Playing a warrior in World of Warcraft is sometimes no fun – in fact, it’s physically painful. Blizzard now wants to fix that.
If you want to play at a high level in World of Warcraft, then in most cases you have to fire off a lot of skills at a very short frequency – and ideally do so sensibly. This is stronger in some classes and weaker in other classes. But a specialization has to carry out so many actions per minute that it is downright painful for some players.
Therefore, Blizzard now wants to adapt the protection warrior and reduce the amount of abilities that are used.
Some bugs in WoW are similarly absurd:
3 absurd bugs that happened in WoW
More videos
Autoplay
What’s the problem with the protection warrior? Protection Warriors currently have to perform too many actions per minute (“APM”). This is mainly because they generate so much rage that they have to constantly use abilities without a cooldown to even spend it. Instead of only using an ability every 1.5 seconds like most other classes, warriors often do so much more frequently. Blizzard says in the official WoW forum:
High APM, especially when constantly using abilities that are not affected by the global cooldown, such as shield block or gritting teeth, can be uncomfortable or even downright painful for some players.
One of the culprits that drives up APM is high anger generation, which causes excess anger to be gritted into teeth. As a result, many of the new changes now focus on lowering instantaneous rage generation and moving more of it into regular sources so that you always have enough rage for your mitigation and rotation without constantly having to put some of it into non-cooldown abilities .
Or to put it more simply: Protection Warriors simply generate so much anger that they hardly know how to spend it. This leads to them spamming a lot of abilities just to somehow get rid of the rage.
What will be changed? Blizzard has identified the Shield Bash ability as the culprit. This is one of the most important abilities of the Protection Warriors as it generates a lot of rage and also deals a lot of damage. “Strategist” and “Devastator” in particular cause additional problems here. Therefore, the procc chance of shield bash being reset is reduced.
The changes will go live with Patch 11.1 Lorenhalt. Then Protection Warriors should be a little more pleasant to play again and you should be able to get through the dungeons and raids without getting your fingers knotted on the keyboard. But it will still take a few weeks until that happens.