[Warrior] Consolidated List of Issues

Here are some warrior comments from various threads. I know there is at least one very long thread, but in my experience players are less likely to read huge threads. I mean no disrespect to any other posters by posting here.

1) We want rage to be a mechanic. We don't want rage to be something warriors ignore because they can just hit all of their buttons whenever they want. That tends to lead towards the class being cooldown controlled. It's fine for some classes to work that way (Enhance shaman are pretty close), but that's not our vision for warriors.

2) We think the rate of rage income in Battle Stance is currently about right, but we knew that warriors could totally ignore Heroic Strike and Cleave, so we've been tweaking things like Enrage providing more rage, so that being rage capped is more of a risk (allowing smarter warriors to bleed off that rage with HS).

3) The Berserker Stance redesign is still pretty new and something we're adjusting. If we are successful, then warriors will use Battle Stance much of the time, but would consider Berserker for PvP or boss fights with an excessive amount of raid damage. We aren't looking for warriors to constantly stance dance, nor do we want them to be in Berserker all of the time.

4) Your entire class doesn't need to revolve around having X amount of crit. We will balance warrior damage around whatever stats are available at various character and gear levels. We like the fact that warriors will have more Enrage uptime as they acquire more crit. Mechanics like that are the kind of thing that make gearing up more fun, because it can actually impact your rotation a bit rather than hitting the same buttons the same way as you did when you were level 86. Warriors (especially Fury) need some amount of crit and Enrage uptime to function, but giving them too high a crit rate early on leads to devaluing the stat in later tiers of gear. (This goes for a lot of stats on a lot of classes.)

5) We run DPS tests all the time both at level 85 with starter gear and level 90 with end-game gear. The numbers are in a pretty good place, though we'll continue to adjust them as we make class changes and refine rotations. I offer that because saying "My DPS is terrible," doesn't really give us much information. What is your DPS? Who are you comparing it to?

(Continued.)

6) Target dummies are great for learning your rotation. They are terrible for trying to predict how your rotation will feel in scenarios, dungeons, raids or PvP, and that is one of the reasons we went so long before adding them. Please try to get a feel for how your class plays in a group setting before coming to conclusions about whether you have enough buttons to hit or are waiting around too long. (Again, this is not a warrior-only consideration.)

7) I probably sound like a broken record here ("What's a "record," GC?"), but we don't want warriors or any class to be able to just pick DPS talents and forsake all others. If you are a DPS dude choosing a damage talent instead of a tanking talent, then you probably don't really have much in the way of a choice. If you focus on relatively easy content where you never need a survival button, never need to help out an ally, and never need crowd control, then I can understand why the talent choices may not be as interesting to you. On the other hand, try some of those 2-3 pulls in Townlong or run a scenario without a tank before you cement those opinions.

8) For tanks, the goal of active mitigation is to let you translate your resource (rage in this case) into survival. If you use Shield Block or Shield Barrier frequently, you'll be a better tank. If you spam them whenever possible, you'll do fine for scenarios and Raid Finder. To do more challenging content, you're going to want to use them at the right time, which may mean delaying them a few seconds for when a big hit is coming. Shield Block isn't designed to keep you alive all by itself -- fortunately you have plenty of emergency cooldowns. We also don't want players just learning the class or running easier content to crumple just because they failed to keep Shield Block up as much as possible. Many factors go into making you an effective tank -- watch a video of some of the world's best tanks if you don't believe me. Spamming Shield Block isn't going to cut it. Using Shield Block intelligently will help some.

9) I know it's fun to brainstorm new abilities. Just understand that such feedback is much less useful to the designers than commenting on how existing things feel. The frustration of missing a Mortal Strike in PvP and having that shut down your entire rotation (just to use an example) is great feedback and the kind of thing we can easily address. "Hey, I came up with a new ability or resource, what do you guys think?" is cool and all, but less likely to lead to an action item for our team.

10) Please don't expect or demand regular posts like this. The team has a lot to before we're ready to ship this expansion. We will read and take seriously all of your feedback, but we just can't afford to spend hours making forum posts. Just because I made a warrior post today and not a warlock post doesn't mean your feedback is being ignored or that we don't love you.

I don't use mathematics, which seems to be the devs' lingua franca; but I can work with spatial/systemic concepts instead, so that's how I communicate.

It’s not necessary to use numbers if you want to give feedback on how a rotation feels. (Though the community in general would benefit from finding more adjectives than “clunky.”) It is necessary to use numbers if you want to claim your DPS or survivability aren’t competitive, because otherwise you’re just guessing.

We put literally freak, freaking HOURS into trying to help him and his team out for no benefit with only the intent of making their awful, low depth designs work better and he disregards it? Forget that, I'm going to play Tera. At least THEIR idea of AM is actually engaging.

You're going to get disappointed a lot if you're hoping to see developers incorporate your ideas. That’s just no a realistic goal with a player base the size of ours. The reason I took the time to try and address some of the feedback in this thread is to make sure players understand our design intent. The players out there who are trying to turn “active mitigation” into “I have a ton of cooldowns that don’t cost resources” are working at cross purposes with the class designers. It’s not an invalid design by any stretch, but we also feel it’s essentially the design we had in Cataclysm where tanks would spend all of their resources on threat that was all just overkill. Spending resources on defense gets more to the heart of tanking and we think will be more enjoyable in the long run. In the short run it may feel different and weird.

- The players posting on this forum do not represent the majority of the warrior population and are practically meaningless to you ('the vocal minority').
- The vision we have is completely different from yours, and if you're not budging, then we can only silently take the hit or move on.
- You/the developers did not read the warrior threads that I have conveniently listed in my 3rd post.

The players who post are ALWAYS a minority. By far, most of our players don't post. Some of the most skilled and informed players out there don't post. Does the posting community represent the feelings of the majority? It’s hard to know for sure. That’s why we pay more attention to intelligent argument than we do to any kind of invocation of how "most players" feel. We do read all of the feedback though. We’re not always going to act on all of it. That’s just the reality of game design. We don’t want WoW to be designed by committee, and you probably don’t want us to either. :)

There are still other issues not adressed regarding our rotation. GC mentions they want rage to be somewhat unpredictable and that a good warrior would dump it with HS. However, that seldom works in the current model where Slam, Execute and HS all serve the same function. If anything, it removes value of Slam since OP + HS is more damage per rage than Slam (was until the last changes to warrior damage, can't find the current numbers). The same can be said about Wild Strike and HS, since you're more likely to dump the excess rage on WS rather than HS and suffer an empty GCD (or not if you have talents to fill it with).

Execute is a great button, but it’s not available much of the time. Slam and Wild Strike are better than Heroic Strike. You should always go to them first. If you have so much rage than even several Slams in a row will leave you with excess rage, then you break out the Heroic Strikes as well, since you can Heroic Strike AND Slam in the same GCD. You’ll have to make the call about buttons like Overpower depending on the situation. Overpower won’t help you with rage management if it’s time to Slam, but on the other hand, Overpower is free, and the ultimate goal is to do deliver as much damage as possible. Managing rage isn’t the goal itself; it’s just a strategy to deliver the damage.

the prot warrior was fun, required rage management and had active mitigation.

There is no active mitigation on live. You can define active mitigation your own way if you’d like, but using our definition, active mitigation is mitigation costing resources. On live, all mitigation is cooldown-driven for warriors, druids and paladins. Resources are for gaining threat (which isn't that hard to generate) or delivering DPS (which usually isn’t very valuable for tanks except on very tightly tuned fights).

Alright, you don't want suggestions on how to fix the many, many problems?

Suggestions are fine and often useful. We are seeing some players brainstorming new abilities or resource systems, which aren’t as valuable to us, and can actually be a little risky to the process when players can get overly attached to their own ideas and end up disappointed or bitter when we don't use them.

Perhaps it would help to increase the rage cap to 200, so Shield Block would only be a third of our red bar, and warriors can pool enough rage for 2 or 3 Shield Blocks. Or make the first Shield Block less expensive, and later ones more expensive (like Arcane Blast).

I don’t think we’d increase rage to 200, but we could get the same effect by making Shield Block cheaper. The reason we haven’t yet is we were concerned it might lead to feeling like you can realistically have 100% Shield Block coverage. Once you can afford to push Shield Block constantly, then it feels like it’s a maintenance buff (more like Thunder Clap) and not a button with any kind of timing component. It might be worth trying just flooding Protection with rage to see how it feels. Likewise, we could see how much rage it takes before Arms and Fury are using Heroic Strike constantly instead of situationally. Also remember that warriors will get more rage with better gear -- we still want that to occur because it feels fun, so long as it doesn't become a big scaling problem (meaning warriors are weak with bad gear and unstoppable with good gear, which has often been a problem in WoW).

Can warriors get an offensive benefit to strength, much like agi and int gives to the other classes? Defensive benefits do literally nothing for me, considering how negligible they are. It's been a long standing issue of mine that warriors get Parry, while Agi users get crit, and int users get crit and spell power bonuses.

We balance around the stats you have. If warriors received crit from Strength, then we’d have to lower the damage of your abilities as a consequence. We don’t like Strength providing crit, because then it just feels like Agility. There are potential scaling risks if Agi users do more damage as they get more Agi than Strength users do as they get more Strength. With warriors though we usually have the opposite problem because they do so much more damage as they get better weapons (as well as more rage from better gear as well).

Since I'm not sure yet when you'll get the next beta build, here are a few upcoming warrior (mostly Protection) changes to try out:

Shield Slam -- now generates 20 rage. Sword and Board generates 30.

Unwavering Sentinel -- now grants passive rage generation like the old Anger Management effect. The intent is to make rage generation smoother when a tank is kiting or otherwise doesn't have high boss contact.

Demoralizing Shout -- a new (old) Protection spec ability, now in the form of a short-term, free cooldown, much like Barkskin. Reduces the damage done by 20% by targets against the warrior for 10 sec. 60 sec cooldown.

Shield Barrier -- cost reduced to 20 rage, but consumes up to 60 rage for up to triple the effect. (Total absorb adjusted accordingly).

Glyph of Thunder Clap -- Not super useful. Redesigned to Glyph of Unending Rage, which increases total rage cap to 120, allowing interested warriors to be able to bank more Rage.

The sum total of these changes may provide too much rage. We'll have to see. We still want to mess with Berserker Stance and possibly Enrage rage generation as well to make sure warrior rage isn't too static and predictable. We want there to be some Heroic Strike use.

One of the reasons we don't always announce changes before they happen is that things can move pretty fast in beta. Even though I mentioned some Protection changes above, they are already out of date. :(

Overall, the goal is to mix up Protection's rotation a little more. Prot warriors are used to lots of buttons, and we don't want too much waiting around. (For Arms and Fury, we can just flood them with rage, but with Protection the risk is that we hit 100% uptime of Shield Block, which turns it from being a short cooldown to a managed buff like Thunder Clap.) We also want to make sure tanks who execute their attacks with more skill are rewarded with better mitigation. To make this compelling, we think it needs to tie into Rage generation.

As part of this, we're going to try Defensive Stance no longer generating Rage from auto attacks at all. Instead we'll have nearly all Rage come from special attacks while in Defensive.

In addition to Shield Slam, we'll try Revenge and Devastate generating some Rage. Devastate will do so by once again being the ability that procs Sword and Board. For Revenge, we agree that the more rotational version has lost some of its old excitement. Revenge will generate Rage outright. It will no longer proc from blocks but will also have no cooldown so you will sometimes get multiple Revenges in a row.

We're going to try Shield Block using the charge system that we've tried for a few abilities, such as the monk Roll. This one may feel too different, but we'll see. What it means is you can use Shield Block twice in a row, but then pay a 15 sec cooldown. (The first use will start its cooldown as soon as its used.) This mechanic should let you chain together two Shield Blocks but not keep it up 100% of the time.We think this rotation feels better and more traditionally Prot, but let us know how it feels to you.

I'd find it a bit more comforting if I ever saw actual passion coming from Blizzard regarding Warriors. But I don't see that, haven't seen that. Does anyone really see the passion there? If these people enjoy their jobs, really enjoy working on the game, really believe in their design - then you'd think they could set aside an hour or two to address our concerns about enjoyability. If I were in their position, I know I would. It just leads me to the belief that they cannot adequately defend what they're doing, and the passion just isn't there because of that. And it's hard to fake passion - it really is. So by not responding, they can at least have "benefit of the doubt".

So I guess, from my viewpoint, I find it disconcerting that even through this outpouring from the Warrior community regarding the concerns about enjoyability, such issues have so far been blatantly ignored. At least, judging from the responses it has. Maybe they are taking us seriously now. Not knowing, though, makes me nervous, and the responses so far have been disappointing.

But two hours times eleven classes turns into a huge time commitment pretty quickly (and that's on top of reading all of the posts in the first place). Believe me -- you want the design team spending time designing the game, not debating players on forums.

We are all very passionate about our designs, but we're also professional game designers who know better than to get too attached to any particular implementation. Stuff changes. Ideas that seem great might not pan out. We've all seen ideas we were really excited about being greeted with indifference by the community. That's just part of the job.

Passion also can come across as being defensive ("they're stuck on their pet feature!") or impartial ("he likes priests better!") when read on forums.

I know I participated in it, but really these discussions would be more useful if we kept to class feedback. I have found as a rule of thumb that any time the discussion strays from the design to the designers, then it is probably off course.

There actually is a bit of active mitigation for paladins, Word of Glory and the overheal shield.

Except you nerfed it a couple patches ago or so.

You definitely caught me scratching my head when you said you were moving tanks to 'active mitigation', kept all the passive mitigation skills for prot paladins, and nerfed the only active mitigation skill we had.

No, you are correct. The way paladins were playing with lots of Word of Glory was closer to the new design. We said at the time however that we didn't think it would work for tank balance to let paladins convert resources into mitigation while warriors could not. I think we even said at the time that we'd like for all of the tanks to play more like that, but it required a whole sale design.

That happens a lot in this gig, where class A is working the way we'd consider ideal, while class B, C, D and so on do not. The "pure" design is to keep A working the right way, but the right decision is usually to change the single outlier until we have time to fix everyone.

I'm curious how exactly this is going to work. Does it just consume as much rage as it can (Up to 60) and give you a decent sized absorb based on that? I do like the change though, it makes the move much more interesting.

Right. Assume that spending 20 Rage will give you an absorb equal to 30% of your attack power. If you have 40 Rage, the bubble is 60% and 60 Rage, it's 90%. If you have 100 Rage, you still get the 90% bubble and have 40 Rage left over.

Like Aed said, unless Heroic Strike gives some form of defensive benefit somehow, warrior tanks are basically never going to use it. You guys learnt that lesson with the pre-nerf WoG back in 4.0, remember? :P

As a few players pointed out, I meant Heroic Strike use for Arms and Fury. Prot will use Heroic Strike when not tanking at the moment, when soloing, when running easy content, or when Ultimatum procs. Tanks have never chosen spending resources on damage when they could spend them on survival.

Although I wish that auto attacks would still generate rage, I understand that we shouldn't be swimming in rage because that makes us imbalanced. I like the idea of our special abilities generating rage much more. It actually feels like I am "actively" working torwards taking less damage.

There may be a way to get some Rage from autoattacks. We were just concerned that so much Rage was from autoattacks that buttons like Shield Slam weren't contributing much so warriors were ending up feeling passive when what we were going for was active.

GS since you posting can we get atleast an idea of plans with Arms and Fury? currently they play way to similar and when I say that I mean they play exactly alike only difference is you don't have something procing to turn Slam into 3 stack 10 rage, and Overpower is proc'd from using your rage generating ability but they still play to alike, I'd just like some info as to what might be the plans with them? thanks

If you say they play similarly because they both have an attack that generates 10 Rage and both have an attack that costs 30 Rage, then that's true. However the similarities sort of end there. Arms has a second attack, Overpower, that is reliable, though it can sometimes chain proc. Colossus Smash sometimes has a lower cooldown. Arms' AE is based around Sweeping Strikes and Blood and Thunder. Arms' Rage income is slower from autoattacks and come in chunkier because of slow weapon swings.

Fury can sometimes use Raging Blow but not predictably. Rather than a proc concerning Colossus Smash, Fury gets to use Wild Strike three times in a row. Fury cares about being Enraged more than Arms for a couple of reasons (RB and mastery). Fury's AE is based around Meat Cleaver procs and using Raging Blow. Wielding two weapons ensures more consistent rage income, even when using two-handers. Fury will probably always have more Heroic Strike use. Overall, Fury's rotation is probably less predictable, which is fitting for their kit of crazed berserking.

I'm just trying to get a feel for what you're looking for. Should Bloodthirst deliver 20 Rage? Should Bloodthirst just be a cooldown? Should Arms have a different cooldown than Recklessness? Should Fury not have Deep Wounds?

I thought we were supposed to be commenting on how it feels now, not coming up with our own fixes.

I feel like most of you have been on the forums long enough to know the difference, but here goes:

Example One: "I think Mortal Strike would feel better with a 9 sec cooldown."
Example Two: "I find myself with not enough Rage as Fury."
Example Three: "I find the rotation confusing. I'm not sure which button to push."
Example Four: "Rend was a fun button. I miss it."
Example Five: "I came up with a new warrior ability. It's called Staple. Staple requires 40 Rage and roots a target. You then get 100% crit chance against the Stapled target. I imagine it would have an icon that looks like a big staple. The glyph of Staple would staple the target to the warrior so you would drag them around with you."

Five is fun, but less useful to us overall. If it's fun for you, go for it. Maybe it will spur some interesting discussion as players try to explore what design problems (if any) you're trying to address with your brainstorming. The risk is that you grow attached to the idea of Staple and essentially refuse to like any warrior change unless you see Staple implemented. Ultimately, it's just a less efficient way to have a discussion than figuring out what the root problem is you are trying to solve anyway. But I understand sometimes it isn't easy to get your finger on the pulse of what is bothering you. I've been doing game design a long time, and it still vexes me sometimes.

For Arms, I want Rend back. And Taste for Blood using Rend. And both of those scaling from Haste.

As a PvPer I don't want rend back. That move was a waste of a GCD and i'm glad its gone.

Right. That's the problem with Rend. We removed it because so many players didn't like it. Some players might like it's return, but for others, we'd be moving backwards. The same is true of cast-time Slam. Plenty of warriors are happy to see it gone.

Enrage would matter more if RB didn't cost rage, but generated it. The ability would be different from BT in that it would still have a cd and still hit hard. Now enrage would grant increased rage gen AND an ability that increased rage/did lots of damage. Frenzied Berserker achieved.

The risk there is you become *even more* dependent on Enrage. Now not only does it provide more autoattack rage, and is your mastery and Raging Blow enabler, but you get extra rage from using Raging Blow.

If you can let Bloodthirst have a decent base bonus to crit it would help with giving us a decent amount of up time on enrage and the use of raging blow for lower levels.

We had that in for a short time, but thought that the newer implementation (where an Enrage becomes increasing more likely) made things smoother overall. Even a high crit chance can still not crit.

Not generating rage in Defensive Stance hurts DPS warriors as well.

That doesn't have to be the case. Defensive Stance has always been a last resort for DPS warriors because it lowers your DPS. It's just a matter of degree. In other words, we're not trying to make Defensive Stance something Arms and Fury want to spend much time in.

I'm not sure if Ultimatum is gone, or if Devastate procs SnB and Ultimatum.

At the moment Ultimatum is from Shield Slam, because Devasate lighting up two buttons was too much.

Before I forget: a parried Rend is an annoyance. Under the new Taste for Blood, a parried Mortal strike means you're SoL for six seconds.

Taste for Blood is applied from using Mortal Strike, not landing a Mortal Strike. This may be a recent change.

On the other hand, there's a lot of damage that won't be affected by this, assuming that it puts a debuff on the target. For instance, the damage from Grasping Tendrils on spine wouldn't be affected. Most of the adds on Zon'ozz would be out of range. If you messed up Alysrazor, it wouldn't reduce Lava Spew.

It's only 20% damage reduction. If you're concerned about missing some adds on Zon'ozz, use Rallying Cry or Shield Wall or have a healer blow a cooldown or all three. It's not critical that all tank cooldowns work the same way, as long as nobody is at a terrible disadvantage. Applying the right cooldown to the right situation is one of the marks of a skilled tank.

They both have a 10 rage generating attack on a 6 sec CD, which sets the timeframe everything falls in.

Yeah, I agree the 6 sec cooldown makes them feel similar. I don't think we'd be excited about a 3 sec Bloodthirst again, but a 4.5 might be worth trying.

Fury currently needs obscene levels of Crit, Hit, and of course Expertise just to function normally. This leaves no room for Haste or Mastery. We have far less choice in our gear due to this problem.

You are defining "normally" differently than we do. Fury isn't balanced around 100% uptime of Raging Blow. Swinging two weapons is a huge dps increase that is offset partially by missing more, which means having to dedicate more stats to hit and expertise. I don't see the fundamental flaw there as long as Fury's damage is about the same as Arms. You may not like the randomness personally, but we do give you ways to mitigate it (including just playing Arms).

If you try to fix this by increasing Enrage up-time, where does it stop? 70%? 80%? 90%? 100%? If we become capable of 100% up-time, what's the point of Enrage as it currently is?

Off the top of my head, Enrage uptime of 40% in starting gear and 80% in endgame gear is probably a good target. Once something approaches 100%, then whenever you don't get it, it feels like a penalty rather than it feeling like a bonus when you do.

Does anyone actually notice when Flurry is up? Anyone? It's completely random, and with how low Haste is in terms of stats we're capable of valuing, we'll never have any discernible control over it through gearing.

The intent of Flurry is to break up the steady swings of autoattacks, particulary to make Rage income less predictable (which then in turn asks you to manage that situation by deciding when to Wild Strike and / or Heroic Strike). If the effect is too subtle to notice or Fury has enough mechanics going on without it, then we could consider removing it. It has just always been one of those iconic Fury mechanics. (Iconic is in the eye of the beholder of course, because we did kill Rend.)

Later in the thread, there were some suggestions to make Flurry a more meaningful proc that you react to. I'm not sure Fury needs more procs though since it already has Raging Blow and Bloodsurge. Something like Deadly Clam (see below) breaks up the rotation in a more predictable way.

Bring back Deadly Calm in some way for both Fury and Arms.

The class designers have discussed Deadly Calm quite a bit. It's an interesting ability and it changes the rotation in a way Recklessness does not. The problem is that with Recklessness and a cooldown on the level 90 tier (especially Avatar), that's a lot of burst buttons for warriors to use. We could prevent them from being stacked, but that often doesn't feel good. We could give Deadly Calm to Arms and Recklessness to Fury, but I don't think that would go over well.

Strength needs to provide Crit. I've already went over why your argument against this fails - Intellect and Agility are already pretty much the same thing (SP = AP, both provide Crit). Regardless, it's just not fun to not Crit.

I did address this. We just disagree. If you like crit, stack crit. If you like a lot of passive crit, play a rogue. Apologies if that sounds cut and dried, but I'm not sure where else to take that discussion.

I'm going to go ahead and strongly disagree with Fury's design being so attached to this idea of being "random" or "uncontrolled" (which is the synonym you're using for random). As I've said frequently, a little RNG is fine, but you have to know when it's too much.

Randomness is also in the eye of the beholder. We like to have a pretty high amount of randomness in class rotations because handling that randomness presents an opportunity for reactive players to perform better than those who try to play their class with a 1,2,3 cadence. You seem to have a different vision in mind for Fury than we do. I'm not sure how to resolve that. And no, it's not going to be a poll. :)

We did find a bug just now where the combat tables were not exporting correctly. Among other things, this means that warriors, paladins and DKs were lacking 5% of base crit. I was trying to figure out why the crit numbers being reported were so low. (They still may not be as high as you'd like with the +5%, but they should be where we want them.)

Here are some upcoming changes to Arms and Fury:

Bloodthirst has a 4.5 sec cooldown and generates 5 rage to distance the Fury rotation more from Arms. Bloodthirst’s crit mechanic was redesigned so that you can see the crit chance of your next BT and predict the crit / Enrage a little more.

Colossus Smash is free. We hope this lets warriors time their rage pooling a bit more instead of spending so much rage on CS that there is nothing left to benefit from CS. Since Arms uses CS more, this will throw more kinks (the good kind) in their rotation than Fury.

Deadly Calm reinstated as a 60 sec cooldown. It allows the next 3 Heroic Strike or Cleaves to cost 10 less rage, so again you’ll want to time this a bit depending on current rage mechanics. Ten less rage should be the sweet spot to encourage HS use, but it may need to be 20. We don't want it to be free, because then you would just hit Deadly Calm on cooldown rather than timing it.

Enrage now also increases the rage generated by MS, BT, SS and Revenge. This should make the rage income more noticeable when it’s up.

Overpower now does more damage with subsequent procs. It was already a high priority button, but this will give warriors an opportunity to time the bigger hits with Colossus Smash or Deadly Calm..
As always, let us know how these feel in beta. These are very much experiments (as are many of our beta changes) so we may decide not all of these changes are good or necessary.

I have seen some confusion on this issue (my fault). The missing 5% crit is on beta, not live. I am nearly always talking about beta these days. We added 5% base crit for warriors, paladins and DKs for Mists. This was not working. It should be soon.