Playing the MoP prepatch I’m amazed at how smooth Arms feels. In modern WoW they’d need to do a little cooking to add some complexity, but overall the MoP version of Arms feels much better to play than the current version on live.
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A lot of classes peaked in MoP, have you seen what they’ve done to warlock since then?
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I disagree, while Arms is fun in MoP and it feels that way because of how they decimated it going into WoD. While also slowly designing it back to where it used to be as a spec.
Baseline Arms has a lot of problems in MoP imo that show now that we weren’t aware of back in the day.
Overpower is weak and it’s decreased gcd isnt exactly intuative since it breaks the flow of combat.
Slam hitting harder than MS is kinda lame and ruins the ability priority within CS windows.
MS is still hit on cooldown but also feels a lot less impactful.
Sweeping strikes is too spammy in MoP and AoE is a snoozefest while also being a very small range for your slam aoe. Comparing to retail it’s got a much more fluid AoE gameplay to it that’s also not restricted by needing it to be as pixel perfectlt stacked.
CS also kinds feels lame with it resetting. It devalues it as a cooldown window.
Haste has little to no interaction with warrior due to the changes made over time in it compressing bladestorm’s channel and providing CDR to MS.
Overall TWW arms is superior it’s a lot smoother of a damage profile in terms of ability breakdown as it’s focus on MS/OP/Exe is a lot more fun than CS/Slam, but I can still have fun messing about in the MoP iteration.
The only thing i would take from MoP for retail would be removing rend in favour of adding that damage into deep wounds.
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Yup, had ever class in MOP and the design was amazing.
Really fell off a cliff following MOP during the great pruning of WOD
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Listen, everyone knows raid obsessed parsers under Ion took over wow and that is why year after year the rotations are made more complex with more weak auras, but utility is pruned where you can creatively react to things rather than pressing sequence:
111333444566644 Number binds on your keyboard.
MOP simply had more of a diverse range of ability to use on warrior. Even Heroic throw could silence a mob.
What we have now is damage modifiers spread out into a gazillion talents for the illusion of choice which is ok for the ape brains who feel like they are making meaningful choices in the tree.
But don’t tell us its that much more advanced than the elegance of prior iterations.
Its also why PVP has suffered because you had more agency in prior expansions for your character especially MOP.
Game shifted for M plus as well with a million means of cleaving damage.
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Sure, but every class had too much utility in MoP. Everyone had a stun. Everyone had a group interrupt. Everyone had a healer cooldown. Everyone had a raid buff. Everyone had too much of everything. That wasn’t good for the game. Warrior could certainly use some of that back, but most certainly not all of it.
Unironically the reason we have this isn’t because elitist people that did a bunch of math and wanted to have a superiority complex. Its because Talent trees returned to a more level based focus in Dragonflight. Due to each level needing to provide something, more things had to be added so that each level was meaningful. Ironically its the casual base that bought this style of class development upon us with the demands of more incremental talent trees.
Curoar is correct, talent trees took away a lot - intimidating shout is a prime example of this. Before every warrior had it, it was baseline. Didn’t use it a lot(outside pvp) but we had it for the times we did.
Now? its not even worth the talent point as its to niche to really have outside of pvp. Many of our talents are tied up elsewhere we can’t really expend one on something we use once in a blue moon. Not to mention to make it really useful in PVE with menace which is an AOE CC without the risk of pulling extra much like blinding light TAKES TWO ENTIRE TALENT POINTS to get (one for shout, one for menace) in a talent economy we don’t really have any to spare
A lot of our talents suffer from that, shattering throw/wrecking throw, piercing howl / berserker shout, intervene, bitter immunity. Really great on paper, but so niche they arent really worth spending the talents on in our talent economy
Not to mention we arent even taking a capstone talent when we are able too in the fury tree because currently other talents offer straight up more DPS. (ok straight up more DPS is wrong, but rather the other abilities [blooodthirst, raging blow] have a lot more modifiers and procs attached to them casting something like onslaught is a waste so its better to buff those more with talents over getting capstones)
I often say, I felt like I had a lot more utility in Shadowlands than I’ve had in Dragonflight or The War Within.
Anything I am saying is conjuncture about the trends in talent design so no I can’t exactly blame Ion and some cabal of elite players.
What I can say for sure is priorities have changed over time regarding talent design.
I understand some hate the MOP iteration given everyone had access to a multitude of things.
Personally, I enjoyed it because picking a class was more about the fantasy and feel of it than it being the only class that can do so and so many stops.
It’s more aesthetics. With that being said to me it’s better than what we have now which is wild unbalance in utility. I personally feel my class is gutted some compared to prior iterations.
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I wouldn’t say Arms peaked in MoP, I would say that the warrior design in MoP was the best design they came with using that talent system for the class as those talents were tied to the class as a whole with a few variety that changed based off the spec.
All classes used the same system among their specs with that Talent system, however WoD design destroyed that for Warriors and it showed more on Arms how the system was flawed in that expansion and it exposed those flaws we see to this day. The main thing is our Utility is either not worth taking (due to not enough points to their locations in the tree) or other classes have access to their Utility with a better flow in their designs.
Arms has changed over that course of time, where some of our abilities were very niche, like how OP would only activate when our targets dodged (which it was mainly seen as powerful in pvp), now it’s part of the main rotation.
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I wouldnt say it was bad for the game either. Spec diversity was alot higher in MOP and I had fond memories of playing arms until switching to fury in Siege. The utility bloat had some bad sides, but it also had some good
When Condemn was hot in Shadowlands, is Top 3 most fun I had in WoW. Mostly for PvP, but having that mini-charge I could spam while ignoring armor was so fun. The others were dope, but I’m Venthyr4Life. Having the Necro Lord Shield and Banner would be nice…
So you didnt necessarily enjoy Condemn, what you enjoyed really was the execute charge PvP talent that was removed and is not coming back anytime soon.
Condemn was thematically cool and was a nice to have to execute mob at high health and then cleave in openers.
I don’t even know why people are still trying to fix juggernaut when Condemn is right there waiting to take its place.
No, I liked Condemn because it could be used on people at full health and did shadow damage, bypassing armor.
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Don’t let anyone tell you what you should or shouldn’t like. Your opinion is a valid as anyone else.
So yeah, plenty of us thought condemn was neat and it was a very satisfying button to press with the animation.
I loved how it had the sideways sweep when you had Sweeping Strikes up. I thought it was a very nice touch to have the overhead smash and cleaving animation.
MoP class design was amazing for ALOT of specs.
Destro lock was great too.
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Or demo lock, the OG demon hunter. Turning into a giant demon and transforming several of your spells