The Weapons Master(y)

Since my last article, I've had a few messages about "what I honestly thought" about the Warrior changes, primarily due to the fact that I go from periods of explosive rage on the MMO-Champion Forums or Twitter to being calm when I write here. I'd just like to take a minute to say that to say that the most accurate version of what I feel about a change usually gets documented here. Most of the time when I go full-out ragemode on something, it's because the initial reaction to a change is pretty bad, but then after about 10-20 minutes I've had enough time to weigh up all sides of the change and post something somewhat respectable here.

Today's plight is unfortunately just that I'm tired. I'm tired of asking, in some cases begging, that the Developers take feedback and use it appropriately. The case in point is the new Mastery for Arms Warrior, where it just increases the damage of your abilities by X%. There were two things that were wrong with this Mastery.

1) It wasn't good enough to be an even remotely valuable stat. It was beaten by Crit, Multistrike and Haste at every turn.

2) It doesn't scale with any AoE we do, at all.

Tackling Issue #1 isn't just a case of "Throw numbers at it 'til they like it" like Windwalkers got with Fists of Fury, it needs to actually be a stat that you look at and go "That's good". And you should want to. Blizzard clearly want the Spec Blurb to match your perception of the spec (See: Fury Warrior) and Arms is supposedly "A battle-hardened master of two-handed weapons" so you should look at mastery and the little RP box inside your head should go "I'm a weapon master, I should value Mastery over anything else". The issue of this of course is that Blizzard has been told numerous times and instead of tinkering with individual values and making sure they added the right amount of flavour/damage to it, they just buffed it by 40% and called it a day. Except this doesn't solve the problem because Crit is still better.

Amusingly, solving Issue #2 might indirectly solve Issue #1. Nerf Whirlwind appropriately (it's already hitting 40% harder than it's meant to) and then make it scale with Mastery. The simple fact that our main AoE ability doesn't scale with our supposed "best stat" is mind-boggling. To me, something is the best stat if it makes everything do more damage overall, regardless of whether that more damage is obvious or not (Haste Breakpoints and Colossus Smash spring to mind) Mastery right now makes Colossus Smash, Mortal Strike, and Execute do Mastery% more damage. Pretty unintuitive, though you can see that as "Oh it makes me do more damage, sweet!" Except that on AoE, it seems like we're balanced around obviously having Ravager and Dragon Roar and Whirlwind Spam (I'm not even going to count Bladestorm here as it's so horribly tuned currently). Obviously if they make Whirlwind scale with Mastery, our AoE in the next raid tier is probably going to dwarf anyone else's.

It's a double-edged sword. Don't change the Mastery and it stays worse than Crit and they may as well make our Attunement Passive into 5% Crit rather than 5% Mastery. Change the Mastery to make it scale with WW and watch as our AoE slowly spirals out of control, in which case it gets nerfed 6 months down the line.

I'd love to say that one solution is better than the other, but I can't. Each has their ups and downs, and for every thing that you fix, two more are almost guaranteed to break. I guess all I can do is hope that Warriors get a redesign for either 6.1 or the next expansion, so that we finally get the treatment we deserve after this sham of a Beta test.

Doctor's Report: Anger Management

Okay so I'll get it off my chest right now. I'm angry. And no this post won't be about the talent Anger Management, it's going to be about me.

I've been playing Warrior full-time since (roughly) 4.2, and I've been playing DPS full-time since 5.3, and this is the first change I've had to deal with that has actually infuriated me

Click to zoom!

So yea, Colossus Smash is going to peace out and stick to Arms. Now some of you may be wondering why this has made me mad, and I'll be happy to explain because it's probably angering me in a way you wouldn't think of. I'm not mad because it's gone, I'm mad because nothing is replacing it.

Fury has always had this concept of being a Berserker that lets his Rage out in bursts, annihilating a target's defenses and then giving him both barrels while he's vulnerable, except in Warlords, that idea is gone in favour of "Oh you're just furious, just keep hitting him with whatever you have handy". Even ignoring the actual concept of the class, Colossus Smash was the only serious mechanic the spec had in it's rotation, obviously it has Enrage and Raging Blow to track, but Colossus Smash was the mechanic that kept you on your toes, always thinking about your RB charges, your Enrage, your BT cooldown, your Rage levels, your cooldowns, your trinkets. It was the core spec mechanic, and now it's gone.

I really hope that Blizzard realises that the "bandaids" that they were going to apply in small changes are not going to help this class ascend to it's former glory. Now, if you want a spec that rewards correct play and correct use of it's complexity, you're forced to play Gladiator, which means you lose out on Rallying Cry and situational use of Defensive Stance, making you and your raid worse off as a result.

Right now, what the class definitely needs is an overhaul, a complete redesign from the ground up, and I think I'll be one in a very long line of people willing to fly/walk/drive to Irvine to help Blizzard redesign one of the most iconic classes of any RPG universe every created.

For the time being, looks like Gladiator is the only way forward, and I don't want to be this harsh, but I'm sincerely hoping they don't fuck that up as well. 

Doctor's Report: Mr A. Warrior

So, I decided to do another Doctor's Report, this time looking into a class, rather than ongoing surgery on a boss, a mechanic style, or something similar, as I main a Warrior, I'll use this as a preface to say that this might be similar to some other posts by Stoic over at Stoic But Not Silent or by Archimtiros over at SentryTotem.com, but I like to provide a little bit of a critical overview of the situation so that people are encouraged to think up their own suggestions.

Without further ado: Nurse, scalpel please.

THE ANATOMY OF A WARRIOR

Warriors like big weapons and big armour and generally things being big and then having the Warrior chop them into reasonable sized pieces for pansy wizards to deal with. That's more or less the history of every RPG Warrior class ever. They jump in, kill everything, jump out. With WoW there's more facets to this killing machine as you've got Protection, Arms and Fury. The Guardian, Weaponmaster, and Frothing Berserker respectively.

So with each spec, comes a certain identity. Protection Warriors specialize in big shields, heavy armour, and are all about just being a human (or Orc... or Gnome if you're that way inclined) tank. Soaking up all the damage and smashing stuff in the face as all Warriors do. Arms Warriors are the masters of two-handed weaponry, carving man and monster into nice neat piles with devastating attacks. Fury is the rabid wolf, choosing to sacrifice personal safety to guarantee that if something will lose one limb, it'll lose them all, carving it's way through armour like a hot knife through butter.

The issue here is that of course, these are -my- visualisations of the specs. Much like how you might have your own image of a Fury or Arms Warrior, I have mine, and the Devs have theirs. So lets look at what we'll have to deal with in this unexplored land of Draenor.

DOC, JUST TELL ME. IS IT BAD?

Naturally, many will dislike the changes because nobody really likes change. When you get used to something, it becomes a difficult task to adapt to a new way of doing it. I'm guilty of this myself. I was well prepared for a "slow and boring" Arms Warrior rotation on Beta, but threw myself into it thinking it couldn't be that bad, and while I'm used to the slowed down pace now, it was a definite shock at first, especially when my fingers are twitching because they need to be pressing buttons after a year of playing Fury in MoP.

But it's just that, it's a need to be pressing buttons. Nobody wants to play a game where they only press one button every few seconds, it would get boring too much. So we need to think about what we could do to it to make it better, while still cutting down a lot of the buttons we don't need.

These are my bars currently on live (I know, not using ElvUI, how could I?!) and the square box is where I have Shift Modifiers to swap the first 3 abilities to Battle, Defensive and Berserker Stance respectively, and the Taunt swaps to Spell Reflect. Arguments could be made to say "Oh you don't need to bind Int Shout or Disarm, and you can click potions from your bags" etc etc, but my point is that this is what I use and it functions perfectly. I understand that stackable defensive CDs need to disappear to prevent someone going from perfectly killable to invulnerable for 8 seconds, so Shield Wall disappears and DbtS gets buffed. Banner and Reck are merged and Battle/Commanding Shout are turned into buffs so they can get shifted to a second action bar, and of course our beloved Heroic Strike is gone too.

Some of this ability culling makes sense, and in other cases it's a case of "Why was that removed? It was fine". What you need to do is put yourself in the mind of the developers and ask if it's fine now, and is it fine in Warlords, where what we're basically experiencing is Vanilla anew.

While there's arguments for both sides, let's look at some of the positives of this triple-actionbar-bypass surgery.

W-WILL I MAKE IT THROUGH THE NIGHT?

Of course you will, and with some changes that you might find refreshing.

First off, Recklessness and Skull Banner are merged now, but only for you. There's no need to have to min-max when you drop SB for maximum raid DPS benefit, you can just go nuts with CDs whenever you want.

Secondly, Battle Shout and Commanding Shout are buffs. While many liked the on-demand rage during the (small periods of) downtime, I personally would have rather been hitting buttons. Not sad to see it go, though I'd like to know why they weren't merged into one button like what happened with Monks' Legacy of the Emperor/White Tiger buffs.

Thirdly, Demo Banner is gone. Now while many will immediately say "Demo Banner was great, we could intervene to it and it was another raid cooldown and...and...and..." I really don't care because it was an extra we got that won't be needed in Warlords. Raid utility is being cut down and reassigned across the board and we already have (in my opinion) the strongest raid utility cooldown with Rallying Cry, so I'm not going to cry about losing a 10% damage reduction CD.

Finally, while many are opposed to the "I have to learn my class all over again" scenario that happens to crop up with Warriors, I'm actually looking forward to it. Consider it a Leaderboard Reset if you will. All of the top players, middle players and bottom players now get a fresh chance at the class and get to pick a spec they might not play in Mists and run with it. World of Warcraft has been out for 10 years, if you've not played Warrior yet, you might find that despite a lot of the negative feedback, you'll like the class after all.

POST-OPERATION RECOMMENDATIONS

Firstly, make sure to drink plenty of water to prevent overheating. Secondly, give the game a chance. While you may not agree with what the Devs want for the game, the only way for the game to advance forward and be better than what it was is for the Devs and the Community to communicate. Everyone is guilty of ranting when they see a change they deem ridiculous, including myself, but when you see something that looks out of place, take a step back and think about why the change was made, and if you can't figure out why, ask. Watcher, Celestalon, Holinka et al are all on twitter and can be asked basically any question pertinent to design of classes. Granted you may not get a response, but better to ask and get a late response than to never ask and to never find out.

That said, the same principle needs to be understood by the Devs themselves. Nobody wants to be playing a game that isn't fun. When large groups of players see a change and all come to the same conclusion and react the same way, quite often that reaction is justified. The players get given the opportunity to interact and help pave the future of WoW by the Devs. That means both parties are responsible for how the game turns out.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank my readers for sticking around, this blog started off as a rant page for stupid changes and it's matured somewhat over the year and a half or so that I've had it, and I'd like to think it's changed for the better. Nearly 3000 views and 37 posts later (make this 38), CSTK has come a long way. Though with the release of Warlords of Draenor, I'll probably split my time equally between Warrior and Windwalker, meaning some of these posts will be relevant to one, the other, or just melee as a whole.

Warlords of Draenor will mark the 10th year of World of Warcraft's existence, 10 years of developing the community, the game, it's creators, it's haters and it's lovers. 10 years of my life have been spent playing this amazing game, and I'd like to think it's worth something. If you're like me, take the new expansion with a pinch of salt and dive in. Don't pretend it's like Mists of Pandaria for a second. Pretend that you've never played WoW before and just play. Enjoy yourself.

Rhaid cropian cyn cerdded.*

Exhil.


[* - Learn to crawl before you start walking]