Arms Feedback
General
Before thinking about hero talents, there are three issues with Arms imo, from a gameplay perspective.
Cleave
The base cooldown of Cleave being 3 seconds effectively locks us in to pressing Cleave every other global, then using primarily Overpower with a few TClaps sprinkled in between Cleave casts. This has a few negative implications:
- It’s very boring. There is little decision making going on, rage economy is still high enough that I never run out of rage while constantly spamming Cleave every other global, and the choice basically boils down to “Is Rend about to fall off? Yes: TClap; No: Overpower”. Tactician procs are still plentiful enough that, in my experience, I almost never ran into a situation where Rend was freshly applied and I didn’t have the OP charge to spend in between Cleaves.
- It makes Martial Prowess effecting Cleave feel pointless. There is no realistic scenario where you will ever use Cleave with 2x MP stacks since there is only one global in between each cast, and the vast majority of your Cleaves are buffed by exactly one Overpower. At that point, it’s not a buff, it’s the new baseline.
The biggest change I would like to see in this regard is to change Cleave to a 4.5 second hasted CD, and the damage buffed to compensate if needed. This would directly address both points:
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With 2 GCDs in between each Cleave, there is more room to spend rage on a different filler (e.g., WW), and make an actual decision with your globals. It would still be very simple, but not quite as bad as it is now.
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Similarly, with 2 GCDs in between casts, you would have the occasional double-buffed Cleave, and the MP buff makes more sense as there would actually be variance there.
Overpower
This is mostly just a tuning problem, but: Multiple talents buffing OP and OP still ends up feeling kinda bad to me, unless you are playing Colossus with its massive buff to OP damage. Dreadnaught in particular feels awful.
I would really love to see the damage profile of this ability shift more towards the direction of Cataclysm Arms, where OP is a significant hard-hitter on its own and can compete with MS in terms of overall damage. It’s a minor gripe, but I don’t personally love my ST damage profile consisting of ~40% or more MS damage.
Resets
I really do hate Exhilarating Blows and Battlelord, and think they have no place on the tree or in Arms’ gameplay loop, particularly in combination with Martial Prowess. Mortal Strike (and to a lesser extent, Cleave) having it’s CD reset can never feel as good as it should when you know that each time you reset it and use it immediately, it could be doing 30-60% more damage. It is irrelevant that it is numerically correct to just slam the button off CD regardless of MP stacks, it still feels bad.
This is much less of an issue for Battlelord than it is EB, since BL will always result in the MS having at least 1 buff, but I still dislike BL as I fundamentally believe MS CD should not be something that can be reset, period. If we insist on having MS resets be possible, then I would at least strongly prefer that MP be removed, so each reset MS is full value. That would make something like hitting 3 EB resets in a row feel actually good, whereas now it feels very meh.
Slayer
Slayer has two notable issues, from a gameplay perspective:
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From the dungeons I’ve done, I rarely got enough SD procs to get a +3 stacked Bladestorm from this hero talent tree. I assume that the SD proc rate buff is just NYI or bugged, so not going to worry about it too much, but still want to note it. Bladestorm coming off CD and still only having 2 stacks despite having good uptime doesn’t feel great.
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I really do not like Reap the Storm being tied to Mortal Strike. This is exacerbated by the above-mentioned issues with Cleave, there is simply no room in the rotation to press MS and fish for procs. If it does end up being numerically correct to press MS on CD at higher target counts in between Cleaves to fish for procs, I would argue that just feels unintuitive and bad to do, even if it is the intended behavior. I don’t have a good idea for a solution for this outside of just moving it back to proccing off of Overpower, but tied to MS it is almost non-functional imo.
Outside of these two issues, I really like the gameplay loop of Slayer, and Bladestorm being such a huge impactful cooldown feels phenomenal.
Colossus
Similar to Slayer, Colossus has two issues for me from a gameplay perspective.
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It is very inconsistent in my testing whether or not CS with Anger Management and Demolish would come off CD at the same time. There are many times where they do come up around the same time, and then there were other times where they were desynced by 15+ seconds. Using either ability without the other will feel bad, and holding either ability for the other will similarly feel bad, so I would like to see their cooldown reduction normalized between the two so they are consistently available at the same time.
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It would be nice if the buff duration of Colossal Might was increased to 1 minute. At 30 seconds, there are many times where it would fall off while waiting for the tank to move to the next pull, and that is such a colossal (ha) damage loss that just feels terrible. This issue is exacerbated by players being new to the dungeons and tanks moving slow, but buffing the duration to 1 min would basically just remove this problem.
Other than these two minor gripes, Colossus Arms feels incredible and is super fun to play, Demolish is an awesome ability.
TL;DR:
- Cleave cooldown is too short, making the AoE rotation feel restricted and boring.
- Overpower feels pretty bad even when taking multiple talents to buff it.
- The combination of Martial Prowess with effects that reset MS cooldown feels bad, and one of these things should go. Either one would be fine on its own without the other.
- Slayer’s SD proc rate increase does not seem to be working.
- Reap the Storm being tied to MS feels very unintuitive and counter-productive to how the AoE currently functions.
- It is easy for CS and Demolish cooldowns to get desynced, which feels awful as you would surely not want to press either of these cooldowns without the other.
- It would be a nice QoL increase for the buff duration of Colossal Might to be increased to 1 min, to prevent annoying pain points of of the buff falling off right before the next pack.