Storm Bolt.
Tenderize.
More Overpower charges.
Less rage.
Slam is BORING. I don’t care how mechanically useful it might be, it’s a go-nowhere, do absolutely nothing ability.
Slam needs a sound and animation rework if they’re going that way with Arms.
A 30s stun will not take the role of a st rage dump.
So you want the spec to go down to 2 buttons so you end up sitting there picking your nose when you’re out of charges? Even a mop like charge system would be utterly boring due to how low it would be tuned and would tickle your target in the guise of keeping you busy doing sweet stuff all.
The fact that you’re so confidently wrong is hilarious. Your suggestions for replacements do nothing but dumb it down even further too. Maybe don’t get into game design with ideas like that.
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IMO the way to make slam feel good is to give a bit more visual flair and a chunky more obvious sound effect.
The new talents that support slam seem to make it a much better button to press than ever was before. If they could support that with better visual and sound design, it would add to the desire to wanting to press it.
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Arms is still too split between aoe and single target where other specs are not.
E. G. Unholy is getting a talent to make their main attack, scourge strike, act like chain lighting.
Arms should not have a huge variance in aoe, cleave and deal single target damage based on talents.
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Well I like Slam and I understand that I shouldn’t be able to Mortal Strike all day…I miss Double Mortal Strike from Shadowlands.
And yet those other specs are clamouring for any crumb of split between their ST and AoE buttons. It’s not really a strength that you think it is for your ST rotation to also be your AoE rotation.
By that same vein, AoE shouldn’t be something you need to talent into to actually make work from a base level, Cleave should be baseline for Arms and replace Whirlwind entirely.
Like a lot of things, I think this is a matter of degrees. As I said previously, Arms currently has nine dedicated multitarget talent nodes, which is a lot.
- Fury has four, which feels a lot more comfortable than the two it had previously. The issue is that if you have too many, and there’s no real choice encouraging you from always taking all of them together, which limits the amount of choices left.
I don’t want to gut Arms’ multitarget talents, but I think it could comfortably drop two, and multitarget will still be well represented by the remaining seven.
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Yeah there’s a fair amount of talents that effect AoE somewhat minor amounts in their scaling per target or majorly of which I count 11.
Storm of Swords/Fervor of Battle
Dreadnaught
Cleave
Broad Strokes
Crushing Combo
Improved Sweeping Strikes/Powerful Momentum
Collateral Damage
Merciless Bonegrinder
Bladestorm
Mortal Wounds
Bloodsurge (would assume it’s ‘chance’ is per target and doesn’t have a lockout, but who knows with such a vague tooltip, that’s why i’d include it here too anyway)
Taking out the ones that are also ST upgrades you would probably almost always take or are sharing a choice node between a ST option in some cases where it’s barely a loss in the case of Just Warming Up/Broad Strokes. I also wouldn’t include Bladestorm in the below due to it’s a lock in for Slayer and it’s extension of CS does buff it’s damage value for ST.
That leaves us with what 5 that you’d actively go out of your way for?
Storm of Swords/Fervor of Battle as a choice over Bloodsurge (let’s face it you’re taking FoB for that Colat Dmg synergy always at 3+ targets).
Cleave
Improved Sweeping Strikes/Powerful Momentum
Collateral Damage
Merciless Bonegrinder
Out of those 5 I’d say the only stand out is Cleave which needs to go baseline which it still boggles the mind that it is not with how badly Whirlwind is tuned against it since Whirlwind is unable to proc Deep Wounds via Mortal Wounds nor is it able to proc Reap the Storm for Slayer like Cleave is able to.
I still don’t see the potential for any AoE build to utilise WW over Cleave for either hero talent, large add wave spawns as a last ditch filler for slayer if you’re speccing pure ST sure, but outside of that? no chance.
This doesn’t seem all that farfetched to go out of your way for as you’d only really drop a couple of different talents that wouldn’t make much of a difference in a M+ environment, namely the execute phase talents like Fatality/EP/Massacre which are already dropped in retail builds too based around keys.
Now that’s not to say the tree is perfect, there’s definitely some questionable things that need to be ironed out like how in the world gating Finishing Blows behind Collateral Damage was thought of to be a good idea 
.
It’s not about how many you go out of your way for, its about how many you expect to take in any multitarget situation and how other choices compete against them (if they do at all). The nature of multitarget damage is that any choice between a single target and multitarget enhancement is typically no choice at all.
Again, I have no problem with the majority of Arms’ multitarget capabilities, it just has
a few more dedicated multitarget talents than it needs and paring down just a couple of them would open up more potential for customization and variety. It would also help mitigate the “dropping all your ST for multitarget” problem that a lot of specs have.
It actually scales its proc rate based on the number of targets affected so that while you do get more rage over time from multiple targets, it’s not a directly linear increase.
For M+ yes i’d agree, for Raid it’s a little more nuanced and really balances out based on who in your raid loses the least to be able to blast the adds, you can still swap out a few low ST points to get a medium amount of MT.
Hence why most Arms raid builds whenever there’s AoE involved just tend to switch 1-2 points from Bloodborn into Cleave and potentially also Improved Sweeping Strikes if they’re staying Slayer.
Even in the Beta build for a raid AoE build as either hero talent you’ll probably end up just swapping out a point or two into Cleave and Dreadnaught if you haven’t already specced into it to begin with. At most you’re probably switching out of a lower ST node again so it’s not a major loss if at all.
I feel like these tradeoffs are fine to a degree as you’re only ever really going hard AoE if 1. you’re assigned to do so for your raid because that’s what the fight dictates, or 2. for M+ where it enables a type of build diversity so you’re not just playing exactly like you would in a raid with just one target.
I still stand on the opinion that Cleave should replace WW outright for Arms though, none of this 1 talent point investment nonsense and WW not interacting with half the AoE toolkit that Cleave interacts with.
You’re absolutely right, although that’s more due to the fact that Arms AoE is more drawn out than Fury’s, but you can’t just look at one content type, right? You have to evaluate the whole board.
- Let’s also not forget that many of these new talents are related to cleaving two targets (not the talent), which increases their likely use-case in raid.
Again, you don’t make bad points, but none of this is justification for having more than double the amount of dedicated multitarget nodes than Fury or most other specializations have. It is the definition of excessive, and the talents I’d like to nix aren’t even particularly important anyway. I wouldn’t mind Cleave being baseline (aside from the devs not wanting to make a whole lot of things baseline), but the talents I’m looking at are already problematic:
- Crushing Combo reduces the cooldown of an ability we already press every 3 GCDs, which constricts the rotation and introduces another buff tracking problem due to its unique duration (you want to use Bladestorm during Colossus Smash, but after Crushing Combo).
- Broad Strokes doesn’t work with Sweeping Strikes whatsoever, introducing needlessly unintuitive desync of two cooldowns which you would think should be aligned. I’m not against more charges of Sweeping Strikes, but that could just as easily be budgeted elsewhere (like into Improved Sweeping Strikes).
While these could probably be salvaged, I am confident that less problematic bonuses which have similar or even more gameplay value can also be found.
Yeah This one is a little weird to me, I get why it was implemented as an AoE alternative to Press the Advantage since it’s basically Blademaster’s Torment renamed and tagged onto CS instead of Avatar. The whole compressed CD aspect also isn’t exactly that good? Yeah it definitely doesn’t mesh well with Bladestorm if you’ve gone 1 further with Merc Bonegrinder but that isn’t a problem without MB as much since you’d opt to Bladestorm in the last 1-2 seconds of CS to just extend it pack health pending.
It could definitely be removed and Press the Advantage could be retooled to be your next 3 Mortal Strikes or Cleaves if it hits 3+ targets so it also has AoE value in being able to force tact procs for Master Tactician, easily forcing dreadnaught resets/opportunist buffs in AoE situations between Cleave/MS if no MS resets. The 3+ target condition for cleave being added to PtA is so that it doesn’t force it’s way into ST if your MS doesn’t reset from ExhilBlows/BattleLord.
This is probably just a poor coding set-up. They maybe had a previous version where it just removed SS as a button and made CS auto cast SS which ideally should be what this talent is. Retool it to the following.
Your Sweeping Strikes is now passive, Automatically gain 12 stacks of Sweeping Strikes when you cast Colossus Smash. Then have it interact with the the other sweeping strikes talents as normal granting additional stacks etc.
Sure this just ends up being minor QoL about not needing to spend the additional half GCD for Sweeping Strikes at a loss of CS generating 15 rage which is a fair enough trade off whenever you’ve got additional targets to cleave. But it would also fix the wonky order of operations you can get around it’s currently buggy implementation. It would also fix player’s complaints about SS being on the GCD since they always cast it with CS almost always so might as well double down on it since they said they wanted to remove bloated b2b cd casts as apart of their simplification of specs.
Not that anyone would really miss hard casting SS but then it would be there as an option for times players want them desynced by just not talenting into it.
The bug of it putting Sweeping Strikes on CD is, but the talent explicitly states that the effect doesn’t allow you to go over 12 (18 talented) charges of Sweeping Strikes, in effect disallowing you from using the two cooldowns together - Sweep grants 12/18 charges, so if you end up using Sweep and CS within ~10 seconds of one another, you’re going to end up munching charges, which is horrible UX.
- My presumption is that there’s a fear players would be unable to spend upwards 24 charges in 30 seconds, when you also include GCD and channel time.
They could probably fix it, but again, I don’t think the talent is inherently necessary for anything, considering how much easier Sweeping Strikes should be to manage now.
Yes I’m aware of the bug of the skill, however the followup to what you quoted fixes that situation by making the bug a feature and not allowing for the manual casting of Sweeping Strikes and instead make it just cast with CS.
In 2+ target situations you’ll almost always utilise all charges unless it’s potentially overlapping with a Bladestorm window every ~60s for Slayer and 90s for Colossus assuming CS’s CD still stays around ~30s with AM as with no haste the 1.5s GCD would mean 18*1.5= 27s of active SS uptime.
Of course haste would compress these values and provide a somewhat similar downtime of 2~3 gcds between each CS cast that’s not buffed via Sweeping Strikes if also talenting into Improved Sweeping Strikes.
Now it’s move to a QoL talent and not one that’s ‘mandatory’ more just a nice to have over the rage gen option which also seems pretty minor if at all of an increase to pick pathing wise while you go to the followups.
Or just remove it as a talent, remove sweeping strikes as a button press entirely and just add it as a passive to Colossus Smash.
Slam sucks.
I get triple and quatruple MS procs all the time.
In Shadowlands there was a way to get two Mortal Strike to swing in one GCD. It is different than todays streak of Mortal Strikes.
You are right that was cool too.
Is it though? It’s doing exactly what it needs to do as a single target last resort rage dump that acts as a filler when nothing else is available.
It’s not meant to be anything more than that at all.
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