Warrior Q&A Released

I think that with the PTR being up for quite a while now and with the class Q&A’s coming out faster, it might be a sign that Patch 3.2 is coming soon… at least sooner than I originally thought. It’s the Warrior class’ turn to go under the microscope and see what Ghostcrawler and the development team has to say about the class moving forward.

Warrior trainer

The devs think that one of the things that make the Warrior class interesting is the Rage mechanic, specifically the way rage can convert into damage which converts to rage and so on. It’s a design that they still haven’t been able to really balance. Another aspect that makes warriors interesting is the Stance system, which forces warriors to occasionally switch stances to gain certain benefits and access to certain abilities. They want Stances to be part of the decision making a Warrior has to go through and for him to adapt to a certain situation by switching to the right stance at the right time.

Ghostcralwer thinks that from a design perspective, they’re happiest with the Protection tree and that Fury and Arms need a bit of work. By this he means that Protection is now more flexible with less mandatory talents and more of the fun and useful talents. They’ve been wanting to do the same for both Arms and Fury but doing this now could mean nerfing their dps just to make them cooler and that’s something they don’t want to do. They also want to move further away from the idea that Arms is for PvP while Fury was for PvE because it’s too constraining for people who enjoy one over the other.

Just like how Death Knights can tank with any tree, the devs have been saying that they would like to give warriors at least two tanking trees someday. it certainly would be interesting to see Arms warriors tanking with a two-hander someday. In fact, to some extent I’ve seen it done already like when my level 80 warrior friend tanked regular Drak’theron Keep as Arms.

If you’re looking for a way to gauge your dps as a DPS warrior, Gjostcrawler mentioned that they should be comparable to other melee dps hybrids like Ret pallies, Enhancement shamans, Death Knights, Kitty druids. It used to be that warriors did more than that because they used to be exempted from the rule that pure dps classes do more damage than hybrids.

The devs see a problem with the way Rage is currently being generated. The way things are now, an overgeared warrior tank won’t generate as much rage because he won’t be taking enough damage to generate it and thus generating less threat. They feel that generating more rage through damage done is the way to go for the future but they still have to be careful because in this system, an undergeared warrior tank probably won’t generate as much threat. While we’re in the matter of rage generation and dealing damage, it’s worth mentioning that Blizzard feels like dps stats like Strength aren’t as useless as players might think when it comes to tanking. DPS stats are important for generating threat so they shouldn’t just stack the tanking stats like Avoidance and forget about stuff like Strength.

To see the whole Warrior Q&A you can click here.