I feel that DPS warrior has a few issues that negatively impact both its feel and performance in SOD currently. I would identify the primary issues as:
- Far too burst dependent
- Lacking in impactful feeling instant attacks
Explanation of issues
1: It doesn’t feel very fun to me and most other warriors I’ve talked to for us to do extremely high burst damage at the start of the fight and then suddenly feel very weak and slowly drop down in dps for the rest of the fight. I think that flattening the damage profile of warrior so that you feel impactful for the entire fight would go a long way toward improving feel.
2: This is a less distressing issue than 1 in my opinion, but it would still be nice to see a change in regard to it. With such a large portion of our damage (60%+) coming from melees, heroic strikes (empowered melees), and deep wounds, our instant abilities do not feel particularly impactful. For instance, bloodthirst will not even be cast after the first time used for a fresh meat proc in some builds for P8. I do think that there are some improvements already coming with Regicide, 4pc T4, and 6pc T4. However I think the abilities could still use some extra oomph.
Suggestions for improvement:
(A) Make Fresh Meat apply 100% of the time with blood thirst casts. This will help to reduce the gap between warrior’s damage during and outside of the initial burst window, helping to solve issue 1. It will also help with issue 2 by making bloodthirst feel like a more impactful button to press. At the very least, every build would still want to press blood thirst at least every 12 seconds.
(B) Make a rune or set bonus that reduces the magnitude of Death Wish’s damage multiplier but causes your rage spent to reduce the cooldown of Death Wish by some amount. This should ideally be tuned such that Death Wish can have almost full uptime with proper play. The reduced power but consistent uptime of Death Wish will help significantly with problem 1 by reducing the damage during our burst window and increasing our damage outside of it. I would suggest replacing the tier 2.5 2pc bonus with this or placing it on a rune in the boot, head, or chest slot.
(C) I think that the tier 4 6 pc set bonus could feel more impactful if it was changed to make it so that it allows unused hits of whirlwind to apply (at reduced effectiveness) as extra hits to targets counts below 4. This would make whirlwind into an extremely impactful feeling ability in single target. Pressing the button and seeing 4 big numbers with 2H or 8 smaller numbers with dual wield would be extremely fun. Having extra chances to proc deep wounds or extra attacks off of these extra hits would also feel really good. This would help a lot with problem 2.
Closing thoughts
Some of the proposed changes look like they could constitute significant buffs for warrior. That’s not really what I am after though. I think that those changes being applied with the numbers being adjusted so warrior damage output remains similar (but better on long fights of course) would still be a huge improvement.
I have had a very fun time with SOD so far and I am greatly looking forward to trying out the new sets and special items (like Regicide) when phase 8 releases! Thank you to the devs for all your hard work