Arms doesnt feel good to play (PVE)

Classes Warrior
1

Longtime warrior player here. I’ve gotten AotC since SoO mixing between Arms and Fury tho arms has always been my favourite and played it exclusively since SL season 1. I’ve been doing m+ since SL season 2 (mostly as a healer), but have always kept my warrior geared for content and do both heroic raid and keys with in consistently.

But since the DF talent changes, its just been…boring? I thought it was just me getting over the character after so many years but I sat down and thought about it the other day and have thought of something else.

Whats with all the bad buttons you need to press? Slam, Skullsplitter and thunderous roar are all just bad. Dont get me wrong, they do good damage and are a useful part of the rotation, but they are so boring. Arms is at its best when it does big smacks of damage. Mortal Strike and Execute are the enjoyable buttons. Does this mean i only want 2 buttons? No, of course not, id play fury if i wanted that. So when was Arms fun to play, why did i love this spec in the first place.

And the answer is legion. Execute>Execute>Mortal strike was amazing. CS procs were amazing. Warbreaker as its own button was amazing.

If i could wave a wand, id replace my slam buttons with CS proc buttons, even if that means nerfing CS so its not busted. Having warbreaker be a seperate aoe button would be great. It lets you drop it, slam your CDs and when its done you go onto your CS rotation. Execute has felt fine and they have the talent that makes the MS hit hard after 2 so theres that, but having CS procs would make them hit harder…and thats pretty cool.

Other small gripes include rend and thunderclap being the same button but AoE vs ST. Easily fixed by just making thunderclap hit as hard as rend on primary target or w/e. Skullsplitter i have never liked. Make it a MS passive proc every 15 seconds or w/e. I like me overpower, i like me bladestorm, i like me avatar so nothing from me there.

Hell, i might be off, all my highest content is on healers these days, but every season the warrior is there and ready to zug, and every patch note i read blizzard does nothing but tweak numbers and I’m sick of it. Make it feel good again and get rid of these ‘feelsbad’ buttons.

2 Likes
2

You can’t have every attack being a ‘big smack’ damage profiles are a very important aspect of PvE, the balance right now is pretty solid.

Next patch cycle there is going to be a higher MS/Cleave baseline and overpower contributing less to empowering them, which may see things like Exhilarating Blows make it’s way into ST builds as opposed to being restricted to AoE builds due to it’s strong synergy with cleave. so you’ll definitely be hitting slam a lot less if this is the case.

A spec like Arms needs a dump to press whenever there’s nothing else important to hit so while boring Slam definitely serves a solid purpose.

CS resets coming back would just further devalue it as a cooldown which is bad, moving away from RNG casino fiesta which was legion was honestly one of the best changes Arms ever got in a rework.

3

just rework it

2 Likes
4

maybe, but the main issue with arms atm is that it cant be good at both ST and AoE at the same time, which really sucks on +10s or tyran week. Slam ‘serving a purpose’ doesn’t mean its good. I would honestly prefer balancing rage starvation rather than wasting it on slam just so i can press something. It might mean more holding abilities but if you told me i had to hold abilities for 3 seconds rather than press slam if it means my MS hits harder, i would be down for that. The CS proc, or at least a type of rework around CS is just the easiest way to help with that

5

Maybe it’s due to my crit rate and mostly optimised gear, but Colossus in it’s main key build it does pretty damn good ST as well.

Battlelord is the heart of it, it’s definitely worth taking in keys specifically as it makes the spec a lot less rage starved in the absence of a shaman buff while also feeding back into allowing you to compete with other dps with next to no issue, while also having Executioner’s Precision for sub 20% when paired with a Ravager if timing is right skyrockets your ST on bosses.

While I could say the opposite in raid, yes you do have to sac a point out of SkS to run Cleave, and potentially another point or two elsewhere for other talents to better optimise for the damage needed for a fight.

Having build diversity and talents being different in different situations helps keep things a little more fresh than if you were to play the same build that did everything. Otherwise talents should be removed entirely and class/spec skills and passives should be baseline like ff14.

6

Yeah, rage starving hasnt been an issue since…WoD? MoP? You’ve usually been able to push something but slam really only made it onto my bars proper in BFA/SL.

But my issue isn’t with slam specifically, its the spec having a bunch of bad buttons. I’ll just ask since you main Arms more than i do. Do you enjoy slam? Do you enjoy having ST Rend and AoE Thunderclap? Do you enjoy Skullsplitter? Do you like the Warbreaker replaces CS?

I don’t like any of those things personally. Proc CSs might not be the answer, but i remember enjoying it. I remember enjoying pooling my rage for my CS windows. I think the spec needs a fix. It hasn’t been touched properly since before BFA. I feel like every patch note is:

“Arms warriors like Mortal Stike”
Mortal Strike now does 3% more damage.

It deserves bettter.

7

It’s just a button that manages rage for the spec, so it had a job as the last button you press to avoid overcapping rage. It’s use does give us somewhat of a differentiation between ST and AoE dumps albeit we don’t really have a no CD AoE dump any longer since Cleave is always talented when AoE is needed and Whirlwind is disgustingly undertuned as it is right now.

It’s nice to have a nuance of ST vs AoE buttons in a rotation where there is some thought involved in their use, but Rend vs Thunderclap is something that I don’t really care for all too much about to the point where if Thunderclap replaced Rend entirely when talented wouldn’t exactly be the worst thing in the world.
Could also work well if it went the way of SV’s butchery and Merciless Blows, where Thunderclap/Rend would have a cooldown of 12~15s and provide a bleed debuff for a shorter duration 6~8s to where it was a little more potent in it’s damage contribution giving them a more important role in our skillset.

I enjoyed SkullSplitter a whole lot more when it consumed the full Rend/Deep Wounds on the target.

It felt amazing seeing the hits that went off when it was done right. It had a nice flow to how it would also lead you to MS/Rend after it almost like you were pulling off a combo hit in a fighting game.

It’s current version though mostly just works as a rage generator and I’m not really attached to it either way, I don’t mind the playstyle it enables, since it changes up what our filler is between rend(or TC) and slam.
But it is also the very first talent on the chopping block when other talents in the 2nd rung need to be taken for certain fight types.

I don’t mind that it augments CS into an AoE CS currently since I understand why it does, which is mainly to avoid ability bloat and to condense cooldowns to less buttons.
But I also did enjoy it during legion when it was a separate button to CS so you had the choice to save it for AoE or to send it for additional boss damage which allowed a little more of a tactical approach to an encounter.

That’s fair, but those moments we also mostly had our rage dump as an oGCD so it was an entirely different gameplay loop. I don’t think we’ll ever get that back unless it’s heavily adjusted to the point where Heroic strike is reintroduced with a cooldown of say 3~5s, but a rage cost of something around 50 with damage being then moved off of Mortal Strike/Execute and into it to avoid too much layering of damage in the one GCD. Really too many problems that would arise if we went back to that gameplay in all honesty.

Most of the main issues with the spec did get fixed going into TWW from DF in rage economy being able to be spent over more GCDs allowing for more on GCD play, no longer being centralised on Test of Might which is a fantastic thing which has opened up a lot more options for us PvE wise in not being locked to passive STR trinkets and ignoring overpower procs in favour of maximising the after damage window of our cooldown which we should’ve been focusing on.

Hero talents have also brought in some interesting gameplay that’s augmented Arms in a lot more of a fun way from Slayer’s increased Sudden Death proc rates being somewhat overwhelming when they chain proc b2b, to colossus having some fun interactions that it plays off while also giving moments for a big pay off when you get the demolish off at the right time plus it’s recently sturdiness buffs.

Also as for tuning, a lot of the has mostly been on MS/Cleave as to equally increase both hero talent options and to lower the gap between them which for the most part has been pretty successful.

At least seeing more targeted ability buffs is somewhat better than a flat x% buff we were used to seeing before

8

Yeah, completely forgot HS was off the GCD, wild. I don’t think that’d ever come back, cool if it did, but me thinks people in PVP didn’t like getting global’d lol.

I’ll agree both hero talents have done much to help. Slayer is more of a good thing, and Colossal just give us a big shiny button that slaps.

And yes, Skullsplitter was better before, cause you could just Rend>SS>Rend and continue with life, but now it feel kind of ‘eh’ to press and then you need to reapply rend soon after, but not straight away. Its something you need to pay attention to and now (for me) it becomes an annoying button.

And I’m sorry, but I’ll just never like slam haha. Like i said, i prefer managing rage rather than being overcapped all the time and pressing what feels like an auto attack. I would say it would almost be better as a rage generator, but fury exists if we want that playstyle. Tho having everything cost more to use, using slam to “pool rage” for CS windows doesn’t sound awful.

Like I said, I still feel like there are too many bad, or at least, boring buttons. I do appreciate that you’ve taken time to discuss with me. Your rework thunderclap/rend sounds good. A harder ticking rend would be much nicer. I’m hoping more people will reply with ideas to push arms into a direction we can all be happy with.