You think you do, but you don't

This just in; based on some posts in the past week or so, as well as discussions in Skyhold, I feel it may be beneficial to give a PSA. Warrior specializations, including arms, fury, and protection, do not scale in any special way with stats over the course of the expansion.

They did not scale special in Battle for Azeroth, they did not scale special in Legion, or Warlords of Draenor. In Mists of Pandaria, fury scaled exceptionally well, but only due to specific changes made in patch 5.4, and only for that patch.

They did not scale special in Cataclysm, but did in Wrath, and to a lesser extent Burning Crusade and Classic, due to how the damage : rage formula worked at the time.

If you are confused, please do ask questions.

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Remind people that tuning also hasn’t happened yet, so all this “omg arms is bad. omg fury is bad. blahblah” is irrelevant as well.

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I’m confused, are you saying they don’t scale meaning at the start of the expansion (or around there, getting to the max ilvl) that’s pretty much it as far as growth goes?

Like spriest got better in bfa towards the end of each raid tier because of stacking crit and haste.

I need a little more clarification if possible.

Also, are you drezlawuz the other level 20 troll race who used to be on the warrior forums?

He’s referring to the extremely persistent myth that “warriors are always bad at the start of the expansion but then they get really good later because scaling.” Which hasn’t been true in more than ten years, given warriors haven’t had a weak start since Wrath, and haven’t had exponential scaling since rage was normalized in cataclysm.

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Of course not, he was permanently banned, and making a new account to get around actions against an account is against the ToS.

Specifically, as Caargon put it, the myth that warriors start weak, and end strong. Be it patch or expansion specific.

It’s ever prevalent, whenever one of the two specs is in the lower-half of dps specs.

Recent examples, at the start of BFA fury was undertuned. 6 weeks into the expansion, it received a 6% damage buff.

Despite this, for the entire previous 6 weeks, as well as a portion of the beta, and for months after, you’d often see people here, in Skyhold, or on various other forums (reddit, mmochamp, etc) stating that, not to worry lads, soon enough fury will start to scale and become stronger than arms!

Obviously, this was not exactly the case. Fury didn’t scale, it was simply a bit weaker than ideal, received a buff, and was from that point on somewhere between good and outright strong the rest of the expansion.

More recently, we see it on the beta with arms. Currently, arms is undertuned, without offering comment or opinion on it’s design. As a result, we’ve repeatedly seen people stating, not to worry, arms always starts out slow, it just needs time to scale.

Neither spec does specially or exceptionally well with stats. The grand majority of specs, don’t really scale special, and haven’t for years.

Part of Blizzard attempting to better balance the game, while giving the semblance of individuality for flavour, is by removing extreme cases of interactions with specific stats.

Mages, warlocks, spriest, warriors, are all examples of specs that once upon a time scaled extremely with stats, at varying times in WoW’s history. But while some still do slightly better than others, for the most part most specs are relatively uniform in how they gradually grow stronger with more stats.

I think I answered that well enough. If not, let me know and I can try again.

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Is this a Glad stance thread?

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Not yet, give it a day or two tho.

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Yes, yes he is.

Nope, this was a real good thorough answer. Thank you!

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Thanks for the reply!

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How long must we suffer this state of warriors?

Till blizzards grants to clemency

…what?

…what?

IMHO warrior scaling in Wrath was because of Armor pen cap.

That sure was lovely while it lasted.

That was fixed before 3.2 dropped.

I thought armor pen remained a thing until cata prepatch. I definitely had 100% armor pen in ICC and RS.

That said, it wasn’t a warrior thing exclusively. Many classes had it as I recall. What other classes didn’t have was the constant loop of damage increasing resource gen increasing damage and on and on and on…it only stopped when you literally couldn’t spend any more rage, and we were well in the lead, even w/o Shadowmourne.

It was, it just wasn’t ridiculous like in the first ~1/2 of wrath. A bit before ToC was when it was capped.

Well, armor pent over cap was, where you could take armor negative. Armor pent in general remained the hardest scaling stat for classes that benefited from it, with warriors being the prime example. By ICC people could hit 100% passive or just under it, which was insane.

I know this already.

And to be technical, it didn’t actually scale that hard in later Wrath. As the scaling was nerfed shortly before ICC was released.

Sounds like warrior just isn’t for you my man. Just reroll flavor of the month subtlety rogue since that’s obviously what you’re after. Google current top DPS sim and roll that class. Sounds like a fun experience.