[6.0 Guide] Arms - The 10 second master

[Warrco]

I think my biggest complaint is I feel more like a burden on my raid than a boost. Yes there are a select few fights we do really well on, but even then if it's not Thogar we're just not that amazing right now. We have shitty defensive and shitty self healing. Almost every other class just gets all these heals and what not at basically zero detriment to their dps. Our heals blow, defensive stance hurts your dps quite a bit, we have the worst move speed of any class.

It's not like you can't kill bosses with warriors, but it just feels like I would offer so much more to the raid as a number of other classes.

Only thing I can really agree with is the movement speed.

The only fight I'll honestly admit that we're one of the worst on is probably Blackhand due to the downtime one can have if the tanks are eager to move the boss a lot and very fast.

For the rest of the fights, warriors are actually very strong. With some decent gear, you'll be able to keep up with everyone else(You'll have to change spec back and forth to fury ofc.) This is becoming to much of a circle-jerk atm because arms became very strong at the end of HM. Sure we're not in the best spot, but there's spec that are suffering way more than what we are.

http://i.imgur.com/YuOjADY.png

This may give a small insight, but take it with a grain of salt.

[Archimtiros]

Yeah I understand that, Ghostcrawler's interview comes to mind "it's really refreshing to work on a game where I don't have to worry whether someone's grandmother can pick it up or not." I think the same regarding that case, as well, but I absolutely don't agree with it. If you balance towards the optimal way the specs are played (and lets be honest here there aren't dot snapshotting and advanced stuff like that for any class anymore, fire combustion isn't that advanced either if you ask me, don't even have to do trixtery things with alter time anymore) that will encourage people to try and improve themselves, this way the average player does decent damage and skilled players are hitting the roof.

Also going back to what you said on the topic of casuals don't care about balance, I agree and this is also why I don't get they balance towards the "bad" player, the bad player doesn't care anyway :P

I don't want to be a god, but I certainly don't want to be beaten by a hunter who is a lot less skilled than me, it's really annoying when you are in the 90% perncentile and the derping class above you is like 65% and still beating you by a decent margin.

Thing is, you can create simple and fun design. They are mutually exclusive. Warriors are just an outlier right now.

There are plenty of ways to make current Warrior specs work without too many tweaks too, but I'm holding out for what I suspect will be a 7.0 revamp.

[klepp0906]

It's not debatable whatsoever. It's exact, we know exactly what the nerf was, what it did and how much DPS went down by. I already went through one debate on this, I'm not having another and I don't want to write out a wall of text so here is the short version:

You can't expect rankings to get reset every time there is a buff/nerf, Arms is still good (read: generally better than Fury) in the places it was before, you can't compare rankings without looking at them very in depth due to a lot of nuance, user error, RNG, etc; and I'm not sure whats wrong with your sims or what settings you use.

I agree about the reset..... As for the rest... Debateable, as I said. And nothing's wrong with my anything. I'm the top warrior on my realm by a healthy margin. Been playing since vanilla. Not sure how what you said is relevant but like you said, it's not worth getting into here. I don't visit often enough to merit it - too busy raiding and running a guild. (And for the love of God I would like to give my darn consoles some attention sigh)

- - - Updated - - -

I mean the nerf still hurts quite a bit when you look at all the buffs almost every class got. But I agree that just the nerf to us wasn't THAT bad, but the only fight I feel like it's worth playing arms on now is Maidens. MAYBE, blast furnace. A few other fights could be close, and I don't think you're arguing this exactly, but arms feels in a real bad spot performance wise. Where as fury I feel fairly competitive on more than a few fights.

Arms is still viable on the fights you mentioned, but assuming equal skill and gear.. Your going to be pushing it trying to use it anywhere else and in some places simply shooting yourself in the foot. But we know this

- - - Updated - - -

Definitely. But people act like the sky has fallen by saying things like FURY IS SO MUCH BETTER THAN ARMS NOW!

I don't know how to break it to them.... Fury was always better than Arms on Single target, and intermittent AoE, and basically anything except 3 cleave fights. Guess which fights Arms is still as good/better than Fury on?

Now don't get me wrong. I firmly believe that design should adhere to one of two types of tenants: Either every class should be equally good at everything (less desirable and even realistically impossible), or specs should have general niches where they perform well.

Arms has a niche, cleave. The problem is that it is [I]too/I] niche; there is barely any actual cleave in the tier. Likewise Fury has a problem, its niche is a talent. Which means anytime you can't or don't use that talent you are effectively screwed. Bladestorm is perhaps the worst thing about our class right now, as odd as that sounds, because its so strong, the developers intentionally limit us from doing anything else.

The other side of the niche argument is that every class needs to adhere to niches, and they don't. There are way too many classes that are good at single target, good at aoe and good at movement. Their only niche is that they don't have one!

Now this I can get behind. The problem is they've just widened the gap and shrunk arms niche that much smaller. It's back where it began, very inferior to fury in most cases. /boggle

[nativity]

Thing is, you can create simple and fun design. They are mutually exclusive. Warriors are just an outlier right now.

There are plenty of ways to make current Warrior specs work without too many tweaks too, but I'm holding out for what I suspect will be a 7.0 revamp.

I'm still holding out a glimmer of hope for some redesign or tweaks in 6.2 but probably gotta be mentally prepared to ride out this fuck shit all the way till 7.0

[Deleted]

I'm still holding out a glimmer of hope for some redesign or tweaks in 6.2 but probably gotta be mentally prepared to ride out this fuck shit all the way till 7.0

Judging by the shitstorm of feedback they had and still didn't do anything about it at launch, I highly doubt they're gonna do anything inbetween, but it would be wonderful indeed.

[CollisionTD]

I'm still holding out a glimmer of hope for some redesign or tweaks in 6.2 but probably gotta be mentally prepared to ride out this fuck shit all the way till 7.0

I realize you've accepted Arm's Fate, but just in case.

I'll help soften the blow from 6.2's release some for you, they aren't.

Maybe 7.0

I wish Fury would get a 6.2 redesign as well, but it won't happen.

I'd hope that they've learned a few lessons from Fury's redesign during Beta. For those who didn't pay attention, this is a rough timeline of events... I may have the dates wrong by a week, but it's close.

• Beta Starts - Early June - Multiple tweets/posts have been made that they plan to keep Fury as-is, and only a few small tweaks to the rotation to increase the value of haste.
• Late June - Heroic Strike is removed from Fury. 'small tweaks', indeed. Curiously, Ignite Weapon (Heroic Strike v0.9) is left in the game.
• July 2nd - Wild strike is the new heroic strike! Except that whole off the gcd part, and that it has a 0.5 second gcd. Up to this point, Blizzard has received almost entirely negative feedback about sub-1.0 second globals, mostly from Rogues. This matters not, Blizzard is sure that Warriors will love it.
• July 3rd - Warriors don't love it. Celestalon and some guy from EU who mains a healer and was playing with 200 ms love it.
• Mid-July - Major blue posts appear in the warrior feedback threads, assuring us that they're going to fix it.
• July 25th(~) - Raging Blow now extends the duration of Colossus Smash + Level 45 talent revamp. The RB extension came out of no where, and I didn't particularly like it, but hey, they're flailing around, maybe they'll accidentally get something right.
• July 26th - Arms Sudden Death nerfed to the ground after one-shots galore in pvp
• August 1st - I posted a video of the finger-blistering Ignite Weapon + Unquenchable Thirst rotation, where rage was nearly exclusively dumped off the gcd to ensure that raging blow would extend colossus smash until it came off cd. It clocked in around 90-100 actions per minute. It was the optimal way to play by a significant margin.
• August 15th(~) - Ignite Weapon removed and replaced with a nearly 100% copy/paste Storm Bolt. Seriously. Check the offhand icon that Blizzard uses.
• Late August - Colossus Smash is removed because they were planning to remove it the entire time. Yeahhhhhh...... four weeks after adding in RB extensions to CS. They were really planning ahead there.
• Early September - After 2 months of negative feedback, Wild Strike's GCD is increased to a (very) slightly more appealing 0.75 seconds.
• Mid October - 6.0 is released

Hopefully they're actually planning spec redesigns ahead of time, rather than what happened there.

If you want to make yourself feel sad, this is what Fury played like with a hasted GCD before everything was stripped away. Sorry for no sound + no WA. The hasted GCD + MoP mechanics felt perfect.

Since this is a Arms thread, here's a video I made of Arms, as it was also similarly fucked with during beta. It's also (probably) why we can't gain rage from charging the same target twice in a row. Yes, it was THAT bad, and no, I wasn't avoiding hitting buttons on purpose. This video was also taken relatively soon after there were blue posts about how "Arms idle-time was fine."

[nativity]

I realize you've accepted Arm's Fate, but just in case.



I wish Fury would get a 6.2 redesign as well, but it won't happen.

I'd hope that they've learned a few lessons from Fury's redesign during Beta. For those who didn't pay attention, this is a rough timeline of events... I may have the dates wrong by a week, but it's close.

• Beta Starts - Early June - Multiple tweets/posts have been made that they plan to keep Fury as-is, and only a few small tweaks to the rotation to increase the value of haste.
• Late June - Heroic Strike is removed from Fury. 'small tweaks', indeed. Curiously, Ignite Weapon (Heroic Strike v0.9) is left in the game.
• July 2nd - Wild strike is the new heroic strike! Except that whole off the gcd part, and that it has a 0.5 second gcd. Up to this point, Blizzard has received almost entirely negative feedback about sub-1.0 second globals, mostly from Rogues. This matters not, Blizzard is sure that Warriors will love it.
• July 3rd - Warriors don't love it. Celestalon and some guy from EU who mains a healer and was playing with 200 ms love it.
• Mid-July - Major blue posts appear in the warrior feedback threads, assuring us that they're going to fix it.
• July 25th(~) - Raging Blow now extends the duration of Colossus Smash + Level 45 talent revamp. The RB extension came out of no where, and I didn't particularly like it, but hey, they're flailing around, maybe they'll accidentally get something right.
• July 26th - Arms Sudden Death nerfed to the ground after one-shots galore in pvp
• August 1st - I posted a video of the finger-blistering Ignite Weapon + Unquenchable Thirst rotation, where rage was nearly exclusively dumped off the gcd to ensure that raging blow would extend colossus smash until it came off cd. It clocked in around 90-100 actions per minute. It was the optimal way to play by a significant margin.
• August 15th(~) - Ignite Weapon removed and replaced with a nearly 100% copy/paste Storm Bolt. Seriously. Check the offhand icon that Blizzard uses.
• Late August - Colossus Smash is removed because they were planning to remove it the entire time. Yeahhhhhh...... four weeks after adding in RB extensions to CS. They were really planning ahead there.
• Early September - After 2 months of negative feedback, Wild Strike's GCD is increased to a (very) slightly more appealing 0.75 seconds.
• Mid October - 6.0 is released

Hopefully they're actually planning spec redesigns ahead of time, rather than what happened there.

If you want to make yourself feel sad, this is what Fury played like with a hasted GCD before everything was stripped away. Sorry for no sound + no WA. The hasted GCD + MoP mechanics felt perfect.

Since this is a Arms thread, here's a video I made of Arms, as it was also similarly fucked with during beta. It's also (probably) why we can't gain rage from charging the same target twice in a row. Yes, it was THAT bad, and no, I wasn't avoiding hitting buttons on purpose. This video was also taken relatively soon after there were blue posts about how "Arms idle-time was fine."

I did follow the beta testing feedback rather closely even though I did not take part in the testing and I knew the Arms redesign is complete fuck shit work done by some low grade developers with a shitty attitude. I still remember the blatant lie by the developer (think it's Celestalon) whom promise to "talk" to the warrior beta testers but faded into shadows soon after..

[Stoic]

I think my biggest complaint is I feel more like a burden on my raid than a boost. Yes there are a select few fights we do really well on, but even then if it's not Thogar we're just not that amazing right now. We have shitty defensive and shitty self healing. Almost every other class just gets all these heals and what not at basically zero detriment to their dps. Our heals blow, defensive stance hurts your dps quite a bit, we have the worst move speed of any class.

It's not like you can't kill bosses with warriors, but it just feels like I would offer so much more to the raid as a number of other classes.

We retain our spots for Vigilance and Rallying Cry in the World of Rangedcraft and TankCDcraft. The only fight that is even remotely hard to justify our spot on is Blackhand and yet because we are so good at balcony duty (booo) with victory rush we seem to lose sight of the big picture because we sometimes see our names in the bottom half of the meter. If you are doing something which lowers your own DPS but effectively aids your group due to taking care of a mechanic than you aren't a burden. DPS DKs I think have a much better case for sitting themselves on Blackhand than Warriors do, they don't even have tank/raid CDs to fall back on.

As far as your statement about survivability I really think that Warriors could do well having an "Iron Hawk" talent option. Basically a talent exclusive to Arms and Fury which would give the Defensive Stance damage reduction without having to be in Defensive Stance. It would have to be modified to a lower % when in actual Defensive Stance cus PvP reasons. It could remplace Second Wind for all I cared or even Impending Victory. On some fights just a flat damage reduction without paying a DPS cost would be a compelling option.

15% damage reduction (as Passive in Battle Stance)
5% additional Damage reduction (while in Defensive Stance (again only Arms&Fury have this talent option))

[rashy]

[*]August 15th(~) - Ignite Weapon removed and replaced with a nearly 100% copy/paste Storm Bolt. Seriously. Check the offhand icon that Blizzard uses.

I was wondering why MSBT sometimes pinged SB icon. It was easy enough to tell what was doing it, but it was sort of getting to me why it was just OH SB multistrikes. Kind of funny really, in a way.

[Archimtiros]

I realize you've accepted Arm's Fate, but just in case.



I wish Fury would get a 6.2 redesign as well, but it won't happen.

I'd hope that they've learned a few lessons from Fury's redesign during Beta. For those who didn't pay attention, this is a rough timeline of events... I may have the dates wrong by a week, but it's close.

• Beta Starts - Early June - Multiple tweets/posts have been made that they plan to keep Fury as-is, and only a few small tweaks to the rotation to increase the value of haste.
• Late June - Heroic Strike is removed from Fury. 'small tweaks', indeed. Curiously, Ignite Weapon (Heroic Strike v0.9) is left in the game.
• July 2nd - Wild strike is the new heroic strike! Except that whole off the gcd part, and that it has a 0.5 second gcd. Up to this point, Blizzard has received almost entirely negative feedback about sub-1.0 second globals, mostly from Rogues. This matters not, Blizzard is sure that Warriors will love it.
• July 3rd - Warriors don't love it. Celestalon and some guy from EU who mains a healer and was playing with 200 ms love it.
• Mid-July - Major blue posts appear in the warrior feedback threads, assuring us that they're going to fix it.
• July 25th(~) - Raging Blow now extends the duration of Colossus Smash + Level 45 talent revamp. The RB extension came out of no where, and I didn't particularly like it, but hey, they're flailing around, maybe they'll accidentally get something right.
• July 26th - Arms Sudden Death nerfed to the ground after one-shots galore in pvp
• August 1st - I posted a video of the finger-blistering Ignite Weapon + Unquenchable Thirst rotation, where rage was nearly exclusively dumped off the gcd to ensure that raging blow would extend colossus smash until it came off cd. It clocked in around 90-100 actions per minute. It was the optimal way to play by a significant margin.
• August 15th(~) - Ignite Weapon removed and replaced with a nearly 100% copy/paste Storm Bolt. Seriously. Check the offhand icon that Blizzard uses.
• Late August - Colossus Smash is removed because they were planning to remove it the entire time. Yeahhhhhh...... four weeks after adding in RB extensions to CS. They were really planning ahead there.
• Early September - After 2 months of negative feedback, Wild Strike's GCD is increased to a (very) slightly more appealing 0.75 seconds.
• Mid October - 6.0 is released

Hopefully they're actually planning spec redesigns ahead of time, rather than what happened there.

If you want to make yourself feel sad, this is what Fury played like with a hasted GCD before everything was stripped away. Sorry for no sound + no WA. The hasted GCD + MoP mechanics felt perfect.

Since this is a Arms thread, here's a video I made of Arms, as it was also similarly fucked with during beta. It's also (probably) why we can't gain rage from charging the same target twice in a row. Yes, it was THAT bad, and no, I wasn't avoiding hitting buttons on purpose. This video was also taken relatively soon after there were blue posts about how "Arms idle-time was fine."

Don't forget the 4 or 5 feedback threads that you and I posted that dominated the beta forums until they got deleted.

This timeline is a clear example of what I was saying before about inconsistent design. No consolidated idea as to what the spec should be doing, just throwing ideas out and hoping something sticks.

This also ignores most of Arms changes because hey! It got a good revamp in early June, had great reception with only a few minor suggested tweaks, only to be completely scraped by July/August. Arms literally only had three buttons, swifty recorded videos one shotting people, Bahjeera laughed for 10 minutes straight after reading the "core abilities" section of the spell book; we were told Rend was never meant to be part of the toolkit, then it just kind of showed up! Arms was now considered "awesome" and all of our negative feedback was subsequently thrown into the garbage can.

Oh and don't forget about the mandatory stances tied to abilities and its subsequent removal, though to be fair it was probably removed because it was universally despised and a shit idea to begin with. Or the inclusion of Devastate and Revenge into the Arms/Fury toolkits.

TLDR: This isn't a bitch fest. I understand the pressure designers are under and the stress they have to deal with. The problem is that they have no idea what we want or how to give it to us. Designers and players are in a symbiotic relationship, not a war. Somewhere along the line that was forgotten and change started happening just for the hell of it. #1 rule of design: The game is made for the players. If the players don't enjoy it, the design failed, regardless of how good it's intent.

[Artunias]

Don't forget the 4 or 5 feedback threads that you and I posted that dominated the beta forums until they got deleted.

This timeline is a clear example of what I was saying before about inconsistent design. No consolidated idea as to what the spec should be doing, just throwing ideas out and hoping something sticks.

This also ignores most of Arms changes because hey! It got a good revamp in early June, had great reception with only a few minor suggested tweaks, only to be completely scraped by July/August. Arms literally only had three buttons, swifty recorded videos one shotting people, Bahjeera laughed for 10 minutes straight after reading the "core abilities" section of the spell book; we were told Rend was never meant to be part of the toolkit, then it just kind of showed up! Arms was now considered "awesome" and all of our negative feedback was subsequently thrown into the garbage can.

Oh and don't forget about the mandatory stances tied to abilities and its subsequent removal, though to be fair it was probably removed because it was universally despised and a shit idea to begin with. Or the inclusion of Devastate and Revenge into the Arms/Fury toolkits.

TLDR: This isn't a bitch fest. I understand the pressure designers are under and the stress they have to deal with. The problem is that they have no idea what we want or how to give it to us. Designers and players are in a symbiotic relationship, not a war. Somewhere along the line that was forgotten and change started happening just for the hell of it. #1 rule of design: The game is made for the players. If the players don't enjoy it, the design failed, regardless of how good it's intent.

I'll never be able to understand how we got to where we are today. There was a tsunami of negative feedback, especially for arms, and hardly anything changed at all. I feel like the devs are at a complete disconnect with the warrior class and the warrior community right now.

[Kirbynator]

Incompetent, clueless and stubborn class designers.

[wladimir89]

Is skull of war trinket woth to upgrade?

[Warrco]

Is skull of war trinket woth to upgrade?

Do you plan to do heroic BRF soon?

[Kirbynator]

I forgot arrogant and imperceptive, too.

[Darkfriend]

I think my biggest complaint is I feel more like a burden on my raid than a boost. Yes there are a select few fights we do really well on, but even then if it's not Thogar we're just not that amazing right now. We have shitty defensive and shitty self healing. Almost every other class just gets all these heals and what not at basically zero detriment to their dps. Our heals blow, defensive stance hurts your dps quite a bit, we have the worst move speed of any class.

It's not like you can't kill bosses with warriors, but it just feels like I would offer so much more to the raid as a number of other classes.

IDK only fights I perform poorly on are H:Blackhand. All the mythic fights we've killed or are progressing on if the DPS wasn't as amazing as some, the utility of RC+Vigilance+interupt w/ rude interuption made up for it.

[CollisionTD]

Yeah, Blackhand is the only encounter where I feel relatively useless on.

[Warrco]

Had a shot at blackhand yesterday, without going up to the balcony(this was heroic)

Damage wasn't that bad, was mostly sitting at about 42k dps. But the downtime you have in p2+p3 can get very annoying very fast.

[Crisius]

Had a shot at blackhand yesterday, without going up to the balcony(this was heroic)

Damage wasn't that bad, was mostly sitting at about 42k dps. But the downtime you have in p2+p3 can get very annoying very fast.

Going rogue for mythic progress on that boss in a few weeks time since our melee team is too heavy to take in another and warrior is easily one of the worst choices to bring if you need to bring anything but a rogue. But hey, at least I get another char geared for free.

[Artunias]

IDK only fights I perform poorly on are H:Blackhand. All the mythic fights we've killed or are progressing on if the DPS wasn't as amazing as some, the utility of RC+Vigilance+interupt w/ rude interuption made up for it.

I wouldn't say I perform poorly on any fight and on Blackhand I think it would be *ok* if I got to stay down. Having to go up into the stands though, hits ya pretty hard but it's a necessary mechanic. And during progression I'll admit I do have a fault in forgetting to take into account we haven't made it to execute phase yet some nights and am still in potato dps phase.