Warrior Must-Haves for Midnight: Interactive Gameplay, Rage Economy & Cooldown Usage

Top 5 Midnight Wishlist

Need More Rage
Get used to hearing this, since it comes up a lot in Midnight. With all of the various talent tree changes and rearrangements, Arms Warriors have lost several supplemental sources of rage generation, including Battlelord, Skullsplitter, Finishing Blows, Warlord’s Torment, Avatar, and Ravager. Combined with generally less Tactician and Sudden Death procs, this leaves Arms in a position where its very easy to rage starve just by following a normal rotation.

Resource management hasn’t been a particularly important part of gameplay in a very long time for most classes, but while it is an interesting concept, it’s also an extremely hard needle to thread. Too abundant resources makes it feel meaningless, but there’s also no worse feeling than wanting to press buttons but being unable to due to artificial limitation. It only feels good when there’s meaning behind it, when you’re choosing to forgo one action in order to get a bigger payout elsewhere, but just keeping Mortal Strike on cooldown and sometimes pressing Slam or sometimes watching the GCD go by isn’t particularly exciting.

Skyfury helps, since those extra swings still count as auto-attacks, but it also leaves Arms Warriors feeling dependent on having a Shaman around, which isn’t always guaranteed in smaller group content.

Consistent Cooldown Alignment
A recurring complaint throughout The War Within was the descync between various cooldowns affected (or not) by several different forms of cooldown reduction. While Midnight has improved this to a degree simply by removing some cooldowns, it also continues the trend by introducing yet another form of cooldown reduction with the new Master of Warfare apex talent.

• Slayer continues to juggle Colossus Smash being affected by Anger Management and Bladestorm reduced by Unrelenting Onslaught, though the removal of Thunderous Roar does simply things a bit. Although Avatar was briefly removed, it has since returned and is now also affected by Anger Management, though the introduction of the apex talent means it will end up misaligned with Colossus Smash regardless.

• Colossus has gone from bad to worse. Not only is it also juggling the new apex, Anger Management, and its own unique Dominance of the Colossus, it also has a new version of Ravager which is not affected by anything. Although Blizzard set out to reduce the impact of cooldown alignment, the only step actually removed was Thunderous Roar, while everything else got worse.

While adding a little more consistency would go a long way toward streamlining cooldown use, arguably even more important is simply removing more redundant cooldowns. The new version of Avatar is the very definition of bloat, featuring no talent or gameplay interactions whatsoever. Ravager was returned to offer a Colossus-themed alternative to Bladestorm, but Demolish already fulfils the same role – all Ravager does is add an extra step to the rotation every 90 seconds… also no longer aligning with anything else in the process.

More Meaningful Utility
Utility has been a curse word for Warriors for quite some time. Truth is, Warriors actually have a great deal of special effects available to them – breaking fear, removing shields, providing minor movement speed, several slows, multiple stuns, an AoE tether, a low-cooldown interrupt, and now even a ranged silence… though very rarely is any of it particularly unique or important in modern PvE content.

With the advent of Mythic+, there has been a conscious effort to ensure that most group compositions will have the tools to deal with the presented threats, meaning that the ability to slow, interrupt, or stun have become universal to almost every class. Countering more niche threats, like breaking fear or removing shields, simply isn’t something that comes up very often anymore, so that Warrior or Shaman aren’t considered required to complete a particular dungeon. Because of this, when those threats do show up, they’re often so minor that it isn’t even worth investing the talent points in countering one encounter mechanic over the course of a thirty minute dungeon.

As a result, Warriors are sort of a jack of all trades, bringing a lot of little tools that can be overshadowed by bigger and better effects. Rallying Cry is nice, but unlikely to be the difference between life or death in any particular situation. The new effect on Piercing Howl will help speed players between packs, but it isn’t a replacement for Stampeding Roar. The stun lockout changes allow Warriors to get more use out of Storm Bolt and Shockwave, though so too does every other class. This doesn’t leave Warriors in a bad place, but it would be nice to use the rest of those sidelined tools a little more often.