5.2 Arms PvE Viable?

[Fishlady]

Any thoughts as to whether or not Arms will be PvE viable in 5.2 in 10 man raid prog?

[Deleted]

Any thoughts as to whether or not Arms will be PvE viable in 5.2 in 10 man raid prog?

Impossible to say before all the patch notes are out which takes a long time.

[Tehterokkar]

We haven't even had a PTR "release" date yet... Hold your horses...

[Nakkí]

Arms is viable now and for the next patch we seem to be getting slight buffs.
I expect us to still be viable then - although time and PTR testing will naturally tell the truth.

[Deleted]

Arms viable now? I really enjoy playing arms but it feels like Furys autoattacks are enough to compete with our damage, sims shows 20% (TG) and 25% SMF) lead in BiS gear. Only advantage of Arms is the requirement of only one weapon to work properly and no dependency on crits to fill all those empty globals (happens to arms as well but not as frequently).

http://raidbots.com/dpsbot/Spec_Scor...01100000000000 just play around on the right side for all four difficulties and raid sizes, arms top 100 parses are almost always 20k dps behind fury and rather low on the graph for the last month on all relevant measurements. There might be some top dogs playing arms and ranking high but even myself as mainspecc prot offspecc arms can rank rather easily on heroic 10M fights because it looks like there're only about 100 persons playing this specc (was ranked with 30k dps on Spirit Kings heroic for several weeks in top 50).

[Nakkí]

Arms viable now? I really enjoy playing arms but it feels like Furys autoattacks are enough to compete with our damage, sims shows 20% (TG) and 25% SMF) lead in BiS gear. Only advantage of Arms is the requirement of only one weapon to work properly and no dependency on crits to fill all those empty globals (happens to arms as well but not as frequently).

http://raidbots.com/dpsbot/Spec_Scor...01100000000000 just play around on the right side for all four difficulties and raid sizes, arms top 100 parses are almost always 20k dps behind fury and rather low on the graph for the last month on all relevant measurements. There might be some top dogs playing arms and ranking high but even myself as mainspecc prot offspecc arms can rank rather easily on heroic 10M fights because it looks like there're only about 100 persons playing this specc (was ranked with 30k dps on Spirit Kings heroic for several weeks in top 50).

You really have to be careful when discussing viability. It does not equate to always top ranking performance in arbitrary simulations or WoL top100 lists. A player's ranking number by itself means nothing - only the player's actual damage output does. Here's my point:

Fury's top numbers will always be (sometimes significantly) higher due to the risk-reward ratio being decidedly different from Arms. It has higher potential gains coupled with a higher risk of drying up entirely at a bad time due to a sudden lack of procs. It's also notable that there's a significant sampling bias favouring fury since far more players are actually parsing with the spec to begin with.

I will agree that you have to really be on top of your game to remain competitive as Arms on heroic content, but it is possible. For one, I'm doing it.

There are naturally many fights on which one can expect more deeps as Fury (especially if one has weapons for SMF that are on par with one's best 2H) but on others Arms can even gain an advantage either in numbers or at least in the way it applies its DPS if played smartly.. and I'm not even talking solely about Garalon here.

[Deleted]

Well, Arms is lacking in Scaling nothing else. Must be the worst scaling of all classes specs atm? And im not really sure about Arms AoE either.

[Kankipappa]

Currently on the PTR I've actually lost a decent amount of single target DPS. It's quite awesome-the new rotation for Arms seems very...restrictive to say the least. There are two problems you may run into. 1.) Overflowing with rage and 2.) overflowing with OP procs. It's actually quite annoying mostly due to the GCD.

That's what i've been trying to tell while few people keep telling Arms is getting "buffs". I could calculate that from the start by just reading the chances on my head. 1.5s GCD is still going to be a huge problem and when OP is so low on damage (While free) it is going to take more uptime from other skills what actually do our decent damage. Even currently OP is just a free filler what actually is a damage loss compared to other skills and is only used because you can't sustain your rage gain otherwise.

Currently you can (sometimes) get many chain procs with OP and when colossus is also running you could basically hit HS + OP every time it reprocs until MS comes off the cooldown again, or build the stacks to go off later with bloodbath - an advantage on damage what we can't have on next patch. HS is going to be so weak without scaling mastery like fury is having...

On the future, you will be building up rage for slams - what you can't hit unless you want to skip those OP's, but that will be a problem because OP will always get +2 stacks and MS rolls off from CD after rolling out those two OP's and single Slam (or two OP's + colossus proc). I'm sure you're supposed to offset that by hitting one or two HS in between to adjust the rage gain, but the overall situational damage burst is going to plummet for PvE. Using sweeping strikes is going to get easier due to more free skill usage uptime.

My idea to fix that one? Revert OP's GCD to 1.0s - what it was for a long time even on Cata, so you can dump them out faster and keep the same "dps per ability usage" like with other skills like slam. I know that's not gonna happen, and we will keep hitting those weak HS's there once now and then maybe do stupid rotations like MS -> CS -> Slam 3x to use the builded up rage.

[Darkfriend]

Arms viable now? I really enjoy playing arms but it feels like Furys autoattacks are enough to compete with our damage, sims shows 20% (TG) and 25% SMF) lead in BiS gear. Only advantage of Arms is the requirement of only one weapon to work properly and no dependency on crits to fill all those empty globals (happens to arms as well but not as frequently).

http://raidbots.com/dpsbot/Spec_Scor...01100000000000 just play around on the right side for all four difficulties and raid sizes, arms top 100 parses are almost always 20k dps behind fury and rather low on the graph for the last month on all relevant measurements. There might be some top dogs playing arms and ranking high but even myself as mainspecc prot offspecc arms can rank rather easily on heroic 10M fights because it looks like there're only about 100 persons playing this specc (was ranked with 30k dps on Spirit Kings heroic for several weeks in top 50).

I'd like to point out that fury also has 2 things going for it if one only looks at logs. 1.) More people play fury at a higher gear level than play arms, meaning that the top fury players are probably better geared compared to the top arms players. 2.) Fury is more RNG overall than arms is, meaning that from pull to pull arms may have a ~5% DPS difference (Made up number, IDK the exact difference) while fury will have a larger variable. It's like a fire mage in cata, if they got lucky, they scored big.

That being said, generally fury is better, and I really hope arms gets some good buffs in 5.2, since I love arms.

EDIT: Nakki said the exact same thing I am trying to say, I just read it. Well said.