Warrior runes haven’t felt like SoD runes at all so far. It’s all been bunch of enrages and X% dmg boosts and copy-pastes from other xpacs, not the big, iconic ones but the stuff you get on the way to make your character slightly more impactful. Now they leaked P3 upcoming runes and it’s all pretty much the same boring additions and modifiers and gladiator stance doesn’t seem to be like WoD, from what i can tell. Warrior needs some more flavor to compete with other classes, both in terms of performance and gameplay satisfaction, especially in PvP.
Considering how much locks, mages, priests and shamans got, and the already 1 dimensional style of classic warrior, there’s tons of stuff they could’ve added to make it fun. Ppl hoped for bladestorm since p1, but other stuff like heroic leap, leech, anti-magic build, death knight inspired kits would, imo be great stuff to have. Even utility spells like aura banners and recruitment banner that can summon your party similar to lock portal (perhaps by having to talk to a guard, if they don’t want to give away the whole warlock fantasy). Meta lock rune makes a caster be an off tank, based on one of the most broken glyphs in MoP i think, Shamans are now the jack of all trades master of all. Alliance got windfury, Horde got blessing of kings. Clearly they wanted to make something new out of classic, that was the whole selling point of SoD and obviously they’re not very concerned with balance. What i don’t get is why they’re so selective about it. Why are some classes allowed to have too much fun, at the cost of everyone else, and some to have less than average fun? Why are they encoraging unconventional playstyles for classic standards on some classes, but are extremely conservative changing others? I am baffled how this company has every resource in the gaming world and 2 decades experience but still manages to launch half-assed variation of an already completed game that doesn’t get much more over the course of 5 months. I just don’t know if it’s laziness or lack of courage and creativity
I looked at some of the updates for tank (my alt)
And i just felt sad.
Warriors aren’t getting a lot of new toys, I suspect, because they had the toys and power to begin with. Almost every single one of Warrior’s buttons are for them to do more damage themselves, or take less damage themselves, their kit is built almost entirely around them, and they’re the only class that has unlimited resource at a certain tipping point for spamming buttons to do more damage. That’s why they always end up at the top of the meters by the end of the phase- with the exception of High Armor bosses such as in Gnomer.
I certainly was not advocating for them to get anything in P1 or P2 due to an admitted hatred for the class and its complete dominance of Vanilla in every iteration of Vanilla/Private Server/Classic for 20 years- and the arrogance that accompanied it…as an Enhancement Shaman main myself
That said, at this point I think they should have some cool things like Stormbolt for a short-ranged stun or something like that. (I would suggest heroic leap, but I think that’s actually a game limitation with Classic not programmed to have anything flying controlled through the air outside of a preset flightpath, and a teleport would be too off-brand.)
Though maybe a janky thing that just throws them haphazardly and stuns an area where they land? Would be a heck of a skillshot, but hilarious.
While i know what warrior is capable of, i think it’s stupid that the reason why they left them so lackluster is because of how things used to be back in 2004. I myself was never a Vanilla player bcs i was a toddler back then. I did watch Classic era stuff, but still it’s been years. My point is i personally don’t care about the balance matters of the past and no one should at this point. Blizz themselves advertized SoD as a new experience and ironically for warrior it is not. And i don’t wanna offend you or any reader but WoW should not be treated like a 40 year old classic Andy’s own country club. I am aware of what the playerbase is but i mean come on, it’s weird to balance around the experiences of different versions of the game, 20 years ago. But i guess players are at fault here with the “back in my day” mindest, that’s why Wow is adapting so poorly in general. At the end of the day, they didn’t necessarily have to make Warrior be exploding on the logs, just make it feel more fun and smooth. Hating warrior so much that you don’t want anyone to have fun playing that class is unreasonable don’t you think?
As a side note imagine implementing heroic leap that works like grenade lol. You appear at a target location after a second but there’s animation of your model “jumping” which is just an illusion. Janky af. When i think about it tho, GMs and some extreme examples of bots have been able to fly (more like swim) in any point of space. There actually might be a way to code leap into the game
Is there a TL;DR?
Two words:
exponential scaling
Warriors are a ticking timebomb because of how the rage positive feedback loop works. Blizz’s hands are tied on giving them anything too crazy or they’ll take over the game again.
Barring absurd armor values, warriors are going to be climbing back towards the top of the damage meter again this phase despite the runes they have.
Yet every rune they add is % damage and makes the situation worse.
Blizzard - “warriors scale to well due to the damage/rage/damage loop and are difficult to balance”
Also blizzard: “here’s 50% flat damage modifiers”
Tbh this this fully a poor dev team problem.
The better the class the more bland the runes. If they move everyone equally nothing changes and the game gets too easy
garbage excuse thats just called lazy balancing. And if anything they just made them more boring and even more op at 60 with all these passive modifiers thats bound to scale crazy at 60
Warrior runes are just as boring as playing the class itself in era. Yet they’ll still probably be top of the meters.
Just wait for NURSE WARRIOR spec recently datamined.
because baseline warriors are overpowered in vanilla so they are trying not to make the problem worse also with warbringer warriors main counter in pvp is less effective against them and in pve they are destined to be top dps so all you have to do is wait a few patches for this to happen no matter what other classes get wars will still outscale them unless they go out of their way to break other classes like they did with the soon to be nerfed lake of fire rune for destruction warlocks hunters were also completely overpowered and still did not put out the damage that dual wield fury warriors do on low armor targets and gnomer has extremely high armor to try to combat the scaling that physical dps classes deal i think runes like gladiator stance will probably do a lot to make warriors interesting since it will presumably allow you to devastate in all stances disarm and use retaliation shield wall and recklessness without a stance dance as long as you have a shield equipped i do think warriors should probably get shattering throw at some point but paladins are crybabies so im not sure blizzard will consider it until they make paladins as faceroll as enh was in s2 anyway thats just my 2c
Just wait until level 50. We will likely be using a 13-28-0 build. That’s right, no 31 talent ability… the only class going backwards.
More creativity in their april fools joke than their actual warrior sod runes.
Rune of bloody armor
When rend deals damage it applies a stack of sunder armor. If the target has 5 stacks of subder armor (or equivalent debuff) rend now refunds 10 rage on use.
This makes warriors able to easily apply the debuff with 1 gcd, and when they have an open gcd after that tend can be added to the rotation as it will be free.
Warrior is just a generic non magic class that aspires to become something else in the long term. Its your fault for choosing the adventurer arch type sorry
Have glad stance
Be deep prot.
Literally lock someone out of dealing damage to you for at least 6 solid seconds
Devestate
Shield slam
Sword and board
Mor3 shield slam
SHIELD SLAMMMMM
Did you mention shield slam? Cant forget that one, its a big deal.
Glad stance will probably end up being really good with the right build.
I’m still staying Arms though. I’ll get Overpower procs off Rend ticks next phase. That’s about it.
I hate how the conversation always devolves into PVE for runes. I think there is some room for pvp/solo open world runes that could be added. I don’t think a lot of warriors are asking for PVE buffs based on most of the conversations I have seen. I think adding a spell reflect rune or bladestorm (maybe takes place of sweeping strike?) would appease most of them. I think lawnmower memestorm has always been the most fun ability on warrior in my opinion. There’s obviously some wiggle room, but I don’t understand the warrior hate on the forums for the open world experience. Clearly you get the lol just roll a shaman/paladin/mage/hunter, but it would be nice to give them some tools to create a more enjoyable experience. It’s frustrating to me in the same way when people tell hunters to stop complaining about being forced to go melee. Again it isn’t hard to add “fun” abilities and prevent them from becoming OP in pve/pvp even with scaling.