For people who aren't following Warrior mechanics, here's the key points I want to discuss.
- Rage from attacking will be generated as a function of base weapon speed, rather than damage dealt.
- Critical hits will generate twice as much rage as normal hits, and offhand hits will generate half the rage of a mainhand hit.
- Heroic Strike (and cleave) are being moved off the "on next swing" mechanic and turned into a normal GCD strike with pseudo-execute mechanics (their rage cost and damage output will scale with how much rage you actually have).
- Fury will have a choice between 2H and 1H dual-wield, with two "sister" talents at the top of the tree: Titan's Grip (as it exists now) and Single-Minded Fury, which is supposed to be designed to make it so 1H weapons will be competitive with Titan's Grip.
Chapter One: Weapon Scaling
I love the idea of being able to choose between TG and SMF. Titan's Grip is a very satisfying talent; being able to dual-wield gigantic weapons is every berserker's dream. On the other hand, I've got a pair of Nighttimes in my bank so far with probably more to come - I greed on them when they drop and I run HFoS a lot. I just hate to see such lovely 1H weapons go unused. So having the opportunity to have many weapons choices (single-2H if you count Arms specs) is exciting. What I'm worried about is scaling.
Titan's Grip has always been a scaling problem. 2H weapons need to be designed to work with most plate DPS classes (Arms, Ret, DKs), but also dual-wielded by fury warriors. There's a start to balancing this baked into the Titan's Grip talent: a 10% flat damage tax- when you dual-wield 2H weapons, you do 10% less damage. The other part of the balance is more subtle: Fury Warriors have few instant attacks, so they are balanced around doing a larger portion of white damage than most other DPS classes. The base Fury rotation uses three instants every eight seconds, leaving 2.5 seconds of just white attacks in there. More on this later.
I'm not sure if this was an unforeseen consequence, but it also turns out that Fury Warriors scale exceedingly well with hunter stats. Agility, Crit, and Armor Penetration all make Fury Warriors very happy. As a result, I chose the agi-ap-arpen Quel'delar over the str-crit-haste one when I finally broke down and spent the 10k on a new 2H last week. Similarly, if you compare damage stats for rings, neck pieces, and cloaks, you have to look at hunter-rogue-shaman gear as well as strength DPS stuff. So when the game designers make a hunter stat-stick that's also a sword, Fury warriors look at it for more than just stats. That may not last into Cataclysm, as they are (I believe) taking the flat AP mod off of agi weapons and instead making agi classes gain AP from raw agility on the weapon. Fury warriors will probably still get a respectable amount of crit from agility (or maybe not- but that's why we use agi/AP items now, the combination of flat AP and crit from agi is better than just a lot of AP from strength on comparable items).
The new rage mechanics means Single-Minded Fury should work okay to start with: you'll get approximately the same rage income from dual-wielding faster 1H weapons than the slow 2H weapons. Easy-peasy. The thing I'm worried about is stat scaling. In order to balance everything, the designers have to take into account that the SMF Warrior will have lower overall stats than the TG warrior, since 2H weapons are itemized to have more bonus stats. Not only will they need to bump up the damage multiplier to make the lower-DPS weapons comparable to dual-wielding 2H weapons, they'll need to do that in a way that accounts for the lower stats on 1H weapons. And they'll need to do that in a way that keeps Warriors roughly in balance with enhance shamans and maybe even rogues, all of whom are fighting to get the same weapons but have vastly different damage output mechanics.
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Actually, you could fix the issue of scaling I believe by making the SMF talent also remove the 50% rage tax from teh off-hand weapon. Add a small % damage on top of that and you could easily balance it with TG with very little effort.
ReplyDeleteThey would begin to do similar top damage, but TG would be more gear-based and SMF would be rage based, since more rage is more damage.
You're probably right: there are clearly going to be ways to keep the two specs in balance relative to each other. What I worry about is keeping them in balance relative to each other over a broad range of gearing itemlevels.
ReplyDeleteLook at what they did to deathknights: they said that frost was too hard to balance around 2H and DW, so they made it a DW tree only (after I started pwnfacing with frost-2H, sadly), then they decided it was too hard to balance tanking and DPSing in all three trees. I foresee a problem balancing TG with SMF over the long run. I'm sure they'll give it the ol' college try and things will be fine at 4.0.