Posted in: Games, Video Games | Tagged: blizzard, entertainment, video games, warriors, world of warcraft: legion

World Of Warcraft – Warriors Feel The Rage Going Into Legion

Published Mon, 16 Nov 2015 13:55:22 -0600

When I first signed up to play World of Warcraft almost nine years ago, I wanted to make a toon that would be hard to kill and powerful. So I made a warrior and somehow ended up being a tank. This permeated through all of my characters after, playing every class like they are in full plate armor and can take lots of damage. It doesn't always end well. This was my main for many years and is still my favorite. Even though I raid on a Warlock, my Warrior jumps in any time we are short a tank. So this was one of the character I was most interested to see what Blizzard had in store for them with the new expansion, Legion.

The designers' main focus for Warriors was making the talent trees more customizable, especially for Arms and Fury. They're bringing back things like Avatar, Roar and Stormbolt along with introducing some new talents to allow players the greatest variety possible. The days of the specs using mostly the same talents is over. The idea is to give more variety of game play within the three specs.

The biggest change to Arms is their Mastery. It is now Colossal Might which increases the effectiveness of Colossal Smash. Blizzard feels this better plays into the theme of the Arms Warriors. To go with Colossal Smash is the passive talent Titanic Might which increases the duration of Colossal Smash by 200% but cuts the effectiveness in half. They're still based on Rage which is built up through auto-attacks… so basically if you want to get angry and hit things, this is the class for you.

Now Fury Warriors always come across to me as the death-dealing whirlwinds that are just a flurry of swords and axes. Their game play is set for quick building Rage and then going wild with Rampage. One of the tweaks for Fury is Enrage now doubles your attack speed which means doubling your Rage generation at the same time. With this in mind there will now be Frenzy, an instant cast melee attack that cost 15 Rage and while it does moderate damage, it increases your hast 5% for 10 seconds… can can be stacked up to 5 times. So you could end up boosting our haste 25% which sure seems like Fury to me.

Protection Warriors, the back bone of tanking, were in good shape according to Blizzard but they wanted to make a couple tweaks. First was removing Shield Barrier, which often created a choice trap with Shield Block, and replaced it with Ignore Pain which massively reduces damage taken and is your primary defensive Rage spender. Prot Warriors still generate Rage through both damage taken and a minor amount from attacks. A fun little Prot Warrior talent you can spec into is Shield Discipline, it is a passive talent that makes Shield Slam extend Shield Block by 2 seconds and Shield Block increases the damage done by your Shield Slam by 30 %. This makes Prot Warriors very dependent on their shield… which make them the Captain America of Warcraft.

One of the best things WoW ever did was introduce the idea of Dual Specs. This allowed someone to be a Protection Warrior for raids and dungeons but they could off spec to Fury or Arms for leveling or if another tank is in the group. So most Warriors know all three specs pretty well… I can't say that the changes I see above really will do much to change the game play or rotation. I'll have to see what the specific talent changes are, but overall it looks like Warriors are going into the new expansion fairly similar to how they are now.

For more on the proposed changes to Warriors, check out this write up from Blizzard.

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