The nerfs to fury are needed, but I wish it was done in a way that didn’t impact their already middle-of-the-road boss damage.
I’m scared these changes are pushing us towards arms, why am I scared?
Arms is overloaded with rotational button bloat and cringe design.
I love warrior, always have, fury and prot are fun, arms is…sometimes playable.
I get that there are some diehard arms fan out there, you’re not wrong for liking it, I have enjoyed arms before, you’re just definitely in the minority right now. More than any other class, arms feels like it regressed about 15 years.
Arms has problems still that were fixed on other specs many years ago, having 11 rotational buttons to keybind for single target is insane, having cooldown reduction that desyncs your cooldowns is insane.
I have enjoyed arms in the past but since shadowlands it’s kind of been the posterboy for classic design in retail, with so many classic abilities returned to fill up our bars and make the spec less fluid to play overall.
Moving from ST to aoe as fury we press whirlwind, great, fun, nice.
Moving from ST to aoe as arms, depending on talents, we include, whirlwind, cleave thunder clap, and sweeping strikes, making an already bloated rotation go through the roof.
Many players who play multiple classes/specs like to bind similar abilities to similar keybinds across classes and this works fantastically for most classes in the game, consider a frequently pressed aoe button, something like crash lightling, spinning crane kick, divine storm - fury has whirlwind, arms has whirlwind, thunder clap, and cleave, all fulfilling the same purpose in the rotation. Where in any class would you fit an additional 2 buttons that do identical things? Consider even just respeccing from fury to arms, does your whirlwind stay on the same bind? For me it doesn’t, thunder clap goes there because it fits the use case more cleanly, they’re functionally the same button as addressed in the fury mountain thane talents, but wait, we still have to bind whirlwind and cleave.
Thunder clap and rend is another pain point, on an already bloated bar, making thunder clap apply rend in aoe is nice, but it’d be great to see thunder clap do damage to the primary target equivalent to rend, having to have both on your bars just makes the problem worse.
The problem doesn’t just exist in aoe, slam has always sucked to press and needs to go. Rend could be nice to have around but we already have a dot and it’s only there because of classic, the spec was better though legion and bfa without rend not because rend isn’t cool, just because it added an extra keybind.
Fury is popular right now, in part because it’s overpowered, but fury will always be more popular than arms regardless of tuning if the current design direction continues simply because for the majority of people, fury is fun, and arms is not. For the same reason I hope colossus is never the correct hero talent to choose, desyncing a big hit from cooldowns feels bad, rooting yourself feels bad, needing a target for an aoe you’d rather aim yourself feels bad, the design of arms plummeted with the success of classic and has so far not recovered.
For people who care about and derive fun in this game from performing well and optimising their character, making fury worse than arms takes away from the fun for the majority of dps warrior players. I’m not saying don’t nerf fury, I’m not saying never let arms have its time, I’m saying start moving arms in a better direction, it’s needed a full rework since 2020. You have to ask why nobody plays this spec even when it’s good. Please address this, it’s been years.