Arms < Fury Gear-Scaling Transition point?

[Virasha WRATH]

Hello all,

Hi i have been fury most of my wow raiding career, i have tried arms a bit but my output was considerably lower, this isn't because arms is inferior or my gear isnt all that good for arms or anything, i believe its cos i havent played arms for long and thus dont know it that well. Things this are instinctive in fury mode are alien to me in arms, i find myself looking at my cooldowns instead of knowing when they trigger etc etc etc. So here is my 5 cents worth

1. PLAY THE CLASS that makes you happy. No amount of raid dps will make the game enjoyable if your playing a spec or class that you dont enjoy.
2. If you choose fury remember that gear will take longer to "optimise" (i.e. you will need 2 decent weapons, you will need exp cap and hr cap and decent amount of crit while pushing your ap)
3. Whichever spec you play your gear and setup only count for a certain amount of your dps, THE REST IS YOUR SKILL with the spec, so practice it dont get lazy be prepared to raid with slightly lower numbers till you get used to the class.
4. Do not be afraid to ask about the new spec be it fury or arms from other fury and arms warriors in guild or on server, any hints or tricks will be useful.
5. Give your new spec a chance, dont go out and channge it back in 1 day cos your numbers dont look good.

Ok now to some technical stuff

1. Fury has awesome burst on demand abilities so on any fights with a "boss weakened" phase you should pwn. The timing of your deathwish and recklessness is paramount to good dps.
2. Arms will be easier to gear up simply because you need 1 less weapon to start with.
3. Personally i have found that BiS items are more important for fury than for arms, well our arms warrior does well and is still missing a few BiS items, whereas my dps improved greatly when i got those items i did mis
4. From personal experiance fury absolutley needs to be fully raid buffed (icy talons etc).

You can play fury at any stage of gear and be competitive cos i have been in the top 5 of our dps meters on bosses and overall since naxxa, and compare favourably with ohter dpsers on server, im not sure about arms but i suspect it will be the same.

V

[galindo]

with out going into much, your three main sources of damage are hs/bt/ww all of which are gear dependent:
hs: mh damage range
bt: ap coming from gear
ww: both weapon damages.

but with arms a bit part is rend/deepwounds/execute/op/ms

rend/deep: do the same damage as fury (fury doesnt rend but w/e)
execute: does a like 8k max, arp increase this tho.

main difference is that fury allows more attacks, with hs on every main hand and weaving shit between that you gain more value from talents like impale, flurry, and wat not. the way these trees work is arms relies on talents and a weapon and buffs, where fury relies on gear and buffs. so arms only scales with things that stay relatively constant, while fury is 100% gear/buff driven. This was writtten very sloppily but w/e

[cryogenic]

Actually, the number-crunchers over at Elitist Jerks are predicting that the Armor Pen nerf won't affect arms warriors too bad... they said if your armor pen SEP is 1.01, it may end up being 0.97 (or someting like that).

Thanks everyone for the helpful advice. So I think what we learned is:
-there is no known transition point
-playstyle and skill count for a lot more in the decision making process

In fact, although I've heard about fury scaling better, I really haven't seen any proof of it. I've still heard many top Arms guys saying that they are matching Fury well (with variation on who gets a little more dps depending on boss fight mechanics).

Of all the classes it will effect them the most...
Regardless of severity there is no way to compensate the comparative damage loss.
Arms looks to cap arp without procs other classes look to trinket cap them requiring less arp to do.
Basically we lose 170 stats with the change to descaling soft cappers are not hit so severely.

These arms warriors are matching poor undergeared fury warriors.... the only fight arms is preferable is for mortal strike there are no fights where having more threat less aoe and less single target damage are preferable.

The only short burn aoe phase would have to last 10 secs for arms to have any chance of coming out on top, death wish and cleave+whirlwind of fury is undoubtably better aoe sweeping strikes dissipates quickly, really there is no circumstance where this happens all cleave aoe fights are dominated by fury as cleave is a huge rage drain on arms.

Honestly arms in most situations is the weakest dps spec in game and if it is beating out other classes the problem is the other classes are poor players or are severely undergeared or hampered in some way.

I've just picked up justicebringer and most fights as arms has me severely threat capped off a straight start where I'm 5 stacking sunder to ramp up initially. The threat is very high yet the output is lower but arms requires less raid resources as in weapons and supplies many buffs and isn't faceroll.

[Devro]

B) they all have an aura that reduces the damage they take from aoe by 75 pct, meaning whirlwind and cleave are terrible on that fight.

I've done the fight myself many times. This statement is not true. Whirlwind and Cleave don't count as AoE on this fight since they actually target the enemy that are close by and can only hit a select number of targets unlike Thunderclap, Blizzard, etc.

[Pieterman]

basicly, at the point ur offhand swings grant u enough rage to use heroic strike on ~80% of the main hand swings.