WoW: Forever Warrior Deep Dive - What Changed, and What is Still Needed?
WoW: Forever Warrior Deep Dive - What Changed, and What is Still Needed?
Warriors are quite possibly one of the most, if not the most, iconic classes in Classic. WoW: Forever brings quite a few adjustments to this class, so our Fury class expert Babyhoof dives into everything Warrior - the good, the bad, and what needs to change.
Ever since its rework in the Original Patch 1.6, Warrior DPS has only gotten better and better, both in its perceived viability as well as its power. By the end of the Original run of Vanilla, Warrior had clawed its way into being a respectable DPS class, and by the time Classic rolled around in 2019 was considered the best DPS in the game. The gap between DPS Warrior and every other class was immense, and was incomparable to any other gap between DPS specs across the history of the game, with the possible exception of early Death Knights in Naxxramas during WotLK Classic. As such, Warrior was fully expected to receive heavy changes heading into Forever, and while some of the removals and additions we have seen feel both expected and understandable, others only seem to invite more questions.
Rage and All Its Friends
To address the Devilsaur in the room, Rage Normalization was, in my opinion, a change that was much needed. Rage normalization refers to the change made in Cataclysm where instead of Rage being generated with a formula based on damage dealt with auto attacks, Rage is instead generated with a flat amount based on swing speed, with a bonus amount generated with Critical Strikes. Non normalized Rage was by far one of the most prominent issues with DPS Warrior; gear not only increased your damage outright, but also scaled the amount you could press abilities, leading to a situation where the gap between gear levels was far higher than it initially seemed. This gap could be felt even when leveling; getting a new weapon not only sped you up simply by the fact that you had a better weapon in the first place, but your rage generation would be increased by a significant amount as well.
Rage became a much bigger issue with Dual Wielding, however. Due to a major bug with the way the game recognized attack tables, queuing an "on next attack" ability such as Heroic Strike or Cleave would remove the Dual Wield miss penalty from your offhand while the ability was queued. This meant that a major disadvantage of Dual Wielding, the added chance to miss with your auto attacks, was completely removed, and in raiding content meant that your rage generation was vastly above what it should be. Instead of these abilities becoming a way to dump extra rage, they became a much more common part of your rotation because simply pressing them had a good chance of your off-hand generating more rage than you would spend on the ability. Once again the problem became even worse with gear, and at end game you could simply ignore your rage bar for a large part of the fight unless you got a streak of unlucky dodges. This bug persisted all the way through until Heroic Strike was reworked in Cataclysm, and has finally been fixed in Forever, although we have received the Furious Precision talent to compensate for its loss.
The initial variant of Rage Normalization we received, however, had several significant issues. The first, and most important issue, was that it simply did not generate enough rage. The base formula for Rage generation is expressed as a simple formula, as displayed below:
base = 3.46 x weaponSpeed x handMultiplier (off-hand: half)
swing = base x 1.3 for a two-hander, else base
Credit to The Forever Warrior Github
With this amount of Rage generation, Warrior struggled to keep its abilities on cooldown, and the relatively fluid and active play style it enjoyed before was almost completely removed. Not only did your abilities cost a large amount of rage, you generated it relatively slowly, and your stats were far worse than before — the removal of easy access to Weapon Skill through racials and easily accessible items such as Edgemaster's Handguards meant that you needed more hit to achieve your soft cap than before. Most notably, the rage scaling with gear the spec enjoyed had almost completely vanished — critical strikes in the initial build of Forever did not give extra rage, making the only way to generate more rage to stack Hit %, a design that ran antithetical to one of our talents that already gave us hit on our offhand.
This rework was met with no small degree of outcry — while DPS Warrior had needed a nerf from its 1.12 iteration, this had been far too brutal. The low rate of Rage generation would cause the spec to be incredibly slow in end game content, and go from being a spec with one of the more active play styles to one where you would be expected to potentially press no buttons for ten or more seconds. Blizzard quickly announced changes two weeks after the Beta went live, however — adding a 75% additional rage modifier to critical strikes, before increasing it to 100% the same day due to their internal metrics being influenced by a bug with one of the talents.
An image comparison (Credit to Marrows Compendium) of how our rage generation compares between the 3 versions of Forever and Classic.
This change finally put Warrior rage generation where it should be — enough to press your main rotational abilities on cooldown, not enough to spend the whole fight spending Rage on Heroic Strike, but with a way to gradually increase our ability to press more buttons through gathering Critical Strike, an attribute we must balance with the rest of our gear. Blizzard will need to pay close attention, however, and adjust both our base rage gain and the amount we generate from Critical Strikes in case we are either generating far too much or, in all likelihood, still generating not quite enough.
Talents and Abilities
When compared to some other classes and specs, DPS Warrior gained very few new toys to play with in WoW Forever. Victory Rush is possibly the biggest of these additions, but is mostly a leveling bonus; landing killing blows in end game content is rare, and the spell doesn't hit hard enough to consider it a big loss to be unable to proc it reliably anyway. The other major new addition is in the form of Tactical Mastery now having a baseline component, letting us conserve a small amount of rage when changing stances without a talent point investment.
The Fury Tree in particular is a stark reminder that the class has been significantly pruned down; several of the new talents are added only to compensate for removals of features we had before. Furious Precision only exists to serve as a replacement for the Heroic Strike Queuing mechanic, and the minor amount of damage added to Bloodthirst barely compensates for several of our key buffs in Battle Shout and Blessing of Might having a large chunk of their attack power removed. Even one of our core talents in Flurry had its max attack speed reduced from 30% to 25%.
The Arms Tree has a few new toys to play with, but apart from one major new talent that does add some much needed rage efficiency, the changes are very small. Bloodthrill is admittedly a strong new addition to our arsenal, being a proc that allows us to use one of our most rage efficient spells in Overpower that would normally not see a huge amount of use, also allowing us to feel as if our Improved Overpower has more impact. Everything else that was added, however, feels quite underwhelming. Spearing Strike is relegated to either incredibly niche PvP usages, or a long cooldown spell that is weak against all but a few enemy types. Weaponmaster is simply a condensing of the original different weapon type talents, with an added PvE bonus for maces. Improved Slam would be a fantastic new addition, if the baseline ability Slam hadn't been slapped with a quite frankly brutal 18 second cooldown.
Fury also maintains a baffling conditional on its core stance; Berserker Stance continues to increase our damage taken by a quite frankly unreasonable 10%. The "melee tax", a concept where melee specs inevitably take more damage from abilities due to having a smaller area in which they can deal damage but in return are given either increased survivability or are able to deal more damage in return, appears to apply to some specs and not others in WoW Forever — why must we continue to pay this more heavily than any other spec? Retribution Paladins have the ability to become immune and self heal, Enhancement Shamans can self heal, Survival Hunters can go out to range. The closest comparisons are Rogues and Feral Druids, but both specs do not have an increased damage taken modifier. Is the intention that we are being made to compensate for our higher armour? If so, why does this damage taken increase translate to Magical Damage as well? If the intention is to punish us for being in a higher DPS stance, why is there not an effort to enable playing in Battle Stance more; Arms Warriors must be in it in order to apply and use their Rend and Overpower abilities, but Fury must suffer in Berserker Stance the whole time. While we have Death Wish active the situation is even worse, totaling a quite miserable 15% total damage taken increase, a not insignificant number. For reference, this is roughly the % increase Fury Warrior was ahead of other specs in Single Target fights during Blackwing Lair in the recent Classic Anniversary Run, and that was considered an unacceptable advantage to the point of being ridiculed.
Stances in general are a topic I would not be opposed to being expanded upon. Stances have been a core part of a Warrior's identity for the majority of WoW's lifetime, and is a fantastic RPG-esque mechanic that lets us feel as if our choice of stance has an impact on how you are playing. At least, this is how it's supposed to work in theory. Currently, each stance is hard assigned to a certain spec — Arms is forced into Battle Stance because they cannot cast core parts of their rotation in Rend and Overpower without it, Protection must stay in Defensive Stance in order to use the majority of their abilities as well as deal additional threat, and Fury is locked into Berserker Stance in order to use one of their two rotational abilities, Whirlwind. If the goal of these designs is to make players swap between stances more often, then the paltry 25 rage you get to keep when swapping feels like far too little — Arms Warriors get enough to cast Whirlwind and nothing more, while Fury cannot swap to Battle Stance to cast Overpower during gaps in their rotation without risking not being able to cast their other core abilities. To make matters worse, Battle Stance has no positive effects associated with it, making spending time in the stance feel as if you are powered down when compared to the small critical strike increase of Berserker Stance. If the goal is to make swapping between stances the core playstyle, then why is the amount of Rage we get to keep not increased?
