Let me throw out some spitball generative ideas to set the table. I’ll then ask, with the examples below in mind, how you’d like shield usability to proceed in the Arms spec (see end).
- When Arms has a two-hander equipped, it has access to Mortal Strike, Whirlwind, and Overpower per usual.
- When Arms has a shield equipped, it instead has access to Shield Bash, Revenge, and Devastate, respectively.
- Devastate should gain some synergy with Shield Bash along the line’s of Overpower’s with Mortal Strike or Prot’s normal interaction between Shield Bash and Devastate, Revenge, and Thunder Clap; Revenge should gain some synergy with blocking/parrying or the other two; or both.
Contexts:
- Shield dancing would still be a DPS loss, especially in single-target — just not a huge one.
- I don’t think there’s anything to be done to make sword and board fit well with Fury even if it replace Raging Blow, if only due to its being GCD-locked. That’s why this is asking about Arms alone for now.
Surrounding changes:
- Swapping weapons may now be done off the global cooldown, somewhat. Swapping weapons will extend the existing global delay by half a GCD, but can now queue properly to be done at soonest end of animation lock regardless of the existing GCD.
- To compete with what would then be Die by the Sword’s greater synergy with shield-dancing if Revenge is given on-parry free-cast procs or the like, we’d want to add a bit of (especially, priority-target) damage-incentive for sticking with a two-hander for it, such as either hastened auto-attacks on parry or a portion of auto-attack damage on damage mitigated, up to a frequency cap.
That’s all.
With the scope of the above in mind — though one needn’t limit their imaginations to that; you can imagine shield usage “more smoothly integrated” in any number of ways — let’s try those questions:
- Would you prefer to see shield usage better accommodated in Arms, possibly even become an infrequent but well known part of Arms play?
- Would you prefer to see shield usage better accommodated insofar as making it “less clunky” (better queuing, less punishing GCD costs over the swap to and from), but remain just as situational as now?
- Would you prefer to keep shield usability exactly as is?
- Would you prefer to see shield skills removed from Arms entirely?