World of Warcraft

I’ve loved the Warrior class since the first time I saw one tank a raid.  Back then I was attempting to tank with my Paladin during the “seal of rage” era and to be able to see the way the warrior could just do everything better than I could was impressive.  I rapidly started leveling a Warrior up with my good friend Finni as she leveled her priest, and before long I was tanking all of the Late Night Raiders off night activities like Zul’Gurub.  When Burning Crusade was released I used it as an opportunity to shed Hunter as my raiding main and embrace the life of the tank.  It was a good choice and I was largely happy with it until the tail end of Wrath of the Lich King when I started straying from the path by playing a Death Knight.  I kept on that Deathlord path up until Warlords when they reached a point where they felt horrible, and with that I shifted back to my original love and have been a Warrior main again ever since.

As it stands right now…  Warriors are not in a great place.  I’ve always prided myself on being the tank that was the most healable, in that I tried my damnedest to level out the amount of damage that I am taking so that I can be healed in a predictable manner.  That is no longer a protection warrior, in fact as I have seen so far they seem to be the absolute worst at taking damage spikes due to a combination of all of our active mitigation abilities being on the GCD and not being able to maintain 100% up time due to cool downs.  Playing a warrior tank right now is a stressful mess in a manner that it shouldn’t be at the low gear levels and challenge levels of content that I am focused on.  I always feel like I am rage starved and essentially have to choose between active mitigation and dealing damage, and the more I sway towards damage reduction…. the more trouble I have holding aggro on large packs of things.

This is exacerbated by the fact that I cannot find a weapon to save my life and finally had to plunk down 11k on a weapon that I know will be replaced almost immediately just because it is something better than the 273 weapon that I had been using.  To make things worse…  even in the open world while doing World Quests…  Warrior tanks feel like a mess.  It is a constant juggling act trying to keep myself alive while slowly chewing down the health of mobs.  Sure I can solo bigger content, but it requires me to be constantly vigilant and never miss an active mitigation…  or simply pull a ton of trash mobs to make sure I can always be killing something and proccing another 20% heal from Victory Rush.  Basically warrioring right now is the opposite of fun for me and it is at this point that I think I am stepping away…  feeling like I wasted the last few weeks on a class that I just don’t want to play.

Instead I am spending my play time right now leveling the Demon Hunter because their tank ability is just complete nonsense.  They are grossly overpowered and I think honestly I am okay with that…  because it feels like a fun class to play.  At this point I am 113 and have tanked Underrot…  one of the dungeons that has just straight up murdered me as a warrior.  It was only last night that I realized that the 8.0 patch reset my talents… I was apparently doing all this with absolutely no talent choices.  It is nonsense and I cannot underline that point enough, but it is fun and it allows me to have a relatively stress free play experience.  Sure I have to be a damned dirty elf…  but at least my Demon Hunter looks cool.

The truth is at some point Demon Hunters are going to get the ban hammer…  and that is frustrating because they feel like tanks in general used to feel.  Sure it took you forever to kill something, but you didn’t have to worry about incoming damage while you were slowly chewing away at mob health.  More importantly than anything…  Demon Hunters right now are the easiest to keep alive for the healers and knowing that as a Warrior I am stressing out my healer…  stresses me out.  I took Friday off and I plan on using it to do a very hard push of the Demon Hunter to 120 and start gearing it.  The tanking is enjoyable enough that I am likely going to just start pugging dungeon runs for gear immediately or grabbing anyone in guild that needs gear for an instant queue.

I am deeply saddened that I have reached this point, with warriors.  I am even more deeply saddened that if you go on the Warrior forums you see a lot of people claiming nothing is wrong.  If the healers tell me Warriors are in general harder to heal than any other Tank class and they consider them bottom of the rung…  then I believe them.  They are the ones keeping my ass alive and I don’t like the notion that my choice of class makes their lives worse.  I like Fury just fine so at least my Warrior won’t go to waste… I just need to acquire two weapons…  which is its own challenge.  I guess I could craft two fist weapons with my leatherworker Demon Hunter and use that as a starting place.  I can only hope that Warriors return to glory at some point in the near future.

I didn’t blog this morning in part I think because I didn’t want to write the post that was sitting inside my brain.  First off I wanted to share this amazing image of my Elder Scrolls Online Imperial Dragon Knight that I commissioned Ammo to create for me.  Secondly I ended up creating a big damned thread over on Mastodon and I just realized… it was the blog post I should have made this morning.  So I ultimately lied to you and am going to largely post that thread over here since it is actually a post.

I am in a really weird place with WoW at the moment.  The last several nights I have logged in mostly to do the Emissary quest and then largely logged back out.  I rapidly reached a point where the World Quest gear isn’t really an upgrade unless its one of my dwindling number of 300ish items

The other main problem is…  the Protection Warrior just doesn’t feel as good as it has in past expansions, especially for open world content.  Sure after swapping around my build I can survive essentially indefinitely, but the time to kill just feels awful.  Not to mention the flow of combat just feels off for some reason that I can’t quite quantify.

I am starting to feel like maybe I chose the wrong main this time around…  but I am also not finding the oomph to level something else in its place because that is even more time being out of sync with my friends playing.  The stingy nature of weapons while leveling, means that I don’t really have a viable off spec weapon set up to go Fury (my choice of dps spec as warrior), and even Arms would be super anemic since my single two-hander is pretty crummy.

I think if I force myself into chain running some dungeons I might be able to kick start that joy again… but right now I am in a doldrum the earliest I have ever been in any previous expansion.  The last few nights have been a little odd and lead to me just not playing at all with friends so I think tonight I am going to see what a round of dungeoning feels like to see if it kicks me back into enjoyment phase.  Otherwise I have to tackle the thought of leveling something else…  or just moving on for now knowing that eventually I will come back.

Sometimes you just gotta be willing to let the post out that is inside of you even thought you maybe don’t want to be negative.  It will get out one way or the other…  either in a long thread on social media or in a series of private messages to friends.

Last night was a pretty chill night for me, in fact I honestly didn’t play that much Warcraft other than getting in and doing the Emissary quest for the day.  The sand fishing quest in Vol’dun can officially die in a fire… the only thing that managed to make it reasonable is that I happened to have a couple of other hordies doing it at the same time and we tagged each others spawns.  Effectively when you fish with the extra action button… you can either get a work or one of the angry trilobyte things… and it seemed like I pulled way more of those out of the ground rather than the worms I actually needed.  Not a fan at all… but it was a 310 azerite chest so figured I NEEDED to do it to see if I got anything interesting from it.  I am also trying to adjust to drastically changing up my play style with the warrior.

Ultimately I was operating with old data in the back of my head and also trying to play like I had played for most of legion…  when rage rained down from the sky like magic.  The entire time playing Battle for Azeroth I have felt rage starved, like I simply did not have enough of it to do all of the things I felt like I needed to do.  In Legion it seemed like I could spam revenge with impunity and still have plenty of rage left over to keep Ignore Pain and Shield Block active 100% of the time.  Additionally I seem to have missed the memo that Ignore Pain is now sorta garbage as compared to its original state that I was used to.  If I had to make a choice before I would almost always favor Ignore Pain over Shield Block because it seemed to buy me more leverage to work with.

That however is not the case anymore and additionally the Devastator talent that can be used to simplify the rotation…  seems to also be not that great.  So all through the leveling process I ran a build that looked a little something like this…

• Impending Victory – having the heal was nice for regenerating my health
• Crackling Thunder – because thunderclap radius meant I could hit more things
• Unstoppable Force – because more thunderclap with Avatar
• Indomitable – largely picked because I always used this before
• Rumbling Earth – because I like shockwave a lot
• Devastator – because it was one less button I needed to mash
• Heavy Repercussions – because lazy and it is a simple pick

The build that I have shifted to looks a little bit like this.

• Into the Fray – because apparently now haste is king?
• Bounding Stride – more movement options is more better
• Unstoppable Force – still because more thunderclap with Avatar
• Bolster – because halves the cooldown of Last Stand and makes me block all melee attacks while up
• Rumbling Earth – again because I like shockwave a lot
• Booming Voice – because apparently Demoralizing Shout became my fastest way to get some rage
• Anger Management – because thanks to bolster Last Stand is my best cooldown and it comes up more often

The problem with all of this is to make it work…  I had to shift around a ton of my keybinds and last night was largely me running around and killing things and trying to get used to the new places that things are in… and also learning to lean on Demoralizing Shout whenever I am rage starved to get back in the game.  I am old… and as a result I am starting to get a little set in my ways.  The keybinds I have been using for my warrior have been used in that configuration for probably three expansions now more or less apart from some minor tweaks.  It is going to take awhile to get to where I don’t feel like I am walking on marbles with these new keybinds.  Essentially I try and play my classes in a way so that I am not thinking about what I am hitting at any given moment… and I am largely just playing through muscle memory.  So I have to spend some time retraining said muscle memory so I can get back to just reacting to the situation on the ground as it is happening rather than hovering in my head trying to sort out what I should be hitting.

Tonight I will probably do more of the same, doing world quests to get used to the feel of things… and also because I am going to be at RiffTrax with work friends leading me to get home super late as compared to my usual schedule.  It is going to be Krull which has always been a bit of a guilty pleasure movie for me.  I grew up loving the weapon and tolerating the movie because the weapon looked badass.  It should be a good time and I am mostly hoping that I can keep my coughing down to a minimum in the theater as not to distract everyone else around me.