From testing and simming, here are the conclusions so far:
- Dual Wield Fury will deal most damage in extreme conditions, just like the previous phase.
- Gladiator deals incredible damage, has insane utility, and no real drawbacks. Unfortunately, it’s most effective when mashing 2 buttons.
- Prot is now in a very good place.
- Arms is far behind, and desperately needs to scale with attack power to be viable.
- Warriors are (still) especially vulnerable in PvP, and need something to help them survive
These are my suggestions on how to solve this. The first 3 are by far the most important.
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Make Fresh Meat improve Mortal Strike instead of Bloodthurst, making it scale with Attack Power.
This way, all 3 spec trees have a way of scaling. -
Add a rune that improves spell resistance (either passive or active), preferably at the Feet slot (so you can’t stack it with Enraged Regen, and so all specs can take it).
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Decrease Devastate damage slightly. Tank Warriors would be fine dealing a bit less damage, and Gladiator would benefit from having to use other abilities than just Sunder, Heroic Strike and Execute. (I realize this will be unpopular, but I think it’s important for balance)
Next are my suggestions to make all playstyles more fun, and all runes relevant:
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Boost Quick Strike and Raging Blow damage a bit. Currently, their damage is irrelevant, and thus they’re never utilized. They could be very interesting, Quick Strike instead of Hamstring for 2handed builds, and Raging Blow as a way to improve 2handed damage, and as a use for Enraged status.
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Make Consumed by Rage and Rampage work better together for Fury DW. I’d suggest making Rampage a passive effect that triggers every time you get Enraged. Could add 10% dmg to the next Slam, Bloodthirst or Whirlwind, for example. This would make Consumed by Rage actually do something useful, and it would make Rampage feel better than just another activated ability on an identical cooldown and timer as Deathwish.
Overall, these changes would:
- Bring Gladiator and Prot down in damage a bit, but it would encourage them to use other abilities than just Sunder.
- It would increase Arms damage, and make it viable and scalable.
- It would make both Dual Wield and 2h specs more interesting to play, with Quick Strike, Raging Blow, CBR and Rampage going from irrelevant to useful.
- It would make Warriors more durable in PvP, which (imo) has been the main reason why they haven’t been much fun in PvP in SoD.
Lastly, I’ll also add that “forcing” warriors to stance dance via the set bonuses is something that will please very few, and annoy most.