I’ve been playing as arms for about 14 years. Since WOD I created a new warrior and went to the Horde. And the feeling I have playing today is that my class / spec passes far from a great strategist on the battlefield.
I dont know how you guys interpret a warrior’s class fantasy, and I know it’s impossible to draw objective values from what the class should be. The only rule we have to measure is the past of the warrior and his present.
And starting from this assumption, I would like to propose a discussion of the current situation of the warrior arms on a specific topic.
I will mainly address the pvp scenario, but as far as I researched the subject the survival of arms in the pve scenario is also quite limited. Since the pruning of skills in WOD, arms has become an incomplete class in my opinion. Legion was able to mitigate this impression for two reasons. The 2 legendary bis for Wpvp, the neck and ring that healed based on rage spent helped to create an illusion that the class had a reasonable minimum survival. In addition, the artifact’s skills, along with the crucible gave toarms a consistent survival.
Add to this the fact that we had in Legion 5 pvp-talents and arms was able to have a consistent toolkit of defensive, like disarm, spell reflect and warbanner. In addition to passive pvp talents.
Since BFA I have the impression that the correct term to define the spec should be Kamikazi, not Arms.Since an arms today that launches to the field of battle is basically doomed to always be the first target and to die quickly and almost always counting on no defense. This is because it is not always possible to count on the help of a healer, and because players know that arms is the only class that does not have an “oh sh…” button to consistently defend himself to an enemy attack.
Die by sword is the defensive coldown most easily nullified today in the game. Simply you apply a stun and the warrior will basically die defenseless, avoiding only a portion of the damage. And after these 8 seconds he will not have anything else. Basically in the pvp scenario above 2000 mmr, all teams choose the warrior as their target. This automatically makes one of the best support pvps talents ( duel) useless.
In addition, there is a bonus that every smart arena team takes advantage of, the fact that if you focus on an arms, it will necessarily take only 80% of his potential damage almost all the time.
What led me to create this topic, was not the obvious realization that warrior has limited survival. And neither return to the cliché of asking for the second wind of MOP as an answer to our problems. Sincerely self heal, is not the answer that I consider as suitable for our class fantasy.
What would be appropriate, and these would be my suggestions, are active and passive tools, giving the impression that a warrior arms is extremely attentive on the battlefield and able to learn based on the movements of the enemy.
In my opinion this would come in two forms. First, according to the fantasy I have of the class, a warrior arms is above all able to learn from the mistakes of the adversary. He studies the opponent during combat, he learns how the opponent makes his moves, and based on this he is able to anticipate him. In the lore, this was the crucial factor that made Orgrimm Doomhammer end up winning the legendary Anduin Lothar. The clash between them was first and foremost a lesson in how true warriors should proceed in combat. The two warriors advanced on each other, and as they struggled they explored the weaknesses of the adversary, each knew his strength and how to proceed to make the most of it.
Orgrimm knew that Anduin was very old, so he explored the prolongation of the fight, hoping that he would be able to defeat the human warrior because of his fatigue. Lothar had superior martial abilities, so he attacked with speed, knowing that his stamina was minor and that therefore he needed to finish the fight fast. The two warriors in this epic combat were arms. And as we can see it was a struggle of strategists.
I don’t feel like the gameplay of arms today allows me to do this kind of class fantasy. To fill that gap, I think a passive skill would be interesting. Basically it would look like this. As a warrior arms was fighting an enemy, based on time or hp lost, he would gain a buff that would allow him to parry or dodge the incomming the attacks. Up to a maximum percentage of 20-25%. Back in the classic, arms was a class with a great base amount of parry, and I thought it a class charm, since we were masters of weapons, and we knew all of them, including the enemy, and so we knew how to parry their attacks. In the case of a magical enemy he could absorb some of the magic damage. The name for this skill would be simple, something like “learning from the enemy”.
In addition, I would put an active defensive ability, which resembled the shield of vengeance of the ret paladin. However this spell would not harm the enemy. This ability would be in line with the warrior class fantasy, since it would suppose a warrior’s abilitybased on his great stamina,to be able to mitigate a certain amount of damage by adopting a totally defensive posture during combat.
Back to classic and following through the MOP, arms has always been a class with a respectable defensive toolkit. Nowadays, I feel that a ret paladin, a class I also currently play, fulfills in a much more effective way the position of great martial master of the game. Since the defensive abilities of a ret are vast, and superior to those of a warrior arms.
I think in a way, these abilities would be beneficial to the arms in both the pve and pvp scenarios. Currently in the pve, I can count on the hands the times that I was killed in M + or heroic raids with my ret, however with my arms the situations in which I get exposed and get finished are innumerable. I will not assume myself as a pro player in the pve scenario, all I can argue is that I’m slightly in a reasonable position on pvp but far below from pro players. However, in several videos I’ve seen of great arms warriors, linked to the pvp scenario, this critique of arms survivalism is recurrent.
Since in patch 8.2 we will have a big change in the game, and the neck will supposedly have talents, which we still don’t know exactly they will work, I thought it would be reasonable to make these suggestions. In addition, several classes gained talent and skill additions in 8.1 it might not be so far to assume that Arms would have any chance of being looked at by Blizzard.