Anyone found some sort of rotation yet? I'm at a blank on the PTR. I can't even find that 3.2k again.

edit: apparently I was in pvp spec when posting. 3.2 still seems to be my peak unbuffed, no sunders.
Still looking to see if anyone has found a timed rotation.

Also, once a solid rotation can be somewhat obtained and raid approved I'll be writing an in depth guide for those who need help or are just new to arms. It will be posted on my guilds forums and wherever else it's wanted.

I don't think you'll be able to squeeze out a regular rotation. With OP coming every 6s, MS every 5s, and SD procs thrown into the mix, you'll be running into overlapping CD's pretty often - priority queue will still be the way to go.

Looking at HS a bit:

Let's assume you make 75 rage per swing. In 6s, you have 4gcds.
OP - 1GCD
MS - 1GCD
Rend/Execute/Mocking Blow/Slam - 1GCD
Slam - 1GCD

Total rage cost will be around 70 or so. Let's assume you have a 2s weapon speed. That's two HS swings for every 1 swing. Assuming each HS adds on average 500 damage, that's a bonus of 167DPS. Nothing to sneeze at.

With 50 rage per swing, you can probably fit in 3 GCDs. Again, assuming a 2s weapon speed, you're HSing for every 2 normal swings - a 83 DPS increase.

Best case scenario, HS fully buffed will be a nice little bonus. Under normal circumstance though, I just don't think you're going to have the rage intake to make use of it. We'll have to do a bit of real math to be sure.

Actually, it just occurred to me that HS will scale nicely with haste - depending on the gear we end up with, it might be a nice option. I wonder if there's a viable crossover point where HS > Slam with enough haste.

I have also start doing a different kind of priority system for arms from what I had seen others want to do

Basically

SD has priority over everything except a near expiring TfB (aka has been up for almost 6 sec)
MS if no SD procs and its off CD else slam and heroic strike if you have 50-60 rage+
Keep rends up obv
I have been trying to dump as much rage as possible prior to a blade storm and I have been using the BS with about 2 seconds left on the rend so I can use the TfB proc as soon as I get out of the bladestorm and then use the SD proc (if there is one) + reapply rend

The problem is that our white swing is the only source of rage we have.
If you use HS you mutually exclude the chance of getting rage until next swing. Even glyphed Heroic strike costs 2 rage + all the rage you are not gaining from that swing.
The main difference from other specs (prot and fury) is that the former gets rage from damage taken while the further has a 2nd weapon to provide that.
Arms doesnt have any of these "tricks", but just Anger management out of white swings.

In next tier the fact that you are hitting harder will just increase the cost of your HS.
You will nearly never be able to HS twice in a row and you would be able to use HS half the time just with an external source of rage that also has to be synched with your gcds.

Starvation will kill your dps, and some of you are treating white hits like they provide 60 rage every time.
Half the time it could even crit providing 60+, but 1/4th it will glance producing less than a MS.

To get Incite you'll lose Imp execute. This means like 220sh damage per execute and not only during SD but also during the execute phase.
Heroic strike on the other side is affected by Slam as white swing is. From a damage perspective it's pretty obvious you will not gain any advantage replacing slam with HS before you reach something like ~2s speed.
You need 30% haste from gear to achieve that speed with a 3.4s weapon, retri aura, BF and WF. And the trade off to get so high haste is too high.

Our melee damage is in the range of 22-25%, in very lucky fights you can go up to 30% maybe, supposing you won't slam much and get a lot of exe procs. So your chance to have better white damage (so a better impact from haste) is completely tied to have more Execute uses since it is the spell that you replace slam with.
Execute is around 8-10% of our damage over 20% boss HP and a higher value under it, generally being around 12-15% of overall damage.

Best case scenario you HS every 2 swings. You will then turn 15% (being generous) of your damage into HS.
Let's take an average sample and say your white swings will glance 25% of the time so your 15% swings turned into HS should have glanced in the same way.
Your 15% damage is then made up by 25% glancing, 50% crits and 25% hits.
The 25% glancing will get a 25% bonus damage due to HS = 6.25% more damage
The 50% crits will get incite bonus so its 10% more damage.
the 25% hits will only get HS flat bonus.
So overall using HS every other swing grants you a 4.8% damage increase at 50% crit + its flat bonus per swing.
With Incite you increase this damage by 15%*2.23 = 33.45% damage of 4.8% = grand total of 6.4% more damage.

To achieve such results you'd need loads of executes since you practically need to replace slam with it.
Using a 6sec CD for MS so to line it up with OP, MS+OP is 2.5 GCDs over the course of 4 GCDs (6 seconds) so you have 2 spare gcds to be spent in Execute and half gcd wasted.
In 6 seconds you swing about twice and half to line up our "HS every other swing" I'll take a 24s timeframe (16gcds).
10 swings in 24s = 5 HS, 5 white, 4 MS, 4 OP and filling with Execute you are left with 14 GCDs, one of them will be Rend (21s duration).

Imp execute (including 2h spec, BF, WC) is 38*5*1.06*1.02*1.1 = 226 + 226*0.5*2.23 = 478 avg bonus dmg per EXE
HS is 495*1.06*1.02*1.1 = 589 + 589*0.5*2.23 = 1246 avg bonus damage per HS
Incite bring this value to 589 + 589*0.65*2.23 = 1443 - 1246 = 197 avg bonus per HS
13 Execute*478 > 5HS*197

EDIT: replacing exe with Slam
Let's say you will only have 2 Executes, so you wil have to fit in 11 slams = ~-2 swings
2*478 > 4*197
This only gets equal when you have less than 1.6 SD procs every 24s

What I am debating is that even thinking to use HS much more Incite is a lesser damage increase than Imp Exe since your ability to have more swings depends on the "lack" of Slam use, and this can only happen having an insane procrate of SD or completely dropping slam damage (that's more than 10%).
This is the same reason why haste is not really a great stat for us, since slam doesn't scale at all with it and the increased procrate of SD scales with 9% of your haste. You are only left with increased white damage (reasonably around 22-25% of our overall damage).

You can't treat arms playstyle as fury playstyle.
Even in the previous exceptionally lucky example you would need to crit 100% of the white swings to sustain OP+MS+executes rotation.
In a real fight you will not be able to even HS 1/3rd of the time without suffering starvation and gcd waste.

Got my point?

I have been messing around with arms with the past 2 bosses on PTR (Deconstructor and Kologarn). Deconstructor was before the overpower buff, Kologarn was after. Unfortunately the last logs we have are from Hodir v4, so I do not have logs from those two nights. Also, it was incredibly laggy all night on Kologarn, which really hurts arms alot since you are so dependant on waiting for abilities to proc.

Anyways, I was very impressed with Arms on Deconstructor even thought it was pre-OP buff. Rage generation was never an issue, even using all my abilities everytime they were up. I was spamming Slam quite a bit to try to keep rage down, even needing to get in Heroic Strikes relatively frequently to avoid sitting at 100 rage. One thing I tried, and really really liked, was using Grim Toll over Mirror of Truth. The proc on PTR is close to 50% ArP, and with 10% base from Battle, 20% from Sunder, and 12% from the gear I was using, I was nearing 100% ArP for pretty significant portions of the fight, resulting in some absolutely massive hits. I had a OPs/MSs/Slams pushing 10k crits, and had an execute crit for over 17k. Unfortunately I wasn't personally running a DPS meter, but I was doing pretty consistently high DPS on Deconstructor based on my positions on the meters.

I will install recount for Mimiron tonite and see where my DPS is sitting at, as it is a relatively stationary DPS fight, for the first 2 phases at least, and I will see if we can get a WWS Parse from it for people to look over.

The spec I am using on PTR is http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?warr...3&version=9704 (54/17 with Exec/MS/Rend Glyphs) and the gear I'm using is same as my armory except I'm using Obsidian Greathelm over Maly Helm and Grim Toll over MOT.

Oh, one other thing, Shattering Throw during Heroism is pretty unreal. The 1.5s cast time and only 10 second uptime might net you personally a minor DPS loss, or just no gain at all, but the raid DPS increase is massive. I used it on the Heart during Deconstructor when we were going for the hard mode trigger, and it was incredible how much it increased the DPS of all the physical DPSers, obviously it was amplified even more due to doing double damage, but it is an incredibly strong raid buff for the short duration it is up.

Yea Rama, Grim Toll is definately money over MoT with raid debuffs. Only piece of gear I need to change is for a damn obsidian great helm to drop

When I was running recount on XT002 the other day I was pulling a little over 5k dps and that was with a 16 person raid down to about 30% I think. Had no haste buff either. Was going to try Kologarn last night but it was so laggy that it was a joke but for the attempts where I actually stayed up for a bit I was in the range of 4500 even with the lag. This was also on the pve server where I have older char copies without the grim toll.

I am going to try and get a WWS tonight from mimiron as well to see how arms works since it is a fairly stationary fight not excluding shitty bomb placement.

I would still like it for the expertise on it so I can play around with some different gear sets and dropping of WM and still being expertise capped as arms

Chestguard of the Recluse imo

only had 1 drop for guild so far

Just messing around on the front of a level 60 dummy I nearly broke 5k dps. My rotation and spec was the usual with the exception of HS. A lot of white crits caused my rage to stay over 80 for a long time and without the glyph of HS or incite, I still spammed it often. HS ended up being 20% of my damage. I'm thinking with the glyph I might be raiding my 25 mans like this.

(PTR v9704)

what about 4% phys damage bonus from arms warr? I think benefit from this buff + dps of arms warr ( that is at the same lvl as fury warr, as i heard now on ptr ) will be bigger than pure dps from fury warr. well i didn't do any precise calculation, but if we assume, that all mele doing in raid about 30k dps -> arms warr will get 1200 extra dps for raid. Or does anyone have any wws from ptr to compare arms and fury dps in raid?

ups.. it seems that i missed the discusion about it. thx

You can't draw any conclusions from a level 60 dummy. Your crit chance is increased, their armor is lower and you don't glance. All these factors artificially inflate your DPS compared to a real boss dummy.

Just wondering why you would say the above statement a few pages back then go and get those numbers on a 60 dummy /boggle

If anything try the grandmasters if you dont want to do the heroic one.

It's aimed at the theories of HS, not the usual dps test. Find me a balanced raid headed to Patchwerk on the PTR and I'll try not to, "Boggle", you.

The theory of hs would need some math backup. Speculating that you could use more heroic strikes is ok, understanding the limits and the losses of an incite build is another thing.
The tradeoff for using HS in a 2h arms build is very very high. If you do "good numbers" this doesnt mean it's viable, cause you could have done much better with an ordinary priority list.

Advantages of hs: no glancig blows, +20% crit damage, 15% more crit at a cost of 5*38*buffs for every execute.
The former is a 6.25% damage increase per hs, the second (baking in the latter) is a 13% dmg increase for each use of hs, plus you should add the wd/495*buffs of the static bonus.

After this you should also calculate how many times you are able to do this without losing other specials cds, and then check how the side effects are affecting the rest of your dps (more or less procs from SD, etc).

Personally I won't waste the time to check this if you aren't sure to have a fixed external rage source.

I'm not good at the math thing. My math comes into play when my gold disappears from respecs due to testing. I still don't care for the incite build, but maybe the HS glyph to replace bladestorm/rend.

I can understand that the new changes to OP can make bladestorm not so necessary as it is currently on live.
Rend glyph gives you 1 more proc of OP per Rend GCD usage.
Without glyph rend is 5 ticks, OP will proc at 3s, 9s and 15s. If you reapply Rend at 15s, your next proc will be at 2nd tick of rend (since tick1 has t4b on cd) so you can delay rend by 2gcds and always have the OP proc on first and last ticks.
With glyph rend is 7 ticks, OP procs at 3s,9s, 15s and 21s and you can reapply rend at 24s to have the same kind of procs in next rotation.

First case: Rend = 1gcd every 18s, 3 OP procs
Second case: Rend = 1gcd every 24s, 4 OP procs.

If you keep rend with 100% uptime you have to factor OP procs every 2 applications, if you delay it by 2gcd the calculation is simpler.
In any case, Rend glyph increases Rend damage by 7/5 (+40%) and saves you 2 gcd every 5 rend that you can fill with an Exe or Slam. It's 0.4 gcd per Rend.

In a very lucky and really hard to sustain rotation where you use 1 HS every 3 swings, at 50% crit you have 1 HS crit every 6 swings (@2.5speed it's 10 rage back every 15s) with a cost of 24 rage.

The math to compare these 2 factors is a bit harder, but if you consider
Rend glyph: 40% rend damage + 0.4gcd + 1 OP proc
HS glyph: 14 rage in 21s (with a cost of 33.6)

HS even being an arms spell is not really useful for arms that have to rely on a single weapon to generate rage and maintain a gcd rotation to optimize damage.

You can do whatever test you want, but try at least to check what's the average ratio between hs and white.
It's debatable if hs glyph would be better than rend even with a 1:2 ration (hs:white) and probably only a simulator or a spreadsheet can factor it.

At first glance the difference is huge with current usage of HS and will be huge after 3.1.
Glyph of Rend > Glyph of HS for a 2h arms build.

EDIT: and I didn't even include the loss of rage generated using hs and the fact that your swing is delayed by every slam.

You are counting the rend glyph benefits multiple times though. Either you say it increases the damage of rend, OR that it reduces GCD usage. Simpler approach is :

a) Rend damage is same glyphed or not assuming keeping it up. It just ... ticks. Every 3 seconds, whether you glyph it or not.

b) What you gain is *almost* a GCD every minute, or precisely 15/16 of it. But lets honestly assume 1 gcd (this will also "simulate" the lower micromanagement neeed).

So its most likely 1 Slam vs some heroic rage. Putting the whole heroic usefulness aside - heroic glyph gives you ~1 more heroic per minute assuming 1:3 usage. So 1 Slam vs converting 1 white to heroic. I say rend wins - and thats without even discussing the whole viability of HSing.

True Shha, I added the damage gain in an post-edit and made a mistake.
Anyway it's slightly more than 1 gcd per minute instead of less.
You need 4 rend to cover a minute with 15s duration. You need 3 rend to cover 1m and 3s glyphed (it's +2 ticks).
It's dps is the same but the damage per usage is better.

Anyway we have the same opinion and I honestly find very hard to believe it is possible to have 1/3rd of white swings converted into HS even in fights where you swim in rage (think about thaddius or loatheb).

Nobody else wonders why Blizzard is leaving sword specialization untouched in its weak state?
The 6 seconds cooldown nerf to it was a PvP thing to avoid the random chance of getting a streak of procs that would destroy the opponent. And for PvE has left swords for Arms undesired and basically unused.
In 6 seconds there are 3-4 special attacks and 2-3 swings unable to proc the extra swing. At 5% for hit That's basically a 25-30% reduction of the specialization power. To make it more balanced and worth the 5 talent points the talent could add a +5% extra damage per talent point to the extra swing. Looking like this: Gives you a 5% chance to get an extra attack dealing 25% increased damage on the same target. This cannot occur more often than 6 seconds.
Maybe Axe and mace would still be better with these numbers but at least it would be more comparable and basically what disturbs me is that if they leave it untouched is because they think sword specialization is as good as the others?

Sword spec is under-par. But the best way to solve the issue is increasing the proc chance rather than increasing the damage of the added. A ppm proc could be viable aswell, but wouldnt scale well with haste.