[00:00] This is Alondo's video on the Warrior problem in WoW Forever. I have not played a Warrior yet. I want to. I actually was about to, and then the servers went down. That's why we're watching this video. Warriors have a rage normalization issue that I'm hearing about,
[00:16] where you don't get as much rage on crits and while being attacked, and you're kind of rage-starved. That's what I'm hearing, at least. So Alondo, Parry, high level warrior, what's your take, what's going on?
[00:32] Let's hear the facts. Okay, getting right into this. First things first, we can go ahead and admit that warriors are the best class in the game in vanilla WoW. They are by far the strongest EPS. The meta in vanilla is stack warriors and stack the classes that help the warriors.
[00:44] So if you're Horde, you bring Shamans for them, both factions bring Druids and one Druid, one Warlock to debuff the target and they kill everything for you. Because they just do way more damage than everyone. They are the strongest EPS, even without Bisc gear.
[00:56] Common misconception is that Warriors do low damage at low gear, but they are just very overtuned in Vanilla. They do the most damage without gear, they do the most damage with gear. A lot of this is because of Rage generation. The way they generate Rage in Vanilla is pretty crazy.
[01:09] It's basically, the more damage you do, the more Rage you get, the more you can use your abilities. Once again, they're the strongest single target, two target, three target, four target. And not only that, but they have, like, strong debuffs through Thunder, Demo, and Thunderclap. Like, no one else in the game has Thunderclap.
[01:21] They're the only applicator, unless you have Thunderfury. They have strong AP scaling through Bloodthirst, they have strong crit scaling through Flurry and Impale, they have a positive feedback loop with their gearing and their scaling. Like I said earlier, more crits means more flurry uptime, crits generate more rage also.
[01:34] The more flurry uptime you have, the more you hit, the more you hit, the more rage you generate, the more rage you generate, the more you can use spells that proc flurry, the more damage you do means you generate more rage. Okay, so this guy knows his stuff.
[01:47] W Alondo for explaining this. I was talking to Ampy this morning about this concept, and one of the issues warriors have traditionally, and the issue that Blizzard's trying to solve in Lost Forever is literally this.
[01:59] The more damage you do, the more damage you do. The more gear you get, the more damage you do, which means the more range you get, which means the more damage you do. So everything scales way harder on a warrior than it would on, like, an Ellie Shaman or a Mage or something, right?
[02:14] Like, gear scales super hard. World buff scales super hard, because you don't just get the extra crit for the more damage, you get more rage from the extra crit,
[02:26] because you're hitting harder, you're getting more rage, which means you can spend more rage, which means you can do even more damage. And this is scaled to infinity. So the problem is, in a thing that progresses horizontally, if you have a class design like this,
[02:40] and it just scales to infinity, Warriors will just be the number one damage eventually at some point and take over just like they did in ERA. How do you solve that? So that's the conversation. Rage normalization is one approach, but is that the right approach?
[02:55] Let's get into it more. And it's just a feedback loop, right? This got out of control with World Buff because they gave you a crazy amount of Crit and AP. It made it just so that Warriors were just way better than everyone else. Warriors and Vanilla are strong without World Buff
[03:08] and they are out of control strong with World Buff. later on in TDC they nerf rage generation and they increase boss armor so like in Vanilla WoW when a boss is fully debuffed it has like really really low
[03:20] physical damage reduction like maybe 5% meaning like every hit you do is basically ignoring all armor that means you just have a ton of rage like you can attack once and get a full rage bar with a one-hander on and this is a bit of a problem because in solo content
[03:32] and group content you're going to be fighting mobs that have way more armor than raid bosses because in a raid you're going to have you're going to have other warriors helping you thunder you might have a rogue using exposed armor. You're going to have a druid putting up, you know, fairy fire. You're going to have a warlock
[03:44] putting up crucifix. Suddenly that boss with 3781 armor or whatever now has like 400 armor. But when you're in like a dungeon and you're fighting like a single mob, you're not fighting a mob that you're just doing like 30, 40% less damage to.
[03:56] You're getting that much less rage. You're pressing like no buttons and suddenly you're just like completely weak. This is why warriors are like historically so weak in classic. Because like you don't have the support to generate that rage to press your buttons. They recognize that
[04:08] that's a problem, right? Warriors were too strong and vanilla when supported, and by themselves they were very weak. The Forever Devs know this, and they've known it for a while, they've known it back in the Thaw days, but I think we can all agree that Warrior was too strong in vanilla, and that it needed to be toned
[04:22] down a little bit, and forever. Blizzard's response to this is to completely normalize rage. So they make it so that all hits, all crits, and all glances of a weapon type will generate the same amount of rage. This means that if you have your best-in-fault legendary
[04:35] weapon and a grey weapon and they have the same speed, you're going to generate the same amount of rage. You're going to generate the same amount of rage if you have 100 AP and 5,000 AP. This means that you don't get rage from parries or dodges or misses, and this is like,
[04:48] off the bat, this is a little bit problematic. It's fine to have rage normalization, we'll get into that, but to have it to this level with no compensation is a bit of a problem. So as it stands now, a Fury Warrior, you will basically
[05:00] only be able to bloodthirst and whirlwind on cooldown. You're almost at the point where you can't. When you first hit 60 and you sex Fury, you won't be able to use your two buttons on cooldown. You'll generate like 400-something rage a minute,
[05:12] and to use both of those, you need like a little bit more than 400 rage, something like that. We won't get too specific. This means that you're basically never pressing Hero Strike or Cleave. If you do, it's bad. You don't want to Hero Strike or Cleave over your actual buttons.
[05:24] And it hurts Arms even more. Arms won't even be able to press Mortal Strike every time it's up. You'll just be AFK most of the time. So you're going to go from one of the highest APM specs in the game because, you know, you have an off to the ability that you use every swing.
[05:37] You have Bloodthirst to use, you have Whirlwind to use, you can kill with Hand String. That's gone. You can't press buttons anymore because you don't have the ability to generate rage anymore. This is, like, extra bad when, you know, we talked about Thunder and Demo Shot and Thunderclap earlier.
[05:51] Now, if you're applying debuffs, which you should do, if you don't have those debuffs up, you should be doing them. It's going to absolutely destroy your rage economy. And to top that all off, the rage you generate from taking damage is, like, almost halved, according to calculations. So, all things considered, they normalized Rage completely, and they didn't give us anything in return.
[06:08] Now, if we compare it to future expansions, let's start with Cataclysm, which Cataclysm is where they first normalized Rage for Warriors in the history of the game. But in Cataclysm, your crit still generated extra Rage, and there was also a passive, like the talent was called Blood Frenzy,
[06:22] which means you just had a chance to generate extra Rage on auto-attacks. You could charge in combat, and X-Masquito didn't just dump all your Rage. You also had cooldowns like Deadly Calm. Deadly Calm was like a two minute cooldown. When you pressed it, nothing you spent cost Rage, so you could stand all your buttons for the duration of that Deadly Calm.
[06:38] The cost of Mortal Strike was lowered to 20 from 30. 30 is egregious, by the way. And Slam became like the filler that you used. It didn't reset your Slam timer anymore. It was like another button you could press to dump Rage. You also had access to things like Battle Trance. It was a talent that procced off of Bloodthirst, Mortal Strike, and Shield Slam, which would make the next spell you cast that cost more than 10 Rage free.
[06:56] sweeping strike's rage cost removed and it was moved to like a one minute cooldown and heroic strike and cleave were reworked to just be an off global cooldown button. Your swing timer didn't matter. You just pressed it. It cost a lot of rage. It was inefficient to use.
[07:08] So it was high rage cost for like kind of low damage, which it's fine. We'll get into that. I also had the ability inner rage on like a 30 second cooldown, which would remove the cooldown of heroic strike and cleave. Like heroic strike and cleave was like a three second cooldown. They're shared,
[07:20] but they're just a pure rage jump. And that was a way to get rid of your rage if you had too much rage. It also had battle shout. You press Battleshot and you get like 10 rage or something, but that's kind of minor. That was a compensation for rage normalization and cataclysm. So they gave warriors all of that so you could actually play the game.
[07:34] You know, you have all these things that you could have something that was free to use or you had something that would help you generate. Okay, so Alondo knows his stuff. This is awesome because I keep asking the chat, what do you guys mean rage normalization and then people give me 100 answers?
[07:49] This is great insight. This is really, really cool. Bro wants retail. Well, he's not saying to give all that stuff. He's saying that when, historically, when rage normalization came in for the first time,
[08:02] they did get all this stuff. His argument isn't, we need all this stuff. His argument is, if you rage normalize, you need all this stuff, you need some stuff to compensate or find another solution. So, yeah, this is a great video so far.
[08:15] I'm curious what his alternate solution might be. Because, clearly, he started the video with saying, look, it's a problem. If you have no rage normalization, warriors scale too hard, fill out DPS every other class by a mile,
[08:32] and it just becomes too spammy, whatever. Like, it's a problem, but this might not be the best way to fix it. I actually talked to Ampy this morning about this topic, and Ampy, let me not misquote him,
[08:44] and just read you exactly what he said. Ampy said this. I think it's the only option. Forever WoW has a one-year lifespan before Warrior takes over if Rage Normalization isn't in.
[08:59] Imagine if casters had a mana cost reduction based on spell power. It's just not a good scaling system. Especially if it scales exponentially, not logarithmically.
[09:14] Yeah, so essentially that's what Ampie said. So if Ampie thinks this is good, even though it sucks at low level, because it's going to set up the game to work properly later. I would like to see what Alondo has to say about this.
[09:27] Right, Rage? And that way, Rage is normalized, so you didn't need every buff, you didn't need every debuff to be able to play your class, and you can actually play the game in Cataclysm. Now, in Forever, we get none of that. We don't even get critical strikes generating extra Rage,
[09:40] which is, that's kind of crazy. We'll talk about that later again. After Cataclysm, we get Mists of Tandaria, where they actually remove, I believe, I'm not 100% sure, I'm like 99% sure, You don't get extra rage from tricks and mobs, similar to how it is in Forever.
[09:54] But Mortal Strike became a generator, so instead of spending 20 rage to use Mortal Strike, Mortal Strike was free and it gave you 20 rage. I not saying we need to do that but this is just an example of compensation that Warriors were given with Rage on Yeah just to be clear again because people in the chat keep saying like if you think they want all this stuff no that not his point he making his broader point that if you normalize rage something should compensate
[10:15] so my first inclination when someone said racial normalization i was like okay well maybe this helps long-term scaling but they probably then should get something else in place to smooth out maybe the low-level experience for rage gen.
[10:31] I think that is a fair take. I think that works, like, something, right? So then you have kind of best of both worlds. It doesn't scale into infinity, but it also feels nice at low-ish level
[10:45] while you're leveling, which is the majority of the game for most people. You also have things like Colossus Masters for free, and then you have, like, low-rage, like, overpower is like a low-rage ability. They change stances and mobs, So battle stance, for example, when you were in battle, you had 100% rage generation from autos,
[11:00] but you gained no rage from taking damage. These stances, you could switch between the stance of off-global, they share like a small stance global, but you lost no rage, it was purely a rage thing. Berserker stance, you would generate like half as much from auto attacks, but you generated a ton from taking damage.
[11:13] So there was like this little mini-game you could play on boss fights, if you really understood the boss fight and you knew when damage was coming in, you could go berserker stance for that extra rage. Also, you could use charge in combat again. There's a bunch of expansions, I don't really remember everything from all the expansions,
[11:25] but you can, you kind of get the idea here, right? Rage is normalized, but there's other things that make the gameplay more dynamic. Even in retail, Clips still give extra Rage, they'll give a little bit of extra Rage, and they also, like, proc, like an attack to proc, kind of like Flurry.
[11:37] Arms, your overpowers are free, Swipping Strikes are free, and you get, like, free execute procs through sudden death. And then, like, every once in a while, you'll Blade Swarm, at least with Flurry, you'll Blade Swarm, and, like, during Blade Swarm, you can't use any spenders,
[11:49] but you do continue to generate your auto-attacks. In Forever, we don't have, we don't have any of this. We just have auto-attacks. There's no way to scale it through gear. There's no free spells. There's no procs. You're just going to auto-attack, and you're going to hope your auto-attacks land
[12:02] so you can press bloodthirst every once in a while. You're not going to have any rage to use, like, cleave or whirlwind, basically. I say zero gear scaling, but hit will scale up your rage a little bit. We haven't seen any haste on gear, but haste led to it.
[12:14] So I hate to say it, but it is the truth that the way Warriors are playing right now is actually in line with how the rest of the game plays, how every other class plays,
[12:27] where you attack, hit a button, and you AFK, and hit another button, you AFK. That's classic WoW for every other class besides Warrior. But the solution, in my opinion, is not to bring Warrior down to the rest of the classes in the game.
[12:42] That just sucks for everyone. My preferred solution is the opposite. You keep Warrior kind of how it feels in era, because it feels great and people love it, and you bring every class up to how Warrior fell in era.
[12:54] So by nerfing Warrior here, I think it's probably the wrong approach. I think you keep Warrior kind of, you don't want it to scale forever, but you keep the strength and the rotation, how good it feels to press the buttons, and you bring every class up-ish to that level.
[13:09] That's a much better solution. So people are saying no. I'm curious. Why? Because, I mean, we've had this conversation a lot over the years, and this has always been my stance. I'm curious as to why. Let me see if you guys can change my mind.
[13:23] A lot of people are saying yes, too, but I agree with myself. I'm curious as to why people don't want a rotation as interesting as warriors. Power creep, the power creep conversation is not really this conversation
[13:36] because you can still tune damage numbers. I'm talking rotationally. Power creep, boom, out the window. Anything else? I'm curious. I'd be curious if you could change my mind. The general thought process is this class rotation feels fun to play.
[13:48] We can nerf it and slow it down, or we can make every class as engaging as warrior. My take is, let's make every class as engaging as warrior. Can you change my mind? I saw a lot of L's a second ago, and now I'm not seeing any.
[14:00] Please, change my mind. The power creep argument isn't one at all. You just tune the numbers. That's a different conversation. I'm with you? Okay. But for everyone that was saying L a second ago, please, you're wrong. Why? Critical thinking is dead?
[14:12] I agree. I would love to, yeah. I'll give you guys a little longer. Anyone? I just got back. Welcome back. Warrior will be fine. Yeah. I agree with you, Sar. Trust me, bro. Too complex. Can we play?
[14:24] Pull them up. What's up? Critical thinking's been dead. Okay. So for everyone typing L, you have no reason behind it. Okay. I just wanted to call you guys out real quick because I think bringing classes up to a fun level of play is not a very crazy thing to say here.
[14:39] But bringing warriors into a spot where everyone else is at is really just making everything to them. Why do I have experience with this specific conversation? Well, in Warlords of Draenor, what they did is they dumbed down every class,
[14:52] and there was some OP classes that were standouts. And you know the solve for it? What Blizzard did is they nerfed the OP classes to go in line with all of the other classes and made them all very simple.
[15:04] What was the result? Everything was more balanced. But what was also the result? Everything was boring to play. I've seen it historically, and I don't want it to happen again.
[15:16] So that's why I have experience with this conversation. It is a mistake, a very large mistake. I've seen it happen once, and I don't want to see it happen again. Warriors, fun class. Let them continue having fun and buff the classes that are not having fun rotationally so that they can.
[15:35] Using Warrior as somewhat of a gold standard because you have a fun rotation of things to press and play and experience the game and interact with the game. And nerfing Warrior down to let's press one button and making every other class feel that makes the whole game boring.
[15:50] Now, I know we're not all on the same page, but hopefully a lot more of us are on the same. Just have to say it real slow. Cool. And this is basically turning Warrior into like Vanilla Wall Frostmage, but you have to be in melee range. And you don't press Frostbolt, you just auto-attack.
[16:03] You just sit there and press your one button. You get a big powerful weapon upgrade. You know, everybody knows when you hit level 30 and you use your whirlwind axe, now you're suddenly, you're hitting a mod, you're getting 60 rage. That's gone. The rotation is like completely scripted. There's no variance, basically.
[16:16] The only variance is, oh, I missed two attacks in a row. This is going to delay my blood thirst by another however long. It's just going to feel bad. The little mini game that Fury Warriors played with your rage bar, that's gone too. You don't have enough rage to play with.
[16:28] In vanilla TBC, you would make sure you didn't rage cap. you know you would play your heroic tricks and fleece and you didn't rage cap you never wanted to rage cap but you also wanted enough rage to be able to bloodthirst and whirl in on cooldown that's gone that was one of the most
[16:40] fun things to me at least that's gone you just don't have rage anymore and that's a couple of the things that don't really give me rage from taking damage even if you did bosses at least in classic weren't really designed like how they are
[16:52] and later expansions were like for example like Saffron has like a pulsing damage aura that's really rare and been a little while and obviously that can change in forever they change how healers work and stuff maybe they add that you're not generating much rate from taking damage.
[17:04] Now, after I've said all that, you know, you might be thinking, oh, rage normalization is the enemy. It isn't really the enemy, though. It's probably the correct thing to do, and I would... Wow, cool. Okay, I can't wait to hear what he says. So, Ampy said the same thing.
[17:16] A lot of warriors are complaining, but Ampy and Alondo, I really trust these guys, very knowledgeable players, much more knowledgeable than myself, especially when it comes to, like, warrior. So, it's like, they both were like,
[17:28] oh, it's actually kind of good because it helps scaling. So I'm curious, though, what he's going to say to balance out especially the early game. Being shocked of what he's backed off of this, I think they're pretty intent on normalizing rage.
[17:40] I think it's good for long-term. For the long-term health of the game, they're not going to have to constantly look at Warrior and do this and do that because Warrior got this item. Now they do so much rage. They do so much damage because they have infinite rage.
[17:52] When it's done well, it's good. Like I was saying earlier, you know how you're weak in solo content and group content? Much weaker. Obviously, you're going to feel stronger. everybody can buff each other, but warriors specifically, you were so weak by yourself.
[18:04] With rage normalization, you're not going to feel as weak, and like I said, it's going to be easier for them to tune. A big example of this was in Sod. When they released the Gnomer raid, they gave bosses a ton of armor baseline, and that disproportionately hurt warriors, because now warriors would do that boss, and they had no rage.
[18:19] So if they wanted to do something cool like, oh, maybe we want Cassius to be stronger on this fight, we'll add armor to the boss, it really screwed warriors over, because now warriors can't press their buttons. You're just gonna auto-attack, you're gonna get like two rage, you can't press your button,
[18:32] the caster's are nuking the boss while you sit there and do nothing. When they normalize rage, you don't run into problems with it anymore. You'll always be able to press your buttons and play your class. Speaking of class, here's a quote from Agron. I'll just read it out loud here. Warriors, rage is a problematic mechanic because more damage equals more rage
[18:46] equals more damage equals more rage at instant item. This is going to become more problematic at 60% of the time. If we had to do it over again, we'd likely have normalized rage. I mean, you don't get extra rage when you do more damage slash crit. By the way, this was two years ago when he was talking about Solid,
[19:00] and this is currently what we have now. We'd like to have known as Rachel to start a season and focus on major changes to their gameplay to compensate. Now, this is the problem. They haven't given us anything to compensate, as far as we know. Like I said, from Cataclysm and Mop...
[19:12] I'd say this is actually a really fair and balanced take from Milando. I wasn't expecting this. That's actually exactly what I said, very similar to what Ampy said. Like, it fixes the long-term problem,
[19:24] but you might need something to compensate to smooth out a little bit. Yeah. I wonder what his idea is, specifically. They gave us a ton of tools to compensate, and forever, we've gotten nothing.
[19:36] We've gotten normalized rage and nothing to compensate. So hopefully, you know, maybe we're, like, wrong about this and maybe to have something secret until later, but as it is now, it's looking pretty brutal. We're not going to be able to really press any buttons here.
[19:48] And then I wrote some notes down for the specs. Protection, actually, protection's looking pretty good. They were given some tools to compensate. Shieldspec has rage on block, I think I always had that. Shield block, baseline, blocks two hits, so you don't need to spend a talent for that. And it costs ten rage, so shield block is basically free as long as you're getting hit. You press shield block, it costs ten rage.
[20:03] You block two hits you get ten rage back That great There a talent that gives you rage when you dogger parry so if you avoiding the boss a bunch you not going to be screwed Because there are times for example in TBC if you get too tanky you have no rage to hit the boss You can use your spells They don want you to not do your defense
[20:20] because of that. But this will help when you get bad luck. They have the Focus Rage talent, which reduces all spell costs by a flat amount. Offensive spells like Thunder Revenge. They buff revenge hard. It's like skills with AP now. It has way higher base damage.
[20:32] It has a high threat modifier. And the most important thing is it costs 5 rage. 2 with Focus Rage. And you can kind of guarantee it through Shield Block. You press shield block, you block, it procs your ability to use revenge, you press revenge, pretty decent threat.
[20:44] Shield time is 20 rage instead of 30, like the other caps on talent. Folks, again, those talent cost that too much rage. And prot warriors are tanks, so you're taking damage. You're taking way more damage than fury warriors and stuff. So you're going to be getting more rage that way. Prot also has no incentive to play outside of defense.
[20:57] So you can charge in defense now. The only time you would leave defensive stance is, like, if you were going to mocking blow something, realistically. Or maybe, like, you can retaliation or recklessness or something. But that's not really a problem here. So you don't have to worry about like, for example, Arms wants to be like rending and stuff.
[21:12] And they probably want to press Warlord too if they have the rage for it. And then one like thing that could be kind of problematic is like, once again, the rage is normalized. So if you walk up with no rage before a boss fight, you swing on the boss and you get dodged or parried.
[21:25] And that boss will not run to someone. You know, maybe it's Taunting and we don't really know if bosses are going to be Taunting. You have like no way to get that back since you're not getting hit for revenge. This is just like, this will be called later with like expertise and stuff. But it is one thing to look out for.
[21:37] Arms, I think, has hurt the most by far. Now, this is all assuming that they care... All right, guys. We need to have a conversation.
[21:49] It is not acceptable to be hating on theorycrafters on how to make the game feel better.
[22:01] That is what a beta is for. That is literally why we're playing the beta. as long as it's analytical and you're not crying and saying, that's my class, I suck, which this is not,
[22:13] then there is nothing wrong with valid criticism of how can I make my class feel better. If you are the guy saying, oh, warriors finally nerfed and they're crying,
[22:26] you're missing the point. Please, go sit in the corner and take a time out. And for the rest of us, we can continue having a conversation about how the game can feel better. I'm frustrated, guys.
[22:38] I'm frustrated. There's so many of you. I'm having a conversation on how I can make, how we can make nations have a fun rotation and people are like, oh, go cry. You're a maze. You should suck.
[22:50] Go sit in the corner, man. Take a time out. Like, that is not acceptable. We can have conversations about how to make the game better in a positive and constructive manner.
[23:02] That's exactly what Alondo's doing here. There's nothing wrong with this video. He's not a warrior complaining that he's too weak. He's a warrior saying, as it stands right now, we're kind of AFK pressing two buttons.
[23:14] Maybe we need some compensation to press a little bit more buttons. There's nothing wrong with that. If you think there's something wrong with this conversation, time out.
[23:26] Dad mode is successfully deployed. It's frustrating. Because we are trying to have this same exact conversation with mages. Now we're having the same conversation with warriors. and there's just this hate train of like, warriors finally deserve to suck.
[23:40] Dude, you're a hater, man. Get out of here. You know? You're a hater. Like, let's have a conversation on how to make the game better. Like, for the rest of us. We can stay here. Everyone else that's doing that, get out of here.
[23:53] To make ARMS a viable PvP spec, which I don't think there's a reason to believe that they aren't, because they added things like the flam talent. You don't really want to be standing full and flamming in PvP. So, Arms is generating like, way less rage than Fury, like almost 50% less rage I think.
[24:08] Arms has another ability to spend in some of these strikes that cost 30 rage, which is, once again, that's a lot of rage. That's like attacking for like, 8 seconds or something. Ring and Overpower calls require you to be in Battle Stance, and you, generally if you're DPSing you want to be in Berserker,
[24:20] because it, well, lets you use Whirlwind and you have 3% more crit. Arms doesn't have Flurry, which is like, Flurry is the best talent in all three trees. It's by far the best DPS talent you can get, and it also increases your rage gem, I assume.
[24:32] maybe there's something weird with Talon's where it doesn't, but we can assume that it makes you generate more rage. Another problem is Mortal Strike has, like, zero scaling. It's just, like, flat weapon damage, which, I mean, it scales with AP technically, but not very hard.
[24:44] But Blutter scales much harder than Warland. Like I was saying earlier with the PvP, it's kind of... When you're making these changes, you always have to kind of think about PvP. Some people try to write PvP off as, like, this thing they don't care about. I don't think that's true in Classic. I think PvP is pretty important to the game.
[24:58] and I think as a game developer you can't just outright say we don't care about PC so I think they're going to have that in mind and a huge problem with Arms is it has Mortal Strike which is like a 50% kill reduction and if they're tuning around Mortal Strike they don't want Warriors to be too broken
[25:11] so their damage is going to be lower and I think the way to fix that is you shift talents around you like maybe you play Death Wish and you rework Slam into being the Stender you reduce the amount of points you need for Blood Thrill stuff like that
[25:23] Fury I talked about the little mini game of like you know making sure you're not Rage Cap but having enough Rage to Blood Thrill and Whirlwind on cooldown. At its current value, you're basically, like, unable to Bloodthirst and Whirlwind on cooldown. Or if you are, it's like you're barely able to. Probe Strike and Cleave,
[25:35] you'll... So, like, that right there is probably, like, the single biggest, like, rotational problem is that if Fury barely has enough rage to Bloodthirst, Whirlwind, um,
[25:47] at 60 in a rotation, and you can't ever actually Heroic Strike, you can't really effectively execute, you can't even really, you know, effectively gets a Thunder up at the start of the fight
[25:59] and then still Bloodthirst and Whirlwind. Then the rotation really gets dumbed down to two buttons instead of using Thunder, Execute, Heroic Strike, and then even Hamstring if you're horrid with Whirlwind, or
[26:11] even Alliance for extra rage dump. And then, of course, the Bloodthirst-Whirlwind really just becomes Bloodthirst-Whirlwind. Right? So... Yeah, it's a good, very fair concern. Never have enough rage for them. And one of the highest APM specs in the game is reduced to...
[26:25] Like, if you're lucky, you'll press two buttons on cooldown. We're just kind of turned into, like, a mage. And even the mages are complaining. Mages went from one button in vanilla, and, you know, I watched this little thing, and the mages are like, okay, well, we have Iceland, but that's just two buttons.
[26:37] And Arcane is just two buttons. Like, I think the complexity is a bit too low for the rotation. Not that you need to have complex rotations, but this is a little bit too far in the wrong direction, I think. Now, this... I'm so happy someone is critically thinking,
[26:51] Alondo, I love you, bro. Holy crap, this is great. This is one of my biggest rights, is having recklessness. Now, recklessness is a 30-minute cooldown that gives you 100% crit for 15 seconds.
[27:03] It makes you take 20% more damage. I think it being a 30-minute cooldown is completely unacceptable in the year 2026. When you're in a raid and all your friends are popping their cool cooldowns and you don't have your button up, you're just sitting in the corner just hoping,
[27:15] just wishing you had your button. And it also quickly devolves into like... Did they... I thought they made Shield Wall, Wreck, and Retail 15?
[27:29] It's 15, isn't it? Oh, they made the other two 15, but Wreck is still 30? Oh, that's interesting. I wonder why. Because, yeah, if you have Wreck up on a boss,
[27:41] you'll just do, like, double your damage if you don't have Wreck up on a boss. That is an interesting choice. The other two are 15, though. okay I get to have fun on one boss this week I get to pick one boss to press recklessness
[27:53] maybe maybe two you know chances are you press that recklessness and you know maybe there's a really cool mechanic that crowd controls your character randomly and now you just you got your one boss of the week and John Blizzard says you don't get to play this fight and then like just
[28:07] imagine how bad that feels we've all been there any warrior play has been there and also I think it leads to tuning problems like if warriors seem to be good without wreck and how broken are they going to be with Rek. Season of Discovery addresses this, they address it pretty early even.
[28:19] I think Recklessness was never 30 minutes in Fog. Recklessness was 5 minute cooldown in Fog, I think it was a 12 second duration and only plus 50% crit. And I much prefer that. An argument people are going to make is that it was shorter cooldown
[28:31] but it was worse. So it wouldn't make it so that you were like a god when you pressed it. You wouldn't just talk to meters insta, but it was shorter cooldown so you could actually be more consistent. Interesting.
[28:43] Is Recklessness being that long of a cooldown is important because they want every recklessness you press to be really memorable for the journey to level 60 or the journey to whatever, you know, whatever your goal is. Like, I don't completely disagree.
[28:56] I can see it as an argument. The problem is, you get wrecked at level 50. Like, you're deep into the journey at that point. And wreck is such a long cooldown that people are going to be, like, way less likely to press it because, like, what happens
[29:08] when you press wreck and you don't get to do anything with it? Like, what happens, you're really thinking, oh, I really want to press recklessness on this mage, But if I press Recklessness and he just sweeps me, I am going to undersell the game. And I don't think I'm the only one who's like that. Like, I think people are going to be really hesitant to even press the button on a 30-minute cooldown.
[29:23] Once again, there's few feelings in the game worse than pressing a 30-minute cooldown and then getting no value from it. Like, I just press Recklessness and Frostlight drops on me. And then they step away and shut me. Bro, I've never seen a Warrior Pob inside.
[29:35] This is nuts. Holy crap. 16k DPS. Is this slamming the whirlwind? What now? or I press Recklessness and the guy just one-shots me
[29:47] because I'm taking like 38% more damage or whatever because it's multiplicative with Preserve your Stance and Death Wish and all that. Choosing when to press your button creates more stress than the value you actually gain from pressing the button and the feeling you get from pressing Recklessness,
[30:00] in my opinion. I talked about taking extra damage. Normally when you press Wreck, you're going to do so much damage that you might just pull back and die with your 30-minute cooldown. That feels horrible. And another thing is, Retaliation and Shield Loading Forever reduce to 15 minutes, which I still think is too long.
[30:12] One of my favorite things about FOD was retal being five minutes. It lets you feel Warriors are bad at low end right One of the cool things was every five minutes you got to feel like a real class You could pull two mobs and press retell on those I think retaliation was a cool ability and you never really got to use it in vanilla because you always went up a wreck basically
[30:29] Sherwald also 15 minutes, and Sherwald also... There are talents for Sherwald to be formed. Warriors out there, how do you guys feel about that? Sod, I never played Warrior and Sod. I've played a lot of Warrior and Era.
[30:41] How do you feel about a five-minute wreck that's much weaker, that you can use it more often, but it's much weaker? This is modernizing the class a bit. Let me just, a lot of people seem to like that. This is modernizing the class a bit, right?
[30:53] Like the long cooldowns that are brokenly strong, like a lay on hands or something, is part of the classic feel. So it is a little scary to do something like that, but maybe there's a middle ground.
[31:06] Maybe 15 minutes and there's a mid-strength, or 10 minutes and there's a level that makes sense. I don't really know, but I tend to agree like a 30 minute cooldown that makes you like literally
[31:19] just turns you into a you know super Saiyan and then like if you're if you have it you're just parsing that we can have everything else you're just kind of you know that is kind of troll um it is it's a
[31:31] nightmare to balance really and protection which is that's great also and one other thing that people like to overlook is we don't we don't really know how raids are going to be designed but let's assume they do want us to maybe prog everyone
[31:43] If they wanted to progress raids and you're playing a warrior and Wreck is 30 minutes, how bad is it going to feel to press Wreck and wipe and now for the next 30 minutes you're kind of worthless? Another question I have is, people want to talk about the warrior class fantasy and the journey, but why does it have to be tied to a 30 minute cooldown when no other class has a problem with it?
[32:02] I think Lay on Hands was reduced from 1 hour to 20 minutes. it's my opinion that most people would agree to have a weaker recklessness on a shorter cooldown over a 30 minute recklessness with 100% crit but once again that's an extremely thinated thing and
[32:17] maybe not everyone's going to agree on that obviously but this is a big deal to me i hate being worthless outside of my rec and to wrap it up is there any other classes in classic wow with something similar so maybe you have a cold snap at eight minutes or is it even 10 in classic
[32:33] well. But there's no Icy Veins, so that's just Ice Block. So that's not even similar. Trying to think of anything else long. Lay on Hands, of course. But Lay on Hands isn't really
[32:45] this. It's a massive defensive cooldown. Nothing that long. Like, Evocate is 8 minutes. Snap is 10. I mean, there's Rogues have Prep,
[32:57] but that's a little different. Feral has 3 minutes. Zerk. I'm trying to think. What's the cooldown on Rapid Fire? Five, I think? Yeah, maybe it is a warrior-only thing.
[33:10] Maybe a five-minute wreck is the best solution here. Recklessness. Look, the decision to press wreck is never as exciting as the fantasy in your head. A lot of the times you press wreck and you do nothing.
[33:23] In Vanilla Law, every auto-attack you do still has a 40% chance to glance. Even if you have 150% crit, 40% of the time you swing, you'll glance. Glances can't crit. Like, if anything, whenever you press rec, like, more often than not, your rec is going to feel weak.
[33:36] And that makes it, like, something that people are, like, really hesitant and anxious to press instead of, like, a cool cooldown that, like, makes you feel stronger. And I just, like, I just don't really feel like a 30-minute cooldown. If you look at Retail WoW, which, obviously, we're not trying to be retail,
[33:49] but, like, their longest cooldown is basically three minutes, and I don't think the developers even like the three-minute cooldown. 30 minutes is just, like, it's so baffling to me, especially since they made it five minutes and sob. Yeah, like, I agree. like Warrior was too strong in Vanilla
[34:01] it needed to be nerfed the Rage normalization is a good thing if they do it right and right now I don't think they've done it right let's say that the current iteration of Warrior right now with its Rage does the most damage I would gladly do
[34:13] significantly less damage to have like a rotation that I can actually enjoy pressing my buttons I just ended this with some suggestions it's really hard to make suggestions because there's you have to you have to keep so many things in mind you have to understand that the majority of the player base
[34:25] is not I try to do the same thing with Mage to answer that same question that you just asked to repeat it is, I would rather do less damage but have an interesting rotation to press.
[34:38] What button should we, you know, add to make this possible? And it's hard. It's really hard. I spent multiple days thinking about it for Mage. Like, damage aside, how can we make this rotation fun,
[34:50] not just one button? How do you do it? It's like, oh, crap. Because everything is tied to something else. There's so many implications. There's PvP, there's leveling, there's dungeons, there's endgames, and it's like, oh, this would break this, this would break that, you know?
[35:04] It's tough. I'm not going to be, like, trying super hard at endgame raids, and you have to keep in mind PvP, you have to keep, like, a ton of things in mind, so this is just, like, some things that I'd suggest. First of all, let's make Wreck a 5-minute cooldown, just like Slaug.
[35:16] Make it give less crit. You can make it give, like, 20% crit, 30% crit, I don't care. Just lower the cooldown, lower the duration, make it weaker if you want. That's fine. Honestly, they could remove it and it'd be fine with that. They would never do that, though.
[35:28] They could make Ren generate rage. So they had a rune in SOD, Season of Discovery, where your Ren ticks give you rage, and it actually made Ren, like, a rage-positive spell. So, like, it cost rage to use, but it generated more rage than it cost.
[35:40] So, like, for example, on, like, Pax, you would multi-dock Ren, and then you would, like, have other buttons to press. They could also just straight-up make Crypts generate more rage. I don't really know the logic behind removing that. If their whole talk about, like,
[35:52] making your progression on your characters slower, I find it hard to believe that you're going to reach a Crypt mount that's going to be crazy. They don't even have to make it do double. They can just make World buffs are also out so the crit is going to be a lot lower.
[36:04] One of the things I was worried about with Warrior is like Warriors benefit more from World buffs than like anything else and with World buffs out it also means they're going to be you know reduced the most even rotationally if they don't have the rage gem
[36:16] and it sounds like this is certainly an issue with normalization. So I don't know. My like idea and I haven't even played Warrior yet with something just like you add another talent
[36:28] that, yeah, makes crits generate rage or add another talent a little bit lower in the tree or, like, somewhere middle of the tree that's, like, just helps with rage gen on auto attacks or, like, something to where
[36:40] that smooths out the leveling process because most people don't even hit endgame. Most people just level to 60, right? So it smooths out the rage gen and it's a leveling process and doesn't break endgame. Some sort of solution like that would probably
[36:52] work fine. Just generate five more rage or something, like, depending on your weapon speed. I think they can make deep boons generate rage. I think they've done that in retail and some other extensions. I like Blood Surge as an idea. Flame is really horrible. I don't think they really know what they want to do with flam.
[37:07] Flam and Vanilla WoW is a button that you never press. A lot of the times, like when I was going to Warrior, I wouldn't even train flam. It's basically worthless. There's talents and arms that make you one-use flam, but it's still a 15 second cooldown. If Blood Surge procs some sort of free flam in Wrath of the Lich King, that would be cool,
[37:23] but it would have to be instant and not reset your sling timer. They could give you like a medium. Yeah, it would be something like unbridled rage, but like Maybe unbridled rage just needs to be buffed
[37:37] Maybe unbridled literally just needs to be buffed a little bit and then it kind of solves it Unbridled was buffed? Oh was it? Maybe it needs a touch more of love. Maybe that's it. I don't know
[37:49] In like CD generator like in Dragonflight there was something called full footer, maybe some other extension too. It was just like, you do a little bit of damage, you generate some rage. They could do sudden death. They added in Razzle's Lich King to let you use an execute at any
[38:02] HP amount. They also added in some sod, but execute was tuned so poorly and it dumped all your rage that you never actually used it. And finally, I mean, they could just make you generate more rage for auto-attack, but I don't... Surely they've had a lot of time to think about this.
[38:14] Maybe they don't want to do it. Yeah, that's my thoughts as someone who's played Warrior a lot. I play a lot of classes too. I play every class, but... People are going to say, you know, it's just a level 20 beta, you can't really see much, but you can see the trajectory, right? You can do simple math to see,
[38:26] oh, if it's like this, then we can't play our class. Yeah, that's one of my thoughts. Hopefully some people agree with me and hopefully maybe we can get some feedback from Blizzard.
[38:39] Well done. Well done. Alondo is thinking. It's deep. It's analytical. He's not complaining, but he's bringing up a concern and he's giving potential ideas and solutions towards that concern.
[38:56] I love it. He starts the video off with saying, clearly warriors are too strong, clearly they shouldn't be half of your raid, and clearly they need nerfed from Aera because you don't want a raid full of warriors.
[39:09] Obviously. No one disagrees with that. But, with this kind of thing, the rotation is two buttons, other expansions got this, this or this, Maybe there needs to be something in place with rage normalization.
[39:24] I love it. Well done, Alondo. Well done. And he said about the same thing, too. Very well done. Link to video so we can like it. Here we go. Sure.
[39:39] Does high rage spend the character level? Maybe. I think just balking on tribal wrath makes a lot of sense. That might be too simple. Danny says,
[39:52] Prot Warriors, Gen Rage, based on blocks, will scale hard with block rating. Okay. Got a 10 out of 10 shot from Freedom saying, what if they spread gear sets out among different aspects of the game like helmet and boots
[40:04] are from one rage, that's from another than gloves and shoulders. They kind of do that in Saab. They kind of do that in Saab. So we'll see. I see. Thanks for the prime. Normalize rage plus give some buffs elsewhere so they don't scale to infinity. Easy answer. Exactly.
[40:16] Yep. I agree with that. Nimbus, thanks for the prime. I feel like normalize rage for a crit still giving bonus rage and maybe some tweaked rage constant so you can still press a decent number of buttons. It's probably the best way. Yeah. I think we're like most of us are on the same page here. Yeah.