Long ago Arms was my favorite thing to play. The past several years, however, I’ve personally not enjoyed it for various reasons. I thought about what could make it more enjoyable and came up with this. I am genuinely interested in what the warrior community thinks. Maybe for most people Arms is fine (I genuinely don’t know), but if it isn’t, constructive criticism is appreciated. =)
The core of the spec I devised:
Mortal Strike - Good damage, short cooldown, GENERATES rage (primary builder)
Slam - Low/Decent damage, no cooldown, generates rage (filler builder in between MS uses)
Colossus Smash - High damage, increases damage dealt to target for x seconds, no cooldown, costs rage (primary spender, maybe 85 rage?)
This would be the core of the rotation. Add in whatever you like to add complexity and flavor. I personally like spender/builder when not everything costs rage. Similar-ish to Fury, but Arms keeps the heavy hits rather than the more frequent weaker hits. Maybe tactician proc makes CS free?
What do you think? Is Arms already enjoyable now? Would this be a fun change?
If they made Sudden Death an attractive talent to take that would solve the fun factor for me. Random SD procs + traits like Crushing Assault or Executioner’s Precision (rip), would’ve been very fun. To do that they’d need to solve our rage issues so it doesn’t feel required to take Skullsplitter for that rage boost. Decreasing the rage needed on Slam from 20 to 15 and make overpower give 5 or so rage would help a ton.
You just turned Arms into a spell for spell copy of Fury. All builders with one spender (colossus smash = rampage).
I’m playing some PVE arms at the moment and it’s in a bit of a frustrating state, for the amount of work in maintaining rage income there’s no payoff in DPS compared to other specs that just mash resource builders.
But I’m loathe to turn arms into something that mirrors every other spec.
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I don’t think Arms is particularly fun as is presently, but what you’re suggesting seems like it would mostly just double down on at least half its issues.
While I’d prefer a version of Arms that is as GCD-locked as Fury (rather than “AA-locked”), I’d rather go with more variable spending and pacing, rather than copying Fury’s single massive spender a la Rampage/Colossus Smash. Even Fury feels a bit sluggish to me without Carnage, so the last thing I want is to attach a move (especially one as backloaded as CS) so 85 Rage late into our burst.
What I’d personally like to see:
I. Rage
- Generate Rage from %AP (+modifiers) damage dealt. (Conversion spitballed.)
- Mortal Strike = 119% AP = 12 Rage, 24 on Crit, 15 during CS, etc.
Slam = 60% AP = 6 Rage, 8 during CS, 12 on crit, etc.
Overpower = 76% AP = 8 Rage, 11 during CS, 16 on crit, 32 CS-crit, etc.
- Attach Auto-attack damage to all other melee skills. Every time you use a skill, you also deal up to 3.5 seconds’ worth on AA damage to the primary target or first target struck, based on the time since you last (blended) auto-attack.
- If you had a 3.0s weapon and a 1.5s GCD, every GCD you’d strike for half your auto-attack damage instead of actually auto-attacking.
- The contribution from this Auto-attack damage is doubled, making it significant but not the sole or defining contributor.
- Essentially you’d be gaining 10 Rage every GCD, which you’d then be spending in chunks of 15 to 30 per usual.
Rage generation should therefore feel rather smooth and paces quickly from opening burst, leaving some opportunities to disengage between AAs without feeling clunky during continuous uptime.
II. Mastery
- Deep Wounds no longer a Mastery, but simply one of several things affected by Mastery.
- New Mastery - Warhound - Increases the effectiveness of (most of) your debuffs.
- Yes, this includes Colossus Strike (starting at 25%), Deep Wounds, Rend, and Hamstring.
-
Deep Wounds now scales with damage dealt at (initially) 25% of damage, but is now extended by all forms of damage based on the difference between the applying MS’s or EX’s %AP and the extending attack’s (any attack not stronger than the lingering DoT) %AP.
- For instance, if you, say, CS-crit a 40-Rage Execute at 5% bonus damage from Versatility and 0 Mastery and under the effects of a trink that increases STR by what amounts to 8%, that’d be effectively (175x1.05x1.25x2x1.08 --> ) 460% AP. Thus, if no stronger DW is already active, you’d bleed the enemy for a quarter of that over 6 seconds, i.e. ticking for 46% AP every 2 seconds, and essentially 2.3 rage per second.
- A following normal Slam would extend these 46% AP ticks by 60%x1.05 (from Vers) -> 63% AP, which would amount to 5.25% AP ticks, which would convert to .34 additional ticks of the current, stronger DoT.
Thus, you see real burst from Deep Wounds as well, without it deemphasizing burst from direct damage, even though (revised) Talent choices could leave it very integral.
(For instance a talent could give an additional point or two of rage on every instance of Rage generation, making it incredibly important to keep DW ticking, just as it would also increase the value of Slam and WW relative to MS/Ex.)
In short, it gives Arms incredible gameplay design freedom, with DW initially just acting as a way to advantage oneself against a few extra things and maintain the same burst force without having to be balanced back to curtail one-shots. All else, any dependence greater than that, would come with talent choice.
Altogether, this would be enough to immensely smooth out Arms gameplay while giving it a resource system that feels a bit more “Arms-like”. If I were to go any further, it’d only be to suggest a revision of Rend (reducing its rage cost and better integrating it into play), Sweeping Strikes (though a baseline revised Cleave might be involved), and Overpower (to play into DW extension and/or following Crit chance on MS/Ex, with scaled ppm normalization where failed (would-be) procs (i.e. when Overpower is already ready) augment ppm instead of siphoning from it).
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This will make arms gameplay too close to fury.
Changes I would like to see:
Overpower generating rage 5-10
Execute rage refund reverted back to 30%
This prevents rage starve during execute phase and increases single target slightly.
Bladestorm reduced to 1min cd
Increase single target and aoe
More talent variation. Your literally forced to take warbreaker skullsplitter and anger management.
One or two changes would help arms be more competitive in dungeons and raids.
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Bladestorm reduced to 1 min is problematic as it desyncs it from warbreakers CD.
Ding ding. Just give slam 2 charges and a CD and you’re there lol.
I tend to think more in terms of PVP where arms really has nothing to offer vs DK, DH, WW, Rogue
Arms need passive snare,
Arms needs Self heal to put them on par with every other melee.
Arms needs a Baseline stun like every other melee.
and if you are not going to make a attempt at putting them on par at least give them the 1 thing back that made them unique. The MS debuff should be removed from ALL other classes.
Arms will never be good without Heroic Strike.
Heroic Strike only existed because rage was a resource system that suffered from incorrect resource costs, feast and famine regeneration, and a base GCD that didn’t scale with haste.
Heroic Strike was a bandaid for a problem, that largely does not exist in game anymore.
Dude you clearly want to play fury. Just respec already.