Bro this really isn’t as complicated as you’re making it out to be.
With 2 open runes to play around with you could make 1 give Mortal Strike an armor penetration buff or stacks with each MS hit and the other give a flat damage % increase for X amount of time after critting with MS, hell make it stackable. Those are just 2 ideas that would go long way and there are many others. And make wrecking crew increase MS damage by 20-30% up from 10.
As for AoE, you could just reduce the CD on Sweeping Strikes to 15 seconds down from 30 and increase the charges on it from 5. Its not like this would be crazy compared to what other classes are doing in AOE fights.
“expanding roles” and “they designed it to have a classic theme in mind” are two contradictory statements. Youre holding to opposite opinions at the same time.
It was never “melee focused.” It had some utility related to melee abilities, as do all hunter specs. It did always did mostly ranged damage.
Hunter melee got way more love than Arms melee… lol. Imagine if Hunter had totally dead specs while “ranged warrior” was getting more attention and was way better.
it has a tank and healing spec. Who cares about its dps spec, right? Can I use some of your logic? It has other specs so ret should have its damage cut it half? Nonsense argument. It shouldnt do 50% more damage than Arms. I guess warrior just has 2 talent trees then, while hunter was 3 (4?) and Paladin has all the different roles and is way better at all of them and also has strong PVP power tied into its PVE specs.
Arms needs to not do less dps than almost all the tanks, it shouldnt need 50% dmg to catch up to Ret which is way better at everything (raid, open world, pvp, dungeons, etc). Try again.
The main reason its so bad in PVP is it does no damage. The fact it dies easily and has little utility is icing on the cake. In vanilla, damage is the primary reason a class is strong (primarily ranged, high base damage, magic damage). The fact many of the best PVP damage dealers are also hard to kill is because SoD devs don’t own calculators. Not only are Spriests, hunters, and boomkins potentially hard to kill, but theyll obliterate you with 100% armor pen damage and instant cast ability at 30+ yards. A warrior dies easier than all of them, has less utility than all of them, and in PVP does about a quarter of the damage of all of them. Even in BiS gear.
You’re acting like parameters have to exist that are simply arbitrary. Why can’t arms be good? It’s clearly not impossible as other versions of this same game have done it.
So I’ll ask again, why can’t arms be more viable in raids?
Classic arms talent tree is jank as hell and its strength was that no one was stronger than them in dungeons and whatnot
Now everyone is stronger than arms in SoD and the only thing that would save the spec is massive buffs across the board. The problem with buffing the arms tree is that the builds that dip into arms wind up becoming stronger than arms as result, leading to… less of a reason to go deep arms.
My only experience with arms has been, coincidentally, Cataclysm, where the spec actually has a fully fleshed out talent tree and what felt like an actual identity, hence the apples to oranges comment
What solutions do I have? Not a clue – ive never touched warr in classic and wouldnt know where to begin
Arms isn’t bad at pvp. Other specs being overpowered doesn’t mean arms is underpowered.
I literally never had a problem doing well as arms.
Now fury? That’s bad at pvp (but still good for av because it’s pve). Frost mage? Terrible at pvp in sod. 2h enhance? Awful. Combat rogue? Terrible at pvp.
As for pve… Warrior still has 3.5 options between dw fury, 2h fury (weaker but viable), and deep prot (tanking or glad dps, though glad dps is much further behind)… It’s not like there’s even a rotational difference between hypothetical arms and 2h fury, either. Literally just hitting blood thirst instead of mortal strike. Oh no.
Yall cry more than any other class in the game right now and it’s disgusting and pathetic. Warrior players are largely just a collection of emo kids, upset they can’t use their moms credit card to shop at hot topic because their lives are SO hard and no one wanted to listen to their terrible poetry.
the bottom of the tree is not accessible to fury and talents/spells related to arms gameplay are also options. A 1 second starfire cast crits for 9.5k on ptr template with no debuffs from other classes. Mortal strike crits for 2.5k on a target with 0 armor. A boomkin has 54% physical mitigation. In PVP a starsurge typically does around 3-4x the dmg of a mortal strike in a trade. A starfire will almost one shot you. (so, starsurge stuns you, then you die)
Overpower, Mortal strike, and even Sweeping strikes are all abilities that could see runes enhancements or changes. Also some runes like quickstrike are useless while on the GCD as you can use raging blow because the rend rune is also useless (25 rend becomes 125 rend, yay, meanwhile moonfire & sunfire dot is critting for over 1.5k)
It would take an overall 50% boost to catch ret in a raid environment (which means ret will still do quite a bit more dps outside of raid). They’ve got to start making some steps towards fixing this as doing it all in one go will be hard. The gap is massive.
I mean yeah, you arent wrong, but i also feel like if youre going to mess with the tree, youve gotta do some work on the first half of the talents too, right?
They literally added tank rogues, tank locks, healing mages, etc to the game. The idea that they cant make Arms do similar dps to a ret paladin is completely insane.
I checked Zirene’s twitter and he acknowledge Arms isnt even a spec anymore. Cites Elemental as being the lowest DPS despite being far above Arms (Arms is last place, Ele is 2nd to last lol). Then says in another post they have no intent of making Arms playable. I.e. melee hunter gets more love than Arms warrior… okay.
PvP puts you head to head with other players. So when everyone else is doing MORE damage than Classic Era, but Arms is doing LESS (because SoD has 30% damage reduction in PvP and your Arms abilities still hit for the same amount) then that is the definition of bad.
Arms was actually my preferred build in the earlier phases. But ever since we got the PvP damage reduction, which happened mid-way through the level 50 phase, it’s been pretty bad.