I would like to start by saying that I've been playing my warrior for the better part of four years now. From weapon normalization to rage normalization, we've been here and it's really never been that bad. At one point I'd say we were definitely broken due to a design flaw, nerfing rage gen at the beginning of TBC. As a 60 warrior back in Vanilla I was fine with my TUF on rage and never had an issue, but Blizzard in their infinite wisdom decided to nerf it across the board due to a very select group of people (see: top 2%) in extremely good raiding gear having limitless rage. This caused everyone else to have nigh unbearable rage generation and to be quite honest, I don't know how most of them leveled.

Then we had our days as equals on the DPS field with rogues, the other melee combatant. No, we could not tank that boss in dps gear if it decided to kill our tank. But what's this? A rogue can? Evasion tanking and the rogue tanking build made it a very interesting concept. Tanking Gruul or Mother Shaz, it was unheard of and to be quite honest a pretty unfair way to tank. But I didn't think much about it, warriors were still considered DPS OR Tanks. Not both.

Then we have WotLK, where there's only 4 pure classes and the rest are hybrids. It's quite funny, there is no pure tank or pure healer. Any class who has the ability to do that function are ultimately paying the price by lowering their ability to DPS; this is true until we get to feral druids. Because they have such a 'complex' rotation, they are allowed the ability to be on top regardless of them being a hybrid or not. This is utterly against your design policies according to what you have told us and you are lying to the rest of the hybrids. Arms warriors have no rotation, it's a priority system. Prot warriors have no rotation, it's a priority system. Given that we have no rotation, shouldn't we get a special consideration as well like the Feral Druids do? I don't think so, and I especially don't think a class should be the clear cut top just because their rotation is a little bit harder.

Tanking in WotLK is also a major issue. You've said in our Q&A that paladins are behind a little bit, warriors are equal with druids, and Death Knights are a little bit ahead. Honestly I would like to know how you rank them as tanks, because currently warriors have 1 cooldown more than paladin tanks and that's it. They have superior threat by far and far more utility due to being able to AOE tank. Feral druids are ahead of warriors as well due to mitigation and their massive health pool. They're behind in the cooldown department only in damage reduction, but made up for with their massive health pool. Then we have the end-all be-all kings of tanking, Death Knights. Amazing, short cooldowns. Great scaling for stamina. Great AOE tanking. Great survivability. How could you not say that they're ahead? So far with 3.2 we've seen very little in the department to help prot warriors with both their DPS and TPS.

If I were to suggest anything I would suggest converting Armored to the Teeth from giving 1/2/3 attack power for every 108 armor to 1/2/3 strength for every 108 armor. It would give us the buff in DPS and tanking that we need for the time being. It wouldn't be a major change, but honestly it would be big enough to show a difference to all of us.

Then comes a few of the more... inane quotes from Ghostcrawler.

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Q u o t e:
The warrior class has been a very tricky one to balance, largely due to the way rage converts into damage (which converts into rage, which converts into damage...), and we haven’t completely nailed that design just yet.

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I know you have your plate full with so many class changes, but that quote isn't true. There is no attack which you use rage for that will give rage back. Getting rage and using rage are two different systems, one uses white(normal) attacks, and the other uses yellow(special) attacks. Special attacks do not give rage. White damage converts to rage. Rage converts to yellow damage. End. There is no backwards conversion unless this is something that you are planning, which I highly doubt.

TL;DR Warriors are not fine, I know you gave everyone the "we're looking into it" but honestly, can you give us more than telling us we're supposed to be equal with the other hybrids when we aren't? Can you actually give us equality instead of saying we should be? Take a "good hard look" at fury and arms now, not in the future.

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Q u o t e:


It is true. If you have no rage, you can't hit your special attacks and your damage is lower. If you get a little bit of rage, you can hit your attacks sometimes. This is how warriors are designed to work -- you have a resource and it's limited. You are not designed to be able to hit your buttons just as fast as you can. However, at some point in gear, warriors can hit for so much damage that they have virtually infinite rage and can't spend it fast enough. At that point rage no longer becomes a mechanic. You don't need to even have the bar.

Now, the situation would be worse if your yellow attacks also generated rage -- that's a positive feedback loop, and what I fear a lot of players interpreted my comments to mean. I just meant that having more rage increases your damage (through specials) and having more damage increases your rage (through gear). As a result, well-geared warriors are much better than poorly geared warriors, much more so than the gear stats themselves would account for. We don't think that design works well because we have struggled with it since WoW's launch.

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branching off to focus on prot warriors a little bit. our rage resource is as you say limited by design, without it we can't do much, with a little we can do a bit, etc. ramp this up to ulduar and raiding. when having infinite rage, it seems that warriors are or can be on par, depending on the differences in gear/skill/class/encounter, however, when rage starved we produce less threat and damage then it seems that we produce less damage and threat then healers. and there isn't any grey, either i'm rage starved or infinite rage.

if rage generation isn't solved by next expansion, there will be an exact repeat of this expansion on the forums the beggining of the expansion warriors will constantly qq about not being powerful enough and near the end of the expansion everyone will qq on warriors being so op. the catch to this expansion is it's taking longer for warriors to end up 'op', because blizzard nerfed some of the scaling with warriors, or so it seems.

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Q u o t e:
Now, the situation would be worse if your yellow attacks also generated rage -- that's a positive feedback loop

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What? Swipe's getting nerfed? :(

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Q u o t e:

You are not designed to be able to hit your buttons just as fast as you can. However, at some point in gear, warriors can hit for so much damage that they have virtually infinite rage and can't spend it fast enough. At that point rage no longer becomes a mechanic. You don't need to even have the bar.

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it would appear that (prot) warriors are designed to ignore rage as limited resource. or atleast our damage/threat at 100% white hit to HS conversion with every GCD filled appears to be the norm for prot warrior tanking. bar-ing moments where the boss stops hitting us and our damage/threat drops like a rock.

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Q u o t e:


It is true. If you have no rage, you can't hit your special attacks and your damage is lower. If you get a little bit of rage, you can hit your attacks sometimes. This is how warriors are designed to work -- you have a resource and it's limited. You are not designed to be able to hit your buttons just as fast as you can. However, at some point in gear, warriors can hit for so much damage that they have virtually infinite rage and can't spend it fast enough. At that point rage no longer becomes a mechanic. You don't need to even have the bar.

Now, the situation would be worse if your yellow attacks also generated rage -- that's a positive feedback loop, and what I fear a lot of players interpreted my comments to mean. I just meant that having more rage increases your damage (through specials) and having more damage increases your rage (through gear). As a result, well-geared warriors are much better than poorly geared warriors, much more so than the gear stats themselves would account for. We don't think that design works well because we have struggled with it since WoW's launch.

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There in is the problem. You have designed warriors to be resourced STARVED at times, yet have designed every other tank in the game to have infinite resources.

DK's don't run out of runes and are constantly generating runic power.
Paladin tanks don't go OOM, because they generate mana on avoidance/block/heals
Druids just feast on rage the whole time and don't run dry

Warriors, yeah, we're a special group of worthless tanks. If we avoid, no rage, if we go TWO SECONDS without rage, we've lost aggro, and then we can't get it back without serious raid help or a fast OT.

Face it, GC - the class is broken. There is no "balance" - we are not "equal" to Druids, we are not equal to any tank out there. We aren't even a "little" behind - we're simply behind.

Terrible threat per second, terrible damage per second, terrible resource system, terrible buffs, poor raid utility (minus demo shout) - it's useless to play a warrior tank unless you're dead set on not rolling a different toon.

We have no advantages as a tank ... none. Our mobility doesn't help us, our stuns don't help us (they actually hurt us), our snap aggro is useless because we can't hold it - and again, once we lose it, we've LOST it.

I simply don't see why you can, for once, just admit, the warrior has a resource system that is flawed to the core. We are the only class dependent on white hitting (lol dmg) and getting hit to generate our resource. Everyone else generates normally, and they can build rotations, they can utilize strategy. Our resource system stops that, stops it right away. But at the same time, you've gimped this class so badly that we NEED the infinite resource pool (like every other tank has) just to maintain the terrible TPS/DPS we currently output.

Good job with the Q&A - it's nice to have confirmation that you are so out of touch with this class that you actually think we're "equal" to Druids. Seriously ... it was all forum speculation until that comment hit.

Equal ... LOL

Why don't they just normalize threat generation to be based on a flat damage amount and weapon speed so it always scales the same. That way, you don't have the only class in the game whose threat/dps mechanic scales with gear.

Or am I out of my mind?

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Q u o t e:
I simply don't see why you can, for once, just admit, the warrior has a resource system that is flawed to the core.

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I wouldn't say 'to the core'.

Druids have the same resource system, and as you've pointed out it works reasonably well with only one real difference to the 'flawed' warrior version - we get rage on critical strikes (and have a high crit chance to back up that mechanic).

That small difference is usually enough to keep our healds above water, while still allowing room for us to run out of rage when the 'stars align' :)

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Q u o t e:


I wouldn't say 'to the core'.

Druids have the same resource system, and as you've pointed out it works reasonably well with only one real difference to the 'flawed' warrior version - we get rage on critical strikes (and have a high crit chance to back up that mechanic).

That small difference is usually enough to keep our healds above water, while still allowing room for us to run out of rage when the 'stars align' :)

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But as a bear, you generate much higher DPS - so you are generating more rage by default, are you not?

Our gimped DPS adds to our gimped rage generation. We are literally infinite or starved. There's no middle ground.

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Q u o t e:
But as a bear, you generate much higher DPS - so you are generating more rage by default, are you not?

Our gimped DPS adds to our gimped rage generation. We are literally infinite or starved. There's no middle ground.

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No.

100% of that higher DPS is yellow attacks (assuming we don't get rage starved along the way!) which means our only sources of rage are:
5 rage per crit we make
3 rage per dodge
FIVE BILLION rage per hit that lands on us. :)

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Q u o t e:


It is true. If you have no rage, you can't hit your special attacks and your damage is lower. If you get a little bit of rage, you can hit your attacks sometimes. This is how warriors are designed to work -- you have a resource and it's limited. You are not designed to be able to hit your buttons just as fast as you can. However, at some point in gear, warriors can hit for so much damage that they have virtually infinite rage and can't spend it fast enough. At that point rage no longer becomes a mechanic. You don't need to even have the bar.

Now, the situation would be worse if your yellow attacks also generated rage -- that's a positive feedback loop, and what I fear a lot of players interpreted my comments to mean. I just meant that having more rage increases your damage (through specials) and having more damage increases your rage (through gear). As a result, well-geared warriors are much better than poorly geared warriors, much more so than the gear stats themselves would account for. We don't think that design works well because we have struggled with it since WoW's launch.

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Umm how about you fix it NOW rather than talking about fixing it?
- Oh and while you're at it how about you do that Arms/Fury tree overhaul you mentioned

Unless you provide a timeline I'm pretty much done with this class.

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Q u o t e:


No.

100% of that higher DPS is yellow attacks (assuming we don't get rage starved along the way!) which means our only sources of rage are:
5 rage per crit we make
3 rage per dodge
FIVE BILLION rage per hit that lands on us. :)

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at least we get rage when we block

lol just kidding most people don't put more than 2 points in that talent

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Q u o t e:


It is true. If you have no rage, you can't hit your special attacks and your damage is lower. If you get a little bit of rage, you can hit your attacks sometimes. This is how warriors are designed to work -- you have a resource and it's limited. You are not designed to be able to hit your buttons just as fast as you can. However, at some point in gear, warriors can hit for so much damage that they have virtually infinite rage and can't spend it fast enough. At that point rage no longer becomes a mechanic. You don't need to even have the bar.

Now, the situation would be worse if your yellow attacks also generated rage -- that's a positive feedback loop, and what I fear a lot of players interpreted my comments to mean. I just meant that having more rage increases your damage (through specials) and having more damage increases your rage (through gear). As a result, well-geared warriors are much better than poorly geared warriors, much more so than the gear stats themselves would account for. We don't think that design works well because we have struggled with it since WoW's launch.

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Well I am not against fixing it because the response to it in the past, although most of them have been repealed, is to make a talent not function well until a warrior gets the gear. I would prefer a continuity of balance across end-game gearing instead of having Blizz try and balance warriors with BiS gear while lower geared warriors (the mass majority of players) suffer.

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Q u o t e:



Umm how about you fix it NOW rather than talking about fixing it?
- Oh and while you're at it how about you do that Arms/Fury tree overhaul you mentioned

Unless you provide a timeline I'm pretty much done with this class.

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Mmmm. Enhance shamans and tseric much?

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Q u o t e:



Umm how about you fix it NOW rather than talking about fixing it?
- Oh and while you're at it how about you do that Arms/Fury tree overhaul you mentioned

Unless you provide a timeline I'm pretty much done with this class.

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I wouldn't rush the change. Last time they did that we ended up horribly broken through a faulty normalized rage gen mechanic.

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Q u o t e:
at least we get rage when we block

lol just kidding most people don't put more than 2 points in that talent

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heh, yes - soon as you can block enough of an incoming attack that the remainder of the damage isn't enough to push you over 100 rage all by iteself.. :(

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Q u o t e:


I wouldn't rush the change. Last time they did that we ended up horribly broken through a faulty normalized rage gen mechanic.

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But again if they dont start working on it when will it get fixed? 2 years? We could have another QA a year from now and have GC say "oh we'd still like to fix rage"