From X, Formerly known as Twitter:
- Warriors - Rage is a problematic mechanic because more damage = more rage = more damage = more rage ad infinitum. This is going to become more problematic at 60 as well. If we had it to do over again, we’d likely have normalized rage (i.e. you don’t get extra rage when you do more damage/crit) at the start of the season and focused on major changes to their gameplay to compensate. … what would be a good trade for some form of normalized rage at 60 if we had to do such a thing?
Dear Aggrend,
This might be a longer post, and you might not read it.
I’ll TL;DR it for you:
Communicate. Reduce reliance on the loop. Understand what makes warrior fun isn’t damage.
I do an alarming amount of homework for these things, but I’m an aging nerd.
I don’t expect you to read anything I write as I have no way to contact you directly, but the question is a complicated and a nuanced one, and you’re going to get a complicated and nuanced answer regarding our core mechanic. I do have good news, though, my answer isn’t “do nothing,” but rather “reward good play.” Your response of “you don’t get extra rage for more damage/crit at the beginning” is harsh and rather binary, but what if there were a way to reduce the reliance on that feedback loop while still allowing the class to be fun and expressive?
It is written from a tank perspective, as I am a tank.
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Reward good tank play with rage: I am a tank, and there are a lot of situations where good play for me isn’t rewarded - like not taking damage because I’m wearing heavy mitigation gear. Likewise, unlike bears I am not rewarded with rage when I dodge, and get a haste bonus to my melee attack when I parry, which is great for damage, and concordantly some rage, but that’s secondary to the wrath-style 5 rage on block/dodge/parry that I get for mitigating an attack properly. You could award rage on unmitigated damage or normalized on hit, or anything.
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Reduce areas where other players cost rage: Things like un-runed Priest shields award no rage when they take damage, and warriors sometimes take damage intentionally to get rage - this isn’t a gimmick, it’s in our kit with Bloodrage, just like a Warlock’s lifetap. When this doesn’t happen, one of the more toxic aspects of warrior play is forcing shamans to totem twist, or priests to pack a certain rune or something else. I like it when everyone is allowed to pack the set of runes they want, not get yelled at because some cranky warrior feels that because the priest tried to save their life, they rage-starved them at a critical moment.
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Rage balancing is something we do with cooldowns: When we pop Diamond flask for 150AP because a boss is about to Dodgewall and we know we’re going to need more rage or pop any one of a myriad of CDs like Deathwish or the Orc racial that allows us to do more damage and take more damage, a lot of skilled warriors are doing that to temporarily boost rage generation during that time. As a tank it allows me to intentionally sunder my own armor for when I need more rage. Full normalization as proposed removes that mechanic entirely from the game and makes warrior less a class with the ability for high skill expression, and more one with limits defined by gear.
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You say you own when you screw up communication, you screwed this up before: When Phase 2 rolled around, you nerfed Quick Strike, Raging Blow, Devastate, Deep Wounds, most of which by changing how normalization worked - estimates ranged from 25 to 38% in terms of the amount done during this nerf for Devastate alone because you switched from a normalized weapon value to average weapon DPS. You did this two days before the phase started to the surprise of many, and without posting any patch notes. I read the transcript from your conversation on the paladin Discord and you say you own it when you communicate poorly. Not putting out patch notes is not communicating at all. You were a QA lead. I was a QA lead. You are a Project Manager. I am a project manager. You are a stake holder, as a Tauren, I am a steak; you have to communicate if/when you do this.
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Super Cheap Reactive Abilities Can Be Rage Builders Not Spenders: Revenge and Overpower, Revenge specifically, is a good button for a tank to press, and in the current design with the amount of rage we have and with Shield Slam/SnB procs free, incenting Revenge by making it Cleave like Wrath or having it build rage is a great way to have people lean in to reactive abilities. It also makes it so Sword and Board isn’t a must have rune.
And in return you still give people a bonus on bonus damage and white crits, but you can put a coefficient on there, or diminishing returns - something that’s still a reward, but not a hard feedback loop.
I am grateful to you, for how you spoke up in the past. When the bug for shaman totem attack power talents[1] came to light it was you who said “I understand the drive behind #nochanges, but this bug was discovered in the appropriate window, this is the right thing do to, and we should fix it.” You were the one who spoke up about weapon procs and the GCD [2] and then corrected himself [3], which was a big deal at the time my husband and I were considering leaving Classic Vanilla because people weren’t communicating and all we had were the forums. I was disappointed at your “hero class” post on Twitter after the fact about mages and even more so that a change like Phase 2 would go in, and that the first time warrior would get mentioned in patch notes would be when we got a partial reversion of the Devastate nerf with no developer comment whatsoever.
What I would take in trade for any changes to this feedback loop would be you being more present and available, and for your goal not to be normalizing rage, but rather normalizing communication. Your goal, in terms of my personal preferences would not be to remove the rage bonus for performing well, but reducing our reliance on that feedback loop.
Sincerely,
-Horse
1: Improved weapon totems does not give bonus Attack power to other people in the group - #37 by Aggrend-1483
2: Proc Weapons and the GCD - #19 by Aggrend-1483
3: Hamstring Reduces the Proc Rate of Nightfall in 2020 - #12 by Aggrend-1483