So I finally got access to the beta thanks to an awesome friend of mine, and I decided to get some first-hand experience with what the Warrior has become.
Arms
So I was dreading this and yet was excited for it. I'm a massive lover of Arms, the aesthetic, the actual playstyle, the whole shabang. So I just bound everything to where it usually is and already noticed that I was using 2/3 the buttons I usually have bound. Shouldn't complain because I knew that was coming, but it was still a shock to get used to while running around killing wolves for 10 minutes getting used to the standard UI again.
It's good. And when I say good don't think "OMG Exhil! Arms is terrible and slow and you spend time doing nothing, you're bad OMG!". I've had some time to come to terms with the fact that the Devs have a vision for Arms and nothing the players can or will say will change that, so I tried to go into the spec pretty open-minded.
Rend isn't that bad, strange having back after not having it for two years, but I'll live.
Mortal Strike consuming rage doesn't bother me considering it hits pretty damn hard.
Colossus Smash consuming rage doesn't bother me considering it hits like a truck.
In fact, the only thing I've had to get used to was pressing Whirlwind as a filler instead of Slam, and that was pretty easy to do. The game, to me at least, does feel better. Actions are more responsive, and at least now it does feel like Mortal Strike is an actual attack, rather than just something I press on cooldown.
If I rate live Arms as a 6/10, I'd give this an 8/10, though could still be improved upon a lot.
Fury
So basically Fury was mutilated compared to live and it just feels horrible. Spamming Bloodthirst is the only playstyle that's even legitimate due to the massive nerfs to Bloodthirst's crit chance at higher levels and slight buffs at lower levels of gear. Due to this playstyle, it literally doesn't matter if you don't proc Enrage, because you can just press Bloodthirst again and the spec does actually turn into a slot machine of annoyance. Wild Strike is still the ability that nobody wants to press, still sounds like crap, and currently (I might be slightly off with this one so I'll correct if neccessary) is actually doing less DPR than Whirlwind.
So that's both DPS specs using Whirlwind as a filler/rage dump. Yay.
In other news, Enrage lasts 8 seconds and Colossus Smash is extended by Raging Blow! But that doesn't matter seen as Raging Blow only costs 10 rage so you still rage cap while using it because Wild Strike is trash and literally does nothing besides dump a lot of rage at once. BUT OH WAIT it doesn't do that all the time because the spec has a proc which makes your rage-dumping ability completely free. Yes. Marvellous. Lets completely ignore this bad design and just go into a numbers tuning pass where we'll just throw damage onto the spec until people want to play it.
Awesome, thanks.
Live Fury I'd actually say is a very solid 9, and a 10/10 in some cases, in which case, I'd give beta Fury a 4/10.
All in all I'm really not impressed with either of these specs. Blizzard in the past has been very open to feedback in regards to whether something is bad design or not, even having some of the best Warlocks in the world help them redesign Warlocks when they got a rework. This time around it feels like they just wanted to have their way with Warriors and disregard any feedback that was constructive, and even feedback that might not have been constructive, but was still relevant. Many of the more prominent Warrior Theorycrafters, Forum-Posters, and some of the best players in the world have all been more-or-less ignored by the class designers, and in some cases have even been told "give it a chance, you'll like it".
They've then tried it, disliked it, and still been ignored anyway.
Warlords of Draenor has so many aspects to it that could very well make it the best expansion we've seen since (in my opinion) Burning Crusade, and yet the biggest letdown is how much the Devs are actually listening to the people who play their game.
If anyone from Blizzard reads this, I'd like to hope that I've opened your eyes. Warriors are sad that we have to deal with this gnarled up corpse of a class that we've enjoyed for so many years now. I just hope that we'll see some intensive care to deal with the burns we've received during Alpha and Beta testing.
Until then, I guess I'll just get back to gearing my Windwalker, because that's so much more fun to play compared to Arms and Fury on Beta.
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