I think the pressure to learn everything instantly is one of the downsides of MMOs. The learning process should be fun, relaxed, and you need to be able to experiment without having a group breathing down your neck.

I still think I’m going to be hooked on the pet battles though. Maybe I won’t even care about instances

I am not fond of what they have done with Vigilance though.

But the class overhaul, particularly for the two specs I love (Protection and Arms), has turned them into something I don’t find enjoyable at all. Warriors are now, essentially, death knights with shields and, though their performance will be fine, it’s not what I want to play.

At all.

I’ll expand, and try to keep this brief.

Vengeance, for the most part, made threat generation passive and completely devalued hit and expertise. If you were a Protection warrior, tanking was already largely active in WotLK; Shield Block, Disarm, Shield Bash, Spell Reflect, Shockwave, Concussion Blow, Demoralizing Shout, Thunderclap and major cooldowns were all routinely used in addition to your threat generation abilities, not to mention sunder maintenance. That’s extraordinarily active. Further, threat was something every tank I knew found fun and gearing with expertise was something I did throughout that expansion, as did most other warriors I knew.

Bringing in Vengeance tried to fix a problem that NEVER existed, and now they can’t balance it properly and had to come up with “active mitigation” as another reason to give value to hit and expertise. The snag with this is that it’s either too visceral and, thus, far too punishing on beginners, or it’s not visceral enough and ends up practically meaningless.

This isn’t a subjective whine, really, it’s a fundamental change in game design that’s now had to have sticking plasters rammed all over it.

As for the talent redesign…

It’s a complete mess for Protection warriors. The self-healing tier? I could pick up Second Wind, Field Dressing, Blood Craze and Impending Victory if I wanted good self-healing before. Now I have zero baseline self-healing, and three dreadful talents that I don’t want any of. I can Charge once every 20 seconds, I have Intervene every 30 seconds, and can glyph Heroic Leap for 30 second availability. In which case, the first tier is superfluous to my needs. Alas, I have to take one from both tiers, despite the fact they’re utterly underwhelming and I’d rather a combination of Avatar and Stormbolt.

Compare that to what we’ve just come from.

Blitz, Field Dressing, War Academy, Second Wind, Drums of War, Deep Wounds, Blood Craze, Cruelty, Piercing Howl, Incite, Blood and Thunder, Gag Order, Last Stand, Concussion Blow, Vigilance, Thunderstruck, Improved Revenge, Heavy Repercussions, Safeguard and Impending Victory were all optional; good arguments could be made for any of these to be taken or omitted, and in limitless combinations because they weren’t exclusive to one another.

Too many people are spouting this “it’s six REAL choices now, not just going to EJ”. But this is just Blizzard-endorsed claptrap that people are shortly going to wake up from. There are clear choices throughout most tiers, and they’re not performance related which makes them effectively meaningless. As for going to EJ, sure, some people did that; but they were never a boon to their raid group. I took all the self-healing talents for heroic Cho’gall because phase two was stressing our two healers, while I picked up Drums of War and Gag Order for interrupt duty on heroic Nefarian.

Neither recommended, both game-changing for MY raid group.

That’s a bit long, but I feel it’s important that I try to accurately convey how thoroughly disappointed with all this I am.

“It was fun before but now I don’t like it” is a perfectly valid opinion, and I can see your point to some extent in that some classes, e.g. warriors in your case, have played largely the same since the beginning, and to have these changes come along could indeed make the class no fun to play.

However, I have faith that Blizzard will fix the things that are broken. That’s what they do with WoW, and they certainly don’t want people abandoning a class because it’s no fun to play. I don’t think the fundamental idea behind the changes is a bad one, it’s just got some initial implementation details that need work.

No matter how good the theme park, nobody likes getting round in a busted car some kid puked in. That’s what playing a warrior is like right now for me.

Gutted.