Where Have I Seen This Before?

Mace warriors; if you don't have one on your team you probably hate them, and rightfully so. Stormherald beats my priest down so hard that it uninstalls WoW from my computer. I've been an Axesmith on my warrior since like February of 05, back when I had delusions of crafting my own Arcanite Reaper, and I didn't want to choose a new specialization in BC because I was finally going to be able to craft a useful axe. I probably should have gone macesmith though.

So what we have now is people crying about mace warriors, and I can certainly sympathize. The extra 4 second stun on the t2-3 really adds insult to injury with how often mace specialization procs to begin with. What it reminds me of is another mace that caused some teardrops to fall in the summer of 05. Before the enrage nerf and weapon speed normalization Arcanite Reaper warriors were tearing people apart. I should know, I got my reaper in April of 05 and it turned my character from a chump to a powerhouse overnight. When the first two battlegrounds were released (AV and WSG) I immediately became addicted to WSG and was playing that to grind honor, all day every day.

When BGs were released, I didn't really think AV was better for honor than WSG. Matches would end up in stalemates and it seemed counterproductive (It turns out I was wrong about that, and in the end Blizzard nerfed AV honor and removed join as group), but the reason that I switched to AV didn't have anything to do with honor. A couple of weeks after the BG patch, warriors, pallies, and shamans started showing up in WSG with a huge freaking black mace of death. Back then, the prevailing warrior wisdom was that crit was hands down the most important warrior stat. As a warrior you were pretty much judged based on what your chance to crit was, with decent crit being somewhere in the area of 28% with Axe specialization. Crit chance was a stat that I had carefully cultivated over the months and for a while I just couldn't bring myself to part with the 5% bonus from axe spec. Over time, warriors began to value attack power in addition to crit, and eventually sword spec became the most popular spec, but before the HWL greatsword became the "must have" weapon, The Unstoppable Force was the new darling of MS warriors everywhere. In addition to having almost 40 more top end damage than the reaper, TUF had a knockdown ability that procced constantly and owned casters so fucking hard. I remember being totally frustrated by pallies who would knock me on my ass left and right with the god damned thing. I had to have one. Just my luck, I got mine a couple of days before the nerf went in.

It was obvious to anyone who used the weapon that the knockdown effect was overpowered, and in a way, it's almost identical to the t2-3 BS proc. They both last about four seconds and are totally frustrating. Keep in mind, this was back before mace stun procs were on a separate diminishing returns and the stun chance was only 5%, so almost everyone chose 2h specializtion instead of mace spec. Nowadays mace spec is freaking great so in addition to the 4% chance to stun from the mace you get an extra 11%. Considering that Blizzard removed the knockdown effect from TUF and changed it to a crappy 1 secnod stun, I just can't imagine them leaving the current BS maces untouched. I actually hope they change it because if they don't warriors are at risk of having something else nerfed which will affect all warriors and not just the ones using the maces. However, if nothing is done (this is a possibility) we will just have to sit back and watch mace warriors play on a different level than the rest of us.