As a big cleave enjoyer I’m excited about the changes to cleave coming with in TWW. It’s going to replace whirlwind(ww) when you take it so it will benefit from all the ww talents which is great! I like that a spell I enjoy pressing and using will be getting strong. It also makes arms feel different from fury – not by much but a little bit helps for spec identity IMO.
However, both colossus and slayer have talents that give you some benefit when you use cleave but not whirlwind which means whirlwind will be much weaker because it will not benefit from these hero talents. This seems to be a mistake and will make cleave the correct choice.
I have two possible solutions to this issue:
Have cleave baseline replace whirlwind for arms warrior and remove the cleave talent (or change it to something else).
Include whirlwind in the hero talents and make the cleave talent a choice node to change whirlwind to cleave and some buff to whirlwind so players can have a choice.
I prefer choice 2) because giving players agency is best IMO.
Or maybe the wording on wowhead’s talent calculator just lacks whirlwind in the talents but they actually benefit from these talents.
Unless I’ve missed something I don’t think it’s literally replacing whirlwind as a button when you talent into it, it’s replacing how important it is to press over whirlwind.
Cleave is still cleave it’s your AoE Deep Wounds applicator and does more damage than whirlwind due to being on a 4.5s cooldown.
While Whirlwind ends up being your AOE rage dump without a cooldown to fill in as needed.
I’m not on beta but going off someone’s recently posted video that showed the talent text says it replaced whirlwind but I’ve not seen this information in the patch notes.
At the 9 min mark cleave says it replaced whirlwind – however the video is 13 days old so maybe it was reverted in the recent patch.
Telling people they’re stupid for spending discretionary funds how they want only makes one person here look foolish, especially when that person has the same hobby.
It does outright replace Whirlwind, with the intent of reducing the button bloat in multitarget, since Cleave is meant to be used basically anywhere you would want to Whirlwind anyway (though because of bonuses like Bonegrinder, it wasn’t actually playing out that way).
Whirlwind is meant to be weaker than Cleave, because you’re not spending a talent point on it. That said, the reason those procs work with Cleave and not Whirlwind is because of their expected frequency of use.
It’s expected that you’d spec into Cleave only in situations where you’d AoE regularly (like Mythic+), because it competes for GCDs with Mortal Strike. You might end up weaving in both abilities anyway, but it’s not requiring Mortal Strike be kept on cooldown at the expense of your multitarget damage ability.
Previously only proccing off Mortal Strike just meant there was very little reason to actually talent into Cleave since you were spending most of your GCDs/Rage on MS anyway.
Whirlwind is meant to be a less of a “regular AoE” ability and more of a “sporadic” one, with the intent that you shouldn’t need to spec into Cleave just to AoE things down on your tmog run, or a complete a trivial world quest and hero talent procs don’t really matter when things are getting one shot anyway.
You could run Whirlwind instead of Cleave in Mythic+, but it’s not really expected, because it’s a target-heavy environment. In raids, you might forgo Cleave on a fight like Painsmith with just a couple short lived waves of adds, but in that case you’re probably only pressing Whirlwind a couple times anyway, which means it wouldn’t amount to more than a couple of extra procs anyway - the majority should still come from Mortal Strike being used on cooldown.
As long as it comes with a “if it hits 3 target” requirement, this is probably fine (otherwise it would replace Slam as the single target filler), but it would lower the value of Cleave, so it’s very likely that either Cleave damage would need to be buffed or Whirlwind damage would need to be nerfed in order to balance everything out, and that may also have other follow-on balancing concerns.
TLDR:
It’s expected that you will use Cleave in situations where you press your multitarget button frequently, even at the expense of Mortal Strike.
Whirlwind is more of a catch-all for situations where you’re not pressing your multitarget button frequently, in which case 1-2 potential procs shouldn’t make any real difference, because you’re still using Mortal Strike on cooldown.
They previously did, but the problem is that you end up using both instead of one or the other, and the multitarget rotation was already pretty bloated with extra buttons.
This is a little more philosophical - some specs have a higher investment than others, mostly as a point of differentiation (not having every spec feel exactly the same as everyone else is ultimately a good thing, even if it’s not always entirely “fair”). Arms vs Fury is a perfect example of that.
Still, it isn’t like Arms is devoid of multitarget capability though - Sweeping Strikes is baseline, and Cleave is just one of several talents adding multitarget value. It’s quite possible that some fights (like Tindral) might talent into Ravager or Bladestorm to burst down adds, without taking Cleave or casting Whirlwind due to the lack of sustained multitarget.
Yeah, that aint it chief. That reasoning is pretty bad in itself when a no cooldown attack with a circular radius is replaced by a cooldown frontal cleave radius.
Not having a single no cooldown AoE rage dump is going to cause some lulls in the AoE rotation itself and also negatively effects certain talents like Fervor of Battle which only needs two targets hit for WW or Cleave so you’re not going to end up getting as much value from the free slams that you’ll also sweep to a secondary target on 2 target raid fights where Arms shined heavily.
Arms AoE now mostly just sits on Cleave 4.5s, Thunderclap 6.0s, Overpower (Dreadnaught) subject to tactician resets. RNG pending you’re going to have a decent chunk of the time where you’re either waiting for one of these attacks or you’re filling in with MS or Slam which would feel awful if you’re not under Sweeping Strikes. The lulls might not be so bad under blademaster’s torment, but then again avatar only lasts 20s unless spiteful serenity gets value for the extension is something we’d need to see final balancing to get a proper idea on.
Not having a dedicated no cooldown AoE dump just doesn’t sit right with me and doubt it’ll make the gameplay any more compelling with it’s exclusion.
I mean if a foolish person is paying just shy of DOUBLE the cost for an expansion just for a couple of days early access when it’s competitor SE does the exact same early access but provides it to everyone who pre-orders the base edition (which is even cheaper when comparing prices between the two games).
Giving any company extra monetary satisfaction for these horrible business practices that certain studios are trying to make the norm just makes others know they can get away with milking people for more because people have no self control over FOMO which has complete control over them.
that’s your preference, I’m just explaining the reasoning as it has been presented. That said, it does play well, and Mortal Strike continues to have strong value due to its priority damage and extra Colossal Might/Reap procs. My preference has always been for Cleave to replace or passively enhance Mortal Strike, but this has also proved effective.
The alternative, which was tested prior to a couple builds ago, was trying to juggle Cleave, Mortal Strike, Whirlwind, Overpower, Thunder Clap (for Rend), and/or Execute (especially as Slayer) all at the same time, and there simply are not enough GCDs to do all of that, creating a very messy rotation which was already one of the chief complaints of Dragonflight.
Yes, Cleave having a cooldown means Fervor “loses value,” but as long as the talent is still worth taking that concern is largely academic in a new expansion with completely new tuning. That said, Enduring Blow is also a viable talent, pulling double duty due to prioritizing Mortal Strike and Cleave instead of just one or the other. Frankly, with the amount of Mortal Strike resets you can get, there are times Colossus hardly cares to press Cleave or Whirlwind.
I get where you’re coming from, but to say that it won’t feel weird also focusing on single target attacks when you want to be hitting multiple targets just feels off for me.
Honestly I’m in a similar mindset, if anything Cleave is literally just an AoE mortal strike (Overpower interactions, applies deep wounds, has a cooldown). It still boggles the mind they’re deciding on it replacing Whirlwind over Mortal Strike especially now that you’re potentially going to have two abilities you may use in single target that compete for the same overpower buff (since Reap the storm for slayer seems to not require a target hit for the damage proc on cleave as far as the wowhead tooltip states) which is going to cause weird conflicts in when you want to press either button.
I think you meant Exhilarating Blows? the MS/Cleave 20% reset talent.
Still not a huge fan of this one from a gameplay perspective as it shifts you from pressing a different keybind for each action and leads to some additional moments of just spamming one button which always feels off for Arms gameplay outside of execute phase which has a different cadence to where you’d fit in attacks between Exe/OP/MS.
Some of us are fortunate enough to be in a position to be able to do whatever we want with our money as this “cost” doesn’t even register. It’s sad that you can’t seem to grasp this simple concept that people place different inherent values on things. The irony is you seem bitter against those who do choose to do this, because you either can’t or won’t. You’ll be happier when you stop worrying about how other people choose to spend their time and money, and maybe you won’t come off as such a toddler.
I think there’s something to be said for Arms remaining more of a cleave spec than a mass AoE one, and think that idea has worked out fairly well in Dragonflight even if the actual rotations didn’t. We still get a lot of multitarget value out of Bladestorm and Roar, and although bleeds have gone down a bit, the addition of Reap and Demolish also provide a great deal of AoE, even if it’s not quite as rotational as one may prefer.
I get your preference though. Pre-patch will probably feel awful, because a lot of these ideas are contingent on hero talents we don’t have access to yet, but Critcake and DanWar are streaming daily, and might help give you an idea of how the gameplay is evolving before you get a chance to test in earnest (I don’t mean this as an insult, I’ve seen your posts enough to know you have a good grasp on the game, just a suggestion since I also know you’re not interested in early access testing).
Yes Pars, and many more who have the money see through the charade and choose not to contribute to the poor practice. That “cost” easily affords many more opportunities be it nights out with close friends/family, another video game that would give you hours of entertainment. But you do you.
If Arms ends up going back to the niches of 2 target cleave, AoE Bleeds and burst AoE to differentiate itself those are fine niches. I can see some interactions from the hero talents that would help these moments too.
I mostly just keep up via checking the updated beta notes week to week that cleave/ww change though was something I entirely glossed over unless it wasn’t specific in a patch note.
Definitely will be interesting to see how it ends up when it’s live and what ends up changing mid xpac if at all following.
Also nws Archi I know how you type when you’re conveying a point so there’s hardly ever any hard feelings on this end.
This is what you don’t get… that cost doesn’t prevent me from doing any of those things. You’re mad because you can’t afford it. It’s fine, but attacking those that can is, again, childish.
You must be missing a few screws in thinking this was all personally about you and anyone having a different opinion on shadey business practices and pricing is “mad because poor.”
I just want to point out that just because something wasn’t worth the cost to you, doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth the cost to someone else. It doesn’t make them a fool if they found it to be worthwhile.
You’d probably want it to be a choice node between “Improved Whirlwind” and Cleave, since otherwise that would require spending an extra talent point to get that basic multitarget ability, something predominantly single target builds won’t want to do.
that’s your preference, I’m just explaining the reasoning as it has been presented. That said, it does play well, and Mortal Strike continues to have strong value due to its priority damage and extra Colossal Might/Reap procs. My preference has always been for Cleave to replace or passively enhance Mortal Strike, but this has also proved effective.