This thread is dedicated to leaving feedback on Warriors in Midnight. Look in this thread and in the Midnight Alpha Development Notes for adjustments and bugfixes made throughout the testing period.
Please note that off-topic or inappropriate posts will be strictly removed.
Apex Talents
Many Apex Talents are available for playtesting and may be selected using specialization tree points in the final specialization tree node. The current User interface (UI) is temporary for playtesting purposes and will be replaced with a final UI later in development. As with any test cycle, we will be adding more Apex Talents to the test over time and not all will be available with the start of the alpha test.
To help us refine Apex Talents, please consider the following questions as you playtest:
How gameplay-impacting, exciting, and fantasy forward is your Apex Talent to you?
Are your Apex Talents and new Hero Talents meeting the approachability goals laid out in our Combat for Everyone in Midnight article?
Are there cases you would consider not selecting your Apex talent?
Does the Apex talent disproportionally favor a particular talent build or Hero Talent tree?
For feedback regarding the changes on making the combat system more approachable for players of all skill levels, leave your feedback in the Combat Approachability feedback thread.
Thank You
We greatly appreciate all your feedback and are very excited for you to test out all the changes in Midnight!
Since Dragonflight, all three Warrior specs have been overloaded with cooldowns most of which come from the Class tree. The Warrior class tree is also focused far more on damage-dealing and survival than offering interesting choices and new utility Warriors can bring to groups. Weâre taking a fresh look at the Warrior class tree in Midnight and looking to make the tree more interesting with more unique effects that Warriors can bring to content.
Arms
Much of Armsâ damage has from aligning damage increase and high damage cooldowns together, and the loss of damage from not doing this correctly every time can be very high. Weâre keeping focus on Colossus Smash as Armsâ most important damage cooldown, and adding some new talents to customize it for different fights. Weâve also removed some of Armsâ modifiers to the next use of an ability, such as Martial Prowess, to make it less complex to determine the best rotational ability to use. Finally, weâre improving Sweeping Strikes to keep Armsâ solidly in place as a champion of two-target cleave damage.
Fury
In Midnight our goal is to refine Furyâs core builder/spender gameplay and resolve some pain points. Weâve added some powerful Execute talents to make conditions about when to use Sudden Death less complex for players who enjoy it. Weâve added some bonuses to make Critical Strike a more appealing stats for Fury Warriors and added some new AOE talent options. Weâre also reinforcing Bloodthirst to make it a reliably satisfying button to press and create a rhythm to Furyâs rotation. Lastly, weâre simplifying some of the rotation conditions involving Enrage and major cooldowns like Bladestorm.
Protection
Weâre pleased that the major spec work Protection received in Ghosts of Kâaresh has been successful, so weâre comfortable letting things settle a bit more. Most of the changes Protection has received are due to several talents moving to the Warrior class tree work. In Midnight, weâre positioning Thunder Clap to be the primary AOE threat tool, and focusing Revenge towards dealing additional damage with your excess Rage. To that end, Revenge has been changed to allow the Warrior to choose which version best suits their needs and content, and to allow us to better tune it for different content types.
Reading the intro post here I have to say if you were pleased with how Prot Warrior played at the end of TWW then something has seriously gone wrong.
I copied my character over from live so it had hero/myth gear. Went into Cinderbrew Meadery follower dungeon so it was on level for level 80. I had 38% haste - this is important because the rotation felt a LOT slower than live, like night and day difference. I also had a lot of dead GCDâs where I had no buttons to press due to cooldowns. That rarely ever happens on live.
Even worse! I had trouble with threat. Iâm not like the worldâs best player or anything, but I got my Ahead of the Curve with my guild, have successfully timed some M+ 12âs. One of the reasons I actually switched to main warrior this expansion (away from paladin) was because I wanted to try M+, and I felt warrior had the better toolkit for that. On paladin I struggled to keep threat on huge pulls but warrior was easy⌠so as you can imagine Iâm very unhappy right now.
I can live with losing my preferred CD of Thunderous Roar. I donât like it but I can live with Last Stand becoming a passive. What I canât live with is not having buttons to press - I like pressing buttons. It makes me feel more in control, more impactful I guess? Like Iâm doing something and making a difference. This total slowdown of Prot Warrior feels awful. I love Prot how it is on live at the moment, itâs a lot of fun and I imagined I would continue to main it into Midnight, but right now Iâm not so sure.
Since itâs a regular topic on Warrior Discord, I wanted to mention it here. Iâm not sure if this is the right channel to post about it, but Iâll make a contribution nonetheless.
Maybe Iâm asking too much, and the color and animation palette for Warrior is naturally not as versatile as for other classes since magic is obviously not available. But especially when you look at Frost DK, Ret, and DH, just to name a few examples, our animations look very sad. Mountain Thane was a good start and is really nice to look at, and the audio effects are also great, but well⌠Both Slayer and Colossus are very underwhelming in this regard. We can only hope, but at least a decent animation for Heroic Strike would be a start The Apex talent, which looks like a normal slam, is very disappointing. I hope atleast its just work in progress.
Arms is pretty good direction - i think slam/heroic strike need cooler animation
Fury is horrible - stop forcing bleeds on fury its not assa rog⌠remove bleeds completely and go back to fast paced rampaging gameplay, thats what fury is supposed to be..its close to perfect in TWW S3 but you ruined it completely, like fire mage
The mobility aspect of Championâs Spear seems a bit of a miss for me. The leap is 40 yards range but the spear itself is 25 yards. If you move forward while you throw the spear by the time you can leap to it youâre almost on top of it anyway. 25 yards leap would be still useful but it takes too long to execute at that distance.
Iâd like if Javelineer applied Hamstring on Heroic Throw against player characters. Would make the talent more valuable on its own, as it stands now there is little to no reason to pick it up for PvP if you arenât also going for Wrecking/Shattering Throw as well.
Not a new talent by any means, but Frothing Berserker has never seemed like a particularly good talent for me? Itâs, on average, a 2% rage refund. You could delete it and nothing of value would be lost, itâs just tax you have to pay to pick Overwhelming Rage.
Arms
Feels really good! I was skeptical about Slam but Heroic Strike blends into the rotation nicely. The only issue I have is that the spec is pretty GCD locked now that Slam is the sanctified filler, which leaves very little room to press Rend, and pressing Rend against single target feels pretty bad now. Bloodletting always applying Rend on Mortal Strike, or on Mortal Strike critical hits would help with this.
Small edit: Iâve seen people asking for a fancier animation for Heroic Strike and Iâd like to second the motion.
Fury
In general I think the talent tree is pretty good. Rampaging Berserker feels off though, itâs a talent that changes the way you want to interact with Reck, but it actively makes it worse. Maybe do something akin to Slaughterhouse: have Rampaging Berserker stacks increase Strength per use of Rampage without refreshing the buff duration? IDK, I just feel neither this nor last iteration of the talent is it.
Apex talents are problematic, you have no buff start of fights
Then it requires high uptimes or its gone
Its not working fine in mythic + since you are loosing the buff between pulls
Its not rewarding for pressing reck on CD cuz you might greed it for more stacks of primary
As a class that has a CDR system this apex doesnt make sense
Capstones are not rewarding and they make more complex into the spec (we are NOT pressing execute on Thane, RA adds more buttons into our rotation since we have rampage as prio following by execute for slayer and Tclap for Thane)
Many talents can be merged in, addressing one, raging blow amplifiers are doing almost same thing
Oh yeah forgot to mention, since Fury needs to pick between Bladestorm and Avatar, which means no more root/slow removal on recklessness+avatar it will be a meme spec in PvP, you are just amplifying his biggest weakness roots and slows.
Ok I tried out warriors again. My previous complaints about the glacial slowness/dead GCDâs still stand but itâs not quite as bad as it was. Itâs now more terrible, than totally unplayable. I donât know if it was a bug or if blizz has fixed something. I still find it worrisome because I am level 80, in copied level 80 heroic/myth gear, with 38% haste, facing level 80 mobs. The argument âstats diminish while levelling, once you level up/get more haste itâll feel betterâ doesnât feel like it really applies. Which makes me wonder whether the slowness of the rotation is just how blizz wants it to be?
Anyway! Even if the awful slowness/ridiculously reduced apm (seriously every class I have tried on beta, the GCDâs feel faster than warrior) gets fixed Iâm still considering not maining Prot Warrior next expansion because of the Apex Talent. (I mean I donât know because I do love how warrior played in TWW so much, itâll be hard to break away if goes back to feeling like it does now in TWW).
Apex talents are our big new shiny thing right talent/ability wise? We got Hero Talents in TWW which gave us new buttons/visuals/ways to play. In Midnight we are getting these Apex things. Warriors one though is so boring!! I canât speak to the power of it, and Iâm sure mechanically it is fine, it builds on our primary abilities and sure, fine, whatever. It feels like itâs pretty passive and will just happen during normal gameplay, but again whatever, I donât care, but maybe because it is just ânormal gameplay buffedâ I canât even tell when it activates.
Visuals matter to people. This new shiny thing (apex talents) has zero sizzle for Prot. The DH one can call down void meteors, paladins have beams of light shooting out. Why canât Prot Warriors, I donât know, summon a purple lightning bladestorm type thing, or do a huge roar like we had a ghost dragon on Thunderous roar, or make us double in size or something. Apex talents feel like they should give us a âhero momentâ when we do the big numbers and it feels super satisfying, but visually Prot Warriorâs falls totally flat.
Itâs a foundation AoE mechanic, not a niche modifier, Gating it behind Rampage-Side talents forces MT-Fury builds into suboptimal paths, requiring Ragin Blow and Improved Rb just to unlock AoE keystones. This undermines build flexibility and punishes AoE-focused players.
Talent Reallocation
Swap positions of:
Cruelty, Bloodcraze and âWrath and furyâ â replaced with:
Improved WW
Rampage Ruin
Meat Cleaver
Move Bloodcraze to the current position of Massacre
Merge Massacreâs passive into Executionerâs Wrath, consolidating execute-phase modifiers and freeing up tree space
Swap Vicious Contempt with Deep Wounds
Put Bloodborne back to the old position below Coold Steel, Hot Blood
This can not be true, while all the community is complaining for bad apex talents on fury, you choose to nerf the extend time by 1 sec as a solution
This apex is useless for reasons we explained before and i will explain again
1- its hard to maintain specially in non raid environment
2- basicly fury starts with 0 stack at start while everyone is using cd + potions + bloodlust
3- its against the work of anger management while you want to greed more stacks for better burst or any damage takens in fights
The Apex talent, which looks like a normal slam, is very disappointing. I hope atleast its just work in progress.