nitramlliw

so like a 54/8/8 spec? i assume that would be a good investment for a small boost in damage for someone, but you have to remember that if you hit with a HS and it crits (assuming you have the glyph) you will only get +10 rage from that crit (net loss of 2 rage if you are specced for it), while you would have normally gotten somewhere around the order of 40+ rage for a crit. just doesn't seem like a great idea once you hit about a 50% crit chance (raid-buffed)

 

Gorrog666

For those of you who still think the change to SD is not a nerf:

PTR DPS: 3292
Live DPS: 3428

Here are the screens.

PTR



Live




There's also something important to say about the DPS. The PTR is more stable and less spikey, you have more solid rage and it is easier to run a simple rotation. On recount you can see that Slam and MS was used more often in terms of % of damage. However, there is a reason why the DPS on live is more spikey and unreliable. I used a simple G15 macro to make the test. I had a simple priority list that lokked like this:

Rend
Execute
MS
Slam
OP
repeat until Rend needs to be refreshed

You can hopefully see how such a prioritation will benefit the PTR. I did not use judgement on the Live server whether to use or not to use Execute or when to use it which results in greater rage starvation on the Live server however. The only way you can achieve increased DPS above a stable point is through crit luck and high damage Executes. On the PTR the DPS remained stable at around 3250-3300 this is very little variation. On the Live server however teh DPS ranged from 3350-3500 this DPS depends very much on crit luck and increased whenever I saw Execute crits that went above 10k.

Like I said earlier those of us who know when to use Execute will be hurt by the SD change and those who just like to spam buttons might see an increase in DPS.

This might not be the best test but it gives us a basic idea.

 

Marukh

The execute and overpower procs make it hard for me to follow a concrete rotation. I'm so used to breaking my keyboard trying to execute before the expansion, I'm sorta on the same track now. I've noticed though, that keeping a steady slam rotation is a lot safer and provides steadier dps as opposed to throwing all rage on execute.

My basic rule is to only execute when I'm at full rage. Otherwise, I'm just wasting time; especially if my execute gets parried.

*edit* quick question: is mace spec worth keeping with an arms spec?

 

angi

@Gnorrog You know that tests on a dummy show nothing do you?
Additional rage when executing is multiplicated by a fix number which doesn`t change if you are in a raid or on the dummy. BUT slam, ms op etc. do more damage in a raid setting, so its totally irrelevant if you do more or less dmg on the PTR dummy. Additionally when you do around 50-100 hours of testing we can speak about your results but not after 200 swings.

 

Gorrog666

No, I do not believe mace spec is worth keeping. ArP becomes saturated and I am currently at 24.42%+15% and I can't say it helps. ArP does not stack with Rend or Deep Wounds and that is the reason why it is not so effective.

Sorry, but you need to get your facts straight and you missed the point. Execute is affected by Raid-buffs, it receives 20% AP, and in fact your right the test is short but long enough to give one an idea how DPS range works with the differences in SD. I was doing less special due to higher rage starvation after SD on Live since you only have 10 rage after an Execute. On PTR you can have up to 70 rage after an Execute.

And please, in the near future if you try to flame someone be sure you know everything about what you are talking about at least try to spell the persons name right. Gorrog is not that hard to write, that's one reason why I picked it.

 

pdpi

Yes, I meant it specifically as a replacement rage sink. Since I don't actually have a high level warrior (yet ) I'm unsure how common it is for arms to have rage overflow. In particular, I was wondering whether, in those situations, trading rage for higher crit chance and glance removal on "white" hits would be worth it.

 

angi

"Attempt to finish off a wounded foe, causing [ 20% of AP + 1456 ] damage and converting each extra point of rage into 38 additional damage. Only usable on enemies that have less than 20% health."

The extra rage converted to damage scales not with AP and is static.

 

Plea

I like the SD change. It could have been the greatest nerf in warrior history (doubtful), but it's also the greatest relief ever. Now I don't have to make a 2 second decision on when to use it, I don't have to plan for a nonlinear stochastic case, so I'm quite pleased in the way they changed it. It's also stated that they acknowledge arms dps is a bit too low, so I guess we don't have to whine about how bad a nerf this is.

My wish is that they play around Mortal Strike a bit. Considering MS isn't that great in pve, and arms warriors are suffering in arena, an MS buff would be nice.

 

Gorrog666

@angi: I'm sorry but I don't get your point. In fact you do have better rage generation so the PTR version of SD is closer to taht what it actually is in a raid since your independent of rage generation. On Live you have greater rage generation in a Raid and therefore a dummy is actually more inaccurate if you meant that: I am no sure but with the current SD your Raid-DPS will actually be higher on the PTR it actually doesn't make too much of a difference if your buffed or not.

 

Windchilla

The SD change is a slight nerf to the top 1% of extremely skilled ARMs Warriors, but also a slight buff to the other 99% of people who are currently losing their entire rage pool with poorly timed SDs. I'm personally against the change without a substantial buff coming to Arms and it's disappointing.

Fury is already easier to execute and will post-patch be substantially more damage, for less work - it's unfortunate the direction they're tanking warrior DPS.

 

Gorrog666

I agree, we are all on this forum beacause we want to belong to those top 1%. I am rather dissappointed that Blizzard is admitting that Arms DPS is too low, that Deep Wounds is not balanced and that rather trying to fix some problems they are actually putting more in by giving us 2 nerfs before giving any insights on how they want to help us.

 

dbrocksyoursocks

About the SD change.
I'm not too sure about whether it's a nerf or a buff, cause I was thinking like this.

I'm assuming all arms warriors have the glyph of execution, which will make your execute ability act like you have 10 more rage.
In a situation with 100 rage, and an active SD proc, you can execute, execute costs untalented 15 rage, that'll leave 85 to be converted in damage, 38 damage for every point of rage, and you'll get the 380 added damage from the glyph of execution.
That means, if you use 100 rage, you'll get an execute with the extra damage of 95 rage (included the 10 from the glyph), burning all your rage. An execute causing 95* 38 extra damage for the cost of 100 rage.

With the new Sudden Death change and a full rage bar. An execute will cost you 15 rage, and will convert 30 rage points into damage. With the glyph, that means an execute will deal damage like you have 40 rage converted into points, for the cost of 45 rage.

In the current situation, you burn all your rage, but keep 10, that's not enough for any other any other ability, but refreshing rend. You'll have to wait the swing to built up rage again, and MS or slam.

With the 'nerfed' SD however, you'll be able to do a mortal strike, and or slam, giving you more change to get another SD proc. If you get another SD proc within that swing (or the next swing) from Mortal Strike, you will execute again for 45 rage, causing damage like you use 40 rage. Those two executes cost you 90 rage total and are dealing just a bit less damage then one 100 rage execute, but, with the two small ones, you have an extra swing and/or MS/slam.

This is just a theory of course, and I'm basing my thoughts on perfect circumstances. Maybe my idea is all wrong, but I'd like to hear some opinions about it. Also, I'm not too sure yet, whether it'll be an increase or decrease. I've seen the screens, but it might work out otherwise.

Question about slam.

Some of you are saying we should be using slam in our rotations, personally, I love the skill for PvP, and I talented improved Slam. But, slam does still reset your autoswing timer, right? So wouldn't it be better not to use it in PvE?
When I use it, I use quartz to time it. But when do you guys pop it, or do you just spam it?

 

bookan

Slam no longer resets your swing timer, it merely delays it (for 0.5 seconds) now. I'm not sure whether Quartz works correctly with slam yet or not.

 

dbrocksyoursocks

I can confirm Quartz does not work with slam correctly anymore then. Thanks a lot for that information though.

 

vytautas

4770 Patchwerk. Was really hoping to break 5k this week and then our Feral couldn't make it today, zzzzzz. So that's 4770 with no 5% melee crit buff in raid, my crit rate as a whole was a bit low, v disappointed didn't break 5k especially if patch is next week, kind of hoped the upgrades I got from last week might carry it anyway. Rerolled JC from mining, got 25m T7 shoulders > 10m T7 and got FotFF in preperation to go TG soon as we get a weapon drop which is looking to be never zzzzzzz. Ah well, an improvement over last weeks 4717 either way and I think it would have been >5k had I had the LoTP but alas.

Really hoping they package some nice buff to slam with the SD/DeepWounds nerfs, guessing it won't be instant, though god that would make playing Arms on some fights a lot easier, but a chunk of dmg added would be nice to it or MS.

 

Tankietka

After a bit more thought I think that SD change while making playing arms easier, at the end is unfortunately a nerf.

With a better gear it is much more common to sit at high amounts of rage and additionally there are many fights with aoe damage which fuels rage even more. Trying to use full/high rage execute just before predictable moments when boss does aoe damage is good for our dps. Now it won't be possible anymore.

 

higel

I fixed up Quartz to handle the Slam swing pause properly. It seems to work pretty well but it could be tidier. I also have a sneaking suspicion that any non-instant spell cast causes a swing-timer pause so I should probably make it more generalised before trying to submit it for inclusion in head. I'll post my fixed Swing.lua when I get home.

In the meantime, is there another swing bar mod that actually does work with post 3.0 slam to which I could compare it?

 

Rishkkin

I use LD50_abar, works like a charm

 

Healranktwo

There is a bug with SD on the PTR atm where if you used SD just as your white swing goes off, it resets your rage back to what it was before your swing.

What I mean is basically, if you were at 30 rage, and swinged at the same time as using SD, instead of having 30 + X rage you gain from swing - 30 rage from SD, you would be at 10 rage since it would not count your white swings rage.

I have reported this on the PTR forums so hopefully it gets fixed before the patch goes live.

 

Brgid

Haven't we got 'worst of both worlds' with this change? We can no longer use good timing to add a bit of burst in just before a white swing or taking (predictable) damage, but we can still be left Rage-starved if on <= 44 Rage and time a SD badly?

Wouldn't a more elegant fix be that SD Executes only use a certain % of Rage (~50% seemed like a reasonable number but could b tweaked) It would give us a way to blow off high Rage without lousing up our basic Slam cycle, while limiting the RNG burstiness that the devs seem to dislike. 'Low-Rage' SDEx would still leave us <15 Rage so would have to be timed well to be worth doing.

At the moment, I'm just waiting for a second decent weapon to drop (my OH at the moment is the AD rep mace *sigh*) before going Fury, as much as I have loved the Arms playstyle.

 

cainor

Maybe it has already been explained but what is a poorly timed execute? dont you execute with 100% rage? Or do you just execute when bt/ms/slam/ww are on cooldown? Is a good timed execute the less rage it uses the better?
Somehow i missed the discussion where the "best timed" execute took place.
Would be nice if you could tell me, helping become a one-percenter ;-)
thanks

 

Tankietka

Generally your aim as arms warrior should be to utilize all available GCDs. Poorly timed execute is execute that leaves you with not enough rage to do it before next rage income.

So for example if SD procs from your white hit and you use it right away then you are left with only 10 rage till next white swing (assuming no aoe damage). If neither ToB procced nor Rend needs reapplying then you forced yourself to sit doing nothing for up to 3.0-3.5 seconds.

High rage executes are fine as long as in less than 1.5s (this time range can change if ToB procced or Rend ends) you will get white swing or get hit by aoe damage.

 

hellord

In a raid environment your swing is often under 2.6s even with slow weapons.
The changes in 3.0.8 are a slight nerf if your are testing them on dummies, but it's a big nerf in raid situations where your crit is over 40% and your swing is often giving you more than 30 rage (a 3k white crit should give you about 60 rage with ER) but you can't use 2 gcds before next swing.

This will bring us to a situation where we can't dump rage and we must use HS depending on swing timer to get a decent dps.
The flow is important, you won't loose gcds maybe, but honestly i'm sure we will just have tons of rage and at high levels of gear we can avoid ER since we just don't know where to use all that rage.

Execute damage is not just 38 per rage, it's still 38*2h spec*wrecking crew and it's our 2nd best move in therms of dmg per gcd after OP (since OP with UA is 1 second cd only REMEMBER THIS).
So since DPS is not just about damage but is tied to time, you have to consider that a Slam+Execute is better than a +15 rage execute but it takes 2 gcds, and in raid you generally don't swing once every 2 gcd.

I don't know how they think to make up the difference, but this is a nerf from any pov in raid and there are more chances to randomly execute and get a new hit in less than 0.5s rather than starving for 2 seconds.

So how will they manage this?
- HS isnt the answer.
- Deep Wounds will be nerfed, even thou we don't know by how much.
- Raising base damage of execute (again? lol) could be something that makes fury flies when boss is under 20%

In the majority of cases we just won't have enough gcd time before next white swing to dump rage.

ArP Whore

 

Gorrog666

Frustraion is gaining on me again and today I am just being lazy. Here's the WWS page for my guild, we post WWS from every raid.

Wow Web Stats

From this week with "The Jawbone" I can say that slower weapons are superior but mace spec is definitely not the answer. I am hitting close to 40% ArP and while it is nice it's not the answer. Afterall I am still using Grim Toll and a total of 80% ArP with a proc might provide nice Slams and high Executes it however does scale like crap with Rend and Deep Wounds. I am totally confident now that high rage Executes, that can reach up to 15k, are the answer to better DPS. There are 2 factors to consider when you argue for such a conclusion it is your average damage on Execute when you use your Executes right and your max. damage Executes but when you have more high damage Executes you automaticly have a higher average damage.

Anub'rekhan as an example:
Wow Web Stats

9 Executes with an average damage (non-crit) of 4751 and max. damage of 15926
12 Slams with an average damage of 2435 (non-crit) and a max. damage of 6161

Just looking at these numbers imagine you change your rotation slightly so that your Executes aren't just right or let's say we are using the new SD. Your Slam damage will not change, you are using probably the same ammount of Slams and since the proc chance of SD isn't changing your also using the same ammount of Executes. What does change is the fact that the average Execute damage is going to sink due to the fact that you won't be able to achieve something like a 16k Execute crit. So while now you can see that an average of 2.3k damage increase of Execute over Slam makes it a superior ability it is only the right timing that gives you the damage you want.
MS has an average of 2.7k damage, non-crit in my case, and it shows that Execute is the number one DPS ability we have by far.

Adding everything together you have around:
700 DPS Deep Wounds
330 DPS Rend
Possible GCDs
~1600 DPS Slam non-crit (Slam-crit 3626 DPS)
~1800 DPS MS non-crit
~2778 DPS OP
~3167 DPS Execute non-crit

These DPS numbers are based on the average damage and on one GCD. In the case of Overpower you have to always consider that it is almost never a non-crit. You can obviously see that Execute is far past Slam and MS. And giving it some more thought maybe I should be putting more value into OP. Since Slam had a 50% crit chance in my case I'd just use that. The average DPS at 50% crit should be around 2613 so OP is a little higher due to the fact that it always crits. I can't recall seeing too many rotations where OP was on the top. Most of this stuff is going to be outdated when the patch hits us but I hope you can use some of it.

Pretty soon the rotation should be something like:
Execute
OP
MS
Slam

 

hellord

Unless you take OP without Unrelenting Assault, OP has 1 second cd vs 1.5 sec GCD, that gives it a 33% effective value if you consider its GCD. In a few words if you can achieve 100% crit on OP you are doing 2xWeaponDamage (+impale 20% +axe spec 5% +meta 3%) in 1 second while your best MS if you can achieve 50% crit is 120% WD (with imp ms and glyph) + (120%+20% impale + 5% axe +3% meta)*0.5 + base MS dmg in 1.5 second.

(WD = Weapon Damage)

OP: WD*2 + WD*0.28 = 2.28WD
MS: (WD+380)*1.2 + (WD+380)*(1.2+0.05+0.03+0.2)*0.5 = (WD+380)*1.2 + (WD+380)*0.74 =
1.2WD + 456 + 0.74WD + 281.2 = 1.94WD + 737.2

Ms and OP equivalence is:
2.28WD/1 = (1.94WD+737.2)/1.5
2.28WD = 1.293WD + 491.467
2.28WD - 1.293WD = 491.467
0.987WD = 491.467
WD = 491.467/0.987 = 497.94

So unless you have a 498 weapon damage (practically at 0 ap or even less) your Overpower will do more damage per gcd (referred to its own gcd) than MS.

Feel free to correct me if my math is wrong, but unless you are using a 1hander with 0AP equipped you will prioritize OP if talented with 2/2 UA. The comparison with execute is different since execute doesnt use WD but just AP.
The only reason why you want to use it after execute is cause of its low cost and opportunity to burn all rage on the previous exe getting back enough rage to use OP.

It could be worth tracking rend ticks just to be sure to not waste any possible proc of T4B, but please don't say that MS is best move per gcd unless you provide math to compare it with OP with UA.

ArP Whore