Arms Rotation in Beta?

[Keltas]

Rend being back feels like it was forced to make the talent row reasonable and to appease the old school warriors who have lost so much.

It really doesn't fit in the new arms at all though. They wanted this new arms to be "Hard and slow hits". Bringing back rend just makes it look like they've already realized having solely huge hits was absurd in PvP and boring in PvE. (Plus, it makes me fear damage will all end up getting baked into rend, to prevent burst 1 shots.)

[Aeno]

Rend being back feels like it was forced to make the talent row reasonable and to appease the old school warriors who have lost so much.

It really doesn't fit in the new arms at all though. They wanted this new arms to be "Hard and slow hits", and bringing back rend just makes it look like they've already realized having solely huge hits was absurd in PvP and boring in PvE. (Plus, it makes me fear damage will all end up getting baked into rend, so prevent burst 1 shots.)

Rend/Sudden Death also give you a reason to not nod off when you are spamming your 1, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 3, 3, 3 repeat.

[Keltas]

Rend/Sudden Death also give you a reason to not nod off when you are spamming your 1, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 3, 3, 3 repeat.

Except sudden death is a talent, and rend is applied literally once every 18 seconds. Rend also has absolutely no interaction with anything else. You apply it, and you're done.

[Aeno]

Except sudden death is a talent, and rend is applied literally once every 18 seconds. Rend also has absolutely no interaction with anything else. You apply it, and you're done.

Oh I know, but with so much rage generation that Arms has there is almost no point to taking the other two choices.

And it's not my ideas. Blizz (whoever thought of the changes) just thinks that it will help.

[Nitromonger]

Bajheera's dramatic recreation of Arms on beta I realize that there are changes that haven't hit the beta builds yet, but this is pretty accurate. Skip to around 50-seconds if you want to skip the arena match.

[Archimtiros]

Oh I know, but with so much rage generation that Arms has there is almost no point to taking the other two choices.

And it's not my ideas. Blizz (whoever thought of the changes) just thinks that it will help.

Wut? So much rage generation?

Arms rage generation is shit. Its so shit they had to buff it by 20% and it still has copious amounts of downtime.

Of course this is more an issue with the high rage costs on... everything, but still. The only talent that is even moderately useful atm is the Slam talent because its our only cheap filler. We don't even know how Sudden Death works yet (with the variable rage cost on Execute, or its proc rate), and the Rage from Rend talent isn't nearly enough to keep up with the heavy cost on fillers.

These talents were introduced as a way to introduce a bit more depth in specs that are sorely lacking it atm, it is also a very early look and I'd wait until the next round of patch notes or a beta build until we make any kind of determination.

[Secondwind]

Well adding rend and increasing rage gen seems to have dropped wait time to 23%, which is a pretty major difference from the 50% on beta currently. Taste for Blood is kind of bad, it drops the wait time by about 3% to 20%, and boosts dps by about that same 3%. Slam is a slightly better dps gain (about double what Taste for Blood grants), but fills a lot more GCDs. Even with suboptimal usage and just having it straight up replace whirlwind in use, it cuts wait time in half. Optimizing the action list some more by waiting to let stacks drop or encouraging rend usage between Slams so the stacks drop in between. Or even encouraging slam at all times (I literally just replaced Whirlwind with slam, so it tries to spam several in a CS window... which I don't think is the most efficient use of it at the moment). Optimizing those things to get more of the cheap efficient slams could potentially gcd cap Arms and make it an even bigger dps boost.

It's impossible to judge Sudden Death without knowing the proc rate though. I don't know how high Collision put it in Simcraft, but using his implementation SD has about the same downtime as TFB, but is a solid 1k dps over the (unoptimized) Slam rotation, that's with the proc rate being low enough to be used ~every 17 seconds (so I'm guessing 10-15%)

[Leih]

So spent some decent amount of time with the new build's Arms spec.

They really have to make Slam baseline, and give us a choice between TFB (buffed a bit, cause 3 rage is a bit... yeah), SD and [something else] for Arms.

Trying out different ways of playing Arms with the 3 new talents, seemed like having Slam in the rotation certainly feels a lot better. There's still the odd dead global, but that's acceptable when it's now and then and not constantly. It's a big improvement over the last build.

But the other two talents make the spec pretty much as boring to play as it was last build. It's barely a change, aside from the slightly smoother rage generation. Without baseline slam I wouldn't want to pick either of those two talents because I'd just be BORED.

I'd like to see Whirlwind going away (mostly for theme reasons), Slam to be made baseline, and the level 45 talents being some kind of choice between Rend Interaction (TFB), a proc to watch for (SD) or a new Passive or something like that in the third slot.

If we had Slam AND Sudden Death (a spammable ability, and a proc) then Arms would at least start to feel like it's in a decent place. That's my opinion after trying it out today.

[Archangel Tyrael]

My God what have they done....

[Secondwind]

I'd like to see Whirlwind going away (mostly for theme reasons), Slam to be made baseline, and the level 45 talents being some kind of choice between Rend Interaction (TFB), a proc to watch for (SD) or a new Passive or something like that in the third slot.

Like I said over in the other thread, what I'd like to see is the three talents be:

Taste for Blood: Rend procs overpower on a 5s ICD. Overpower hits for X% weapon damage with 60% increased crit chance, generates rage when used.
Sudden Death: Procs an Execute with the first 10 rage free, allows spending up to 20 rage for additional damage.
Wall of Blades: Whirlwind deals additional damage to primary target and is now affected by mastery.

Overpower and Whirlwind both gain mastery scaling to avoid any weird issues where past X mastery Sudden Death is the only viable talent. Taste for Blood proccing Rend is practically a tradition, and having it as a regularly usable rage building attack helps make it the talent used for filling the maximum number of GCDs. Sudden Death is the Sudden Death we all know and love, but with above 20% execute being restricted to avoid the 200k instagib crits. Wall of Blades makes the current default rotation an option. If you like a slower rotation with more downtime and high free AoE damage, Wall of Blades is where it's add.

[Leih]

Wall of Blades makes the current default rotation an option. If you like a slower rotation with more downtime and high free AoE damage, Wall of Blades is where it's add.

I could get behind that setup provided it was certain that the tuning for 'Wall of Blades' made it an inferior DPS rotation to the other two options (for PVE). I would just be worried that if there was an actual TALENT like that we'd run the risk of being forced to play the slow empty boring rotation because in some set of circumstances or gear level it starts parsing higher DPS than the regular rotation. Would make me cry.

[Secondwind]

I could get behind that setup provided it was certain that the tuning for 'Wall of Blades' made it an inferior DPS rotation to the other two options (for PVE). I would just be worried that if there was an actual TALENT like that we'd run the risk of being forced to play the slow empty boring rotation because in some set of circumstances or gear level it starts parsing higher DPS than the regular rotation. Would make me cry.

The whole point of the talent tier is to give options to change up the rotation. They should all be tunable within a reasonable number of each other. It's a much easier choice to tune to be equal than SMF vs TG for example. I'd imagine they could get them within a couple hundred dps of each other, rounding error effectively.

[Leih]

Sure, in theory.

In practice, that rarely happens that we can freely pick which one from a row we want to use. In any tier with 3 DPS increases, it'll be math'd out until one of them is picked as the highest DPS on a given fight, and then if you don't use it you're not being optimal.

If there was a talent that forced us to spend most of our time doing nothing and having the worst rotation that's ever been in the game since TBC days, I would be very unhappy if it parsed out as being the optimal spec on a bunch of Mythic fights.

If they want to give people the option of using the slow, horribly boring but new player friendly empty GCD rotation, make it a glyph or something so it can be tuned as deliberately less DPS than the more interesting rotation (like they had intended with the CS glyph at the start of beta).

[Secondwind]

Sure, in theory.

In practice, that rarely happens that we can freely pick which one from a row we want to use. In any tier with 3 DPS increases, it'll be math'd out until one of them is picked as the highest DPS on a given fight, and then if you don't use it you're not being optimal.

If there was a talent that forced us to spend most of our time doing nothing and having the worst rotation that's ever been in the game since TBC days, I would be very unhappy if it parsed out as being the optimal spec on a bunch of Mythic fights.

If they want to give people the option of using the slow, horribly boring but new player friendly empty GCD rotation, make it a glyph or something so it can be tuned as deliberately less DPS than the more interesting rotation (like they had intended with the CS glyph at the start of beta).

Depends. How do you feel about Arms on the beta right now? Particularly with the Sudden Death talent.

Because with the addition of Rend, reduction of CS rage cost, and boost of rage gen, Arms is down to about 25% wait time (compared to the 50%+ a few builds back). Making Slam baseline would take that down to 5-10%. In the case of the talents I outlined, TFB would reduce that wait time further (making it basically always 0% wait time, and making when you time your overpower in relation to slams a big factor in skill cap). Sudden Death would leave it virtually untouched, maybe increasing slightly (so say 10-15%). Wall of Blades would revert the wait time to where it is on the current build (around 25%). In no case would the wait time get so bad as it was a couple builds back, which is what you seem to be afraid of.

Edit: Though now that I think of it, a Whirlwind based talent would probably be tuned lower intentionally for single target just because of the great advantage it would give on cleave fights.

[Leih]

I'd still greatly prefer if they'd just make a build with using Slam be the standard regardless of which talent you picked. I like being GCD capped as a melee DPS, and not having buttons to hit kind of sucks. The wait time with Slam isn't quite GCD cap, but I can live with it, it's close enough. Arms with Sudden Death I still find really boring in current build, still way too many empty gaps for my liking.

I guess other people may feel different, but one empty GCD in every four is just a bit too much for me to enjoy the gameplay. At least with some other classes, like paladins, you have some utility and stuff you can potentially toss around in those empty GCDs. But Warriors not so much. I really want to be hitting buttons.

You're right about the cleave thing though. Any fight with cleave would put a whirlwind talent like that miles ahead compared to not having it in your rotation. Maybe that'd solve it, but also possible they might overlook the fact until most of the tier is over!

[Deleted]

Bajheera's dramatic recreation of Arms on beta I realize that there are changes that haven't hit the beta builds yet, but this is pretty accurate. Skip to around 50-seconds if you want to skip the arena match.

Aye that was pretty much my reaction when I was checking out Arms.

[Nightstalker]

how much has changed in terms of rating priority?
multistrike still on top?
how much will the downtime change with stacking crit?

imo they shouldn't stick to 30 rage per whitehit (noncrit). Depending on situation you might be dumping really early. Better lower costs and gain a bit.

[Secondwind]

how much has changed in terms of rating priority?

Last I checked, Multistrike was firmly in the middle. Crit/Mastery were on top, with Mastery edging out usually (varied by which talent was chosen). Versatility is in 4th place, and Haste fell from almost matching Multistrike all the way down to like 20% below versatility due to a rating change (which I still don't understand why happened. It was in a perfect place, and then they neuter it?!)