Its been a few months since a dev confirmed Arms has been dropped from getting support. The tree is left obsolete, is substantially less dps then the next worse dps, and generally has no place in the game.
WoW doesnt have PVP specs. Arms is terrible at PVP anyways compared to boomkins, Spriests, rogues, rets, etc which are… PVE specs? Basically all through the game’s history the best talent tree for pvp or pve is always evolving, as we have PVP and PVE “talents” not “trees.” I.e. in wotlk Fire mage was the best PVE spec in the game but also one of the best trees for PVP, and currently in Cata, Arms, Sub rogue, and Ele sham are all good in PVE. Also, a spec can’t be worse than every other class’ “pve” talent set up and be called a “pvp” spec.
Hunters and shamans are getting some updates for this phase, but is Arms still left unsupported by the devs? The talent tree seems like a really good place to create a way to play that is better for dungeons, open world, questing, PVP, etc. Something with quick ways to apply armor pen, weapon based bleed damage, and higher base damage compared to fury that scales well in raid but is otherwise bad.
I loaded up some sims (same ones the dev reference in the class discords) and see that Spriest is within 2% of fury warrior and in WCL can actually beat them. But when I remove raid and world buffs the otherwise same sim settings results in shadowpriests doing 300% the dmg of the warrior. Leaving fury as the “raid and world buff scaling raid spec” is fine if Arms can be playable outside of raid.
hunters, rogue, and many other classes get countless supported ways to play the game and every talent tree is used or considered in some way… except the entire Arms tree is just totally discarded. Why?
hunters, rogue, and many other classes get countless supported ways to play the game and every talent tree is used or considered in some way… except the entire Arms tree is just totally discarded. Why?
I mean they dont. both beast master and deepsub/hemo are even more dumpster then arms warrior. they are so bad we dont talk about it and just do the other specs. which you should do. deep arms is just MS and some weapon specializations its not even really a unique playstyle.
This is actually not true. BM doubles Arms warrior dps looking at the 90th percentile on a few fights in BWL. Sub does even more than BM, and the other 2 rogue specs are great. All 3 talent trees for rogue are playable in both PVE and PVP. Some are better than others but they’re within the general range of what all the classes can do. Arms is the extreme outlier well below every other dps, and most of the tanks and even healers.
Deep any tree is “just” a few talents. The capstone talent for most talent trees is more underwhelming than SS or MS. You absolutely can create a unique playstyle if they can do that for 2h melee hunter v 1h melee hunter… or 3 rogue specs lmao.
Arms was always based on a slower, higher base dmg 2h spec. If they put the same work into Arms as they did any other class or spec, you could easily have a slower, armorpen/bleed damage, high mortal strike damage based playstyle that would work well in dungeons, open world, pvp, etc.
Ret paladin is within a few percent of Fury lmao. In MC, Arms would have needed a flat 50% increase in damage to match ret. In BWL, it would be a 70% overal dmg increase to catch ret. Blizzard has sword/axe/mace spec, sweeping strike, and mortal strike to paly with. Make mortal strike do real damage rather than 1/3rd the dmg of Wyvern strike… make SS also do 10% more base dmg to primary target as bleeds… make overpowers on a target you mortal strikes do 100% weapon damage as a bleed over 3 seconds. Give you a heroic throw that applies 5x sunders so you can compete with shadowpriest and rogue sunder times.
If they can build entire speccs around runes (healing mage, tank lock, tank rogue, melee hunters, etc) then they can also make Arms not useless. Theyre just choosing not to which is ridiculous.
Yeah, pvping again now to save up honor for next reset and I remember why I haven’t queued since I capped. Warrior is just awful, got smacked with a 1900 lava burst crit while at the same time the only thing I’m critting for 1k is an overpower on a mage. So basically I can beat up the red-headed stepchild of SoD PvP and get absolutely farmed by everyone else.
For the record, I am R13 with ~10k hp self-buffed in BG’s. My average hit is ~300.
you understand that none of raid rogue specs go deeper then 5 points into sub right? Theres sword combat, backstab combat, and mut assassination. The sub tree is effectively dead. theres literally less then 20 sub rogues logging about half as much as arms warrior and are parsing about the same as arms warriors. And BM hunter is even worst their are 7 of them and only 1 is dealing above 1k dps. the dps comparison is skewed because of so few logs.
by that logic then arms is fine because fury dips in like 3 tiers. like how are you defining a spec besides going deep into tree? same with sub rogue they could do something with hemo serrated blades and prep the defining feature of the trees and the talents no one uses. BM was effectively nerf into the ground in phase 1 and had a viable spec but again no one is going deep and the other specs are dipping into early talents.
like yes arms is dog poop but dont act like its unique.
Raiding rogues also have like 4 talent builds that work. Hunters have ranged, melee 2h, and melee dual wield. Warrior has fury, and prot is clinging to what viability it has by it’s fingertips. Arms was literally described as “unsupported” by the devs.
It’s not even good in PvP. You provide mortal strike for your premade or you’re a free kill if you solo queue. Atleast other classes providing good utility also have insane damage output.
Speaking of logs, arms is below literally everything including tanks at the 90th percentile of heroic, literally dead last. (mythic and normal aren’t loading for some reason so I can’t check those atm but still…)
arms is unusable in pvp and pve, and has no place. All three rogue talent trees massively outperform it and even the BM hunter makes arms look terrible.
Having some trees get less attention or less use, or niche use is okay. Arms doesnt have dev support. Zirene outright said he knows its terrible in the class discord, and then on twitter noted its not going to receive updates to make it playable as “it would take a massive overhaul.” lol. Oh you mean like healing mages and tank rogues? hahaha
2h fury is decent, still worse than dual wield on logs because the sweats stack 3+ chicken buffs. I think dual wield only gets better the faster the kills are as well. There’s just too many buffs to stack at once now, dual wield will always be better in ideal.
I just noticed btw, interrupting boomies does nothing, they just keep casting. 4 second lockout after pummel, stopped a wrath, boomie casts starfall->starfire.
in raid with buffs, yes, fury is okay. Looking at BWL logs if you remove fights that dont have gimmicks like Vael, fury warrior is a middle of the pack dps but its in that range where its at least playable (okay damage, no utility, better than an empty slot). This is at the 90th percentile, which is a lot more useful info. I am aware that some players build their raids around their parse and 1h fury can create some high outliers at the top .01%.
But using the dev sims, fury is 2% more than Spriest (underperforms in WCL tho, slightly) but then Spriest is 300% of warrior’s fury dps when you remove raiding buffs. So, warrior is playable in raid as 1h or 2h fury and as prot, but thats it. Arms talent tree is not updated or maintained in any way, and the class is the worst by a big margin outside of raid for any non-raiding activities.
Rogues get a book that gives instant 2.5k armor penetration, its not a talent or rune. I see no reason why Warriors shouldn’t get a book or rune that gives armor penetration to Mortal Strike or something along those lines. That along with buffs to enraged regeneration(lower CD and higher regen %) and blood craze and I think Arms warriors would go from mid in PvP to a pretty good place. It’s really not that complicated.
I don’t care if its the Era Ret Paladin of SOD for PvE DPS with 2H Fury being buffed last phase, just make it better for PvP. Arms in its current state is like the only spec that goes against the entire philosophy of SOD because its not very good at either.
Sadly Zirene recently posted he wished they had time give arms some identity but they dont.
Its a shame they left an iconic spec in the dirt while they had time to make entirely new specs.
Theyre too busy setting up cash grabs and not making their products better.
I mean, they’ve brought over “iconic” abilities for most classes. For Arms, it’s pretty easy and everyone had been expecting it since Phase 1: Bladestorm but a better version. Doesn’t mean it would fix their PVX performance, but it would give them something cool and iconic for their niche which is trash clearing at the very least.
I couldnt agree more. Warriors are usig the exact same kit as classic. Sure we can charge in combat but its still just charge. There is nothing SoD about warriors. With mages how ever bad they suck they using the frozen orb, heals and the blink back atleast they got new toys to play with.