...Now with 100% less Inner Rage debate!

Up-to-date talents:
http://www.wowtal.com/#k=.9vn.warrior

Previous thread / Inner Rage discussion:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=26435296359&sid=1&pageNo=1

NEW THREAD!!! (This one's getting bloated)

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=26726035459&postId=267233812876&sid=1#0

Recent changes:

Build 12942 (Codename Fluffy)

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Q u o t e:
Arms
Heroic Strike is now trained at level 14. Up from level 12.
Sweeping Strikes now lasts 10 sec with a 1 min cooldown.
Improved Hamstring now immobilizes the target when you reapply Hamstring. Still cannot occur more than once every 30/60 sec.

Fury
Heroic Leap now has a 8-40 yards range, up from 8-25 yards.
Commanding Shout now gives 20 rage, up from 10 rage.
Battle Shout now gives 20 rage, up from 10 rage.
Execute is now trained at level 16. Up from level 14.
Single-Minded Fury now also let your Heroic Strike hit with both weapons.
Bloodsurge no longer procs from Raging Blow. Proc chance increased from 7/14/20% to 10/20/30%. Duration increased from 5 sec to 10 sec.
Meat Cleaver no longer increases the damage of Cleave and Whirlwind by 10/20% at all time. Proc chance increased from 30/60% to 50/100%.
Booming Voice is now a Tier 2 talent, down from Tier 5. Reduces the cooldown by 15/30 sec and increases the rage generated by 5/10 of your Battle Shout and Commanding Shout.
Improved Execute has been renamed to Executioner and revamped - Your Execute hits have a 50/100% chance to improve your melee attack speed by 5% for 9 sec. This effect stacks up to 5 times.
Intensify Rage is now a Tier 5 talent, up from Tier 2. No longer reduces the cooldown of Bloodrage.

Protection
Taunt is now trained at level 12. Up from level 10.

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12857 (Codename Ninja)

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Q u o t e:
Arms
Sweeping Strikes now lasts 30 sec instead of lasting 5 attacks. Cooldown not changed yet.

Fury
Inner Rage now increases damage caused by all abilities by 15% (Down from 50%) and increases rage costs by 50% (Up from 15%). Values are just inverted and this is most likely a bug.
Die by the Sword is now a Tier 4 talent, down from Tier 5.
Meat Cleaver is now a Tier 5 talent, up from Tier 4.
Improved Execute is now a Tier 2 talent, down from Tier 3.
Enrage is now a Tier 3 talent, up from Tier 2.

Protection
Bastion of Defense critical hit chance reduction now only applies in Defensive Stance.
Blood and Thunder is now a Tier 1 talent, down from Tier 2.
Hold the Line is now a Tier 2 talent, up from Tier 1.

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12803:

None

12759:

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Q u o t e:
Enrage's duration is up to 9 seconds now.
Battle Stance: Increases damage dealt by 5%. Reduces damage taken by 5%.
Defensive Stance: Decreases damage taken by 10%. Increases threat by 45%.
Berserker Stance: Increases damage dealt by 10%.
Cleave was added to War Academy.
Cleave now works like HS and shares a CD with it as well. It was taken off of SMF as well.
Drums of War is now a 1 point talent that does the same that 2/2 did.
Inner Rage is learned at 83 now and is 50% inc damage/15% inc rage cost. Looks like Gushing Wound is gone for good.
Strike: 20 rage, 3 second CD. Deals 55% weapon damage. Arms tree, but doesn't have a stance requirement. Guessing this is what warriors will have at level 1.

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Anyway, there wasn't a good warrior thread up that doesn't pertain to Inner Rage, so let's have a go at one. If you wan't to talk about IR, go to the previous thread.

If you have something on your mind about the trees, how we're looking so far or whatever, post it!





My thoughts:
I'd say that overall, warriors are in quite a good place atm. We're certainly looking more polished than other classes, and are doing better than we were before our first pass. That said, there are a few questions that I'd like to pose, and a few comments that I'd like to get out:

General

- It's clear that your trying to make prot-offsecing viable for PvP (gag order and shield mastery in T2). This is only really a choice for fury tho, seeing as Warrior PvP NEEDS Pircing Howl, which is still T2 fury. Conversely, a Prot PvP warrior might want to subspec Arms to get second wind or drums of war, but likewise have to go fury for PH. I know it's been thrown out there, but how about making it baseline?


Arms

- As they stand, War Academy and Lambs to the Slaughter are all fairly uninteresting talents. War Academy is just a flat damage buff to some more situational moves and LttS is really just 10/20/30% damage sometimes. LttS in particular could use some snazzing up. 33/66/100% chance to have rend tick instantly as well?

- What is the direction of Wrecking Crew? It's much weaker than on live, only proccing on MS crits as opposed to all (which realistically was 100% uptime). Also, Enrage should be unreachable for Arms, or WC should be made better than Enrage in all cases. It feels lame to have a T2 talent be better than a T6 one (especially since they are exclusive)

- Imp Hamstring, while technically less RNG biased, is now random in its usefulness. There will be times when you don't want to use the Proc, but have to because you need to HS the target, and then be left wishing you still had it. Can we get some degree of control over the proc somehow?


Fury

- The low uptime of Colossus Smash in PvP for fury could potentialy be an issue compared to Arms. How about making Imp Execute also increase it's duration by 1/2 sec.? One longer CSmash compared to Arms many but breifer ones could be exelent PvP flavor

- Bloodsurge's proc is still very short considering that slam is low priority for Fury (Below BT, RB and CSmash), and that it's more likely to proc when your using RB, which eats even more GCDs. Prehaps double the length of the proc to 10 sec?

- Any chance of making Die by the Sword also deflect the next 1-4 spells cast at you?

Prot

- Impending Victory feels clunky. Why not just make VR useable against targets @ 10/20% health, but when used this way causes a 6 sec CD or something?

- It might be me, but spending a GCD to apply the first rend for Blood and Thunder seems like it would be annoying. Also, the first part of Thunderstruck could be a hellua lot more interesting. Just sayin'.

Some of those glyphs don't look correct. Colossus Smash is a major. Hamstring doesn't do that anymore. Shield Wall provides 60% damage reduction but on a longer cooldown. That's just off the top of my head.

Prime glyphs aren't going to be exciting in a "change up your rotation" style. We want primes to be unambiguous dps (etc.) increases so we figured they might as well be easy to understand rather than something so convoluted that everyone would just go to a fansite to see which 3 to pick.

The majors are more interesting, because they are either not dps increases at all, or dps increases in ways that are tricky to math out. We think players will debate and geek out more about which majors to use, and with the new glyph design, swapping them out once in awhile isn't very painful.

Minors are basically convenience or fun.

We don't want glyphs to change rotations. We feel that was a mistake in LK. Talents should affect your rotations, and glyphs should just provide a little bit of customization and power. We fixed some class problems with glyphs in LK, which was an easy solution to do at the time, but now is the time to undo all of that and let the classes stand on their own without the glyphs.

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Q u o t e:
I'm not sure I agree with this. I can understand wanting to keep it simple, but like someone else said, if you're going to have 3 glyphs that we're always going to have with no variation, and none of them have any effect on the rotation... couldn't we just stick with minor/major glyphs, and just remove the prime glyphs entirely?

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A few things:

First, it would be a weird world in which a warrior say could glyph Charge and Battle Shout but not Mortal Strike. It might make sense to savvy players who thought through it, but I'd wager you'd also see a lot of "Why don't they make glyphs that affect the buttons I care most about? Blizzard is dumb." (And to be clear, the point of that is not to defend ourselves against agitated forum posters, but that if something in the game is confusing like that in can get in the way of having fun.)

Second, gaining power when you level up is fun. Hitting a milestone where you get a noticeable damage bonus is fun. There is also some mildly interesting decisions about which prime glyph to use first. In other words, don't view everything through the lens of the maximum level player.

Third, not everything in the game needs to be a nail-biting decision. We don't for example really want Fury warriors to stress about whether to choose Raging Blow or not, nor we do we make it particularly challenging to choose your weapon enchant. Sometimes easy decisions make players feel more comfortable rather than every potential decision having a host of invisible pitfalls. This isn't an issue of catering to the dumb players -- it's more about there being a few safe places in the game. [I feel nearly certain after re-reading that paragraph that it's going to be hard to understand and I will end up having to clarify it for months to come.]

Finally, I'd argue that the popular glyphs on live today already were the no brainers because in most cases they led to a consistent dps increase (for dps specs of course). When everyone uses those glyphs, then you aren't making some interesting decision about how to use your abilities -- you're just doing what every other warrior out there is doing. The only way to deviate from that is to have two glyphs that affect your primary abilities in two totally different but equal ways. That's a very tall order, because more than likely we'll end up having to constantly adjust around that. "Encounter #4 in Grim Batol is unfair to warriors who use the Glyph of Furious Mortal Strikes instead of the Glyph of Meaty Mortal Strikes." What I mean is that we end up having to support multiple play styles within one tree. We're willing to do that to a limited extent (the TG vs. SMF Fury warrior for example, or the FFB mage), but it's hard enough to develop 1-2 viable rotations per spec. We don't want every important glyph bifurcating that rotation even more.

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Q u o t e:
When enrage first changed to a proc on hit, a lot of people said the issue was fixed, so I figured I'd wait a few builds. But now we're seeing the same problems crop up again in the complaints being voiced in the beta forums. The unreliable uptime results in differences between TG and SMF, and makes RB far too much like a random proc. Damage varies wildly as you get a 20% buff that comes and goes at random, and this makes us heavily RNG reliant, if we have a fight with good RNG and we end up with near 100% uptime our damage will be absurd. A fight with bad RNG and our damage is abysmal. The current rotation is basically everything we should be trying to avoid as far as random effects go.

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Damage won't vary wildly over the course of a fight, just in the second to second snapshots of where you are. You also have plenty of on demand enrages if you just need it to happen right then. Our combat model (for nearly every spec) involves having to manage random events. We see every day players who want to minimize the influence of randomness in their rotation, but they're looking for an experience like Street Fighter, not an RPG. Fury in particular is too static on Live, so we're committed to mixing it up a little.

Don't worry about TG vs. SMF balance yet. Just pick one and see how the rotations feels with your chosen playstyle.

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Q u o t e:
That said, increasing the duration of Bloodsurge to 10 sec would go a LONG way in making fury feel less frustrating when not enraged

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Yeah, we buy that. I think it also makes sense that Raging Blow not proc Bloodsurge, since that's not when you need an increased proc chance.

The Thunder Clap portion of Heroic Leap was the subject of much derision on this very forum. If you liked it, you should have stuck up for it then. It's gone now.

That sounds harsh, which isn't my intention, but it is really, really common on these forums to see a concerted effort among some players to say "Change X" and then when we do, other players come out of the woodwork to say "But we liked X!" I can't suggest a great solution to that except to pay attention to the kinds of discussions that are happening, and chime in if you disagree with something strongly.

On Bloodsurge, a lot of specs pay the price for hitting an ability that procs at the wrong time: Art of War (Exorcism) and Hot Streak (Pyroblast) to name a couple. We don't want it to be trivial to achieve maximum dps.

We had a problem with Heroic Leap's high arc because it could propel you through doorways, essentially showing you all of the interior geometry of the world, which looked pretty unpolished. It's the kind of thing we can keep trying to improve though.

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Q u o t e:
I can't even begin to fathom why these sort of things are being discussed/decided on the live forums and not the beta forums where everybody actually has access to the mechanics.

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They are of course, but the public forums still get a lot more posters overall. Feedback shouldn't be limited to just people in the beta, though we do put slightly more emphasis on players who have tried something out in the beta compared to the "My cousin said that X ability isn't any good" level of feedback.

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Q u o t e:
Instead of addressing the REAL ISSUES at hand GC turns around and makes an assine comment about thunderclap which was not really what people giving feedback were complaining about. This not only shows a disconnect between the playerbase and the dev team, it worse shows a lack of understanding and to be frank incompetence on many fronts.

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Take a break, angry person. This is not the kind of feedback we're looking for.

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Q u o t e:
I think a lot of the problems being expressed with regards to heroic leap is that when it was first announced as a player targeted ability, it was complained about. As a response, we saw it lose its shared cooldown with charge and it became an ability that uses a targeting reticule rather than targeting an individual. I know that I pictured that allowing us to use it to jump across chasms, up on top of tall buildings and ledges, and other such things that could be useful in PVP or even certain PVE encounters (I can't think of any offhand, but I'm sure they exist). I am pretty sure I was not alone in believing that would be the case. We basically thought we were getting a rocket pack from Gunship on a 2 minute cooldown. Even with that, the cooldown seems pretty long for what it does, but hey, we can live with that as long as it is cool when we can use it.

Then the first warriors start hitting 85 and what do we see? A ground targeted charge that has all sorts of issues with LoS, can't take you up a level, can't go across gaps, and honestly looks like it is even more restricted than Charge/Intercept. So what is cool about it? It causes damage (a rage free 100% weapon damage isn't terrible, but it's hardly 'massive damage' as we were promised, and with the minimum range of 8 yards you'll only get it once in PVE, and that once will be during the period when you are most likely to pull aggro, during the initial pull.), and it can be targeted anywhere, so you can use it as an escape.

Now here's the problem: Neither of the two uses of this are particularly worth a 2 minute cooldown, or really not even the 1.5min talented cooldown. Additionally, the uses are mutually exclusive. You will use it as a bonus charge with damage OR as an escape. It's almost like the ability doesn't know what it wants to be.

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This ability has a lot of history because we tried it once before. For the Cataclysm version, we received a lot of feedback originally that Heroic Leap just didn't distinguish itself enough from Charge etc. any more. This is a world with Juggernaut and Warbringer after all. We discussed that feedback and understood where warriors were coming from, so we redesigned it so that players could choose where they would leap to. We think the current implementation has lot of different uses. No, it can't get you over canyons or up to ledges, but how often will those case legitimately arise? The potential exploits were the ability that unfettered would be enormous, and reducing those is what let us offer Heoic Leap as it is in the first place. It's a useful ability now. We can experiment with visual effect and height and that sort of thing. I understand from reading this thread that there are players who would design a different ability were they in our shoes. That's fine. This is a subjective business.

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Q u o t e:
Yeeeeeahhh... That's what it was in WRATH Beta, and it was BROKEN. It let you get to wherever you wanted to, even places the developers wanted you to have to work to get to. They removed it entirely, at that point.

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Yeah, the current implementation has 90% of the functionality with 1% of the abuse potential. I'll take that trade. :)

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Q u o t e:
Man remember people usually come here to post about something when they are unhappy with it. Not so much when they like it.
That's not harsh but a bit funny and sad, its like the idea that players have to be paying attention to what's happening on the game and be ready to lobby for what they like or else it might be removed because of other players.

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Well, to a point, sure. That's why we try and emphasize debate here. We're just going in circles if the proponents of A all come out and make a compelling case so we make a change, and *then* the proponents of B all come out in response of a different, or even the original, design. I'm just pointing out that this sort of thing happens a lot. I don't have a great solution here (but I don't think it's kind of built-in voting system or anything like that).

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Q u o t e:

TL;DR: let Blizz balance the game. But by all means, give feedback on the forum, just don't whine

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Yep. Sage advice.

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Q u o t e:
I just want to take a minute to expand upon this. Because this comment just really stood out to me and made me think "You know what, he's right!". Currently Arms Warriors are the ONLY melee in the game that are using a cast time attack. This is supposed to be something that makes arms warriors feel different and special. But it doesn't make any sense whatsoever as a physical strike.

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Remember, "the ONLY" is a positive in our mind, not a negative. :)

Slam is a controversial ability for sure, but we know there are Arms warriors who considered the height of skill of their class to be when they had to line up the Slam swing time in between their Mortal Strikes. It's not for everyone, for sure, but with Improved Slam and Bloodsurge and being able to move, it really isn't asking too much of you. Yeah you'll screw it up sometimes, but it won't be a catastrophic dps loss when you do.

We've seen just a ton of feedback in the past few weeks on lots of different abilities for different classes that essentially comes down to "X is too hard to use." We think overall that WoW's combat is pretty forgiving. We really don't think this is the time where we need to be making everything much harder to screw up. Simple is good. Confusing is bad. But abilities or rotations that are challenging are good for the game to a point.

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Q u o t e:
seriously, you shouldn't be changing abilties based solely on forum feedback, this should be something that you as a designer feels makes the game better, and for you to say that you might not be changing an abiltiy if a few people had stood up for it is sad.

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We ultimately make the decisions we think are right for the game. We like to make informed decisions, which is where community feedback is valuable. There are players who think we listen to the community too much and those who don't think we listen enough.

I think we've spent enough of this thread on the role of feedback for now. I made my point, which is that it's helpful when you stick up for something you like in addition to criticizing the things you don't. Let's get back to warriors.

Adding a secondary effect to Heroic Leap, like a Thunder Clap or letting you get out of roots might be a good role for a glyph. We don't like to glyph new high level abilities immediately because then players don't appreciate what the glyph does for them, since they have never used the ability unglyphed. It's something we could consider for a future patch.