It’s funny how people treat being shot by a musket as dealing more damage to you than being lobbed by a fireball to your chest. Or at least I’ve noticed that in emote battles. Most people will avoid gunshot wounds in combat seemingly to the last end, but being cut at, smashed, thrown, set ablaze or frozen into a block are all seemingly preferable options.
Or it’s like with mind/mental based attacks that are often brushed off with “My character’s willpower is very strong”, except that’s everyone. Most people can’t even stop themselves from smoking, but they can resist eldritch horrors being directly uploaded into your mind.
It’s not helped by the fact that there are a number of folks who roleplay that their firearms can penetrate through any kind of armor, be it fantasy metal, or fantasy magic, or any kind of fantasy anything. It’s the less direct version of simply being upfront about the fact you don’t want to engage with someone whose ideal vision of emote combat is a Sniper Elite v2 killcam, written by someone whose entire joy out of fantasy writing is trying to solo it with a realistic automatic firearm like a character that’s self-aware he’s in a fictional fantasy world.
I will have my character gibbed by someone with a cool as hell fantasy firearm, but if you bring a Mosin Nagant into a fantasy fight and start talking about how ‘it’s chambered in (real bullet denomination) and thus can penetrate every kind of armor or wards there are,’ I, and many people out there, will simply decide that the rifleman in question will simply have to deal with: A) Never landing a body shot; B) Logging out and downloading Call of Duty: Warzone from the same Battle.net launcher as Warcraft’s; or C) Engage in the fantasy universe they pay fifteen a month to write in, in specific.
But again, not everyone is like this, and I am sure the inverse can be said about folks with armours that are immune to all types of damage - but regardless, probably not much related to the warrior talk, given how the vast majority of them use neither firearms nor spells in that sense of the word.
A single Arcane Blast splatters people over the pavement, leaving behind little else than a bloody pulp in the lore. Downside is that this is extremely mana costly, because you’re essentially unloading your mana. Khadgar, as an apprentice, could only perform 5 in a row.
A Frostbolt explodes inside of the target and skewers them inside out with hundreds of icicles. Whatever organs you think you had before, you now don’t.
A Fireball flash burns people into an unrecognisable shape, with the victim unable to take more than a few steps before their screams cut off. In the hands of Medivh, the fireball disintegrated the victim instantly into a cloud of ash.
All of the above feats are depicted against orcs and worgen in the novels and comics who are noted for being extremely resilient. I think I’d rather get hit by a bullet.
AHHHHHHH IM GONNA ARCANE BLAST AAAAAAARRGHH I’M BLAAAASTING AAUUUURGH
Yeah and then you see a warrior like Barnabas Grell, literally, as he’s being supressed by a torrent of fire from a mage, simply pull out his shield, advance on the said mage and even the odds.
Magic is also very inconsistent. Sometimes it seems to do little more than slap someone in the face, other times it burns them down to the last atom.
This is easily explained using older lore rather than new lore. The streamlined retail experience did away with spell-ranks that demonstrate increasingly effective (and thus more costly) versions of each spell. An archmage may be able to lob a lot of rank 1 frostbolts that are equivalent to minor icicles being flung at a heavily-armored target and it’ll not do much but it will slow them down (as frostbolt debuffs for a slow).
But that same Archmage could then switch out to Frostbolt Rank 10 that would, as Telaryn said, be capable of piercing into the target and then exploding into hundreds of tiny ice particles that skewer the target through the piercement in their armour. Similarly, there’s a reason higher-level enemies have increasingly high resistances that let them shrug off or negate lower ranks of spells. This is pretty important to keep in mind for magical combat in WoW.
Because he’s a fantasy warrior and not just a dude with a sword and shield being called a warrior. The same fire mage, and Barnabas, in the very same comic, single-handedly assault a Scarlet Crusade base at the height of their power and nearly wipe them out, with the entire enemy base having to work in conjuction to defeat just the two of them.
Fantasy classes are cut above the rest from anyone else in terms of power. Varian Wrynn two-shot a fel reaver ‘with just a sword’, Tirion Fordring one-shot Frostmourne with ‘just a sword’, but there is no way in blue hell that John (Conscript That Can Sort Of Swing A Sword And Block Arrows When Commanded To) will be able to do anything even vaguely ressembling that just because the silhouette is vaguely similar enough to a warrior or paladin.
If common people really were as strong as the playable classes are, most quests around the homelands of the playable races wouldn’t be about them practically begging you to do all the feats you do - long, long before the ‘Champion of Azeroth’ storybeat ever became a thing.
It depends on the race honestly, I once RPed a Belf warrior who could augment her martial skill with some basic spells. I’d not necessarily do the same for an Orc or a Tauren, but I might for a Nightborne.
Warriors don’t need magic, it’s proven time and time again. But there’s no reason why magic can’t be added ICly.