Great to see they are throwing a little love to the stubbourn people like us who have refused to bow to the Fury TG face roll. I would like to thank everyone for their posts on this topic, its been a huge help. Since reading these posts I have been able to consistently out DPS the two fury warriors in 25 man Naxx in the last few weeks. Cheers to all the Arms Warriors staying strong out there!
I spent some extensive time on the PTR the past few days, testing arms DPS. I've got a few observations.
First and foremost, I find myself in a GCD deficit almost all the time. That is to say, I have TFB and SD proc quite often, and by the time both procs are used, MS is either off cooldown, or close enough that I only have time for one slam in between.
Keep in mind, this is also with allowable 'downtime' to accumulate some rage...but this is minimal at best.
Also, rage generation seems to be a non-issue, assuming axe spec. I rarely have to take a break to accumulate rage. It's quite nice.
If it hasn't been mentioned already, Shattering Throw can be cast while moving. I tested this last night.
It also increases DPS on any given target by quite a margin...my execute crits were going from ~6400 up to a maximum of around 7100 with Shattering applied to the target.
As arms, my DPS hovers (on a grand master dummy) around 2800-3000, depending on RNG and latency. As fury, my DPS hovers around 2500-2700, again depending on RNG and latency. Note, this would be higher if I had my binds and bars set up on PTR, but it probably wouldn't matter that much.
Overall, I'd say Arms will DEFINITELY be viable as a raid spec after 3.1 hits live. It might be that I can be a tad dense and maybe not as quick on the uptake as others sometimes, but it seems as though Arms, while being slightly more complicated, also allows for a certain amount of error in judgment in the rotation, as opposed to fury that is a bit unforgiving, considering it's only 4 buttons at most.
I've seen it debated and i've seen some numbers posted but I'm not terribly good at math and I'm still unsure as to what the final outcome of the debate was.
Considering the BOH is 3.4 speed and the Cryptfiend's Bite is 3.6 speed, which is the higher dps for an Arms Spec'd warrior? Does the higher dps of BOH and the better Stats on it truly outweigh the speed difference given the amount of non normalized skills that an arms warrior uses? If anyone has any parses available to show the difference it would be appreciated.
Right now I'm looking forward to 3.1 a lot. I've already solidified my rotation to out dps our fury warrior on certain fights, and given the arms buff and the fury nerf I'm looking to top the charts even more.
I'd still think the BoH would be better than Cryptfiend's. It's sortof like the Jawbone vs. BoH debate...there MAY be certain situations where Jawbone can out-do the BoH, but they're so few and far between that it's a non-issue.
Mind you, statswise, Cryptfiend's is much closer to BoH than the Jawbone is, but the principle is the same.
Regardless, I would be interested in some parses as well. More than that, I'd like to see some parses between mace spec and axe spec, to see if mace spec (with the new armor pen changes) matches up with Axe.
Tzul there isnt that many skills that are non-normalized - namely Slam Deep Wounds and Rend . With 3.1 changes especially (but not only), amount of Slams in arms "rotation" is suprisingly small. Rough count of skills /gcds per 21 sec of rend - Its obviously rough estimate since executes are random, and gcds tend to ruin any sort of "set rotation", but it should give you the idea
Slams arent really a huge deal. Deep wounds from instants obviously helps , but overall I dont think after 3.1 its worth to use Bite over BoH. Before patch - maybe.
On a side note - Im really torn over new arms. On one hand all is fine and fun - dmg is there, rotation is more manageable yet still fun and decision based. On other - numbers show that arms still scale slowly, and it feels like it just got "patched up" to proper dps - but at end of Ulduar it will be a dead spec again - simply because of slower scaling with gear.
It always scaled bad with haste - nothing changed here.
It scaled badly with ArP - bleeds are still important, although with ArP buff its better - but so is every class/spec , arms is still not benefitting as much as Fury from it.
It scaled ok with crit - well the more damage overpower does (and its probably highest dps move atm), the less benefit from crit - with 13% raid buff + poleaxe spec crit + ~4% crit from kings/motw/totem all it takes is 33% unbuffed crit (before axe spec) to cap out overpower's crit. We are there already. So the scaling got toned down.
It caps on hit/expertise faster then ever due to talent changes.
It really seems that STR is only leftover stat to stack - and single stat stacking is never effective. For comparison FURY Sep are really nice now - STR-1 Arp ~1.05 Crit ~0.9 Haste ~0.8 Hit ~0.65 for my gear.
It feels for me ARMS warriors should be somehow included in the haste rating buff hybrids got at least (i can understand why fury was left out - although considering it got extra nerfs in WM and others - maybe it would be manageable) - otherwise stat scaling will remain its weak point.
Assuming as you've stated that we'll be slamming a lot less in 3.1, why does haste not scale well? Currently looking at a few parses from some of the higher dps Arms warriors (I'm getting up there but my guild is failing at doing parses at the moment) it seems that Mele is still a good chunk of dps, between %15-%20 or so. Since an arms warrior will be slamming less, and thus pausing our swing timer less, does this not make haste a more valuable than is current on live? Also if I'm not mistaken larger amounts of haste can affect the global cool down, though in amounts that are most likely not worth doing the math on.
Is there something I'm not taking into account on this topic?
Like you said - Melee is 15-20% of the dps. Maybe 25% with DW taken into account. For fury right now melee + heroic + deep wounds from those 2 is around 55% (+ heroic % goes up with haste so the effect is a bit bigger). Additionally 4 slams /21 sec = ~10% reduced haste impact) Common sense dictates Fury scaling over 2.5 times better with haste (taking into account slowed swing by slam).
Like you said - Melee is 15-20% of the dps. Maybe 25% with DW taken into account. For fury right now melee + heroic + deep wounds from those 2 is around 55% (+ heroic % goes up with haste so the effect is a bit bigger). Additionally 4 slams /21 sec = ~10% reduced haste impact) Common sense dictates Fury scaling over 2.5 times better with haste (taking into account slowed swing by slam).
Sure it scales better for fury. However seeing as we'll be slamming less and Overpowering more it would appear that with proper stats there we'll find ourselves with excess rage and possibly heroic striking more. I'm not disagreeing on it being a better stat for fury, but with upcoming changes it seems as though it won't be as worthless as it is now. Unfortunately i've not been able to get a good read don the PTR as my glyphs keep disappearing, and most PTR tests will probably be quite inaccurate compared to a true raid situation. I'm mostly just thinking out loud and trying to get feedback on said thoughts. I've recently hit the %40 unbuffed crit and with the few more upgrades out of naxx and up coming Ulduar I'm looking to find out what the next stat to start stacking is. Strength/AP will obviously be good, but I would hope that it won't be the only stat worth stacking.
I dont really see why you think haste might be better with patch. Even if you have say 10% worth of haste that would only end up being a 2% increase in total damage if you white damage is around 20ish%. Yea you would have a bit better rage generation but crit pretty much covers that. Strength/AP increases all damage, crit and ArP increases all damage excluding bleeds.
So bottom line is that haste sucks for arms warriors if its possible to take another stat in its place.
I deleted question since it seemed a bit stupid, but not to confuse readers I'll repeat it- Do you find any place for HS to burn rage, or you slam all the way.
While there are people swearing by HS for arms, my stance is - you should avoid using it.
Main reason why fury benefits from heroic strike is to remove glancings/misses - not the extra 500 dmg. Well arms white hits dont miss. So all you are left is :
- 500 extra dmg
- 9% extra damage from reduced glancings ( ~225 damage assuming 2500 non crit white hits - very very generous, but then again with new ARP the damage of white hits can get really high)
- impale bonus of ~10% (assuming 50% crit rate) of the increased damage - 325 or so dmg.
Its very rough estimate, but you can count heroic strike extra dmg as ~ 1500 or so.
The cost though is no rage generation for at least 4 gcd skill uses. 4gcd is 2xMS,1xOP,and then possibly 1xSD. And right there you get rage starved. Sure you can exchange MS for a slam, or do same with execute - but that alone basically costs you 1500 damage (lower slam damage, and lost white swing). If you get some "bad" luck (obviously bad is relative here) and for example you get multiple SD procs (which normally force you to delay OP), that you wont be able to take full use of because of heroic you will actually lose damage.
There are times when Heroic can be useful - when you have a full rage bar , when you need to refresh rend (low rage skill), when you have mocking blow up (and boss isnt tauntable). But honestly its probably not worth the extra effort of "decision making". You are likely to lose out on it in longer run.
Btw - since more bosses in Ulduar i hear are immune to taunt - mocking blow- glyphed, is another nice filler (even once per minute) - 125% weapon damage (i believe not normalized too), is on par with other instants , and its 10 rage - useful for those low rage moments.
I completely agree with Shha.
Heroic strike should just be used when approaching a swing you are over something like 80 rage.
Even here you must take that decision just before the swing and possibly during the global cooldown, so you know you already used something that costed rage and your next white swing is before 4th gcd.
In the worst case scenario you have 2xMS cost 60 rage, then you have another (or 2 other) gcd with a filler that can cost max 15 rage (Slam). Execute with rage will burn down 30 rage, but you can use it even at 10.
So the ideal case would be using hs after a slam when you are rage capped.
You are left with 88 rage and can use 2xMS (down to28 rage) and eventually fill with an OP+Slam before next white hit.
Heroic throw, mocking blow and rend can ease use that heroic strike safely at around 80 rage, but it's unpredictable when you have SD up, cause in the best case you would only use that rage for additional execute damage. Unless there is an external source of damage that provides you rage I don't think HS will do more than 1-2% of our total damage and slamming in-between only increases your next white hit timer.
Hs is not really a great move for arms and rage generation is not what makes it more used (unless you reach a point where every swing will fill your bar). The risk of being rage starved isnt worth it cause for arms the loss of rage due to hs (considering endless rage) is 25% higher than for fury.
Heroic Throw resets swing timer though, so its a very impractical spell to fight "rage starvation".
It just needs to be used like the old slam was ie just after the swing.
Anyway it's tricky without a swing timer and is not really addressing the issue of rage starvation, but used wisely is a negligible loss of swing speed for 0 rage cost and decent damage.
I have been arms since BC started, and now in wotlk I have found myself still holding my own on dps. You can check my armor if you want, but even before I had mostly bis gear, I was stil managing to pull 4.5k dps on patchwerk. I see the new changes to arms coming up in 3.1, and smile in glee.
The change to taste for blood will allow overpower to not only have increased damage, but to also make the rotation much much smoother. At the moment arms dps feels alot like lock dps, lots of 'if this then that' decisions. It will soon be very easy to dps as arms.
I have gone to the ptr and am seeing around a 1200 dps jump in my dps with these changes on the heroic dummy, around 3400 unbuffed where on live I am at around 2200 unbuffed. So all in all, Arms will most certainly be a vialble raid spec, because it already was before, it will just be much better come 3.1.
I see the theory craft on mace spec, and I def think if you find a mace in ulduar of similar damage to BOH then it would perform on the same level, I really feel arms and mace spec will be fairly equal on dps in most situations, with axe spec pulling ahead on trash and bosses with low armor.
Well 4.5k DPS is respectable for arms, but its not even close to 6.5k pulled by fury currently. So i disagree about the part where arms is a "viable" raid spec currently. Well given how easy content is, maybe, but definitely not if you look for dps.
After patch i believe arms will outperform fury (which was "overnerfed" atm - something that will be eventually overcame with ulduar BiS gear, but for now thats how i see it - 10% was already a bit too far, forcing us to give up another 2% or so damage by dropping weapon mastery is definitely too much imo).
Mace spec will be actually better on trash too, since you will rarely see full sunders on such pulls.
After patch i believe arms will outperform fury (which was "overnerfed" atm - something that will be eventually overcame with ulduar BiS gear, but for now thats how i see it - 10% was already a bit too far, forcing us to give up another 2% or so damage by dropping weapon mastery is definitely too much imo).
I sincerely hope we wont go back to 'ol' good times where arms was poor man choice aka , if you dont farm BWL stay with arms. Frankly speaking i prefer fury. but parses from PTR dont seem to be too promising.
As soon as the new changes are pushed to PTR (the overpower change and the new 'Juggernaut' talent), I'm very anxious to try out Axe vs Mace spec. I have a Death's Bite that I'll try vs. Jawbone and Inevitable Defeat.
This is from this week. I had pretty good RNG on patchwerk with nothing but raidwide buffs. I missed some of the heroism and started dpsing late cause we were being extra careful for immortal attempt. I Lost alot of dps on KT and total damage on trash cuz i was dealing with loot but i can put out 4500 overall dps in a naxx raid normally.
I'm still short quite a few upgrades due to them never dropping, but if you sort that fight by Act. DPS you'll see I'm in 5th with over 5100 dps. Melee gets the short end of the stick having to wait 20+ seconds to start dps.
i dunno definatly not worth it to do that little dps, i dont see any reason arms atm would be of any use, its holding back your classes dps and not maximizing your input to the raid.
when the patch comes out it definatly might be something to look at, i was the arms warrior in bt/sunwell and of course that got blown up and was fun at the end, but right now its lame all around imo. perhaps when dual spec comes out and i can swap with my 2 boh on b4 it gets fixed it will be worth while for a week. /shrug just my opinion. + a tauren with only 1 betrayer looks kinda gay :/
I've been running arms for about 2-3 months now after 3 years of prot. After reading most of these post, I'm not sure if I see a solid rotation. It seems everyone has a thing they do, or only comment on parts. (Yes, I know there is no true rotation to a RNG spec)
My top dps has only been 4.4k (25 man Patchwerk & 52/17 spec). After seeing some of you break 5k, my aim is to blow fury out the water come 3.1.
Running axe spec in nearly full heroic-raid gear, I'm obviously doing something wrong. I feel that I blowing through my GCDs without enough white hits or not slamming enough. Rage is never a factor, in fact, my top DPS was earned with a lot of heroic striking to replace white hits. Probably in my ability usage lies the dps killer.
03/13/09, 10:49 AM
Similar Threads
