Overall, I feel like warrior is getting a lot less than most of the other classes in this revamped version of WoW. There’s a whole lot I love, but warrior specifically feels like it’s getting short changed.
Rage
I think everyone knows a rage normalization had to happen. I’m not against that, but there is a bug at the moment where critical strikes are not generating additional rage. So while we can’t really tell what rage gen will be like on the higher end this bug certainly doesn’t seem intended or in the spirit of classic either way.
EDIT: Apparently the crits not generating additional rage is intended design, and that’s just one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard tbh. You can see more about that here: Warrior Rage Normalization - Auto Attack Crits Don't Generate Extra Rage
Gameplay
Victory Rush - a 30 second cooldown for a 10% hp heal that can only be used after you kill someone. This is kinda worthless. For such a minor heal, and you experienced this early on in SoD as well, trying to use the ability can actively do more harm than good. That is an incredibly minor heal, with too many conditionals for use. Learning it at level 20 is also a pretty overloaded level for training as is, and the ability would arguably perhaps make the most impact in the earliest levels by giving warriors an actual button to hit. I’d like this ability to be learned earlier, have a shorter cooldown, and maybe heal for a bit more.
Slam - I think cooldown is too long. Heroic Strike management is important to classic warrior, don’t get me wrong, but I think it would be nice to see a little variety between how Fury/Arms play instead of both being hit two abilities and manage heroic strike. If Arms was a bit more active with Overpower procs and Slam usage between Mortal Strikes that feels better to me.
Heroic Strike - I’m worried the rage changes will make this not be much of a thing. Again, rage changes are extremely understandable. But the warrior rotation is very bland if the heroic strike rage management aspect isn’t regularly engaging. Especially for Fury. Even if they add some form of crit scaling back in for rage, it’s hard to overstate how big the normalization nerfs are compared to what rage is like on era servers.
Honorable Mentions
- Does Recklessness really still need to be a 30 minute cooldown? Everything else in the game was changed, and many classes have gained cooldowns.
- Sunder Armor stacking still sucks as DPS, especially with the rage changes never letting it be better in high gear
- Either way as I look across other classes I feel like warrior needs one cool and fun thing, maybe Sudden Death from SoD?
Forever is incredible, and warrior dominance had to be checked. I get it. But I hope we can get a few changes to make the spec feel a little more exciting before launch in November.