7.2.5 PTR Arms, Rage, and why it should matter

[Deleted]

It's not as difficult as you're making it sound. A number of different approaches could be made that achieve the same thing, more closely balanced numbers between talents without nerfing FR. Taking into account that it's perfectly fine (and preferable for me) to have FR the best single target talent, Mortal Combo has massive potential with some imagination, such as outright increasing the damage on MS in addition to 2 stacks, perhaps having it not consume Shattered Defense, having it extend CS duration on MS use, or as you mentioned a stacking damage buff.

Shattered Defense alone is the key here, I feel, given how it directly hampers Mortal Combo. Aside from causing massive problems alongside CS in how Arms is balanced and developed in my opinion.
Mortal Combo could be great, but as it stands to hit anywhere near decency you have to do as you do in PvP, by going CS MS WB MS for burst, but in reality in PvE popping WB this deliberately isn't good.

In for the Kill is the problem talent because it's actually purely situational and quite weak at that, it needs to be outright replace or have some additional factors. I think it's important to stress though that Focused Rage being the best talent on single target is not a bad thing, and the primary reason for it dominating is down to the weakness of the other talents, they put a strong valuable talent next to 2 weak talents.

In for the Kill, in my eyes, suffers the Sweeping Strikes, Defensive Stance, Overpower, Rend syndrome: these are not good "talents" nor do they make for good ones.

Arms' talents are mostly made of abilties that were in the core kit in previous iterations of the spec, some of them with different tweaks.
As they were, those made for nice quality of life improvements. But as an optional choice they can't hold a candle to talents that outright improve the strength of the spec.

EDIT:
It all boils down to what the point of the thread is though: given how Rage income and spending is right now, either how Warriors generate it, the spenders or the talents has to be remade from the ground up.
Years of messing around and testing mechanics brought the spec in a place that's perplexing at the very best.

[Juliansfist]

I think the warriors problem is the very idea of rage as a resource is broken. It builds too quickly and burns too quickly (fury) or doesn't really burn outside of FR/execute (arms).

I almost feel that being enraged should be its own stance focused on burning rage.

I never played warrior before MoP (and only arms in Legion) but for fury at least both MoP and WoD were much more fun and felt a lot more like alright I'm enraged time to burn this rage. The haste warrior is the dudd warrior