WC3 - Mountain Thane - SMF

Classes Warrior
1

Straight from the Battle.net website, this is the description of the Mountain King.

The Mountain Kings, or ‘Thanes’ as they are known in Khaz Modan, are the mightiest Dwarven warriors under the mountain. Wielding both enchanted warhammers and hand axes, these fierce fighters live to test themselves against worthy opponents. Unconcerned with their race’s preoccupation with mechanical devices and mining precious minerals, Mountain Kings live only for battle. Dedicated to safeguarding the Alliance which saved their kingdom during the Second War, the Mountain Kings can be counted upon to rally behind any banner that stands between freedom and the ever looming shadow of evil.

Now, of course this is what was in Warcraft 3, and with the introduction of Mountain Thane as a Hero class in The War Within, they had to open it up for more than just Dwarves, to which I’m perfectly fine with.

HOWEVER, when Blizzard goes around talking about how they are always trying to exemplify “class fantasy” with every decision they make with regard to all classes, I feel they’ve talked themselves into a corner with this one in particular.

The inclusion of Mountain Thane fits perfectly between Protection and Fury. But not Titan’s Grip Fury. It fits with Single-Minded Fury.

Wielding both enchanted warhammers and hand axes, these fierce fighters live to test themselves against worthy opponents.

Both those weapons mentioned are one-handed weapons. There’s no way to get around that if they want to continue with this idea of “class fantasy”.

When I made this character back in Vanilla, it was inspired by the Mountain King hero of WC3, as well as Thibbledorf Pwent, the Battlerager from RA Salvatore’s Drizzt series of books. I had a “class fantasy” I was going for, and Blizzard gave me the opportunity to play it.

Then the Death Knight came along, and MyStErIoUsLy we were given Titan’s Grip while they had the option to also be a DW 1H Plate class. And from that point on, Single-Minded Fury suddenly became a named “option”, and the default way to play Fury Warrior was permanently changed.

With the introduction of the Mountain Thane as a Hero Class, I allowed myself to get excited. Why? Because one massive thing that Protection and Fury share are the ability of wielding one-handed weapons. It made sense that Slayer shared between Fury and Arms, with their ability of wielding two-handed weapons. And it was a neat idea for Colossus between Arms and Protection to have a 2H/Shield combo. But Blizzard had to mess that one up too. Instead, your size is increased by 5%? Really?

I had this image in my mind of seeing talents in the Mountain Thane tree giving increased bonus damage to one handed weapons so it was something Titan’s Grip players wouldn’t want to be a part of. Giving us double the stat bonus (or whatever the math actually is) on 1h weapons so they were similar to their 2h counterparts.

But instead Titan’s Grip shines again by literally taking over the Hero Class of Warcraft 3 I built my character around, and also giving them lightning abilities. The truth of the matter is TG players are just gonna go with whichever Hero Class gives the best numbers, and there will still not be a place for SMF.

So really there are only 2 options for the devs here with regard to Single-Minded Fury.

  1. Make Mountain Thane give bonuses to one-handed weapon damage to where Titan’s Grip players don’t want to play it. (my personal preference)

  2. Remove Single-Minded Fury from the game, and allow Fury Warriors to transmog one-handed weapons. (everyone other Fury Warrior’s preference)

5 Likes
2

Option 2 is the better one to be honest; there’s always gonna be balancing issues around weapons, and they’ve said out “Titan’s Grip is the competitive option, period.”

If they were to go with Option 1, they’d be caught up trying to balance weapons even more so than they do now, would have to make sure they add 1h and 2h cantrip weapons that are equivalent to one another.

Just make it a mog, or a glyph (SMF Glyph: Makes your weapons look like 1handers, now you can transmog 1handers). Idk which is easier, coding wise, but the mog option has to be the better option in the long run. Less to balance, less to worry, more attention devoted to other issues.

1 Like
3

imagine to tank in wow like w3 mountain kings. Why I’m dreaming again…

4

Option 2 makes the most sense.

Warrior doesn’t have very many “class perks” and aesthetics compared to other classes.
Allowing us to just mog any weapon at any time, and toss glaives into the mix, would actually help with that.

2 Likes
5

Yeah look none of those are really going to happen, even though it’s the best way for cosmetics if they allow open xmog of weaponry between 1h/2h for flavour purposes but they never will due their unwillingness to favour one spec over the remaining others.

The only possibly way for 1hs to be relevant at all is to have the talent removed entirely and a passive bonus made baseline that makes 1h’s stats the exact same as if it was a 2h weapon at 3.6s base weapon speed and primary/secondary stats adjusted accordingly. But even then this has a slim to no chance of happening either.

Realistically if you’re min/maxing you’re only ever going to run SMF if there’s a busted proc weapon in a tier with no other 2h counterparts that makes up for such a differentiation.

6

That’s why they push Titan’s Grip. Shaman, Rogues, Demon Hunters, and Death Knights all dual weild 1h weapons.

Warrior is unique in that they’re the only one who can Dual Weild 2h weapons.

7

And that’s not exactly engaging in comparison to the aesthetics of all those other classes.

We’re bland.
And I’ve been playing warriors and bersekers in most games for 20 years. WoW just has no flair to them. At least give us a class perk.

8

Never said that Warriors couldn’t use additonal aesthetic effects and changes. Simply Titan’s Grip is one of the few ways Warriors stand out from other classes.

I’d love to see Warrior get new melee animations (Rampage is a great example of excellent animation) and additional things that are spec specific.

Ok do you want a cookie or something?

9

You’re absolutely right, though it’s worth recognizing this is a pretty common issue in high fantasy settings, rather than wholly unique to WoW. While some games may handle it better, in a world of Mages, Shaman, Paladins, and Death Knights, it’s kind of hard to to make “hits with weapons good” quite as flashy or unique.

Interestingly, this issue has several parallels to traditional D&D Fighter that Warriors are based on, and their own long-running problem with class identity. The broad-based theme is that fighters are good at combat… in a game in which balance demands that basically everything else be similarly good at some form of combat as well. In D&D, this is somewhat counterbalanced by specific archetypes (Echo Knight) and greater flexibility to customize through wider availability of feats/ASI to create specialized characters, but that doesn’t really exist in WoW. Even in D&D, it doesn’t necessarily result in a stronger combatant than classes with predetermined ability growth, it just gives them a little more choice in how that strength is presented (assuming the games even go far enough to reach that point, which most don’t). Regardless of how they reach it though, at the end of the day, the class identity is still pretty straightforward - they hit things good, but so do about a dozen other archetypes.

Now obviously this doesn’t translate entirely to WoW, but the philosophical underpinning is more or less the same - Warriors are broadly defined by things that most other classes also do, without any mechanism to define how exactly they do it “better” than others, either literally or figuratively in terms of flavor.

  • Warriors are “heavily armored melee fighters,” as are Paladins and Death Knights.
  • Warriors are “weapon masters,” except every martial class also uses weapons in more or less the same way.
  • Warriors are “raging berserkers,” except several classes are just as fast paced and frenetic.
  • Warriors can “shield their allies to protect them from hard,” just like every other tank in the game.
  • Warriors “lead the charge into battle,” except everyone has mobility tools now.
  • Warriors “carefully master their rage to deliver crushing attacks,” which is how every other class resource works too.

There may have been a time where some of these things were true (vanilla), but increasing player agency and their ability to choose different fantasy options (e.g. embracing the fantasy of a Protection or Retribution Paladin) has eroded most Warrior-specific capabilities in the same way that giving everyone competent multitarget tools has eroded the previously Mage-specific AoE niche. From a macro perspective, this is a good thing for the game, it just comes at a cost on the individual level - if Paladins and Death Knights express the same general plate/melee/weapon themes as a Warrior, then their class identity is more or less that of a more magical Warrior.

TL;DR

  • From a mechanical perspective, the wide availability of class/spec choices and overlap of capabilities between them means that mechanics don’t define class identity the way they could or in some cases once did.
  • From a fantasy perspective, like D&D Fighters, Warriors are so broadly defined as “good at fighting” that it’s actively detrimental to the concept of class identity in a game where everything needs to be good at fighting. You can headcanon them as just about anything, but there’s no theme or mechanic that other classes don’t also represent.
  • Ironically, Mountain Thane actually does help alleviate this by shoehorning a fairly specific theme, yet that’s also been one of chief complaints against it. You could also argue that Titan’s Grip is the one thing truly unique to Fury, and yet there’s no end of complaints arguing for a return to one-handers. :dracthyr_shrug:
1 Like
10

And this is the part that I specifically brought up.

For Vanilla and the first expansion, the Fury Warrior was known as the “Rogue in Plate” since we were a dual-wield class (like Rogues), but we wore plate armor instead, and quite often we shared the same 1h weapons as Rogues and Shamans (and I think Hunters might’ve dual wielded at the time? I don’t remember).

Then Wrath of the Lich King came out and they introduced the Death Knight. Overall, we know of Death Knights as “fallen Paladins”, which is why TWO of their specs are 2H. But then they also got DW as an option. And instead of trying to differentiate them from Fury (which shouldn’t’ve been any kind of problem considering they have spells and a pet sometimes), they changed the Fury Warrior instead. There was literally no reason to do that. In fact, it would’ve made a lot more sense to give DW Death Knights Titan’s Grip and explain it away by their unholy strength allowing them to do so. They literally have TWO specs that use a 2H, so why couldn’t their 3rd spec also use 2Hs, but two of them?

My entire gripe was that they just decided after 4 years, to just change what Fury Warrior was.

I feel like outside of the OG Enhancement Shaman (who could off-tank with Rockbiter Weapon, or used a 2H for massive Windfury procs), no other class had a core change as hard as the Fury Warrior did. You could argue Feral Druids did since they literally split them into 2 different specs (Feral and Guardian), but they were turned into 2 different specs entirely. Why can’t the Fury Warrior be split into 2 separate specs?

The Fury change happened in patch 3.0x. The Feral-Guardian split happened in patch 5.0x. They waited literally YEARS to make these key changes. There’s no reason they can’t split SMF from TG as two separate specs. I’ve also suggested before they make the SMF spec more of a support class with Warcries helping our teams if we can’t do great damage.

11

You’re half right, but perhaps only half.

  • The Rogue in plate expression became commonplace in TBC, and may have had some reference to weapons, but was applied to Arms builds as well, because non-PvP Warriors wore fairly little plate due to how bad its itemization was (although the introduction of role-based tier sets helped a great deal). Even after, they typically wore up to half leather/mail through Wrath, which is exactly why the armor specialization bonuses were added in Cataclysm.
  • Fury didn’t exist as a functional spec until Patch 1.6 turned Bloodthirst into an actual attack, and ultra slow 2h weapons were still dramatically better until Patch 1.8 normalization. The giga-powered Heroic Strike spam we know today was atrociously bad back then (we even used to call it Heroic Slap) - its damage had to be buffed several times, offhand queueing wasn’t discovered for about 6 more years, and damage/rage generation was lower across the board since (despite our best efforts of the time) the game was not nearly as min/maxed as it is today.
  • Even then, it wasn’t until the loot revamps of Patch 1.10-11 that Fury itemization started to pick up (a lot of people forget how much iteration Vanilla WoW went through), and it was still underplayed - most servers only had a handful of semi-capable raiding guilds, high impact 2hrs had very little loot competition (whereas Rogues were utterly dominant), and Fury was largely disregarded in PvP due to the lack of Sweeping Strikes & Mortal Strike.
  • Because the Classic Warrior Meta didn’t exist until many years later on private servers, the vast majority of “DPS Warriors” at the time were actually 3rd or 4th off-tanks. Rogues were the real powerhouses of the day, and most semi-serious raid groups were built to juice them, meaning even if you did come across the rare Fury/Prot (Nihilum used one to tank Crypt Lords on Kel’Thuzad), they were mainly setup to bring Improved Demo & Battle Shout while waiting for their turn to off tank, which Arms/Prot couldn’t do.

My point with all this is to emphasize that, for the vast majority of the player base, dual wield Fury was not really considered a “real” playstyle until sometime in TBC. Even then, Arms was generally preferred (with a few exceptions: it was more popular among second-string tanks and the extremely rare cases of Warriors with Warglaives).

That isn’t to say nobody could have played and fallen in love despite its flaws… but it paints a very different picture to the one you’re telling, in which a much-beloved specialization was cruelly torn apart and reimagined - the reality was that Fury barely existed and Blizzard was struggling to find a way to make it interesting and compelling.

Hunters did, but Shaman couldn’t dual wield until TBC.

I think this is a lot more nuanced than a one sentence retelling would suggest. Every class and spec saw evolution throughout those years; gaining new abilities and capabilities was a defining hallmark of each WoW expansion.

It’s also kind of disingenuous to suggest that going from 2x 1hrs to 2x 2hrs was some fundamental core change for Fury - all aspects of balancing aside, it was (and still is to this day) a largely cosmetic difference. It’s certainly not the level of change of Combat becoming Outlaw or Survival becoming a full-fledged melee spec.

You say they “waited years” to make these changes, but that implies they had the foresight to envision those changes in the first place, whereas in actuality WoW has always been a continually evolving game. Blizzard struggled with getting players interested in Fury throughout virtually all of Vanilla and even most of TBC. Titan’s Grip was created in response to that as a means to give Fury a unique identity inspired by the much beloved D2 Barbarian, and kind of hit a home run for them - it’s hard to overstate how popular that talent was and how popular it helped make Fury.

  • Ironically, TG was actually a lot weaker than using 1hrs when first introduced during the Wrath pre-patch, due to the excessive +15% hit penalty, which was reduced and then removed entirely shortly after the full expansion launch.
  • Cata introduced SMF to re-establish loot parity, since otherwise DKs were the only ones using offensive strength 1hrs (and tank loot was itemized differently), and with a few exceptions SMF was on par or even better throughout Cata and MoP, with TG ~1% ahead in WoD… but Titan’s Grip was massively more popular, and so when the time came to introduce artifacts in Legion, it was a pretty clear winner.
12

If I remember correctly, legion was going to be the return of SMF as their artefact was going to be a pair of one handers however due to the insane outcry after that initial announcement at blizzcon, blizzard changed them to be two handed weapons instead easily evident by how low poly the weapons actually are compared to others.

Honestly they just need to make the SMF talent baseline and balance it to be equal to TG at all intervals to make both camps happy.

13

Unfortunately, equal will never exist in this game. It’s simply a fact of the matter that something will always come out ahead, however slight, and as long as those differences exist and are measurable, people will care about them.

Since that is the case, the best situation for everyone is one in which the go-to option is as noninvasive as possible. For the past many years, that’s been TG (although I don’t really like that its soft-gated behind choosing Arms loot spec, since the option isn’t very visible to newer players).

I’ve been lobbying for a transmog option since Legion was in development, but since that is apparently something Blizzard is still unwilling to commit to, the current paradigm (whether SMF is a talent or baked into the baseline dual wield capability) is the best one for the game as a whole… even if it’s not necessarily any specific individual’s favorite one.

14

Well there is one way to make them equal, remove SMF entirely. (hold the pitchforks)

Fury’s Titan’s Grip now has the following passive effects.
Allows the use of 2h weapons in both Mainhand and Offhand.
Makes 1h weapons the EXACT same stats as their 2h counterparts of the same ilvl, 3.6s same str/stam and secondaries.

Which then allows people to stick to simply 1h weapons if they want the 1h mog and 2h weapons if they want the 2h mog while not having an extra caveat for mog that would upset the rest of the playerbase.

Although if they were to go the transmog option, would be cool if it was introduced to every single spec so we’ve got more agency on cosmetics and animations.
Sure would be cool to use a 1h weapon model and 1h animation rig for Arms/Ret/Unholy/Blood as an example for a different flavour of animations. But that also messes with being able to judge what is what at first glance, but in a world (of warcraft) where they’ve got onesie cosmetics and leeks as cosmetic weapons i don’t think that’s an issue anymore.

1 Like
15

That’s been suggested before, but it more masks the problem than fixes it. What it really does is expands the pool of weapons and opens them up to awkward situations where Fury can exclusively combine Fyr’alath + Gholek. While some people may think that’s a neat “feature,” I don’t think solutions that cause new problems are the best kinds of solutions.

We also know there’s going to be someone who comes in kicking and screaming about the difference between 2.6 and 3.6 swing speed weapons, as we’ve seen plenty of times before. :roll_eyes:

Frankly, this is the main reason they’ve not done it for Fury.

  • Give Fury 2h ↔ 1h tmog and now Frost DK wants it too.
  • Give it to Frost DK and now Enh Sham wants it too.
  • Give it to Enh Shaman and now Casters want mh/off ↔ staves too.
  • Give it to Casters, and now tanks want 1h + shield ↔ 2h + shield too.
    and so on.

Are any of these bad things? From a customization and personal expression standpoint no, absolutely not.

But from a gamewide perspective, its an extremely big change with a lot of long-term ramifications that the developers could never backtrack on. It also contributes to that continual erosion of theme, which got us to this point in the first place, so its not at all surprising that it’s a rabbit hole the designers have been unwilling to go down.

16

But as you said, we were given 2H to make us different to DKs, and since we can do 1H or 2H, and DK could only ever DW with 1H, they shouldn’t feel a reason to whine about it. Because as you said, IF it is then given to Frost, then it has to be given to the next and the next.

17

I did not say that. You said it in your initial post.

It also doesn’t change my point. Whether justified or not, opening up transmog restrictions like that would start a chain reaction, and it’s not at all surprising that Blizzard is not interested in going down that particular rabbit hole.

18

On my warrior main, I’m perfectly happing using TG over SMF, so I didn’t care that much during Legion/BfA when SMF was temporarily removed. I was using the weapons I wanted.

It’s a different story with my primary alt (frost DK). I’ve thought about this a lot more from the frost DK perspective as someone passionate about using a 2h as frost (where Legion/BfA kept me from using my preferred weapon type, which was thankfully restored in SL). On my DK, I can hardly look at a 1h weapon after Legion/BfA, I never want to see one drop for me (my loot spec is set to unholy), and I never want to have more than one weapon equipped. I didn’t realize how important having a 2h weapon equipped was to me (as a frost DK) until the Legion pre-patch. The reason why I’d like to see SMF work for those that prefer it is the experience of being in a similar situation during Legion/BfA and how awful that felt.

There’s a passive armor proficiency skill that gives a bonus if all plate armor is equipped (5% str in this case). Could a similar passive for weapons work for fury that incentivizes using 2 weapons of the same type (1h or 2h)?

On my DK, I wouldn’t necessarily want it unless there was a guarantee that I would be still be able to equip and effectively use the same variety of weapons I can use right now. I know I’m speaking as just one person who enjoys 2h frost and cannot stand dw frost. Transmog is not a substitute for being able to equip and actually use the weapon type I prefer. I feel very strongly about that after Legion/BfA. If there was a guarantee that I would always be able to equip and effectively use a 2h as frost, then I’d be fine with xmog between 1h/2h weapons, if it ever happened (which it sounds like it won’t happen based on what you said).

19

No disrespect, but this is exactly why the problem will never be solved. Someone is always going to have a different preference and insist that their arbitrary preference is more correct than everyone else’s.

Players will never be happy so long as they’re unwilling to compromise, no matter what does or does not happen.

1 Like
20

Feral Druids were split into Guardian and Feral. But they were both Feral first. Talking about this being a “compromise” is as if Feral Druids were never split, and they just said “You can still play as a Cat, but you’ll do more damage as Bear, and Cat will never be competitive, but you still have a choice”.

It’s not a real choice. It’s not an actual compromise.

1 Like