Rage from getting hit

Blizzard kept the old formula for rage generated when you take damage, with one change. The game now calculates that rage as if you always had 50 percent damage reduction from armor, so plate and cloth earn the same rage from the same raw hit. Absorbs are ignored too, so a Power Word: Shield on you does not cut your rage gain.

A real shield and heavy plate are no longer a rage penalty when you take a hit. Before this change, more armor meant less rage from the same raw hit, so Protection Warriors, who carry the most armor of any spec, felt it hardest. Blizzard's 30 September class deep dive on Priests and Warriors confirmed both changes are intentional, not a side effect of something else.

Dee beside an orc warrior blocking a troll's mace with a shield in Ragefire Chasm, rage glow still on the orc, a dagger and greatsword lying together.
The shield stopped the mace. It never stopped the rage.

Rage from landing a hit

Rage from the damage you deal is fully normalized to the speed of the weapon that landed the hit, not to how hard it hit. A fast dagger and a slow two-hander earn the same base rage per swing once their speeds match. A better weapon still hits harder, it just no longer pays a bigger rage bar for doing it.

That retires the old idea of stacking a fast off-hand purely to flood rage. On the beta forums, some Warriors argue the change favors swing count over gear quality, since a starter weapon and a raid-quality weapon of the same speed now generate identical base rage. That is a player read on the design, not a Blizzard statement, but it is the debate shaping Warrior feedback right now.

How much extra rage do crits give?

Warriors got no bonus rage for a critical strike when the Forever beta first opened. Blizzard's designers called that intended at the time, not a bug. The 30 September deep dive reversed that stance and said the bonus was coming back, re-adding critical strikes at 75 percent more rage than a normal swing.

The 1 October development notes moved the number again, to 100 percent more rage on a critical strike. Use 100 percent until a newer note changes it. Warrior rage has already moved twice in two weeks of beta, so treat any number here as current, not final.

What's still being tuned

Blizzard said plainly in the deep dive that its engineers are still hunting bugs in rage generation and that tracking them down could take a couple of weeks. The 1 October notes backed that up in practice: a bug in Dual Wield Specialization was skewing the team's own test numbers, and fixing it led to a wider talent pass on Fury Warrior in the same build.

Wowdee's gear comparisons will show straight away that your dagger and a friend's two-hander earn rage at the same rate once their speeds match, so you do not have to work out the math mid-pull to know whether a weapon upgrade actually helps your rage bar.

Still to come

Not yet settled by our sources or tested in game:

  • Whether the rage-generation bugs the deep dive flagged are fully fixed.
  • Any further change to the 100 percent critical-strike rage bonus after 1 October.
  • Whether player-tested weapon-speed rage numbers match Blizzard's final formula.

Sources

Beta notes are dated because Forever is still changing.