Arms/Fury Warrior PvP Feedback

Classes Warrior
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Hello! I go by the alias Smexxin in WoW. I’ve been playing both warrior specs since Wotlk, when I achieved my first rank 1 on the class. Since then I’ve achieved 12+ r1s as well as participated in many tournaments, including winning regionals and placing top 4 in 2 different Blizzcons. I’m going to be separating this into 2 sections; one for Arms warrior and the second for Fury.

ARMS

Overall thoughts - Currently I feel like Arms is actually in a great feeling spot for pvp. Has good chunky damage, great utility, and the ability to protect itself work well in it’s tanky “in your face” role. I think it’s really great that majority of warrior’s damage is back into Mortal Strike and Execute. The class feels at it’s best for me when you’re able to get big executes and maintain big chunks every few seconds through Mortal Strikes. There’s a few things I think would really enhance the gameplay and feel of warrior however.

Covenants :

Kyrian - Currently in my opinion, Kyrian is far and away the best covenant in many different aspects. Not only the functionality and utility of the main active ability, but also having a reliable self heal with the ability to gain 5% mastery among other things seems to far outweigh the other options.

Venthyr felt super clunky to use, especially considering Arms’s current rage generation. The door of shadows definitely was fun to play around with and felt useful.

Night fae’s active ability felt really easy to counter by just running a few yards out of the area, however the mobility from the other active felt like it was actually useful.

Necrolords shield felt incredibly fun to play around with, however the active ability felt super lackluster and annoying because stationary. (would love to see this ability just put the banner on your back and carry it with you.)

Back in legion, hamstring was put back on gcd because you could fish for tactician procs for pve. Now that that mechanic is not such a big deal, I really feel like hamstring being put off global would make warrior feel much much better. Especially with globals being slower and chunkier, having to press hamstring constantly with it doing nothing but a snare feels really bad, especially considering other classes ability to put up snares on targets (cripping poison etc)

Rallying Cry was another victim of the GCD changes, and I feel would make warrior feel much better with it being taken off as well.

(Both of these changes would make for great pvp set bonuses in my opinion ;))

Current talent rows don’t seem to make a lot of sense in some areas.

The second row with double time, impending victory, and stormbolt feels like its all over the place. These options are all pretty great in their own right, but with warrior having 0 baseline CC other than Intimidating Shout there’s almost 0 situations where we are able to play anything other than Storm Bolt. This ability feels like more of a baseline thing for warrior at this point. Impending victory however I think could be incredibly fun to have as an ability, but rather than having it be in the 2nd row, I think it would make a lot more sense to have the talent swapped with the talent in the 4th row “Bounding Stride.” Swapping them would have multiple mobility options in the second tier, with having another option of survival in the 4th row (which happens to feel basically mandatory currently as well in almost all pvp situations.)

Some honor talents feel completely mandatory, while others feel completely useless.

With the loss of getting sharpen blade baseline through the “Conflict and Strife” essence in BFA, we’re almost forced to play this every single game because of our good it is. While I do like having an additional button to press, I also feel like having this be redesigned into giving your mortal strike a higher passive healing reduction would be much more in the warrior flavour. Some of the Honor talents I think could be looked at for possible replacement would be Shadow of the Colossus, Duel, Death Sentence. All of these have barely any use compared to the other talents and seem a little outdated.

General thoughts about warrior rotation : Mortal strike costing rage makes the spec feel super clunky at points. If mortal strike generated rage instead of costing, and then we only had rage to dump on slams/rend/ignore pain/shield block/or even heroic strike as a talent :wink: would be awesome! There’s times when Arms still sits there and has nothing to press because of this.

FURY

Overall thoughts - fury has been in a difficult position for awhile now. The only thing that it particularly excels in has been mobility, but nowadays majority of other melee do this as well or even better at this point. Fury doesn’t offer any great win conditions, as it doesn’t have a mortal strike to tax healers and cause them to use more mana, it doesn’t have great CC as it only has Intimidating Shout baseline (same as Arms,) with Storm Bolt being a basically mandatory talent. It’s burst damage is something to be desired compared to other classes, with it having to not only ramp up for a little, but also having it’s main cooldown being 1.5 min CD. Currently it just doesn’t set itself up for any true ways to win games or contribute other than damage.

Covenants - pretty much all the same as Arms, though rage generation feels better for venthyr. Will still be picking Kyrian over all for this specialization as well though.

Back in Legion, with Fury warrior being pretty much completely redesigned we also lost our “Mortal Strike” effect. With most other melee having this effect at this point, it feels a little weird for Fury to not have it baseline as well. However, I think there would be more fun alternative ways through some redesigning of some of the honor talents for fury.

Currently, the honor talents Death Wish, Slaughterhouse, and Death Sentence all don’t have much use and feel like they could offer ways for Fury warriors to end games instead. I’d love to see a talent that changed your shout abilities for instance - decrease Intimidating Shout’s cooldown by 45 sec while reducing its duration by 2. Challenging shout now has a 1 min cooldown and works on players but duration reduced by 2 seconds… Something like this would open us up to working well with “Crowd Control” type comps, while also offering a different flavourful way of being able to setup kills for our team (this would function like the ability of the character “Axe” in dota 2, or “Galeo” in League of Legends). I’d also love to see fury have some capability of buffing their teammates with some sort of anger or rage mechanic. Fury just lacks a real definitive type of win condition currently in it’s design. It becomes very stale and one dimensional quickly in every game, as your only real input is just doing damage that is easily healed up due to no mortal strike effect.

Hamstring and rally (like with arms) off GCD would help fury tremendously as well.

I honestly feel like Fury warrior outside of these issues is incredibly fun to play and super dynamic, especially with some of these talent changes we’ve gotten in Shadowlands. I really think it has amazing potential to be such a fun class!

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super solid, I really hope they take this feedback seriously.

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I think this is actually a really cool idea and I hope Blizzard actually considers giving Arms some kind of baseline rage generation ability (although I think you hit the nail on the head with it being Mortal Strike).

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I love all of this.

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Have to agree. Have played Arms warrior since returning to WoW and despite sitting at ilvl 476 with most Essences unlocked to 3, there are times where you are rage starved and it feels terrible.

I do not have the Haste trinket off Raden (which might maybe make a difference) but that should not be a determining factor if your class feels good when playing it.

I understand they don’t want warriors to just sit at 100 rage at all times but man it’s been bad for awhile and I’ve seen other ppl have their issues playing Arms as of late.

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Highly agree with all of this. Particularly on the points of Hamstring and Rally needing to be removed from the GCD, the current plight of rage generation as arms and the lack of Fury having a niche. Warrior is shaping up to be really, really fun in SL and these few changes would probably make it one of my favorite iterations of the class.

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Good Stuff.

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Love it. Appreciate the post Smexxin. Don’t have beta myself but it is reassuring to see someone like you offering positive words about the class going forward. Same to Revo.

Absolutely agree with the suggested changes, especially the talent swap for Impending Victory and Bounding Stride. That’s a change I hadn’t even thought of that would be simple yet make a world of difference.

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Not sure how it feels on beta but on live MS having a 30 rage cost while auto attacks generate 27 rage feels awful. With the loss of so much haste going into SL I would love to see MS’s rage cost reduced to 20 so that it wouldn’t take two auto attacks to generate enough rage to press.

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Good to have someone prominent from the PvP community addressing Fury Warrior lack of identity and poor performance in PvP. Now to hope Blizzard does something about it.

I also agree that adding a MS effect would not be the best way to fix it, since it would compete directly with Arms. Would be fun if they added something unique to it. The ‘‘berserker’’ like fantasy is everywhere in other games.

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Auto attacks generate 25 rage.

Heroic strike would not serve a purpose with current arms. MS generating rage would go against current design as well.

You’d have to rework large portions, if not the majority of the spec’s combat playstyle for those changes. Which seems pointless.

It’s been that way for 7/8 iterations.

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The whole point of possibly adding heroic strike back was that we would have excess rage to dump due to mortal strike generating rage instead of costing it. Obviously it wouldnt work with current arms haha. I really don’t think it would take a huge rework of combat playstyle, just some numbers tuning if we had rage be a bit different.

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This would be a great change for War. Really hope they consider doing this.

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I disagree with warriors having two strong PVP specializations. Abilities that provide both a damage-dealing property and a utility-based ability should not go hand in hand. Mortal Strike should cost rage because of its powerful effect and you should have to make a meaningful choice as to push for a stronger burst hit or use a GCD for a utility debuff such as hamstring. A mortal strike is still both part of arms rotation and a pivotal debuff which would possibly push it to be too powerful of an ability if you did not have some ramp up time in order to hit mortal strike. Arms is already doing exceptional and as the expansion goes by will only get better.

I agree that fury should have a better selection of pvp talents. Even if fury is not really useful in competitive arena (for now) every spec that makes use of pvp talents should at least have some decent ones. The only ones I found useful for fury enhanced the defenses or self healing but for the most part fury should not be brought up to the level of arms as warriors already have 3 excellent specs that will perform well.

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I had a good read, you nailed it with both specs.

ARMS is comfortable once geared and lives up to its damage potentials. Mortal Strike / Sharpen Blade feels important and unique. Though not perfect and lacks a ton of self healing and CCs, something that has cursed the class since 2004. In groups like in Arenas and RBGs, Arms really can be a monster when played correctly.

One thing i would like see added is Disarm being baseline for this spec and offer a Glyph that acts as a Weapon Chain (Immune to Disarm effects). A master of weapons, gets disarmed… doesn’t really fit well with this spec.

FURY on the other hand isn’t all as special. Its fun to play and i find it great for solo content however Fury lacks a lot of things. Its all about self healing and basic damage. Nothing really sets it apart outside the fact Fury is holding 2 Handers and has higher stats than Arms. It does lack a healing reduction, something that can be easily implemented. Example: Furious Slash can also stack an MS effect, similar to how it stacks Haste, maybe 3 stacks of 5% Mortal Wounds. Just a simple idea. It needs something to set it apart. As you mentioned, many wasted talants, Death Wish, Slaughterhouse and Death Sentence can by better.

Iv always wanted an ability for Fury when used, both weapons catch on fire and deals fire damage replacing phyiscal damage for a duration or adds a % of Fire damage to help bypass heavily armored targets.

I haven’t played the PTRs for Shadowlands however from what i am hearing looks promising.

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Give fury a mortal strike effect again and nerfs will have to occur in its self-defenses. Cant have 3 super effective specs in PVP and PvE.

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I agree, having both wouldn’t be balanced, that’s why i was suggesting a weaker version of MS, so a 15% Mortal Wounds instead of a full 25% as Arms (Without Sharpen Blade) and have Fury maybe have to stack it. Just a random idea.

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I am not sure fury needs any utility. It still might have its place in a modified turbo cleave. Might not be season one though. I still feel fury will have its place being a peeler and able to sustain itself enough to harry spread groups and help break up the mage/warlock synergy.

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Really solid feedback, Would love to see these changes implemented.

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isn’t that the goal though? when is it a bad thing to have all specializations be powerful?

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