I was playing warrior on retail from season 3 to season 8 and I wanted to play on Lordaeron but somebody told me Wrathful season/ICC gear will begin in 1-1.5 year.
I want to know if there are going to be any balance changes regarding pvp because as you may know warriors are going to be the weakest class during deadly, furious and relentless seasons/gear.
I already played on progressive private server couple years ago too (from TBC to Wotlk to Cata). When I played there I did noticeable damage only with Mjolnir Runestone active for 10 seconds and execute procs. I spent rest of my time pooling rage while doing negative dmg. Armor pene. proc trinkets were not available during deadly and furious season.
I noticed these gamebreaking issues during deadly, furious and relentless content:
1. Rage generation. Warriors need rage to use abilities/do damage. With low gear you are gonna be constantly rage starved. ie: auto-attacking for 7-10 seconds to use mortal strike. This completely changes the gameplay of whole class, other classes dont have this issue.
2. Bladestorm disarm nerf. Bladestorm was nerfed during wrathful season. Before this nerf bladestorm COULD NOT be disarmed. It was bread and butter for every warrior and key ability.
3. Execute nerf. Execute was nerfed at the start of relentless season. Before this nerf execute didnt have rage cap. Difference between 30 rage execute and 100 rage execute is around 6-7k dmg on critical strike. This was reason why warrior was viable during deadly and relentless season even when doing low dmg with other abilities. Getting somebody to 20% hp meant instant death.
4. Armor penetration and nerf/gear dependence . Armor penetration was nerfed during relentless season. Affecting all classes using this stat. Armor penetration is best stat for warriors and its almost impossible to get without icc gear. Compared to other classes which already have their most effective stats in pvp gear already.
5. Resilience buff. At the start of relentless season resilience was buffed. Now reducing ALL damage done instead of dot damage. This buffed every class stacking resilience(all casters) and reduced damage of classes using lot of pve gear.
6. All damage done by warrior is affected by weapon damage. With terrible weapons available warriors are going to terrible damage.
Compared to casters who are usually have base damage + scale from spell power on top of spamable cc.
example: Chaos bolt base damage is 1850 and scales with spell power by 0.85
With deadly gear and 2k spell power its 3550 damage and with wrathful gear 3200 spellpower its 4570 damage.
Lets assume you have 700 resilience with deadly gear(usually players have around 500 with deadly gear) which is 15% damage reduction and 1200 resilience with wrathful gear=25% damage reduction.
This means that chaos bolt does on average 3017 damage with deadly gear and 3427 damage with wrathfull gear.
That is only 410 damage difference with non crit chaos bolt.
Critical strike chaos bolt:
deadly gear=7100 damage, reduced by flat resilience 0.85=6035 damage, reduced by crit resilience0.85=5130
wrathful gear=9140 damage, reduced by 0.75=6855 and by crit resilience 0.75=5140
This basically means that chaos bolt is going to do even more damage on critical strikes in deadly season than in wrathfull season.
Keep in mind there are much smaller health pools.
Correct me if I am wrong.
(For people saying reroll prot pvp for first seasons: charge and intercept removed roots/snares and shield block was doing 25k crits with block gear in furious season.)