WoW Forever Warrior: Rage Changes the Rules
After the druid, the paladin and the mage, Kami moves on to the WoW Forever Warrior. He warns up front: a lot of players are going to be disappointed, because of the new rage system. The episode then goes through the reworked spells, the talents of all three specializations and the most interesting races for the class. The server is still in beta, and some values have already moved since it opened.
The values quoted come from our Grimoire, which sets every spell against its Vanilla version, cross-checked with the Forever branch of Wowhead. The full trees are in our talent calculator, updated with the latest beta patch, and the full video can be watched on YouTube.
Rage Normalization: Less Rage From Big Hits
This is the change that has the beta on edge, and it affects the druid too. On Vanilla, the rage gained followed the damage dealt and taken: a critical hit or a heavy hit taken filled the bar much faster. For the WoW Forever Warrior, that link is gone. Kami felt it in dungeons, where reaching 100 rage points becomes very hard.
The figures he presents, sourced in our article on Warrior rage, show a gain at the very start. At level 20, a normal hit gave 3.7 rage on Vanilla, against 7 on Forever. A critical hit of about 113 damage gave 11.7 and now gives only 7. At level 60 the gap widens: up to 23 points for a normal hit and 46 for a critical on Vanilla, against about 15 in both cases on Forever. That last figure remains an estimate, since nobody has reached level 60 yet.
Attack speed would be the remaining lever to generate more base rage. But most Warrior abilities scale on weapon damage, which favors slow weapons. If Blizzard ever recalculates them on damage per second, as in later expansions, fast weapons will become interesting. Kami has no confirmation of that.
The Classic Molten Core speedrun rankings explain this choice. To chase the best times, guilds stacked almost nothing but Fury warriors. Optimized gear and non-normalized rage put them far ahead of every other class. Kami thinks Blizzard wants to take back control of that balance, without having found the right formula yet.
The Talents That Give Rage Back
Several talents compensate, spread across the three trees, so you can’t take them all. 
Anger Management generates one rage point every 3 seconds in combat. 
Unbridled Wrath gives a 60% chance to gain one extra point per weapon hit, two with a two-handed weapon. 
Master of Defense returns 5 points on every dodge or parry with a shield.
Shield Specialization adds 5% block chance and now returns 5 rage on every block, where Kami remembers a single point on Vanilla. 
Improved Berserker Rage gives 10 instant points, and 
Dual Wield Specialization doubles the rage generated by the off hand.
Focused Rage reduces the cost of all offensive abilities by 3 points. According to Kami, the talent moved up earlier in the tree with the September 24 patch, proof that Blizzard saw the problem. Less than a week after the beta opened, the tree was already moving.
His view: the tension mostly comes from the beta, where nobody has access to all these talents yet and where the warrior is weak at low level. You have to wait for level 60 to judge. He imagines a compromise: keep a normalized base, but add a bonus tied to attack power or to the percentage of health lost, so that big hits pay a little more again.
Tactical Mastery and Victory Rush
Tactical Mastery becomes a baseline spell: every warrior keeps up to 10 rage when switching stances, with no talent point invested. To get back the 25 points of the past, you still need Improved Tactical Mastery, which adds 15. For an Arms warrior, nothing really changes.
Another arrival, 
Victory Rush. It restores 10% of your maximum health and can be used within 20 seconds of killing a target that counts: a player who grants honor, or a monster that gives experience. In PvP, it can save a life. Kami doesn’t yet know whether you have to land the killing blow or whether contributing is enough, or whether the attack can crit. If you have the answer, he wants to hear it.
Bloodthirst and Shield Block Reworked
Bloodthirst scales less on attack power, 35% instead of the 45% on Vanilla, but adds flat damage. That balances the spell better early on. It also raises movement speed by 10% for 10 seconds. With a 6-second cooldown, a Fury warrior who keeps chaining it holds that bonus almost permanently.
Shield Block gets a big bonus. It now blocks two attacks instead of one, and its duration goes from 5 to 7 seconds, still with a 75% chance to block.
For 
Rend, Kami expects a lot more damage. In PvP, the spell mostly served to stop a rogue from going back into stealth. Since every periodic effect in the game can now crit, he assumes Rend will benefit and scale with attack power. The current description still shows 147 points over 21 seconds: to be checked in game.
Spearing Strike and Bloodthrill
Spearing Strike is new, and Kami finds it useless. It deals 40% of weapon damage, plus 80% against giants, dragonkin and mounted targets, which it dismounts. On paper, it’s fun. In practice, a warrior charges then lands a 
Hamstring, and the opponent still in the saddle gets hit with no way to react. Everyone gets dismounted anyway.
Kami also stumbles on the cost: 15 rage and a 20-second cooldown. Free with a simple cooldown, it could have served as a PvP opener. But 
Charge stays unusable in combat, so you charge first, and by the time you cast Spearing Strike, the target has often already dismounted.
Bloodthrill was buffed in the latest patch, its value doubled according to Kami. Your right-hand attacks against a target hit by Rend have a 20% chance to unlock 
Overpower for 6 seconds. The trigger comes from white hits, not from Rend’s damage, which limits its appeal: with a slow two-hander, that’s one attempt every 3 to 4 seconds. Combined with 
Improved Overpower, which adds 50% crit chance, a streak of procs can still hurt a lot. Kami wouldn’t be surprised by another buff in the coming months.
Arms Talents: Weaponmaster and Improved Slam
On Vanilla, three separate talents covered axes, maces and swords. Forever merges them into 
Weaponmaster. Axes and polearms gain 5% crit chance. Maces and staves ignore 15% of the target’s armor. Swords keep their chance to trigger an extra attack. Staves therefore make their entrance for the warrior, and Kami thinks some staves with proc effects could open up options at level 60.
Improved Slam leaves the Fury tree for the Arms tree, which seems more logical. The old cast-time reduction talent looks folded into the base spell: Slam goes from 2 to 1.5 seconds by default. The new talent reduces the global cooldown and cast time by 0.5 seconds, takes 3 seconds off the cooldown, and above all, Slam no longer interrupts or delays your melee attack.
On Vanilla, the best players cast Slam right after their white hit, watching a swing timer provided by an addon. Badly placed at the end of a cycle, it put the next attack on hold and cost a huge amount of damage. With the talent, there is no need to watch the timer anymore.
Fury Talents: Boundless Rage and Raging Blows
Boundless Rage raises maximum rage by 30 points. Given how hard rage is to build up, Kami still doubts its usefulness, except in PvP to store damage during the approach. With every talent available at level 60, and perhaps a few system fixes, it could become an obvious pick. 
Precision adds 3% hit chance.
The talent he considers essential is called 
Raging Blows. For a single point, your Whirlwind also hits with the off-hand weapon, and 
Cleave costs 2 less rage. A reflex pick for any dual-wielding Fury warrior.
Flurry loses a bit: 25% attack speed on the three hits after a crit, against 30% on Vanilla. 
Death Wish, for its part, no longer lowers your armor and resistances by 20%. It only increases damage taken by 5%, a real buff, especially in PvP.
Kami wonders whether the hybrid Fury-Protection tanks of Classic will come back with the WoW Forever Warrior. That style swaps between a one-hander and a shield mid-fight to stay very offensive, notably on packs of monsters. With threat reduced quite a bit on Forever, this kind of spec could become useful again if aggro generation is a problem at high level.
Protection: Thunder Clap and Vanguard
For Kami, Protection is the most buffed spec of the WoW Forever Warrior. The block bonus is felt from the lowest levels, with Shield Block and Shield Specialization. 
Anticipation now gives 20 defense points instead of 10, for the same investment. It’s a flexible talent: useful early on, and free to drop once the defense cap is reached, for example to pick 
Deflection.
Improved Thunder Clap moves from the Arms tree to the Protection tree, and reduces the spell’s cost by 6 rage instead of 4. The spell itself gets a huge bonus: 
Thunder Clap increases the time between attacks of enemies hit by 20%, for 30 seconds and on four targets.
Those 20% match the effect of Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker, the legendary weapon of Classic. Its effect slowed boss attacks by 20%, and that is partly what made it one of the best tank weapons. The Protection warrior now brings that slow on its own, and Kami thinks no other equivalent source exists today. For him, that effect is enough to justify its place in raids.
Another long-awaited comfort: 
Vanguard makes Charge usable in defensive stance. No more leaving your stance to charge, so no more rage lost on the way. 
Bastion increases all damage dealt with a shield by 10%, an interesting bonus, but five points is expensive at that spot in the tree.
Shield Wall Every 4 Minutes
Kami discovered this talent during filming. 
Improved Shield Wall reduces the cooldown of Shield Wall by 11 minutes. Wowhead lists 15 minutes as the base, which leaves 4 minutes, for a 60% reduction in damage taken over 12 seconds.
Between Improved Thunder Clap, blocking, Charge in defensive stance and 
Last Stand, the WoW Forever Warrior as a tank looks indispensable to him in raids. A Shield Wall every 4 minutes can also annoy a lot of people in a battleground.
Kami goes further: the Classic Protection PvP builds, which relied on block value and a dedicated trinket for spectacular 
Shield Slam damage, could make a comeback. Only the reflect spells would be missing, perhaps unlockable late in the game through the hidden quests announced for the various classes. As things stand, Protection is the spec that gained the most in the move to Forever, in his view.
Best Races for the WoW Forever Warrior
In PvP, Kami would pick a Gnome without hesitating. Escape Artist now gives 3 seconds of slow immunity after breaking free, where the old version let the opponent slow you right away. The engineering specialization makes PvP trinkets more reliable, Expansive Mind raises maximum rage by 5%, and Eureka! reduces the cost of the next three attacks while increasing their damage by 10%. A Mortal Strike available at the right moment can win a duel. The Gnome’s small size, shrunk even further by a Noggenfogger Elixir, helps with slipping around.
The Human remains viable, with 2% extra crit chance on swords, very interesting with Weaponmaster procs, and a second trinket against stuns. The Dwarf removes bleeds and blindness with Stoneform, useful against feral druids and their big periodic effects. In PvE, Kami would choose the Night Elf, for its ability that adds 10% crit chance for 15 seconds and its 2% dodge when tanking.
On the Horde side, he would tank as a Tauren, for the 5% total health and War Stomp, handy in dungeons against monsters that flee. For damage and PvP, the Orc is very good: Blood Fury has only a two-minute cooldown and lines up with trinkets, Shatter Curse reduces magic damage for 8 seconds, and Hardiness cuts stun duration by 20%. The Troll keeps Berserking, capped at 10% attack speed against 30% before, and a Regeneration that restores 50% of maximum health, with a cast time. Kami finds the new race poorly optimized for the warrior. Details on each race are on our racial abilities page.
Builds and What’s Next in the Series
Three PvE builds for the WoW Forever Warrior accompany the video: Protection Warrior, Fury Warrior and Arms Warrior. For PvP, Chooki’s Arms build is also live. The previous episode covered the Mage’s reworked spells and talents.
Spotted a missing talent or a value that shifted in beta? Flag it in the comments and the page will be corrected.
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