Changed some random comments that weren't really necessary to the key point I wanted to respond to.

Although I'm not sure that the particulars of this suggestion seem like a great idea, the concept in general is pretty good. I think it would be pretty cool to change the arms playstyle so that arms warriors are encouraged to use battle stance, and so that they get better performance by primarily using battle-stance specific abilities. Right now, Arms is a PvP tree with some gimicky ultra-powerful talents that make it viable in PvE. It doesn't really have a strong defining feel or flavor though, other than being the BF/Trauma bitch. Some example brainstorming to help fix this:

• Improved Battle Stance - The other trees both have an improved version of their primary stance (as do other classes like palies, DKs, druids, etc...) Make a deep arms talent to buff battle stance enough that it provides a better passive buff than Berzerker stance does, thereby making it more appealing for Arms warriors. This wouldn't be sufficient in and of itself since berzerker still has WW, which leads to the next point.
  
  
• Arms Special Attack - Make some sort of attack that works as a main special attack in the primary rotation. You could piggy back off the already arms-only overpower (turning it into a nuke that is available every cooldown), or preferably make an additional attack.
  
  For the overpower idea, instead of reducing the cooldown, make it available all of the time when the CD is up (6 secs), or mabye after a crit. If losing the unique reactionary element of overpower is too big of a deal (which is certainly a very cool aspect of the ability), consider making MS a base ability so that fury and prot can have a bit more PvP viability, while making a new battle-stance special attack for arms warriors to use from battle stance instead of encouraging them to sit in fury and use WW.
  
  Though there might be some initial concern about this plus WW being available, people currently hardly ever stance dance in PvE, figuring that the rage you lose to get to battle from frenzy to overpower then get back isn't worth it. Even if this turns out to be not the case, that just makes the play more fun (at least to me, stance dancing while levelling was super cool, and I miss it in high level raid content). Arms already does a LOT less DPS, especially after the WF change, so I certainly don't think this would be too powerful. Other options along the lines of making it on a linked CD with WW are possible, but probally not necessary.
  
  
• Flurry Equivalent - Right now, a heavy secondary in fury is pretty much a no brainer. Flurry is just such an appealing talent. I would suggest making a similar ability but with a bit more of an arms playstyle flavor of slow hard hitting attacks. Instead of a speed boost to attacks, something along the lines of a multiplier to damage after you crit for a short time. This would go a very long ways to making it an actual interesting decision to go deep arms or to get flurry in fury.
  

Though not comprehensive by any means, these are a few examples that could make deep arms more interesting. The specifics aren't all that important, but I think that the general goal of making battle stance the prefered stance for arms warriors, and the intention of making the deep arms tree into an appealing playstyle as opposed to simply a pvp tree with some gimicky PvE synergy talents is important.

Slam may not be completely better than Overpower, but given that it is unnormalized and would be used with a slow weapon, while OP would be used with a normalized fast weapon, I'm pretty sure that OP wouldn't be better than Slam by more than 25%. Since BT is better than MS, and probably by the same amount, it is somewhat balanced there, and WW is better than Rend. Adding in Flurry, +10% AP, +3% crit, Rampage, and the OH weapon, I don't see how it Overpower could be that imbalanced.

Edit: To reply to Alaron, all the abilities that Battle Stance needs already exist. MS is already a special, rend is good damage that you have to use a GCD on anyway to keep Blood Frenzy up. Overpower can be used every other attack as a spammable filler, assuming it can be activated reliably. Arms DPS doesn't need to be entirely comparable to Fury DPS due to BF, and Imp Battle Stance doesn't really need to exist, nor does a Flurry compliment. And since, of the first 20 points in Fury, only the first 5 points add to DPS, there really is no reason to compare Bladestorm to Deathwish, even assuming that it belongs in the tree. Heroic Leap would be a much better talent for deep Arms and Bladestorm would be a much better talent for deep Fury.

I do agree that Strength of Arms and Bull Rush need to be moved around in the tree and/or buffed. Imp Intercept is also somewhat silly in the tree, maybe combining both Imp Intercept and Bull Rush into a 5 point talent and swapping it with Commanding Presence would be a good idea. Move that to Tier 3 in Arms, put Imp Overpower in Tier 4 and the talent to make Overpower reliable in Tier 4 or Tier 6 in place of Imp Intercept.

Actually, that change would probably be pretty useful. You'd be able to spec 15/x/5y for Deep Prot and get Commanding Presence for better Battle Shout or Commanding Shout, while a Fury spec could get Imp Demo AND UW instead of it and Imp Demo OR UW, and could still choose to get it in the Arms tree. This would also be a reason to bring a Fury warrior, since no other spec would really have Imp Demo, which is one of the two AoE AP reduction abilities. If you've got an AoE pull, Imp Demo from a DPS'ing Fury warrior is going to be easier to use than Imp Demo from a DPS'ing Feral druid.

Edit2: You also have to remember that a self-refreshing Overpower would be pretty worthless if you didn't also reduce the cooldown, which means Blizzard can alter the usefulness by moving Unrelenting Assault deeper, if they feel it is too easy to get, though I don't think it would be necessary.

I changed my post around before you posted this, because I realized a lot wasn't relevant to what I was responding to. Take a look at the post again, it has changed considerably I do hear what you're saying, but I do like the idea of making Battle Stance a valid raid stance for the arms spec, and here is why.

First of all, yes you will need to be rending likely to keep BF up. Rend isn't equivalent DPS in and of itself to WW though, so as things stand now though, that is only going to weaken your overall DPS by losing so much rage to stance dancing. MS, Rend, Slams. I suppose it isn't that much different from the current MS, WW, Slams cycle. It does seem a bit boring though, and certainly will do a ton less DPS given the WF changes. Without making some fairly drastic changes like mentioned above, arms DPS is going to remain gimpy, and you are only going to be further reinforcing the fact that Blood Frenzy is simply a gimick to prop up a weak spec and give it a raid spot, as opposed to being a playstyle of its own.

For some specifics on why I chose to keep the points that I did: Overpower does not reliably activate in a raid. You get expertise so you don't get dodged (and even without it it is only like 6.5% or something - can't remember the exact number). That means overpower doesn't activate. You could either make a talent to activate it on cooldown, or an extra ability to pair with MS, while making MS global (something fury and prot wanted for ages to give them more pvp viability).

As for comparing bladestorm to death wish, that's a bad comparison, and I removed it. For PvE, flurry is the no brainer, not death wish. So your entire deep arms tree competes with getting flurry. And Flurry is good, so that is hard to compete against. Putting in some equivalent (if slightly weaker version) with an arms flavor as suggested would mean that the top of the tree actually was a valid choice.

Flurry is really powerful, but if Blood Frenzy is the reason you are deep in the arms tree, you can't get more than 4 points in Flurry. If they put something in place of Bull Rush that is any good, you would be forced to choose between the last few points in Flurry and it plus Strength of Arms (which we both want to see slightly buffed) or something that replaces it. At that point, Death Wish competes with the 51 point talent and whatever you can get with 15 extra talent points.

And if you aren't in the Arms tree for Blood Frenzy, there's no reason not to spec for Fury DPS rather than Arms DPS.

On the subject of WW vs Rend, WW isn't as good as Overpower for an Arms build, if Overpower became usable. Rend is more of a filler ability that also provides BF if you aren't keeping Deep Wounds up. Also, it will be really nice synergy if a Glyph reduces or increases the duration of Rend by 3 seconds, since you'd either be clipping it or having it down 1/6th of the time.

Double post, delete.

Yes, that's exactly the point. I think we agree for the most part that this is piss poor design. I'm not saying the above are good suggestions even, but I think that arms should be a unique and viable playstyle, as should fury. Making crits have overpower light up is certainly a way to do that. It takes away a bit of the uniqueness of the ability though for non-raiding, so an alternative would also work.

I don't really care how they buff it (I usually play prot so I don't really care beyond academics anyways), but one way or another, we agree that they should really buff deep arms in some way so that it isn't a no brainer to get the debuff then go into fury. To my mind, this means making the two notably different, and I think that guy's suggestion of focusing on making battle stance the primary arms stance is an interesting idea to facilitate

"We're not at all happy with the "fun choice" of deciding whether to take a Fury warrior with awesome dps but no buffs, or an Arms warrior who begrudingly picked up BF just to earn a spot in the raid. " - (Bluepost) Ghostcrawler


I like that quote as it shows that at least one person working for Blizzard things Fury stands for awesome dps but "no buffs" (except battleshout?).

I've always liked the idea of Fury being Highest DPS but without much control over it, and Rogues being less DPS but better control. Giving us alternating top spots on damage meters depending on the boss at hand, however throughout TBC this hasn't been the case.

It should be imo:
Warrior's Higher DPS = Rogue's better Threat management.
Warrior's Battleshout = Rogue's better survivability (clos/evasion/sprint/blind/-berserker stance/-recklessness/-deathwish)


Oh well i guess we just have to wait until we see the next Warrior updates... Fingers Crossed.

I believe that the sword spec internal CD was removed (but feel free to correct me on this), and Axe spec is really only all that when paired with Flurry.

Regarding Sudden Death: I can't currently see the point of this talent, as the lack of scaling on Execute makes it a remarkably poor choice except in certain very specific circumstances. As it stands, I wouldn't even spec SD. However, I am waiting to see what the Execute Glyph does before passing final judgement on the talent.

EDIT: and bear in mind as well, if you are specing SD, you are going to need Improved Execute as well.

There's several reasons why the 51 point Arms talent has a hard time competing with an investment in Fury. Quite apart from the lower tier Fury talents (improved shouts, notably) the changes to how Deep Wounds functions (in that it properly rolls a la Ignite) means that Death Wish becomes a very good investment for triggering a series of high damage bleed effects - thus the effect of DW (and any trinkets) is extended beyond the base duration of DW itself.

And then there's improved Slam.

From a raiding perspective, 23 points is the absolute minimum viable investment in Arms, and getting Flurry beyond that is therefore less costly than it would seem - it's really only a 7 point investment.

The trees just seem out of whack right now..Not to play developer too much, but honestly titans grip is not a talent thats easily balanced, the other problem is how well upper tier fury talents out-pace lower tier arms talents. For example, weapon mastery is just flat out better than strength of arms for PvP and PvE..Its kind of silly that an upper tier fury talent so easily crushes the 45, 5 point, arms talent..Even in a conceptual stage, its kind of dumb.

I understand why its delicate..If they give arms too much DPS they will be extremely over-powered in the arena and the obvious choice for raids. The main problem is their class philosophy for warriors is "Damage dealing and....More damage dealing." The class conceptually is very one dimensional and its meant to be that way, its the flavor of the class. Unfortunately this makes adding any cool abilities hard because the warrior can't really grow outward, only upward.

Personally..If they changes sudden death to something that proced overpower..Changed strength of arms to also provide disarm resistance (And perhaps +10% strength.), made blade storm a CC break, that does a WW and then provides a one minute buff (Like, I don't know, 15% haste? Because the warrior couldn't have flurry, anyway.)...And made bull rush do something like stun anyone within 15 yards (33%/66%/100% chance) of the target, then the tree would be enticing enough for me to spec more deeply into it..As is right now though, its just not clicking, the tree is a hulk of nothing but poorly though fillers, even conceptually they don't mesh well with the class.

Also, with the loss of salv, and the extra agro reduction everyone is getting in their trees, arms warriors need some kind of agro modifier, granted their ceiling should be lower than fury and much lower than rogues, but they need more than 20%.

Edit: Also, as was mentioned, the class is plagued by out-dated ideas like the stance penalties. Hopefully the developers will look into how philosophies have evolved since then and make changes are some core issues, like this one.

Agreed, Emeraude already made a post on the Beta forums here. It's an interesting read and I would urge everyone of you with an US Beta account to support this thread. I could also copy the thread over to the EU forums if noone did that yet (frankly, I don't even bother to check EU forums anymore, US boards get replies from the Devs - EU doesn't) and if Emeraude doesn't mind.

The sword spec CD hasn't been removed, there's just confusion over the tooltip.

And you can say execute doesn't scale perfectly, but it's not like you have a lot of options to begin with when you use a BF/2-hand/Slam build.

With Endless Rage, you'll always have the rage to Slam immediately following a white hit.

When Mortal Strike is down, an execute is always going to be a better choice over say Whirlwind or rage dumping with Heroic strike, I mean really, what other options do you have available to you? The sudden death buff lasts long enough that you can use it when you want, but obviously you'd want to use it as you can have overlapping(wasted) procs.

And yeah Liar, you can copy it where you want. Apparently people are using a few of my beta forums quotes as their Sigs on the Warrior forums. O_o

It does in live. Bloodsurged Slams don't reset the swing timer at all, as I understand it.

This won't work as it would make glancing blows a boon to Arms warriors rather than a bane. The intended functionality of glancing blows is along the same lines as that of crushing blows, i.e. to discourage players from taking on mobs of a much higher level than themselves. On top of that this would increase arms dps only against bosses and higher level mobs.

Anyone else notice that it is impossible to get both Improved Slam and 51 points in Arms with the current talent setup? It'll take a lot of talent shuffling to get the arms tree to stand on its on at this point.

First off, if Deep Wounds actually rolls like Pre-BC ignites, then you are going to be using two 1.3 to 1.5 speed weapons, so Slam is worthless, WW will be the best ability you have due to having two chances to crit, you'll stack crit, agi, and haste so that you keep critting and keep your Deep Wounds stack going. Strength, AP, expertise, hit, and armor pen will be worthless unless you actually manage to crit cap. This is insanity and will never make it to live.

If Deep Wounds doesn't roll like Pre-BC ignites, then there is absolutely no extra damage from Death Wish due to Deep Wounds lasting past the duration. If you crit while Death Wish is up, you'll get Deep Wounds damage based on your extra 20% damage, but it wouldn't be any different than if Deep Wounds read "Your critical strike damage from all attacks is increased by 48%." and the damage happened instantly. Damage is determine when the attack lands and has no change due to any buffs you gain or lose after the strike. Stacking debuffs generate no extra damage due to stacking (other than through bugs), they just exist as a stacking debuff to make sure you don't lose damage.

Secondly, if Slam is the primary filler of an Arms build, then yes, Improved Slam is useful. However, if Arms were to get another ability that could be used instead, then Improved Slam becomes worthless. Currently, Arms is absolutely horrible because it doesn't have any viable filler abilities and thus must rely on Slam.

Third, Commanding Presence is okay, but if Arms can provide it for Battle Shout, then there's no reason to bring a Fury Warrior except to also provide a better Commanding Shout, which is mostly unnecessary. Commanding Presence is one of the very few things a Fury build can easily provide as utility. Same goes for Improved Demo Shout.

If Arms can ignore Commanding Presence and Imp Demo Shout, with Imp Slam becoming obsolete, then Deathwish would be competing with the Arms 51 point talent +15 extra talent points (although you may also have a situation where those talent points are value-less unless some other things are changed). Flurry ends up costing a lot more than 7 talent points at that point, too.

If nothing changes in Arms, then Blood Frenzy will just be a forced spec, or may even result in so much of a penalty that it isn't worth getting (it would only make up for somewhere around a 30% DPS loss in an average raid, and if you're breaking even, you wouldn't want to play a shitty spec, so you end up with it being worth at most a 20-25% DPS loss compared to a deep Fury or hybrid Fury/Arms spec). If this is the case, then it doesn't really matter what happens to the tree.

Titan's Grip is pretty easy to balance, actually. If it is slightly underpowered, you can add a little something to it (like increases Str or AP by 0.5/1/1.5/2/2.5%). If it is slightly overpowered, you can adjust where 2H spec is in the Arms tree. There's so many ways to change a spec by slight amounts that it isn't really an issue how powerful a single talent is when most people are comparing specs. There aren't going to be 2 specs that are the exact same except for the 5 points in TG.

Weapon Mastery is pretty good for PvP and PvE, it's true, but it costs a lot to get, as I explained above. It doesn't actually cost 2 points, but could be viewed as costing 18 points (since you'd get Death Wish first, probably). For PvE, there might be the issue of having no other good talents to get instead, so the extra 15 points that'd be spent getting to Death Wish and Weapon Mastery would be worthless, thereby making those the optimal choices for a pure DPS spec.

However, in PvP, things are a bit different. Instead of getting Piercing Howl, Deathwish and Weapon Mastery, you could get Last Stand, 5% dodge, Improved Bloodrage, Improved Disarm, and Concussion Blow. I don't really have any experience with PvP though, so I can't really say which is better.

Regardless, adding disarm duration reduction to Strength of Arms would be redundant and pointless. You have other options, such as Weapon Mastery or a weapon chain or whatever pair of gloves has it as an effect in WotLK. It's just not a change that would actually be in line with what Blizzard has said about wanting to make players make hard decisions with respect to talents.

On the subject of threat reduction, since some of your damage is coming as a buff to the damage of other players, you already have something similar to threat reduction. It would be nice if there was a reduction to the threat on specific abilities while in Battle Stance, even if there wasn't a flat threat reduction effect like Improved Berserker Stance. However, I don't think it is necessary, even if it would be nice.

Execute is a rage dump. Slam is a rage dump. Heroic Strike is a rage dump. If you are using one of those, you aren't going to be using any of the others unless you have a ton of extra rage. With the current Arms tree, there are several ways you could spec, with one of those abilities being your rage dump. I don't see any reason why you would want to use a 2H weapon with Sudden Death, since your chance to proc Sudden Death is lower than if you were dual wielding, and Slam is much better on your threat generation, and probably better damage per rage. If you are dual wielding 1H weapons, you aren't going to be using Slam, so Sudden Death becomes a good choice. Heroic Strike is just a shitty default with a high rage cost, extra threat, and crappy damage, used when you have too much rage generation to dump it with just Sudden Death procs or Slams. At least, that's how I see it.

I'd like to see Blizzard change deep Arms so that Heroic Strike is an optimal rage dump for 2H weapons. That could be added to Strength of Arms or replace Bull Rush. There's a ton of ways to make the tree viable, I believe.

Slam is not a rage dump, it's a core ability that you use at every possible "cooldown" (i.e. beginning of each swing).

I'm still very unconvinced that Sudden death could work as a rage dump with 2h weapon. Emptying your rage bar could mean that you get rage starved for a long time, in my experience you need a rage buffer for slam cycles to work. Then again I haven't tested how it works in beta so it might be different with Endless rage as Emeraude says. Using Execute instead of WW seems unwise when you take into account what an empty rage bar coupled to some unlucky dodges/glances can do. Maybe it could work with capped expertise and Endless rage though.

Regarding a raid buff talent for Fury to pull the emphasis off of BF, it seems to me we already have a pretty good delivery system set up in Rampage. Imagine this talent slotted into the Rampage tier(or perhaps even just rolled into the original talent):

Improved Rampage(Unstoppable Rampage, Frenzied Rampage, pick your own name)-
0/2
Requires Rampage
50/100% of your Rampage bonus affects party/raid members within 20yds.

The last rank of Rampage in WotLK gives 425 ap all told, this might be a bit too much when balanced against Fury's higher personal dps but the percentages can be tweaked to accomodate. It should help to remove the dependancy on BF as a requirement and at the same time make Rampage a more satisfactory ability while keeping 'the flavour of Fury' intact.

Sorry for splitting this up, but it does require to specific responses. TG is difficult to balance because it requires an itemization balance in line with the talent point balance. Any time you have a talent that directly affects how an item is used, especially an item as strong as a weapon is for a warrior, its a very delicate balancing game. Up until know the entire tree, the entire class and indeed, the game, has been balanced around two handers requiring two hands and one handers requiring one.

The delicate nature of altering a core, fundemental principle that is this basic is difficult to do, increase it even a little in one direction and its going to be either horrible or far too good and the worst part is, that balance might be skewed with every tier of progression. Do you balance titans grip for the final tier? Or do you balance it for the first tier? Is it ok to have an ability thats absolutely garbage until 12 months into the xpac?

See, thats the problem..Certain abilities in the game right now can border on "overpowered" due to how they interact with weapon/itemization scaling..Take, for example, hunters, with the KJ bow and how steady shot scales..Its not balanced, we know it is, but its ok, for now, because its not that broken, and its only really bad at the highest of gear levels, in other words, it takes a ton of gear to be "off balance".

Warriors are balanced on their weapons..Doubling the scaling of said weapons seems difficult to balance when the arms spec is balanced around a single two hander. So you have multiple classes in the game balanced around using one of these weapons, and a single spec that can use two? That kind of balance is difficult to solve because it changes as the game evolves..Its certainly not "easy".

In 90% of compositions, there is no choice..If you don't PvP with weapon mastery, you're going to be at a severe disadvantage. This will only be worse in WoTLK when rogues have better access to disarm. Which leads back to the issue..Certain talents are "no brainers" and would require over-powered talents to compensate for losing them. There is nothing in the lower-arms tree right now that would even make me take a second look over weapon mastery, it would need to be extremely strong in order to draw many warriors in, to the point that whatever ability it is, might be over-powered.

In other words, whats redudent and pointless is a PvP only benefit being mid-way through fury..That only helps make the arms talents seem even more lackluster. There is only so much they can buff warrior talents to compete due to how warriors scale, this is evident in most of our talents, most of them being strict "meat and potatoes" type stuff, simple and easy to balance, which they need to be, because of how unique warrior rage interaction is with itemization. So, you're left with our dilemma, an inability to draw someone deep into the tree because of the over-all simplistic nature of the talents.

Weapon mastery shouldn't have a disarm component, it should have some other unique ability, but the disarm portion of it should be moved to arms.

Oh, and those "tough" choices the devs talked about were in relation to different roles for druids..Which I assume is the case for every class, they want classes to make tough choices about what "niche" they play (DPS or Tank in that case.). I don't think, however, they want classes to make tough choices about core abilities (And disarm protection is core in PvP), in fact, many "core" abilities have been tossed into base skills or moved to much more accessible points in the talent trees..(Rogue changes, Mage changes, DK balance with plague strike ect.)

The developers philosophy seems pretty clear..They want tough choices to be made on how the class performs a role..not on how it functions within said roll. If a warrior chooses to specialize in PvP he should have to choose between what kind of PvP he does (High control IE Bull rush/Imp HS/Imp Disarm..Survivability...Heavy damage), not his basic performance of said role.

The last time I had opportunity to check (I don't have a beta account myself so I have only occasional use of a friends one), Deep Wounds was rolling as follows - the damage done on a per tick basis was determined by the average weapon damage at the time of the initial crit, and thus was affected by DW, trinket, orc racial and so on. Later crits would refresh the duration, but the damage would continue to be determined by the weapon damage at the opening crit.

If this is no longer the case then I apologise, and you should ignore my comments on the subject.

However, if it is the case that Deep Wounds still functions as described above, then the synergy between Deathwish and Deep Wounds is too powerful to ignore, because it effective extends the beneficial effect of Deathwish somewhat beyond the duration of the ability itself. As long as you keep critting to extend the duration, the damage bonus to Deep Wounds from Deathwish continues to apply.

They'd need to turn Arms upside down, remove the focus on DPS and add a focus on utility and offensive support to make this happen. However seeing they dropped the "offensive support" concept for Warlocks already and headed them for pure DPS, I doubt it'll happen.

Lithose: The following are percentages of base DPS from weapons relative to a 1H weapon (with minimum hit for specials and expertise capped unless otherwise stated):

A single 1H weapon: 100%
A single 2H weapon: 130%
Dual Wielding 1H weapons w/ no extra hit and no DW spec: 121.5%
Dual Wielding 1H weapons w/ DW spec, but no extra hit: 131.625%
Dual Wielding 1H weapons w/ DW spec and max hit: 162.5%
Dual Wielding 2H weapons w/ DW spec, but no extra hit: ~142.6%
Dual Wielding 2H weapons w/ DW spec and max hit: ~176%

Now, the benefits from AP:

A single 1H weapon: 100% benefit
A single 2H weapon: 100% benefit
Dual Wielding 1H weapons w/ no extra hit and no DW spec: 121.5%
Dual Wielding 1H weapons w/ DW spec, but no extra hit: 131.625%
Dual Wielding 1H weapons w/ DW spec and max hit: 162.5%
Dual Wielding 2H weapons w/ DW spec, but no extra hit: ~109.7%
Dual Wielding 2H weapons w/ DW spec and max hit: ~135.4%

Now, the benefits of AP and weapon DPS on specials (compared to a single 1H weapon):

Mortal Strike w/ 1H weapon: 100% of AP and 100% of Weapon DPS
Mortal Strike w/ 2H weapon: 137.5% of AP and 130% of Weapon DPS
Whirlwind w/ 1H weapons and DW spec: 162.5% of AP and 162.5% of Weapon DPS
Whirlwind w/ 2H weapon: 137.5% of AP and 130% of Weapon DPS
Whirlwind w/ 2H weapons and DW spec: ~223.4% of AP and 211.25% of Weapon DPS

Bloodthirst and Execute don't scale with weapon DPS. Slam and Heroic Strike aren't affected by dual wielding, for the most part and are used primarily by different specs. Nothing else is really used in DPS rotations.

So, with the above numbers, you can easily figure out how anything will scale at any gear level. You can figure out the inflection points where white DPS becomes better with any of the different weapons combinations and you can figure out where the inflection points where specials make up for the loss of white damage. Haste, crit, and armor pen are all independent of the above numbers. Blizzard can look at a similar table and get an answer to the question "With gear level x, will y spec with TG be better or worse than z spec without TG with regards to special damage?"

For instance, when your DPS contribution from AP is less than 49.8% of your weapon DPS (compared to a 1H weapon), with maxxed hit, you will have more white DPS with 2x2H than with 2x1H. And at this point, your whirlwinds hit ~32.5% harder with 2x2H than with 2x1H.

Another example: if you have 200% DPS contribution from AP compared to 1H weapon DPS, your whirlwinds with 2x2H are ~135% of the DPS of a whirlwind with 2x1H, but your white damage with 2x2H is only ~91.7% of the white DPS of 2x1H. When you have 300% DPS contribution from AP compared to 1H weapon DPS, you whirlwinds with 2x2H have improved to be ~135.6% of the DPS of 2x1H, but you white damage has fallen to ~89.6%.

Now, if Whirlwind, BT (since it has no change with regards to weapons), and auto-attacks were all that existed, the balance would depend on how much of your DPS is made up of whirlwinds vs auto-attacks, which would easily put 2x1H as better than 2x2H. However, Slam is better than Heroic Strike, which helps 2x2H out a little (and is much harder to determine with any type of precision due to weapon speed being a factor), while Sudden Death Executes are much better than Heroic Strike and can make use of the fact that 2x1H generates more rage than 2x2H. The flip side is that Execute and Heroic Strike have added threat, so even if 2x1H is better for DPS, it also requires that threat not be an issue in order for it to put out more damage than 2x2H.

Since average rage per hit can be calculated by tossing in DPS numbers, and we know what the rage costs are of all the different abilities, it isn't that hard to figure out if one of the specs is going to be rage starved or have too much rage. Then figure out the average DPR of the different rage dumps and you can figure out where DPS with 2x2H is going to be significantly better than 2x1H and vice versa. If one is lagging behind at specific gear levels, you toss in a set bonus or a glyph to even things out. If one is lagging behind at all gear levels, you toss in a buff to a talent that primarily affects that style.

It is more complicated than I've made it out, but all the numbers exist and can easily be tossed into a calculator and crunched. If the different teams at Blizzard are actually communicating well, it shouldn't be hard to get expected stat values at different gear levels and just run the numbers. There were people in these forums that did the same thing when TBC came out and predicted that warlocks would pull ahead of mages in DPS due to superior scaling and they didn't have inside info (I'm going to assume that Blizzard realizes the mistake they made and actually care this time around, since they didn't then).

The only thing that even remotely screws with this is the fact that some extra stats have to be added in when talking about 2x2H when compared to 2x1H due to the extra item budget on the 2H weapons.

Tornaz: The way current ignites work is that you crit, 40% of your crit damage gets added to the target as a debuff. This damage is then dealt over 4 seconds in 2 ticks. If you crit while ignite is on the target, the new ignite damage is added to the remaining damage on the old ignite and ignite is reset to have 2 ticks and a 4 second duration. This allows repeated crits to build up large stacks of ignites. However, when things aren't buggy, there is no extra damage.

Now, I have no clue what is going on with Deep Wounds, but in order for damage of deep wounds to ever increase after the initial application, new crits have to add to the Deep Wounds damage. And, unless Blizzard had a case of the retarded, they won't have reset the damage of the debuff to what it was when it was applied, so the new Deep Wounds damage should be equal to the remaining damage on the debuff plus the new damage from the crit that is refreshing the debuff. This means that repeated crits will build up the stack and tick damage, but no extra damage should be generated.

I suppose they could have gone back to the Ignite 2.0 days... or was it the early Naxx days. They were screwing with ignites back then. Either way, for a very brief period, ignite damage was based on the first 5 crits, so if you made those big numbers, like with pyroblast and fireball, you could get huge ignite ticks, but the timer refreshed whenever you crit with a fire spell, without changing the damage being dealt per tick. That's pretty much how lifebloom was acting in early TBC, where you'd trinket and toss up the first 3 lifeblooms and your bonus healing from the trinkets would stay with the stack. However, this type of mechanic should have been fixed, plus it only occurred with debuffs that actually stacked to a maximum amount (5 stacks of ignite, 3 stacks of lifebloom). Current ignite has no stack number, and is just a single debuff. I imagine Deep Wounds is a single debuff as well, not an actual stacking debuff.

Anyway, from what I've read about Deep Wounds, it appears to function more like current Ignite than like Lifebloom in its "stacking" mechanics. Hopefully it is less buggy, since the ignite bug is pretty shitty, but doesn't happen often due to how mages work. Warriors will see a lot more instances of buggy Deep Wounds if they don't fix it, though.

As an example, say I'm using a single 2H weapon, with a 48% weapon damage value of 288. I crit and Deep Wounds is applied doing 288 damage over 6 seconds, or 48 damage per second. 2 seconds (and 2 ticks) later, I crit again. Now my current Deep Wounds debuff has dealt 96 damage and should have 192 left. My new crit should add 288 to this value. Thus, my new Deep Wounds should deal 480 damage over 6 seconds, or 80 damage per second. 2 seconds later, I crit again. The current Deep Wounds debuff has 320 damage left on it, and I'm adding another 288. This means my new Deep Wounds debuff should now deal 608 damage over 6 seconds, or 101.33 per second. If I failed to crit for the next 6 seconds, my total Deep Wounds damage would be 608 + 160 + 96 = 864, which is 3 times 288. That's the expected damage.

Now, let's say that I pop Death Wish and now do 20% more damage. Now, my Deep Wounds debuff should deal 345.6 damage over 6 seconds. So, I crit and apply the debuff. 4 seconds later, I crit again, and again in 2 seconds. 2 seconds later, I WW and crit, plus crit my auto attack. 4 seconds later, I crit again. At this point Death Wish fades. 4 seconds after that I crit again, with another crit in 2 seconds. Let's get a bit of a graph for that.

Hopefully you can see how it would work if it works like Ignite. The extra damage doesn't really help make the ticks bigger, so much as critting a lot does, which is why popping Recklessness results in huge ticks. The example there also assumes it ticks every second, though it would work the same for every 2 seconds, if you just ignore the odd numbered seconds.

TL;DR: Titan's Grip isn't that complicated to balance, as long as you know where you're going and what gear to expect. Deep Wounds probably works like Ignite, which means it should result in Deep Wounds damage/ticks like shown in the code block above.

Thanks for posting the numbers, quite an interesting read.

The problem for us at EJ forums to model the effects is that there are too many unknown things that affect the total dps. For starters, we don't know what type of ability cycle that will be the best possible one, neither for 1*2h, 2*2h or 2*1h builds (since it in turn depends on things like rage generation and weapon speeds). Another example is that we don't know how rage will be normalized.

I disagree that you don't have to take BT, Execute, Slam and HS into account. They all depend critically on your AP and rage generation which will be different in a 2*2h vs a 2*1h build. In a 2*2h build BT will likely hit slightly harder due to having extra stats, Execute and HS will be worse because of spiky rage generation.

As to Slam, I get the feeling you don't really know what you're talking about (sorry if I've misunderstood you). In live Slam is the bread and butter of Arms dps (well, at least until you run into problems with too much haste) and actually hits harder than MS and WW, it should thus be prioritized if you want to maximize dps. One of the main pros of a 2*2h build might very well turn out to be the ability of using Slams to do a lot of damage. The cycle posted by Shha a couple of pages back is an excellent example of how important Slam could be to TG builds. Slam is very much affected by dualwielding, since it reset the swing timer of the OH.

Spirit on mage gear?

In all seriousness, I know you mention this, but I'm not sure if you took Impale, deep wounds, the delay on swings allowing more DW ticks ect into account. As you said, despite being more complex, you can put them all into a calculator and figure out inflection points, but I disagree that its going to be easy, there are so many more variables and remember, its only *one dev* or a small team working on this, vs a community of thousands trying to squeeze any advantage from it..The community always wins, and they can turn a talent useless, or over-powered in a heart beat.

Blizzard has consistently failed to figure out inflection points on gear levels..To the point that they actually damage taxed mages due to faulty (As far as I can tell, they had to be faulty) DPS models, when anyone with a calculator and some time could see that they were actually falling behind in damage. I mean, how many times did blue post that they were "Surprised at how much damage mages are doing during our internal tests.".

You might not think its difficult to account for Two Handed spec, Impale, DW, Rage Gen, Sword spec Vs full TG, Slam, Heroic strike (Improved/Non and Improved/Non vs Incite vs Impale.), stat allocation on two handers, glyphs, enchants and a host of other factors that I know I'm missing, however, Blizzard does, or at least appears to. Even when I think about it, now, I know its possible, and building a spread sheet should be time consuming but possible, however, the fact remains..As is right now all their tools point toward a simple concept of DW vs Two hander..Even with those tools, severe imbalances have come up..Perhaps your faith is better than mine, but for me, the talent looks like a headache.

(TLDR): Blizzard has had trouble balancing unique fundamental mechanics before..If the goal is to have every talent be fun, work and provide a use, then TG will need to be monitored constantly through tier levels/itemization changes..I'm not sure if its worth the effort.