I don’t see Warriors being in a weird state with the story.
Yes, there’s guns and spells, and sci-fi magic hoo-hah, but, let’s break it down.
Guns: WoW’s ammunition still seems primitive in the narrative sense. In our history, firearms didn’t really prevail in their creation. From bombards to proper muskets and rifles, even with threaded barrels, Platemail still prevailed. If you wanted to handwave it in Warcraft, you could just say the metal of whatever non-existent metal isn’t as strong as the metal it’s impacting. That, combined with the chainmail and padding you wear beneath platemail, is likely enough to prevent you from suffering serious enough injuries that’d force you to forfeit the field.
Magic: Magic is the weird one, because it’s a rule breaker. We have no precedent for it in our reality, we can’t measure it with science and as far as we know, it just doesn’t care about anything. To the Warrior’s end, they have “Deflect Magic” in their kit, which could imply that there can also be goods enchanted to protect against magic, and allow the soldier to close the distance.
In the martial arts, fights don’t go on for a long while. It’s about ten or so seconds on average. There might be some discrepancies (Undead are not killed by traditional means but physical destruction, Tauren are massive with a lot of mass to protect their innards and are less likely to bleed out before receiving medical attention, Trolls can straight up regenerate lost limbs and survive otherwise lethal injuries, what have you), but, for the sake of argument, if it were two people both in platemail, and the first move doesn’t disable the other, and magic is dependent upon gestures performed with fingers/hands/limbs/words/what-have-you, you can reliably close the distance and grapple this enemy to take them out of the equation.
But it really boils down to is: If mages are all-powerful, who’s going to be the line between them and their enemy? Someone who commands such power is going to be the immediate target of assassins, sharpshooters and all assortments of soldiers. “Geek the mage” isn’t just a fun, trendy catchphrase from Shadowrun (it totally is), it just seems reasonable from a logical point of view. It’s all the more reason why the soldier is an important figure on the field in Warcraft.
The important part to realize (aside from the fact that WoW sort of waffles on this but generally speaking it does not care anything vaguely related to realism), is that humans (and the creatures that share physical traits with them!) are frail creatures. Most direct forms of harm are enough to take us out of a fighting state. You can read about a lucky few even in the modern era who’re shot by high caliber rounds that just go through them, rather than fragmenting and destroying their vitals, but, generally speaking, what you can gather from the martial arts in the olden days that one direct hit is enough to subdue a human being and thwart it from fighting any more.
Skill also doesn’t decide battles, circumstances does. Heck, Warrick the Kingmaker in our history, a trained swordsman, commander and rich enough to afford fine armor, was done in by a random conscript with a spear. Zawisza the Black was defeated by random Ottomen soldiers. Florian Geyer was killed by two literal house servants armed with knives.
With all of this context, for the point of this conversation, I’d say a warrior is adequate in doling out punishment in the current setting. You don’t need to get fancy with it. You just need to hit them with the business end and you’re good to go.
