My thoughts on DPS Warrior after TWW S1

Classes Warrior
1

To explain where I am coming from, I began TWW as a Windwalker main, but was asked to play Warrior for my raid team in the first weeks of the season. I had played Fury back in BfA, but had not spent much time with the class since then. Now, I have played Warrior for the entire tier, raiding on both specs upto 7/8 mythic, and done many dungeons as both Protection and Fury (as high as +14). Overall, I have not enjoyed playing warrior as much as I remember from BfA. Playing Protection in dungeons has been enjoyable, so I am only going to comment here about Fury and Arms. Here are my thoughts and opinions about DPS Warrior (in no particular order):

  • Colossus and Slayer both feel extremely passive. You just do your regular rotation and hit Bladestorm/Demolish on CD.

  • Mountain Thane is also quite passive, but at least Thunder Blast feels more visceral

  • Bleeds for both Arms and Fury feel very “tacked on” in that its an entirely separate gameplay loop that doesn’t interact in a noticeable way with the core mechanic

  • Being completely flooded with rage most of the time does not feel good. On the contrary, it only feels bad in the few times where you don’t have enough rage to use an ability.

  • Sweeping Strikes should not be on the GCD as it is currently implemented

  • Sudden Death and Juggernaut interaction (particularly for Arms, but I don’t see why the same wouldn’t be true for Fury) is some of the most unfun design I have ever experienced in WoW. Instead of Juggernaut making you a powerful execute spec, it turns the entire spec into proc-or-perish where a substantial part of your dps is based on maintaining a buff that you have no control over.

  • Arms has 6 capstone talents related to execute damage. Rashanan is one of the most cut-and-dry execute fights we have had in a long time. The fact that arms isn’t the top dps spec on that fight by a landslide should be considered a design failure (not just a numerical tuning issue).

  • Assassination Rogue, Feral Druid, Arcane Mage all received changes in the last few years to make them better equipped and more desirable in AoE situations (esp M+ dungeons). Arms deserves a similar treatment.

  • Warrior currently lacks desirable utility for M+. Rallying Cry scaling with group size could be an interesting avenue to explore to address that issue.

  • Similarly, giving Intervene more widespread applications could be an interesting approach. I really like the idea behind Storm Shield (in the Mountain Thane hero talents), but it is currently such a tiny amount of absorb that I have not be able to tell if it ever made any difference to the person I shielded.

  • Wrecking Throw should be significantly stronger (in PvE). Either give it a much shorter CD or much higher damage. I’ve tried using Wrecking Throw in dungeons with notable shields and it never made an appreciable impact.

  • In my opinion, Warrior CAN have too many cooldowns. It is unlikely you would ever talent as such, but it is possible that a fury warrior (with 3 core rotational buttons) can have upto 5 separate 1.5 minute CDs. 2 of which give you basic buffs and 3 of which do AoE damage. Seems like this could be easily reduced to 2-3 CDs with more impact and less “button-bloat”. Likewise with Arms.

  • Related to the above note, I do not care for the capstone level of the warrior class tree. Some ideas for utility-based capstones: Bitter Immunity has a shorter CD but no longer heals, Intervene is more widely useful, Disrupting Shout, second charge of Heroic Leap, something that makes Defensive Stance less punishing to use.

  • The talent Unhinged seems dubious at best. Either the ability it uses during Ravager/Bladestorm is so weak that it has no impact to your gameplay (essentially how it plays for Fury currently) or the ability cast is so powerful that it makes the actual damage of Bladestorm feel unimpactful (Colossus Arms in Single Target fights).

  • Dance of Death seems pointless for PvE content (it might also be pointless in PvP, I just don’t know PvP well enough to say)

A final thought: Arms and Fury might be the two most similar DPS specs in the game; they have differences, but the primary gameplay loop is quite similar. At least compared to classes like Mage, Hunter, DK, or Rogue which have multiple DPS specs that all play wildly different. If some crazy bug happened where I changed specs and I had rampage instead of mortal strike, I’m genuinely not sure if I would notice. I’m not sure how you could address this without alienating existing warrior fans, but I personally would love to see the two specs diverge more in their core gameplay.

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This is a wild way to show everyone you don’t know how to play warrior properly.

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I clearly explained that I’ve played warrior for only 1 season and only because my raid team needs battle shout. I know I’m not a good warrior, but that does not invalidate my feedback.

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Instead of belittling, why don’t you try some effort to help a player grow their knowledge base and skill set? Explain your own perspective instead of tearing down someone else for no reason.

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Well im one Warrior that has played WoW for what seems like a lifetime. The reason why the warrior is so hard to balance is because of its toolkit. So many abilities that the warrior has is because of the permanent bandaids.

After Wrath, the Warrior has undergone some of the most extensive rebuilding and retuning than any other class in the game. Lets take Arms for instance. In Cata the Mastery for the Arms spec was Opportunity Strikes. It was built that way to compete with Fury because two Two-Handed Weapons was way to overpowered and Opportunity Strikes allowed that gap to be narrowed. But as always it had a MASSIVE impact in PvP and almost made Arms THE ONLY SPEC for a warrior to use there. But as time went on it started to annihilate Fury in PvE content as well. Reforging was in the game and as more Mastery gear became available, it just went out of control from there. It was so common to see Fury getting decimated on meters by the Arms Warrior, and it was by no small margin.

After Pandaland launched it was changed. The only problem there was Hit Rating and Expertise was so important but easy to reach the cap. Again Arms pulled ahead of most other classes because Crit was ALWAYS the highest stat with capped Expertise and Hit Rating Capped as well. Never missing when most of your hits being Crit Hits just made their damage skyrocket.

Guess what happened next? Yup they removed hit rating and expertise for the launch of WoD. No more Bladestorm for Fury and the spec completely collapsed.

Im done with history but lets take a look at today. With the launch of TWW, why was the Warrior smashed into the ground with the nerf bat? Yup, Bladestorm on Fury. Combine that with Odins Fury. Oh but wait theres more. Cleave applying Deep Wounds and being almost uncapped. So yeah, Zug Zug to the face, BIGTIME. Add to that also the Slayer talents actually BUFFING Bladestorm.

After all that design and so called “testing”, it still went live like that. You played the warrior, well guess what? You got the tar kicked out of you by the mighty Nerfbat. Since then, accept for the Protection Warrior, the class has been struggling to even be played because of “the new meta” playstyle.

90% of the Warrior problems are because of knee jerk reactions by the Blizzard Dev Team. Instead of nerfing a little here or a little there, they went full bore and opened the flood gate of torrential nerfs and made Warriors what they are now. Its getting better with some recent changes but the toolkit of Fury and Arms requires changes to be made with a calculated approach because almost every single Passive ability can make or break the spec. The widespread blanket nerfs either kill the spec or make things run way out control.

Blizzard knows what they need to do, but they are worried about a lynch mob, aka-playerbase, calling for their heads if they get it even remotely wrong.

Some of your post has merit, ill give you that, most of it though is not even your place to pass judgment, or even my judgment for that matter. Blizzard really needs to do some number crunching to get it right. If they arent willing to do that, well, its gonna be a disappointment for a lot of Warrior Purists this expansion.

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A lot of these seem sound and I agree with them.

Disagree. Its refreshing having a capstone that is actually fun (for arms)

Arms has 2 buff buttons and 1 direct damage (Troar). i dont feel like this is really too many since avatar is off the global. I would like Csmash to just apply skullsplitter though.

I think Executioners Precision should be baselined into Arms and a new interesting talent or old legendary should be added in (The colossus smash reset from SL comes to m ind). EP just makes the spec a lot more interesting to press the rotation on. Juggerenaut needs to be removed and execute rebalanced. It should be exciting to press Execute, not having to stack and maintain a buff to make it similar in damage to other classes.

Yeah this is clunky.

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I actually like where Warrior is right now, for the most part.

Biggest issue I see is Arms/Fury need more M+ utility. The utility they do have in the class tree also needs to be more accessible. A couple additions here to the class would go a long way. Maybe bring some of the PvP talents over to PvE. Lots of utility there.

Sweeping strikes, off GCD, or if it’s staying with a GCD give it a damage component so it’s fun to press.

I like the bleeds components of Arms, but I agree it could be buffed or better integrated into the spec design.

Also yes, warrior execute DMG needs to be turned up to 11!

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You are one of very few. Congrats?
While I agree with your points on utility and Sweeping strikes, we still would require a significant buff or some higher caps on our AoE for us to be on even playing field. The current buffs on the PTR sound nice, but it depends on where everyone else lands. Though they do nothing to address the utility issue.
Execute certainly does need to be buffed big time, and they need to remove Juggernaut so they can balance it properly.

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I’m have a ton of fun on Arms right now (Slayer). Fury feels like it could use one or two fewer CDs to stack together. Could use a better Rallying for M+ and maybe another little something, but we did get a bit of utility improvement with Shockwave becoming much easier to get for all specs.

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While they are pretty passive (There is some niche with Slayer’s usage of Sudden Death), I’m a big fan of how they turned out. Hero trees IMO shouldn’t play vastly different from each other outside of a few moments during gameplay. At the end of the day I’m still a Fury Warrior, or I’m still a Survival Hunter. Making those moments fun though is very important and I will agree that Slayer and Colossus at times fall flat with those.

For Arms its simply a setup step similar to other classes. Building Icicles, setting up Frenzy charges, Judgement Debuff, etc. You’ll be hard pressed to find classes that don’t have to setup their damage. I will say that for Fury the only bleed of note (Cold Steel, Hot Blood) simply just adds to give Bloodthrist some much needed additional benefit.

For Fury this is more than fine, because it results in a satisfying loop of dipping in and out of the peaks in valleys of rage quickly. For Arms it is more problematic, but is due to a myriad of reasons from Execute Phase to Skyfury/Windfury Totem directly affecting our resource. Arms is supposed to be about rage management, but a lot of players don’t like it when you have to sit on your hands and wait, and want a more active playstyle.

So do you make Arms a spec thats flooded with resources but always get to press a button like Fury? Do you make the spec worse (almost anemic) to play when you don’t have a Shaman in your group like in SL?

At the moment, the spec has a decent amount of rage maintenance IMO as Colossus, but as Slayer, rage is almost a non-factor.

Agreed, especially since we’re not even the best two-target cleave spec anymore. This is a relic from BfA’s slowdown on GCD CD changes that never got fully reverted.

Agreed, IMO Juggernaut shouldn’t be active until you can press Execute at sub 20-35% based on talents. That would solve a lot of problems with Juggernaut tuning rather than outright remove it.

Rashanan is also a very big pad fight. Arms Warriors are currently second across all percentiles (only losing to Assassination Rogue) for Mythic Rasha’nan when its filtered for boss damage. We’re fulfilling that execute damage profile well, even with our current tuning. Like many other specs in the game, Warriors have to choose between Single Target and AoE, we don’t get to choose both at the same time.

No arguments here. Warrior badly needs some group utility. A shout that dispels enrage effects, Heroism, Rallying Cry scaling to 5 man groups like darkness, etc. Battle Shout and two stuns doesn’t really cut it.

This has been dabbled with in the past. During MoP Intervene had a talent called Safeguard that gave a flat 20% damage reduction to someone you intervened (you also ate the next melee attack, so if you were a DPS spec you had to be careful with who you used Safeguard on). This was taken away because it was too powerful of an effect on a 30 Second Cooldown, but utility via Intervene has existed before for Warriors.

Honestly its not even a tuning issue with these talents. Its the fact we too many talents in our core talent tree that prevent us from ever functionally taking these abilities. Even if it was tuned even higher, you wouldn’t take it due to its location on the talent tree, and its niche effect.

When we had better pathing in Dragonflight, it was very common talent that was taken whenever shields played a big factor during your PvE Encounters.

I agree and disagree with this, as a lot of Warrior CDs do have some OOMPH or uniqueness surrounding them. Things like Bladestorm and Champion’s Spear do unique things that I would be sad to see Warrior’s lose. On the other hand things like Avatar and Thunderous Roar are additional damage abilities or damage Amps that don’t have a lot of gameplay surrounding them beyond, “Hit as many targets” or “Use whenever off CD as frequently as possible”, but in the past have been affected by things like Anger Management which does give a fun playstyle into expending rage (Do my thing faster and better and get your high moments more often).

With Warrior Cooldowns lining up most of the time, this is something that I’m not sure more discussion needs. We’re not mage’s with our amount of Cooldowns, but I wouldn’t be upset if a few were consolidated.

Honestly, we were off way worse in Dragonflight with hurricane (Bonus Strength after Bladestorm Channel) that kept those abilities so weak that you pushed them for the buff, rather than the button themselves. Unhinged at least gives these abilities some Single Target benefit, while keeping the actual damage of these abilities some what decent.

Yeah I don’t think anyone specs this even in PvP.

I touched on it earlier, but this is largely due to Arm’s and its interactions with Rage. In the past the big separator was that Fury was a GCD locked spec, that always wanted to press a button every GCD. Arms was about Rage management which meant occasionally you had dead pockets where you didn’t press buttons. A lot of people didn’t like that and wanted a more active playstyle, which resulted in Arms pressing buttons all the time similar to Fury, or in BfA’s final patch pushing buttons faster than Fury.

I would love to see Arms get an updated gameplay loop, but like you said, not at the expense of alienating older players. That being said a lot of older players are more fond of just big number Mortal Strike the spec, and really don’t care how they get there as long as Mortal Strike is a big number with minimal setup that they can frequently press.

That being said I don’t hate either playstyle, and feel they are unique enough that nothing drastic needs to occur at the moment until the next expansion. The bigger issue with Warrior is our sheer lack of utility.

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I just hit 70 and Fury feels good to me, even in blues. I am looking forward to the 11.1 buffs.

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its ABSOLUTE CRAP in the PTR compared to others even after the buffs

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You can’t say these things together man.

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This is because of MS buddy. The defensive kit and team saving abilities are another part of why Arms stomped Fury for PvP forever.

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rip it out by the roots and start over fresh

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