Bring back gladiator spec

[RenDefiance]

So the best thing about WOD was a spec that nobody played

Plenty of people played it, perhaps not at cutting edge level but outside that it was quite popular. I get why they cant do it as it was then (same reason why Feral/Guardian are 2 different specs.

But something is to be said for a Sword n Board DPS-er. As a flavour it definetely is awesome!

[dcc626]

This is why pre cata trees were better imo. They had the option to make different builds based on playstyle preference. Rather than just ability swapping, you could adjust your power and pick up or drop abilities.
Talent rows just aren't fun or interesting. They are only convenient

in todays game anything other than the most optimal setup is considered bad. if you think people wouldnt put other people down based on their talent trees, you are lying to yourself.

putting 5 points into addition crit was not mind blowing gameplay.

[Teflon]

It was a bad spec that never had an interesting rotation and no-one played it because it was tuned so low - yet somehow people ardently want it back? So you all have some fond memories of playing the worst dps spec there was? I am sure all your friends have fond memories of carrying you in dungeons and raids, because never did gladiator spec do better damage than other warrior specs.

[Bigbazz]

Plenty of people played it, perhaps not at cutting edge level but outside that it was quite popular. I get why they cant do it as it was then (same reason why Feral/Guardian are 2 different specs.

But something is to be said for a Sword n Board DPS-er. As a flavour it definetely is awesome!

It wasn't popular, I took my Warrior to Heroic HFC once and I got like 7-8 of the rank 1 parses, because on each fight there was only a handful of parses, literally a handful of parses and a few of them were Arms/Fury players like myself just playing the spec for a one-off farm raid. You had thousands upon thousands of parses for Arms and Fury, Gladiator was the least popular spec on the website despite that fact that it was actually nowhere near the lowest damage spec.

As I showed in the video I posted earlier, Glad actually had good dps.. Literally nobody played it, even Survival was more popular and that spec had been purposely killed by Blizzard early in the expansion for some mystery reason (the mystery was unravelled when they revealed it was becoming a melee spec).

It was a bad spec that never had an interesting rotation and no-one played it because it was tuned so low

See this can't be the reason nobody played it. It wasn't tuned well low, it simmed and parsed decently on single target and cleave and had decent enough AOE. It didn't get taken by progression guilds because it lacked rallying cry and had specifically low burst dps, but it didn't have low overall dps.

Arms specialised in cleave and was incredible at that, but it had no real AOE, Fury had incredible AOE but struggled on cleave, and both those specs struggled on single target at higher gear levels. Glad had no specialisation, it had better AOE than Arms and better cleave than Fury while having about equal single target with both, a geared skilled Gladiator Warrior could raid and on equal grounds be competitive on overall damage.

I think Gladiator wasn't popular because people didn't want to play it. Of course the fact that the progression guilds didn't play it means that the lower guilds will copy that method, so there is some element of that, but Gladiator was so under-played that it might as well have not existed after Highmaul.

[EyeOculus]

I would love Gladiator. However, not because i terribly want Gladiator, but breaking the hand-holding that blizzard is doing with all its specs and classes. Most, if not all specs are forced in a singular way to play.

[Wazooty]

Give us class themes. Give us a shield themed arms warrior and a 2h sword themed prot warrior.

Yeh.

[Firefall]

I miss Heroic Strike/Cleave gameplay as a warrior tank so much.

I know. It hurts every time I remember Heroic Strike and Cleave from Wrath-MoP (/WoD for prot). It was the most fun I've ever had in WoW. And then Gladiator felt like that concept turned up to 11, even faster paced and with two burst windows that you had even finer control over.

[rayvio]

Wasnt it hilariously broken? No thx

something is broken
do you (a) try to fix it
or (b) throw it away

sadly Blizz seem to often pick the wrong option. mission command tables that got almost exclusively negative feedback in WoD? still appearing in every expansion since in some kind of adaptation. none of which have been fun
underwater content... hugely fun but a pain in the arse for melee due to pathing issues. rather than fix it, they've gone out of their way to avoid underwater content
Gladiator Stance... a great way for tanks to still be useful on fights requiring less tanks (which gives developers more options for variety in designing bosses) and in solo content without having to learn another spec... had some issues that could've been fixed but they just tossed it away the very next expansion

[Eninya]

Wasnt it hilariously broken? No thx

It was overtuned in the beginning, and then it got gutted and couldn't keep up in heroic. The HFC buff helped, but its scaling was still too nerfed and, again, would fall off before Mythic.

It was nice dealing the exact same damage as my hard sims, without the massive RNG swings of Fury and Arms.

[Beelzebull]

I used to play it and enjoyed it very much, it being top tier or not.

[Raugnaut]

So broken it was nerfed into obscurity fairly quickly and then not touched again because it was then useless.

...

At the start of Highmaul, Gladiator was quite overtuned, and was nerfed.

However, it preformed on par with Arms in HFC for single target, though preformed poorly on AoE in all aspects.

It was just stupid broken in PvP though.

[dcc626]

I would love Gladiator. However, not because i terribly want Gladiator, but breaking the hand-holding that blizzard is doing with all its specs and classes. Most, if not all specs are forced in a singular way to play.

if you have more than 1choice, 1 will always be better. so either blizzard needs to make several choices all equally powerful or the playerbase needs to stop shitting on people who dont cookie cutter their way to mediocre. inb4 neither of those 2 things happens.

[ohiostate124]

I want it back but id settle for them opening up transmog completely because I’m really not interested in tanking but the sword and board fantasy looks so cool.

[ohiostate124]

Is there anything that actually prevents them from just letting you transmog your 2hs into sword and board? If a holy paladin can do it with a 1h/oh into a 2h, what is the problem?

[Narwhalosh Whalescream]

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I thought gladiator was boring and never really cared for it. I tried it one night, beat on a training dummy, ran a couple of dungeons, etc, and it didn't really do much for me. Looked kinda cool, but I didn't find it fun.

That said, I'm all for more options and wouldn't be opposed to bringing it back.

They could always make it a proper fleshed out spec instead of a talent.