Arms Legion Discussion

[Bleaklord]

They better not give Arms any self healing. They should just work with making Defensive Stance good. I like the idea of Arms being able to take burst damage but relies on a healer for healing. Fury can be the sustained damage healbot that's good in duels, I really don't care.

why wouldn't you want that? Self healing and sustain are essentially core mechanics of the game at this point. We'd be essentially the ONLY ones unable to do anything. I'm not even necessarily thinking about dueling, so much as playing the majority of uninstanced gameplay...I for one like being able to play the game in general without REQUIRING a healer. Many times victory rush isn't enough to do what needs to be done, and to have a class without even a little of that functionality would make arms a broken spec. At least classes like mages can kite, but it's counterintuitive for a warrior to run in and hope for the sake of god your defensive stance mitigates enough damage that you can kill a train before it runs you over...Even hunters and rogues have healing when they never originally did, but they also have utility to support their functionality...

[Exotath]

He constantly trolls the thread don't feed him.

[HolgerDK]

He constantly trolls the thread don't feed him.

In before he tweets something ridiculous to Celestalon, who then answers him.

[Rorke]

why wouldn't you want that? Self healing and sustain are essentially core mechanics of the game at this point. We'd be essentially the ONLY ones unable to do anything. I'm not even necessarily thinking about dueling, so much as playing the majority of uninstanced gameplay...I for one like being able to play the game in general without REQUIRING a healer. Many times victory rush isn't enough to do what needs to be done, and to have a class without even a little of that functionality would make arms a broken spec. At least classes like mages can kite, but it's counterintuitive for a warrior to run in and hope for the sake of god your defensive stance mitigates enough damage that you can kill a train before it runs you over...Even hunters and rogues have healing when they never originally did, but they also have utility to support their functionality...

That's not true. We don't need self healing if we have retarded burst windows with CS where other classes would have to constantly play defensive against us or risk being globaled. Fury looks like it suffers from the fact that it has shitty burst damage where it needs its ridiculous self healing to even be remotely playable. Rogues and Hunters don't even come close to the retarded damage potential Arms has. Again, those classes have more utility and defensives, but they've never had the pressure this class has.

If Arms becomes an offensive powerhouse in PvP it doesn't need self healing. I'm okay with something like Blood Craze for PvE so you have less downtime against chain killing mobs but Arms doesn't need a relibable self heal like Crimson Vial or else that's too much.

Not only is it too much but it just makes specs feel exactly the same. This is something that Blizzard is suppoedly trying to do away with and that's why they're pruning a shit ton of defensive cd's from classes across the board as well as trimming some escape tools and mobility for classes that shouldn't have it as others should have it.

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In before he tweets something ridiculous to Celestalon, who then answers him.

I don't tweet the devs. To me its a waste of time because they're basically going to do whatever they want to do anyway. And I'm nobody important either.

[Bleaklord]

That's not true. We don't need self healing if we have retarded burst windows with CS where other classes would have to constantly play defensive against us or risk being globaled. Fury looks like it suffers from the fact that it has shitty burst damage where it needs its ridiculous self healing to even be remotely playable. Rogues and Hunters don't even come close to the retarded damage potential Arms has. Again, those classes have more utility and defensives, but they've never had the pressure this class has.

If Arms becomes an offensive powerhouse in PvP it doesn't need self healing. I'm okay with something like Blood Craze for PvE so you have less downtime against chain killing mobs but Arms doesn't need a relibable self heal like Crimson Vial or else that's too much.

Not only is it too much but it just makes specs feel exactly the same. This is something that Blizzard is suppoedly trying to do away with and that's why they're pruning a shit ton of defensive cd's from classes across the board as well as trimming some escape tools and mobility for classes that shouldn't have it as others should have it.

- - - Updated - - -



I don't tweet the devs. To me its a waste of time because they're basically going to do whatever they want to do anyway. And I'm nobody important either.

I'm not sure why you're taking the current damage output as a reliable measurement right now, when it's pretty absurdly untuned. I'm trying to go by the thought that, with tuning, we'll all be averaging a general dps, and classes with crazy burst would have a lower regular output (this seems to be how blizzard always balances things, since numbers are too important. If an arms warrior does 40% more damage than other classes because they have no other utility and they NEED that damage just to be playable, then it's too significant a difference...) Also, fury has a lot more potential than arms right now in terms of mechanics. Plenty of mobility, an aoe slow, sustain, and it still has the same reckstorm burst so idk what you mean by it doesn't--the only real downside is if you can't hit with bloodthirst you die, which is a good hard counter I feel.
Also, you say rogues and hunters don't have pressure now, but you'll still die to them REAL quick as arms, because without any healing or shield barrier, and with no way to actually stop big damage--arms drops fast and hard. Not to mention the current build iteration is pretty counterintuitive in terms of keeping uptime.

I wouldn't say having some basic functionality makes the class feel the same, i'd say it feels fair and playable to have some means of getting health back, other than hoping to land killing blow or relying entirely on a healer. It makes for a feeling of helplessness when you have no button to press to save yourself when your healer is trained and they jump on you, or in the open world when you're fighting a mob with twice as much health and hitting 3x as hard...But if you really want to feel different, then i'd say give arms a different kind of heal rather than none at all. They're just such significant mechanics, I can't see a plausible/balanced design when we have neither but other classes have both a hard stop to damage and the ability to bounce back.
If they're really trying to prune defensives, it seems like other classes still have their necessary ones. I'm just saying we need SOMETHING to stay alive as it appears right now on alpha, and i'm not the only one with this belief.

[Haveth]

X-posted from the WoW forums.

Saw someone suggest that Tactician be changed to a percentage chance per rage spent to reset colossus smash on MMO champ, that sounds like a solid idea to me, especially since there's little incentive to press anything other than Slam because of the opportunity cost of getting a CS reset.

Arms could really use another ability to spice up the rotation, if only for the sake of alleviating the slam spam that the spec has going on now. Perhaps making Overpower baseline, and returning it to a charge based system where it can stack up to say 5 charges, procced off of auto attacks, or crits or something. Have Overpower generate rage and balance the rage intake from auto attacks around it. Perhaps give slam a higher rage cost to compensate so that the chance to proc a CS remains the same per global spent (2 instead of 1, Overpower > Slam), or just tack on a % chance to proc CS on Overpower itself.
This would:
A) Put rage control in the hands of the players
B) Get rid of pressing slam so much
C) Give reliable rage gen in execute phase
D) Make the execute phase more busy than just waiting for rage
E) Provides more dynamic rotational gameplay

The talents of both Arms and Fury are so bad that they deserve entire posts by themselves, a couple of notable problem talents are:
- Avatar is a 1.5min CD and doesn't line up with anything
- Second Wind is even worse in PvE raiding than the current iteration
- DbtS is a talent, replaces D stance, and the other two talents are so useless in comparison that they will rarely be picked
- The usefulness of Mortal Combo is questionable at best, and probably will never compete with the other two talents
- Focused rage will probably never be used in PvE, it has low value per rage spent
- Titanic Might is a trap talent, especially now that CS lasts 8 seconds
- The entire 100 talent row is boring as hell

As a side note, I don't enjoy rend at all, having it probably the best in cleave situations, and perhaps single target makes me worry, especially since the other cleave/ST talent is Avatar, which as I said above doesn't line up with anything and just feels awkward to use.

Someone also mentioned that the artifact ability should be off the GCD, I haven't been given alpha access so I couldn't tell anyone either way, but it's something to look at, especially when it will be used with BS so much,

[Breccia]

- Second Wind is even worse in PvE raiding than the current iteration

I haven't seen anyone even attempt to defend this talent in any situation, other than the gaps between pulls while leveling, a situation which by its very nature self-terminates. Are there going to be a ton of dungeon'raid bosses with lengthy gaps in random/AoE damage where people will be all 'Yes! Second Wind makes me unkillable!" And, if there were such, wouldn't the talent be nerfed even...heh...worse?

[Warriorsarri]

I love Second Wind in its current iteration. On close to all of the raid testing I've done this far I'm topping the healing charts, not counting healers and tanks. The healing it does may seem trivial, as most of the healing it does could easily be covered by aoe heals, or other passive healing, but due to the fact that I don't know how the Mana situation will look at the start of Legion I put a really high value on anything that will lessen the burden on our healers.

Second Wind also plays really well into the "Play well and get rewarded" category. If you're able to avoid taking damage, which on a lot of fights is possible, you can quite easily cover your own healing needs. On Ursoc for instance I healed myself for almost half the amount of damage I took. Even if you only manage to squize in one or two ticks before the counter gets reset again that's still 6% per second, and that is far from a trivial amount.

All in all the strength of the talent is going to depend a lot on the encounter you're up against. To use the latest two encounters as examples; On Ursoc it made me almost self sufficient, where as on Nythendra it was useless due to the DoT reseting the counter constantly. On some fights the mobility provided by Bounding strides may also outweigh the self healing, but based on the raid tests that has been done this far I'll most likely use Second Wind on a fair amount of fights in the first tier of Legion.

[Caargon]

He constantly trolls the thread don't feed him.

I actually agree on that point. Healing has become too prevalent on DPS classes who have no good reason to have it. Blizzardsaid a while back that one of their goals was to reduce such self-maintenance for all non-healing specs, and assuming they actually follow through with that (HINT FCKING HINT) then it's a perfectly fine design decision. At the very least rogue/hunter heals are a major cooldown now, which is a start.

[Saycheese]

You people need to quit complaining and acting like everything you say needs to be responded to. Just because blizzard hasn't been responding to your feedback doesn't mean they aren't reading it and iterating on it, which they have said before. You think they would go through the trouble of selecting top-ranked PvE and PvP players just to ignore them? Get a grip.

[Haveth]

I love Second Wind in its current iteration. On close to all of the raid testing I've done this far I'm topping the healing charts, not counting healers and tanks. The healing it does may seem trivial, as most of the healing it does could easily be covered by aoe heals, or other passive healing, but due to the fact that I don't know how the Mana situation will look at the start of Legion I put a really high value on anything that will lessen the burden on our healers.

Second Wind also plays really well into the "Play well and get rewarded" category. If you're able to avoid taking damage, which on a lot of fights is possible, you can quite easily cover your own healing needs. On Ursoc for instance I healed myself for almost half the amount of damage I took. Even if you only manage to squize in one or two ticks before the counter gets reset again that's still 6% per second, and that is far from a trivial amount.

All in all the strength of the talent is going to depend a lot on the encounter you're up against. To use the latest two encounters as examples; On Ursoc it made me almost self sufficient, where as on Nythendra it was useless due to the DoT reseting the counter constantly. On some fights the mobility provided by Bounding strides may also outweigh the self healing, but based on the raid tests that has been done this far I'll most likely use Second Wind on a fair amount of fights in the first tier of Legion.

But compared to DdbS? Especially on progression? Time has proved that HoT effects are always inferior to instant cooldowns or instant heals, especially talent wise. Looking back at the raids in this expansion, most of the time when you'll need heals are when constant damage is going out, like Iron Reaver pounding, which healers have raid cooldowns for, or gorefiend feast phase. Nearly every fight in HFC has periodic direct damage effects that will reset the Second Wind timer. While we won't be doing HFC in legion, I don't think the raid dynamic will be much different, especially looking at fights like chromatic anomaly.

While I do see where you're coming from, and you could be healing for a decent amount over the course of the fight, it's not particularly useful healing, healing that is coming at phases where healer hots could easily pick you back up to full HP since you haven't taken damage is such a long time, it's effectively a talent designed to save healers a marginal amount of mana, and something that is more useful in 5 mans than any sort of raid setting. What I'm getting at, is that Second Wind will never save you, but DbtS very well could, and unless the healer meta changes dramatically in Legion, I don't see SW being taken much if at all because of this.

[bladeXcrasher]

-SNIP-

Best to just ignore him.

[Celarent]

Arms could really use another ability to spice up the rotation, if only for the sake of alleviating the slam spam that the spec has going on now. Perhaps making Overpower baseline

I've already suggested mechanics on this forum (not in the beta).

Overpower baseline, procs from any ability. Tactician abilities reduce Colossus Smash's cooldown by a small amount. Overpower reduces Colossus Smash's cooldown by a larger amount, and rolls over any excess reduction to a new cooldown.

Thus:

* Fishing is constantly broken up with satisfying Overpower hits
* Overpower procs mean no non-Tactician ability is ever a complete "waste"
* Colossus Smash timing is variable but no longer totally random

This is solid. It's close to the existing design. Seriously, can someone just suggest this on the beta forum? Take the credit. Let Blizzard think it came up with it. Whatever. I don't care. Irvine doesn't know how to design rotations and my favorite spec isn't fun.

[Artunias]

Arms really is bad, I hate it. Your idea would be fine, there are also plenty of other ideas that could spice it up. It DESPERATELY needs something, because my god. It's awful.

[MrMonstrosity]

Is anyone worried about the interaction between Anger Management and the new legendary wrists Manacles of Mannoroth, the Flayer?

(legendary ring) Mortal Strike now generates 10 Rage, instead of costing Rage.
(Anger Management talent) Every 10 Rage you spend reduces the remaining cooldown of Battle Cry by 1 second.

It almost feels like the legendary wrist should read "generates 30 Rage" and remove the the "instead of costing Rage" bit. Battle Cry looks like it'll play a huge damage role now and has a lot of synergy when it comes to both our T19 set and the artifact passive, Corrupted Blood of Zakajz.

Battle Cry - Lets loose a battle cry, granting 100% increased critical strike chance for 5 sec.

Corrupted Blood of Zakajz - For 5 sec after activating Battle Cry, Strom'kar radiates shadowy energy, causing all your attacks to deal an additional 20% damage as Shadow over 6 sec.

(T18 set bonus)
2P Bonus - Increases the duration of Battle Cry by 3 sec.
4P Bonus - Slam, Whirlwind, and Execute critical strike have a 20% additional chance per target hit to reset the cooldown on Colossus Smash.

The other weird thing looking at the 2p bonus is how it doesn't really synergize well with Corrupted Blood of Zakajz. I wish the passive read "while Battle Cry is active" instead of "for 5 sec after activating Battle Cry".

[Breccia]

There is no point in having ANYONE on Alpha if they are either unable to, or unwilling to, listen to feedback. Lack of time is not an excuse for lack of respect for the testers, which remains unacceptable behavior and the sole reason I will quit the game.

And now the clock's ticking. Faster than I expected, too. Hopefully more testers -> more suggestions and comments -> ANY kind of feedback.

[Bigbazz]

It does have some mild synergy, if you're critting you're generating more rage meaning you have more rage to spend, meaning you can get Battle Cry back off cooldown quicker, so 3 extra seconds of Battle Cry means you get the next Battle Cry faster. Of course it won't really work out as much of a difference, maybe in Execute phase when you're able to spend a lot more rage.

My worries have moved over the reality of needing to choose a spec and then hope it's competitive. If you decide to play Arms and the tuning causes it to be poor, you're pretty much screwed currently, reason being that Blizzard are already forecasting that you will not fully unlock your Artifact in time for Mythic progression, let alone two of them. And without the artifact talents the specs are as good as useless.

Unless they allow us to offload all our artifact power into a different artifact we will be stuck with what we have. It could go either way, we could find the best spec and go with it only to be nerfed, or we could have a Fury at the start of WOD situation where we're praying daily for a buff before raiding hits.

[MrMonstrosity]

It does have some mild synergy, if you're critting you're generating more rage meaning you have more rage to spend, meaning you can get Battle Cry back off cooldown quicker, so 3 extra seconds of Battle Cry means you get the next Battle Cry faster. Of course it won't really work out as much of a difference, maybe in Execute phase when you're able to spend a lot more rage.

My worries have moved over the reality of needing to choose a spec and then hope it's competitive. If you decide to play Arms and the tuning causes it to be poor, you're pretty much screwed currently, reason being that Blizzard are already forecasting that you will not fully unlock your Artifact in time for Mythic progression, let alone two of them. And without the artifact talents the specs are as good as useless.

Unless they allow us to offload all our artifact power into a different artifact we will be stuck with what we have. It could go either way, we could find the best spec and go with it only to be nerfed, or we could have a Fury at the start of WOD situation where we're praying daily for a buff before raiding hits.

"Bring the player not the class" --> "Bring the class and the player --> "Bring the class, player, and correct spec"

[Artunias]

"Bring the player not the class" --> "Bring the class and the player --> "Bring the class, player, and correct spec"

XD

/10char

[Archimtiros]

"Bring the player not the class" --> "Bring the class and the player --> "Bring the class, player, and correct spec"

Bring the legendary.