Arms appears to once again be a viable raid spec and worthy of its own thread. Lets kick off discussion with this post from Hellord.

From the first minutes on the dummies and hrc 5mans,i ve found that Slam has become a bit non-existant on my rotation.HS does a lot more damage especially with 3/3 incite.Is it worth changing Improved slam for something else?Even Sudden Death seems appealing for the extra rage it reserves on Execute-spam phases.I have already changed Glyph of Slam for the Bladestorm one.

Can any1 post how the Arms warrior acts in a raiding environment so far?We havent set foot on icc with the guild yet(too many ppl having problems with UI and addons).

Ill try to get some damage parses up of arms in the next day or two. And yes the damage output of slam vs the rage cost makes it almost useless in the arms rotation at the moment.

We did some ICC-raiding on Thursday, that was before the hotfix in EU. Atm Arms and Fury have pretty much the same DPS, ranging anywhere from 13-15k single target. Will have to wait and see how much the DPS improves when the hotfix is deployed.

They had already deployed the hotfix a couple of days ago:

Can't find the actual source, but it's on mmo-champion.com anyway.

As I said in the FAQ post, with the recent changes Mastery is really close if not higher than crit, at least for 20%sh+ crit levels. It is also very likely that expertise becomes more important given that OP didn't get any buff and mastery has been buffed a lot.

For a finer result we probably need a working simulation with raidbuffs, but I'd say that crit, exp and mastery may just not be reforged at all since their value is so close that there seems to be no reason to stack any of them, with the only exception of Exp since is easily cappable, especially at level 80.

It's worth noticing that HS and Exe got a coefficient buff (HS seems to be .75AP baseline) that is not reported in the notes, and MS was buffed aswell to something like 185% weapon damage.

With BS up I have 40.28% crit chance, this should make Overpower an autocrit each time. For some reason this is not the case. My first thoughts were I must have let BS fall, but that doesn't seem possible given BS gives rage and I use it off CD.

What might be the case here?

Found out I crit less against mobs higher level than me. Go figure.

There are two different priority lists, one sorted according to DPRage and one according to DPGCD. In Wrath you shifted between those two a lot during combat depending on rage situation, including predictable incoming damage and your weapon swing.

Now out of Deadly Calm you are 'rage starved'. There are no calcualtions like should you delay your MS for that extra Slam because you can easily wait for the MS and use Slam right after it. Also without Colossus Smash and with expertise softcap there are no unpredictable procs, you know exactly what happens next.
OP and MS have by far the best DPRage-ratio, but they are limited. You will use MS every 4,5 seconds and you will use OP about every 6 seconds. Those two spells alone will not consume every rage. There are two possible rage-dumps, Slam and heroic Strike. Because you can neither spam Slam nor HS there is only the question which one is better DPRage-wise. There is no scenario were you will sometimes use HS and sometimes Slam. As for now HS seems to be better and as long as you never hit 100 Rage while having HS on CD there is no use in using Slam. Even if you want to use Battle Trance HS is better, althought Incite seems stronger.

Inside Deadly Calm you will use the Spells with the best DPGCD-ratio because there is no cost. Now it is a little more complicated since OP only have 1 second GCD instead of 1,5 seconds so there will be the question if you should use Slam and delay MS for 1 second or wait 0,5 seconds for MS. As far as I can tell the last one seems superior but numbers may change the next weeks. Also it is recommended to use Deadly Calm shortly after using Rend so you don't get a cost free Rend instead of a cost free Slam.

Execute phase is far more complicated. You could use Execute every GCD because it only needs a minimum of 10 Rage and also 10 Rage will be left at least. You are also 'rage starved' so you should also use Rend and OP as usual. I'm not sure if MS should be used during Execute phase too but Lambs to the Slaughter seems really strong. If you use Deadly calm during this phase you may just spam execute, the damage with high rage is far too superior, but it could be useful to use MS for Lambs to the Slaughter and also Rend may have a higher DPGCD-Value than Execute but OP doesn't.

Seems like cruelty is broken, it doesnt give the (full) 10% Crit Bonus wich leads to big holes in the WC uptime.

http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/9...1710145403.jpg

I also testet 30% haste VS 17% VS 11% and I didn't feel very big difference between these stats in rage generation.

What about reaplying Rend with Thunderclap instead? I tested it and it's a DPS increase with little effect on Rage. Of course, I have it glyphed so it's just 5 rage more. Has anyone else done it like this instead of just using Rend?

In a raid situation, you will have haste buffs. On the dummy, you do not. So, you should have more rage generation in the first gear setting, allowing for more damage on the dummy. In a raid, the haste that you lost by regearing will be recouped. The same will happen with Crit percentage. As such, all of the other stats (Mastery and Strength) increase in relative value while haste and crit decrease in relative value. You should have more DPS in a raid with your second setup than with your first setup.

As for execute phase, I wouldn't drop Mortal Strike. As you said, Lambs to the Slaughter is very strong, especially paired with an Execute. Additionally, MS is how we get our 10% damage increase from Wrecking Crew. By dropping MS, we lose both of those effects. I would think it would be best to keep rend up and drop Heroic Strike unless Deadly Calm is on, while still using MS to Execute and Overpower after Execute benefits from Lambs to the Slaughter (while Execute still hits as hard as it does at least). This hinges heavily on how much rage you are getting in though.

I haven't seen any parses detailing exactly how much harder Execute hits when compared to Mortal Strike in a raid setting, so if it is really not a contest then it might be best to just spam it.

From my testing, it doesn't look like the 115% WD mastery has been implemented yet. When it is, I think Mastery could overtake Crit as a desirable stat.

What would you be speccing out of and would it be worth it to spend a GCD every few GCDs to gain a 5% damage increase on MS and HS?

Stance dancing is on a seperate GCD than normal abilities, so you are not losing any GCDs.

Stance Swapping is still off the GCD, so there is no loss except for speccing into Tactical Mastery (to minimize/eliminate rage loss). The spec would probably look something like:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

So you're giving up Second Wind, Drums of War, or field Dressing, for that damage increase. Seems to be well worth it from a pure optimization point of view, unless it's an encounter where one of the skills from Drums of War will be used a lot. After that, the only trick is macroing a change to zerker stance into most of your abilities, and a change to battle stance to Rend/OP (or just manage it manually. Now that we don't have to HS spam, I can easily see binding stance changes to the mouse wheel for example).


I'm actually personally more interested in the possibility of a Prot subspec. Like I mentioned in the Fury thread, I can foresee Heroic Throw being a decent addition to a rotation if you get a swing timer, given it is a rage free attack that hits pretty hard, and even adds a sunder (assuming that's ever even an issue with druids and hunters bringing sunders much easier).

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Basically you pick up an extra HT per minute, the utility gained from the silence on your HT (makes you the tanks best friend on some pulls), some extra AoE from Blood and Thunder, and you get to add Thunderclap into your single target rotation as your rend refresher, picking you up a bit of dps.

But I'm not sure at this time that going for that Prot subspec is worth losing Executioner and 2 points in battle trance (or 2 points in cruelty, while maxing out battle trance. I made the assumption the extra wrecking crew uptime from Cruelty made it the better talent). I think it bears looking into, but it may end up being just more trouble than it's worth.

Oh, gotcha I had thought you were talking about 4.01 where those extra points wouldn't be there.

On another note, I didn't know that crit took into account mob level. Which means level 83 dummies would require more crit to cap OP that I was wondering about a few posts before.

I had made the post describing a stance-dancing scenario with the assumption that the three alternate talents at level 80: field dressing, second wind, and drums of war, provide no additional DPS output. In fact, outside of PVP they seem pretty marginal for DPS warriors. On the other hand, optimal stance-dancing has a maximum benefit of changing the stance damage bonus from 5% to 10% on all non-OP, non-rend abilities.

I just tested the stance dancing and I am very impressed. All I had to do was make a macro for MS, Rend, OP, HS, and Execute and the stance dancing worked painlessly. The dps was on par if not better with no stance dancing. The reason for this is probably because I haven't quite got the hang of when to refresh rend yet with stancing.

This is something I consider an issue. I am voicing my concerns about the differences between stances on the beta forum since a few, because the stance dance isn't anything but a gimmick way to gain dps and the whole process can be macroed. Used correctly it's much more than a marginal gain: rend ticks gain the bonus aswell so you only miss the 5% on the application refresh and you can simply keep the time in battle stance down to 2-3s every ~10.

Latest changes also prompted up the damage of everything but OP so increasing the benefit of sitting in berserk for most of the time. Also, since MS is far higher damage than OP, even accounting the 50% crit difference, you are still going to try to avoid using LttS on OP.

My testing indicates that refreshing Rend with Thunder Clap for single target damage with the Blood and Thunder talent is not worth it.

Rend ticks 6 times, once at 0 seconds, and every 3 seconds after, until the debuff falls off at 15 seconds. In order to refresh the debuff with a Thunder Clap, you lose that last tick. A Rend tick is currently doing more damage than a Thunder Clap hit. So you're doing less damage for 50% more rage.

Blood and Thunder should only be worth it with 2 or more targets.

I agree that staying in berserker stance is not intended as arms has always been associated with battle stance. It does present some issues though, especially during Deadly Calm phases. During DC since nothing costs rage you want to mash HS on CD, however if the macro requires HS to only be usable during berserker stance then it would not go off while you were OPing at the same time which required you to go back to battle stance. The simple remedy would be I suppose to unmacro HS and allow it's use whenever since generally you'll be in berserker stance after an MS anyway.

It does seem a bit gimmicky this way though.

Some more things I just tested with Rend.
First of all the behaviour has changed a bit since some weeks ago. For a while Rend had a very low crit chance, but now seems fixed. However its damage per tick is based on the initial application so changing stance or getting an AP buff won't change the tick size until you refresh or reapply it. This wasn't happening in the beginning of my beta experience where damage changed based on stances and buffs. The only thing that seems to affect the tick is Trauma and the first tick on a target without the bleed debuff is in fact doing less damage.

About Rend vs TC for single target there is a different "approach" you should use. Rend *refresh* won't grant any tick at 0 time, it will just continue to tick on a 3s basis wheter you refresh at 14s or 0.5s and will tick 6 times eventually extending over 15s to achieve that (up to 17s if you refresh @~9s or ~4s).

TC does the same thing, ie produces another 6 ticks after the *refresh*, but contrary to Rend it deals damage on the refresh. TC is mitigated by armor, but can't be dodged or parried and has 3yds additional range. It scales from pure AP instead of weapon damage and scales slower than Rend.

So you actually need to reapply Rend to produce that 1 tick, and this produces a loss of OP damage. Ideally you want to reapply Rend as fast as possible after last tick. This is not always the best choice tho because of cds and GCD collision. TC won't make you lose any OP damage cause you can only refresh Rend with it. Also for this reason it will cost you more than X rage (5 glyphed, 10 otherwise), cause you will have always to use it before the expiration, while Rend can even be delayed to up to 3s.

Imho if you see that your cds will collide with the optimal Rend reapplication, you are better off using TC as close as possible to last tick. Rend ticks should deal more damage than a TC in nearly every occasion except under CS and low AP levels, but you shouldn't clip last tick with another Rend because, unless you only have 14 or less rage, TC will deal more damage even for single target.