MoP Arms Warrior Discussion - Forums - World of Warcraft

I have created a new MoP Arms Discussion thread on EU Forums, and included 2 Rotation samples as well as a list of all the changes that have been made. I request you all to please do read and contribute to the discussion, if you have an EU Account. You may of course borrow from the discussion there to discuss on it here as well.

If people are interested, I may also create an MoP Fury Discussion thread.

A more recent blue post indicated that Thunderclap will not cost any rage either, so the only things to spend rage on are heroic strike, cleave and shield block/barrier. It does mean that by spamming TC within our single target rotation we should be able to avoid any empty gcds, but it does seem to make the rotation for more complex than ever before with so many cooldowns to keep an eye on. Also you probably have to spec into some or all of the talents that give new attacks to fill up your gcds, which is quite a restriction on choice. Before you could just use a devastate if you ended up with nothing off cd to use and it wasn't a big loss but now if you go wrong you'll have nothing to do but spend 1.5+seconds feeling stupid for messing it up.

This seems completely at odds with their posts that they're trying to simplify our tanking rotation because we have so many abilities to deal with. The other possibility is that shield block/barrier is no longer off the global cooldown and actually is filling the empty gcds in our rotation. That would probably prevent the need for heavy TC spam, but would mean we're contantly using abilities that don't deal any damage at all, which isn't very satisfying (to me at least). I would hope that the blues would have given us a post to indicate that if it were true though, so it likely is still off gcd.

Even if all the abilities cost 0 rage in the MoP model I don't see why we couldn't keep the identical rotation we have right now. We tend to use our current abilities due to their damage/threat rather than damage per rage (except for HS which is more damage than devastate but much worse dpr), and largely ignore their rage cost (again with the exception of HS which is only used at high rage). I don't think any of us would feel motivated to spam devastate even if it costed no rage when we could be pressing shield slam instead.

Also I'm a little concerned by the HS change. It's now 100% of weapon damage instead of being AP based, this means it'll be significantly lower for tanks (before vengeance..) than for 2h dps. But I suppose they can balance around the numbers to make it work.

Still sad that collosus smash is gone for prot, but I do acknowledge that the vast majority of tanks never used it anyway.

Yes, you can fit all 3 HS in a CS. You can do the same with Stormbolt, and you can do it twice.

Furthermore, Incite no longer adds 15% Crit chance to Heroic Strike which means you cannot rely on Incite procs to enable better Enrage up time. It's only a possibility.

OT : I have plotted out two Sample Rotations, one with Zero Enrage Uptime, and the other with 100% Enrage uptime. In both cases you would not be using Heroic Strike unless under Deadly Calm, and there would be no point using DC when Stormbolt does way more damage. As for swing timers, Stormbolt is like Deadly Throw, and it doesn't reset the swing timer, but instead forces a full melee swing. Landsoul posted the same in the Arms Thread.

As for the sample rotations, here they are. Feel free to check the math.



Practically you could use 2x Storm Bolts inside these 60 seconds in the places where the Pauses occur. However the first Pause occurs at 28.5s for the First Case, and at 34.5s for the Second Case. Hence you may need to use it right after the CS, which will change the rage generation and hence the rotation and so on and so forth.

Frankly, the fact that pauses occur even when we have 100% Enrage uptime disturbs me greatly.

A quick note about lack of enrage uptime: I think the boss dummy is now level 93 and has some sort of crit resistance. I was noticing now enrages, and started watching for crits and was not getting any over 5 minutes. So I switched to the level 85 dummy and started getting crits and enrages. Recklessness on the boss dummy got me a few crits but not many. Just a thought on that front.