Warrior Class Development Notes for The War Within Alpha - Arms AoE, Fury Bloodthirst, & Buffing Bladestorm

03.05.2024 - 00:25 / wowhead.com

Blizzard has posted additional developer commentary explaining some of the new Warrior changes in this week's Alpha build for The War Within, from redefining Arms AoE rotation, to punching up Fury's Bloodthirst, and major buffs for Bladestorm!

There are a few Warrior updates in today’s Alpha build.

After giving Arms and Fury access to both Bladestorm and Ravager, it was clear that Ravager had strong advantages in all situations. We’d like Bladestorm to be a strong pick for burst AOE, so we’re buffing its damage significantly, and reducing Ravager’s damage slightly. This should help make the choice between these abilities more meaningful and let each ability shine in different situations.

Arms
We’ve heard the feedback that the Arms AOE rotation lacks definition, so we’re making adjustments to Cleave to make it the centerpiece of Arms’ AOE rotation in The War Within.

We think this will give a unique feel to Arms’ AOE rotation while bringing a classic iconic Warrior ability back to the limelight. We want Overpower to be an important part of Arms’ AOE rotation as well, but Dreadnaught was simply too strong in all situations. We’re reducing the damage from Dreadnaught and buffing Strength of Arms to put the choice between those talents on equal footing.

This is not intended to be an overall reduction to Arms’ AOE damage, we simply feel that we’d rather Arms’ damage come from their direct damage abilities hitting harder and the subsequent bleeds and that will be reflected in the ongoing tuning of Arms overall.

Fury
We’ve also heard the feedback that Bloodthirst was not an exciting ability to use and that it felt disconnected from the rest of the Fury kit. To address this, we’re giving Bloodthirst a significant damage boost as well as adjusting several talents to affect Bloodthirst that did not previously, and adding new functionality with Deft Experience causing Bloodthirst to extend your current Enrage and changing Bloodcraze to introduce aa new interaction between Raging Blow and Bloodthirst. Our goal is to continue and extend Bloodthirst’s interaction with Enrage in new ways, as well as it contributing to Fury’s overall damage and survivability.

Protection
Protection Warrior has tools like Spell Reflect and Spell Block to protect it from magic, but its defensive toolkit is weak to ongoing or frequent magic damage.

Fight Through the Flames is a new tool to help warriors survive that type of damage. We’ll keep an eye on its tuning. Additionally, we removed the damage penalty from Defensive Stance for Protection Warriors.