#0 - Feb. 17, 2007, 9:14 p.m.
I started writing this with no real intention of posting it. It was to be a cathartic exercise while at 30k ft over Africa in a cramped jet - to help me vent a few frustrations I felt over the Warrior class. I was seriously contemplating cancelling my subscription on my return to Europe (and I may still).
Anyway, I posted it, but why read another “warriors are crap” post? We’ll this isn’t one, because actually warriors are working as intended; they are exactly where you wanted them to be. Warriors work: grats.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that you wanted to achieve several things with the changes introduced in 2.0 / TBC.
- 1) Make raid groups smaller, take the burden of managing such a huge undertaking of organising 40 motivated and competent players away and make the game more agile and dynamic.
2) In the above context, make the hybrid classes viable; make sure that it is easier to form a 10 / 25 man raid by removing the absolute dependency on specialist classes (priests, warriors, dps classes).
3) Without fundamentally changing the game mechanics (anyone remember the SOE / SWG NGE??) try to introduce some changes that stretch the players and challenge them in new ways. Small incremental changes = lower chance of upsetting the community = lower commercial risk. Why change what’s not broken right?
Well actually you succeeded in all of the above. In this context, and the ease with which TBC was rolled out you really did perform very well. It was smart to introduce the majority of the hard changes to classes before Christmas – when TBC went live, you made it as easy as possible to isolate bugs and server related problems to squash them in a controlled and phased manner.
But given all that success there’s a dark underside, there’s a malignant tumour lurking within the happy world of WoW waiting to grow and bring this game to its knees.
Warriors are that tumour.
You have checked out all the metrics, proved to yourselves that warriors haven’t been nerfed substantially (and infact we haven’t). You made sure that the mechanics of the class still function and figured we would be the ideal endgame tanks again, just like pre-TBC. Somehow though, you lost sight of one thing: warriors play to have fun just like any other class.
While warriors are viable in a cold hard mathematical sense, they aren’t fun to play. We only have access to half the game at any point in time (mutually exclusive trees that force us to select either pvp / pve or tanking). Sure we can grind quests and resources as a protection spec tank, but it’s painful – yes grinding involves repetition and some boredom but protection warriors really define the worst extreme of that.
Well anyway, the endgame grinding debate is going to have those who stack block value come out insisting that shield slam is pure pwnage, to be honest it might be the case in terms of numbers, but it isn’t fun. We are forced in to one tree if we want to tank, we are then presented with one option if we want to do any kind of damage. Sacrifices are of course acceptable, but options are good also – they don’t exist now with warrior, and it’s just not fun.
All of the above being said, yes we can tank if we are protection, yes we can mitigate damage. If I’m in a group on my own I can convince people that they need to focus fire and use CC properly to help me manage my threat generation on multiple mobs...if i have a paladin or druid with me, im toast, useless, dead weight. So, It can be done but it’s not fun for me as a tank, anymore than it is to run a marathon – it feels good at the end but it is pure pain during the process. I play for fun, not to feel like the masochistic health freak that runs 26 miles. This hurts the most when I see a druid or paladin stroll along and easily achieve what it takes me untold stress and effort to achieve.
More importantly, warriors are not fun to group with. Other classes have all these fun nukes and amazing dps. They spend time gathering gear to wtfpwn and with us they can’t use it. We are the pre-eminent tanking class, yet we are the hardest class to dps against in a chaotic melee. This is what makes bears and paladins more desirable as tanks. They may not be better in cold hard numbers but other classes can WTFPWN!!!1!! with a bear tank and not have to wait for a warrior to build threat. That means they have more fun with a bear tank and a paladin tank. Fun is what this game is supposed to be all about.
So what does that mean?
It means that warriors are really not the primary choice for tanks in 5 man and 10 man. It means that people are going to do what is most fun for them and bring in the tanks that let them wtfpwn and not worry about threat or gimping their damagemeter by having to use CCs *gasp*.
It means that by the time we hit 25 man raids there are going to be a lot of disheartened warriors who may or may not stick with it. It’s not nice to be constantly struggling – a challenge is good but constantly fighting your own group members rather than the mobs, is beyond challenging and well in to the realms of “work”.
Surely our focus should be on how we control mobs. At present we are obliged to generate threat as fast as possible while constantly being limited by global cool-downs and rage generation – any remote break from this to control other mobs results in loss of aggro to a nuking dps’er (and yes I have good gear and use rage efficiently to generate threat). That’s not fun for me or my group (compared to other tanking classes).
It means that we will have had to endure 10 levels of tanking frustration while levelling, a further number of weeks / months gearing up and doing 10 man and then maybe, just maybe we get a shot at doing what we do well in 25 man…assuming other tanking classes don’t wtfpwn us with all the gear they have gathered faster than us because actually no one other than a raging lunatic wants to group with a warrior.
So in general, I don’t care how you buff us. You are the devs, you know how the class works compared to others. All I’ll say is this:
Make the class fun to play, more importantly, make us fun to play with – or the game and your source of employment is going to have a massive hole in it from all the warriors who re-roll. Maybe that was one goal of TBC - reduce the warrior population, but you went too far. Even the hardcore dedicated raid tanks are suffering.
Get your head out of your spreadsheets, stop data mining, stop crunching KPIs and metrics and start thinking about maximising the fun quotient in the warrior class. I don’t care if on paper I’m a god in T5 I want to have fun before I get that gear.
As it stands I can honestly say that my undying loyalty to this game is already starting to be frayed at the edges. As with any relationship, once one starts to question the merit of ones involvement it is already close to being too late to fix.
Kind regards,
