Darniaq's Archive of Blizzard's Posts

As a game company, Blizzard has been around for quite some time, and is known for the quality of their products. As a MMORPG company Blizzard is inexperienced. And one of the results of this inexperience is how badly they communicate with their players. Basically what they do is answering some questions on their message boards. But as that message board is rather crowded, and the search function doesn't work, the answers are usually very hard to find. Patch notes are also hard to find. This has lead some people to believe that Blizzard isn't very active in improving their game. When in fact they are, people simply often don't notice.

Darniaq has created an archive of Blizzard's Posts in the form of a phpBB forum. Not really a discussion forum, but a good place to look for interesting tidbits of information from Blizzard. For example about upcoming changes to the warrior class, which are all improvements. More damage from Heroic Strike, the main "added damage" special ability, better Thunderclap, and a bug-fix to Execute.

My Heroic Strike is already better than many other warrior's Heroic Strike. I noticed the difference recently (before I got the Sword of Omen), when I switched from one sword to another one. The first weapon was slower, but did more damage, the second weapon was twice as fast, and did half the damage. In damage per second the two swords were very similar, but on the Heroic Strike the change had a huge impact. Heroic Strike is an ability with no cooldown timer. Instead you "flag" your *next* normal attack to be a Heroic Strike, dealing more damage, but costing some rage. The amount of additional damage is fixed, and only depends on the rank of your Heroic Strike ability. So basically with a faster weapon, you can use Heroic Strike more often. That *will* cost you more rage, so the faster weapon isn't strictly better if you just consider overall damage. But the fact that you can use it more often enables you to deplete your stored rage pool faster, if need be. I'm a big fan of tactical fighting, I like to keep my rage pool at least half full as long as the fights are easy. And when there is a problem, additional monster joining the fray or something, I have a rage reserve to expend. For this, faster Heroic Strike is a huge plus.

I certainly don't have the fastest weapon available. The Sword of Omen with 1.90 second per swing is slower than the Knightly Longsword with 1.50, and a Dagger can be even faster. But I noticed that many of my fellow warriors are using two-handed weapons, 2h axes or 2h swords, and these usually have around 3 second per swing. That means they can only use Heroic Strike every 3 seconds. Sure, the 2h weapon you can get for a level 40 elite warrior quest, like the Whirlwind Axe is dealing a huge amount of damage with every hit. But the damage per second with 35.6 isn't that much more than the 29.7 of my Sword of Omen, and I would lose over one third (1051 of 2871) of my armor. No thanks, I'll stick with one-handed weapons.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:35 PM Permanent Link