The recent damage buffs from this prior Tuesday’s reset (Aug. 22) were welcomed changes. More consistent pressure feels great for the playstyle of Arms Warrior in PvP.
However, a few core issues still remain for the spec in PvP.
The first issue is everything bleed related, excluding Deep Wounds. I seriously hope I am not in the minority here, but there is hardly anything I enjoy less than playing a bleed focused Arms Warrior. I want to press abilities that deal direct damage. Main rotation should consist of Mortal Strike, Overpower and Execute. Rend is outdated for the playstyle and fantasy of an Arms Warrior. We already have Deep Wounds baked into our spec baseline and passively. We are also approaching button bloat.
-Remove Rend completely. If not, please just bake this ability into mortal strike or execute in some fashion. We already have Deep Wounds, so just buff the bleed damage a bit to compensate for the loss Rend.
Second up, I also do not enjoy playing Dragon Roar in Arms PvP. Arms should either play Spear of Bastion or Shockwave primarily instead. Dragon Roar is boring and just an extra passive high-pressure bleed in the background. This is a lesser issue to me behind Rend but still worth noting.
Lastly, can we look into ways to choice-node abilities such as Whirlwind/Thunderclap. These abilities seem to fill a similar niche. Perhaps if Rend was outright removed, Thunderclap could spread Deep Wounds in AOE?
Thoughts?
Does anyone else not enjoy Rend and this bleed focused version of Arms Warrior?
I miss season 1 of Dragonflight Arms Warrior. Pressing Mortal Strike, Overpower and Execute with Spear of Bastion and chunky crits is Arms Warrior at its perfection.
I think arms needs work for sure. I like the idea of thunderclap ww choice node or just remove ww from arms. It is such a fury ability.
I personally like rend and deepwounds because I like dots but I agree that rend does feel good to press. It’s just a dot that does more damage than mortal strike you you use it to refresh the dot.
I think deepwounds is a good nob for devs to fine tune damage and burst for arms.
I think arms needs more flow to the rotation and a consistent theme. It’s half way there with setting up for big mortal strikes but it needs to be fleshed out.
Appreciate the feedback response and I do largely agree. You hit the nail on the head. Arms fundamentally needs to function by setting up for big mortal strikes. That is the core gameplay element. Not spending a global on Rend which is a carbon copy of Deep Wounds. To also drop a big Dragon’s Roar cooldown that results in yet another passive, high-pressure bleed is a real bummer.
I don’t really get why people have a problem with arms doing bleed damage. We’ve always had rend (literally first tier in arms tree before they removed the original talent trees) and deep wounds (T3 in original tree). Obviously we shouldn’t be doing feral levels of bleeds, and we don’t, so it doesn’t seem like an issue.
I do think arms in PvP should be more focused on debuff management again though.
Bring back taste for blood and make it so we want to keep rend applied to get other benefits rather than just using it as a filler when no higher priority abilities are available.
I’d kind of like to see them shave a bunch of initial damage off of rend so it’s not something you spam, and then give us an off GCD damage rage dump, AKA heroic strike.
Roar is the only new bleed we’ve got. It’s pretty bland as far as a deep tree talent goes, just being a big AoE damage button. I’m all in favor of getting rid of it if it can be replaced by an ability that actually does something interesting. TBH I think most people would rather be running spear, but spear is extremely unreliable and nerfed in pvp.
All the hate for bleeds just kinda seems less about wanting a more well designed spec and more about just wanting big zugzug crits.
Something else that isn’t really damage profile related, but about our defensives. I’d like to see us go back to more active defensives and less % mitigation defensives. Reduce the damage penalty and mitigation bonus of defensive stance, but switch up how some of our abilities function while in D stance so you’re actually switching up how you use your kit. Take the stinky 20% magic reduction off spell reflect and lower the cooldown again. Just pressing a few buttons and taking a flat % reduced damage is so friggin’ bland. Let us actually use different weapons for different situations, ala the arms class fantasy which is completely lost these days.
I personally, do not have a problem with Arms Warrior doing bleed damage. My issue with modern-day Rend, is that it is essentially a carbon-copy of Deep Wounds. I do not enjoy the fact that Deep Wounds is applied passively through Mortal Strike, and then my next global is spent on applying Rend, which is the exact same thing. Why apply a bleed passively just to then have to apply another one actively?
It is also about opening up more talent diversity and improving our playstyle to press active abilities.
Overall, Rend in current-day play is just outdated.
You could say the same thing about basically all of our damage rotation buttons though.
I’m not gonna defend the state of the spec. It’s been a hot mess since legion.
On this we both sort of agree. Current rend is bland. But I we’re talking about how the spec could be improved. I don’t think pruning everything that is redundant in its’ current iteration would improve the spec. Overpower, Execute, MS and Slam are all very redundant. You could prune 3 of them and just have a one button rotation. But I don’t really think anyone wants that.
This was the big problem that Arms faced in WoD. We were trimmed to really have no rotation and based everything to be so Mortal Strike focused as our only button to press minus heroic strike and whirlwind that I still feel like we haven’t been fixed.
The big thing about Arms is it can’t be fixed for just PvP or we will be back to square one. If you want to fix the spec for PvP, it needs to have that PvE focus as well and that there lies the biggest problem. I do agree with some thoughts about Rend, we have a passive bleed attached through our mastery which back then was applied through critical strikes from any of our abilities.
Back in the day it felt very good to press rend in PvP, it did it’s job very well till I felt it was gutted and hasn’t been the same since. I feel like if they did a complete overhaul of the spec, that both passive bleeds like Deep wounds and Rend should compete as a talent node in the Arms tree, design pvp talents around it, giving players that choice to either have passive bleeds or a bleed that we press but do almost the same thing.
There was also the added bonus that a lot fewer classes had healing and regen baked in, so it was a lot more viable to use bleeds and kite certain specs.
In wrath, you hit a mage, rend them, and back away while bleeds break ice barrier so you don’t get frozen in place when it breaks. You bleed kite rogues, you bleed kite other warriors, you bleed kite tank specs. Because in most of these cases, the damage actually stuck.
Because bleed effects are antithetical to Arms’ role in PvP, our damage being shifted to them has impacted our ability this expansion to perform the role of locking down kills while not providing anything worthwhile in return.
Hi! just checking out the game again, would anyone mind explaining the choice to go mastery > haste and vice versa. Seems people are split between choice. Thanks!
Haste is good would consistent damage and can help you get of an extra gcd in a burst window.
Master gives you a damage amp and increases deep wounds. So it will make you hit harder in burst windows and the bleed increases your damage of you’re being kited. Damage while being kited isn’t important.
So, it comes down to math to determine what will make you do more damage in burst windows.
Side note: fury pvp is vers+mastery so having the same stats for both specs is nice.
OMG someone brought up the old Heroic Strike… BRING IT BACK IMO PLOX! Big rage spender, that’s OFF THE GCD! Sitting there rage capped just waiting for a CD when your tgt sits at 1%… so many times! It would fix so much.
