Does arms need a new mastery?

[MattyP]

I don't know about you guys but as an arms warrior, opportunity strikes is only like 6% of my damage and that's with a 25% chance, I mean I haven't reached raiding yet but it wasn't much of my damage in DS either.

I for one wish we would get something possibly like the way the old deep wounds worked where a portion of our damage is converted into a second DoT or our mastery could up our deep wounds damage. What do you guys think, is the mastery crap or am I insane?

[Strah]

well it's pretty damn shit right now.
Even if you compare it to Retribution mastery - it works almost the same, yet the retlol one is MUCH, MUCH better.

[Kuniku]

i'd quite like if it were the same as the old weapon masteries, with different effects depending what weapon you equipped, gogo mace stun mastery for pvp :3

[ati87]

Does it mater?

Other classes and spec may have higher mastery scalling but in return they have lower crit/haste scaling.

As long as your dps is similar to other classes having better scaling with a 2e stats means nothing.

[Kaljurei]

Well for Arms, the scaling on Mastery and Haste is half that of Crit. The reason for this is pretty simple, it does the same amount of damage as it did in Cata, because of the 55% WD modifier. This needs to go up in order for Mastery to have a better scaling.

However, it will never go up as they want Haste to be a better Stat for Arms(god knows why!). But just by baking Sudden Death into autoattacks cannot increase Haste's value massively so that it becomes better than Mastery. Haste needs to have a better effect on our DPS.

You can look at Retribution. With a very simple change to Sanctity of Battle, they made Haste a wonderful stat, even better than Mastery/Crit. But this wasn't done for Arms.

You can look at Fury. Crit ties in mechanically and aesthetically to Mastery. Haste is shit as always. It's a great change but Fury is going to get real boring pretty quickly with higher levels of gear when Enrage uptimes start approaching 90%.

Arms stats effect and synergy makes no sense at all. Crit is the only thing that increases damage to an extent that it is noticeable.

There are so many easy ways where we can make the stats synergize with each other and make them much more useful towards increasing our damage. I really don't get what the Developers think of these days.

[Valdemar]

I think that they should remove Strikes of Opportunity and Sudden Death and just have the current mastery passive armor pen on it's primary skills (MS, Slam, OP, Execute) that has a respectable base value. Let's say 30%, considering that a very large portion of DK/Ret damage cannot be mitigated. After that, it has decent scaling but not scaling that's good enough to make Mastery significantly more valuable than Crit, Strength, or PvP Power.

Colossus Smash could stay in, it would just do something else, something cool. Like knock people back or nuke really hard on a medium length cooldown.



It would be like Ret's mastery in Cata, if I remember correctly. Their old mastery simply made all of their primary abilities deal additional damage as Holy damage.

[kenshiro]

my answer is 100% yes!!!!

[MattyP]

the point isnt whether or not we are competitive the point is that A) mastery as a stat sucks ass for us (and so does haste which is on fucking everything thats plate) and B) its not a fun or interesting mastery.

I dont want a new mastery so itll change my damage I want a new mastery so it is something fun or noticeable, atm its nothing, its not fun, its not exciting and it has virtually no effect on our damage. Strikes of Opportunity is nothing. All I see when i see mastery on gear is something that can be reforged to crit.

[iamthedevil]

I wish it were something more.... interesting. As it stands now it's just a bore, and weak.

[Skygoneblue]

+1 for the passive amor penetration idea. Mastery is a tough stat to work with when its value is so procky and random. Fury's Mastery is much more active and tangible (and less suceptible to RNG).

Bleeds would be great as well, but I'd wonder how an enemy is still standing after suffering through a Bloodbath use... lol

Honestly though, unrealistic as it may sound, I wish they would just get rid of the "Crit Mortal Strike / Colossus Smash = 6 second enrage" bullshit. That mechanic is the reason Crit is so damn important. It makes sense for Fury, but without the Mastery buffing it, it's much weaker for Arms (10% for 6 seconds).

If Arms' abilities were moderately buffed, and the Enrage on Crit mechanic removed, then Haste and Mastery could be prioritized better to make more use of the increased attack speed and, consequently, more Mastery procs.

(Just dreaming out loud!)

[MattyP]

I dont mind enrage being tied to crit, I personally don't want to stack haste, i prefer to swing slow but hit hard. I just wish our Mastery were either more substantial and recognizable or more exciting. Hell even something like a chance to proc bonus rage on your next mortal strike would be more interesting.

They want arms to be like a tactician and fury to be a berserker, so it could be something like when it procs your ready your next blow carefully and you get more rage from it. Then again they could just reverse the way Strikes of opportunity works and make it a set chance to occur but mastery effects the swing's damage, therefore mastery/haste arms warriors would proc more swings for higher damage while crit arms would ignore mastery and haste but have harder hitting specials.

[blackblade]

i'd quite like if it were the same as the old weapon masteries, with different effects depending what weapon you equipped, gogo mace stun mastery for pvp :3

And when your BiS in raids is a mace, tears. will. flow.

[Flaks]

It's funny because this is another on a pretty long list of terrible warrior mechanics/abilities that are being cast aside due to Blizzard stacking us with new, unnecessary and overpowered mechanics.

[Egitel]

Well for Arms, the scaling on Mastery and Haste is half that of Crit. The reason for this is pretty simple, it does the same amount of damage as it did in Cata, because of the 55% WD modifier. This needs to go up in order for Mastery to have a better scaling.

However, it will never go up as they want Haste to be a better Stat for Arms(god knows why!). But just by baking Sudden Death into autoattacks cannot increase Haste's value massively so that it becomes better than Mastery. Haste needs to have a better effect on our DPS.

You can look at Retribution. With a very simple change to Sanctity of Battle, they made Haste a wonderful stat, even better than Mastery/Crit. But this wasn't done for Arms.

You can look at Fury. Crit ties in mechanically and aesthetically to Mastery. Haste is shit as always. It's a great change but Fury is going to get real boring pretty quickly with higher levels of gear when Enrage uptimes start approaching 90%.

Arms stats effect and synergy makes no sense at all. Crit is the only thing that increases damage to an extent that it is noticeable.

There are so many easy ways where we can make the stats synergize with each other and make them much more useful towards increasing our damage. I really don't get what the Developers think of these days.

It's not that they specifically want Haste to be a better stat for Arms. They want all three off stats to be better for everyone, so that you can choose what to reforge away, and what to pick up by choice, not because it's 'better,' or 'the best'. If Blizz had their way each off stat would have an equal benefit to as the other off stats, for every class and you could just change them to fit your playstyle. The problem is, that is basically impossible with the current way things are designed, and as such we're stuck with what we have. Situations like Arms where there's only one decent off stat, and everything else is crap, or things like Fury where there are two pretty good off stats, etc. I wouldn't be surprised to see them do away with reforging, and majorly changing the way stats interact with classes and such sometime in the future. Obviously not any time soon, but yeah. GC mentioned not too long ago on Twitter that he didn't like how 'mathy' it has become, and likened to the situation before with Armor Penetration and why they got rid of that.

On the subject of what could be a better Mastery for Arms, what about if it was the same type of Mastery it currently is, but it had a set chance, and your Mastery increased the damage of the proc, rather than being set damage with increased chance? Maybe even start off with higher baseline damage to make it a more attractive stat to improve? Or maybe even like.. instead of being a set damage, it has a chance to copy a percentage of damage of the whatever the hit was that procced it? Maybe say Mortal Strike procs it, so you get a second free hit at x% of the damage that MS did? I dunno. I play Fury, not Arms, so not sure if either of those would work, or if the second one would potentially be too OP.

[nyc81991]

As long as they nerf warriors crazy Op burst I wouldn't have a problem with Arms having a better mastery.

[MattyP]

As long as they nerf warriors crazy Op burst I wouldn't have a problem with Arms having a better mastery.

Not crazy OP at all, frost mages during all of cata was crazy OP...

[Deleted]

They should change it to be like oldschool windfury totem.

[roflwaffle]

i would really like it as a bleed on crit like the old deep wounds honestly : /
it would keep crit as top prio but at least give a second secondary instead of it being all crit all the time

[Calamari]

i would really like it as a bleed on crit like the old deep wounds honestly : /
it would keep crit as top prio but at least give a second secondary instead of it being all crit all the time

I like the idea of getting back bleed-on-crit as a mastery for arms alot, even if it would also mean that crit would pull even further ahead of mastery and haste.. but so i does for Fury as well so who cares.

The Opportunistic Strikes mastery is very boring, weak and completely passive. It's a half hearted tip of the hat to the old Sword Specialization, which only had a 5% chance to proc, but when it did it hurt a ton in comparison, unlike the fish slap barrage from SoO. lt also gave rage unlike Opportunistic Strikes, which now synergise in no way whatsoever with our rotation.

Opportunistic Strikes used to be O.K. when they could proc sudden death, now the whole mastery seems dead weight and out of place for arms.

[Deleted]

It can proc from throw, making it ideal for sniping lowbies from trees.