I'm not sure why you are AoE'ing the ghouls in P1. We keep them up to bounce around Necrotic Plague and build it high enough to eventually kill them and the Shambling Horrors. As Fury you may not hit 12k but you'll be pretty close, and thats just from Whirlwind passively hitting the ghouls as they spawn. P1 DPS only matters as far as managing a smooth transition with no shamblers or nearly-dead shamblers.

Arms does have an advantage in being able to save BS to burst down the Valkyrs in 25 man where there's 3 of them. In 10 man with less Valks and less Raging Spirits you are hardly ever hitting more than two targets. Even in 25 man you usually want to focus down the spirits and passively AoE.

I can understand that Arms is more interesting to play, brings different buffs, and a skilled player can perform really well with it. But more than likely that same amazing player would always pull better numbers as Fury. The spec is that far ahead on every fight.

I'm not sure this is a true statement. The incite spec gives increased crit to HS, which would increase the damage from it, but unless you have the glyph for it to reduce the rage cost, it wouldn't change your rage management or rotation much? So the execute build costs less rage to execute (often with improved shouts which would probably be the main reason to spec into that anyway) while incite build gives more crit to HS, but the rotations would be very similar unless you changed glyphs. So if anything the execute build might actually free up more rage to do more HS that hits less hard, but I don't know I haven't been playing that spec for awhile.

Had an interesting occurrance on Sunday's 25 man lich king try. Was able to get a bladestorm off just before I was picked up by valkyrs in 25 man. I got dropped off the cliff for various reasons but my damage meter claimed over 200K damage to the valkyrs by myself. After checking world of logs, I can confirm that a well time sweeping strikes + bladestorm can do 200K damage to valkyrs by itself.

Parse of 204K damage while being picked up by valkyrs:
World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis
Under log browser, query is:
[{"eventTypes": [1, 2], "targetNames": ["Val'kyr Shadowguard"], "sourceNames": ["Celandro"]}]
There are 52 events starting at 23:00:35 from 1 bladestorm prior to being picked up by the valkyr's A little excel work came up with 204K damage where any other class/spec would do 0
Note: it seems the 3rd valkyr picked me up and i only hit the first 2 with the first of the 7 whirlwinds of bladestorm.


Being able to have sweeping strikes up and hit bladestorm before the valkyrs land, get picked up by the valkyrs and still do 204K damage to them on 25 man is a huge advantage over fury. In addition, arms dps seems considerably higher than fury on valks from parses Ive seen with no 277 gear. On 10 man, ss/cleave or ss/bladestorm is still going to be very respectable damage on the valkyrs, I don't know if fury can beat it, but dont forget arms places other debuffs up as well.

In no circumstances should Phase 1 aoe dps be a consideration. If it is, your off tank is doing it wrong. he should be taunting over adds every cooldown to spread the disease.

So 4pc for arms is still bugged.

It now guarantees that your 2 SD charges you first get have a reduced gcd, however, if you get another after you use both of those or before, the GCD reduction won't apply past the first 2 SDs.

IE.

You gain 2 charge SD, used one and it has reduced GCD, you have one charge left now. However, before you use it, you gain a new proc, resetting it back to 2 charges again. Using it again will grant you the reduced GCD since it's your second SD, but the third one will not.

Seems like there's a hidden cooldown that prevents more than your first 2 SDs to gain the reduced gcd if you gain multiple procs in a short time. Very sad really that it's still bugged =(

Fury's proc on the other hand...oh man lol.

It seems Blizzard has finally decided to look upon our 4t10 bonus but I'm still wondering how much of a dps increase it will be, since it's quite hard to calculate. I still suspect 2t9+2t10 will be better.

I'm not gonna have numbers to back this up, just my experience playing the spec and a loose "theory" as to why I play and do as well as I do.

Arms DPS is limited by two main factors: GCD's and Rage. Not using a GCD on an attack is a Bad Thing(tm), just as allowing an auto-attack swing to hit while sitting on 100 rage is a Bad Thing(tm). Incite + Glyph, especially at the higher gear levels, allows you to convert more auto-attack swings into harder hitting Heroic Strikes with a higher crit chance, and allows you to maintain a bit more rage with the Glyph to keep your GCD's filled with attacks like Slam, MS and OP.

I am by not means a math whiz, and can't explain with formulas and numbers as to why this is true, Hellorco and Landsoul would be better speaking to that than I, but I feel I am quite successful with DPS as Arms.

So in any build the reasons to not heroic strike would be 1) have enough rage to do your hardest hitting attacks when they come off CD 2) have more rage to do more damage with execute.

For reason #1: the rage management effects of either build (ignoring the glyph of heroic strike) allow for heroic striking and having enough rage to not miss GCDs. Honestly this feature is the same for either build. I did 11.5% damage from heroic strike (total of 29 heroic strikes) in our last "test dummy" fight Saurfang without missing GCDs (which is hard to prove but you’ll have to take my word for it on that one).

For reason #2, I can take a stab at calculating if that would be worth it. Heroic strike costs 12 rage with improved HS in arms tree (which you should take because in a PVE spec you don’t need parry). My crit rate for heroic strike and melee ran about 75% with an average increase in damage of a heroic strike being 2390 over average melee hit. Execute (talented or untalented) adds 38 damage per rage converted. Cost of heroic strike 12 x 38 = 456.

The modeling is fairly incomplete however because the loss of white swing for rage generation is not accounted for the 12 rage loss of damage on execute, if increase the rage loss to 30 (I’d suspect a dramatic over-estimate) the edge is still to heroic strike. The break point for rage lost by doing heroic strike to favor pooling rage to save for execute would be 62 rage (in the context of one parse on Saurfang). It also doesn’t take into account the loss of DPS by having your rage pegged out at 100, which in my experience with the generous raid damage in ICC encounters is a fairly realistic situation.

Reviewing the top 5 DPS parses for arms warriors on Saurfang 25 #1, 3, 4, 5 all did >9% damage by Heroic Strike, #2 did almost none. So that might suggest this is hard to model and it can be done either way. My personal experience is also that my DPS took a large upswing as I mastered use of heroic strike while not going OOR (out of rage)* TM.

Glyph of Bladestorm is just a bit meh as Bladestorm is so sensitive to fight lengths, trinket (I)CDS and add phases that knocking 15 seconds just doesn't seem worth it.

personally i've had the opinion that raiding with Bladestorm in general is pretty meh. the actual description of the ability says that you will whirlwind for 6 seconds, hitting a target every second (up to 4).

if we analyze some fights, say BQL hard mode, the top 5* arms parses go something like this:

Total Damage	% of Overall Damage	Hits	Crits	Total Swings	Fight Length (s)
256353	4.8 %	14	10	24	310
403668	6.8 %	9	18	27	321
338183	5.2 %	15	11	26	316
364082	6.7 %	12	16	28	327

*excludes a parse in which bladestorm was barely used

Average % of damage contribution = 5.875%
Average # of swings = 26
Average Fight Length = 319s

On a fight like this you can only use Bladestorm a maximum of 3 times, and in most parses that number comes down to 2 because for a decent portion of the fight she is not in melee range of the player due to movement, air phase, etc. (In my napkin-math I figured that the average number of Bladestorms used in these fights was 2.045.)

Therefore, and this may sound completely ridiculous especially coming from a prot warrior, I wonder why Arms warriors spec into Bladestorm in the first place as it's an ability that is on such a long cooldown (even with the glyph) that the amount of damage it provides overall really doesn't seem to be much of a significant contribution.

I was able to actually test out a Bladestorm-less spec on the same encounter with my lackluster Arms gear (which includes a heroic weapon, t9 gear, and other assorted iLvl 200-245 peices), choosing instead to put that 1 point into Death Wish. I got bit pretty late into the fight (had Essence of BQL for 48 seconds, 14% of total time) and managed to put out 9.3k DPS in the following spec:

The World of Warcraft Armory

WoL:
World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

So I guess the question is, is Bladestorm really even that good of an ability? Especially now that in PvP it can be disarmed why bother even spec'ing into it? I suppose for heavy AoE fights it has value, but even in the above spec I was able to get Improved Cleave, and used with Sweeping Strikes has a good bit of AoE damage.

The on demand burst from bladestorm is incredibly good even for single target. You gain more from that one talent point in bladestorm than you would from deathwish since it doesn't stack with wrecking crew. By picking up deathwish you gain only 10% more damage every three minutes as opposed to two bladestorms in that time. Any time you need burst (particularly in aoe situations like valks on LK) a bladestorm will be more valuable than 10% more damage half as often. As far as the disarm in pvp I assure you bladestorm is still quite good and not worth speccing out of.

BQL is a poor fight to make comparisons with. The damage-increasing buff can skew the % damage contribution of Bladestorm, depending upon bite order/effective cooldown usage. Time spent off-target is also variable due to the random nature of Swarming Shadows and Pact of the Darkfallen. Use Saurfang if you want a single target tank-and-spank fight.

Regardless, the usefulness of burst AoE from Bladestorm makes it worth speccing. Furthermore, with the recent Thunderclap buff, there is little reason to go deep into Fury instead of getting Incite.


There may be some validity in proposing the use of two separate PvE Arms specs, depending on the fight particulars. However, convincing anyone to use a dedicated "single-target spec" without Bladestorm would obviously require a substantial amount of analysis/testing.