TWW Warrior Feedback - Class Tree "Re-arrangement" and Lack of Dungeon Utility

Classes Warrior
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I wanted to share my feedback on the the warrior class talent tree “re-arrangement” as defined in the dev notes and the issues that still exist within the Warrior Class Tree.

Talent Rework Re-arrangement and Removal

Warriors received a “rework” a few weeks ago, however it was disappointing and did nothing but remove talents and “re-arrange” the class tree as described in the dev notes. The class tree still has issues, and the arms and fury trees remain mostly the same, except for several talents removed with nothing to replace them.

New Class Tree

The re-arranged class tree, although allowing for a little more choice for utility talent points, still has some of the same issues as the old tree:

  • A majority of the talent points are damage points (27/48 56%) with the same ratio of damage points to total talent points as the old tree due to the removal of talents and no other talents being added.
  • Despite the utility being higher in the tree, the tree is just as restricting as the old tree when it comes to utility options especially in dungeon content because of the damage points in the tree.

Too Much Damage in the Class Tree

It is clear that the design for Class Tree is to provide most if not all of the utility for classes. This at least seems to be what all of the “best class trees” like Monk, Shaman, Demon Hunter, Mage etc. have in common. They are able to get all of their throughput talents with talent points left over for other talents they need.

The warrior class tree has the most amount of damage talent points (26 in the current TWW build) compared to other classes. Below is a table comparing each Class Tree talent point distribution split into Damage, External Healing, Defensive, Utility, and Mobility Talent Points.

Class Talent Tree Comparison - TWW (Updated 6/13)

Classes Damage Points External Healing Points Defensive Points Utility Points Mobility Points Total Points (Excluding Starting Points) % Damage Points of Total Points
Warrior 26 0 9 9 4 48 54.17%
Paladin 21 6 6 12 3 48 43.75%
Rogue 18 0 12 7 6 43 41.86%
Demon Hunter 19 0 10 12 5 46 41.30%
Druid 20 5 13 12 2 52 38.46%
Death Knight 12 0 20 12 2 46 26.09%
Evoker 12 6 9 18 6 51 23.53%
Hunter 11 0 11 21 5 48 22.92%
Warlock 10 0 25 11 3 49 20.41%
Monk 10 3 11 15 10 49 20.41%
Priest 11 16 13 14 1 55 20.00%
Shaman 9 6 9 22 9 55 16.36%
Mage 7 0 19 16 9 51 13.73%

The table might not be perfectly accurate since some talent points can fit multiple categories, like DK’s talent Coldthirst grants runic power and reduces the cooldown of mind freeze with successful interrupts. I either counted it as one or the other, and leaned towards damage for cases like Coldthirst. External Healing Points are any ability that can heal other party members, regardless if windwalker takes talents to buff vivify or not, vivify can be used on other party members for off healing. Defensive Points are personal healing and defensives. Utility Points include CCs, external defensives and group mobility. The %s might be off a couple of %, but won’t change that warriors have a much larger % of damage talent points.

This results in very little points available for utility in dungeons after damage and needed defensives are taken even after the alpha class tree changes.

Still Lacking in Dungeon Utility

The large amount of damage talents within the class tree isn’t the only issue impacting dps warrior’s utility in dungeons. Even if arms and fury could talent into all of the utility they have available in their class tree, they would still have the worst dungeon utility kit in the game.

Why does this matter?

This makes it hard for warrior DPS players to PUG midrange keys (8-12s) where dungeon mechanics and affixes are still required to be dealt with in order to complete them. It is the most run key level and most pugged key level where mechanics and affixes are still required to be dealt with in order to succeed. If you are forming a group for your key in group finder, you are going to pick classes based on certain criteria that will give you a better chance to complete and time the key. If you are running lower keys (M2-M5) you can get by without filling all of those needs. Players that run high keys (M15+) are more likely to have a consistent “push group” that accommodates warrior’s weak utility than they are to pug at that level. Even when I run keys with friends as a warrior, we have to carefully plan the rest of our comp in order to make sure that we can cover the needs of the dungeon.

What are the Criteria?

Two of the criteria are Dungeon Knowledge i.e. Dungeon/Raider.io Score, and Item Level which are class neutral, so lets assume equivalent score and Item Level for the sake of argument. Another criteria is whether a class is meta or not. Generally this isn’t as big of a deal for keys <5, however meta specs are still more likely to get picked than a non meta spec at the same IL and score just because of bias. Even if a dps warrior had significantly higher IL signing up for a 8 key, they still can’t help with affixes and common dungeons mechanics, making the criteria below more impactful.

The criteria that are the most impactful, if not required, that players look for when forming groups for these keys are the following:

  • Hero/Lust
    • Even though drums are available, if a class with hero signs up, why not take the better hero?
    • Classes that Qualify: Mages, Shamans, Evokers, Hunters
  • Battle Res
    • Engineers can bring bres, but you can’t count on other players having engineering as a profession, so you’ll pick a class or multiple classes with bres for security and a better chance at a successful run.
    • Classes that Qualify: DKs, Druids, Paladins, Warlocks
  • Dispels (Curse, Disease, Magic, Poison, Purge, Soothe)
    • Almost every dungeon has deadly DOTs or Deadly enemy buffs that require to be dispelled from trash, boss fights, and/or affixes.
    • Classes that Qualify:
      • DH (purge),
      • Druid (curse/poison/soothe),
      • Evoker (bleed/curse/disease/poison/soothe),
      • Hunter (purge/soothe),
      • Mage (curse/purge),
      • Monk (disease/poison,soothe),
      • Paladin (disease/poison),
      • Priest (mass dispel/disease/purge/soothe),
      • Rogue (soothe),
      • Shaman (curse/poison/purge)
      • Warlock (magic)
  • Hard CCs
    • There are several dungeons with trash, boss fights and/or affixes (Incorporeal) that need some sort of hard cc to survive or make the encounter significantly easier. A boss example is Globgrog from Plaguefall where the common strategy was to hard CC the large slime.
    • Classes that Qualify: DHs, Druids, Hunters, Mages, Monks, Paladins, Rogues, Warlocks

Warriors are the ONLY class that doesn’t fill any of these needs.

Although not every class above that “qualifies” is equal in what they bring, they still have these things available, and are still chosen from group finder because their class has these things.

There are other useful things that classes can bring in dungeons as well that make the dungeon run smoother like Stuns, Skips, Off-healing, Group Defesives, Party buffs, etc but aren’t required like the things above usually are.

Warrior’s Current Utility

So what utility do Arms and Fury currently have in the current alpha build:

  • Stops
    • Shockwave - AOE stun.
    • Intimidating Shout - 5 target fear.
    • Storm Bolt - ST stun.
    • Pummel - ST interrupt.
  • Knockback
    • Menace - Makes Intimidating shout a 4 target knockback.
  • Group Fear Removal
    • Berserker Shout - Removes fears from party (rarely is there a group fear that can’t be stopped or interrupted).
  • Group Defensive
    • Rallying Cry - Grants 10% temporary and maximum health (less impactful in dungeons).
  • External Defensive
    • Intervene - temporarily intercepts melee and ranged attacks against an ally.
  • Slows
    • Piercing Howl - AOE snare.
    • Hamstring - ST slow.
  • Group Buff
    • Battle Shout - Comp dependent.

Even if they could bring everything above, their utility kit is the weakest among other dps specs in the game, and they have nothing that qualifies as “needed”.

So how can Warrior Utility and the Class Tree be Improved?

I think removing some damage talents and replacing them with utility would greatly improve the class tree.

A lot of the damage points have been watered down or aren’t very interesting, however they are still technically damage increases. Most players don’t have a good idea of how strong these damage talents are, but they still feel obligated to choose damage over utility (especially if the utility is mediocre).

Capstone changes

Once you reach the capstone area, you don’t really have extra points to select things further up in the tree. It seems that the design of the capstone area is not to give player cool talents but prevent players from getting Avatar, Thunderous Roar, and Champion's Spear with a variety of primary and secondary stat talents. I think it is fine to not want players to have all three abilities, but I think there are better ways to achieve that that will also allow for more cool talents to be added to the capstone area.

Here are some changes I think should be made.

  • Make Thunderous Roar and Champion's Spear a choice node
    • Since players are going to grab Avatar every time (which everyone loves Avatar and the follow on “Signet of Tormented Kings” talents), I think that Thunderous Roar and Champion’s Spear should become a choice node, and then have the 2 follow on talents change tooltips depending on which ability you choose, similar to Druid’s Incarnation and Convoke the Spirits. You would have the same choices that you make with the current tree.
  • REMOVE Dual Wield Specialization
    • This talent adds no flavor or fantasy to the talent tree, it’s purpose only seems to force players to use a point for it to prevent getting all 3 offensive cooldowns. I think most players would be happy to see it gone.
  • Make 2 point nodes into 1 point
    • With Champion’s Spear and Thunderous Roar being a choice node, Cruel Strikes, Wild Strikes, Endurance Training, and Armored to the Teeth can be reduced to 1 point nodes, since there is no longer a gate requirement.

This now frees up 5 points in the capstone area where either more utility or other non damage talents can be added, or you are able to take other utility nodes further up in the class tree.

Champion’s Spear

While on the topic of capstones, I think Champion's Spear should be altered a bit in order to make it a more fun talent to play.

Most pve players have chosen Thunderous Roar over Champion’s Spear even if Champion’s Spear does more damage just because it is punishing to play. Warriors having no increase in melee range, and Champion’s Spear being the smallest “Stand in this to get more damage” talent in the game make it punishing and a pain to use.

I think extending the buff radius out beyond the effect so warriors can have more range to move if they need to would make the talent much better. Dks had this added to Death and Decay, and Mages were able to stand way outside of their Rune of Power when it was in the game.

I’m sure there is enough feedback from almost 4 years of playing with Spear of Bastion/Champion's Spear to warrant making this change.

Other Changes

A lot of the damage points outside of the capstone area are minor and boring. I understand that most classes have simple damage nodes so keeping some is fine but some can definitely be removed.

After making the changes above we freed up 5 points (technically 8 since we combined Thunderous Roar and Spear but since you couldn’t select both anyway, you really only have 5). However, there are still 19 damage points in the tree. I think reducing the damage points to around 15, which is the average amount of damage points among class trees, would be justified.

Keep

  • Thunderclap and follow on talents - You could make Thunderclap baseline since every spec/hero talent combo uses it except Slayer/Fury.
  • War Machine - This has added benefits to leveling and open world content, so I think it is fine to keep.

Remove

  • Sidearm - I personally think talents that make your auto attacks have a chance to proc more auto attack damage are incredibly boring. I don’t think I’ve seen this animation while in combat. I prefer talents that are triggered based on buttons the player presses.
  • Frothing Berserker - This was nerfed in order to address rage generation. Since there are a lot of different talents that contribute to extra rage generation in the spec trees, removing this might simplify that tuning nob (but I’m no dev).

Reduce and Combine

  • Crushing Force, Overwhelming Rage - You can reduce both Crushing Force and Overwhelming Rage to 1 point each and, if needed, reduce their benefits to compensate.
  • Barbaric Training, Seismic Reverberation - both of these talents are similar, I think you could combine them into a choice node and change one of them to be more single target focused and the other multi target focused.
  • Reinforced Plates - Since this talent becomes a damage talent because of Armored to The Teeth you could just bake it into Armored to The Teeth so that it grants 10% armor, and gives 5% of your armor in strength.
  • Concussive Blows - This talent isn’t very exciting, I think it could be removed.

If all of those changes were made, you would be left with 35 total points that you can now add more non damage points to replace.

Possible Talents to Add

As I said above, even if you talent into all of your utility, warriors are still among the weakest in dungeon utility compared to classes and the only class without one of the “necessary criteria” dungeons require. Those criteria are Bres, Lust, a Hard CC, and a “Dispel” of some kind.

Class fantasy is important, so giving warriors something like battle res doesn’t really make sense. Giving Warrior’s lust could make sense but it would make it less valuable since multiple classes have it already. I think giving warrior’s a Hard CC and a “Dispel”/Soothe of some kind would be the best option. Every Class has 2-3 of the above with DK being the only one at 1 (Bres), with most classes even having multiple forms of “Dispel”.

So staying on theme, warriors are tough and are able to put their bodies in harms way to help and defend their allies so I think giving warriors more external defensive’s to help their group would be another good direction.

Some Talent Ideas

  • Safeguard - It was a lot of fun in shadowlands to help allies survive attacks or AOE effects. You can either make this reduce damage to specific types of damage other than magic damage so when you add the Storm Shield talent in the Mountain Thane tree it a adds magic DR. Or you could just add the Safeguard conduit version that gave a flat DR.
  • Extra Charge of Intervene - You can add a talent that adds a charge to intervene.
  • Intervene removes harmful Effect - You can make intervene remove a curse, poison, disease, or bleed which would give Warrior’s one of the missing dungeon “Criteria” mentioned above.
  • Intervene grants spell reflect - Grants Spell Reflect to your intervened target, you can increase the cool down of intervene in order to compensate this.
  • Intervene grants Second Wind - You can make intervene grant 2 ticks of Second Wind to an ally.
  • Soothe Talent - Warriors are intimidating and can “out rage” an enemy, to soothe it.
  • Dispel of some kind - Since prot is really strong against physical damage and designed to be weaker to bleeds and magic, a bleed removal might be too broken if it can be applied to yourself. So maybe a poison or disease would make more sense. If the bleed removal can only be applied to party members, then that would be more on theme and more unique since Evokers are the only other class with a bleed removal.
  • Hard CC - I’m sure warriors can throw something hard enough at an enemy to disorient it for 30s-1min.
  • Heroic Leap with a Ally - A talent that will cause you to leap with a friendly target if they are in melee range of you to help someone get out of harms way.
    • To make it less valuable than Evoker’s Rescue you would only be able to leap with a player that is close to you. You could also reduce the range that you can jump in half to reduce it’s strength.
  • Party Wide Lesser Spell Reflect - Spell reflect grants 2-4 party members a lesser spell reflect
    • You can either make this trigger off of spell reflect being casted like DK’s Vestigial Shell but increase it’s cooldown, or you can make it a separate button like Mage’s Mass Barrier and make it a longer cooldown. The “lesser” spell reflect would just give magic damage reduction and not grant the reflect or deflect part of spell reflect.
  • Rallying Cry more Effective in Party - You can add follow on talents to buff Rallying Cry’s effectiveness to your party, or reduce it’s CD somehow.
  • Cut Roots - Can remove roots from a party member.
  • Intimidating Shout Affects All Enemy Targets - not a new talent but a suggestion, I’m not sure why Warlocks and Warriors have a fear limited to 5 players. This would also make Menace a more useful knockback instead of only working on 4 enemies.
  • A 3rd Stance for CC - You can add another stance that reduces movement impairing effects duration by 25-50%.

There are some definitely powerful talents I suggested that could work for capstones potentially. If warrior isn’t given any “necessary” utility for dungeons then I would hope that the talent’s added would make them great to have with their defensive’s and ability to take on damage for their group. Or at the very least some damage points are removed freeing up more points for other talents.

Conclusion

It has been great to see how responsive the devs are to feedback, and how many great and frequent changes they have made to classes since the DF beta. I’m optimistic about the future and I’m excited for The War Within.

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This is good feedback but this post could be significantly shorter and still convey the message you’re trying to send.

I honestly checked out half way through.

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That is fair, it is long. I’ll look into trimming it down. Thanks!

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I kind of wish they would give warrior a bit more utility against heavy spell cleave comps in bgs\arena. Maybe buff spell reflect and increase the damage of reflected abilities or something.

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I don’t really pvp so I tried not to speak into pvp utility. I have watched a good amount of bajheera’s streams and some of Magnus’ and Mud’s streams and have heard some of their opinions. I’ve gone as high as 1400 in 2 skirmishes on arms and fury.

Are warriors weak defensively in pvp? I know fury is a little more weak defensively than arms because they don’t have ignore pain and they don’t have blamestorm to break out of roots and avoid cc.

I know that spear isn’t liked in pvp either and could use some changes. From what I have heard, the big issue with spear is the increased cooldown from shadowlands making it easy for most classes to break out of the tether everytime you cast it. So maybe replacing Piercing Challenge with a talent that makes spear a 1min cd or 45s would be a good idea.

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I want to highlight this section and chart. It’s hard to say our tree is bad or that the spec is not enjoyable, but when you compare it to literally any of the other trees that have been updated in the Alpha so far it feels like we are not even on the same planet as them.

If you look at Monks for example. Basically every week they’ve had items moved baseline while generating some cool new talents and more importantly generating an insane amount of freedom in how they choose to customize their builds.

The warrior class and spec trees both do not even come close to offering this. We are heavily locked behind throughput choices in our class tree, and baseline functionality for essentially any ability we want to hit in our spec tree.

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My one gripe with how poorly set out our class talent tree is that our Stamina node is locked to the 3rd tier of the talent tree itself (The 3rd tier of talents is anything that requires a 20 point investment in the tree to reach hence 3rd tier.)

We’re the only ones for crying out loud that have it in this tier, every single other class has their stamina increases either in the second or first tiers.

The tier that is basically all throughput talents so you’re never going to pick this up ever, leaving warriors with some of the lowest health pools amongst others who have their stamina talents in actual proper spots that they can take it so others have 6-20% extra stamina than we would have in the exact same gear which is outright criminal.

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The Monk have been getting some great changes, they have had a pretty bad class tree all expansion. And the WW changes have looked awesome.

Spec trees and Class trees seem to serve different purposes. Spec trees obviously giving you most if not all throughput, and the choices you make revolving around different builds. The Class trees have some throughput and do allow for some different build options, however they also contain most of our non throughput talents, defensives, mobility and utility.

So having 27 points in our class tree dedicated to damage when we only have 31 to spend (It is worse on live where we have 30 damage points), severely impacts our ability to grab those talents. If that was the standard among other class trees then that would be fine I guess, but just looking at the numbers in the table, we are a clear outlier. And unlike other classes that have 20+ damage points all of our talents change tool tip depending on the spec so they are technically valuable for each spec.

And again, even if we could take all of our dungeon utility, we still have severely less than every other class.

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Thanks for this well put together analysis of most of my issues with the Warrior class tree’s current design. I play a lot of classes and having the data laid out confirming my feelycraft about how putting points in the trees felt is rather validating.

and yeah, you’ve hit the nail on the head with being locked out of most of our already lacking dungeon utility.

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I have heard a lot of different suggestions to make the class tree better like changing some pathing, or switching some talents around, but I think the heart of the issue is the fact that we have too much damage in our class tree and too little utility. ST raid builds have a little more freedom (but not much because they have more pathing issues) because they don’t need the aoe talents. Raid builds also don’t really need utility other than Rallying Cry (although it really isn’t that valuable in its current state of 10% health on a 3min CD). Pvp builds don’t need the aoe talents either, and value utility differently.

Warriors are clearly not designed to have weak utility so they can do significantly more damage than other classes because most specs are pretty balanced damage wise. Just looking at mages (who have the least amount of damage talent points), they do as much damage as anyone in dungeons while also having almost every form of utility you could want (lust, a hard CC, dispels, mass invis, a group defensive, a knockback, stops, etc) and they are one of the strongest defensive classes in the game. So more damage talents does not equal more damage.

It seems like classes are designed to be fairly balanced in throughput, utility, and defensives in dungeons, and it seems that the design of the class tree is to consist majorly of utility, defensives, and mobility. Yet, warriors are the only class in the game with more than 50% of their class talents being damage talents. Warriors are an extreme and blatant outlier in dungeon utility when compared to other classes.

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Pretty much this. There’s no reason for talents like Crushing Force to be a thing when skills like Spell Reflect and Intimidating Shout aren’t yet baseline. Even when maxing out what utility we can take, even to a loss in damage, it’s still far from overpowering.

For DPS*, it feels like we need about another two point’s worth (assuming no loss to existing utility or accessibility to other). I don’t much care how. Baseline some or drop some damage talents; whichever.

  • As Prot, maybe a third, just due to Reflective Armor no longer being mere “utility”.
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True and most real post. Can we talk about the 6 two point nodes in the class tree?

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I liked when Intervene replaced charge for prot warriors, I don’t like it as a seperate talent it just another button to bloat the bars.

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This is what I was hoping to see in a warrior post, and is also our issue in the class tree. To continue to be a broken record, we have MORE damage talents and LESS utility talents than hunters do and every other class for that matter.

I don’t have access to beta so I unfortunately can’t post in the feedback forum but hopefully they look at the class tree again with the same design intent as they did in this hunter’s post.

You can use a macro that will use intervene if your target is friendly or charge if your target is an enemy.

Something like this:

#showtooltip
/cast [harm] Charge
/cast [help] Intervene

You can also make it a mouseover as well.

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Bumping this thread in light of the recently announced changes to the shaman general tree.

When I read this, I had to come back and find this thread because the first thing that came to mind was the chart Denbaugh made roughly tallying throughput nodes on all class general trees.

Obviously, as OP stated, there’s a little wiggle room with some of the talents as to what category they fall into.
But even taking that into account, there is enough of a divide that it’s more than a bit confuddling to see them make this statement about the shaman tree when it seems to be so much more significant of an issue for other classes.

The context of these issues in our general tree is doubly ironic when you also take into account the recent hunter reworks referenced in Denbaugh’s post above this one.

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