Playing a warrior in World of Warcraft is sometimes not fun – it can be physically painful. Blizzard wants to fix this now.
If you want to play World of Warcraft at a high level, you often have to use many abilities in a very short frequency – and preferably do so meaningfully. This is more pronounced for some classes and less so for others. However, one specialization has to perform so many actions per minute that it is downright painful for some players.
Therefore, Blizzard wants to adjust the protection warrior and reduce the number of abilities that are used.
Similarly absurd are some bugs in WoW:
What is the problem with the protection warrior? Protection warriors currently have to perform too many actions per minute (“APM”). This is mainly due to their high rage generation, which forces them to use abilities without cooldown continually just to spend it at all. Instead of using an ability every 1.5 seconds like most other classes, warriors often need to use abilities much more frequently. According to Blizzard in the official WoW forum:
High APM, especially when continuously using abilities that are not affected by the global cooldown, such as Shield Block or Bite the Bullet, can be uncomfortable or even downright painful for some players.
One of the culprits driving up APM is the high rage generation that leads to excess rage being spent on Bite the Bullet. Therefore, many of the new changes aim to lower spontaneous rage generation and shift more of it to regular sources, so you always have enough rage for your mitigation and rotation without having to constantly spend some of it on non-cooldown abilities.
Or to put it simply: Protection warriors generate so much rage that they hardly know how to spend it. This leads to them spamming many abilities just to get rid of some rage.
What will change? Blizzard has identified the ability Shield Slam as the culprit. This is one of the most important abilities for protection warriors, as it generates a lot of rage and also deals a significant amount of damage. Especially “Tactician” and “Devastator” cause additional issues here. Therefore, the proc chance with which Shield Slam is reset will be reduced.
The changes will go live with Patch 11.1 Lorenhalt. Protection warriors should then be a bit more enjoyable to play, and it should also be easy to get through dungeons and raids without getting your fingers tangled on the keyboard. However, it will still take a few weeks until then.
