#0 - Oct. 10, 2006, 6:16 p.m.
I think it's important to reiterate that these changes are having rather minute impacts now, but is something more for future development of rage mechanics, rather than any dramatic change for the immediate future.
As Kalgan said, this has been in alpha for a little while and the changes are rather unnoticable. Sure, at its base numbers have been changed, but a point or two of rage lost on the back-end is going to be negligible to the guy who was dealing a ton of damage in sweet epics anyways.
I suspect there might be some trepidation when hearing 'rage normalisation' upon the release of the expansion. However, that will be the usual pre-patch jitters and theorycraft. When that happens, we can look back and see that this has already been in practice and there is a good chance you won't even be affected by this change.
Y'know, just putting it on the record. ;)
Warriors definitely still smash faces in BC.
Community:
1. Regarding Tactical Mastery, many view that moving this talent into the Protection Tree was a nerf in order to prevent the MS/Flurry build. Is there any truth to this? If so why not change the talents so this won't be as overpowered as it seems to be? If it was to make it more available to Protection warriors, why not just switch it with deflection in the arms tree, as right now, a Protection warrior will still have to invest 5 points into arms, where as if it were switched with deflection, they could need to invest only 3 for TM.
2. Regarding Endless Rage and Spell Reflection, since Spell Reflection doesn't have a cooldown, that makes for Spell Reflection spam a viable tactic against casters. Is this under consideration for change or does the need for a 1h and shield and the global cooldown make this balanced? Also will this reflect the seemingly uncounterable Death Coil?
3. Will Intervene and Intercept share a cooldown? And if so, will they both be affected by the Improved Intercept talent?
4. And another Endless Rage question. How will this ability work with execute, provided the opponent is below 20%?
5. Are there any plans at the moment to normalize rage generation?
Kalgan:
1. The change was definitely made in order to ensure that there were viable DPS alternatives to MS/Flurry for an arms warrior. I'm certain that without that change, MS/Flurry would have been the only way to go. Don't think for a second that the idea of having TM as tier 1 arms and Deflection as tier 1 prot didn't occur to us, but the reality is that all it would have done is lower all dps warrior's parry percentages by 5, but every arms warrior would still be looking at 31/30.
The other obvious ways to approach it are either to have extremely powerful talents beyond 30 for arms (but this causes huge problems the next time we raise the level cap and you can get those new overpowered talents and still get flurry), or to nerf flurry (which I'd rather not do, since I feel it's a tree-defining talent).
I very much feel that having TM at tier 1 prot opens up a ton of new possibilities, including builds that don't take all 5 points in TM, builds that use the 5 points in TM to make it worth continuing down to Last Stand (which = hotness in arena combat btw, while also keeping you pretty well balanced for raid tanking if you do that too since you probably scooped up toughness on the way). These examples, along with the possibilities for arms-heavy builds and all of the typical fury heavy builds become realistic to expect with this change.
2. Actually, we're in the process of trying out spell reflection with a 10s cooldown. Generally speaking, we try to avoid cooldowns whenever we can, and honestly this is a case where the cooldown is pretty important to have in PvE rather than PvP (smart players can react to spell reflection by casting a relatively meaningless spell to knock it down, but the mobs aren't quite so clever). It's still super-cool in pvp even with the cooldown, and has a lot of potential to distinguish skilled players from unskilled (if you time it well, spell reflect can win a fight for you). Yes, it can also reflect Death Coil.
3. No, they're on separate cooldowns.
4. It reduces the base rage cost to 0. It'll still consume any rage you have to deal extra damage, but the base cost is reduced to zero.
5. Yes, rage generation has been normalized somewhat (although it's difficult to notice with current gear for most players, it's more of a protection against continued scaling off into the future). It also benefits the sword & board case, allowing tanks that aren't dealing/taking a ton of damage to generate a little more rage (again, it's not a big difference compared to before, just a bit better).
Community:
No DPS warrior would go 31/30 even if TM was still in arms.
And flurry is not at all overpowered for PvP, actually, it's pretty useless.
Of course the developers would know this if they had ANY clue as to how warriors work.
Kalgan:
1. I don't think we're only talking about PvP here.
2. Flurry isn't pretty useless in PvP. Of course, you'd know this if you had any clue as to how warriors work.
Community:
The rage normalization thing has been a pretty big concern for warriors for a while, and it would be nice to hear exactly what "somewhat" means.
Kalgan:
In practical terms, it means if you have a high-end epic 2h weapon you'll generate a point or two less rage on normal hits, about 3 less on a crit in the same case.
As all of you are probably aware, warriors scale incredibly well with gear, this is intended to take a little bit of the suck out of having lesser gear (or sword/board), and a little bit of the insanity off of the effects of uber gear.
Again, it's actually very hard to notice, in fact I haven't seen our alpha testers mention it in any significance (although it's definitely working).
Community:
Aren’t warriors SUPPOSED to scale well with gear? Hence, uber gear, insane warrior.
I dont see why this is happening.
Kalgan:
Warriors still scale extremely well with gear, even after the change. I think I've tried to emphasize a few times that it isn't a nigh-and-day difference... it's pretty subtle.
Community:
I’m interested in how this Rage Normalisation affects the people in "Less then Epic" Gear.
Also 2-3 points of rage of a two hander doesn't seem to bad of a 2 hander, But the 2 handers weren't the poeple known for their Rage Generation, over the course of say 5 Minutes how much Change should a DW Fury Warrior PvE Specced 17/34 (at least thats mine) In Epic Gear expect notice.
Kalgan:
If by "less than epic" you mean "blue", I'd say you won't notice the difference at all. If you mean green gear, you'll probably do very slightly better.
As far as how it affects DW fury warriors, it's pretty much the same effect overall (not as much rage difference on a per hit basis, but since they're hitting more often it adds up to the same change over time).
Community:
1. With reduced raid sizes and introduction of shaman to alliance and paladins to the horde is the role of dps warrior now going to be diminished?
2. With the role of dps warrior possibly diminishing is blizzard trying to pigeon hole warriors into tanking?
3. why (even before the rage cost) is rampage so weak and does not scale?
4. why is weapon mastery so low in the arms tree? Its highly regarded as the best PVE damage talent but yet to aquire it to be top damage dealers warriors would have to ditch everything in the fury tree below bloodthirst (which most of it is very lackluster anyways)?
5. Is blizzard trying to buy warriors with new uber gear so we dont care about our talents as much?
6. why is deep wounds possibly better for a damage increase then rampage?
7. why a 5 minute cooldown on endless rage?
Kalgan:
1. I think that the sheer effectiveness of dps warriors (even if the gap closes somewhat in BC) will make it unlikely that their role will be diminished too much. At the same time, raids will be a bit more sensitive to slight variations in group composition, so if there happen to only be a few tanks in your raid (which should be unlikely with the potential for paladin tanks being thrown into the mix)... prepare to do a little tanking too?
2. We're definitely not trying to pidgeon-hole warriors into tanking, we view them as a tanking/dps hybrid, both parts valid.
3. Contrary to popular belief, I don't believe that everything has to scale when it itself is a value that scales other things (ie: rampage itself doesn't scale, but it helps your bloodthirst, victory rush, etc) scale. Scaling abilities that scale other abilities tend to be very dangerous to balance.
4. You just can't have it all, can ya. =]
5. ...
6. We're still in the process of tuning. Right now Rampage feels pretty mechanically solid in testing (the latest changes made a huge difference), but we'll keep evaluating the numbers.
7. In testing, this ability feels 'ok'. Not amazing, but also not bad (certainly not as bad as some here imagine). We're evaluating options on this one, which could lead to either design changes or a cooldown reduction. At the same time, we don't necessarily want 41 point talents to be absolute must-haves.