Warrior change preview

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There are a lot of concerns I have, and the devs keep telling us to calm down and see what they are going to do, but compared to the other class previews, I wouldn't expect to be too happy.

Protection warriors will be happy, Arms PvPers will find some good things and a couple down sides, but overall will be ok. Fury warriors may as well just consider becoming tanks or arms warriors or changing to a DK/rogue/hunter etc. I hate to say the sky is falling, but if you recall the beginning of WotLK, when the TG changes went in and most warriors switched to Arms because the damage was better, and the rotation was more fun, Cataclysm looks like it may be similar.

I'm actually trying to keep a "Wait and see how beta goes" attitude, but so far, I'm having a really hard time keeping an open mind about the effects on Fury. This only bothers me because Fury is a warrior's only viable PvE dps spec, and we're seeing it being ignored by the developer's preview of upcoming attractions, and only getting nerfs to some of our core abilities. It's' clear that they're giving us plenty of rage generation abilities, but since our rage dump will be on the gcd along with everything else, there's going to be a finite amount of button pushing we can do regardless of how much rage we have.

On that note, with regard to the lack of haste improvements, I tried to explain my fears to a friend earlier today as follows:

Let's propose a test to see how much resource management actually limits damage dealt.

Phase 1: take one member of each class, have them do whatever rotation they think will maximize their damage for 10 minutes to a target dummy in basic gear (or no gear, whatever) but with haste nullified.

Phase 2: take the same people, but set their resource (runes/energy/focus/rage/mana) at maximum and never diminishing at all. Have them do whatever they have to do to max out dps for the same time period (still with haste nullified).

Now compare these two numbers.

What will this test tell us?

If someone's damage goes up significantly (as I believe it would in the case of rogues/hunters/DK's) then that class has their damage tied directly to their resource management, so haste being something that increases their resource gain would be beneficial to their overall dps, and you could even use those numbers to see if any abilities needed tweaking.

If someone's damage stays pretty much the same (as I believe it would in the case of paladins and warriors) then that class really doesn't benefit much at all from increased access to resources, and thus, haste doesn't really do what was promised by developers.

The reason I suspect that rogues/hunters/dk's would see a pretty noticeable improvement is that they're the classes whose resources really do limit how often they can press a button. Rogues' buttons are only pressed on gcd during the initial phase and when they have sufficient energy to allow it, and the rest of the time they're waiting for more energy to build up. Hunters, with the new focus resource, would likely be similar. DK's are limited in a different way, but still by their resource. If runes were permanently activated, a dk's rotation would be (1) apply diseases, (2) spam big attack (Heart Strike/Death Strike/Obliterate/Scourge Strike) until diseases needed to be reapplied. So, in the case of DK's, their resources limit their choices in which abilities they can use next.

Give infinite resources, all three are then able to spam their best attacks continuously in perfect rotations to achieve big increases.

Now look at paladins and warriors. We already have pretty much infinite resources, but our damage isn't infinite. It's still limited. This is because we have not one resource (mana/rage), but 3. Our most obvious resource is rage/mana, but our other resources are gcd's and cooldowns. If you wanted to see the same results from this test as you saw from DK's, rogues, hunters, etc. from warriors and paladins, the only thing you could do would be to take away gcd's and/or cooldowns. Since gcd's are an inherent part of the game and are part of what allow the server time to deal with things, let's focus on cooldowns.

Let's say Bloodthirst is our best ability. We can hit it once per 4 seconds. Notice that this is the same whether we have just barely enough rage to hit it, or an infinite amount of rage. In fact, if that's the only button we have, unlike the dk's, rogues, hunters, etc. our damage would stay EXACTLY the same in this test, because rage is not what holds our damage back, it's the cooldowns on our abilities. Now, if rage were enough of an issue that it prevented us from using our abilities every cooldown, then the argument could be made that this would be a good thing. However, they'd need to normalize our abilities to do MORE damage to allow this to be the case.

So, in short, if they really want to make haste better for us, it seems like one way to do it is to constrict us with rage starvation. Force us to wait more than our cooldowns for enough rage to hit a button, and then amplify our damage from each ability to compensate for that. Then, when we get haste, we'll get rage faster, be able to hit buttons faster, and all will be well, except then we'll be QQ out of the frustration of sitting at our computers waiting to hit a button.

An alternative is to let haste shorten our cooldowns.

Frankly, I like the second one better.