How I Would Revamp Warriors

Classes Warrior
1

It’s a public secret that Warriors have massive issues when it comes to gameplay as the class fantasy that’s advertised in no way lives up to what’s actually experienced. As this is just basic gameplay issues, I’ll only go a little into Talents. A spec should work fine on its own and the Talents should just be upgrades to the spec, instead of now where some Talents are mandatory to get Arms to work. Here’s what I would change:

Warrior:

  • 2 uses of Charge baseline.

  • Storm Bolt would be baseline.

  • Unstoppable (Passive) (New): Any Stun, Snare, or Immobilise effects have their duration reduced by 20%. The Troll Racial Flip Out and the Orc Racial Hardiness only adds 5% to this.

Warriors are supposed to excel in mobility and when factoring in their counter mobility they’re the worst class around when it comes to that as they either have to Talent mobility or a stun, which no other Class in the game is forced to do. It’s so easy to stop them or otherwise hinder them.

The Talents Double Time and Storm Bolt are replaced with:

  • Impact (New) (Arms, Fury): The Warrior’s Charge no longer roots the target instead it knocks it down. This counts as a stun that’s off the Diminishing Returns.

  • Bringing the Thunder (New) (Arms, Fury): The damage of Storm Bolt is doubled, and the duration of the stun is increased by 0.5 seconds.

Arms

Arms is where most of the effort is as Arms needs a major overhaul on the mechanical front as the spec is unwieldy and require the right everything to even be workable and even then, it still has a low level of enjoyment.

  • Rage replaced with the resource Momentum, which works mechanically like Rage and Rage sounds like the opposite of what a tactical mind would run on.

  • Return damage to be primarily front-loaded.

  • Momentum is gained in lowered amounts than Rage from auto-attack.

  • Momentum is gained from using Overpower.

  • Overpower no longer increases the damage of Mortal Strike.

  • Veteran Soldier removed. Critting only gives basic Momentum.

  • *Tactician (Passive) (new): In addition to having a 1.40% chance pr. Momentum spent to reset the cooldown of Overpower, it also applies Expose Weakness which is a cumulative, stacking buff of +the previous chance

This makes the effect a “when” instead of an “if.” Which would make it more predictable, which Arms is advertised as being. Right now it’s random.

  • Momentum-generation (Rage) is now smoother which in turn makes it possible to use more abilities. This has the effect that the passive damage bonus from Seasoned Veteran can be lowered.

  • The Mastery Deep Wounds is removed.

  • New Mastery: Overpower: Increases the damage of Overpower by X%

Due to the new Mastery and the Momentum-generation of Overpower the entire spec is now centred around it. Right now it’s this weird mix between Deep Wounds and Overpower. Chain-procs of Tactician make playing Arms a lot more enjoyable as you’ve something to do in between auto-attack.

  • Tactician and Overpower are now a part of the Arms Warrior basic package since the spec is unable to work without either.

  • Vanguard (Arms) (Passive) (New): The Warrior is healed by 1% for each 15/20 Rage used.

  • The effect of Victory Rush has been lowered to compensate for this.

Most DPS specs have a way of adding a tiny amount of self-healing. This way is also thematic for the Arms Warrior as it’s a steady way to stay in the fight instead of gaining a sudden burst of power. A Warrior is mostly about the long haul instead of a sudden burst.

  • Second Wind (New): While the Warrior is below 35% health the effect of Vanguard is doubled.

  • Damaging abilities such as Mortal Strike, Slam, and Whirlwind now costs Momentum (Rage) and generates a small amount of Momentum (Rage).

This feeds further into the idea that once the Arms Warrior gets going, they can continue going. With the abilities, both costing and generating Momentum is reflects that it takes something for Arms to get going and once it gets going it can continue to go forward based on its own momentum.

  • Anger Management removed and replaced with Perpetual Motion

  • Perpetual Motion (New): Every 20 Momentum that you spend reduces the cooldown on Colossal Smash and Bladestorm by 1 second.

More of a name-change to keep in line with the class fantasy.

  • Ravager removed and replaced with Analytical Insight

  • Analytical Insight (Arms) (New): The cooldown of Sweeping Strikes is reduced by 12 seconds and the base chance for Tactician to take effect is increased by +15%*

Ravager is bad and in the grand scheme of things does little for the spec, also the name Ravager implies an emotional desire to destroy something. And letting your emotions control you is something that I would expect of Fury rather than the rational precision of Arms.

  • Hamstring removed and replaced with Heavy Burden

  • Heavy Burden (Arms) (New): “The Warrior lets out a shout that places a heavy burden on nearby enemies.” Nearby enemies are Snared by 50% for 10 seconds.

Yes, this is just Piercing Howl with another name since PH is so superior to Hamstring that it’s annoying to use Hamstring at all.

Fury

Fury is mostly in a good place right now. The gameplay feels smooth and it’s immensely instinctive, which is what Fury is advertised to be. The only thing I would add would be that Rampage added the Mortal Wound debuff else Arms will once again totally dominate in PvP.

Protection

Like Fury it’s a spec that mostly works, it has one glaring deficiency compared to every other tank spec out there in that it can only prolong its own death instead of preventing it. It’s only good because it has some damage, can take some hits and otherwise brings nothing to the group. This is the last thing a tank should want to be known for. As it is now Protection Warriors are the worst tanks by far, to the point where it’s almost detrimental to bring one, for an important part of the content. All Protection really needs is one thing.

  • Vanguard (Protection) (New): The Warrior is healed by 1% of their total health for every 10 Rage they use.

That’s all it would take to make Protection Warriors at least viable for the content where they’re detrimental as it means that bringing them would be less of a drain on resources than before. This small self-heal can easily be compensated for reducing their damage output a little. After all, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

I would also change Spell Reflect, though that’s more of a QoL thing for me.

  • Spell Reflect: Reflects the first spell that the Warrior takes after the use of this ability. In addition, all magic damage is reduced by 15% for the duration of this ability.
5 Likes
2

Brilliant ideas I particularly like the arms changes.

I would like to see arms receive some more ‘tactical’ spells along with what you’ve provided, to make it feel like a true master of weapons.

Brilliant post.

3

I agree with you that it needs some party utility as right now Fury has more and is a lot more selfless than Arms, which is reversed of how it should be.

My approach to design, in the over-arching sense, is that the final product has to resemble a pyramid in the design. The lower layer has to be solid in order to support the layer above it. The basic spec is the bottom level of the pyramid. Make it solid before you start adding the next layer which is party utility. After than you can add Talents and since you have the two layers below firmly planned out you can easier design Talents to interact with the other abilities.

Arms carries the feeling of trying to design everything at once and as a consequence nothing works. The Talents were clearly made in conjunction with the abilities of Arms as you need the right talents to even make Arms work.

4

I’m just curious about the mastery change.

Why not just go back to old arms mastery? just a flat increase to damage of (most) abilities?

5
  1. It’s a boring Mastery. This one is tied to a central mechanic of the spec which oddly enough makes it feel more important.
  2. It’s going to raise Warrior burst to unreasonable levels, which is the cause of the whole DoT thing. It’s an excuse to rein in the burst of Warriors. Which is a rubbish mechanic since every other class has had their burst increased.
6

I have seen Blizzard try and create interesting masteries and majority (almost all, really) of them have either ended up becoming impossible to balance or insignificant.

There’s beauty in simplicity. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel when we have a streak of 4 or some expansions or so where “mastery increases tha damage of x of your abilities” was not only sufficient, it was enjoyable.

I honestly don’t really think burst should be a thing for arms warriors. If you look at any of the expansions where warrior was decent or good/broken in arena, said brokenness either game from gimmicky burst abilities (which were aptly nerfed), but more importantly oppressive pressure damage. Think of Frost DK’s from legion as an example.

I much rather think arms warriors should have high sustained damage with talents giving an option to have a bit of a “burst” window (which in warriors case is the execute phase, not something you naturally pick up), but primarily the focus should be on damage that, if let to connect, will just mow anybody down over time.

That’s how it worked for BC/Wotlk/Cata/Mop/WoD, and that’s how I liked it. Not that you can leave out the utility aspect of it, of course. You need that too.

7

Yes, because someone in charge of those masteries have no understanding of how narrative causality works. Which I’m unable to fault them for, they educated as programmers after all.

So what I suggest is too advanced? Tell me how “increase the damage of one ability by X,” is complicated?

This tells me that your understanding of PvP mechanics is low. PvP, at least organised PvP, is about jousting. Jousting is the word used to describe that you have a small window to make one huge hit. If you only have one hit then a 200k hit does significantly worse than a 100k one.

And the weird game mechanics that benefitted Warriors wildly the fears of those have been transferred to the Warrior class. Warriors are designed based on fears from 2005 instead of the reality of 2015.

8

You run into the problem of potentially frontloading way too much damage to one ability, which is really a plague of the game since Legion for most classes. When that damage is more evenly spread across all abilities, we do not end up having gross offenders where abilities like slam are really uninteresting to press and in fact a dps loss in most cases- Without offering anything interesting (Which is a bit of an oxymoron- You slam someone with your weapon. That ought to deal some damage, no?).

Also if I understood your new way to work out the gimmick we all know as tactician (rather than just removing it), it doesn’t really fix any of the issues with it, and tactician has been universally what’s been wrong with the spec since legion. There are far more reliable and less frustrating ways to generate abilities for warriors, e.g. bleed ticks or use of other abilities, which also promotes synergies between the said abilities that might be otherwise underwhelming.

I’ve been past duelist and could have probably gone higher if I was interested to do so- I only ever really play arena when there’s nice visual rewards (e.g. sets), and duelist happens to grant me all I need. I’ve also played this game since Burning crusade (mainly battlegrounds, duels and the occasional arena), so belittling my point really simply based on experience is not going to work for you here.

Wrong, that’s one way to play the game. RMP is a good example of a “jousting” pvp which plays around creating a lot of pressure for a few seconds. That’s their win condition. I don’t particularly enjoy that kind of gameplay, hence my class roster shines with the absence of rogues and mages for example.

Other win conditions in pvp can involve bruising or out-sustaining your opponent (e.g. rot-comps, tank comps), some are a hybrid of these two (e.g. Turbo).

You can apply this to classes too, to some extent. Rogue and mage are both in the camp of jousting, whereas other classes like warrior, I feel, are more bruiser-y. They should be more about sustained damage ( a little bit of burst damage ), and have tools to enhance that oppressiveness.

More importantly, as the feedback shows, people do not seem to particularly like the gameplay where the game can be decided in 1 second by ridiculous burst windows (e.g. combustion, vendetta, pala wings, etc), but that’s a whole another issue. The pvp seems to shift between sometimes being about more tanky seasons, sometimes more bursty. That’s how it goes.

Could you iterate on this? I do not really understand what you mean.

9

We have that now and splitting Warrior damage between being front- and back-loaded is the issue right now as it makes Warriors objectively worse.

One never means the other.

That’s good, it just makes you good, it in no way gives you any deeper knowledge of the mechanics. A åilot can fly the plane and has only superficial knowledge about how the rest of the plane works.

And this comment shows how little you actually know other than the surface stuff. What has a Rogue and a Mage (most likely specced frost) have in common? They have insane amounts of crowd control. They have no need of jousting because they prevent the target from moving away from the damage.

Example:
There was no attack speed normalisation for weapons on instant attacks, meaning that Warriors with their insanely slow weapons were better in that encironment than anyone else. Meaning that the Arcanite Reaper, a blue lvl 58 axe, were better than any weapon from MC and possibly BWL.

The only thing I think that Blizzard was fully justified in changing at the time was the cap of Intimidating Shout as the Fear Bomb, as it was called, literally crashed entire servers when the Gates of Ahn’Quiraj was opened.

10

I was more thinking of using rend bleed ticks (as was the case in the past), but deep wounds existed long before they were tied into our mastery. In fact, prot has deep wounds as a passive. Arms can retain that without any issue.

Can you please answer without making some cryptic references?

True, but it was you who rose my point as being wrong because of my apparent lack of rating- Which, turned out to be wrong, so obviously you subscribe to the point that now that I ahve proven I do have the said rating my opinion is therefore legitimate but if you do not subscribe to that idea, then your own argument really comes off as trying to simply shut me off for disagreeing with you- Which, it clearly is.

We’re not speaking of utility, we’re speaking of damage. You will also find me -specifically- saying that utility is part of creating opportunities for making that damage, hence:

If you read the posts instead of putting words to my mouth maybe you could actually oppose my points, but you don’t.

Anyway, if you want to include the utility in the discussion (which I suggested already earlier), then warriors also used to have those said utility options to create that pressure.

  • Charge stun baseline
  • Selfheal & defensives (e.g. Shield wall, enraged regeneration, second wind) to let the warrior get the damage going
  • Off global hamstring

All of which helped warriors (alongside the other utility that still exist) to keep their pressure going- Which, has been gradually stripped away. You will notice me only having called you out on the mastery change- Not the proposed utility changes, for example.

This was a thing in vanilla. I’m not advocating for vanilla, I have no idea where you got that idea from, since Mastery didn’t appear to the game until Wotlk (?).

And still, I have no clue what the hell does this point of yours have to do with your mastery proposition being probmelatic?

I also do not think the momentum change is good- Rage is, and has been, a warrior thing since the inception of the game. With class design being paramount (supposedly) in shadowlands, I do not want to alienate fury, prot and arms from one another. If anything, I want them to have more shared talents and abilities, not less.

11

Really? Outside of a dungeon, where most mobs are placed, it’s closer to 1%, inside a dungeon most mobs are affected by slows except a few. I know because PH works when the tank wants to flee mobs when it’s Necrotic weeks.

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In fairness, that’s how it should be in my view- Though again, the damage was spread more evenly among abilities. Even slam was quite high in damage meter thanks to talents like trauma.

Yep, as I said. I think deep wounds can stay, but not as our mastery.

OK, I think I understand now what you mean, though I can not for the life of me understand what does it have to do with slam (which you quoted in the first place).

I think that stats, at best, should be ways to customize what kind of gameplay you want out of your character, rather than something mandatory you need to build toward.

I personally -hate- and -loathe- having to hit “haste caps” (e.g. all warrior specs) in order for a spec or class to be viable and this is definitely a case for warriors since Legion. Which is a bit ironic, isn’t it? Warrior was framed as “all about big hits” but then our resource generation was tied to…Making us as quick as possible. Lol.

Mastery on the other hand fits quite well. It promotes hard hitting abilities, while the scaling of it also makes it so that you are not punished excessively for trying out other stats too- Such as putting more into crit or haste or versa, depending on what you like.

Also our mastery had a strong position since Wotlk all the way till WoD (and really in Legion too, though for the wrong reasons), and from Wotlk to WoD warr was at its best spot.

So it seems to me like whatever gimmicky crap people try with tactician or new masteries ends up just ruining the spec when we have working solution since Wotlk.

Turns out I have experience in organized pvp, so tit for tat.

Then pray tell me what have I gotten wrong? I mean, all throughout your argument you just keep shifting the argument instead of answering my points?

It turns out that some classes are about jousting. Others less so.

Well I mean I seem to have more knowledge than you, I was able to point out that jousting is not used by all the classes (e.g. Shadow priest/affliction warlock vs rogue/mage). Further, as said, your argument is wrong for a much more fundamental reason.

Even if the PVP, for the moment or anywhere els ein the past, is suddenly based around burst meta, doesn’t mean that every single class needs to gravitate toward burst gameplay. In fact, that’s not very healthy at all. Part of the reason why PVP has felt so hollow since Mop/WoD has been that all the gameplay is spun around damage cooldowns and defensives- And whoever runs out first, loses. Not very engaging gameplay.

Now, if you happen to enjoy quick games where games are decided in a few globals, good for you. I don’t. That’s not the same as being right however, as there have been plenty of seasons where burst has been less important (e.g. S1 of BFA).

Well, clearly you don’t because only one of us (me) have been able to bring up examples whilst you constantly instead tell me I don’t know anything while having failed to bring up another argument. Further, you still haven’t adressed the concern about frontloading damage to single abilities- In fact, you completely skipped the point. Why?

That doesn’t seem like “winning” material to me, that seems like you don’t have an answer.

Yeah, as I said so myself:

Hamstring was fine until the GCD was forced upon it. Warriors had hamstring as we know it in MoP and the spec was at best it’s ever been, so clearly it’s not the fault of the snare.

I hate to break this for you but slowing people is -definitely- in the fantasy of frost mages and having slows tied to their damaging abilities is fundamental. Regarding rogues, utility has always been their strong part so that is also alright.

What they do have in excess however these days I feel is survivability and sustain- Unlike in Vanilla for example, rogues are really tanky these days. Which they shouldn’t be. Same with mages.

That’s not a shortcoming of warrior, that’s the bloating of said classes.

Again, this has always been the case and warrior was in the spot of having a melee slow since forever and regardless, warrior was great in pvp until Legion.

True, but warriors used to have strengths of their own back in the day. They could disarm, they could swap stances without cooldown, they could sustain a lot of damage with the passive (and active) healing they had, they had in many ways the strongest melee pressure. Sure, you could out-burst the warrior but he could overpower and mortal strike and at the same time his bleeds were ticking on you and you’d probably die off anyway.

I would know, I played a warr since Wotlk and esp. in MoP there were very few if really any melee save for maybe feral druids that could have any hope of taking on me 1v1. Even with casters with frost mage and destro warlock, if I got the jump on them and timed my reflect right, I was able to close games really easily because no matter what utility they got I got pure damage and disruption on my side.

Ok you cherry picked the worst examples, but you left out demon hunters, feral druids, , priests and warlocks, all of which are either without a slow or have a weak version of it- Which, is totally fine. That’s not their main strength, so it’d be weird for them to have super strong slows.

What would you have instead? Homogenized slows and cc? Yeah, no thanks.

You could actually talent piercing howl back in the day in MoP, and I just didn’t because I’d much rather keep pressure on my opponent than waste a global on an aoe slow. Sure, it had range and in some situations it was the better option, but I had other tools to count for that (e.g. Intervene, banners).

IDK about you but I’d take hamstring in a heartbeat over mind flay slow lol.

No, much rather you can see the downhill start from Cata onwards (in a way) with stances becoming less important and colossus smash appearing as an ability. Since then, colossus smash became gradually more and more important, until it ruined the spec.

MoP gave other things to compensate for the stances, but by far and large Vanilla had nothing to do with arms problems- Mainly because mastery didn’t even exist in Vanilla.

OK, I think I finally understand what you are trying to argue- Which is a bit weird, because I never brought the opposite point up, but you seem to assume I did?

You’re saying that because warriors were ridiculously strong (in fairness, they weren’t) back in Vanilla, that is holding back Blizz from buffing them?

Well, that -could- be the case, only that Warrior had several times since Vanilla shining as the big star. Burning crusade mace spec, wotlk shadowmourne, cata last patch, ALL of MoP, and most of WoD really. Event the 1st week of BFA and Legion were fine-ish (though that’s a bit stupid because it was due to overtuning of their burst, which is precisely what you seem to be advocating for).

If it was holding back warrior development, we’d seen warriors never be strong, but they became far more stronger- Until Legion.

So clearly, that can’t be the main reason. Might be part of it, but certainly not all of it.

…Well, “works”. Yeah, it does. Kind of. Maybe. Not really. Not in rated pvp for sure. Not even perfectly in duels and bg’s but that’s fine.

Yeah only that it’s about as fun to play as taking a waterslide over sandpaper. If I could have pre-legion Prot in any iteration, I’d take it back in a heartbeat.

I think that might be part of the reason, but more largely it’s the damn spec-fantasy thing. Warriors (and hunters) lost the most abilities when transitioning from MoP to Wod and from WoD to BFA, which is why the said classes also feel the most hollow.

Other classes felt the said impact too- Like shadow priests, demo wlocks and many others. So no, I don’t think it’s because they hate the spec or are afraid of it. I think it’s because their design approach has been completely wrong since Legion in class design. Warrior just happened to take a big brunt of the hit, unfortunately.

It seems to me that we don’t really disagree on so many of the issues, but it seems we disagree on the arms design going into future. I want to go back into what made warriors great during its hayday (e.g. MoP/BC), not try another re-invent of the wheel because we have seen how that goes.

13

I said that, you seem to go for “technically correct” instead of having any substance, so I’m quitting any debate now as it’s sless of a debate and more you shouting at me. Grats, you win! I hope your life get any meaning from proving that you’re superior.

14

Absolutely agree.

15

In my opinion Warrior just need to feel like the most versatile melee spec in the game again… Disarm,roots,double charge,stun,recklesness,retaliation,spell reflect, (shield block + revenge in defensive stance),mobillity,BIG overpowers,shield wall, old hp regeneration talents like second wind and Blood Craze maybe something like fury´s battle trance talent baseline for arms and fury ? As warrior you need to have answer for every kind of fight… (sorry for bad english)

1 Like
16

What do you mean, yes balance wise but they have more freaking healing than death knights!

Remove all healing to warriors, keep Victory rush at best

Its immersion breaking reeeeeeeeeeeeeee

17

They need to work first. The things you suggest would solve none of the base problems they actually have.

That would make them flat out unviable when everyone else has some kind of self-healing. I remember the days when I had to eat after every 2-3 mobs.

18

I agree with 100% what Arcana has suggested here.

19

Smart and fast revamp for Warriors for Bfa:

(I hope in Shadowlands they get a big rework , mastery…big hit spec and not bleeds…stances…spells…etc…)

Baseline:

  • Stormbolt
  • Banner
  • Disarm
  • Reflect

Rework:

  • DbtS 2min CD
  • Self healing on Mortal Strike Hit

Done, Warr viable again

Cheers

20

Make em tankier than other classes to compensate, youknow, how mage has a shield instead of healing?