Arms warrior is down below tanks and healers. Meanwhile hybrids are all pumping and there isn’t a reason for Arms to be this useless. On Twitter, a dev Zirene acknowledged that Arms is substantially below the next worst DPS and that they arent supporting Arms as a talent tree in SoD. They said it would need substantial work and time to fix.
Wowhead articles using WCL as reference showed a Ret needing 70% dps gain to catch a BiS fury in 2019 classic. This is the same gap in BWL that an Arms would need to catch a ret and the gap has only been widening. The gap to the top is even greater. Hybrids are overall outperforming even Fury, and the disparity grows outside of raid to extreme proportions. A sim between even fury and a hybrid can be 2% but then outside of raid the same exact sim settings net the hybrid 300% more dps than the fury. Uneven world buff scaling is a huge culprit of this.
First and foremost, Sundering was a part of warrior’s identity, but rogue can now AoE 5x sunder and Priest can 5x sunder, but warrior cannot… 100% warrior needs a SoD niche that at least matches rogue and priest in this category.
Now, below is how you fix Arms. Aim to have it do the raid DPS of a ret paladin (still wont have ret’s utility). If you can make Raptor strike, wyvern strike, and mangoose bite all do around 3x the damage of a mortal strike in SoD, all of the following is possible.
Make Mortal strike do damage. I.e. it does 150% extra weapon damage as a bleed tic (sort of like scourge strike) or a flat 250% wpn damage.
Make rend do actual damage, and base it off weapon damage, and apply a tic on application like in Cata.
Make Sweeping strike also apply X% of your weapon damage as a bleed on your primary target.
Add heroic throw with a similar cooldown to SW:D that also applies 5x sunders.
Make an interaction with overpower where if your target has mortal strike applied, overpower “gushes” the target for X bleed damage.
Make the Taste for Blood rune also reduce the CD of overpower like in WotLK so you dont lose dodge overpowers and also allows for a more interesting rotation of timing your overpowers based on other procs and CDs like in Cata.
Just start with this, and tune the numbers so you’re around Ret paladin DPS, and Arms will suddenly be playable! It will be an option for open world, pvp, dungeons, etc. It will do okay damage to armored targets the way enhance and ret can because bleeds will be like the “magic” damage. Fury will still be the ramping spec for raid on short fights where you can maximize deathwish uptime but Arms will have some purpose in SoD as the slower, bigger hitting, more bleed focused spec.
If hunter and rogue and all these other classes can get tons of ways to play their class (like why does rogue need all 3 talent trees to be good in PVP and PVE? lol) then surely Arms can not lose an entire talent tree in SoD.
If they want to fix arms in SOD they need to bring in WOTLK or Cata arms as runes. Maybe not colossus smash but the rest of the loop fits SOD well.
Its also criminal they never added bladestorm to sod
The devs gave up on warrior a long time ago. Look at the past patch notes how many has passed with warrior absent on the bullet points.
I just seen the data mined class changes and as of yet it looks like were being over looked again.
they didnt give up as much as they intentionally made it bad
it wouldnt be hard to make it playable, its actually nuts they just leave a talent tree that unplayable, do nothing, and then say “yeah we know but its a lot of work” while we have tank rogues and mage healers lol
Zirene specified that they couldn’t figure out an identity SoD Arms warrior with the time they’ve been given so they didn’t feel it was worth the effort.
This isn’t a “Life Support” issue. This is a “They’ve already buried the body” issue.
In a dream world where they wanted to put in the effort and give Arms Warrior an identity in SoD, they should’ve focused on two things Arms should be superior on than Fury: 2+ AoE and Executing targets.
Remove the Wrecking Crew rune for Wrists.
(Because the SoD Devs have said they don’t want to add more runes. Yes that means its competing with Rampage, but I genuinely cannot think of another rune to remove as most are generally useful in SOME form of content.)
Replace it with the Storm of Blades rune for Wrists.
(While Sweeping Strikes is active, your Whirlwind casts resets your number of available sweeping strikes back to 5. This allows you to potentially keep sweeping strikes up indefinitely, vastly increasing your AoE potential.)
Buff Sudden Death rune.
(When using Execute with Sudden Death on a target while your Mortal Strike debuff is active, the additional damage per point of rage is increased by 10. Yes this would make warriors scary as hell in PvP, but let’s be honest, I’ve been hit by a 5k starfire before. They’ve already abandoned pvp balance.)
I doubt these changes would ratchet us up to even middle of the pack in the meters, but it would at least give us an actual use case argument.
The reason why the OG dev (vivendi not activision)
Made warriors top dps in era, is because they don’t do magic damage or long range damage
What’s happening in sod is, they’ve made a hunter pure kiter 43 yard, trap control high avoidance class have greater dps than a warrior. A boomkin which is a long range magic caster do greater damage and at the same time ignores all armor. Even paladins hit much harder for burst than all these classes
In era, warriors dealt okay damage in pvp as a top pvm dps. Now in sod, warriors deal nothing compared to the magic casters and hunters. The activion devs wanna make sure warriors are below average in pve, without taking account of pvp
Result is even melee hunters dominate warriors
Why make a melee pure physical damage class deal less than magic and long range classes? The dev iq went out the door when they started balancing off of their own bias
Well what your seeing is the OG devs wanted the classes to be balanced as a whole. Classes was balanced around everything, leveling, pvp, and pve.
The current devs balance the game around the top 1% of raiders.
You just cant compare.
OG era devs made pvp a lot more balanced, they didn’t care much for pve. the evidence of this is the hardcore era 100k usd makgora tournament hosted by Esfand a retail gladiator between the pro OG players who are also gladiators in retail
each class had a weakness of their own
in SOD, pvp is as garbage as the activision developer bias which is the focus and basis of buffs and nerfs
There is basically no existing dev here in sod who even has a level of skill to be a retail gladiator, and yet they just want full control to make changes based on their own bias lol. The likes of Xaryu, Ziqo and Pshero have the same views on sod, and that is why they love era so much
It just resonates the need for a non biased developer team who knows how to play well in the top level rather than making biased changes with devs who are not actually skilled enough to give a knowledgeable non delusional say, this is the fix for the organization needed for sod to get balanced
a 100 rage execute on 0 armor does about 5k, a 1.0 sec starfire does 10k
so then add in PVP modifiers and armor and you can see why warrior hits for terrible numbers
also, its very easy to give Arms an identity. I did in my original post. If they can make rogues have 3 great talents trees for PVP and PVE, AND tank… and tank locks, healer mages, 1h and 2h melee hunters (that swing for 3x the dmg of a mortal strike with all their abilities)… they absolutely had room to make arms not be useless.
My suggestions would instantly make Arms fun and unique. Slower swings, bleed based additions to your damage, wala, both fury and arms have different playstyles and identities.
also with only world buffs, so now while a spriest in raid does 10% more dps than fury under optimal conditions, they do 300% dmg everywhere else. In 2019 classic all the classes did MUCH more similar dps outside of raid. In 2005 they just didnt consider how raid + world buffs made warrior’s spam heroic strike which removed glancing blows and the -19% hit penalty from both MH and OH weapons. Rogue is truly the winner of classic when you consider how close they are to warrior without this mechanic, making them far better in every aspect of the game outside of raid and almost as good in raid.
All the things arms are dealing with can be approached via Rune Fixes and talent adjustments. It’s an easy fix and Arms truly needs the help and deserves it.
Everyone looks good in their highlights. I can post some clips where i legit 1v4 people looking like a god then a moment later im fighting a shaman and I cant land a hit so no rage and im a fish outa water.
Luckily you dont have to deal with warriors hardest counter. But sweet highlights
a 100 rage execute on 0 armor does about 5k, a 1.0 sec starfire does 10k
Good to see you ignored the buff suggestion entirely.
also, its very easy to give Arms an identity. I did in my original post.
As did I in my post, but the SoD devs have shown patent indifference to that fact.
I believe they have an issue with how the baseline talent trees are set up.
Fury has Death Wish and Flurry. A 30% damage boost and a 30% aspeed boost.
Arms has Sweeping Strikes. A limited 5 hit cleave effect.
The buffs they would have to give Arms to be comparable to Fury would need to be systemic, and go beyond what THEY feel they can accomplish with Runes alone.
At the very least they can just buff Mortal Strike to either increase weapon damage or add an effect like “also applies rend” or “also applies 2 stacks of sunder armor”.
It’s an absolute joke that mortal strike is still in this state.
Epic video bro. I love how you started with a BG clip because last time someone was saying ‘open world is a different story try doing this in a BG’ lol
