It’s a beautiful point though; it’s no fun to lose. Winning will always be more fun.
That said, I agree there’s no heavy “rock-paper-scissors” to class design in current year. When mages can play keep away with multiple blinks, a death passive, ice block, and counter-mobility like root and polymorph, the only way you can “outplay” that is to have the chance to one or two shot them when you get in range though. That’s a serious design gap that exists and probably why you’re seeing dominant competitive teams including RDPS stacking into heavy dampening.
I don’t think, framing this as a PvP context, there’s anything wrong with current iteration (except the slight falling off of melee because the above “lack of access” factor not being mitigated with better priority burst). That said, I don’t care about the PvP context for Deep Wounds (old) vs. Deep Wounds (new) because that’s not where I’ve felt it creates a disservice to the gameplay. PvE is where the lack of Deep Wounds (old) has been felt the most, and as far as PvP goes, an extra 25% damage on a Mortal Strike isn’t going to suddenly push a 20k health pool into Execute range when MS is hitting for 1500 (after Mastery).
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honestly the mastery change to me is whatever compared to having intervene and spell reflect baseline
destro can literally 2 shot u btw lmao
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That’s true. But that wasn’t quite a function of the class so much as the overuse of corruption which wasn’t properly balanced or tested around. Destro only because a 2 shotting machine in the last patch. Once corruption is gone they won’t have the insta kill power.
destro was complained about since after it got buffed in season 1 of bfa, its been stupid for literal years
The only way destro is 2 shotting you is if you let it ramp up with long CDs.
Arms did not need to ramp up, nor use long cds, to accomplish what you were talking about prior, nor what I was talking about.
Comparing an apple to an orange is not a checkmate.
destro can global u in a mortal coil every 2 minutes my guy idk
destro is actually the most ridiculous caster ive ever played against in my years of qing this game
I am in camp “revert mastery” now.
So dude, deep wound should have been what it was originally, a debuff from a crit, the mastery for arms should have been something else, an extra hit, increase rage regen, or let our current mastery also affect REND so it can be useful, or just make rend baseline, why is rend a talent? But seriously who used rend? and when is it useful? Why is it 30 rage? Why is it on a GCD?
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I drew a lot of parallels to Monk mastery (which theirs is arguably easier to maintain), and the difficulty of balancing their PvE and PvP performance because of it.
Imagine your damage is a roller coaster track. There’s highs and lows. At the high point, it’s 1000’ and at the low it’s 20’. If your mechanic designs it 20% bigger (flat percent mastery), you gain 200’ at the peak and a meager 4’ at the valley.
When the roller coaster is a damage profile, those peaks are your burst potential. And PvP, especially right now, is all about that burst ('bout that burst, 'bout that burst).
Crit and versatility already amplify the amplitude of your curvy damage function. Haste increases the frequency. It would make a lot more sense to design mastery to amplify the valleys enough to raise the average by the same percent or to include a flat damage mechanic that simply “adds up”.
Back to the roller coaster, if you’re adding a total of 204’, for the sake of WoW (since crit and vers already add to those peaks), it might be better to add 124’ to each (flat damage benefit–aka Old Deep Wounds) or to add 204’ directly to your valley (e.g. bigger white hits with extra rage gen and chance to double swing).
I was concerned in 8.3 about the mastery change because I saw where WW was placed, and I heard the trouble of balancing then. Looking where Arms is today in sustained performance makes me worry about the future for the spec, at least in PvE.
(In before: Just PvP then 
.)
People that say they enjoyed BFA Deep Wounds are like hecklers at a comedy show.
At this point, anything is better than that atrocity from a gameplay standpoint. Just find a way to make Cleave and Rend baseline again.
I’ve been wanting Cleave to be a No Rage Cost, 6 second cooldown that generates like 3 rage per enemy hit up to its cap for the longest time.
i would love cleave baseline. Arms aoe feels nonexistent.
As it is right now its basically bladestorm and dreadnaught SS. What aoe do we have? Ravager does terrible dmg and just gives rage so you obv want BS. So you take DN, simply because cleaving DN with SS is the only other solid source of AOE. Outside of that you have Warbreaker as a debuff, so you basically dump WB, Use BS and then SS DNs for the remaining duration of SS and WB.
EDIT: OHH… Whirlwind lol. I cant remember the last time I even pressed WW if im being honest.
The answer right now is basically roll Fury for AOE, roll arms for 2-3 targets maybe. Fury is looking to pull ahead of arms though overall, which is a little sad but eh idc, i enjoy both differently
No one liked BFA arms mastery, but it was better for the spec.
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I beg to differ, I was fine with it. And every time a mechanic takes me off a boss in mythic nathria, I miss it even more.
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If you want bleeds play a Feral.
Never signed up to be a DoT class. Hated it.
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Rofl, because an intentional dot class with many dots and one that passively applies a dot are so similar.
Either you missed all the years early on where rend was a thing or you just didn’t actually look when you were “signing up”.
That was a snappy come-back.
Rend lol…
I didn’t sign up for a passive DoT to be my #1 overall damage either. It’s a less exciting version of another lame mastery Arms was givin; Strike of Opportunity.
You play arms warrior to smash with big hits. You can’t do this if your balanced around feeding a super fun passive bleed.
WE WON THE WAR, sweaty PvE nerds in TEARS.
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Huh, wasn’t really any war to be had.
If Deep Wounds is your #1 damage ability, it’s not the spec causing the problem…
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