught/Odyn’s Fury, Recklessness, Bladestorm/Ravager, Avatar, Spear/Roar = 10 rotational buttons used by practically every build.
  • Arms has Mortal Strike, Overpower, Execute, Slam, Skullsplitter/Whirlwind/Cleave, Colossus Smash/Warbreaker, Rend/Thunder Clap, Sweeping Strikes, Bladestorm/Ravager, Avatar, Spear/Roar, Demolish = up to 12 rotational buttons, though you don’t actually use all of them in a lot of builds.
    • Skullsplitter will practically never be used alongside Whirlwind or Cleave.
    • Single target builds don’t use Sweeping Strikes.
    • Slayer doesn’t use Demolish and Colossus doesn’t always use Ravager/Bladestorm.

So we can reasonably say that Arms will usually be around 10-11 rotational abilities for most builds, which I still think is fairly comfortable. It could be pared down, though I’m not sure there’s an overriding need to at this point in time.

It’s a neat theme, but lacks any meaningful mechanical change, since having Cleave turn into Whirlwind just backloads damage while retaining the number of buttons/binds. It’s very Final Fantasy-esque, and with some mechanical changes to reinforce/reward that switch it could be a compelling combo, but it really doesn’t do anything to address the specs number of buttons.

Demolish is probably the bigger culprit, since it is specific to one hero tree, but this would require a complete overhaul of how Arms and Colossus works, which simply isn’t going to happen at this stage.

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I haven’t come out and specifically addressed this in this thread yet, but my views are coming strictly from a PvP standpoint.

The issue with Rend comes down to your rotation priority in PvP. In PvP, you spend a massive amount of time constantly applying and re-applying Hamstring. This is something I’m sure you do not do in PvE and creates separation in playstyle.

In rated arena, especially at a very high rating, you can hardly find yourself wanting to press Rend as you must Mortal Strike on cooldown, Hamstring every 3-6 globals while pressing much of your utility and mobility cooldowns. Then of course factor in Execute/Sudden Death procs and so on.

Overall, Rend feels incredibly redundant as a keybind. Why press Mortal Strike to hit hard, reduce the target’s healing received and also to apply Deep Wounds, just to then press another ability immediately following that just once again applies “Deep Wounds”. It’s very strange and dull.

This is my primary issue with Rend as a concept.

I can see your point about not solving a button bloat issue with this change. But ultimately, I am still in the camp that Whirlwind and Thunderclap should permanently become merged into one ability in whichever fashion.

Off topic slightly, but you could solve a PvP button bloat issue with Mortal Strike also auto applying Hamstring and Bloodthirst auto applying Hamstring for examples. If Hamstring is to remain, I would love to see it have its global cooldown removed once again. This ability feels terrible to press in PvP, especially as Fury. As Fury, it costs Rage and detracts from Rampage building. I have found that the smoothest feel for pressing Hamstring currently, is only following a Rampage.

Honestly, I’m seriously shocked they didn’t choose to implement Demolish in the same fashion as Hammer of Light. Fury doesn’t have access to Colossus and Arms is definitely the bigger button bloat culprit. It seems they should have really thought about that on conception. But you are right, it probably is too late at this stage.

I also occasionally see you share feedback in the beta warrior thread. You seem like you do your homework and really know what’s going on with Warrior. Thanks for commenting in here as well.

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This is fair, although I wonder if Rend is really the issue so much has the amount of time being dedicated to spamming Hamstring?

I don’t know if it should necessarily be applied by Mortal Strike, since that’s already a high value ability that’s kept basically on cooldown, but I’m sure there’s an answer somewhere that also helps Fury with the same problem.

Possibly because it doesn’t have an analogue for Protection, but probably just not willing to dedicate to that level of overhaul for Arms just yet. Between Colossal Might, Anger Management, Test of Might, In for the Kill, and the (already since changed) Warlord’s Torment, that’s a lot of moving parts!

Appreciate that. I think you highlight an important issue - PvP is not my area of expertise, I am familiar with sometimes endless hamstring spam. It’s probably too easily dispelled in general, though that’s something that affects far more than just Warriors.

Maybe Rend ticks should apply the slow, just to give you more reason to care about pressing it! :stuck_out_tongue:

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Both buttons last 15 seconds. I think hamstring might have a shorter duration in pvp, regardless it’s really not that impactful on your globals. I do think they could probably remove rend and move it’s damage into deep wounds it does feel like an outlier for a button. Tclap should probably spread rend baseline as well, that’s a bit of a crappy talent to have to pick up.

1 Like