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Q u o t e:


I'm not sure this directly relates to Heroic Strike spam, but... we are looking at making changes to abilities such as Devastate. These changes will increase the amount of damage that a tank will be able to output. These changes are still in testing (and thus did not make it in to this Q&A). If all goes well, Protection warriors should have a decent damage increase.

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I saw the recent Devastate change on the PTR notes and it is definitely most welcome. One of the best and easiest fixes to warrior damage problems, for sure, and it makes using Devastate more attractive as a tank since it's near the bottom of the priority list right now.

The problem with Heroic Strike isn't the damage, though. It hits plenty hard with how many we can get off in an unlimited rage situation--the problem is that we, oftentimes, can't use Heroic Strike every white hit. That leads to a threat problem, and in turn leads to damage problems because it's such a large increase over white damage.

The biggest problem is how interlinked our base threat is to Heroic Strike spam; this link isn't simply a "it feels necessary" because on any threat-intensive fight (Hodir, Algalon) having anything less than 90% of white hits as Heroic Strikes can lead to aggro being ripped off us quickly. It's also a quality-of-life issue in that no other ability has such potential to cause actual physical pain from its usage; after my hour on Algalon last week, I literally had to get an Ice Pack for my hand from mashing the button so hard. On Hodir it's even worse, because I spend a lot of time in the Starlight beams mashing it doubly hard due to having .8 sec white swings.

I'd just like to say thanks to Crygil for putting the time and effort into this, I (and I'm sure the warrior community in general) appreciate it. I have played a warrior as my main since Vanilla, and I still remember when my raid group first killed Luci (one of the earlier kills on the server) and I love my warrior to death but quite frankly I was losing faith that blizzard gave a #!#! (excuse my french). So thanks again, your attention is appreciated.

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Q u o t e:


I'm not sure this directly relates to Heroic Strike spam, but... we are looking at making changes to abilities such as Devastate. These changes will increase the amount of damage that a tank will be able to output. These changes are still in testing (and thus did not make it in to this Q&A). If all goes well, Protection warriors should have a decent damage increase.

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Warrior DPS being low goes beyond the Prot tree too. It takes BiS gear for a Fury Warrior to even begin to compete with Pallies and DK's.

Ok, i'll do my best to not QQ about the recent answers in our Q&A topic. I am just a little frustrated that page after page of comments left by warriors, a good percentage of them PVE protection warriors, a lot of our questions went unanswered. They threw us a bone or two with the bare mentioning of block and how they "know" its messed up. They gave us Rage from Dodge / Block / Parry in 3.2, but there were so many questions that were repeated and repeated that never got answered.

I know you do not have the time or scope to answer every single question on any given Q/A but i feel that PVP warriors and DPS warriors got a fair majority of their questions answered. With a class being a Hybrid and the questions reflecting that, one could only assume they would answer a fair amount of questions from each aspect.

To give an example, here are some of the repeted questions that went unanswered. I'll give around 4 for a better chance at it being read / answered.

*************Most Important*****************1) AOE threat for warriors is better then it was pre-WOTLK with TC and Shockwave, yet we are still way behind pallys and DKs and even the new 360degree swipe from Druids. Are there plans to buff our aoe threat generation?

2) I had to get 4 pieces of Ulduar tier to see some magic mitigation, and even then its only 20% on a cooldown. Are there any plans to make us more viable in magic fights?

3) Will heroic strike ever be fixed / replaced? At least make it toggle able or automatic with a certain % of rage. You are killing our hands. Maybe i'll just send you the bill when i get carpal tunnel.

4) Shattering throw. Terrible 5 minute cool down, Battle stance only, more rage needed then attainable from blood thirst, horrific casting time. This is a fantastic utility for warrior and takes a good 30 seconds to use every five minutes. Are there any plans to make this a more usable skill for prot warriors in raids?

You've stated in the past that warriors were one of the most popular tanks even today because tanks are hard headed and do not usually succumb to "Flavor of the month." and yet your punishing our loyalty by ignoring most of our requests. The fact is, we have to try harder then any other tank just to be adequate.

Thanks for your time.

From reading the Q&A, i have changed to Zerker stance and gained 100 rage. (IRL)

I was so excited to read the Q&A, but after reading...i have been VERY disappointed.

ya.. 1.4k dps is kinda low for a Prot warrior. I wouldn't mind having a Paladins that I watch tank cranking out 2.8k dps while tanking in T7.5 gear.

A question that isn't addressed:

Classes that burst people down are not ok, unhealable damage was a way to balance some classes but it's a design flaw. So why is 75% MS ok? This seems like a similar cop out to make up for warriors lack of damage output. In PvP you see most classes now doing full on PvE rotations and damage in PvP, these are your OMG burst classes. Warriors suffer from not really being able to do that because of the mechanics of slam. The answer shouldn't be give warriors an MS other players can't heal through, the answer is to fix warrior issues. Specific examples are stances which should work more like druid forms, where you can use an attack and it will switch stances automatically for the costs. Secondly rage needs to be normalized so warriors aren't rage starved or swimming in rage.

How do you make sure the warrior class stays fresh? In light of the addition of DKs our class has clearly become outdated, our cooldowns have huge disadvantages, our snares are not comparable, even our damage output is substantially lower. DKs have so far in PvP and PvE overshadowed the warrior class completely.

How do you make armor matter? Right now in PvP no one does physical damage except other warriors, everyone has armor which mitigates us, but we have nothing to mitigate anyone elses damage. Ignoring resilience next patch.

How do you make up for how the resilience buff will hurt warriors rage generation in PvP? Clearly since we aren't getting buffed we are expected to preform the same with 10% less rage.

Lastly how do you make all 3 trees viable in arena? Your stance is all should be but getting 1 there is the most important thing. What doesn't make sense there is all 3 pally specs are very viable, and yet warriors and every other class isn't allowed to compete unless they are FOTM spec.

In PvE can we stop being balanced around BiS gear? It's claimed over and over again that we don't get balanced around BiS gear, but warriors leveling and just hitting 80 do terrible damage because of nerfs aimed at the top 1% of warriors.

Why do warriors, or any class for the matter 3 dungeons in still get treated as second class citizens? By the time you hit 3.2 dual spec doesn't mean anything. You will have a great set of gear you can raid the best instance in, and you will have crumby gear you could maybe use to dual spec farm content in. It just doesn't make sense in sunwell or icecrown when you already are guaranteed to have absolute min/maxing which will shut hybrids out unless they bring a buff.

I'd love to see those answers, although it doesn't really matter. I've rerolled, because honestly warrior are the only vanilla class trying to compete in WoTLK, and the fact is we cannot do it anymore. Our DPS sucks, in PvP we are reliant on having lots of teammates to dispell and support us. I want a class that can carry it's own weight, but I can't do that in 2s sitting in sheeps, cyclones, roots, chains of ice, crippling poison, and I also can't do that getting blown up in 2 gcds which is about how long it takes for the server to even figure out I am eligible to use shield wall.

EDIT: Sorry for the QQ in there, but the questions are very valid. I'm sorry to say but you've really missed answering any of our concerns. Your answers come across as your fine L2P, when every other class who is balanced as well if not better than warriors get some insight into how their concerns will be addressed. We already feel like the red-headed step children with the addition of DKs and the lack of concern for any of our issues is really alarming (it is why I rerolled and quit raiding).

Warriors are quite low in survivability (PvP). They have no spell damage or elemental mitigation. Although they wear plate, they lack utilities and talents that other plate-wearing classes have that reduce magic and even physical damage. Inversely, we have no attacks that apply spell damage and our damage is purely physical. Therefore, our physical attacks must be strongest/stronger than the rest of the plate-wearing classes. Our damage in PvP is also severely lacking and we often get outbursted by other classes and die faster. Also, our Hamstring is a particularly weak slow effect and we as plate-wearing melee classes get slowed/snared the most. It is sometimes hard to land even a hit on the opponent before falling down and dying.

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Q u o t e:
I don't need to stack arp. I'm at like, 92.xx% arp when grim toll procs, which is more than enough for me.

You call it %##@*, I call it providing an important raid buff. See how that works out?

Improved Cleave, a mediocre dps talent utilized only on trash and some trivial boss encounters, or an important talent that provides a raid wide buff. Hard choice, yeah?

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this is very simple. dont give advice that is contrary to your own build without an explanation, especially in the forums. I expected you had tons of ArP with a BiS build, which is why I mentioned your trinket, which was likely grim toll. If you tell people to stack STR, don't be contrary to your own opinion without an explanation. This is the warrior forum, not the "I'm better than you" forum

Guys, this Q&A isn't really meant to answer our questions.
From the content it's clearly meant to tell us that the blizzard development team wants the warrior class to be a minority and have us reroll Death Knights.

But you know what? The warrior has much more flavor than the death knight. I don't want to play a death knight. I also have a 80 death knight. I can kill stuff and gank with ease on my death knight by smashing my face on the key board. Its the game on easy mode.

Don't say that the blizz development team doesn't know how bad of a situation warriors are in. THEY DO. THEY FRIKKEN MADE THE GAME AND THE CLASS.

I wish all the other class Q&A has close to this much QQ as this one.
But to blizzard, the large amounts of QQ noise only suggests that more people should L2P.
Don't get me wrong if I had a job where I had to be subjected to that much QQing I would lose sense of reality and judgment also.

This Q & A was terrible.

The best thing it did was generate comments that reask some of the questions Bliz totally ignored.

Fail.

The FAQ answer me 0 question.
Epic fail.

I must say, the Warrior Q&A was one of the most disappointing things I have ever experienced with this game and the Blizzard community in general.

I have a real question for you, if you will answer it.

Are you guys going to buff the damage of any of our offensive abilities? Like restore Mortal Strike to 220% weapons damage?

Since all of our abilities rely on physical damage, and since many classes can mitigate this quite well, we are at quite a disadvantage compared to other melee out there. Master of melee we are not.

It truly baffles me how Greg Street believes that Warriors are fine.... either he has no real grasp/ sense of the class....or he truly does spite the class for whatever reason.

I am not sure which.


**Edit: Also, I agree with Defasa's post above. If you are truly unhappy with the state of your class and the game, then it is time to quit.

I didn't buy WoTLK because warriors remained broken, instead opting to be a lvl 70 AV PvP twink. There I will remain until warriors are seriously worked on, or until the game no longer interests me at all (which almost happened once).

I almost quit a second time, when Greg stated that Arms warriors' dmg would be buffed for 3.1 and then nerfed sudden death to a rage cap of 30. I stuck it out, and enjoyed playing against under geared lower lvls in AV (the only aspect of this game where I think a warrior can feel and be powerful). However, this recent "F' you" to the warrior player base has got me reconsidering quitting this game. Warrior is the one and only class I play, and if that is the development teams attitude towards our obviously broken and disadvantaged class, then maybe we should take our business elsewhere.

Really Blizz needs L2P Warhammer maybe I have never had more fun playing a tank then i did the Black Orc man they are just a damage sponge, a warrior should be the best TANK period, I did a capture the flag with my Black Orc and the whole 7 defenders needed to focus to kill me and it took them a good 20 seconds at least to do it while my lil buddy ran off with the flag :P Damm that was great.

while i enjoy the shield specialization changes (nice too see some steps to band-aiding rage for tanks) I'm still trying to figure out the best way to spend my talent points, without giving up so much in the prot tree.

Has any thought been given to warrior tanks and the need for Deep wounds for threat? And also how the new changes to making Shield specialization talent being much more attractive might effect an already very tight spec?

It seems that there is often a lot of talk by blizzard saying that warriors tanks shouldn't ignore threat stats, but how does most of warrior tanks are specc'ed into deep wounds, and not fully into shield specialization and other great talents in the protection tree fit this statement?

How do Paladins that can completely ignore (for the most part) hit and expertise, can stack stam, and still have 10%+ more crit, while still only spending 53 or so points into their protection tree fit into the comment of "tanks not needing to ignore threat stats"?

I Agree that the Prot tree is good, and has a lot of great talents, but all those great talents usually come at the cost of far less threat. I know there has been a lot of changes for threat on the ptr, but the fact is that warriors will still likely have to give up EVEN MORE great talents in the prot tree, just to stay on top of threat, and has there been any thought into how to address this?