Siegebreaker damage scaling for arms/fury

[apoe]

Siegebreaker hits really hard as fury, and depending on fight length can give more DPS than anger management.

However, I find the damage of the talent as arms is really low (granted, you will most likely be using arms on sustained multitarget fights where you wouldn't use siegebreaker anyways), even though the listed tooltip damage seems similar for both specs.

E.g.

Test 1, raid buffed with all CDs:
As arms, siegebreaker crit inside colossus smash with all CDs up = 130k
As fury, siegebreaker crit (MH+OH) while enraged with all CDs up = 290k! (Horn trinket may have been procced, wasn't paying attention)

Test 2, no buffs at all, no CDs:
As arms, siegebreaker hit (no CS) = 27k
As fury, siegebreaker hit (not enraged) = 24.5k + 13.5k = 38k

What causes such a massive damage difference between the two? Even though arms mastery doesn't affect siegebreaker damage while fury's does, that's still a stupid difference, and the 130k crit was inside a CS. Bugged? Can someone else try this?

[Archimtiros]

Because Fury hits with two weapons.
Edit: Testing more stuff, see below. Also tomorrow. Thanks Kanki for beating me to it.

Welcome to Arms, that's just how the spec is. You would think that the "heavy hitting" spec would in fact have strong hits but it really doesn't. Hell Raging Blow hits harder than Mortal Strike does. Its actual abilities hit like wet noodles, the only thing that makes the spec strong is its ridiculous Mastery gains (for reference, 18% Mastery for Fury is a whopping 60% for Arms) and all of our damage rolled into Execute. There is a reason that damage breakdowns for Arms end up with 50% Execute, 10% Mortal Strike, 7% Rend 5% Whirlwind and so on.

Here is a prime example of Arms ridiculous damage breakdown. Notice how insignificant Storm Bolt is there? Now sure, part of this can be attributed to the short fight length and how powerful CD stacking sub 20% is, but you really can't argue how Arms damage is stacked.

Regarding talents, there is no difference in the "scaling" (by which you actually mean coefficients) between Arms and Fury, and it is a common misconception to think so, because it seems right that they would. In fact, they are exactly the same (450% weapon damage). Same story for Bladestorm (160% weapon damage) and so on. This is also why Fury Bladestorm trumps Arms so hard.

*Also for the record, CS doesn't double damage like most people think. Ignoring Armor is not a 100% damage increase, its more like a 35% damage increase.

[apoe]

Regarding talents, there is no difference in the "scaling" (by which you actually mean coefficients) between Arms and Fury, and it is a common misconception to think so, because it seems right that they would. In fact, they are exactly the same (450% weapon damage). Same story for Bladestorm (160% weapon damage) and so on. This is also why Fury Bladestorm trumps Arms so hard.

For "450% weapon damage", as fury, does it mean "450% weapon damage from mainhand PLUS 450% weapon damage from offhand"? Is that how it works? Without any buffs, the ingame tooltip shows 37k damage for siegebreaker for both my arms and fury set, very misleading.

I'm aware fury bladestorm is stronger, I always assumed it was just because of enrage damage increase, not necessarily because you're hitting with two weapons.

Edit: my tooltip for bladestorm (unbuffed) shows 20k dmg/sec as arms and 13k+7k dmg/sec as fury, so they definitely already accounted for dual wielding when balancing bladestorm, which they seemingly forgot to do with siegebreaker. A mainhand siegebreaker hit as fury alone does more than arms'. This reminds me of early mop, where fury bstorms did like 50% more damage than arms (even without enrage) until a later patch brought them closer together.

[Archimtiros]

For "450% weapon damage", as fury, does it mean "450% weapon damage from mainhand PLUS 450% weapon damage from offhand"? Is that how it works? Without any buffs, the ingame tooltip shows 37k damage for siegebreaker for both my arms and fury set, very misleading.

I'm aware fury bladestorm is stronger, I always assumed it was just because of enrage damage increase, not necessarily because you're hitting with two weapons.

Edit: my tooltip for bladestorm (unbuffed) shows 20k dmg/sec as arms and 13k+7k dmg/sec as fury, so they definitely already accounted for dual wielding when balancing bladestorm, which they seemingly forgot to do with siegebreaker. A mainhand siegebreaker hit as fury alone does more than arms'. This reminds me of early mop, where fury bstorms did like 50% more damage than arms (even without enrage) until a later patch brought them closer together.

They did better this time around with balancing Bladestorm, I was referring to historically as well as present (like you mentioned with MoP). It still isn't equal though, primarily because of Enrage.

Siegebreakers tooltip is the combined damage. Tooltips are very misleading though, partially because they tend to include all manner of passives that are now hidden from the player, and mostly because the formula isn't as simple as 450% of whatever your weapons damage is. There's damage range, normalization, attack power, armor, and a whole slew of modifiers to consider. Best to do your tests with as low level a white 2hr as you can find (new characters are good for this!) with no other gear equipped.

That said, it does seem like Siegebreaker is hitting for less than it should as Arms, I'll look into it a bit more. I'm probably just missing something obvious at 2am. Edit: Herp derp, Armor. This is why I don't test things in the AM.

[Kankipappa]

The tooltips 'should' account for offhand damage, but surely it doesn't calculate it correctly and only shows mainhand. More likely the tooltip is taking the "average melee damage" directly from your character's "attack" swing damage value and then calculates from there.

It is obvious, if you are using something like Mik's scrolling battletext and use it to merge hits/crits - check the tooltips and check the combined hit values. Not even close, ever... More easy way to see it is to check your melee damage value, and proceed to unequip offhand.

After that check your siegebreakers damage and check your melee damage. For me the drop is only 2k from siegebreaker if I don't have offhand at all, while it is less than half of 1k from my "melee attack" damage. So yeah, the tooltip shows mainhand only.

[Archimtiros]

The tooltips 'should' account for offhand damage, but surely it doesn't calculate it correctly and only shows mainhand. More likely the tooltip is taking the "average melee damage" directly from your character's "attack" swing damage value and then calculates from there.

It is obvious, if you are using something like Mik's scrolling battletext and use it to merge hits/crits - check the tooltips and check the combined hit values. Not even close, ever... More easy way to see it is to check your melee damage value, and proceed to unequip offhand.

After that check your siegebreakers damage and check your melee damage. For me the drop is only 2k from siegebreaker if I don't have offhand at all, while it is less than half of 1k from my "melee attack" damage. So yeah, the tooltip shows mainhand only.

Yeah, I only played with Fury for a second before falling out, this is indeed the case. My initial assessment was reversed, the tooltip is accounting for the stat gain out of the 2nd weapon but isn't accounting for its actual damage of the OH. It ends up being fairly close, a 23k MH and 13k OH hit is 36k, eerily close to the tooltip value of 34k, but it is actually because of Armor on the target reducing the MH hit from the tooltip value rather than than the MH and OH supposedly adding up to the tooltip value (as the tooltip doesn't reflect reduction based on Armor).

TLDR: Fury OP, Arms needs to learn to swing around like a ballerina more. Maybe duct tape a second axe blade to its forehead or something.

[Stoic]

Maybe duct tape a second axe blade to its forehead or something.

Pack up your bags boys and saddle up your suggestions; Archi just hit the motherload of ideas. Consider. Arms. Fixed.

(Sadly this would be the 1 suggestion out of our hundreds that the Devs might even consider implimenting )

[Archimtiros]

Pack up your bags boys and saddle up your suggestions; Archi just hit the motherload of ideas. Consider. Arms. Fixed.

(Sadly this would be the 1 suggestion out of our hundreds that the Devs might even consider implimenting )

Oh they already know, it's why Arms is so good in PvP.

[Deleted]

I don't see how Arms is the "big hitter" of DPS specs, when a Fury warriors abilities hit almost as hard as Arms' does. Damnit Blizzard, sort this shite spec out already

[Archimtiros]

I don't see how Arms is the "big hitter" of DPS specs, when a Fury warriors abilities hit almost as hard as Arms' does. Damnit Blizzard, sort this shite spec out already

Lol thats the point I tried to make. The only reason it is the "big hitter" is because Execute is ridiculous.

[DarkRonin00]

Kind of something that still bothers me is why they changed the way Arms was in MoP to the way it is now. Did the community really want a change for arms? The return of rend was nice, but the entire deletion of overpower and how fast pace arms urks me. I feel like it if they brought it back it would probably fix the entire execute being our main source of damage that or having abilities generate rage instead of just dumping it.

[Archimtiros]

Want a change? Yes. Want this abomination? No.

The current Arms build is a design experiment, and it shows. The original conception was this very slow, few GCD spec, that only ran something like 20 APM if you can imagine. It went through a couple iterations which sped it up, and it gained/lost pieces of its toolkit (most notably Rend). After all those iterations though, it ended up being the worst of both worlds. It is still a slow spec, but speedy enough to consider acceptable, however it still suffers from all the downsides of the slow idea, namely those few big hits.

I maintain, the best Arms design was the first, that allowed us to weave periodic Executes above 20% for good damage. Similar to Sudden Death now, but without the (annoying) rage booster, and controllable enough that we could plan it around Colossus Smash. Rend would have fit into its toolkit as well, and it got most of its AoE damage out of Sweeping Strikes, not a weak, arbitrary attack like Whirlwind; which made it Cleave heavy without a 1 button spam rotation that requires a specific talent to maintain.

I think they got the specs backwards to be honest. If they want Fury to feel fast and furious, and Arms to feel more tactical or methodical, then Arms should be the one that generates and spends rage in large chunks, as to get that slow-hammer feeling. Lots of generators or free attacks and a couple whollops, giving it a combo style feeling. Fury on the other hand can easily feel frenzied by making rage a dynamic resource, generating and spending quickly, but in smaller bits.

Instead Fury's filler, Wild Strike, chunks rage on half a normal GCD. Hitting a button twice in quick succession doesn't feel furious, especially when you only do it once every 5-10s and sitting on your thumbs for 3s in between. Furious comes from having buttons lighting up, playing a frantic game of whackamole and pressing those buttons constantly. We have this feeling now when things start proccing a lot, the downside at the moment however is the interaction between or rage spenders and bloodsurge. Wild Strike takes up too much rage to be an effective filler, Bloodsurge making it free completely stops us from spending rage, and Raging Blow is so cheap it might as well not have a rage cost.

Meanwhile Arms attacks are surprisingly cheap, for being marketed as the slow heavy hitter, the only reason we don't press buttons more often is because our rage generation is so arbitrarily limited (and random, thanks to AA crits). Then we spec TfB and watch it become GCD locked while we spam Rend and Whirlwind, two of the weakest attacks in the game, like no tomorrow.

[Deleted]

@archimtiros

Holy crap, how the hell did you crit for 600k execute on the butcher!?!?

I never ever critted over 350k EVER.

[Teye]

@archimtiros

Holy crap, how the hell did you crit for 600k execute on the butcher!?!?

I never ever critted over 350k EVER.

Scabbard+Potion+Reck+60 rage = possible 600k Execute. That said, where did he say he had done so?

[Archimtiros]

@archimtiros

Holy crap, how the hell did you crit for 600k execute on the butcher!?!?

I never ever critted over 350k EVER.

Hah, unfortunately I can't claim that one! That log was from Qadesh, the rank 1 Butcher kill. I normally don't like to use Rank 1's as examples of anything, especially when they contain 'stars-align' timing like that, but it makes the case nicely against showing how ridiculous Execute is in our rotation.

[Deleted]

Scabbard+Potion+Reck+60 rage = possible 600k Execute. That said, where did he say he had done so?

He linked a log, that speaks for itself, if you're willing to listen

Dat horn porccing at the exact right time tho stacking with reck/avatar/scabbard/potion, if only he had the legendary proc there too (and mastery enchant instead of crit), would've been even higher :P

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...07&end=3413542

Good lord, dat reck, average execute 500k rofl, incl. multis but still

- - - Updated - - -

Maybe duct tape a second axe blade to its forehead or something.

Lmfao, the sad thing is, seeing how fucked up they made the spec, I wouldn't even be suprised if they introduced it, Arms is that fucked up right now :P

[Selenti]

Lol thats the point I tried to make. The only reason it is the "big hitter" is because Execute is ridiculous.

Bring back Flurry and quick attack speed for Fury and I'm cool with Arms being the harder hitting spec. Hell, bring back rage scaling and Arms can be a magical unicorn for all I care, I'd just die of ecstasy right there.

...

Damnit, thinking of how warriors used to be in the past sure is depressing.