I’d like to start a thread on ideas for improving the Arms Warrior. Rage normalization hit this specialization by far the hardest of all 3 specs, and initial estimates have Arms warrior scarcely able to fill out their own rotation even at level 60.
My immediate suggestion would be to change Improved Rend to include a talent from Midnight Arms Warrior – Bloodsurge. Bloodsurge grants rage when your bleeds tick – I think being able to keep Rend rage neutral is a huge QoL improvement, and in AoE settings you’d be able to multi-dot to build up big bursts of rage to then spend down on Sweeping/Cleave/Whirlwind.
Other major points of feedback are figuring out an identity for Slam (it doesn’t hit hard, it’s a wasted global unless you pay a 1 talent tax LATE in the tree, and it has a laughably long cooldown for an attack that doesn’t even hit as hard as Heroic Strike) and fixing the ludicrous cooldown on Recklessness by retuning it downwards to 10-15% crit chance.
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Slam is one of the few abilities for arms that is not using normalized weapon speed, if you have a 3.8-4.0 weapon slam will make the best use of it
Very few abilities that do “weapon damage” will hit as hard as heroic strike, because heroic strike does weapon damage + (flat value depending on rank). But heroic strike is bad in terms of DPS, and utterly atrocious in terms of rage cost because it makes your next hit a special attack and because you’re using a 2h weapon it’s going to cost 12 rage (if you spec’d for imp HS) + 13.5 to 18 rage depending on weapon speed for losing the white attack.
At level 30 I can do more damage than heroic strike for a lot cheaper by following a an auto attack with thunder clap.
The problem with both slam and heroic strike is that it is near impossible to make them good without making them overpowered slam not interrupting swing time and having no cd (as vanilla slam had no cd) would mean doubling or more your auto attack damage, but if it has a long CD like it does now it adds very little to your DPS. On the other side of you can’t allow heroic strike to generate rage like an auto attack would or it would pay for itself and then some while doing similar damage to mortal strike every swing.
I like the idea of both heroic strike and slam, but both are awful and buffing them to fix their greatest weakness would immediately make them op.
I think the best play might be a lateral move. Have improved heroic strike give a buff that increases rage generated from auto attacks, and change improved slam such that slam does go back to interrupting the swing timer, but also gives a haste buff when it lands. The result is two abilities you want to press often enough to keep the buffs up, but not something you would want to spam or the buffs would be wasted.
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Beta goes to level 30. Anything beyond is speculation. I’m excited for SoD-like items that may take specializations in unexpected directions.
I’m enjoying Arms at level 30 with ~100 hours of Arms in beta. I’m having no problems with output. Keep Battle Shout up, keep Rend applied, Cleave spam. Overpower when it’s up. That’s it. I’m enjoying the big numbers and ease of play. Have fun out there!
rage normalization means Arms rage gen and therefore buttons it can actually press at 60 is completely known. Spoiler alert, its not nearly close to a rotation. Blizzard said leveling is part of the game, do we seriously think, or want, random items to fix a broken class? The spec is fundamentally unable to keep up with any other spec in this game at max or any point in leveling.
Arms isn’t broken right now at level 30 in my experience. Certainly not broken. Definitely able to keep up. I’m not having any issues with damage. Sure, AoE is better than ST due to the abilities we have available at 30, and that AoE is satisfying.
I’m genuinely confused when I see threads about Arms being broken. I’m having no issue keeping up and putting out high or top damage done more often than not.
They mean Genuinely Broken in the gameplay flow sense not the gameplay balance sense. Level 30 arms is missing its 2 most rage intensive abilities still, whirlwind and mortal strike so comparing the rage economy of level 30 when the most expensive ability is 20 rage compared to Mortal Strike’s 30 and whirlwind’s 25 is just off when those are rotational abilities you want to be hitting on CD.
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Bleeds generating rage has been suggested. No indication blizzards likes this idea, but they are quite silent on their thoughts.
Personally I’d like improved slam talent to enable this. First make slam instant but resets swing timer. Improved slam 1 pt removes swing timer interuption. And gives rend ticks a 50% change to generate rage and target takes 2.5% more bleed dmg. 2 pts make rage 100% chance and 5% more bleed dmg. For some more synergy in the tree.
We also don’t know what rage generation will be like with the new changes.
This makes sense to me. Thanks for the reply!
I don’t think theres any currently announced changes to rage gen coming past them giving back rage on crits and the new formula on rage from damage taken (we can’t test it properly as it scales with level/gear ironically). So maybe we get Arms fixes today but I doubt it.
Arms needs Frenzied Assault from SOD, slam fixes, and maybe even endless rage from TBC to actually complete a rotation with abilities on CD. Sadly I doubt they add in any way to express skill or growth in the spec like TBC slam spec got
I assume from their changes to Fury it’s being viewed as feature complete, which sucks cause its why slower and way more boring compared to Vanilla/TBC/WotLk but hypothetically functional.
Far as I know there isn’t any rage changes beyond what’s already done. I was referring to gear and stats at end game. With that knowledge we are guessing.
Lots of goodies around that arms could use. I’m still hoping for a “big” arms tlc, but I’m not holding my breath.
Ya fury looks quite good, at least to my casual brain.
rage gen is affected by , hit , expertise, crit and HASTE. sims have been done asuming 35% crit, 9% hit , 2% expertise and almost no haste.
still coming out short.
when you talk about rage from gear , the biggest contributors are HASTE and CRIT. saying a core mechanic will be fixed via stats is horrible class design and pidgeon hole ARMS warriors to stack HASTE just to get decent amounts of rage (crit and the other stats are comonly present in gear from vanill, with the exception of expertise).
any decent warrior would opose to this kind of thinking, i shouldnt stack X or Y stat just to get enough rage to function.
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This isn’t really true. Slam has been a main rotational ability at various points of the game’s history. In MoP, you Slam-weaved. You’d queue up Slam in between autos just to add some damage and then auto crits would give you bursts of rage that you could then spend down with Heroic if you were going to overcap.
The issue with Slam in Forever is that it offers half the bonus damage as Heroic Strike, requires a talent tax late in the tree to not interrupt your swing timer (which is effectively the exact same extra cost that Heroic Strike has where it consumes your auto), and it has an 18 second cooldown. The cooldown doesn’t make any sense whatsoever – for an ability that doesn’t do a ton of damage, it for some reason carries a cooldown like an ability that does.
What you absolutely CAN talk about for Arms is the rage economy because it’s normalized. You generate the same rage at level 1 that you generate at 60 with the given loadouts. Anything that’s deeper in the talent trees can be simulated/calculated.
I’m a little dubious of your claims that you spam Cleave with Arms at level 30 because Arms really doesn’t generate a lot of rage. You get what – 12 to 14 rage on autos? 24-28 on crits. Spamming Cleave means you’re not getting rage. You get no rage when you miss. Rend costs 10 Rage and can miss.
I’m still going to play a Warrior in Forever, but as a lifetime Warrior main, this will be the first time in my life that I DON’T roll a Warrior first. I’ll be maining Shaman until Warrior gets some better attention. Fury will probably be my alt. If they make some really cool changes to Arms, I’ll consider swapping back to it because it’s always been my favorite.
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Your opinion on what a decent warrior would think is worthless.
The sims are still just a guess, and I’m not throwing shade at the sims people. They have to make assumptions. But lets not pretend you know we won’t get some dumb ring or set bonus that increaes rage gen by 30%. Thus it’s still unknown.
Given your logic on stats fixing a core mechanics. Have thought rage was always flawed? Because we have the same general issue we’ve always had.
Is the coming up short just for Arms? Last I saw fury was fine, but Arms was still behind. Haven’t checked since the change to 100% extra rage from 75%.
Arms is definitely the hardest hit by rage normalization and PvP Arms with its much higher APM (hamstring, intercept demo shout, stance dancing etc.) is even worse off.
Here is a rage gen calculator. Deep Arms would need 60%+ more rage gen to equal Deep Fury.
- won’t let me link, find Kovarel Rage Calculator
Keep in mind Fury is not where it was in classic either rage gen wise.
Fixing rage via abilities like Rend opens up the door to unbalancing Fury and Prot rage gen.
Arms needs a real talented 2H-specific rage fix, first and foremost.
Bloodthrill Overpower procs add 3ish extra OP procs on a still target with no misses per minute. Doesn’t come close to offsetting rage normalization damage losses.
Arms will also need access to new PvP abilities and current PvP abilities re-worked in order to find pace with the current state of other classes.
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you said it yourself a gear fixing a core mechanic is DUMB. it SHOULDNT be the way.
as the title of the post says, ARMS warriors are coming short, fury may be decent and prot is actually great. my concern as all here is about ARMS warriors
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Chill tiny.
I didn’t disagree about itemization. Thus why I supported ths rage from bleeds idea, or furious assault and etc. Im just not pretending I know our endgame rage profile.
Why feel the need to be an a-hole when I was asking for clearification?
i really fail to see where did i offended you. excuse me, as english isnt my first language . was it the use of capital letters ?
Oh I’m not offended.
Caps don’t help, but the post came across quite rage filled and sperging. Which could just be my presception. So I returned the same energy.
Apologies if that wasn’t your intent.
I get it, but basic stats will not change Rage Gen besides Hit/Expertise caps. We’re rage starved and anemic APM in sims with capped stats due to the normalization. I just don’t have faith/nor even want the fix for warriors is to be one off specific pieces of gear to bandaid broken resource generation. That feels the worst case scenario. Particularly since WoW Forever promised us better leveling and now Warrior leveling will be even worse AND only at high/max level would we be ‘fixed’.
Fury is not completely nuked anymore but they still halved the APM and fun of the spec from Vanilla/TBC gameplay for literally no reason.
Looking at what other classes, classes that were already massively strong in pvp, get all these new tools and Arms got a gimmick attack that will almost be never relevant is deeply depressing.
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