Cataclysm

[caladein]

I don't believe Blizzard was deliberately overpowering anyone, Warriors were just the case that, "Hey, you're the tanking class."  The pure DPS classes were the same way, when they worked, as they were not so much overpowered as just supported by the game.  A Feral Druid just wasn't.  The "chosen" comment was more meant that some classes had it better than others as all-rounders.

That said, my recollections about Mages being THE answer for all ranged DPS, AOE, and CC needs could be wrong, I've never really been in a truly top tier guild and definitely wasn't in Classic.

The healers thing was about people spec'd as healers and needing materials, or farming reputations, or needing to finance raiding and PvP habits.  Sure, if you were able to cobble together some decent off-spec gear and had enough time to make 100g respec cycles a net gain going to a DPS spec between raid nights could work.  That really wasn't that case for me until uh... mid-2007.

[Maledict]

I don't believe Blizzard was deliberately overpowering anyone, Warriors were just the case that, "Hey, you're the tanking class."  The pure DPS classes were the same way, when they worked, as they were not so much overpowered as just supported by the game.  A Feral Druid just wasn't.  The "chosen" comment was more meant that some classes had it better than others as all-rounders.

That said, my recollections about Mages being THE answer for all ranged DPS, AOE, and CC needs could be wrong, I've never really been in a truly top tier guild and definitely wasn't in Classic.

The healers thing was about people spec'd as healers and needing materials, or farming reputations, or needing to finance raiding and PvP habits.  Sure, if you were able to cobble together some decent off-spec gear and had enough time to make 100g respec cycles a net gain going to a DPS spec between raid nights could work.  That really wasn't that case for me until uh... mid-2007.

You're probably right re. "overpowered". What Blizzard actually said was that Warriors were a unique class, and for Launch / TBC they were balanced differently to everyone else. Unlike all other classes with a dps spec and a healing spec, warriors dps specs were balanced as if they were a pure dps class. This was unique, and explains why they were so good through the original game. Every other hybrid class was given lower dps than a pure spec, and corresponding buffs & abilities to compensate. I never understood why they took this stance, and it left the game in the high end oddly unbalanced - you could happily bring 10 warriors to a raid and still want more.

Hunters were appallingly good in the original game, but it required someone who knew how to play the class, and timing their shots around their auto-shot rate which was not easy. I don't think a macro was invented to cover it until near the end of classic / TBC, but in essence it was the exact same as warriors with arcanite reapers issue - slow weapons allowed for unbelievably hard hitting shots. They were certainly harder to play right than any other dps class.

Overall, balance in the original game was very much hit and miss. The majority of strengths and weaknesses came not from deliberate design, but purely from ignorance or bugs. Once we reached TBC they started to have a paradigm around which to design, and they *mostly* got it right, with the only upset really being moonkin / retri paladins / mages being underpowered at the very high end.

Re. CC - apart from Majordomo in MC, mage CC wasn't used at all in raiding. If you're talking about 5 players, then it's a different kettle of fish as mages have always been extremely powerful, and a joy to play, in 5 player groups because they have so manytools and tricks which they never get to use in raiding at all. A well played mage is obscene in 5 player stuff, especially in the original game as frost spec.

[Sheepherder]

Any class looks chosen compare to warlocks in the original game, but thankfully they fixed that and more in TBC.

SM / Ruin wasn't bad.

[kildorn]

Any class looks chosen compare to warlocks in the original game, but thankfully they fixed that and more in TBC.

SM / Ruin wasn't bad.

Pre negative resist fix, warlocks were the slot machines of one shotting people in pvp.

Locks have always been decent, just difficult to use well and weak against multiple attackers. Plus early on the running all over creation for your fucking pets was stupid.

edit: IMO what fixed locks in pve was lifetap scaling, which was.. mid TBC? Before that they just had shitty mana issues and a lot of useful buffs and debuffs in pve.

[Rasix]

Who picked a class first and role second at release?  That was doing it backwards.

/raise hand

I picked a shaman.  I had a lot of damage doing spells and also melee boosting abilities.  I thought at maybe some point I could DPS.  Instead I spent most of vanilla (before I made my rogue alt) staring at health bars and casting Lesser Healing Wave (because the scaling on everything else was fucking broken before I quit).

I play really casually, so I like to have fun when I play.  I have the most fun when I DPS, but in the past played characters that most people wanted me to heal with (shaman, druid) or tank with (DK, druid).  I've gotten so sick of being expected to do either of those that I spend most of my time playing my warlock or rogue.  The druid is retired, the DK is a mining/JC alt, and the shaman only heals for friends.  My next character is going to be a goblin hunter. 

[kildorn]

I like healing, some raid nights just stress me the hell out though. But in general I'm happiest when I can heal people. I get unhappy and want my dps alt when we get to the point where we need to cast one heal every 30s because the tanks outgear the encounter too much.

[Arinon]

Who picked a class first and role second at release?  That was doing it backwards.

/raise hand

Maybe I'm the odd man out then.  Grabbing some class that sounds cool and running with it is too much of a leap of faith for me.  I screwed up anyway though. Leveled a priest to 60 expecting to never have to heal before settling down into warrior for most of Vanilla and TBC.  At least I rarely had to tank with it!

[Draegan]

Umm, I'm sorry but what? Mages?

In Classic, if you wanted to be a caster DPS, what was your other option besides Mage?  Broken.
If you wanted to be a physical DPS, what was your other option besides Rogue? Occasionally broken.
If you wanted to tank, you were a Warrior.
If you wanted to heal, you had some options but then you were totally helpless outside of a group.

Sure, a lot of Classic was completely stupid and I have no idea how I put up with any of it, but pretending that some classes weren't more equally stupid than others is just deluding yourself.

Fury Warriors were sick with good gear in Vanilla.

[SurfD]

I seem to remember that in vanilla, back before the great Debuff slot revamp, the main reason warlocks sucked in a raid environment was because every boss had like 20 debuff "slots" maximum, and applying a new debuff to the boss could potentially push "good" debuffs off the mob.  And since good dps from a lock required you to put up like 3 or 4 debuffs PER lock on the boss, having more then 2 or 3 locks in a a 40 man raid usually ended up being a bad thing.

[Tarami]

Not particular to warlocks but even worse, for the same reason Defensive Stance tended to be pushed off of the tanks which resulted in a prompt wipe.

[fuser]

Warriors have been the worst tanks for quite some time now.

This is not to say that every warrior is a bad tank (speaking as someone who's been tanking since the start, fuck you), but it's pretty much a given right now that tanking as DK, Druid or Pally is just miles easier.  This is undeniable.  Anyone who disgrees should have those as alts (as I do) and weep.

I still prefer playing the warrior tho.  He's more FUN.

I stopped my BC druid and switched over to a Pally to take the easy way out. Seriously cone swipe was silly because DPS in WoTLK have no concept of aggro and just go hog wild on AOE. After they changed the swipe to an AOE taunt it helped out quite a bit but Pally tank DPS is still incredible (first or second in 90% of pugs).

[kildorn]

I seem to remember that in vanilla, back before the great Debuff slot revamp, the main reason warlocks sucked in a raid environment was because every boss had like 20 debuff "slots" maximum, and applying a new debuff to the boss could potentially push "good" debuffs off the mob.  And since good dps from a lock required you to put up like 3 or 4 debuffs PER lock on the boss, having more then 2 or 3 locks in a a 40 man raid usually ended up being a bad thing.

Yeah, but one was nearly required due to how negative resists worked (random chance for up to double damage) made CoE/S the most powerful debuff in the game for a bit. You rarely wanted many around though. Barring the gimmick banish fight in MC.

[Ingmar]

You're probably right re. "overpowered". What Blizzard actually said was that Warriors were a unique class, and for Launch / TBC they were balanced differently to everyone else. Unlike all other classes with a dps spec and a healing spec, warriors dps specs were balanced as if they were a pure dps class. This was unique, and explains why they were so good through the original game. Every other hybrid class was given lower dps than a pure spec, and corresponding buffs & abilities to compensate. I never understood why they took this stance, and it left the game in the high end oddly unbalanced - you could happily bring 10 warriors to a raid and still want more.

It wasn't completely deliberate so much as a natural consequence of the way rage worked at release, and to an extent still does now. When you hit harder you get more rage and can hit more buttons, so there's a little extra dps feedback loop that other classes don't have. Warriors are always overpowered at the end of expansion cycles because of it. The normalization thing should help with that, if they actually stick to their guns with it this time.

[Maledict]

You're probably right re. "overpowered". What Blizzard actually said was that Warriors were a unique class, and for Launch / TBC they were balanced differently to everyone else. Unlike all other classes with a dps spec and a healing spec, warriors dps specs were balanced as if they were a pure dps class. This was unique, and explains why they were so good through the original game. Every other hybrid class was given lower dps than a pure spec, and corresponding buffs & abilities to compensate. I never understood why they took this stance, and it left the game in the high end oddly unbalanced - you could happily bring 10 warriors to a raid and still want more.

It wasn't completely deliberate so much as a natural consequence of the way rage worked at release, and to an extent still does now. When you hit harder you get more rage and can hit more buttons, so there's a little extra dps feedback loop that other classes don't have. Warriors are always overpowered at the end of expansion cycles because of it. The normalization thing should help with that, if they actually stick to their guns with it this time.

No, it was a deliberate policy. You could always balance rage to simply hit less dps - warriors scaling stupidly is just part of their badly balanced rage system. For all of the original game and TBC, they were aiming to have dps warriors deal the same amount of damage in a raid as a rogue / hunter / mage / warlock. That was unique - it was a specific design goal, and no other class got that. Blizzard took this route because "you never need 5 tanks and warriors have a dps spec that should be used". All it actually meant in reality was you brought your 3 tanks or whatever, AND then 5+ dps warriors because warriors were so good. Every other hybrid got screwed with a dps spec that was vastly under the pure dps classes, whereas warriors got to be the sole takning class with a unique raid role AND dps equal to the pure dps classes.

It's beyond me why they thought this was a good idea to give warrios an absolutely vital unique raid role AND make their off-specs the equal to the pure dps classes, but that's how they operated for the original game and TBC - from their own lips, not mine.

[Ironwood]

That all sounds like absolute bullshit.

Warriors never used to have any Threat control at all.  If it was that bad in raids, they'd just be wiping like little suicide bombs.

[Ingmar]

Threat control was eventually a major issue for warriors back then, particularly because HS had inherent bonus threat. By the time they hit original Naxx a lot of warriors were using cleave instead of HS for their rage dump a lot of the time just to keep threat under better control.

[Maledict]

That all sounds like absolute bullshit.

Warriors never used to have any Threat control at all.  If it was that bad in raids, they'd just be wiping like little suicide bombs.

To quote:

This philosophy largely evolved in Wrath of the Lich King and is the design we plan on carrying forward to Cataclysm. In vanilla WoW, every class typically had one role. In BC, we tried to promote other roles for some classes, but we still didn’t make everyone play by the same rules. Warriors, and I hate to pick on them, were intended to be the best tank while also deliver dps that we would now label as competitive with rogues. By contrast, druids, paladins, priests and shaman were intended to be competitive healers, but have dramatically lower dps than pures and warriors.

Obviously the point about threat really depended upon which side you were on. Alliance had such massive advantages re threat thanks to paladins, it's really embarrassing looking back at how grossly unfair the paladin  shaman divide was for raiding. But even without paladins, our DPS warriors were top of the meters in BWL and beyond, purely through going slow at the start and making sure your tanks had windfury and every buff possible to boost their threat. Threat was a huge issue in some BWL fights, but most fights after then the bosses were tauntable anyways so threat was not a huge issue.

[Paelos]

Wait.  One minute ago you said all Druids must have a heal spec or they are 'failures' and now you're saying tank/heal is useless.  So in your world, Druids aren't allowed to ever tank because that violates points one and two?

Sure why not?  

In a raid format I've had very few druids who didn't prefer healing or dps actually.

[Fordel]

Who picked a class first and role second at release?  That was doing it backwards.

A lot of people did pick classes with their desired roles.

Blizzard then decided that those classes that didn't start with W and end with 'arrior' weren't really supposed to fill those roles. The roles they had entire talent trees and class defining features devoted too. They got one job, or half a job sometimes, Innervate bot go!

Of course Warriors got to do both of their jobs without penalty, because... well because Blizzard said so and you other classes need to shut up and heal. 

[Ingmar]

Is there a good reason we're rehashing 5 year old class drama at this point anyway?

Yes there are a bunch of douchebag attitude-laden warriors out there, apparently including in this thread, but warriors haven't been atop the tanking totem pole for a couple years now and surely they'll all quit eventually. None of the other tanks have any justification for the chip on the shoulder attitude at this point, they can all do the job, and have been able to for literally years.

Can we move on now?

[Fordel]

You would say that, Warrior! 

[caladein]

Is there a good reason we're rehashing 5 year old class drama at this point anyway?

I accidentally started a horrible, horrible derail.

So how 'bout those new talents?

[Sheepherder]

It wasn't completely deliberate so much as a natural consequence of the way rage worked at release, and to an extent still does now. When you hit harder you get more rage and can hit more buttons, so there's a little extra dps feedback loop that other classes don't have. Warriors are always overpowered at the end of expansion cycles because of it. The normalization thing should help with that, if they actually stick to their guns with it this time.

Say it with me: the rage normalization scheme they added with TBC was never removed.  Read the Patch.txt file.

Obviously the point about threat really depended upon which side you were on. Alliance had such massive advantages re threat thanks to paladins, it's really embarrassing looking back at how grossly unfair the paladin  shaman divide was for raiding. But even without paladins, our DPS warriors were top of the meters in BWL and beyond, purely through going slow at the start and making sure your tanks had windfury and every buff possible to boost their threat. Threat was a huge issue in some BWL fights, but most fights after then the bosses were tauntable anyways so threat was not a huge issue.

1. The point you start with contradicts the point you end with.
2. Sanctuary didn't make initial threat any easier.  Because it's a coefficient on threat it only becomes statistically significant at the end of the fight, where even horde apparently had no problems.
3. Windfury.

By the time they hit original Naxx a lot of warriors were using cleave instead of HS for their rage dump a lot of the time just to keep threat under better control.

Cleave also has a threat constant, and the amount of bonus damage gained per added threat is less than Heroic Strike.  AFAIK even when it was fully talented.

[kildorn]

Salv was far, FAR better than windfury when dealing with new or difficult raid content. There's a reason it went away.

Windfury was crazy in pvp and crazy for fights you could do in your sleep, it greatly increased raid damage if you were melee heavy.

Why, exactly, are we having vanilla wow conversations, though? Are we comparing this to class balance in a just released game, or are we all just having rose colored the grass was always greener conversations for fun?

[Fordel]

I blame the Warriors.



There's also not much to discuss without going to the heavy NDA breaking leak site info. 

[Ingmar]

It wasn't completely deliberate so much as a natural consequence of the way rage worked at release, and to an extent still does now. When you hit harder you get more rage and can hit more buttons, so there's a little extra dps feedback loop that other classes don't have. Warriors are always overpowered at the end of expansion cycles because of it. The normalization thing should help with that, if they actually stick to their guns with it this time.

Say it with me: the rage normalization scheme they added with TBC was never removed.  Read the Patch.txt file.

You're just wrong. They backed off on the initial TBC rage normalization in 2.0.10:

"* The rage normalization equation has been adjusted to grant more rage. The typical warrior should see an increase of 15% to 20% in their rage generation"

This led directly to warriors becoming ridiculous at the end of TBC as usual (the ones with warglaives were particularly... special.)

No it was not removed *entirely*. Just gutted. That is what GC is referring to when they say they tried normalizing in TBC and it didn't work. And he's right.

By the time they hit original Naxx a lot of warriors were using cleave instead of HS for their rage dump a lot of the time just to keep threat under better control.

Cleave also has a threat constant, and the amount of bonus damage gained per added threat is less than Heroic Strike.  AFAIK even when it was fully talented.

Making a big assumption that current bonus threat values at these ranks are the same as what they were then:

Level 60, talented cleave was 2.09 bonus damage per bonus point of threat.
Level 60 HS was 1.14 bonus damage per bonus point of threat (assuming rank 9 trained by that book from AQ20.)

The real downside of cleave was that it cost quite a bit more rage than HS but at the gear levels where they started switching that conveniently mattered less because as I mentioned earlier, rage was a really badly broken mechanic in vanilla.

EDIT: I forgot they increased the damage on cleave at some point, the level 60 number should be more like 1.1 bonus damage/threat. Roughly the same as HS, but less threat in an absolute sense so better to use given rage was not a concern.

[Chimpy]

I seem to remember that in vanilla, back before the great Debuff slot revamp, the main reason warlocks sucked in a raid environment was because every boss had like 20 debuff "slots" maximum, and applying a new debuff to the boss could potentially push "good" debuffs off the mob.  And since good dps from a lock required you to put up like 3 or 4 debuffs PER lock on the boss, having more then 2 or 3 locks in a a 40 man raid usually ended up being a bad thing.

Original debuff limit was 8 per mob.

Meant in raiding Molten Core/BWL we would have: 1 Hunter's Mark, 1 Stack of Sunders, 1 Serpent sting, 1 CoE, 1 CoS, 1 Warlock DoT spell, and one Mortal Strike/Wound Poison which would leave 1 spot open at all times for a Taunt debuff to go up if needed. I knew raid leaders who would kick people for wasting debuff slots with fireball DoTs etc.

[Sjofn]

(assuming rank 9 trained by that book from AQ20.)

SPEAKING of total bullshit from the vanilla days. I had almost forgotten they fuckin' did that.

[Paelos]

As yes, making you raid for skill upgrades; I'd forgotten about that was well. That and the helmet upgrade trash patterns from Sunwell are probably the silliest things they've ever done in terms of drops. God, I still shake my head over the stupidity that was "trash teams."

[kildorn]

I always loved the initial 20 man raid: twice the difficulty of anything else at the time, 10% chance per boss of an epic! Otherwise, you just got decent blues <3

Seriously, old WoW compared to new WoW are totally different games as far as the players they want to cater to.

[Simond]

Is there a good reason we're rehashing 5 year old class drama at this point anyway?

We're all waiting for the to drop, so there's nothing better to do than pointing out warriors are all a bunch of prima donnas with entitlement complexes. 

[Ironwood]

When the drops, there's gonna be screaming.  Guarantee it.

[Paelos]

Is there a good reason we're rehashing 5 year old class drama at this point anyway?

We're all waiting for the to drop, so there's nothing better to do than pointing out warriors are all a bunch of prima donnas with entitlement complexes.  

To bad we run the raids!  

But on another topic, the game is a fucking ghost town right now for my friends list, guild roster, and raid channels. It's pretty obvious for the last month that nobody gives a shit about playing right now, myself included. I'm wondering if we'll see a spike for the next few weeks with the introduction of the Ruby Sanctum fight, but who knows. I don't think I can get motivated to fight it in 10 man while the Lich King isn't dead yet, and I'm certainly not motivated enough to stright a 25 together.

Also ME2 is just tons more intersting atm.

[Ironwood]

Wait, how come Warriors are suddenly getting bashed here ?

Is it because of the Dancing Monkey ?

I thought I was being reasonable in the points I was making...

[Arinon]

It's because Warriors aren't the only ones with complexes.