The introduction of these abilities has done nothing but cause a headache for players and developers. For players, the choice of dual wielding one handed weapons or two handed weapons seems to be mostly a cosmetic issue. For developers, it has been a never ending struggle to properly balance the damage output of dual wielding one handed weapons or two handed weapons.
The current developer experiment of turning Single Minded Fury into a “casual” play style is going to do nothing more than worsen the issue. What if someone who wants to dual wield one handed weapons wants to play the “non-casual” play style? What if someone who wants to dual wield two handed weapons wants to play the “casual” play style?
Developers, you already have many parts of the solution implemented. Get rid of Single Minded Fury and Titan’s Grip. Design Fury warriors to focus on either dual wielding one handed weapons* or two handed weapons (not both). Allow warriors to transmog their weapons into any melee weapon.
There would be a few benefits to this:
- There would be no need to constantly try and balance damage output of dual wielding one handed weapons or two handed weapons.
- Fury warriors wouldn’t have to worry about getting both one and two handed weapon drops. For example, it is a waste of time to run content and get a one handed weapon when dual wielding two handed weapons is superior.
- Warriors, being masters of arms, would finally be able to customize the look of their character to their own fantasy. If a warrior thinks a pair of daggers or glaives looks better on their character, then they should be able to transmog their weapons to them.
*I would personally prefer that dual wielding two handed weapons was removed. The benefit of this would mean faster attack animations for those who would like to transmog their weapons into two handed weapons.
24 Likes
I’ve been saying this for weeks. It just needs to be cosmetic and nothing more. Keep TG baseline for the mechanics of it, but make SMF a transmog option and call it a day
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Agreed. Just make it an xmog option and use those resources elsewhere.
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No to getting rid of titan’s grip. Either make SMF a viable option or make it xmog only. They have the chance to give choice in the tree, instead of cookie cutter. They should aim for variety.
I also hope the tooltip for Massacre is a visual bug. Because that shouldn’t be for Arms only when it’s in the way of dual wield spec. And dual wield and two-hander spec should be at the top of the trees, not the bottom.
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As a long time warrior i agree with this too much, ive been asking for this on forums since early BFA, make it a cosmetic option and just keep titans grip as the baseline fury build
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Another vote for titans grip baseline and SMF mog available.
No one is going to play SMF when you can wield two big ol two handed weapons.
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For those of you who would like dual wielding two handed weapons as the standard, what is your reasoning?
As I stated in my first post, I would prefer one handed weapons to be the standard since transmoging them to two handed weapons would result in faster looking attack animations. The description for Fury warrior on the official Blizzard site is that they unleash a flurry of attacks to carve their opponents. Having slow attack animations because of two handed weapons doesn’t feel like unleashing a flurry to me.
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Blizzard has already stated that they want TG to be the most optimal. The fantasy of a fury warrior has always been linked to duel-wielding two-handers. No other spec can do that. Also, the misconception that since you duel-wield 2handers you attack slow is false. Sure, you attack slower than 1handers but with all the haste you get you attack pretty damn fast in general. TG should just be baseline and you should be able to transmog 1h to 2h.
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It hasn’t always been linked to dual wielding 2 handers. They couldn’t even dual wield 2 handers until WotLK. I really wish that people would stop saying this as if it is actually true. The core fantasy of fury warrior has always been attacking fast and feeling like a bloodthirsty animal. Which weapons they use has nothing to do with it.
Having said that, I agree with the OP that attacking fast with 1h feels cooler. The problem is that some people want 1h to be the default and 2h to be a cosmetic option, and other people want 2h to be default and 1h to be the cosmetic option. So, simply removing one doesn’t work, in my opinion, if you actually want everyone to be happy.
7 Likes
So, for 14 years out of the game’s 18-year life span TG has been the way to go. I’d say that’s Defacto the identify for fury warrior. SMH never scales well and its very niche. It’s always a headache to deal with. They’d have to buff the hell out of SMF to make it viable and currently the left side of the fury warrior tree is inferior to the right.
1 Like
None of what you just said negates the fact that the statement about the fantasy of fury warrior having always been about dual-wielding 2h’ers is simply historically incorrect. The identity/fantasy of fury warrior existed before TG, and it’s the same as it ever was even now. Attack fast. Thirst for blood and feed off the carnage.
To say that the identity or fantasy of Fury is dual-wielding 2h’ers logically suggests that Fury did not have any identity or fantasy before TG existed. It’s just not true.
8 Likes
Are you implying identities cannot change? I mean that was the whole point of TG in wrath to change the spec’s identity. It doesn’t logically suggest anything but what I just said. You’re arguing semantics. When you think fury, you think of TG plain as day. Regardless of what the spec “use” to be before TG is irrelevant as for the past 14 years that’s been the norm. Fury had a different identity from 2004-2008 pre-TG but how that has any bearing on the past 14 years is beyond me. Brass tacks you’re arguing semantics but I’m not here for what fury has historically been for a brief 4-year period.
I should have said “To say that the identity or fantasy of Fury has always been dual-wielding 2h’ers logically suggests that Fury did not have any identity or fantasy before TG existed.” Nevertheless, the core class (spec) fantasy of fury still isn’t about TG. It is the same as when it was first released.
And no, I’m not arguing semantics, because the point I’m making is that the core class fantasy has never changed. You say that “When you think fury, you think of TG plain as day,” but this is also not true for everyone. There are many people who think of the original, core fantasy of Fury, and TG is simply an added feature that has come to be associated with it.
3 Likes
Sure, it may not be true for everyone but mostly everyone who plays fury plays TG. You’re doing a disservice playing SMH. The distinction between these two are huge and change the spec radially. For proof just go to the fury warrior tree in DF because these are 2 different playstyles and identities. TG has been deep core feature of fury and is tied to its identity. Hence why blizzard when making artifact weapons made the fury artifact TG-based instead of something else because they understood the intrinsic importance of its fantasy
Mostly everyone who plays Fury plays TG because they have always balanced it to be superior. You can’t use data like that to suggest that people only want to play TG. I’m positive that many of the people that play TG want to play SMF but, since it is worse, they feel like they can’t.
EDIT: And to expand that, I guarantee that, if SMF was balanced to be better than TG, then everyone would play it instead, even if they would prefer to play TG.
3 Likes
Guarantee you most people wouldn’t pick SMH if you could transmog 1handers on 2handers. TG will always be better just due to the simple math of 2handers having more stats than single weapons. No way to balance around that without serious consequences. And if TG wasn’t so crucially tied to fury’s identity, then you’d think blizzard would have no problem replacing as the most competitive option it with SMF or something else because it’s just an “associated feature”. By and large most people like TG better and just want the transmog options.
1 Like
Something can always easily be made to be better than something else. It is not hard to buff SMF to have a big enough modifier of damage that it eclipses the power the stats of 2h’ers innately provide. It isn’t a math issue at all. It is a design decision. What “serious consequences” come from doing that? The only consequence is that SMF is stronger than TG. That isn’t any more serious than TG being stronger than SMF.
I would like to see data from a poll that asks one simple question:
If TG and SMF were balanced completely evenly, which one would you choose?
Until this is known and a huge amount of people have responded, any claim that “most people like” something is conjecture because you can’t judge what most people like based on what they have chosen while the options weren’t balanced. If you could, then people wouldn’t have just chosen the mathematically best covenant for their spec in Shadowlands even though they would have liked to choose something else.
5 Likes
That question is based on a hypothetical which isn’t going to happen. If SMH was stronger than TG I could just say its only popular because its objectively better throughput. If it were so easy to balance SMF blizzard would have done it by now. But they’ve obviously encountered issues, so they compromised.
You’d have to phrase the question in a way that ignores balancing.
“If SMF was stronger than TG I could just say it’s only popular because its objectively better throughput.” This is exactly my point. The same logic applies in both directions, regardless of which one is tuned to be better. And, I think Blizzard has intentionally made TG always slightly better than SMF. Because, it is very easy to make SMF better than TG, or vice versa. Let me give you an extreme example to prove my point:
Single-Minded Fury
While dual-wielding a pair of one-handed weapons, your damage done is increased by 99999%.
It is not hard to make something mathematically better than something else. Obviously, this is an extreme example, but logically it doesn’t matter whether the number is 99999% or 21% or 12% or anything in between. It is very easy to dial in a percentage that is closer than 99999% but still better than TG. If it weren’t, then how do you think they consistently are able to make it so that SMF is only less than 5% worse than TG all of the time, through the 14 years of iteration on the spec (or at least for many of the most recent years)? It is a design decision that has caused them to not make it better than TG, not math.
EDIT: Also, I intentionally phrased the question in a way that ignores balancing. The entire point of the question is to consider TG vs SMF in a vacuum if balancing wasn’t involved (or if balancing was perfect) and they were completely equal.
4 Likes
Well hypotheticals aside TG is the norm and as blizzard has stated it will be the most optimal. One thing is clear though and that’s they will never be equally balanced, and one has to be better than another. Nobody wants to farm out 4 weapons. It already takes more effort to just get 2 2handers. Blizzard clearly knows the importance of TG. It has been in more expansions, is more unique, and it has been unequivocally apart of the core fantasy since 2008.