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.
