With classic+, one thing I would like to see with regards to warrior is taming their rage so they don’t scale out of control compared to everyone else, in exchange for better 1v1 and soloing potential. It’s already one of the worst 1v1 classes and a CC magnet
Agreed they need to gut warrior feedback loop scaling where more damage = more rage which = even more damage. They’re the only class that scales like that, and especially with Wbuffs, makes them above and beyond everything else pve wise.
As for the second half of that statement. I don’t really want them changed, pvp wise. Arms wasn’t doing crazy pve damage regardless, and pvp damage is more about rage from incoming damage and healers keeping you alive and snare/root free via dispells to do anything. Warrior is already arguably the strongest pvp class in the game when being supported.
I’d also REALLY like to avoid the “arms race” that happens when you start making warriors a better 1v1 class. SoD gave warriors snare/root break on charge/intercept/intervene, in combat charges (I think, it’s been a hot minute), and 2min instead of 5min trinket…. The end result was that my warrior was hard countering most frost mages, because the warrior got a bunch of snare breaks/gap closers to counter roots, and the mage just got a big ol arcanite reaper to the face. An arms warrior should never counter mage, let alone a frost mage….. maybe with a faps they can go have fun once per potion cd….
Those things being said…. if the rumors of us getting Death Knights where remotely accurate, then the mobility/gap closer arms race is already a go, because a pure vanilla warrior will be 100% useless around a plate wearer that can spam chains of ice, and deathgrip a warrior out of his intercept. I can’t perfectly remember the warrior wrath toolkit, but it’d have to look like that.
If you make Warrior better in 1v1 they have to lose being the strongest class in group PVP with support. I would rather be broken a killing machine with skilled support in group PVP than a 1v1 hero any day, it fits the class fantasy perfectly.
The reason that having high rage scales like that is the Heroic Strike bug (feature) that removes the off-hand miss penalty from dual wielding. While Heroic Strike or Cleave are queued your off-hand auto attacks are treated like a main hand attack which means if you are main hand hit capped (9%) your off-hand don’t miss.
Without this bug/feature off-hand attacks should have something closer to a 16% chance to miss if you stop gearing +Hit at 9%. If you look at logs from Classic auto-attacks make up the bulk of the damage. Heroic Strike will be up there because that is what causes this.
They could just fix this bug and not touch rage. When the screw around with rage they tend to just break Warriors especially ones that aren’t in GigaBiS gear.
In any case, if Classic+ raiding is just a repeat of what Classic raiding has been it is a failure, let’s hope they have made good decisions.
Normalizing rage is definitely a way to go… it’s what they did in retail and we know it works well enough.
Having said that, I’ve been advocating for an alternative approach for a while now. I don’t feel like digging up the post but the short of it is, as warriors spend rage they gain a stacking debuff that reduces the amount of rage you generate. Better gear lets you generate rage faster, but as you spend it you’ll also hit those caps more quickly. However, warriors will also have talents, abilities, and consumables that lets them manage their debuff stacks.
The goal is to make rage feel a little more like mana, giving it a speed limit that makes it less effective over long duration fights without nerfing their ability to dish out damage in short-term PvP engagements.
I’m sure Blizzard will just normalize rage generation… it’s definitely too much to hope for that they take another route. Still…!
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Yeah except they normalized rage in cata and over a decade later still can’t figure out how to make the class function with it.
Look at retail arms warrior right now. Normalized rage gen means you get the same rage from every single hit/crit with no variance. And you still can’t maintain your rotation properly without windfury.
We just played cata, cata warrior was really good in spite of the fact that fury was complete garbage relying on a mastery snapshot opener to do relevant damage and arms got absolutely SHAFTED on crit scaling, I had 28% crit in BIS. 28%. That means 38% on mortal strike thanks to a talent. Dragon soul bis. Rogues had like 40% in T11. Arms was an absolute lottery spec. And lets not get into the absolute STATE of arms in pvp lmao.
And now we have mop warrior, arms is aight rotation-wise but all it’s damage scaling is crit/weapon damage so it’s dead in the water now, miles behind fury (because mastery and haste do virtually nothing). Fury is feeling good, with evil eye and being essentially hard crit capped (I’m at 46% in raids, ~92% crit chance on bloodthirst). Arms is good in pvp here, kind of hard carried by second wind, but I won’t deny stormbolt+shockwave+safeguard+banners being absolutely insane utility.
So even with normalized rage, they either haven’t been able to escape an over-reliance on gear to make our rotations function properly, or giving us enough juice from stats to properly scale in the first place.
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The rage formula was changed in TBC and then iterated on throughout later expansions, so there isn’t one singular version of what ‘normalized rage’ constitutes.
I like WotLK rage since they tweaked it to allow warriors to generate rage from absorbed attacks which would benefit prot warriors.
When they say normalized they mean “post-cata release”. That’s when rage from attacks became static.
Pre-cata (vanilla, tbc, wotlk) it’s not normalized. Hitting harder generates more rage.
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rage normalization is retail 
simple as
if you want to nerf warriors, there is only one good way: remove WBs in all instances (raid, dungeon, bg)
Just normalize rage to weapon speed with effective hits not based on damage done. This fixes warrior vs absorbs and glancing blows, blocks and stuff but also fixes WB scaling out of control also and makes low geared warriors are lot more enjoyable play. IMO if you’re not in R13+ gear warrior is painful to play. After that its really nice, but with WB’s it gets a little silly because rage is no longer a resource.
Simply binding rage to attack speed fixes everything, it makes the class enjoyable to play at any gear level and not broken at high level.
IMO fix rage with a 2 hander / Sword and board to roughly 8-10 rage per sec, this mirrors rogue and with DW make it 10 - 12 Rage per second without haste proc’s like flurry, sword spec, and Unbridled Wrath. This does not change how rage generation will work VS damage taken when in Def stance, that is fine.
If they go with normalized rage gen they HAVE to make mortal strike/bloodthirst generate rage. It’s a fundamentally different design/gameplay loop. And even then, arms/2h would not want haste.
I don’t think normalized rage works for a classic+ design. Like I said, they normalized it in cata, it’s been SIXTEEN YEARS, and they still cannot get arms to work with normalized rage. Or fury really.
All the important rage gen comes from abilities post-normalization. Which would be somewhat antithetical to a classic design where auto attacks actually matter.
I’m speaking from experience, the best version of fury is vanilla fury. Could they add to it and make it better? Sure. Bloodsurge to proc instant slams would be great. Execute procs would be great. Something to fill in the gaps between bt->ww->next bt->ww other than pressing hamstring. Normalizing rage will not make this better, not when they’ve shown time and again they have no clue how to make it flow without just, injecting rage into your veins. The literal class design of fury for the last 10 years has been reach max rage, empty rage bar with rampage.
I agree, I love vanilla fury its by far the best version.
The only reason tho that it does the damage it can is WB stacking that scales deathwish that scalea rage the the moon.
As for arms, its very good in PvP, but really should it be good in PvE?
As for PVE balance, I am in favor of maintaining the existing place of Fury as the best DPS in raid for reasons that extend beyond PVE.
Imagine if you will a world where rogue or mage mage or hunter is BiS? Ill happily pass on that.
That’s still somewhat incorrect. SoD fury was vanilla fury with 2 extra buttons. They added a 20% damage buff from aq40 set bonus, and we still needed to wait until naxx when fights dipped back down to sub 60 seconds to be competitive/top on dps. And then they removed our funny gnomer hat. And other classes scaled.
SoD aq40 was the worst raid for fury post-60 and it was nearly identical to vanilla fury, the fights were just 5 minutes long.
Obviously they buffed other specs a ton, an absolutely egregious amount in some cases.
The other class buffs were outa sight… Molten core doing WB’s naxx fury DPS on hyrbrid DPS is ridiculous.
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I stand by SoD being the worst leveling experience I’ve ever had for warrior too. Everything in the world had double the health and hit harder. Best geared I’ve ever been while leveling and it was absolute misery fighting green mobs sometimes lol.
SoD was an absolute mess.
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could not agree more, SoD was a trash build
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We’ll see what C+ is like but I strongly suspect they’ve learned nothing in the last 20 years.
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That is a safe assumption. Look no further than retail.
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People simply feared normalization of rage because it sounds like a nerf.
It’s not.
Warrior leveling in general was one of the worst experiences in vanilla, tbh.
My very first warrior ever, got to the barrens at level 12ish…..then got absolutely dumpstered 1v1 vs an even level Zhevra who apparently was trained by Morpheus, and could out ultra instinct Goku. Dodge, dodge, miss, parry, dodge, dodge dead….. It took me 20 years to make another warrior.
That all said…. It is still better leveling warrior than Ret and priest which just auto attack and wand respectively. I also find hunter and mage leveling to be dramatically tedious, because absolutely nothing even begins to threaten you (and while mages can aoe level, every time I try to do that, the spots are flooded with other mages)
Warrior isn’t much of a step up. Atleast ret and priest can heal and keep pulling. My choice is bandage if it’s half my hp, or eat if i need all of it back.
You don’t get a consistent instant attack as warrior until 36 with whirlwind. Slam is at 30 but is a cast. Overpower is at 12. And then you get MS/BT at 40. Atleast palas have seals/judgement damage. I can press sunder.