dont know when it was that arms became a bleed spec but honestly arms warrior mastery is so boring. Needs to be changed back to what it was in WOD or Legion where mastery would give you a chance for your attacks to hit twice anyone else agree ty
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Like, vanilla.
Legion rotted warrior players’ brains into thinking it’s a zugzug big crit spec, but it’s always been very bleed centric with imp rend and deep wounds being in the arms tree.
Never as bleed focused as assa or feral, but still very much a bleed spec.
Arms mastery is fine, it’s such an easy hoop for what is effectively just a damage mod stat to differentiate from Crit (Chance for double damage), Haste (More faster damage), Vers (More Flat damage done and reduced damage taken), where Arms master just sits as a More Flat Damage done while a target is bleeding.
Other classes just have + damage type, or + damage while X masteries.
Strikes of Opportunity is coming back with Slayer’s first passive anyway.
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I always felt like “Martial Prowess” should be Arms’s mastery. Were you stack mastery to increase the damage of overpower and the overpower buff. I also think Cleave should replace Whirlwind much like how Revenge does so for Prot. This way you can have talents that build more around stacking mastery and unleashing “big hits,” and talents that are more focused on doing consistent damage through bleeds and using your abilities regardless of overpower buff stacks.
Bleeds were always secondary in terms of damage for Warriors since Vanilla. Rend’s damage was really low, and Deep Wounds was a prerequisite to get Impale, which was what Warriors were actually aiming for. So, Arms has always been a “zug zug” crit spec, because back in those days, Crit was our best secondary stat outside of Armor Penetration in TBC/Wrath and Mastery in WoD. Infact, if memory serves me, back in WoD beta they had brought back Rend after it was removed in MoP because you could do nearly maximum DPS as Arms by macroing all your skills to one button. So, Rend was added to prevent that from happening by giving the rotation a bit more interaction.
Personally, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having bleeds, especially ones that are auto applied and don’t necessarily have to be maintained. I’m just not a big fan of them contributing to a significant portion of our damage and could greatly negatively impact dps if a player decided to skip out on utilizing them.
Edit: Grammar and wording.
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Absolutely. But they were still very present part of our damage breakdown and arms was in no way about doing huge crits compared to the actual big crit specs like fire mage, destro lock or ele sham. The advantage of crit was rage generation and deep wounds, not hitting insanely huge MS crits. What else were warriors going to stack after hitting hit and eventually expertise cap?
Outside of our objectively better stat? I mean yeah if you take the two secondary stats that were viable for warrior and ignore the better one, crit certainly does start looking pretty dominant. Sorry haste, but it just wasn’t viable for melee back then (outside of maybe combat and enh iirc who just wanted infinite hit and haste for white damage?).
The thing about warrior Bleeds back in Vanilla, it was a different time (Elementals, Undead were immune to bleeds). Yes we had rend and deep wounds, we also had Impale which our crits also left bleeds. It was small sustain damage but Arms was about big hits in the past, we were a burst spec as well. Big issue is either to many complained about our Bursts (pvp complaining) or Blizzard tried to remove our burst.
In Warlords, our damage was focused just into Mortal Strikes and that has continued since then where Mortal Strike is our biggest damage ability where our smaller abilities enhance it. So no, we aren’t really a focus of Bleeds, the Arms Bleeds is there to make us have sustain damage till we hit our other abilities in between since they changed the mastery in what it is.
It really wasn’t.
Unless you mean fully raid geared endgame warriors doing big numbers because we scaled the best.
If you wanted big crits, you went something like PoM pyro mage.
Arms was always about big hits, that’s why it had good burst and mediocre sustained DPS. Hence, why back in the day you would rarely see any Arms Warriors in end game content outside of PvP. This of course was mainly due to its limited move set and cooldown on abilities. However, later on in WoW’s life, Blizzard made it their mission, with all DPS specs, to be competitive at least from a PvE standpoint.
Deep wounds, Impale, Poleaxe Specialization, Wrecking Crew, Flurry, and more all relied on landing critical strikes. From what I can remember, no other DPS stat in the game had as big of an impacted to Arms abilities, outside of the aforementioned Armor Penetration, and Mastery in WoD. Haste, pre WoD Mastery (and after), Versatility, and even Multistrike all paled in comparison.
Rend’s damage was negligible, and it didn’t really serve a purpose outside of keeping Rogues from re-stealthing. Later on, it became mandatory thanks to Blood Frenzy and Taste for Blood being added to the game. However, bleeds weren’t spread around like they are now, because they weren’t that important damage wise.
On a side note, I think it was during Cataclysm when Blizzard had introduced Deep Wounds “rolling” damage, and promptly nerfed it. Meanwhile, Rend was only applied via tab target during WoD because of Taste for Blood rage generation talent, which we desperately needed because rage generation was pretty bad, and our main AoE/Rage dump ability was Whirlwind.
In any event, my point to this wall of text is, Arms Bleed Damage wasn’t as significant as it is in current day WoW. It went from being something that you sometimes applied through landing crits or for things like Blood Frenzy/Taste for Blood, to you use Bleeds because they make up a significant portion of your damage.
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If you think Arms is a bleed spec now, you definitely didn’t play it in BFA when all of its bleeds were affected by haste. That was so nice…
Now its bleeds feel like a distant secondary mechanic.
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That was NOT nice, bfa s4 was absolutely depressing in PvP, and in PvE you literally stacked haste… playing budget feral Druid or assassination rogue is disgusting.
Arms has always been traditionally about chunky big crits, with bleeds being secondary… anyone who is saying otherwise has not played warrior for very long…
I like bleeds as a result of crits, not instead of crits.
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Reminds me of some older warrior play. Would 100% like this.
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