Warrior Leveling Guide

Some players really enjoy tanking and see no problem in leveling their Warrior as a Protection Warrior. Shield Slam and Revenge do decent damage and also Shockwave is nice at later levels. If you want to speed up your leveling though, you should definitely explore the Fury talent tree. Two one-handed weapons should be used until you can equip two two-handed weapons.

I have made two builds. One will also take the Impale and Deep Wounds of Arms while the other is even more focused on Fury. It is up to your preferences which ones you would choose.

Warrior Leveling Build With a Little Arms

Warrior Leveling Build Fury + Imp Charge

I would advise you to at least first take Improved Charge in the Arms Tree. Then you can continue with 5% crit rating in the Fury tree and go on down from there. Aim to get Death Wish, Precision and Weapon Mastery asap so you don’t miss that often and Deathwish is a nice damage boost. Flurry is extremely nice and after you take this ability you really get that ‘Rogue-in-plate’ feeling because you really make sushi out of your opponents.

Next in line is Blood Thirst which does not only do a great amount of damage, but also restores health over time. This ability is just great for leveling because it is one of the few life-giving abilities a Warrior has.

Now you will get to choose between some nice damage dealing abilities. Do move down in the tree though and pick up the remaining ones at later levels. Get Rampage as soon as possible, it is a great ability that boosts your damage significantly and only costs one talent point.

You can see that Blizzard wanted to improve the ever so useless Slam ability of the Warrior and you can see that they succeeded. You will have a 20% to instant cast Slam and its damage gets improved to. Whirlwind and Cleave as well get a damage boost in this three which makes the Warrior more capable to deal with multiple mobs at once.

Finally you got Titan’s Grip. Man did I love to see my Warrior looking ba%&$s with two two-handed weapons. Of course, it doesn’t only look great but it will also give you a whole different game play. Ok, you will need to get a lot of hit rating to make up for the hit rating loss but it is kinda cool that the Warrior, the weapon master that always could wield all weapons, can now wield two two-handed weapons instead of the Death Knights in example, which the words once spread before the release of WoTLK.

Warriors – Weapon Masters

Warriors are a great melee class. They are capable to Tank, and even by most considered to be the best tanking class still, but can also do great damage in both PvE and PvP. Masters of the melee fight as they are, they are capable to equip all the melee weapons and even Dual Wield. Next to that they can also wear Plate armor and Shields. Their special abilities can be used with the use of Rage which is gained by taking and dealing damage, and some talents and abilities.

The Warriors have stances they can choose between. The Defensive Stance is normally only used for tanking because it reduces the damage done by 10%. However, it does increase the threat made by 10% and the damage done to the Warrior is reduced by 10% as well. Then there is the Battle Stance which is their basic stance which doesn’t give any boosts or reductions and finally there is the Berserker Stance which increases the Warrior’s critical strike rating by 3% but also increases damage done to the Warrior by 10%. Some abilities can only be used when the Warrior is in a particular stance.

Warriors are strong and can take a few punches which make them easy to level because their damage output is good as well. One should carry a shield with him while leveling so you can tank an instance when you get the chance. At level eighty 70+ however you will definitely need to have a Protection build to tank the instances though. In my opinion Warriors are fast levelers because you can kill the mobs quite fast and then Charge into the next one. Because of the plate armor you will not lose a lot of health, though one does has a few abilities that restore hitpoints and otherwise some bandages can be used which isn’t that time-taking either.

All the races, except the Blood Elves, have Warriors in their ranks.

The Warriors have the Protection talent tree if they want to become good tanks. In this talent tree there are a lot of abilities that reduce the damage done to the Warrior. You will also improve your threat done with this talent tree and will gain some new nice abilities like Spell Reflection, Shield Slam, Shock Wave and Last Stand. A Warrior can be a great tank, in my opinion, Blizzard designed Warriors to be tanks and they are the best at it.

Since WoTLK, the Arms tree is considered to be the weakest talent tree by many Warriors. This is basically because the Fury talent tree has received some great talents that make the Fury talent tree just as good or maybe even better for PvP and it stayed better in PvE. The Arms tree was good because of the Mortal Strike’s debuff left on the character that reduced healing done on him by 50%. Now the Fury Warriors have something similar in the talent tree called Furious Attacks which also gives the same debuff of 50% healing reduced on the target. If you follow this tree you will be able to Dual Wield two two-handed weapons as only class in WoW! It doesn’t only look great but boosts the damage as well and puts the Arms build even more in the shadows. Then there is Heroic Fury, another PvP talent that removes immobilizing effects and removes the cooldown from your intercept.

Cataclysm Class Preview: Warrior

Quote from: Bornakk (Source)

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will bring with it several changes to class talents and abilities. Here you will get a glimpse into some of the changes we have in store for the warrior. The information you're about to read is not complete, and is only meant to act as a preview for some of the exciting new things to come.

New Warrior Abilities

Inner Rage (Level 81): Whenever the character reaches a full 100 Rage, he or she will gain a buff that causes attacks to consume 50% more Rage and do 15% more damage for a short amount of time. This is a passive ability so it won't need to be activated by the player. The goal for this ability is to provide a benefit for hitting max Rage instead of it feeling like a penalty. However, we also don't want warriors to feel like they're supposed to pool Rage and do nothing until they hit 100, so we'll be closely monitoring how this plays out during the beta testing, and making adjustments as needed.

Gushing Wound (Level 83): This ability will apply a bleed effect to the target. If the target moves, the bleed gains an extra stack and refreshes its duration, up to a maximum of three stacks. The ability is currently planned to have no cooldown, cost 10 Rage, and have a 9-second duration. Gushing Wound is designed to be weaker than Rend with one stack, but better with three stacks, which will be reached when fighting a moving target.

Heroic Leap (Level 85): This ability makes the character leap at their target and apply the Thunder Clap ability to all enemies in the area when they land. Heroic Leap will be usable in Battle Stance and shares a cooldown with Charge, but the Juggernaut and Warbringer talents will allow Heroic Leap to be used in any stance and possibly while in combat. The cooldown for this ability might be longer than the Charge ability, but it will also apply a stun effect so you can make sure the target will still be there when you land.

Changes to Abilities and Mechanics

In addition to learning new abilities, you'll see changes to other abilities and mechanics with which you're already familiar. This list and the summary of talent changes below it are by no means comprehensive, but they should give you a good sense of what we intend for each spec.

• Heroic Strike will no longer be an "on next swing" attack, as we are removing this mechanic in Cataclysm. To keep the niche of Heroic Strike as a Rage dump, it will become an instant attack, but will cost between 10 and 30 Rage. This ability will not be usable until you have 10 Rage, but if you have more than 10, it will consume up to 30, adding additional damage for each point of Rage consumed above the base 10. Other abilities, such as Cleave, Execute, and Maul (for druids) will work similarly. The goal is to provide players with an option where if you can't afford the Rage, you don't push the button, but if you have excess Rage, you can push it a lot.
• Battle Shout, Commanding Shout, and possibly Demoralizing Shout will work more like the death knight's Horn of Winter ability. Specifically, these shouts will cost no resources, generate rage in addition to their current effects, and be on a short cooldown.
• Whirlwind will hit an unlimited number of targets, but only for 50% of weapon damage. The intent is for this ability to be used in multi-target scenarios and not on single targets.
• Overall, heals cast by players in Cataclysm will be a lower number relative to players' health than the current game. So to make the Mortal Strike debuff less mandatory but still useful in PvP, Mortal Strike will reduce healing by only 20%. All equivalent debuffs, including the Shadow priest and Frost mage debuffs, will be for 20% less healing. At the moment we aren't considering giving this debuff to anyone else, though we will certainly consider PvP utility for historically under-represented specs that use other mechanics.
• Sunder Armor will be reduced to three stacks instead of five, and still provide only a 4% reduction in armor per stack. We want to make this debuff easier to apply and less of a damage swing when it falls off.

New Talents and Talent Changes

• The Furious Sundering talent in the Fury tree will make the Sunder Armor ability cause 25/50% weapon damage and reduce the threat generated by 50/100%.
• The Mace and Poleaxe Specialization talents in the Arms tree will be removed. These provided just passive stats, which are not the kinds of talents we want to design in the future. We will keep the Sword Specialization talent, but it will be changed to a talent that applies to all types of weapons.
• As a Fury talent, Booming Voice will increase the Rage generated by shouts.
• While we like how Titan's Grip plays, we recognize some warriors liked the Fury tree because of the really fast swings that dual-wielding one-handed weapons could provide. Therefore, we're planning to try out a talent called Single-Minded Fury that is parallel to Titan's Grip and will provide a large boost to the damage of a pair of one-handed weapons.
• Several talents that reduce the Rage cost of abilities will be changed to focus on increased damage for those abilities instead.
• The new Arms talent called Disarming Nature will make successful disarms cause the target to cower in fear for 5/10 seconds.
• Another new Arms talent called Blitz will make the Charge ability hit for extra damage. The amount will possibly vary depending on the distance travelled.
• Improved Pummel, a Fury talent, will cause a successful interrupt to generate 10/20 Rage.

Mastery Passive Talent Tree Bonuses

Arms

• Melee Damage
• Armor Penetration
• Bonus Swing

Bonus Swing: This is similar to the Sword Specialization talent that is currently in the game, but Bonus Swing will work on all attacks and with all weapons. You have a chance to proc a free, instant weapon swing that hits for 50% damage.

Fury

• Melee Damage
• Melee Haste
• Enrage Intensity

Enrage Intensity: Every benefit of being enraged is increased. This includes doing more damage/healing/ etc. from abilities like Bloodrage, Death Wish, Enrage, Berserker Rage, and Enraged Regeneration.

Protection

• Damage Reduction
• Vengeance
• Critical Block Chance

Critical Block Chance: As we mentioned in the stat changes preview, block rating is changing to a chance to block 30% of a melee swing's damage. Protection warriors have a chance that the block will be a critical block and block for 60% of a melee swing's damage instead. There will likely be talents available to push the amount blocked even higher.

Vengeance: This is a mechanic to ensure that tank damage (and therefore threat) doesn't fall behind as damage-dealing classes improve their gear during the course of the expansion. All tanking specs will have Vengeance as their second talent tree passive bonus. Whenever a tank gets hit, Vengeance will give them a stacking attack power buff equal to 5% of the damage done, up to a maximum of 10% of the character's un-buffed health. For boss encounters, we expect that tanks will always have the attack power bonus equal to 10% of their health. The 5% and 10% bonuses assume 51 talent points have been put into the Protection tree. These values will be smaller at lower levels. Remember, you only get this bonus if you have spent the most talent points in the Protection tree, so you won't see Arms or Fury warriors running around with it. Vengeance will let us continue to make tank gear more or less the way we do today – there will be some damage-dealing stats, but mostly survival-oriented stats. Druids typically have more damage-dealing stats even on their tanking gear, so their Vengeance benefit may be smaller, but overall the goal is for all four tanks do about the same damage when tanking.

We hope you enjoyed this preview, and we're looking forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback on these additions and changes. Please keep in mind that this information represents a work in progress and is subject to change as development on Cataclysm continues.

Quote from: Bornakk (Source)

Here are some follow ups based on what is being discussed.

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.

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).

Blue Post: Cataclysm Class Information Coming!

Quote from: Bashiok (Source)

Beginning Wednesday, April 7 we will begin releasing class previews containing an overview of some of the changes currently being planned for each of the 10 World of Warcraft classes. The type of information you can expect from these posts are a list of the new spells from 80-85, the new passive mastery bonuses for all talent trees, a brief outline of some of the talent changes we're currently planning, and in some cases new low level spells for select classes.

These changes will by no means be comprehensive, and are subject to change between now and the launch of the expansion. It's also important to understand that some classes are currently further along in the development process than others, and as a result the amount of information will vary from class to class. Please do not let this frustrate you should your class be amongst those which are on the "lighter" side of things, as all classes will receive the same level of design attention before the expansion is released. Additionally we'll be providing more information for all classes, especially as we move into the beta phase.

Below is the schedule for each class:

• Shaman - April 7
• Priest - April 7
• Warlock - April 7

• Warrior - April 8
• Death Knight - April 8
• Rogue - April 8

• Hunter - April 9
• Druid - April 9
• Mage - April 9

• Paladin - April 16*

These posts are being coordinated internationally so they'll be posted at different times throughout the day and night on the given dates to give players around the world the ability to see posts made at a convenient time. This thread will be updated with links directly to each class preview as they're posted.

*The paladin is still deep in development. Instead of giving a preview that would be potentially less comprehensive than the other classes we made the decision to post it when it's ready, in order to properly honor the paladin class and those that play them. The wait isn't too long however as we're expecting to be able to post it on April 16.

Blue Post: Mana regen in Cataclysm, Cataclysm Healing, Class Balance and FOTM Classes

Quote from Blizzard staff

Mana regen in Cataclysm (Bye Bye 5-Second rule)
Two changes we're considering are combining all food and drink into food+drink and getting rid of the five-second rule in exchange for an out of combat rule. We're going to start talking a lot more about Cataclysm changes soon.

The FSR provides some interesting gameplay (but at a pretty high complexity cost). We think we can engineer similar gameplay where choosing spell A over spell B is a mana-based decision rather than casting vs. standing still doing nothing is a (less fun) mana-based decision. (Source)

Cataclysm Healing and effects on PvP
Ideally you'd go into an Arena game and not know immediately whether it was going to be an outlast game or a fast game. We don't have a problem with either case, but we think the overall experience is less fun when it's always and predictably one or the other (and in LK too often it's the latter).

We're not really interested in over-emphasizing mana draining as a dominant strategy, but running someone out of mana by causing a lot of damage seems perfectly reasonable. If you can't run the healer OOM then really your only options are to blow someone up while the healer is controlled or blow someone up so fast the healer can't respond. Again, those need to be valid strategies. They just can't be the only strategy. (Source)

Hybrid Tax System
We'll continue to polish it, but we're not fundamentally changing the design. We think there is plenty of evidence to suggest that pure dps would die off if more flexible classes could do everything they could do and more. Again though, in most cases gear or skill will have a much bigger influence on your performance than the potential maximums we engineer into the classes. While the averages more or less follow our general design (with some exceptions that we need to address), you can find plenty of individual parses where a hybrid "wins" or a pure "loses." (Source)

Farming Frost Badges in Heroics is boring
Some players like having a reason to still visit older content and a reason to do something on nights other than raid night, while other players want to be able to log in, raid, and be done for the week. It's hard to provide an incentive structure compelling enough for the first guy without the second feeling like he has to grind. The emblem system has a natural tapering off period where you start to get everything you need and have less and less a reason to keep earning them. But it can feel pretty overwhelming when a new tier starts and you're counting up the hundreds of badges you're eventually going to need.

The problem, and something for which we have a solution, is that the costs are balanced around the maximum badge income per week, which means doing both raids, the weekly raid quest, the weekly Icecrown raid quest, and a heroic run every night. That's a bit much for most players, but since the option is there, some feel like they have to do it. On the other hand, if you have more than one character you care about, then you could burn yourself out quick.

There are alternatives though. As a simple example, if you could run all your Dungeon Finder groups in one or two nights for the week without having to log on every night, it might feel less grindy to you. (Again, for some players doing anything more than a few times is going to feel grindy, but it's impossible for us to develop content faster than players can consume it.) (Source)

Class Balance and FOTM Classes
Actually, the evidence suggests otherwise. Rogues for example have been in a pretty good spot for most of the expansion in PvE and PvP but are one of the least popular classes. If anything I suspect there aren't that many true FotM rerollers probably because they imagine after they've put in all that effort to reroll that we will have adjusted the status quo in the meantime. If players really swapped classes with reckless abandon, I further suspect you'd see a lot fewer "buff me plz" posts. I also suspect it's more likely that players play the classes they like and then get frustrated when they think we aren't holding up our end of the bargain (which is a pretty reasonable response when you think about it). If the motivation was just to go where the damage is, there would probably be fewer passionate pleas to get everything so close.

I don't know if shameful is the word I'd use. That's a pretty heavy one. DPS across the board is pretty close, certainly relative to where it has been in the past. We can still probably do even better, but let's keep things in perspective. Every class has multiple viable specs in PvE and in most cases if they have a spec that is lagging behind it's because it's dominant in PvP so we don't have a lot of room to just tweak up the damage. That's small consolation if you just love the Arms playstyle, but it's better than Arms being a completely dead tree (as Subtlety was close to being). In the meantime, if dps really matters to you, the Fury tree doesn't require massive regearing or relearning. It's not as bad I'd argue as a Shadow priest who has no option but to heal if he's not competitive, or a Balance druid who has to start over with gearing up in order to go kitty.

I'd say it's close, but we can do better. (Source)

Healing and Mana Efficiency in Cataclysm
You should be able to use your efficient spell virtually forever (or at least much longer than the average encounter length). That efficient heal may be fine for earlier dungeons or raids. Eventually though you're going to hit points where someone is going to die in between casts of the efficient heal. In those cases you should switch to an inefficient but fast or big heal. Yet, if you focus on the inefficient heals too much, you will run out of mana.

As players gain more and more regen in later tiers of content, they'll need to rely on their inefficient heals more, but will also have the stats to be able to do so.

Not every healer has enough spells to currently make the decisions between efficiency and other choices. In fact, we'll probably have to adjust the toolbox of everyone to some extent. (Source)

[...] Most healers spam one heal now. Druids for all of their spells can do very well with just Rejuv and Wild Growth. Disc priests spam PW:S and Holy priests spam CoH on cooldown. We want to carve off niches for other spells. Flash Heal can be awesome if it runs you out of mana to hit nothing but Flash Heal. (Source)

[...] Casting a couple of fast / expensive heals to save someone's life is exactly what you should be doing. Casting nothing but the fast / expensive heal because, hey why not, leads to pretty repetitive gameplay. (Source)

[...] We will have to change numbers for Cataclysm. It's probably a safe assumption that we'll adjust every number in the game in order to account for changes such as larger health pools, lower mana regen and all of the talent tree changes. (Source)

[...] I was talking in the context of raiding, but the entire discussion of infinite mana is generally within the context of raiding. The fights are generally shorter in the 5-player content to where mana likely won't be much of a problem. It might be on some of the more challenging heroic bosses, in the same way that Loken was pretty punishing to heal when LK first shipped. If you go to your Flash Heal too often you might run out of mana, but with a Divine Plea, Mana Tide, Shadow Fiend or Innervate you should be good to go and the fight will likely be over (one way or another) before you need them again. (Source)

[...] We want to shoot for a BC style model, except the choice will come from spell A vs. spell B instead of rank 3 of spell A vs. rank 9 of spell A. Downranking had some serious gameplay problems, most notably being an unintutive mechanic for new players and letting players in general cheese coefficients of lower ranked spells. The actual decision that downranking offered of efficient vs. big vs. fast is an interesting one though, and one we think is missing for too much of LK.

To get there, many healers will need a new spell B or A, except potentially druids, who just need the numbers tweaked on some existing spells so that they have more defined niches.

As someone who has spent a lot of time healing, I *think* it's going to be a pretty fun time for healers, though I'm sure it will take some tweaking before it feels exactly right. (Source)


Paladin (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Retribution
Yeah, while Ret and Enhancement generally work out okay as cooldown-limited specs, we think we need to juice up the gameplay of both just a little bit so there are more opportunities to screw up, so that when you don't, you feel really awesome. Removing the chance of failure doesn't really make for compelling gameplay. (Source)

Shaman (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Enh Shamans useless because of 3.3.3 Icy Talons?
My raid sat me, not because I didn't bring a useful chunk of raid synergy, but because some other guy brought it in a more convenient package. I'm sticking with the guild though. I love those guys, even though they don't let me play much, and I think they're going places with their penchant for min / maxxing.

Seriously though, we'd like to iron out some of the disparities where one buff requires more maintenance or RNG or talent points than another, but I have a hard time imagining that many players are really being negative impacted by the relative convenience of identical buffs.

Pushing for more awesome buffs isn't going to lead to more awesome buffs. It's going to lead to more homogenization and less group synergy overall. We'd be in a land where every raid buff or debuff just passively radiates a 1% bonus or whatever so that your group composition had an almost trivial contribution to your success. I'm not sure that would be as much fun though. We don't think the buffs have to be identical. They just have to be close enough that it isn't a major consideration for most reasonable guilds or pugs. (Source)

Enhancement
Yeah, while Ret and Enhancement generally work out okay as cooldown-limited specs, we think we need to juice up the gameplay of both just a little bit so there are more opportunities to screw up, so that when you don't, you feel really awesome. Removing the chance of failure doesn't really make for compelling gameplay. (Source)

Warrior (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Heroic Strike / Next Swing Attacks

We're not getting rid of Heroic Strike et al. We're just making them instant attacks instead of on next swings. The nice thing about on next swings is that they could consume rage without sacrificing a GCD. In reality though, I don't think that benefit is worth their downsides. A new player for instance hits Heroic Strike and doesn't really notice anything different happening. Not a great introduction to the warrior class. (Source)

Blue Post: Rage Normalization in Cataclysm

Quote from: Bornakk (Source)

We are going to take the opportunity in Cataclysm to try and fix some of the problems with the Rage mechanic for both warriors and druids. Some of these problems include:

• Warriors/druids in the lowest levels of gear can be Rage-starved.
• Warriors/druids in the highest levels of gear no longer have to manage their Rage when it becomes infinite.
• Warrior/druid tanks lose Rage income as they improve their gear and take less damage.
• The gameplay of warrior and druid tanks loses a lot of depth when massive boss hits means never having to manage Rage.
• Heroic Strike and Maul are effective, but tedious abilities for using up extra Rage.
• In general, warriors and druids don’t have enough control over their Rage.

To resolve these issues, Rage will be normalized in Cataclysm. This will make the Rage gained by characters more consistent and avoid drastic differences between low-end and high-end gear.

The concept of normalized Rage may leave a negative impression on some veteran players, as we tried it once before in The Burning Crusade and it wasn't successful, resulting in them feeling weakened. However, we think that the concept is still sound -- it was just that the previous implementation didn't balance the values correctly, leading to players being Rage-starved. That is not the goal. As part of the change, we want to give warriors and druids a lot of ways to control their rage, so even in the worst-case scenarios they won’t feel like they lack the resource to do their job.

Here are some of the ways the Rage mechanic will change in Cataclysm:

1) Rage is no longer generated based on damage done by auto-attacks. Instead, each auto-attack provides a set amount of Rage, and off-hand weapons will generate 50% of the Rage main hands do. This amount is based on a constant formula which factors in the base swing speed of the weapon. This means the Rage gained should be averaged out between fast and slow weapons. The constant formula also gives us the ability to easily increase the rage gained if it feels too low (or reduce it if is too high). We are also implementing the following mechanics, which will still allow rage to improve to some extent as you improve gear:

• If the attack is a critical strike, it will generate 200% Rage.
• Haste will accelerate swing times to generate Rage faster.

2) Rage from damage taken will no longer be based on a standard creature of the character’s level, but instead will based on the health of the warrior or druid. Again, there is a constant that is multiplied by the rage generated in order to allow for fine-tuning. This calculation ignores all damage reduction from armor, absorption, avoidance, block, or similar mechanics, so improving your gear will not reduce Rage gained.

3) We will provide warriors and druids with more instant sources of rage. For example, the warrior shouts are changing to work more like the death knight ability Horn of Winter. Instead of Battle Shout consuming Rage, it will generate Rage but have a short cooldown. Both classes will have additional methods to generate Rage in an emergency or bleed off Rage when they have too much.

4) All “on next swing” attacks in Cataclysm are being removed. Heroic Strike and Maul will be instant swings that cost a variable amount of Rage. For example, imagine Heroic Strike costs between 10 and 30 Rage. You must have at least 10 Rage to use the attack, but it will consume all available Rage up to a maximum of 30. Any Rage consumed above the minimum will cause the ability to hit harder, and in some cases much harder. We will tune the ability so that it’s generally not a good idea to hit it when you have low Rage (unless everything else is somehow on cooldown) but becomes a more attractive button the higher your Rage.


We understand this change may be scary for many players, but keep in mind that the constants in the formulas for gaining Rage will give us the ability to make quick adjustments if we feel Rage generation is too low. Our goal is for each character's Rage to not be always high or always low, but rather a resource that needs to be managed properly by the player.

Blue Post: "Next swing" attacks, Threat in ICC

Quote from Blizzard staff

"Next swing" attacks
Next swing attacks are all going to die. The experience of using them is underwhelming, their mechanics are confusing, and they might even cause real world pain. (Source)

Classes Resources
Resources for all classes are supposed to matter. If they weren't supposed to matter then we could certainly simplify the game by removing them all. For some classes or specs, the actual resource is GCDs not a bar that fills up.

Rage, energy, runes and soon focus are essentially infinite. You only risk running out for short periods of time, but they'll be back eventually.

For mana-using dps specs, the gameplay is similar but the time slice is broader. A mage isn't going to run out of mana in the first few seconds of a fight. She might run out later, particularly in a longer fight, but she also has ways to get that mana back, and then using those at the right time becomes some of the skill of playing that class.

Healers all use mana, and they are supposed to run out of mana if they make bad decisions. That isn't currently happening, but it will in Cataclysm. Healers feel singled-out by that design, but we believe that when healers have infinite mana that we lose controls in designing an encounter. We have to rely on killing characters faster than healers can respond, punishing players dramatically for doing or failing to do some key event in the fight, or relying on dps checks with berserk timers and the like. Healer mana is a tool we had in BC and lost in LK. When the raid takes too much avoidable damage, then the healers eventually gas out (after using their own tools for mana restoration, like Divine Plea and Innervate) and the group then dies. Put another way, the game is just too easy when healers can just rely on their most powerful spell all of the time (many of us also think the healer gameplay is a little boring when you arne't using all your spells).

I'm not trying to derail the topic from rage, but I did want to explain why we think it's okay for some characters to have infinite resources and some to risk running out. But the resource itself still needs to matter even if it is effectively infinite. (Source)

Threat in ICC
You need to look at the specific situations in which it's actually happening. We don't see a lot of people pulling off of tanks on single-target fights say 30 seconds into the fight. That is even more true if you make use of Tricks or Misdirect.

Where it does happen is in the first few seconds of a fight or new adds coming to a fight or sometimes if you're AE'ing a large group and the tank can't generate threat on everything.

And yes, threat needs to not fall off as much as everyone gears up. (Source)

Warrior (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Rage Management
The problem with BC was that the rage solution we implemented felt like rage starvation and rather than adjust the model we kind of threw in the towel. I agree that having no rage and no way to get rage is frustrating. Part of our plan is to give warriors (and bears) more control over it.

It’s really not a damage issue so we don’t even need to get into whether warriors are doing too much damage in ICC or not. (Though I’d argue on some fights they are.) The real issue is that their damage doesn't stay in proportion with the other classes and is even more gear dependent. Until they have adequate rage coming in, they can’t use enough abilities. Once they have enough rage coming in, they can mash their buttons continuously. We don't want rage to be something you graduate from. It is the entire core of the warrior class, along with stances. (Source)

Blue Post: Account-Bound Emblems, Expansions discount

Quote from Blizzard staff

Account-Bound Emblems?
Account bound emblems would encourage players to continue to play on their decked-out main character then toss stuff to their alt, get them decently geared and maybe not do anything with them at all because they are already decently geared.

The interest in playing an alt should be that it's something you want to do. The current emblem system allows these characters to gear up much faster and that is through playing the alt itself which is a good thing. (Source)

Expansions discount
We're always looking for ways to make World of Warcraft as affordable and worth every dollar possible for players, particularly as it will soon require purchasing one game and three expansions just to receive access to all of the latest content. This is why we have offered boxed sets and discounted prices on the original game and The Burning Crusade. You can expect similar discounts going further as the life of this game moves on. Of course, this type of marketing is more to benefit those just getting started who are interested in experiencing more than just the 1-60 game.

We also know a lot of couples and families set out to purchase multiply copies of each expansion released in order to play together. It can understandably be much more of an investment in such cases. I don't have any direct plans to share with you at this time with regard to potential package deals for buying multiple copies of Cataclysm, but it's always something to consider. We do what we can when marketing any Blizzard product to players -- whether it be games or in-game pets for sale -- to be as accommodating as possible, letting customers decide what is valuable to them. (Source)

Why doesn't Blizzard sell ... ?
We're of the philosophy that, if there is a market for some fun, virtual flavor items which can be purchased using real-world cash to aesthetically enhance a player's character in a way they deem valuable, we'll provide that service. So far the virtual pet store has been very successful in this regard. Some players might think it's ridiculous to spend real money on a virtual pet that serves no gameplay purpose, so they can easily choose not to invest in that market. There's a very important distinction here though. If a person deems a virtual item not to be worth its value in real money, that person is not negatively impacted when someone else feels differently and runs around in the game with the virtual item on display.

It's an important part of the philosophy that, while we will expand the market for those who are willing to purchase with real money virtual flavor items, we want to avoid selling direct combat advantages to people. We want players to want to play the game to set themselves apart from other players, get more powerful items, or obtain in-game wealth. The reasons for playing the game become almost completely compromised if the best gear rewards for continuing to play can just be bought. (Source)

Are paid companion pets better than free ones?
Do we want to make sure any pets we sell for real money are very cool? Of course. Does that mean more design resources are dedicated to them than other pets? Not necessarily.

Sure, some pets have higher polygon counts because they were added to the game much later, but we're not intentionally saving the "best" pets for sale. Ultimately, your opinion of what are the best or highest quality pets is subjective. I have all of the pets from the store. I have some of the pets we've released for limited purposes (i.e. Murky). My personal favorite pet right now is the Onyxia Whelpling. Players literally had to do nothing for that pet but log in within a certain, fairly generous window of time and check their mail. It isn't very rare, wasn't hard to obtain, and did not cost money, but I love it.

I digress. The one major distinction here is that the value of flavor/vanity items is determined subjectively by each player. The value of a piece of gear is determined by its stats, rarity, how difficult it is to obtain, and the number crunchers who know how to min/max a class. That value is much more intrinsic in terms of gameplay. (Source)

Druid (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Tier 10 Restoration 4-Piece Bonus Bug
Thanks for the reports! We're looking into this and should have a fix in a future patch. (Source)

Mage (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Frostfire Bolts / Brain Freeze
We are going to change it (or perhaps already did judging from some of these posts) that Frostfire Bolt can't proc Brain Freeze.

It's not an ideal solution for some of the reasons that you guys have been mentioned. However technically we don't have the ability to start the internal cooldown on use instead of when the proc is gained. It's possible to get the code changed, but that means it's unlikely something we could hotfix in. Long-term we'll look into a solution that isn't so mean to Frostfire Bolt. (Source)

Warrior (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Rage management
Heroic Strike is supposed to be a rage dump and in an environment where you are converting every swing into a Heroic Strike, it's a safe assumption that rage isn't really a resource anymore. The decision is supposed to be "Do I have enough rage to Heroic Strike?" vs. "If I don't Heroic Strike now, am I wasting rage?" Warriors need to be balanced around doing some Heroic Striking -- not converting every white swing to a HS and not so rage starved that they can never hit it either.

I've been hinting that we're likely to change rage in Cataclysm, and I'll do so again in the hopes that some smart players will come out and defend that decision when we get a lot of "You can't change rage!" posts. (Source)

Bluepost: Stealth nerf & Revenge change

Quote from Blizzard staff

"Stealth" nerfs
I guess you are using "stealth nerf" as synonymous with "nerf." My general impression of the use of the term "stealth nerf" is that the developers decide to sneakily change a spell or an ability in a way players won't immediately recognize and have to explore and math out. For example, if we thought Exorcism did too much damage, we might lower its coefficient. Players might notice, but it would take a lot of testing before anyone was convinced. Someone mentioned the Windfury ICD above, which is a good example of what I would call a stealth nerf. It was hard to notice. Making a change so that a spell doesn't work on players doesn't really sound like "stealth" because it's going to be noticed immediately.

There is little point in us making actual "stealth nerfs" with the intent to deceive, because players are going to figure it out anyway. (The WF one wasn't made recently.) What you seem to be calling "stealth nerfs" are hotfixes or mini patch changes that came without a GC or other blue post. But there are many of these made regularly, probably far more than you realize. Many of them will never affect your character, but some will. Some are made late at night when good developers are asleep or at blues bars.

We haven't yet come up with a great way to communicate changes that come in between patches. For patches we have the patch notes. Sometimes I'll make a blue post and we've tried to get better about documenting hotfixes. We've considered trying to use the launcher or login screen for breaking news or maybe even have a place in game where you can check out recent patch notes. Again, we make a lot of these, and some of them are too trivial for most players to care, and we wouldn't want the list to be so long that players just skip through it.

If you're defining "stealth nerf" as any change that comes in between patches or any nerf in general, well then you're just using your own private use of the term, which is a big problem with game jargon (see examples just as "cleave," "WG," "dead zone" etc.) (Source)

Warrior (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Upcoming Revenge change
In the interest of avoiding the unflattering scent of stealth nerf, allow me to post that we are going to make that change (one Revenge per proc) I suggested above. (Source)

If we change Revenge to basically be one charge then the warrior can still pop the rogue or pet or whatever that triggers the block, dodge or parry, but they'd only get one hit instead of multiples. Such a change should not affect Protection at all.

Blue Post: Tauns missing, Starfall Nerf, No Thunderclap while silenced

Quote from Blizzard staff

Taunts missing = interesting gameplay?
I'm going to vote for not interesting gameplay.

At the very least, you should be able to reduce your chance to miss a Taunt to zero if you reduce your chance to miss with a weapon to zero. It's also possible we'll just let them always hit. (Source)

Druid (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Starfall nerf?
At some point I posted some numbers for Starfall since there hadn't been a PTR build in some time and druids were chomping at the bit to figure out just how much damage it was going to do. The numbers we went with for 3.3.3 were slightly lower than that if I recall correctly, but we haven't made any changes to Starfall since the patch went live. The live Starfall numbers are still much higher than they were in 3.3.

We generally don't try to execute actual "stealth nerfs." The community will nearly always figure it out anyway so we don'y gain much by trying to hide anything. Sometimes "stealth nerfs" are just things we didn't manage to document, but many times they are misunderstandings.

(I'm talking about live anyway. On betas and PTRs numbers are going to change quite a bit -- that's the whole idea.) (Source)

Warrior (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Can't Thunderclap while silenced
It is called "Thunder" and "Clap." That implies some noise.

Seriously though, silence isn't a dispel. Dispels are tied to magical effects. Silences are just tied to things that (more or less) logically require an audio component (in the game fiction -- I'm not talking about your sound card) to work. Most caster spells qualify but some other abilities do too.

As soon as I read that I thought, "Man, GC just opened up a can of worms". I understand where you are coming from but now we get to read 10 pages of "Wait, I don't have to make noise to do X, why does it obey silence!?"

That response is certainly possible, but I figure part of what I can do out here (in exchange for all the feedback we get) is offer the occasional intent behind a game decision. Sometimes players can get us to question those decisions, but in cases like this it's going to take more than "It doesn't seem to *me* like silence could stop a Thunder Clap." Trying to arbitrate how the physics of magic should work is a pretty futile exercise. (Source)

Blue posts – 2010-03-26

Quote from Blizzard staff

Gold cap in Cataclysm
To answer your question though, increasing the gold cap is a definite possibility for Cataclysm -- though nothing is set in stone yet. (Source)

Druid (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Eclipse
The purpose behind Eclipse was to encourage Balance druids to cast something besides their hardest hitting spell over and over again. From this thread it appears at least some of you were content with a "rotation" like that, but you'll have to believe me that it was a very common complaint we heard from druids as to what they disliked or why they didn't play Balance.

Now it's possible to base a rotation around a single spells. Mages are designed to do just that. However, they also have a lot of procs, cooldowns, secondary effects and other situational events that mean that even though you're getting most of your damage from one button, you're managing a lot.

We could have gone that way with Balance druids. We didn't largely because part of the kit of Balance is balance, and we thought that manifested itself nicely in switching between Arcane and Nature spells, or Starfire and Wrath, or Lunar and Solar.

The problem with Eclipse (as I've stated many times, so I find the comments that we won't address the issue to be a trifle unfair) is that it now accounts for so much of Balance's damage that the random element can be punishing. Having to shift positions right when you get a proc should be a little bit of a bummer on the level of missing a few crits in a row, and not a devastating blow to your dps.

We're keeping Eclipse, but the Cataclysm version is a pretty radical overhaul that we hope to be able to reveal soon. It removes a lot of the random element.  (Source)

Rogue (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Action Bar bug when rogues use Vanish while Shadow Dancing
It's technically not a bug. It's just a limitation in how the bars work. Rogues essentially have 3 bars and there are just some technical reasons why we can't go back to the Shadow Dance bar once we've dropped it.

I think the real solution is probably to make it so you can't / don't want to Vanish while dancing. I assume you're Vanishing to get out of roots or dodge spells, but we could solve those in other ways. The spell dodging part of Vanish has been so frustrating to rogues for so long that frankly I'd rather figure out another way to get the same functionality that would feel better all around and leave Vanish as strictly "you want to go back into stealth." (Source)

Warrior (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Revenge and Unrelenting Assault
We like Revenge on UA and we certainly like the new damage Protection can do with Revenge.

If we make any change at all, it would probably be in the duration of the buff. Currently Revenge operates by giving the warrior 5 seconds in which to Revenge. This works fine when Revenge has a 5 sec cooldown, but UA removes that. Having no cooldown on Revenge is also probably fine if Revenge hits softly for Arms warriors, but it doesn't anymore. That allows a warrior who gets Revenge to light up to hit the button three or possibly four times in the window and do massive damage with each one. If we change Revenge to basically be one charge then the warrior can still pop the rogue or pet or whatever that triggers the block, dodge or parry, but they'd only get one hit instead of multiples. Such a change should not affect Protection at all.

I can't believe all this QQ is getting a response from you. Popping shield block and revenge spaming as arms is not new at all.

Nope. And it wasn't a big deal when Revenge didn't hit as hard as it does now. An alternative is to lower the damage Arms can do with Revenge, but we think in this case it's actually a better design that you can do one big Revenge per block / dodge / parry instead of a string of little ones.

I could understand if you think warriors need some balancing but craving into fotm QQ disgusts me. Why are you soo quick to base nerfs off of the community's feedback but soo reluctant to buff them using their suggestions?
Players often complain that we don't implement their suggested buffs or nerfs. This is nothing new. I suspect the volume of nerf posts exceed the buff posts because of the simple math that there are usually multiple classes asking for a nerf and one asking for a buff. We use player feedback to make informed decisions and we place more emphasis on intelligent or insightful points from players rather than a high-volume of low-quality QQ. "Warrior hit me hard" rage with perhaps an attached screenshot of dubious authenticity (tenacity vs. no resilience isn't uncommon) doesn't qualify as an intelligent or insightful point. (Source)