Interesting news: on top of the big Hunter and Warlock changes already known, Warriors will be radically changing their Rage mechanic. Or rather, it will be the same: it’s just that all their abilities will be different.
Short version: Some abiltiies which consumed Rage now generate it (Shouts particularly), “on next strike” abilities are becoming instants, and variable rage costs for some (maybe many) abilities. The latter is a bit odd in that two Bliz people said it worked in two very different ways. One said that an ability, lets say Heroic Strike, would consume from 10-30 Rage. So if you had 10 Rage it would be a weak Heroic Strike and if you had a lot it would be very powerful. Ghostcrawler then said it would work as a percent system. It would always take 33.3% of your Rage if you had the minimum and up to the maximum.
Meanwhile, they are Rage-bnormalizing again, but acknowledge they screwed up last time and are trying to avoid that. Their plan seems to be to make it more predictable, but not work just like energy. Warriors will definitely be able to improve their Rage gain through dual-wielding and haste, as well as a high crit rating. Presumably, we will see Fury warriors be the kings of rage, but of course that’s going to be limited to PvE and some PvP. And every warrior, but especially tanks, will benefit from the fact that taking less damage after all blocks/reductions/armor/whatnot doesn’t reduce your Rage gain anymore. So I’m pretty supportive here, since it looks like they really sat down and gave it some thought.
In fact, it honestly looks like finally did what they ideally should have done before making WoW, which is to analyze and create a coherent framework for each class that gives them actual options. Of course, before WoW, nobody really tried such a thing and it was only because of WoW that the idea developed as it has. So I can’t really fault them.
Apparently, Druids are also going to get pretty much all the same changes and will see different ability functions for it as well. They jsut haven’t said much about it save for hinting that Druids would get some big changes to how they tank and possibly DPS, because of uninteresting rotations.
While there are some DK changes in the works, one thing they’ve said is that Blood will be the only DK tanking tree in the future. This is actually pretty odd since most people expected Frost if anything, but I guess they felt the self-healing tricks were all-tank, all the way. And I can get behind that.
