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  1. #1
    Deleted

    Blizzard's try to balance Arms

    - We have heard the concerns of Overpower inherent dodge avoidance in addition with dodge proc'ing Overpower might do strange things with Expertise. We are considering changes, but are loathe to nerf one of the cool quirks that Overpower has had forever.
    - You might MS, OP, OP -> Slam some of the time, but Arms has so much uptime on Colossus Smash, that that rotation can't last for long. We do want Slam to beat OP + HS in the new model. We think it does (and remember we're trying Overpower at a small ragecost), but we'll double check.

    - We were concerned that our buffs to haste and mastery were enough to get Arms warriors to regem or be angry about passing on drops to say DKs. That's not the goal. We just wanted to make some of the stats better. We think the changes to Taste for Blood for Arms already make mastery slightly better for them, so we are reverting the change back to 55% for Strikes of Opportunity. (It was 75% in an earlier PTR build.) We also reduced the haste buff from +100% to +50%. It's still a big increase over live.
    - Similarly, we were concerned that the changes to Taste for Blood devalued expertise too much for Arms. We changed the Overpower granted by dodge to 1 charge. It's still 2 for using Mortal Strike. However, we also reverted an earlier change that let Mortal Strike proc Overpower even if the Mortal Strike missed.


    Well, i must say i'm pretty angry about this. Arms is one of the weakest Pve Specs atm and gets nerfed (ok they try to nerf/balance burst, which i think is ok ) because of Pvp. It's true that they are/were pretty much OP in Pvp but i think these changes will make Arms in Pve even weaker.
    Here is my Point of View:

    - They were doubling Haste, which is nice to scale it's value more for Warriors. BUT if you have, let's say 5% of haste - you get 10% haste (wow...) which is now even nerfed to 50%. It's value won't get even close to be better than crit or something like that, which means we won't reforge more haste.
    - Mastery for Arms DEFINITELY needed a buff, it is extremely weak and now it is also removed. I don't know where you get the feeling of Arms being maybe too OP with these buffs, while Taste for Blood get's nerfed. Maybe you can clear that up for me a bit more?
    - You are trying to compensate it through buffing Slam, but i think it's not going to work. It's even making it weaker because the lost of OP + HS (with often 1 stacks just on the go ) was a huge amount of our DPS. The Rage cost of Overpower will even make it more rarely that we will use Slam ( 230% is pretty cool, but won't compensate for everything you want to change i think).

    While i like Fury, it would be nice if Arms Perfomance would be a bit better in Pve. I'm just in fear you will really screw up Arms. I know it's not final, but i think it's better to clear things up before the change goes live.

    Sorry for long Post, was trying to be as contructive as i can. Don't know if it worked :x Peace!

  2. #2
    The problem I have is that the changes are boring. OP isn't proccing OP anymore, there aren't any taste for blood stacks to save for CS anymore, removing deadly calm, is heroic leap still worth it without the glyph? Getting maybe a few 100 extra dps from haste is just insignificant. Will see how it turns out but guess I'll go fury even though i enjoy arms atm.

  3. #3
    Deleted
    Yes there is definitely a huge gap on live and on the latest PTR between Arms and other dps speccs. And from my point of view there is a lot of confusion in the ranks of blizzard. So many weird changes, especially the ones they are reverting back (mastery/haste scaling), which where the ones I was looking most forward to since they guaranteed to improve Arms dps for a long run to compete with the scaling of other classes.

    Now after all the changes on 5.2 PTR it is absolutely worse than live.

    - Removed Deadly Calm
    - Overpower 10 rage cost
    - Completely ruined TFB and they even made it boring

    I do 15k dps less on the PTR than I do on live. This is just inexcuseable. Arms does need some serious damage buffs (20-30% overall dps increase) to be even remotely considered worthy of competing in the realm of fury. There is just no choice atm. You either go Fury or you slow down the progress of your raid.

  4. #4
    Deleted
    Yes i think the same way. I know they do read Forums and Player Feedback but in situations like this i can't really believe it.
    What makes me angry the most is, they change things for the "feeling" and "we didn't like one spell to be so powerful"(heroic leap) but they don't think a second about it being a important part of our dps. Same thing for Deadly Calm, i read that "didn't like it either" stuff but do that people realize it was a dps increase? Gone without compensation... If things will go live like this, those people will be table flipping all over the forums.

  5. #5
    Buffing the effect of haste and buffing the mastery would have been easily the most boring way to try to fix the issues anyways but well we all know that buffing instants significantly or changing the rotation is pretty much out of question because of pvp qq.

  6. #6
    Deleted
    Boring yes, but effective. Its actually really important, because even if blizzard would increase the damage of a few abilities fitting for the current tier of gear, we are going to be lackluster with the next patch again. Remember when you were in blue gear where arms was better/equally as good as fury.

    I think better scaling should not be the only way to buff arms, but a necessity in order to thwart running into the same problems.

  7. #7
    Deleted
    The problem I have is that the changes are boring. OP isn't proccing OP anymore, there aren't any taste for blood stacks to save for CS anymore
    I absolutely agree with this. While rng can be frustrating it is also a fun aspect to your rotation. For example when I, as a Fury warrior, don't get RB procs from like a few Bloodthirsts it can be frustrating, but when RB procs, regardless if I'm being lucky and getting many in a row or when I haven't got one in a few bloodthirsts it feels rewarding and fun. Arms as it is already feels steady, you do pretty much the same dps throughout the fight. And now I get the feeling they are making it too steady and too reliable. Getting TfB stacks and proccing several Overpowers after eachother was fun. Now you're luck relies only in CS procs and mastery procs(which is a very boring mecanic). Don't get me wrong when I'm saying reliable and steady, it's not in comparison to Fury or any other class it's just about the Arms spec itself.

    heroic leap still worth it without the glyph
    While the damage will be much lower, it will still be free damage. And who doesn't want free damage if it's there right infront of you. Players that decide not to use the glyph will probably save it for mobility which is the core of the ability anyway. I do think many people will stick to the Hc Leap glyph since it has great mobility and free damage.

    Will see how it turns out but guess I'll go fury even though i enjoy arms atm.
    Personally, I think the most important thing is to play what you enjoy playing. Most of the time you will perform best in the spec you have fun playing. I'll give you an example. In my roster there's an Armswarrior because of this exact reason. He doesn't like Fury as much as he likes Arms and therefore performs better as Arms. And while arms generally is worse than Fury it's not really that bad. It might require good play but you can still rock decent dps. You won't miss a bosskill because you we're Arms instead of Fury.

    "we didn't like one spell to be so powerful"(heroic leap)
    '
    I for one saw this one coming. I wasn't surprised at all. Hc leap is a mobility spell and not intended to be hitting as much or even higher than your other special attacks. I also understand that they removed the damage portion of the glyph because it was mandatory. They wanted to remove the feeling of certain glyphs being mandatory and want people to change on a fight by fight basis. So with the damage gone, maybe people will switch to something else, and then switch back to Hc Leap glyph for fights with high movement. While it was fun hitting 200-300k Hc Leaps in your opener, I knew it wouldn't last.

    Same thing for Deadly Calm, i read that "didn't like it either"
    I'm fine with this change tbh. Most people just incorporated it into their 1-shot macro and those who didn't, well, feels like it just takes up space on your action bar since it didn't have a HUGE impact.

  8. #8
    Deleted
    The problem I have is that the changes are boring. OP isn't proccing OP anymore, there aren't any taste for blood stacks to save for CS anymore
    I absolutely agree with this. While rng can be frustrating it is also a fun aspect to your rotation. For example when I, as a Fury warrior, don't get RB procs from like a few Bloodthirsts it can be frustrating, but when RB procs, regardless if I'm being lucky and getting many in a row or when I haven't got one in a few bloodthirsts it feels rewarding and fun. Arms as it is already feels steady, you do pretty much the same dps throughout the fight. And now I get the feeling they are making it too steady and too reliable. Getting TfB stacks and proccing several Overpowers after eachother was fun. Now you're luck relies only in CS procs and mastery procs(which is a very boring mecanic). Don't get me wrong when I'm saying reliable and steady, it's not in comparison to Fury or any other class it's just about the Arms spec itself.

    is heroic leap still worth it without the glyph?
    While the damage will be much lower, it will still be free damage. And who doesn't want free damage if it's there right infront of you. Players that decide not to use the glyph will probably save it for mobility which is the core of the ability anyway. I do think many people will stick to the Hc Leap glyph since it has great mobility and free damage.

    Will see how it turns out but guess I'll go fury even though i enjoy arms atm.
    Personally, I think the most important thing is to play what you enjoy playing. Most of the time you will perform best in the spec you have fun playing. I'll give you an example. In my roster there's an Armswarrior because of this exact reason. He doesn't like Fury as much as he likes Arms and therefore performs better as Arms. And while arms generally is worse than Fury it's not really that bad. It might require good play but you can still rock decent dps. You probably won't miss a bosskill just because you we're Arms instead of Fury.

    "we didn't like one spell to be so powerful"(heroic leap)
    '

    I for one saw this one coming. I wasn't surprised at all. Hc leap is a mobility spell and not intended to be hitting as much or even higher than your other special attacks. I also understand that they removed the damage portion of the glyph because the glyph was pretty much mandatory. They wanted to remove the feeling of certain glyphs being mandatory and want people to change on a fight by fight basis. So with the damage gone, maybe people will switch to something else, and then switch back to Hc Leap glyph for fights that require high movement. While it was fun hitting 200-300k Hc Leaps in your opener, I knew it wouldn't last.

    Same thing for Deadly Calm, i read that "didn't like it either"
    I'm fine with this change tbh. Most people just incorporated it into their 1-shot macro and those who didn't, well, feels like it just takes up space on your action bar since it didn't have a HUGE impact.

  9. #9
    Deleted

    RE: Blizzard's try to balance Arms

    The problem I have is that the changes are boring. OP isn't proccing OP anymore, there aren't any taste for blood stacks to save for CS anymore
    I absolutely agree with this. While rng can be frustrating it is also a fun aspect to your rotation. For example when I, as a Fury warrior, don't get RB procs from like a few Bloodthirsts it can be frustrating, but when RB procs, regardless if I'm being lucky and getting many in a row or when I haven't got one in a few bloodthirsts it feels rewarding and fun. Arms as it is already feels steady, you do pretty much the same dps throughout the fight. And now I get the feeling they are making it too steady and too reliable. Getting TfB stacks and proccing several Overpowers after eachother was fun. Now you're luck relies only in CS procs and mastery procs(which is a very boring mecanic). Don't get me wrong when I'm saying reliable and steady, it's not in comparison to Fury or any other class it's just about the Arms spec itself.

    heroic leap still worth it without the glyph
    While the damage will be much lower, it will still be free damage. And who doesn't want free damage if it's there right infront of you. Players that decide not to use the glyph will probably save it for mobility which is the core of the ability anyway. I do think many people will stick to the Hc Leap glyph since it has great mobility and free damage.

    Will see how it turns out but guess I'll go fury even though i enjoy arms atm.
    Personally, I think the most important thing is to play what you enjoy playing. Most of the time you will perform best in the spec you have fun playing. I'll give you an example. In my roster there's an Armswarrior because of this exact reason. He doesn't like Fury as much as he likes Arms and therefore performs better as Arms. And while arms generally is worse than Fury it's not really that bad. It might require good play but you can still rock decent dps. You probably won't miss a bosskill because you we're Arms instead of Fury.

    "we didn't like one spell to be so powerful"(heroic leap)
    '

    I for one saw this one coming. I wasn't surprised at all. Hc leap is a mobility spell and not intended to be hitting as much or even higher than your other special attacks. I also understand that they removed the damage portion of the glyph because the glyph was pretty much mandatory. They wanted to remove the feeling of certain glyphs being mandatory and want people to change on a fight by fight basis. So with the damage gone, maybe people will switch to something else, and then switch back to Hc Leap glyph for fights with high movement. While it was fun hitting 200-300k Hc Leaps in your opener, I knew it wouldn't last.

    Same thing for Deadly Calm, i read that "didn't like it either"
    I'm fine with this change tbh. Most people just incorporated it into their 1-shot macro and those who didn't, well, feels like it just takes up space on your action bar since it didn't have a HUGE impact.

  10. #10
    Pandaren Monk meathead's Avatar
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    However, we also reverted an earlier change that let Mortal Strike proc Overpower even if the Mortal Strike missed.

    thats a huge nerf in itself.remember blizz tryed that before and it was so bad they allowed op to proc even when MS misses.wtf blizz never learns,that change is going to kill warrior in pvp.wtf can you do if you miss a MS?

  11. #11
    The Lightbringer Darkfriend's Avatar
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    Ya I really enjoy arms, but there is no way I'll be able to go back to it in 5.2 unless they buff it majorly.

  12. #12
    Quote Originally Posted by Darkfriend View Post
    Ya I really enjoy arms, but there is no way I'll be able to go back to it in 5.2 unless they buff it majorly.
    I think the problem is that they didn't listen to the warrior community during the beta enough and went ahead with changes that we all warned them about and saw issues with. It's just unfortunate it's taken them this long to realise there mistakes but it feels almost too late, arms pretty much needs some new mechanics or a semi overhaul which is unlikely to happen so we might end up with a crappy spec for most of this xpac I just hope they don't try and fix it by simply wacking a huge damage buff and ignore that fact that the rotation and mechanics of the spec are far too simple and boring. They should really look at enrage, I'm sure they could come up with an interesting mechanic for arms enrage like fury that would allow for a bit for fun, arms has always been a spec that could have rend bought back and have something worked into enrage with armour pen, it just needs something other than raw damage increases to make it decent to play.

  13. #13
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    Quote Originally Posted by Distinkt View Post
    Personally, I think the most important thing is to play what you enjoy playing. Most of the time you will perform best in the spec you have fun playing. I'll give you an example. In my roster there's an Armswarrior because of this exact reason. He doesn't like Fury as much as he likes Arms and therefore performs better as Arms. And while arms generally is worse than Fury it's not really that bad. It might require good play but you can still rock decent dps. You probably won't miss a bosskill because you we're Arms instead of Fury.

    I for one saw this one coming. I wasn't surprised at all. Hc leap is a mobility spell and not intended to be hitting as much or even higher than your other special attacks.


    I'm fine with this change tbh.
    What i want to say is, they can make changes out of design philosophy. I'm okay with that. But if you remove (several) damage portions cause of that without any compensation, while also nerfing many other thins i'm not okay with it... It would be reasonable if Arms dps would be too OP in PvE but it's just not true.
    I think if you play a weaker spec, even though you're better at it, you're pretty much stoping your guild from progressing anyway ( depends on the guild philosophy though). There are many bosses which require the missing dps.
    Beside this i agree with you.

  14. #14
    The Lightbringer Darkfriend's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Ravaanad View Post
    What i want to say is, they can make changes out of design philosophy. I'm okay with that. But if you remove (several) damage portions cause of that without any compensation, while also nerfing many other thins i'm not okay with it... It would be reasonable if Arms dps would be too OP in PvE but it's just not true.
    I think if you play a weaker spec, even though you're better at it, you're pretty much stoping your guild from progressing anyway ( depends on the guild philosophy though). There are many bosses which require the missing dps.
    Beside this i agree with you.
    Ok, as someone who plays both specs incredibly well (#1-10 parses w/ both on relevant content in this and prior tiers) I'll prefer to play the higher DPS spec. I'm Fury ATM, But I'd rather play arms. I enjoy is more, but Fury does more dps in my gear. The specs should either be closer in damage, or have some benefit to arms that fury doesn't have (Such as much stronger AOE, stronger execute, or something)

  15. #15
    Quote Originally Posted by Darkfriend View Post
    Ok, as someone who plays both specs incredibly well (#1-10 parses w/ both on relevant content in this and prior tiers) I'll prefer to play the higher DPS spec. I'm Fury ATM, But I'd rather play arms. I enjoy is more, but Fury does more dps in my gear. The specs should either be closer in damage, or have some benefit to arms that fury doesn't have (Such as much stronger AOE, stronger execute, or something)
    I have similar experience on playing Arms and now lately focusing more on Fury, because of the upcoming changes. The difference isn't that high but on times Arms just feels a lot weaker, although more stable too, what works for few fights. Kinda sad that all they've doing on 5.2 is wreck the PvE side, what makes it better decision to focus now on Fury at the moment. Arms isn't that bad currently, I feel it's behind like ~10k on worst case scenario on my gear level vs TG, when the RNG is good for both. Problem is that Arms doesn't get enough rage flow to even sustain hitting many executes, while Fury only has to hit BT now and then to keep enrage procs up to give up enough rage.

    The problem is that enrage also scales the execute damage from mastery up, so on 5.2 Arms just can't compete in any level, not in burst, not in sustained (even though the Execute is stronger on Arms if Fury's mastery isn't quite high). 5.2 Arms currently is only giving you rock stable and laughable dps results, because it just won't scale from anything.
    Last edited by Kankipappa; 2013-01-22 at 10:57 AM.

  16. #16
    I got a simple solution to end this madness, go fury and duel wield armageddon and just go wreck face.... because lets face it, arms is going to be screwed before you know it.

  17. #17
    Deleted
    It is really worrying and disappointing, but moreover, it's frustrating. Arms in 4.3 was sooo much fun to play in PvE. I've been Arms since day one, and it has certainly had bad-spots in terms of numbers, but it has always been fun, at least in PvE (I actually quit the game when they "removed" Intercept, came back for 4.3 though).

    There are so many things they can to sort out Arms, but it feels like they just don't know the best way to do it, and will end up doing a really bad job.

    Haste and Mastery need a revamp for Arms, they need to be exciting.

    It's sad that due to the stance dancing change, Arms can't really go back to the 4.3 idea, because the most interesting part of that rotation was weaving in Heroic Strikes when you had more than 75 rage or so before a stance change.

    Imo, Arms's Haste needs to interact with Colossus Smash in a similar way to Fury's mastery interacts with Enrage. Perhaps something like, the rage cost and global cooldown of your abilities is reduced by X% following the application of Colossus Smash. Something hugely radical that spices up the rotation. Imagine when you get a CS, your attack speed skyrockets, and you can basically just fit MORE attacks into that little window of opportunity.

    Mastery should increase the damage, healing reduction and bleed damage of Mortal Strike. Mortal Strike is THE iconic Arms Warrior ability, I still feel the absolute glee when I finally slotted in that talent point at level 40 back in classic. It needs to be stronger than Slam, and it needs to hit like a truck.

    Slam could potentially have something like a Snare attached to it, or something to make it more interesting than "press this for damage", although I feel that it is best placed to be that filler when we have nothing left to press. I strongly dislike the idea of slam hitting harder than MS.

  18. #18
    I had a better idea for Haste and Mastery buffing which may(or may not) have been better than this inadequate band-aid fixes that are being foisted on us.

    Your Melee autoattacks and Strikes of Opportunity reduce the cooldown of Colossus Smash by one second.

    We could probably have either an ICD on the proc or have the attacks have a reasonably high chance to reduce the CD so that it's not guaranteed. It would buff Haste and Mastery a lot better and make it fun in a way as well.

    Honestly, I liked the talent Impale and Deep Wounds in Cata very much. Impale was one of the reasons why Arms was competitive, and Deep Wounds was great of course. I'd really think if they wanted to buff Crit we should get back Impale, and maybe increased damage on Bleeds? I dunno. I think I've thrown out a crapload of ideas which nobody wants to promote. I've also seen great ideas on the US Forums, but none of them are even being considered seriously.

    I don't think Arms is going to be even competitive next patch without some serious buffs, and even then the gameplay is going to be pretty boring, and you'd rather play Fury.

  19. #19
    Deleted
    Quote Originally Posted by Kaljurei View Post
    I had a better idea for Haste and Mastery buffing which may(or may not) have been better than this inadequate band-aid fixes that are being foisted on us.

    Your Melee autoattacks and Strikes of Opportunity reduce the cooldown of Colossus Smash by one second.
    Thats a really good idea imho. It would fix so many things with this simple change.

    - No big impact on PvP since low mastery and haste anyways (no balance issues)
    - Would not result in regreting taking gear that lacks Crit.
    - Creates a nice synergy with Storm Bolt
    - Guarantees to keep arms competitive in the long run due to nice scaling
    - Rotation would become predictable but not monotonous or stale
    - Supports using rage outside of a CS window


    But you would have to remove Sudden Death and probably lower it a little bit so it wouldnt be over the top.

  20. #20
    Quote Originally Posted by meathead View Post
    However, we also reverted an earlier change that let Mortal Strike proc Overpower even if the Mortal Strike missed.

    thats a huge nerf in itself.remember blizz tryed that before and it was so bad they allowed op to proc even when MS misses.wtf blizz never learns,that change is going to kill warrior in pvp.wtf can you do if you miss a MS?
    The worst part about it is that there's also a ninja nerf that makes it so op from ms doesn't proc if the ms is parried.

    Good luck against plate melee..
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