I really, really hate Deep Wounds as our mastery. It is one of the worst in the entire game and makes up 30-50% of our net DPS as an Arms warrior.
That’s trash.
17 Likes
When you say worst, do you mean worst feeling or worst mechanically?
As Arms is currently the highest dps spec in the game, and as you say, Deep Wounds
I struggle to believe it’s
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I get what you are saying OP, even tho the above posters seem to be having some kind of difficulty understanding something obvious.
Deep wounds is indeed kinda weird, it doesn’t cope well with the heavy hitting class fantasy Arms players want, and it goes more towards the bleed/dot class fantasy feel, which already belongs to rogues. Its also pretty bad that its your highest damaging ability by far, being almost 50% of your dps when you are undergeared and have your prioritys wrong. We can only hope for Shadowlands.
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Based on what i heard, its more engaging than the old arms masteries. Back then it added nothing to game play but now at least you have to keep track of deep wounds on targets.
More bookkeeping/addons for DoT management (which can never be extended, only shortened) to take into account the corruption mechanic does not make a passive spec more fun and engaging. Honestly, I think our BEST iteration was before Mastery was introduced. Wrath Arms was the absolute most fun I’ve had playing since BC gave us a reworked tree. I’d be fine if Mastery was RELATED to our bleed effects similar to how Arms functioned in Wrath.
Mastery could be something similar to Trauma (originally 30% bonus to bleeds for 1m) and Deep Wounds could be moved back to being a baseline ability tied to critical strikes. Rend could move back to being baseline as well, and back into the rotation. Arms can still feel powerful with a huge bleed effect being a source of our damage if it’s because we’re smashing something really hard and causing it to bleed, rather than just “This is my bnb button, durr sword go clang.” The entire problem with Deep Wounds currently is because it’s Fire Mage’s Ignite, but for physical damage, without the same stacking damage bonus of Ignite. It’s an inconsistently consistent ability, if you get what I mean; Doesn’t matter how hard you hit something, it’ll always do the same damage (crits and procs excluded) and will always get munched no matter what you do, because it’s stupid to NOT press MS/Execute when going through your rotation just because you can game the corruption effect by 0.5 seconds since you just proc’d an Overpower and you recovered your MS faster. Or are just smashing Execute anyway.
tl;dr If Deep Wounds will remain a bleed mastery, Blizzard should just make it a carbon copy of Ignite. I can understand part of the (admittedly misguided) class fantasy concept of smashing someone over and over with huge, heavy blows and breaking their body piece by piece, leaving them with gushing, grievous wounds and setting them up for the final blow, but I want those numbers to get bigger when I keep applying bleeds. They did before, and they were purely based on crit/damage for how much those bleeds amped up or added. It made those effects FEEL good.
Deep Wounds as it is just is a boring passive with Mastery being our literal worst stat, unless we’re doing PvP. Then it only slightly outpaces Crit.
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i got to be say is both worse feeling and mechanically.
From feeling part, no matter what content you do, the majority of your overall damage is always deep wound that continuously tick behind the scene. So i don’t get used to it since mortal strike always could hit those big numbers before this mastery deep wound mechanics introduced. So is not fun / feels good when i can’t press those big hit skill and see it score big hit.
Mechanical wise, basically what Ellywickcet says. And i not sure why there aren’t any talent/azerite that reward us for keeping deep wound uptime to 100%.
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With all the complaints toward deep wounds, you would think they would do something about it. I don’t see them changing the mastery for something else, however, maybe they could add an effect. For example: mastery also increases armor penetration or ignores armor by X amount. Correct me if I’m wrong, but bleeds ignore armor?
Warrior used to do it anyway, as sunder armor and a previous iteration of colossus smash weakened the armor of our foes!
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They will not bring back armor penetration purely because Arms Maces could get 100% ARP and absolutely trash everything in PvP. I don’t recall how it functioned in PvE.
Also, please no, no more Azerite Traits. For the love of god just bring back a damn talent tree instead. No one likes Azerite Traits. No one WANTS Azerite Traits. No one wants to spend weeks smashing their face in a 15+ keystone over and over and over for 200k Titan Residium to buy their 100% best in slot item. That’s a garbage system. I’d rather get a welfare epic here and there and smash my face against a hard raid encounter and EARN my BiS drops from content, rather than a weekly countdown timer.
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Here’s the thing about Armor Pen. Functionally it’s a “Your physical attacks do +X% more damage” stat. Which okay, in rough outline looks like a Mastery stat. But when you look closer there’s several strikes against it.
For one, Armor Pen doesn’t display as a nice simple number, you need to run a variable calculation based on your target’s armor. That sort of non-transparent benefit is something the Devs try to avoid (though goodness knows they don’t always succceed). Also Mastery stats are generally either conditional activations or only apply to a sub-set of your abilities, while Armor Pen would buff everything Arms does. That just makes it Versatility without the DR.
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Something as simple as making 75% of the deep wounds damage instantaneous would make your hits feel “chunkier” and make the gameplay feel much more satisfying.
Yes, because then Mastery literally becomes a good stat to have and not “Aww damn it, there goes my good luck roll on a Mastery/Versatility belt I didn’t even want.”
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And that runs into another two problems.
One is that the current Deep Wounds model has a nice predictable damage output. You’re expected to have 100% uptime, rarely less and never more. Putting most of the damage up-front changes the entire rotation priority to one where a Mastery activator is always your top priority and you want to squeeze as many of them in as absolutely possible.
The other is that what feels satisfying to you is to everyone else “OMGWTF why does this Warrior have so much instant burst damage DEVS PLS NERF”. Burst damage isn’t supposed to be cheap and rotational. It needs to take setup to stack debuffs or build resource or at the very least cost cooldowns. Otherwise it turns PvP into a game of rocket tag and PvE into a joke. The current design of Deep Wounds that spread the damage out over a DoT is a feature, not a bug.
I’m not trying to be a killjoy here. I’m just trying to point out that a lot of the “simple obvious” alternatives are not designs that the Devs will ever go for, and understanding why that’s true will help everyone calibrate their expectations.
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I present the offending party here: Ret Paladins.
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Ret Paladin? Let’s go down the checklist of what goes into Templar’s Verdict. Requires setup? Yes, it needs the Judgment debuff for high results. Costs resource? That too, Holy Power is a throttle on how quickly or frequently it can be used. And both the setup and the resource gen are done by cooldowns, so there’s a third limiting factor.
I mean, I know from messing around on my old Paladin alt just how much of Ret’s output is focused in TV, but I haven’t exactly seen a lot of people crying about Ret demolishing teams in PvP or being stacked to blow up priority adds in PvE. So I think TV comes in a bit under the threshold here.
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My ephemeral data is also 7+ months out of date, but I distinctly remember Ret being a major problem in PvP for me. Mostly cause they deal all their damage in a burst window, can proc free burst windows, and also have more utility than they should.
Regardless, we all have burst in our rotations every minute. It’s called Colossus Smash and Bladestorm. We sync up and use procs and dump cooldowns simultaneously to maximize them, on a rotation.
Ret demolishes casual players. Immunity+Freedom+Long, powerful Damage CD and yeah, people who don’t know what they’re doing freak out. I do almost no pvp but you don’t need to be a Gladiator to know it’s going happen every single time you run into a ret. You ride it out and don’t sit there trying to trade blows with them, and once they’re done with that nonsense, warriors win the battle of attrition every time. It’ll be even easier next expac with shattering throw back on the menu - break their bubble and suddenly Wings turns into a big “Shoot me!” sign to all the ranged nearby.
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This is true. Ret does have alot of burst, but so long as you respect it and respond accordingly to wings ret is a nonfactor in arena…especially in 3s.
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I don’t really mind deep wound the more I play in higher keys and stuff. I would like to see a small nerf to it an a small buff to MS/Execute.
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Exactly, all these people like “Ret is unstoppable!” are somehow taken by surprise every single time a bubbled paladin pops wings and starts smacking them.
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