Arms Warrior PvE/PvP in Cataclysm

#0 - Oct. 31, 2010, 10:39 a.m.

I'd like to start out by saying that I understand that warriors are actually very strong at the moment during this lame duck period, especially with the introduction of throwdown and how we work with a healer in tow.

This is more about keeping Arms warriors 'in check' in PvP while letting us also 'keep up' in PvE.

First off:

Please make Throwdown work like Sap, or Polymorph in PvE/PvP. Give it a 5 second duration in PvP, take away the stupid 'knockdown' animation that you can't trinket out of(Or allow players to trinket out of it while on the floor) and give it a 30 sec-1 min duration in PvE. This lets arms warriors actually do something 'useful' in 5 mans/heroics, especially with the CC focus in the new cataclysm heroics.

Second:

Colossus Smash.

I love this move, I really do, but it has to go. Colossus Smash as a whole is a stupid idea. Blizzard did away with Armor Penetration as a stat for a reason, and then they give it right back. I, as a warrior, do not want to be balanced around the idea of my Colossus Smash uptime, be it arms or fury. Fury will have a lower 'uptime' for the 100% Armor Penetration that colossus smash gives compared to arms due to Sudden Death, but it should be dealt with.

Colossus Smash could be reworked to something akin to obliterate so that warriors do not have to be balanced around our uptime with C-Smash. It could do something along the lines of:

180% Weapon damage+150, plus an additional x% damage for every bleed on the target. Of course, it would need a short cooldown due to the change in utility- but i don't know what would be good.

This would be useful in PvE for both specs, and it wouldn't be complete bull%#** in PvP. While I love bursting someone down in the span of a throwdown due to Colossus Smash, it really is an unfair ability.

I do understand that Arms treads a fine line between being nigh-unstoppable when played properly in PVP to being completely useless in PVE, and both ends of said spectrum and the things that can be done to fix it have repercussions.

#14 - Oct. 31, 2010, 6:25 p.m.

Armor penetration as a concept is not overpowered. We're not worried about Sunder Armor for example. Armor penetration as a stat was overpowered. There was no reasonable mathematical way for us to prevent armor pen rating on gear from just being better and better the more you stack, which has a number of problems, such as making other stats unattractive and making a dude with a lot of armor pen overpowered.

The origin behind Colossus Smash was that we realized warriors were at a disadvantage against heavily armored targets because they do no magic damage. We also wanted to put something in their rotation that was more than just another +weapon damage or +AP attack. Finally, we wanted to replace Execute in the Sudden Death talent, since that was keeping Execute's damage low, instead of it feeling like a powerful finisher.