After Patch 12.0.5, some ability sound effects for Orc and Mag’har Orc warriors no longer trigger after hitting a target. This includes, but is not limited to, Mortal Strike, Overpower, Heroic Strike, and Slam for Arms Warriors, as well as Raging Blow and Bloodthirst for Fury Warriors.
Also, even when an arms warrior has selected the Fervor of Battle talent, Slam applied to the primary target no longer has its animation or sound effect.
These bugs are very frustrating for someone who has played orc warrior for many years. Personally, I dont care much about whether warriors are top-tier or not in mythic, but losing these sound effects has a huge impact on my gameplay experience. Warrior is a class with a strong sense of role-playing, and its sound effects and animations provide immediate feedback when striking a target. Hearing “boom boom boom” is both relaxing and exciting for me.
Compared with other classes that have all kinds of flashy visual effects, Warriors mainly rely on the feeling of weapon swings and strikes. So I think it is fair to say that missing impact sounds are a major loss for the warr experience.
I hope Blizzard could take these bugs seriously, please fix the sound issues affecting Orc and Mag’har Orc warriors, and also restore the missing Slam animation caused by Fervor of Battle. This would allow players who love the Orc/Mag’har Orc Warrior race-and-class combo to continue role-playing the characters they enjoy.
Edit added on May 10:
To help blizzard investigate and fix this bug, I’d like to add a few more details I noticed.
In fact, even without using any abilities, as long as you are using the male Orc or male Mag’har Orc model, Arms warrior auto-attacks do not trigger the proper impact sound when the weapon hits the target.
For Fury warriors, the issue seems to affect the main-hand weapon. When the main-hand weapon hits the target, it does not trigger the impact sound. The most obvious example is Raging Blow: you only hear the off-hand weapon hit. The same thing happens during auto-attacks as well — only the off-hand hit sound plays. I tested this both on training dummies and on mobs.
I also checked some related sound files on Wowhead. I noticed that the same ability can have multiple sound files: some are labeled as cast, while others are labeled as impact. At first, I didn’t understand the difference, but after playing the files, it became clear that many abilities seem to have at least two separate sound components. One is the cast sound, which plays immediately when you press the ability. The other is the impact sound, which plays after the game determines that your attack has actually hit the target.
Because of that, my guess is that the root cause of this bug is that the game is somehow not properly recognizing that male Orc/Mag’har Orc warriors have hit their target. As a result, abilities like Mortal Strike, Overpower, Slam, Bloodthirst, and similar attacks only play the initial swing/cast sound, while the actual hit/impact sound is missing.
As for why abilities like Execute and Colossus Smash still seem to have sound effects, my guess is that those abilities may have been designed with only the first sound component, or at least do not rely on a separate impact sound in the same way.
Of course, I could be wrong about the technical details. I’m just sharing these observations in the hope that they might provide blizz with some useful clues and help get this bug fixed.