Feedback: Warriors

In Development Midnight Beta Test
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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!

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Class

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. We’re 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 Arms’ 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. We’re keeping focus on Colossus Smash as Arms’ most important damage cooldown, and adding some new talents to customize it for different fights. We’ve also removed some of Arms’ 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, we’re improving Sweeping Strikes to keep Arms’ solidly in place as a champion of two-target cleave damage.

Fury

In Midnight our goal is to refine Fury’s core builder/spender gameplay and resolve some pain points. We’ve added some powerful Execute talents to make conditions about when to use Sudden Death less complex for players who enjoy it. We’ve added some bonuses to make Critical Strike a more appealing stats for Fury Warriors and added some new AOE talent options. We’re also reinforcing Bloodthirst to make it a reliably satisfying button to press and create a rhythm to Fury’s rotation. Lastly, we’re simplifying some of the rotation conditions involving Enrage and major cooldowns like Bladestorm.

Protection

We’re pleased that the major spec work Protection received in Ghosts of K’aresh has been successful, so we’re 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, we’re 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.

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For anyone wondering about Single-Minded Fury (the ability to use 1-hand weapons) going away for Fury Warriors, please stay tuned for future updates!

We have plans in the works that didn’t make it in time for the initial Alpha test. We’ll provide more info with a forthcoming test build.

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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 GCD’s where I had no buttons to press due to cooldowns. That rarely ever happens on live.

Even worse! I had trouble with threat. I’m not like the world’s best player or anything, but I got my Ahead of the Curve with my guild, have successfully timed some M+ 12’s. 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 I’m very unhappy right now.

I can live with losing my preferred CD of Thunderous Roar. I don’t like it but I can live with Last Stand becoming a passive. What I can’t live with is not having buttons to press - I like pressing buttons. It makes me feel more in control, more impactful I guess? Like I’m 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, it’s a lot of fun and I imagined I would continue to main it into Midnight, but right now I’m not so sure.

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Since it’s a regular topic on Warrior Discord, I wanted to mention it here. I’m not sure if this is the right channel to post about it, but I’ll make a contribution nonetheless.

Maybe I’m 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 :frowning: The Apex talent, which looks like a normal slam, is very disappointing. I hope atleast its just work in progress.

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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

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Class

The mobility aspect of Champion’s 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 you’re almost on top of it anyway. 25 yards leap would be still useful but it takes too long to execute at that distance.

I’d 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 aren’t 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? It’s, on average, a 2% rage refund. You could delete it and nothing of value would be lost, it’s 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: I’ve seen people asking for a fancier animation for Heroic Strike and I’d like to second the motion.

Fury

In general I think the talent tree is pretty good. Rampaging Berserker feels off though, it’s 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.

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Fury doesn’t look good

  • 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
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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.

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Ok I tried out warriors again. My previous complaints about the glacial slowness/dead GCD’s still stand but it’s not quite as bad as it was. It’s now more terrible, than totally unplayable. I don’t 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 “stats diminish while levelling, once you level up/get more haste it’ll feel better” doesn’t 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 GCD’s feel faster than warrior) gets fixed I’m still considering not maining Prot Warrior next expansion because of the Apex Talent. (I mean I don’t know because I do love how warrior played in TWW so much, it’ll 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 can’t speak to the power of it, and I’m sure mechanically it is fine, it builds on our primary abilities and sure, fine, whatever. It feels like it’s pretty passive and will just happen during normal gameplay, but again whatever, I don’t care, but maybe because it is just ‘normal gameplay buffed’ I can’t 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 can’t Prot Warriors, I don’t 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 ‘hero moment’ when we do the big numbers and it feels super satisfying, but visually Prot Warrior’s falls totally flat.

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Fury

  • Improved Whirlwind must be baseline.
    • It’s 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 “Wrath and fury” → replaced with:
      • Improved WW
      • Rampage Ruin
      • Meat Cleaver
  • Move Bloodcraze to the current position of Massacre
  • Merge Massacre’s passive into Executioner’s 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
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Protection - Colossus

The Phalanx apex talent is a bit clunky to play, with a Colossus needs to use Revenge to generate Might stacks, having to use Thunder Clap to trigger the Apex talent makes a monotonous and slow rotation.

Protection - Mountain Thane

With that being said, my idea was to play Mountain Thane to enjoy the most of the apex talent, however, with the Storm Surge talent change, i was expecting to have less uses of Thunder Clap, it seems like the talent is bugged since the cooldown reduction is still halved. In the end even with the Anger Management change, it seems more engaging to play with the Phalanx Apex Talent as Mountain Thane during Avatar.

Conclusion

As a conclusion, i would probably not use the Apex talent as Colossus, as it reduce the flow of interactions with the world. It seems fair to use as Mountain Thane however the main idea of having a 1 condition talent for a passive upgrade is not very engaging and fun.

Thank you

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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

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You said for Midnight:

Gameplay with High-Action per Minute – this can be physically demanding and uncomfortable.
Situations where lots of ability-modifying effects are active at once, causing an array of buttons on your action bars to be highlighted, giving a sense that all of them are urgent.

Meanwhile, as a Fury Warrior:

  • Rampage gets highlighted
  • Execute gets highlighted
  • Bloodthirst gets highlighted
  • Raging Blow gets highlighted because of the reset mechanic
  • Thunder Blast gets highlighted

That’s five buttons glowing at the same time. Where exactly is your philosophy taking place here?

Even as MT-Fury, with reset mechanics stacked on reset mechanics, the supposed reduction in high APM simply doesn’t happen. Instead, the spec pushes us into the very overload you claimed to avoid.

Make Thunderclap replace Raging Blow, and have Raging Blow talents scale with Thunderclap. That way you’ve already reduced one button, cut down on redundant highlights, and moved closer to the philosophy of lowering APM without gutting the spec’s identity.

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Just wanted to comment that Rend feels absolutely horrible to press as a Fury warrior. It has no place in our already very high APM rotation that feels natural.

I do not know why you decided to bog down our rotation with a bleed management mini game, that is arms thing. Actually, why do I as fury care about bleeds at all?

It just feels like the direction for Fury warrior is very confused right now. Instead of playing into its strenghts (a very fun and fast core rotation), we are just tacking on stuff that should never be there in the first place.

Hoping to see it removed in a future build and either replaced with a more fun button to press, or just simply backed into our kit through Raging blow or something like that.

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Rend doesn’t do all that much for Arms either, I’d drop it completely but there are talents you have to take in Arms that buff Rend (Bloodborne 2/2 is a requirement pick for Battlelord, and I can’t imagine playing Arms without Battlelord).

At this point I feel like Rend should just become a passive that applies the bleed on Thunder Clap and Whirlwind (would fix the discrepancy in rotation between Slayer and Thane Fury).

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It only seems to work and flow well for Mountain Thane, along with Thunder Blast procs from my own experience. Thunderclap applies Rend on targets.

But on Slayer it absolutely feels clunky and becomes a bleed management mini-game. If Whirlwind applied Rend it would semi-fix it, but single target rend managment would still be an issue.

I would not miss Rend if it disappeared for Fury

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So how much DPS lose you get when you don’t play with rend?

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Who knows, it’s not Simmed yet (or rather, if it is, it’s behind closed curtains, since we’re in the middle of tuning phase right now either way).

Afaik Rend in it’s current iteration isn’t worth taking for Slayer Fury. People please realize it’s on the Class Tree, so as usual, Blizzard managed to put something there which only has niche value for one specc while it has some minor value for the other two. You can skip it on Slayer, you can take it on Mountain Thane.

There also really isn’t any bleed management happening surrounding it even if you were to take it on Slayer. You Bloodthirst every 8 Seconds at LEAST to keep up the Bleed Damage Buff from Bloodborne and you would literally just press Rend if it’s about to fall off. We gained some more bleeds, but none of them outside of Rend atm. warrant tracking and none of them require significant (if any) managing.

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Protection Warrior – Beta Feedback

Class Tree

Overall damage feels noticeably low, which makes initial threat generation and sustained aggro significantly harder compared to other tanks. The class remains highly dependent on Challenging Shout, despite having offensive cooldowns on 45-second timers that do not provide enough support for early threat. For comparison, a Paladin can comfortably open with Divine Toll, follow up with a mass taunt, and repeat the pattern without friction.

The redesign around Champion’s Spear combined with Heroic Leap offers limited practical value. The earlier mass-grip-style interaction was considerably more engaging and impactful for group control.

The second-to-last talent row is overloaded: too many points are required, forcing a difficult choice between offensive options and essential utility talents such as Rumbling Earth, at a time when the spec already struggles with holding threat.

Apex Talent

The apex talent does not feel engaging or rewarding to play around. It tends to flatten the rotation into a repetitive Thunder Clap → Shield Slam pattern. Revenge functions mainly as a proc trigger, which disproportionately benefits Mountain Thane.

In practice, Mountain Thane almost hides the apex mechanic entirely, while Colossus requires tracking tools to avoid losing Phalanx damage reduction uptime. The experience ends up feeling unimpactful rather than thematic.

Protection Tree

Locking Shield Charge behind Fueled by Violence feels unnecessarily punitive. In many builds you could normally skip it, but here it becomes mandatory, effectively forcing players to jump over an entire node.

Deep Wounds is isolated and extremely undertuned. Even with bleed-enhancing talents, it only feels remotely valuable in Colossus because it can be triggered via Demolish, and even then its contribution is minimal.

Spellbreaker continues to feel irrelevant. It provides little benefit in real gameplay scenarios and consistently fails to justify a talent point.

Mountain Thane

The playstyle shows little evolution compared to The War Within Season 3. It actually feels slower and more frustrating, even though the new talents preserve the spirit of the previous season. As a result, there is not much depth or novelty to highlight.

Colossus

The apex talent is difficult to activate consistently because the priority naturally shifts toward maintaining stacks of Colossal Might to maximize Demolish damage and bleed value. This often conflicts directly with the need to use Thunder Clap for threat generation. Balancing the two ends up feeling clunky.

Without Mountain Thane’s enhanced Thunder Clap, the spec struggles to generate sufficient initial threat, consistently putting DPS players at risk during early pulls.

Demolish can behave inconsistently in terms of movement restrictions: sometimes it fully prevents horizontal repositioning, and other times vertical knockbacks remain possible during the cast.

Dungeon Testing

Tested primarily in +12 keys. Survivability is heavily challenged. I do not yet have every dungeons mobs and casts memorized, but even accounting for that, I frequently felt close to dying. Last Stand and Battle-Scarred Veteran reached roughly 80% combined uptime in Algeth’ar Academy, which seems excessive. Additionally, Last Stand often triggers simultaneously with Battle-Scarred Veteran, making the automatic proc feel redundant or wasted.

Raid Testing

After running all available Heroic bosses, damage output appears significantly low compared to my co-tank, often resulting in a ~3K DPS gap. This discrepancy increases further when adds are involved.

In terms of survivability, everything is working smoothly. The toolkit feels almost overloaded with defensive options. For example, it is possible to survive the Judgment → Tank Buster combo with Shield Wall and a Spell Reflect alone. Combined with a defensive trinket, the mitigation cycle becomes extremely secure.

Conclusion

Protection Warrior has a decent defensive foundation, but its damage, threat generation, and overall gameplay fluidity behind other tanks in the current beta. Several talents feel restrictive or underwhelming, and both apex designs struggle to provide meaningful engagement. With better tuning and some structural adjustments in the talent tree, the specialization could reach a healthier and more satisfying state for both dungeon and raid content.