Arms is systematically broken

[mmomercer]

Arms is systematically broken and doesn’t reward our effort.

In its current state, arms is systematically broken. The way that our talents synergizes with each other and tactician create a system where we have exactly one choice to make while DPSing, SS or Dauntless, and this choice only really means, are you doing mythic+ or raiding? We also have to do goofy things in order to maximize our personal DPS and I'll explain both the talent choices and our rotation.

The problem starts at Anger Management.

Anger management is, far and away, the best talent on the tier. Our rage income is about 9 per second and is amplified by precise strikes and dauntless. This creates a situation where this talent doubles the frequency in which we will use our largest damage cool down. This is much better than OpS for raid damage in every way, and I'll only mention ravager to remind you what the third choice was.
We are forced to take Anger Management.

The problem now extends to Deadly Calm.

Because of the frequency in which we can Battle Cry due to our Anger Management, Deadly Calm becomes mandatory also. It's partially because Trauma and Titanic Might are so terrible, but this tier is a non-choice. This talent represents a gain of about 60 rage every 30s, and that's without Focused Rage, the next offender in this cascade of pre-determination.

With Anger Management and Deadly Calm, Focused Rage is mandatory also.

The things that Deadly Calm and Anger Management combined do to our rage resource means that we have more rage than we have global cool downs for. If you take the two best 90 and 100 talents, you will rage cap outside of execute phase without Focused Rage. This effect is especially dramatic with legendary gloves, but you don't need those to be pigeon-holed here.

Avatar

While not as grossly synergistic, I'll point out that Avatar is just the best on its tier.

Talent Summary

To summarize the talent section we have 4 mandatory talents that will never change, our only damage choice is Dauntless vs. SS based on how many targets there will be, something that rogues get as a 10 second in-combat toggle, we have to be out of combat and in a town to change.

So the talents are set in stone, let's talk about play style.

Outside of Battle Cry:

All we are doing is casting Colossus Smash into Mortal Strike, and then Slamming until Mortal Strike comes up or Tactician procs and we can Colossus Smash again. This is an OK rotation, but remember, we are rage capped without also taking Focused Rage.

My problem with this rotation, other than being forced into Focused Rage, is that since the nerf to 30%, Focused Rage is less damage per rage than Slam in all situations, including Shattered Defenses. This means that the most optimal use of our rage resource is slam every empty GCD, and then to spend all our brain power getting the most out of a severely nerfed Focused Rage.
At low rage, you’ll only use it when you know it’s going into a Shattered Defenses. When your rage is higher, you have to throw it into Mortal Strikes that hit during a Colossus Smash debuff, and when your rage is even higher you’ll pretty much be spamming it. This occurs when you get your legendary gloves, or during blood lust, and at that point you might as well bind Focused Rage to Mortal Strike and Slam (along with Battle Cry explained later).

Because of what you have to mentally keep track of to maximize the power you get from Focused Rage, while preventing a rage cap during Battle Cry, while also making sure you never miss a slam GCD, combined with the awful damage to rage ratio of Focused rage in general, the ratio of effort to reward here is Hue Mongous. This takes a ton of effort, yet the variance between a good fight for tactician procs and a bad fight for tactician procs has significantly more impact on our DPS than taking any level 75 talent at all. This level of reward for our work feels awful without gloves feels awful, and when we get gloves the mindlessness feels awful.

Battle Cry Phase:

Every exactly 30 seconds, we spend 5 seconds jamming our hardest hitting GCDs and throw out Focused Rage because it's free and might proc Tactician.
I have two problems with Battle Cry phase.

One, we have an incredibly powerful mastery attached to our Colossus Smash debuff, and yet it is a DPS loss to hold off Battle Cry for when we have that debuff up because Deadly Calm dramatically increases the chance to get Tactician to proc. It's so bad that binding Battle Cry to both Mortal Strike and Slam is not a measurable DPS decrease against raid bosses.
And two, casting focused rage 4 times without thinking about it feels wrong. It doesn't matter if your stacks will overflow, or if you're in execute phase and won't use them anyway, or are whirlwinding instead of mortal striking because there's more than 5 targets, it's just something you have to do.

Execute Phase:

I’m just adding this section to say that, I really like how execute phase is right now (other than the 4 Focused Rages during Battle Cry).

I’ll summarize my problems with Arms.

1. Anger Management, Deadly Calm, Focused Rage, Avatar are all mandatory. There’s nothing to think about or decide here.

2. We have to choose between Dauntless and SS in town, rogues have a 10s in-combat cool down to swap.

3. I personally don’t like being GCD capped while also requiring resource management to happen with abilities that are off the GCD, but everybody certainly doesn’t like how small the incremental reward is for the amount of effort required for managing something so tedious.

4. Spamming Focused Rage in Battle Cry regardless of how many stacks you have, or if you’re even going to use those stacks feels tedious and is thoughtless.

5. Because of how Tactician and Anger Management works we need to use Battle Cry as soon as it’s up with very few exceptions, having a cool down you arbitrarily use ASAP is the same as just not having a cool down. This is obvious when binding Battle Cry to Slam and Mortal Strike is not much of a detriment to our dps.

6. Eventually with gloves, some more haste, and more crit, we’ll all be approximately rage capped and will just bind Focused Rage to MS and Slam.

7. Cleave and void cleave need work, but one thing at a time.

To fix these problems a few things must happen:

1. The Anger Management -> Deadly Calm -> Focused Rage chain of synergy has to be broken somewhere. I hesitate to say this because of how heavy handed you’ve been with warriors recently, but if you don’t break this positive feedback loop I don’t think we’ll ever see a quality rotation or any choices to be made in our talents.

2. Figure out what is happening with our tier 75. Is focused rage supposed to be better or worse than slam? If it’s supposed to be worse than our rage dump, like you made it last patch, why are we required to cast it up to 50% more often than our other abilities? That’s a ton of effort for very little reward.

3. Dauntless and SS should not be mutually exclusive. We need Dauntless to keep up with single target DPS, and we need SS to keep up with dungeons. Putting this into a talent that we can’t change in mythic+ runs or during different boss phases doesn’t feel like a bonus, it feels like a sacrifice. Consider switching their tiers around if you have to or giving us SS/Dauntless in a baseline ability toggle (stances?).

[Faible]

I cried from my heart reading this

[sjsctt]

I cried from my heart reading this

Make sure you 'like' on the official forums to get more eyes on it, too.

http://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/t...?page=1#post-2

Devs look there more often than here, unfortunately.

[ReD-EyeD]

Make sure you 'like' on the official forums to get more eyes on it, too.

http://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/t...?page=1#post-2

Devs look there more often than here, unfortunately.

Can't do it as its in US forums, but yeah, I agree on pretty much everything here except Avatar vs FoB. FoB is very undervalued in my opinion. Of course its not a single target option you would choose, but there are like 90% of encounters that requires you to cleave a lot and even on ST FoB is not THAT far than Avatar.

[mmomercer]

Can't do it as its in US forums, but yeah, I agree on pretty much everything here except Avatar vs FoB. FoB is very undervalued in my opinion. Of course its not a single target option you would choose, but there are like 90% of encounters that requires you to cleave a lot and even on ST FoB is not THAT far than Avatar.

It's not "THAT" far behind Avatar but, like you said, even in a fight specifically designed for FoB, Avatar would still be better making it a non-choice.

[Opeth69]

The problem with arms is it has one strength ST dps, which its average at normally, ok/good with leg ring, and still kinda broken as hell with the gloves. Parses from wars with gloves are inflating the crap out of arms making it look far more valuable than it is, the gloves need to be reworked as they have far too big an effect on the spec for a single item.

[Casban]

I made an account to post my agreement.

Most of the problems boil down to Blizzard nerfing one playstyle instead of making others more viable. I don't see them doing anything different in the future to be honest.

[mmomercer]

Can't do it as its in US forums, but yeah, I agree on pretty much everything here except Avatar vs FoB. FoB is very undervalued in my opinion. Of course its not a single target option you would choose, but there are like 90% of encounters that requires you to cleave a lot and even on ST FoB is not THAT far than Avatar.

Feel free to cross post. I can send you the formatting if you want.

[Ferozan]

Corrupted Blood of Zakaj also contributes for this synergy.

I still think arms with an off-gcd button makes no sense. If fury, which is supposedly the fast, quick paced spec, doesn't have one (and does not need one with Rampage), i am sure arms shouldn't either.

[Certa90]

Wow, thank you for writing this, it felt really cathartic just reading it. Hit the nail on the head so hard.

[zivxx]

You almost make it sounds like Arms take any sort of effort or brain to play bro

[Deleted]

I agree with most points, the Rotation should not have been broken by DPS-nerfs. I'm fairly sure that that was by accident though and hopefully Blizz will fix it up soon.

4. Spamming Focused Rage in Battle Cry regardless of how many stacks you have, or if you’re even going to use those stacks feels tedious and is thoughtless.

I don't think this is an actual Problem. Even during Execute Phase it would be alright if 3FR-MS is then worth being consumed after instead of an Execute.

2. We have to choose between Dauntless and SS in town, rogues have a 10s in-combat cool down to swap.

We are not Rogues.

[Plasma]

This is how you get your own class nerfed. If you haven't figured it out by now, if you're not a rogue/mage/warlock, blizzard's priority to balance your specs, much less subspec talents, just isn't there. If you cry asking for synergy between talents to be broken, they will, and we won't receive compensation. Warriors are in a decent spot right now, don't try to mess it up. While I will agree the spec is clunky, I don't trust blizzard to balance it in a way that doesn't gut the class and make us feel worse off (see: any nerfs to tactician proc chance, at all). If you don't like the way the spec plays, I suggest rerolling, it likely won't be changed until the next expansion.

[Kaljurei]

I think there's also another problem that may deserve some attention i.e CS and Shattered Defenses.

If we were to forget Shattered Defenses for a second, CS uptime and using abilities inside CS actually means something. Right now however, the only actual benefit you get from CS is MS enhanced damage outside of SD if CS had not procced in the meantime, or extra CS damage when CS does not reset. So most of the uptime CS uptime is completely irrelevant. Right now however it's a bit more relevant because FR got so badly nerfed that Slam is more worth using, but is this really a proper solution?

I'm not saying remove Shattered Defenses, however Shattered Defenses is one of the major problems why Focused Rage was so good, and why nerfing Focused Rage simply led to most of the problems that we're now facing. I think we need a more thorough look at Arms, and it's not just related to only the above problems, as significant as they are.

The other problem is Cleave. Why is Cleave on a 6s CD when it buffs Whirlwind? Shouldn't it be the other way around i.e make WW buff Cleave, more targets WW hits, more Cleave damage. You could also make it such that Cleave costs 0 rage but requires more than one WW, regardless of targets hit, or a combination of the two. Reworking Void Cleave to do a % of Cleave's damage would also buff the power of the talent.

[Eninya]

Tactician is cancer to the spec because it's RNG. And you only need look at one expansion back to see how RNG can wreck our class design. Fury was pitiful because of it, yet... they had the answer in Gladiator all along and they killed that spec.

RNG is meant to enhance a spec's function or performance, not rely on it as a core mechanic to work at all. Gladiator had Shield Slam resets, but Shield Slam had a short cooldown and Devastate didn't have one at all while contributing healthy damage around Shield Slam's procedural absence in the rotation.

Slam is nothing compared to how badly we need Colossus Smash up and Shattered Defenses both for Mortal Strike, and Focused Rage x1-2 to be icing on top. The spec is designed around a single reset mechanic that actually splits in half if you need to switch targets. If Colossus Smash is on one target, but you have to hard switch to another, you lose the debuff while still having Shattered Defenses, and you still hit like a wet noodle for it.

By design, Gladiator was intended to function without resets, and they were added with such a frequency that they would eventually normalize quickly. With Arms, if you get bad RNG on the pull or during Lust, you're screwed. Gladiator never suffered from that, and it took a lot of gear for Fury to overcome that. I cannot believe they did not learn from their own success.

[Wazooty]

10sec CS cooldown and a proc rate that's reduced to allow you to get, on average, one every....1.5 CD resets? You're still excited when it happens, but you're not relying on the complete utter RNG to not do terrible dmg.

I got my mastery up to 10k earlier and was just amazed thinking that my dmg goes up by 90% based on a random ass proc that regularly goes 30 seconds without popping. Who thought such a wild, uncontrollable dichotomy would be reasonable?

[Deleted]

I knew it was you the moment I saw the Slam rotation. Thing is, the playstyle, regardless FR nerf is terrible. before nerf you really had to fuckin hit the FR button for the whole fight almost every gcd. Now, if Slam is the beneficial rotation (for me it simmed for 3-4k less but with my new gear and newfound 3rd relic maybe that changed), it's gonna be a boring slamfest.

The main problem imo starts from the reliance on CS. With such a small duration, 30sec cd and frankly a godawful artifact ability, we are 100% reliant on it being up..

MAYBE if tactician resetted both artifact and CS, then this could work but I doubt they would every do that or fix it. Fury has the priority and regardless of the extremely tedious and annoying rotation we got, nothing will be done. Just hope for a viable 7.1 fury.

[Bigbazz]

Regarding Avatar, just prior to launch there was a massive fuss about how FOB was default choice and how you would never use Avatar, and of course people with raid experience argued otherwise based on raid strategy logic, but by a few loud posters it was painted as a massive problem that Avatar was not worth using, when it turned out to be quite the contrary. My point is, there will always be a best talent and there will always be someone whining that it's the best talent.

Obviously Avatar was going to have the most use because Arms only has one strength, burst single target/cleave based around Mortal Strike/Execute. Talents being the best because they support the core design strengths is not unusual and is pretty much the same across the board of many specs. Personally my issues with Arms are the purely RNG lottery based DPS results via tactition and the massive reliance on mastery connected with that. Oh and the 2 overpowered Legendaries that made Arms the target of so much attention for its high dps ceiling, while most of us don't have and may not ever even have either of them.

[Kirbydude65]

I knew it was you the moment I saw the Slam rotation. Thing is, the playstyle, regardless FR nerf is terrible. before nerf you really had to fuckin hit the FR button for the whole fight almost every gcd. Now, if Slam is the beneficial rotation (for me it simmed for 3-4k less but with my new gear and newfound 3rd relic maybe that changed), it's gonna be a boring slamfest.

The main problem imo starts from the reliance on CS. With such a small duration, 30sec cd and frankly a godawful artifact ability, we are 100% reliant on it being up..

MAYBE if tactician resetted both artifact and CS, then this could work but I doubt they would every do that or fix it. Fury has the priority and regardless of the extremely tedious and annoying rotation we got, nothing will be done. Just hope for a viable 7.1 fury.

The issue wouldn't be so bad, if we were more concerned with the actual debuff of Colossus Smash, than we were resetting it (thanks shattered defenses!). If the goal was to just keep a signifacnt uptime on the Colossus Smash Debuff, the playstyle would be a lot less RNG based. That being said, a lot of things would have to be adjusted for that to be the case.

[Sorshen]

Where are the days when overpower reduced the CD of MS for a flowing rotation?