[Arms Warrior] Feedback Thread v3.0

Well, lets dive right in. Arms Warriors have gotten some pretty huge changes in Warlords, and that's going to upset some people who are used to the current version, or imagined something else. That's totally understandable. There are a many different points of view involved here, so let me share ours. Then, if you'd like to have some constructive discussions, we can go from there.

Arms was a spec that did not fulfill its fantasy very well. The defining characteristic that we focused on was "big, heavy hits". That is in stark contrast to the fast and furious hits of Fury. This is evidenced by the prominence of Mortal Strike, Colossus Smash, their new Mastery, and non-spammy rotation.

One of the biggest complaints we see here is about the complexity of the baseline rotation. However, from our point of view, the *baseline* rotation hardly matters; nobody actually plays with the baseline. It acts as a platform to build upon, primarily through talents. And the Warrior talent tree provides a *ton* of potential changes to the rotation, to support a wide variety of playstyles. What matters is the whole package, with talents.

Like procs? Take Sudden Death. Want to fill every GCD? There are like 5 different talents you can take to fill GCDs; I don't think any other class has that many. Etc.

Remember, not everyone plays the same way that you do. Most especially, remember that anyone posting here is on the extreme end of game knowledge and hardcoreness.

The Warrior community has been clearly frustrated lately, and I'd like to discuss this further with you all, but please make that easy for me to do, by keeping the hyperbole and anger and useless sarcasm and generally destructive behavior out of this. Thanks.

Important note about today's build: Slam nerf didn't make it into that build, but it will be nerfed similar to how Mortal Strike was, in the next build.

EDIT: And nor will it be viable to use Defensive Stance as part of DPSing. Please point out tuning issues like that, but don't give mechanic feedback on them.

08/18/2014 07:55 PMPosted by Secondwind

The talents you gave us to add some depth to the rotation have mostly fallen flat. Sudden Death has gone between way too strong and way too weak. I haven't logged on tonight for the new patch to see if it's still bugged, but last build SD was using the wrong execute spell ID, and was hitting for the bonus rage damage (625%) instead of the base execute damage (150%). If that gets fixed, when combined with the nerf to Execute, we'll be looking at a 1-2/minute proc for 100% weapon damage, which is abysmally low.

We'll get the bugs and tuning issues solved. Just because something has those doesn't make it bad. With so many changes involved, bugs are inevitable, which surely taints your feedback, and that's just something we have to filter out.

08/18/2014 07:55 PMPosted by Secondwind

Slam is a talent idea I really liked at the start, and was super enthusiastic about, but the more I play with it, both in practice and in the sims, the less of the intended depth it seems to offer. Simulation-wise, playing around with different ways to use Slam seems to barely budge its overall damage marginally either direction. So trying to manage it to use low stacks more frequently (by interrupting slam combos with other abilities) gets no real benefit. Trying to cancel aura to keep at low stack permanently shows almost no benefit since rage gen got buffed. Trying to squeeze other abilities together to get 3 stacks together at once more often is basically a loss. Rather than giving a breadth of depth to the rotation, it adds needles complexity. In actual play, the way its set up tends to lend itself to you having a 0 stack slam available when you're at high rage, thus rage capping frequently by accident, and then when you do have the 2 stack available, your rage is lower and you can't use it again even if you wanted to. This is a talent that had so much potential, but the implementation leaves us with so little control that it just doesn't feel right, and doesn't offer any meaningful depth.

Slam's goal is to fill GCDs, and provide min/max rotational gameplay. Note that being able to right click it is unintended and will be fixed; don't test with that. I'd argue that it does provide you quite a lot of control, but it's easy to misuse. But, you're not severely punished if you do use it improperly.

08/18/2014 07:55 PMPosted by Secondwind

The new mastery was already a weak stat unless we took Slam. With Slam no longer being affected by Mastery, Mastery falls really low. Add in the huge nerfs to MS and Execute, and it's even worse. Once Collision gets the sims updated, I'll get you some hard numbers, but right now as of this build it seems like the "Big Heavy Hits" Arms is dead. Seeing as we lost all of our depth to support that vision, we really need something back.

Again, this sounds like simply tuning issues. Slam being affected by Mastery briefly was simply a bug left over from the previous version of Slam.

General point on 'nerfs': Getting nerfed at this point is not a bad thing. It's just numbers, and they were off. Simple as that.

08/18/2014 07:56 PMPosted by Ultrabad

What I want to know Celest, is should arms be competitive dps? It was clearly overpowered, but a large nerf like the ones we saw today, including the upcoming Slam nerf you mention seem to put Arms quite a bit lower on the totem pole. No one wants to be bottom of the barrel no matter how optimally you play the spec and I can't say for certain we are as there is more tuning to be done.

Yes, absolutely. Arms is far from low on the totem pole.

08/18/2014 08:09 PMPosted by Hamhocks

I'd like to know why you removed Ignite Weapon. I'm rather upset by this mostly as Fury but Arms too. When you guys added it you gave us two things. One, an active on use ability without a cooldown, and two most importantly, a playstyle that doesn't depend on Colossus Smash as much. The pooling factor of CS is something MANY warriors hate. Ignite Weapon helped to make it so we didn't need to anymore. You might say well there's the CS glyph for that, but we both know it won't see any use because it's going to come at a significant DPS loss. And any warrior who does take it will be made to look the fool. Many warriors begged you guys to just move CS to a talent, but since you didn't do it we at least had Ignite Weapon to look forward to and now that's gone. In it's place we get an ability that looks at first glance to be mainly for PVP. This leaves us with two talents and only one is engaging. And that's only for AoE. I really think if you wanted to add in Siegebreaker it should have replaced Ravager instead. We don't need Ravager at all.

Ignite Weapon was designed as a replacement for Heroic Strike. Without Heroic Strike, it made very little sense. See the first post in the Fury thread for a good example of why. If you took it as Arms, or as Fury without Unquenchable Thirst, it basically ate up all your rage, while filling no GCDs, leaving you with some extremely anemic GCD utilization like 30-40%. And if you took Unquenchable Thirst as Fury, it did the opposite extreme, requiring you to be both GCD capped *and* spam Ignite Weapon off the GCD, more spammy than any rotation we've ever had in the game, I believe.

08/18/2014 08:21 PMPosted by Secondwind

But okay, I'll bite, if Arms mastery was already low pre-MS/Exe nerf, and these nerfs will hurt Mastery more than other stats... what options do you have in tuning to bring Mastery up without bringing us back to "omgwtfhitme" levels of damage on those two abilities?

Mastery is the easiest stat to tune of them all. It has a built-in tuning knob.