Having played a warrior during vanilla and most of TBC then taking a long break and coming back for MoP I can honestly say the warrior is but a shadow of what it once was; the class just feels clunky, slow and out of date, it has no uniqueness, no defining moves. Warriors used to feel visceral to play, you knew that if you managed to close in on someone you're going to do major damage to them. The class might be close to balanced now, but it's so god damn boring to play.
Sword/mace/axe specialization, flurry and possibly the original windfury totem; a lot was going on back then with our damage output as arms. Warrior damage had really high standard deviation: one moment you were a chump, the next moment you were exploding someone. That feeling of randomness and unexpected outcome of the damage is what got me hooked on warriors in the first place. When they toned down damage randomness they also toned down the fun, now I just feel like I'm standing around hitting someone with a sponge toy when I'm outside of swifty and it's really NOT fun. I don't feel like I'm a threat like I used to be, people don't even mind me wailing on them outside of swifty. I'm not asking for Windfury back but something needs to be done to bring back that feeling of (possibly) exploding on someone when you close in on them.
I think one of the things I miss the most is incoming damage giving you rage (and Enrage!), that was a defining class trait; you knew that if you focused a warrior in PvP he's going to get really angry at you and that totally needs to come back.
A few things I think could improve warrior gameplay:
- Stances & rage; remove the cooldown on stances, I don't get why this was put in at all. Differentiate the stances way more, it's a complete mess right now. We should be generating rage from white attacks in all stances, with the difference between the stances being modifiers on damage done/taken, it just provides a much smoother gameplay. Make us get rage when we are focused in all stances and reduce the rage generated by attacks like mortal strike to compensate, possibly varied by stance. If I'm being tunneled by two wizards you bet your ass I'm going to be angry and have a full rage bar. Also, bring back getting Enraged when being a victim of a critical strike in some form (pop enrage yo), if necessary remove it from some other abilities that generate it like colossus smash.
- Fix god damn Shattering Throw, it's awful. You can't ever rely on having enough rage to use it in a pinch, and that's exactly when you need it! and on top of that it has a cast time?! the 5 minute cooldown I can sorta live with, but the other two are unacceptable.
- Hamstring; either give warriors a 1s GCD or put Hamstring on its own separate 1s GCD. Combined with its rage cost and the limited rage we currently have it just feels clunky to use and a waste of a precious GCD and rage. Back when hamstring did damage and you had things that it could proc like mace stun/sword specialization/windfury/improved hamstring/weapon enchants it was actually a really good move, even though it did super low damage on its own. And yes, improved hamstring needs to make a comeback because it was the quintessential warrior tool.
- More shield moves for Arms! I want to use revenge, I want to do non-terrible damage when I have a shield on, I want spell reflect on a lower cooldown.
- Make armor matter; If I'm wearing plate it should give me some sort of advantage against physical damage classes. Right now nearly all attacks are either magic or bypass armor in some way.
- Don't let warrior disarm get trinketed; this and shockwave are our only peels. Also, I would like to see disarm do something to casters as well, perhaps reduce their damage/healing by a % when they are disarmed.
- Heroic Leap glyph baseline, as other have said this is mandatory in the current meta game.
- I am not completey sure on this one, but reduce the occurence of strikes of opportunity considerably (and the effect mastery has on it) and make it do twice the damage.
Wow don't we want to be a special snow flake
I can trinket your DISARM BUT CANT MINE RAWR !
Lol i can't tell if your srs
First u guys wanted cake not pie (cake being 25% reduc to def stance back and we will be fine said the warrior class ) Now the class is to boring so u want pie and donuts and muffins and a pizza with a 2 liter soda on the side u FATTYS !
Edited by Silhin, 09 June 2013 - 08:13 PM.