Rage economy question

Classes Warrior
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TLDR: Less rage = less stuff to do = waiting around with noting to press and wasting GCD’s… Am I missing something here? Isn’t having rage and having overpower/Execute procs a good thing? Is it REALLY that bad to cap charges and rage if it means you have the resources to spend them rather than waiting around on CD’s or slow auto attacks to generate rage? I’d rather have the option to have buttons to press rather than a slow play style where I have to wait around doing nothing for 3-5 seconds to wait for rage/CD’s before being able to hit a button.

Also, less abilities going out = less damage going out. It also means less uptime on Colossus Smash/Warbreaker.

Yo, got a question about the alpha development notes based around the warrior’s rage economy.

From what I can tell, Blizz feels that warriors generate too much rage, giving us too many abilities to press.

Ie. The spec is too fast.

They feel that we get too many overpower procs, and have access to too many mortal strikes, and they want to cut down on that.

So my question is; won’t that significantly hamper our damage and slow our rotation down drastically?

If they give us less procs of overpower, that means we’ll be hitting less Overpowers. If they give us less rage that means we’ll be hitting less Mortal Strikes and Executes, which also means less up time on Colossus Smash/Warbreaker.

Less abilities going out = less damage going out.

And yet we don’t see anything about damage increases to these abilities.

They say that there are too many options of buttons to press at any given time. Ie. You have to choose between hitting overpower or hitting mortal strike, because overpower procced a charge.

They think that slowing our rotation down will make hitting that mortal strike feel more impactful and meaningful because we hit it less often therefore it’s more “special” when we do get to hit it. They also seem to think that it’ll give us the opportunity to be “tactical” about which buttons we want to press when they’re up because they “mean more” because they’re up less often. Meaning we’ll have to make choices between X or Y ability because we don’t have the rage to do both.

But as it stands right now, don’t we do that anyway? If we have Mortal Strike up, and get a proc of Execute, we have to choose which one we want to press in that GCD. We have to tactically choose which one will give us a bigger advantage in that moment.

Having more abilities up isn’t a bad thing. Having to choose between letting overpower cap or spending rage on mortal strike isn’t a bad thing… Is it? Am I wrong here when I say that having rage to use abilities is a good thing?

I’d rather have a lot of rage and a lot of abilities to push than have a playstyle where I have to sit around for 3-5 seconds waiting on a CD or waiting on my slow auto attacks to generate enough rage to be able to press a button.

Having access to enough rage to be able to do the rotation fluidly is a lot more fun than not having rage and having to wait around to press a button.

Am I missing something here? Is being capped on rage/overpower stacks REALLY that bad? It just means you have buttons to press every GCD rather than being rage starved and waiting on CD’s.

Edit: Bad grammar is bad. Added TLDR since it’s kind of a read.

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Personally, I don’t feel like filling every possible GCD really enhances the gameplay. I’d rather have a system where we are awarded for pressing things when appropriate than just pressing things on cooldown.
I enjoyed arms more as a debuff management spec where you wanted to refresh rend / sunder armor at the last possible second so you could spend more rage on rage dumps like heroic strike or have more rage pooled for a big execute.
Rage management should be a more significant part of our gameplay.

Also, iirc, they are giving similar treatment to other classes that have an overabundance of resources.

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Pretty much.

Arms on the alpha is basically an inferior version to the one we have on live.

Aside ravager and the change to skullsplitter everything else is not good.

Overabundance of resources is kinda like ability bloat.

It’s an issue sometimes, and it’s not as big of a deal as people wanna make it out to be.

Aside in very specific cases.

If reducing this “overabundance” results in a spec that feels worse to play, they should just abandon the idea.

Also you really only had too much rage when you used bladestorm, people wanna make it appear as if you were always at 100% rage, but this is just a false statement, there generally wasn’t downtime, and you had more rage than you actually needed, but you didn’t waste like 50% of the rage you generated either. And even if you did, so what? Seriously, so what?

Also this overabundance is only really a thing that’s talked about because of test of might. They could have just nerfed test, increase the rage cost a little, and there you go, problem solved.

This “resource overabundance” issue that’s been talked about, ill put that in the “sometimes it’s a problem but it’s mostly exaggerated” bag. And this applies to pretty much any other spec. As far as i’m concerned, no spec was damaged by having lots of resources to spend. Enhance feels better, fire mage, frost mage, outlaw, sub rogue, assassination, feral, balance, arms, fury, etc etc etc… Literally no spec feels better with less resources.

Ultimately the issue is: I don’t like wasting some resources, that’s the real issue that these people have, aside for frost dk breath build where rp generation is indeed an issue because it goes against the idea of breath which was to be a burst button.

But you know what? I don’t like not having enough resources, and i would rather have more than necessary than too little, or perfectly enough as long as everything goes smoothly, like for outlaw rogue.

You know what’s one of the biggest complaints about outlaw? Energy nerfed. Right now you can just about keep up with the rotation as long as you get enough procs as it’s expected and you manage to stay inside adrenaline rush, as long as you manage to do that, outlaw is definitely very fun, barring some pretty massive design issues, but the spec is fun. But as soon as you lose adrenaline rush, either because you made a mistake, even a small one, or you simply got unlucky you’re screwed.

What problem is a little energy waste, compared to that? One is flow damaging, the other is just: Oh damn, i just wasted some resources, but barring that your rotation is really fun.

It’s people overfocusing on an aspect while forgetting everything else and the implications.

There is a similar problem for havoc dh, you have just enough fury to keep up the rotation, until you get unlucky and you suddenly have no more, and you are left waiting for a few seconds. This damages the flow of the spec.

And the same will likely happen for arms.

But arms also got other changes that were terrible, like the removal of storm of swords.

These people, making these points are focusing on a small aspect while forgetting about the big picture.

Should they try to solve this “issue” Depends, will the gameplay be improved or will it be downgraded? And so far, arms is looking like a downgraded version.

Long post but i think it’s necessary to drive this point, because these complaints about overabundance are mostly worthless, i never thought that arms was worse to play because we could actually press abilities on gcd.

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Just a few observations.

  1. Reducing doesn’t mean anemic. There’s a huge degree between 30 APM can’t fill half your globals and 60+ APM slamming keys every second. Reducing also doesn’t mean less damage, as that’s where tuning comes in (and several abilities have been adjusted already, but we’re still very early in the process).
  1. Dragonflight has had four tiers of gear inflation. TWW alpha is being tested with starter gear that has none - however slow it may feel right now, it will scale up, and that’s something that needs to be accounted for.
  1. The idea that “more resources & more buttons better” is somewhat subjective, but the most obvious impact seen in DF (and BfA before it) is the runaway feedback loop that is Anger Management and Test of Might.

More than anything, Arms is being slowed down just because the gameplay is a mess right now. For example: Thunder Clap is used over Slam or Rend, not because it’s directly stronger, but because it spends more rage in order to feed AM/ToM - that could also be addressed just by adjusting rage costs, but there’s only so much that can be tweaked without running into other problems (can’t spend 50 rage per GCD or you will end up with dead time waiting for auto-attacks).

Resetting back to a sensible level is a chance to

  • Rage costs have been reduced in order to make generating and spending less “chunky” - spending 20 rage at a time means less waiting for auto-attacks like in Shadowlands.
  • Rage generation needs to be reduced to coincide with that, or else you just have infinite rage and no way to spend it.
  • Reducing the amount of Tactician procs creates more room for other abilities and more variance in the gameplay, instead of just pressing OP every other GCD. As long as those other abilities feel good to use, that’s fine, but throughout Dragonflight it’s largely been a matter of “press OP all the time and never press Slam” or “press Slam all the time and never press OP.”
  • Storm of Swords is also changed because of the rage changes. Don’t need an excessive spender anymore in a healthier rage economy, and keeping it in could lead to odd gameplay situations where you’re purposefully skipping globals in order to dump rage into one big Whirlwind instead of three Slams.
  • Hero talents and class/spec talent changes also come into play - Sudden Death, Bladestorm, and Demolish are all free fillers that get used pretty regularly. SkS is even a generator. Both of these things help keep the rotation moving and Arms doesn’t actually feel rage starved outside of Execute right now… but Execute can always be tweaked through its rage refund.

TLDR: Give it a chance or maybe check out some gameplay videos - it’s really not as bad as it sounds on paper.

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That’s fair. I guess I jumped the gun before really seeing it in action.

I’m quoting the TLDR but I did read your whole post. I’m not going to go through and quote bits, but I largely agree with most of what you said.

I guess when it’s laid out better than how Blizz laid it out it makes more sense.

Maybe I’ll check out some gameplay when I get home. Do you know any warriors who have alpha footage? Does Bajherra still play arms? Or is there someone who did some pve?

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I don’t stream anymore, but Bajh has been and Dan_Warr (of Method) has put quite a bit of time into the Alpha on stream, and has pretty well reasoned takes. He might be busy with Season 4’s EU launch today, but I’m sure he’d be happy to talk about it on stream and still has vods up. There’s also a lot of information and discussion on the Warrior Discord.

That’s understandable, and nothing against Blizzard but it can be hard to convey sometimes, not to mention had to keep track of changes. Some of the changes mentioned in the bluepost (like reducing Warlord’s Torment to 25% increased rage generated) isn’t even correct.

None of this is to say that Arms is perfect either, this is just the first pass and there are still plenty of problems to address, but I genuinely do think the spec is heading in a healthier direction.

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Blizz could take the rage bar away completely, make every ability free and i would be willing to bet it wouldnt do much to this class except make it more fun to play.

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I would rather not have every single mechanic that defined this class from its’ inception pruned.
Weapon swapping and stance dancing are already effectively gone.
Why do people just want to zug?

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Because people don’t want to have to jump through hoops for basic functionality. Having to swap to a 1h + Shield to use spell reflect left it in a terrible state for PvE DPS warriors for most the game. They removed that restriction and suddenly it became a very cool level of skill expression for DPS Warriors in PvE, similar to a Hunter using Feign Death to Cancel targetted mechanics.

Likewise having to change stances for basic ability usage (EG pummel) felt super bad when other classes just pushed a button.

Just because it was the initial version doesn’t mean it was good.

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Yeah a lot of classes have dramatically changed from their vanilla counterparts. It is essentially a completely different game gameplay-wise at this point. While some of the pruning and optimization hasn’t always been great I don’t really care about stance dancing.

To add onto this if there were ever a class that exists to embrace the zug it is Warrior lol but that isn’t to say Arms can’t feel a bit more methodical than Fury. I am cautiously waiting to see how this all plays out come TWW. I think this specifically from Archimtiros also worth considering

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People tend to forget the downsides too:

  • Changing stances and weapons to use different skills was flavorful, but had an opportunity cost in GCDs and rage caps, which often resulted in simply not doing it - now we can actually use those abilities (and it generally feels good to do so).
  • most of the “skill” involved boiled down to setting up macros, rather than some complicated sequence of key presses - we’re not playing Helldivers here.

These things weren’t removed because Blizzard hates flavor, they were removed because it was an extra hoop Warriors had to jump through to use the full range of their abilities, while many other classes did not. I like stances and I like flavor, but sometimes simplification is good.

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But there is a middle-ground between convoluted vanilla warrior weapon swap macros and what we have now + the suggestion of removing rage as a mechanic that I was replying to.

For instance, druids have forms which are functionally the exact same mechanic as original stances, only more of them and minus having to swap weapons. Imagine the reaction if druids had their forms removed.
Even rogues have stealth, which is also functionally the same as a stance.

For fury, I might be more inclined to agree, and more power to the people who are into that. But I don’t really get the desire to have two specs that are functionally identical compared to other classes which have such a wide variety in DPS spec flavor, like hunter, druid, shaman, rogue, or warlock.
Braindead zugging doesn’t really fit the master of arms brand, and it’s kind of irritatingly ironic when they try to reflect the theme of being a well trained, tactical master of weaponry by just naming the most devoid of strategy, RNG based talent ‘tactician’.

I know this probably makes a lot of people very upset, but a class is just as much if not moreso defined by its’ limitations as much as its’ strengths.
Some classes can do damage from 40 yards away. Does that mean that we should have a 40 yard range?
Some classes have spammable CC. Should we?
Some classes have complete damage immunity cooldowns.

I completely agree. Emphasis on sometimes though. Like I said, there is a middleground between what we had and what we have. I would love to see stances and rage management be more impactful again. Rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater because the initial implementation was too unintuitive, it could be reintroduced in a more streamlined fashion.

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If such limitations were applied even remotely equally, I might agree… but they’re not, never have been, and frankly never will be. Several classes had absolutely no limitation of the use of their kit, and that difference has never been a serious tuning point for Blizzard (which is largely a good thing, since it introduces its own host of issues).

I think you and I have a different interpretation of impactful, because making a macro to use half your abilities is hardly the height of engagement; what’s more, the stance benefits themselves were often secondary to enabling the ability.

The best form of stances Warriors ever had was Mists of Pandaria, because they were used regularly and solely for their effects, not to enable something else for the sake of flavor. The downside, however, is that it was a fairly heavy action-tax on an already high action class… and that was before GCDs were hasted the way they are now.

What we have in Dragonflight is actually very similar, just with a smaller footprint, since there are only two stances instead of three and with a slightly longer cooldown in between them.

And as for rage, that’s exactly why Blizzard is reigning it in during TWW, and the catalyst for this entire thread.

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I don’t really feel like blizzard’s shoddy balancing is an excuse for why things should be homogenized or oversimplified. They pruned a ton of depth out of classes in the past and it wasn’t exactly a utopia of balance. There are still patches where people pass over warrior in favor of other classes even without the limitations of stances. And there were patches where people favored warrior even when we did have to deal with more limitations.

I don’t know why you’re replying as though I was saying we need a 1:1 reimplementation of vanilla stance dancing and weapon swapping back when literally the next words after the quote you replied to was

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It’s not a matter of balancing being shoddy or not, there’s really isn’t any good way to tune around half your abilities locking out another half.

Because we already got what you’re asking for.

  • Stances were reintroduced in a more streamlined fashion with Dragonflight and rage economy is readjusted every expansion - Shadowlands was too low, Dragonflight was too high, hopefully TWW will be just right. If not, they’ll continue to iterate.

And Warriors don’t need weapon swapping. It adds absolutely nothing to the game and wasn’t even that well liked when it was in the game; it was just a macro tax, if you bothered to use abilities which required swapping at all. Not to mention changing weapons is often a protected function because of cantrip weapons, so if we were forced to weapon swap again, it would create further conflict. There is absolutely no upside beyond a long forgotten sense of flavor that was more annoying than flavorful in the first place.

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:person_facepalming:
What we have now is stances in name alone.
It’s like taking all the delicious seasoning out of a soup, and then adding a single grain of salt back in as compensation.
You are really failing to imagine any kind of middleground between vanilla stances and what we have now.

I’ve never said I want weapon swapping macros back. It could be a purely cosmetic thing where you pull out different weapons based on your current stance (and no not the garish faction vanilla faction shield model that they stuck on us for BFA). Similar to how a rogue does not actually have to swap to a pistol, or a druid does not have to equip the moon.

Anyway, this seems fruitless. Enjoy your opinions.

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Stances as they are now are the best iteration of them entirely. The only other way Stances would function in a player friendly manner would be like FF14’s bard songs, where you’re cycling through them with differing procs or ability augmentations and they cancel the previous stance when cycling to the new stance.

Back to wow’s mechanics though when skills are locked behind stances you put a double MS penalty on someone unintentially which is a right pain in the rear if you’re not playing on your country’s server OCE Vs NA in keys/arenas, or different EU server locations on EU.

Especially an issue in PvP where even a fraction of a second is the difference between CC’s landing on you or your target, or your spell reflect doing what you wanted it to do.

Weapon swapping even cosmetically for skills is kinda bland. D4’s barbarian does it correctly because they’ve got all the items equipped, adding such an adjustment to WoW’s equipment system would require an overhaul and potentially bugs littered in the process, or you’re stuck with weapons you do not like cosmetically which is a big no when xmog is a thing.

Weapon swapping for Skills is also horrible for the same issue of the doubled MS to action them when switching, let alone the aforementioned issue with cantrip effects being present almost every tier now.

The only way Weapon swapping would function correctly with the current system is for Arms to have a special caveat with 2h weapons that allows them to split them into 2 smaller 1hs (sharing the same models as their 2h but smaller) through the use of a timed buff stance that made you auto attack twice per 3.6s, at half the strength (Parity with your 2h’s auto attack) and augmenting skills accordingly to their dual wield counterpart, Shalamayne style which could be a perfect way of integrating this in a future Hero talent if a dev at blizzard had a similar idea in mind as an Arms exclusive rather than a shared option.

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Cosmetic weapon swapping is actually something I’ve suggested several times in an effort to create a more cohesive “weapon master” theme for Warriors, but with a few logical observations:

  1. There’s no feasible mechanism to equip multiple weapons. Even if it were for purely cosmetic customization, it would be a huge UI/UX tax for just one class to change up their visuals a bit… which is a nice idea, but also opens the door for every other class to ask why they’re not getting a similar treatment, at which point it’s no longer unique to Warrior. I wouldn’t mind it, but I don’t think it’s a simple or technically reasonable ask.
  1. You don’t want every attack to use a different weapon appearance anyway, since that diminishes the one you actually have equipped and WoW’s combat animations are already so quick that it would create major disharmony if your weapon were constantly disappearing and a different one replacing for every attack (not to mention autos). At that point it’s less “fantasy of pulling out a special weapon” and more some kind of hyper-magical conjuror instead.
  1. Looking more toward D3 for inspiration rather than D4, several skills already manifest special weapons for specific attacks - Heroic, Sidearm, Ravager, and Champion’s Spear - the unifying theme between all of them is that they have a cooldown or proc rate limiting their frequency.

So if I were to try to create a “weapon swapping/master” theme, I would keep it simple and along existing lines - Champion’s Spear throws a spear, Ancient Aftershock or Shockwave could slam down a big hammer, Thunderous Roar could be rethemed to a big axe swipe that causes bleeding, etc (at one time, Shield Wall actually put a shield model over your offhand as Arms/Fury), while still using your regular weapon and animations for the majority of regular rotational attacks. Keeping these effects tied to procs and major cooldowns helps them stand out and retain their visual distinctiveness from everything else.

But as far as actually changing equipped weapons in combat? No thanks; it creates way too many issue without any particular benefit other than revisiting a two-decade old mechanic that never even worked very well in the first place.

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Honest question.
How do you feel about druid forms?

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Ask any Druid player how they feel about having to shift out of their primary forms to use important (sometimes life saving) pieces of their kit.

  • Bear tanks previously being required to shift into human form while actively tanking in order to battle rez (innervate previously had a similar problem).
  • Feral losing Tiger’s Fury when they shift to bear (not to mention dumping energy).
  • Everyone having to pause what they were doing and shift into Bear as a defensive.
  • Despite a ridiculous amount of bonuses, the GCD to shift forms is the biggest complaint with Druid of the Claw, but of course it has to have a GCD (or some kind of malleus), or Druids have the same APM inflating Stance Dancing problem that Warriors had in MoP, where they’re just rapid-fire changing stances/forms every second.

The list goes on, and it’s something that Blizzard has spent a lot of time improving (e.g. bears can rebirth in form now), just like they did with Warrior Stances. Certainly there’s a point where you can emphasize shifting enough to make it rewarding, but that feeling is the difference between a requirement and a reward (not to mention an optional gameplay style that’s being talented into, in the case of Druid of the Claw).

Things like flight/travel form, sure that makes sense and is fine, but shifts that interrupt your actual gameplay are not generally considered fun.

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