The Care and Feeding of Warriors is about warriors, those lovable, squeezable, strokeable bundles of pure joy who seethe with a burning inner fire, a rage that can only be quenched in blood. Matthew Rossi tries quenching it in delicious caffeinated beverages. You'd be surprised how often that works.

Words. Sometimes they fail us, seem inadequate to the task in some way. Very often the fault lies not in the words but we who poorly choose them. So it feels to me today, looking back at yesterday's analysis of the Cataclysm preview for warriors. When one commenter accuses you of taking kickbacks from Blizzard to whitewash changes and another calls you a whiner, you can either decide that you're doing something right or take the opportunity to go over it all again in hopes that this time your message will be more clearly understood. And since I simply can never shut up, I'm going with option #2.

It helps that we had several posts of clarifications and elaborations from the folks at Blizzard to examine. I want to stress up front, again, that while I'm not farting rainbows over every change thus far, I'm very much willing to give lots of slack to the developers as they attempt to redesign rage and revamp old mechanics for the state of the game five years after launch. In many ways, Cataclysm is a huge undertaking, dwarfing previous expansions in both scale and complexity, so bumps are to be expected on the way. So let's take a look at the new information.

Bornakk

Q: Will the rotation for a Fury Warrior just be Bloodthirst and Slam with Heroic Strike to burn off rage?
A: We think Fury is going to end up needing another attack in there for single-target fights. Furious Sundering was intended more as having to Sunder being less of a penalty, but at only 3 stacks, it may not end up being a big deal and we don't want Fury to feel like they have to purchase a talent that they may not always use. We don't want Whirlwind to be a good button against single targets however. It essentially gets "free" damage against groups of targets when it's effective at using against single targets. It's okay if warriors still do more damage in fights where they can use Cleave and similar attacks often, but right now it's too extreme.

Q: Are one-handed Fury warriors going to be competing with rogues for one-handed weapons?
A: This is unlikely. Rogues and shaman will want one-handers with Agility, while warriors and death knights will want them with Strength. I won't be surprised when one of these classes picks up the other's weapon as it could be an upgrade simply based on the damage, but it won't be optimal.

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When we first heard that Whirlwind was being changed to a true AoE that did half weapon damage, the first thing almost any fury warrior would have thought was, "What happens to my rotation?" Since the intention seems to be to throttle back warrior damage in heavy Cleave-spam situations, I can understand that, but yeah, a new 8-second cooldown (current duration of a glyphed Whirlwind) probably needs to be put in there to shore up the tree. The new HS and applying a Sunder effect with 50% weapon damage (what Furious Sundering will do) just aren't really going to fill the hole losing Whirlwind will create.

As for one handed fury using Single-Minded Fury, I remain fairly skeptical. Weapon speed and DPS are going to trump whether a weapon has strength or agility on it, in my opinion, and that's even assuming they can find a way to make two 1H weapons come close to TG's damage potential without nerfing TG's damage and somehow compensating for the raw stats gained by a TG-spec warrior. It still seems to me like rage generation will have to be the draw of a 1H fury build, but I could be wrong. (I'll be really, really surprised if a fury warrior using 1H weapons passed up a DPS upgrade because it had agi on it, though. Even a complete lack of AP from static AP or strength might not matter if the weapons DPS is enough of a jump.)

Bornakk

Q: Why are warriors not getting some kind of AoE tanking tool?
A: We think the newly buffed Thunder Clap plus Shockwave are sufficient abilities for AoE tanking. The design of Vengeance should make sure that threat generation doesn't start to slip behind as the dps characters gear up. It's not our intention that tanks face a constant struggle to generate enough threat, even in group situations, but we also don't want threat to be totally irrelevant either. The danger for tanking too many creatures should also be tank death not threat management.

Q: Is only Sunder Armor being changed?
A: Rogue Expose Armor and other abilities that apply a similar debuff are being changed accordingly. They will all provide the same debuff at 12% armor reduction.

Q: What about rage loss when changing stances?
A: We still want the act of changing stances to require more consideration than just clicking two buttons to use the ability you want. One idea we are going to explore is that you don't lose rage when you change stances, but you won't gain additional rage for a short period of time after changing. This lets you say swap to do an Execute without losing your rage bar, but still keeps the idea that shifting constantly comes with inherent efficiency risks.

Q: Is the intent of Gushing Wound that warriors constantly ask for targets to be kited around?
A: No, it's intended to be a bonus when you're in an encounter where the target either moves around a lot (Ex. BONNNNE STORMMMM-ing Marrowgar) or just has to be moved around a lot (say Lich King). Warriors shouldn't have the expectation of forcing every PvE opponent to move but it would be entertaining to watch this (from a third party perspective). :)

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Frankly, while AoE tanking is never going to be the warrior strong suit, the answer at this point is probably not giving warriors a consecrate. Cleave, glyphs, TC, Shockwave and tabbing about are probably going to have to suffice as the warrior AoE toolkit, and to be fair with Heroic Leap coming into the game and usable with Warbringer, it seems likely that prot warriors will be able to open up a pull with a big damage burst up front. I've chosen to take Ghostcrawler at his word here and believe that Heroic Leap will do a big whack of damage up front when used. This makes it a pretty solid lead-in for a tanking warrior looking for some snap threat to start a pull. Of course, at the moment these previews are still way out from completion: we may not get to see some or all of these changes.

It's only fair that Expose Armor and other debuffs be also scaled to match Sunder Armor, but it's good to see it stated.

A different way to penalize you for changing stances neither upsets nor excites me. It's still a penalty, albeit one that has a new means of implementation. But I will admit it's nice to see them playing with ideas and I'll hope they come up with something dynamic that makes it feel less like a penalty and more like an inherent aspect of rage.

Gushing Wound still looks like it will be most useful in PvP and to help make up for fights where warriors lose on DPS because their targets are on the run.

Ghostcrawler

Inner Rage isn't supposed to feel kiss / curse. It's supposed to feel like a limit break or similar video game analogy. When I get to 100 rage, I go into overdrive mode and cause even more damage. Rather than hitting max rage being a problem (because I'm wasting resources I could be gaining) it's something fun instead.

We put in some of that extra explanation because we don't want warriors to feel like the right way to play is to do nothing until they have 100 rage and then start having fun. It's supposed to feel like getting a string of crits or eating a big hit or something translate into higher damage for a short time.

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This is a laudable goal, but I don't think the description we saw for Inner Rage as yet gets this across and I'm skeptical (but will admit that I'm purely basing this on reading and thinking; I clearly have not had the time to play with this ability yet) that it will have that feeling as it has been described. That being said, I really do like the idea of a limit break for warriors, where when you anger one enough, he finally goes ballistic and starts Hulk-smashing. I'm just not entirely sure a 50% additional rage cost for 15% more damage is going to achieve this. Hopefully the beta will shake this down more and we'll see some variation: I'd love for Inner Rage to have different effects if you were in, say, Battle Stance as opposed to Defensive Stance when you hit 100 raqe.

Frankly, these previews aren't patch notes, so the most we can take from them is an idea of where the design of the class is headed going forward. There's still plenty of stuff yet to unfold, and what we have to digest (rage normalization; many, many old standbys like Heroic Strike, Sunder Armor and Mortal Strike being redesigned) is already pretty thought-provoking. I'm very interested to see what this all looks like when it's more fleshed out.

Ghostcrawler

It's a struggle with previews like this to provide enough context (things like limitations and even numbers) so you get the idea of where we're going with a spell or mechanic without getting everyone over-focused on those details. (As another example, warriors dismissing Inner Rage because they think the numbers aren't tuned perfectly.)

At the moment, we're focused on making fun abilities. As the beta progresses, we'll worry more about the tuning.

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And that's pretty much exactly where their focus should be at this point, and it heartens me to read it. We're getting a taste here, not the whole meal. In my criticism of Inner Rage's proposed numbers, I do not dismiss the idea of the ability. In fact, I very much laud the idea. I just think it will need work in the beta to get the tuning right. That's what beta testing is for: find what works and what doesn't. The bad news with a preview is, none of this stuff is set in stone. The good news is the exact same thing.

Edited to Add: looks like we got a change to how Demo Shout applies.

Ghostcrawler

Oh, uh, I mean "We didn't change Demo Shout at all! Who told you that?"

Actually we changed it to a percent physical damage reduction instead of attack power reduction. I thought that had made the preview and was the source of some of the QQ. :)

...We can't have Demo Shout give you rage if it's not on a cooldown, but we could make Demo Shout work differently from Battle / Commanding. It's not like anything with the word "shout" has to work the same way. Intimidating Shout doesn't. :)

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Honestly, that's what I hope happens. I'd rather Demo didn't give me rage but was usable whenever it was needed. I don't really know if the percent physical damage reduction version of Demo will be an improvement or not until I see it live, but I felt it was an important enough change to amend this post.

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Filed under: Warrior, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Cataclysm