Champion’s Spear is a wasted Capstone For Arms and is not enjoyable for Fury
This Capstone ability is dislike by most if not all warriors. No one enjoys having to stand still inside of a spear only to get denied by raid boss abilities; just take mage rune of power for example, which they removed because mages did not like this, or even death and decay which they are fixing for the war within. I understand what blizzard is going for with spear but it is not an enjoyable gameplay loop. To add to this arms never takes Champion’s Might in ST and Fury which does take spear does not even utilize one of the bottom left capstones which is Piecing Challenge which . Another issue is that spear does basically the same thing as Roar but in a different flavor and why do we have two 1.5m cooldown AoE attacks competing with one another?
Suggestion
My suggestion and a lot of other warriors in Skyhold is to replace spear with Blood of the Enemy from BFA. This would give warriors a more thematically fitting ability as well as a very good ST ability that adds more flavor to the class. Blood of the enemy fits the entire blood theme of arms as well as fury especially with the new hero talent tree called slayer. I believe this is the perfect chance to change out the talent and integrate something more thematic.
Yes i agree 100 percent very true standing in spear sucks especially since it does not do alot of damage and does the exact same thing as blood of the enemy when talented into champions might baze is based yes yes
no, its not, quite literally the worst one to bring back from shadowlands, condemn is cooler, banner is cooler, and night fae is 100% cooler.
Its not fun in pvp, its not useful in m+, and it is not fun or cool, unique maybe, but so are the maldraxxus and night fae abilities while also being fun to use. There is a reason they pretty much removed sitting in mage runes because it isnt fun to be forced to sit in a ability you use to do more damage or be tankier, especially in raiding when you need to dodge random mechanics.
How is spear not “just another damage modifier” in the same way that BotE is? The only real difference is that spear restricts gameplay by confining you to a tight circle (with champion’s might).
Yes it is lol.
It just has issues like an outrageously slow animation and having way too long of a cooldown for how counterable it is. That doesn’t mean the entire ability should be scrapped.
But if it’s never being used for the utility it provides, does it even matter that it has those effects? It’s first and foremost just a raw damage ability, and the way it does damage restricts the player in a way that most find unenjoyable.
If we want to have a conversation about warrior getting spear as a purely utility option, I’m fine with that, but that’s not the topic of the post. I would agree that spear is cool as an ability that functions like Ursol’s Vortex, but it having high damage tied to it means that outside of EXTREMELY niche circumstances, it will only ever be used for damage. Even if it is used for the utility aspect, it will only be used that way incidentally, like it was on Mythic Jailer.
It is though. Just not in PvE. The ability was designed with PvP in mind. Not everything in the tree is going to be optimized for one hyper specific aspect of endgame content.
I’m all in favor of having one of the options below it augment the ability in a way that makes it more favorable in PvE. I’m sure people can come up with a lot of great ideas that are all equally as likely to ever actually make it into the game.
My issue is the idea that people would want an interesting ability pruned in favor of more buttons that just do damage.
Okay, so my rebuttal would be: if it is designed specifically for PVP, and its only used incidentally in PVE, why not just move it to the role of a PVP talent instead of occupying a capstone node in the class tree?
Logically, to me anyways, there’s just not much reason to have it occupy that space when there’s already allocated space for things that are pvp focused so that they don’t occupy space in the general tree.
Again, I think ideally spear would just become an ursol’s vortex-esque talent in the core Warrior tree as a utility option for all, outside of the capstone area.
The most obvious issue is that you only get 3 pvp talent slots. You can’t just move everything that is exclusively pvp viable to pvp talents and tell people to enjoy only having access to 3 of them.
That leads into a whole other discussion about how the pvp talent system has its’ own flaws. I wont go too off the rails into that, but especially after they redesigned talent trees this expansion, it feels very limited and archaic. The new talent trees are more like the original talent trees, which never had designated pvp talents. They just had some talents that were very clearly designed around pvp or pve. Or in the case of frost mage, entire talent trees based around pvp.
Also consider that not every class has 4 capstones in the general tree. Monk for example only has 3. We are not losing anything by having a fourth option. I’m all for more options. Give us 7 capstones for all I care. Give us six capstones that are all just reskinned damage multipliers if it makes people happy. Just don’t take away unique class utility.
100% agree with you on the PVP talent front, definitely feel that that’s due for an overhaul. I don’t necessarily think we disagree on this; I do think that issues can arise with capstones not feeling “capstone-y” enough if you start to introduce too many of them though.
Again, I don’t hate spear period, point-blank; I just think that its an annoying ability to play around from a PVE, DPS perspective and would prefer something more freeing like Blood of the Enemy. Which, by the way, would be a SICK name for any warrior button.
Maybe the real solution is just put spear on a choice node with thunderous roar since I don’t think there’s any situation where anyone takes both of them.
But they said they are making shockwave more accessible next expansion. So we’re just gonna have to be a little patient and see how things work out after they move things around. All of this might be pointless in a few months.
Just remove Spear all together. We already have a full aoe setup in our kit, what we need is a st option to spec into st fights.
Give us Conqueror’s Banner instead, filling in for both st damage + utility with team damage buff.
I like the idea for a couple reasons, firstly to preface I do like Spear as a visual since the overhaul and the tether is a nice bonus but losing DPS due to movement is always a feels bad and as you highlighted it’s essentially just a front loaded version of Roar.
Blood of the Enemy is nice IMO and gets good synergy with Reck, 45% crit chance on warrior abilities for 10 seconds while having the increased 25% crit damage sounds like a fun time.
It also becomes a burst window that rewards proper execution of the rotation compared just a press X to deal high damage. I think it reinforces the aspects I enjoy in Fury, fast game play that rewards uptime and optimal rage build and dump.
I am assuming that if they were to implement this change the cooldown on BOTE would be lowered to be the same as Reck and the 25% increased crit damage be made to last 10 seconds instead of 5.
I do wonder what the two attached nodes would provide to this new capstone, any suggestions?
The funny thing about Spear is all 4 covenant abilities at one time in the Alpha/Beta for Dragonflight was given to warriors. Spear was in the warrior tree for all 3 specs while Dragon Roar had a capstone ability that would have acted like the Night Fae ability of mass interruption. The other two abilities were given to Arms exclusively in the early parts of Alpha/Beta. Then Fury demanded everything which Blizzard caved in before removing all remaining covenant abilities a week later leaving us with only Spear.
I do agree right now the last 2 seasons, that Arms couldn’t take spear for the most part in almost every form of content compared to Fury (when it comes to the dps specs.) Nor has prot really found a use of it either (I know I haven’t really taken it when I’m tanking).
The big issue is a capstone like spear shouldn’t have been designed around one spec’s set up design and thrown into the warrior class tree. If you are aiming to do that with Blood of the enemy, then just toss it into Fury as it feels like you’re just replacing one thing for another and Arms and Prot will have the same issue it has with spear right now.
If you wanted to replace spear, then make sure all three specs have synergy with it if tossed into the warrior tree. Banner or the night fae ability would be much more smoother for all 3 specs to use and should have been our covenant abilities going forward. It would have given us group utility (that we lack as a class), no matter if it was Banner or the Mass interruption Ability compared to another CD that works well for a spec (aka Fury) when it comes to more offensive CDs (which both Arms and Prot lacks with in their own trees) given out in the warrior tree that should be spec specific.