Originally Posted by
Ashetaka
I figured I'd post this because it's how I see things and hope someone can point some break in my logic that can justify me playing Arms. I've spent like 15k gold on azerite respecs back and forth between Fury and Arms testing things pre-raid and can say with some confidence that 8.2 broke Arms worse than pre-8.2. I'm not referring to DPS numbers, I'm referring to core mechanics. You could design warrior to sit there with nothing on their bars but execute, not even able to auto-attack until execute phase where they will instantly deal 40m damage and be "mid-pack", but no one would argue this is a functioning spec.
I mean on a core mechanical level 8.2 has broken Arms worse than before in a way that can't simply be tuned around. It broke it in a way that will require 9.0 to fix and we can blame Memory of Lucid Dreams (MLD).
1) Elevating of Test of Might (ToM) to utterly mandatory. With MLD + ToM Arms can generate over 4000 additional strength following a Colossus Smash. The DPS gains from this are so staggering that sims on the Warrior discord are showing you would drop an ilvl 420 Azerite down to a 385 in order to get ToM. Lucid Dreams + ToM has made Azerite ilvl pointless. What makes this worse is preliminary BoD raid data is showing that even with this brokenly synergistic combo, Arms is only Fury's equal. Meaning if you cannot get 3x ToM you should under no circumstances play Arms.
2) Further eliminates flexible talent choices. MLD allows for unlimited rage to be spent which means more Anger Management (AM) and since it's unlimited, the already dominant Fervor of Battle becomes even more mandatory because it's more rage spent per GCD which means more ToM. More AM also means higher uptimes on In for the Kill. It wouldn't surprise me if even Warbreaker became mandatory due to the AM synergy. The Arms talent tree becomes a pure cookie cutter due to MLD.
3) Drastically increased dependence on burst windows and execute. Due to the mandatory and synergistic nature of MLD + ToM outside of Colossus Smash, the single target rotation for Arms is at or below tank DPS. You are entirely beholden to small windows of time to deal damage. What makes this worse is even within these windows your damage is only 65-70% of a normal DPS. When you hit execute phase the damage synergy between MLD + ToM + Execute is so ridiculous and dramatic your sustained execute DPS compensates for underperforming dramatically the rest of the fight. It's not much of an overstatement to say aligning MLD +ToM + Execute accounts for 50% of your total output during a fight. This broken synergy still only brings Arms up to barely equal Fury. So unless the execute phase is the progression section of the fight between a kill and a wipe, Arms is the worst DPS class you could ever bring to any progression raid. This goes beyond niche into handicapped.
The worst part is you can't just "tune" this in a hotfix. The synergy between ToM + AM + MLD + Execute is mechanically important. To fix this Blizzard would have to nerf ToM by around 25% and buff every other Arms azerite by 25% to make them viable. Execute would have to be nerfed with major compensatory buffs to overpower and mortal strike while nerfing colossus smash bonuses. To fix these issues that are complete unique to Arms would require a complete overhaul of the central damage sources that would mechanically alter the spec. Unfortunately, I think Arms is just dead/niche meme spec until 9.0 even with the 8.2 buffs.