WoW Forever warriors lose rage on crits, and beta players call it an auto-attack simulator

Of all the class changes players found over the first beta weekend, the one generating the loudest pushback is also the least visible on a tooltip: how warriors get rage.

What changed

In original Classic, rage scaled with the damage you dealt, so a big two-hander or a lucky critical hit filled the bar faster. In the WoW Forever beta, rage from auto-attacks is normalised: it is calculated from your weapon’s attack speed, the way Cataclysm did it, so every weapon earns about the same rage per second.

Testers who logged their swings on build 1.60.1.69913 report roughly:

Weapon	Rage per swing	Swing speed
One-handed	about 7–9	every 2–3 seconds
Two-handed	about 14–17	every 3–4 seconds

The part players object to is not the normalisation itself — most of the thread accepts that warriors dominated late Classic raiding and needed reining in. It is that critical auto-attacks no longer grant any extra rage. Cataclysm’s version doubled rage on a crit; Forever’s gives nothing, so income is a flat drip, closer to energy on a swing timer than to the spikes warriors are used to reacting to.

Why it feels slow

Most warrior attacks cost 15, 20 or 30 rage. With no crit bonus, the thread’s author worked out that opening with Sweeping Strikes into Whirlwind — 55 rage together — takes about four auto-attacks, or around ten seconds of swinging, to afford. Several warriors describe low-level play as waiting for three two-hander swings to press Mortal Strike once.

It also undercuts a new talent. Boundless Rage in the Fury tree raises your maximum rage by 10, 20 or 30 across its three ranks — useful when rage arrives in bursts that overflow the bar, much less so when it trickles in and never piles up.

Other complaints stack on top of it:

• Heroic Strike replaces your next auto-attack, and one tester reports that swing then earns no rage at all, so the classic rage dump costs you income as well;
• Tanks without the level 20 Protection talent say they generate almost nothing while blocking and dodging, and that a missed, dodged or parried swing is a lost rage tick;
• Weapon upgrades feel muted, since a big slow weapon no longer means more rage per swing.

Not everyone agrees

The thread is not one-sided. A player who took a warrior to the level 20 cap says the new rage feels smoother and more predictable than stacking crit to dump everything at once, and expects the class to open up after level 40. Others point at the known-issues list, which already says that queueing an on-next-attack ability — Heroic Strike, Cleave or Raptor Strike — switches off the spell queue window. That bug is real, but it affects ability timing, not how much rage a swing gives, so it is unlikely to be the whole story.

The original poster is explicit that the feedback is about how the class plays, not how hard it hits: a warrior can be tuned to top the meters and still feel like pressing one button every six seconds.

What it means for your build

Until Blizzard says whether crit rage is coming back, a few things follow for warriors levelling in the beta:

• Unbridled Wrath is the best patch for now: it pays rage on ordinary hits, not crits, which is why our level 20 Fury warrior guide takes it straight after Cruelty;
• skip Boundless Rage early: with no bursts to bank, the points do more in damage talents;
• use Heroic Strike only when you are near the rage cap, since it now costs a swing’s worth of income;
• if two-handers starve you, a one-hander and shield is a fair stopgap — though testers disagree on how much rage blocking really gives before the level 20 Protection talent.

Our warrior class report from the first days of the beta already had warriors near the bottom of the levelling pile; this is a large part of why. The full warrior talent trees show every Forever change, including Boundless Rage.

No Blizzard developer has replied in the thread yet. Players expect the first new beta build this week; we will check it for any change to rage.