Posts with tag Cataclysm-Rage-Normalization

The Care and Feeding of Warriors is about warriors, those lovable, squeezable, strokable 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.

I have to admit that I'm concerned.

First off, I'm concerned that I don't have a rival on staff. There's no fun warrior/X rivalry like there is for mages and warlocks, or hunters and everyone else, or rogues and whoever cares about rogues (casters, maybe?). It's hard, as a warrior, to really feel like I'm in a rivalry with the other tanking classes since two of them can heal or transform into a giant turkey or a kitty or a fishing lure or whatever it is paladins turn into (I'm aware paladins don't turn into anything, stop typing) and death knights are just warrior 2.0, and in Cataclysm will be even more so with two DPS trees and a dedicated tanking tree. In the end, the other classes are just sort of there. You can't ignore them and you have to be aware of what they can and can't do, but it's hard to really feel any animosity towards them. Maybe I need to start calling Chase names.

I've also been concerned about the changes coming in Cataclysm, and have spent a lot of time thinking about how the warrior class will play and feel once they come in. With armor and stamina differences between plate DPS and other melee coming down, other classes getting boosts to survivability in PvP and PvE, and long time warrior mainstays like Sunder Armor, Mortal Strike, Whirlwind and Heroic Strike/Cleave getting adjustments (as well as rage normalization coming in) the classic advantages of the warrior that counterbalance our deficiencies are being taken out. At first, this had me in a relative fevered pet, a consternation that has since faded somewhat.

You see, if gimmicks like Whirlwind are being rebalanced to not be gimmicky, and armor/stamina edges are being reduced, and tanking tools like Sunder are being revamped, and the very mechanics of rage are being rebalanced, it all ends up in the same place: in Cataclysm, warriors will need sizable, sustained single target DPS increases to be viable, both as tanks and as dedicated DPS, because warriors are undertuned. Yes, undertuned.

What do I mean by that?