#1 - Feb. 18, 2011, 3:11 p.m.
2.Why the Nerf seems so harsh.
Warriors had gotten used to having extremely high mobility. Arms warriors were so mobile that kiting wasn't very effective against them, and their uptime was very high as a result. In fact, we'd arrived at a place where melee in general just had too much up-time on casters. Conditions were prompting a move toward more instant cast spells and casting on the move, when we wanted to take PvP back to a place where cast time spells could still have a place on the battlefield. We feel this approach introduces more choices in PvP both for the casters and melee in terms of what abilities to use, when to close the gap, when to make space, what to interrupt, etc. Rather than give casters yet more tools to generate breathing space and perpetuate that arms race, it made sense to take a second look at melee mobility instead.
We understand that you need to be on your target to do your jobs, but it didn’t really make sense to allow close to 100% up time either. On the other hand, we understand that without high up-time warriors might not bring as much to an Arena or Rated Battleground team, and we're adding new utility in a future patch to help address that, though we’re not yet ready to share details.
Going back to the point though, we didn't want to funnel warriors into speccing into Fury, and that was never the intention. While it would be nice if both specs were equally viable for PvP and PvE, we realize that's a tough goal to meet. On the other hand, if Fury is the best spec for both PvP and PvE and Arms is left with nothing, then that's not a great place to be either.
As for some general notes, we do think Arms damage is a little low in both PvP and PvE, and we might adjust that soon. This isn't a solution to current PvP viability issues, and we understand that. I'm just mentioning it because we're on the subject of Arms and it's worth noting. While we’re on the subject of stuff ‘worth noting’, we also don’t like jumping to avoid Charge, so we're examining some potential solutions for that too.
We're not looking at changing the talent trees at the moment, since we’re very happy with both the Arms and Fury trees as well as the results of some of our core mechanics changes, such as normalizing rage, redesigning Heroic Strike and changing stance penalties.
1.The Usefulness of Heroic Leap.
Heroic Leap involves a lot of movement code, which is among the most challenging things we can do in our engine. We wouldn't have included it if we believed that it was useless, or wasn't usually effective. We think it's a cool ability that does offer greater mobility on the battlefield, even if it isn't as useful specifically for closing with a target as intercept or charge are.
It doesn't help us, or you, to just say that it's useless or almost never works on the forums. Heroic Leap functionality is something we're actively working to improve, so if you find yourself consistently unable to find a path to the jump target, when you submit a report let us know when it didn't work, where you were, and what you were trying to do. The more specific and detailed you are, the more tools you give us to make your tools work better.