Does anyone know if there are any/many bosses on the PTR where AoE is actually useful? Or any where AoE DPS is godly (like morogrim). Thunderclap with Incite is potentially amazing since it has no damage cap but will we see any benefit from this?

At the moment i'm almost 100% certain i'll be going for this build instead of taking Improved Execute.

Is anyone speccing into Bladestorm for PVE it doesn't seem to be that effective anymore if it only hits up to 4 targets.

Bladestorm never hit more than 4 Targets (except if you had the old Whirlwind-Glyph)
Concerning DPS - Bladestorm is still more effective than Death Wish (and therefore worth skilling)

On live I use bladestorm on cd (I generally wait greatness proc, use orc racial and use ms before using it). Mostly cause of the randomness of our procs.

With a more reliable and higher damage OP in 3.1 you can optimize BS use only losing half mortal strike.

It is still an upgrade in dps if you can keep avoid losing OP procs , but to get most benefits from the glyph you should keep it on CD and sacrifice more damage.

Ah thanks for clarifying things I misunderstood what it meant.

Wow Web Stats

Execute is one of the highest damage dealing abilities an arms warrior has. Anyone who would spec out of imp execute is lowering their damage significantly.

Ok I have a question. I've been looking at the Tier 8 and 8.5 sets and I'm confused. Blizzard is trying to increase arms dps while killing our Critical Strike Rating. Doing comparison's even the Heroes Dreadnought set has 67 more critical strike rating than the Conqueror's siegebreaker set.

I know we don't have the entire loot table yet, but it appears that rather than being able to upgrade and gem for str instead of crit, we might have to gem for crit even more so than we do now. Any thoughts on this or am i jumping the gun here?

Yeah T8/T8.5 is a large crit loss, and it's going to end up worse when you consider every other slot.

For example
Item Comparison Tool - World of Warcraft

Even though the Ulduar cape is an upgrade, you still lose over .6 crit unbuffed going from the agility based item to the strength based item. And it's like this across nearly everything. Then you have to consider, as of what is released so far, that a sword is the best weapon resulting in another 5% crit loss. Just one of the potential BiS Ulduar sets I was coming up with was down something like 12% crit compared to my live set.

Imp execute does not increase execute damage, it simply reduces the rage cost of the ability. If this still doesn't make sense to you for some reason ill say it again in another way, your execute hits the same as hard with or without imp execute. It does increase the damage per point of rage used, not damage per second. As Hellord pointed out it can come in handy in the a situation where you get a SD proc when you have less than 15 rage.

There is only one way you can make use of this:
1. Use SD execute, slam or MS to leave you with less than 15 rage.
2. SD execute must proc off of one of the 3 aforementioned abilities.
3. Hit the execute button before your next white swing. If you hit execute after the white swing you are just going to use up all the rage you just gained.

You shouldn't find yourself in that situation if you manage your rage well and keep a nice rotation: the extra overpowers we will get now and correct timing of those overpowers will help keep rage generation smoother and we should generally find it easier keeping a large rage pool. It sounds nice getting a 10 rage execute as it is the highest damage per rage ability we have, however it does not always work out and should not be counted on imo. Fury warriors don't spam execute past 20% cause it wouldn't allow them to use all their other cooldowns on time(i know this isnt an amazing example but it gets the point across). I just about never go below 40 rage by not overusing heroic strike and still fill all global cooldowns. A 10-15 rage occurence should be very rare with 38+ percent crit (thats all i have unbuffed). Something you can count on when patch goes live is using fewer slams as they will be replaced by more GCDs filled with overpowers. This means more white hits landing in a given time period (fewer slams=fewer .5 sec freezes on your swings) and obviously more white damage and rage from that. Being able to always start a rotation with a charge(juggernaut), bloodrage if you choose, and a white swing will give you over half a bar of rage, even possibly a full rage bar to start every fight and you know 3 seconds in you will be able to use a low rage overpower if you happen to burn it up quickly. It was sometimes tough to get a good start on a boss fight in the past but new changes help with this: imp bloodrage from incite build helps even further to get the balls rollin. I guess if you feel like paying 5 more rage for an execute will push you over the edge into rage starvation, go ahead n grab the talent. Also if you feel like you will get a bunch of extra execute procs by stringing together 10 rage SD execute procs every fight, go ahead and grab the talent (and the most you can actually string together at 10 rage at most is 2 since you will get a white hit before you can do a 3rd one).

I'd like to add it is nice having a higher percentage of GCD being instant attacks now due to more average overpower use. Bliz seems to have us headed in the right direction and im excited for changes to go live. I was able to pull 5k+ dps with ease on ptr for hodir testing. The fight had heavy movement and i got knocked back from the boss plenty or frozen in place. We had the MT kiting him nonstop which normally would nerf an arms warrior's dps quite a bit. The 5k+ is a great improvement (juggernaut ftw) from Grobbulus fight, where i can't reach 5k live. I was using an incite build btw and am using it on live server currently as well. I have found no rage problems or change in execute damage. My dps has definitely increased on multiple mob fights, especially trash. The extra crit on cleave and higher tclap damage is nice Tclap was critting for 2.5k (add bleed damage to this) on ptr, however shirt of uber helped with this.

Actually Improved Execute does increase SD-Execute damage.

Well you have to consider that for a given rage, imp execute increases the damage of execute in both SD and under20% cases.

A SD proc can use 15 rage*38 consuming 30 rage. For the same 30 rage with imp execute you burn 20 rage and still consume 30.
Whatever rage you pick you always get 5*38 damage before buffs and armor for every execute, so it's a fixed increase of execute damage AND gives a wider opportunity to use it.

The consequence of more damage per hit is that its DPS increases obviously.

Imp execute has 3 functions to consider:
+ 5*38 EXE damage
+ 30% EXE dpr increase
+ chance to be used

My logic was actually wrong with imp execute adding the 5*38 extra damage. I also took this parse and with generous math and higher than average crit rate figured out that imp execute was a 2% increase in execute damage and a 0.4% increase in overall dps for this specific warrior. Also know that overpower is 6% of his damage and will be closer to triple that with 3.1 and that will make execute a lower overall percent of our damage. Many players are finding overpower to be over 18% of their overall dps on ptr. This is mostly on dummies but it should be closer to double in theory. (5/3)*1.2 five thirds more overpower procs in 3.1 and 20% increased damage.

Is that much extra damage worth skipping the new arms talents along with incite talents?

I know and would hope hellord could calculate this to double check. My math wasn't perfect but the numbers will be close and there was some rounding up involved

5,359,542 overall damage
1,024,029 execute damage 19%
84 execute hits 43% noncrit 57% crit (nice RNG)
i calculated in armor reduction

/discuss

I already said why imho incite build doesnt provide more dps than imp execute.
Incite can be very good in simulators since they generally tend to evaluate if HS is viable directly on swing.
Humans should use a swingbar and check rage and gcd, so the value drops quite much.

There are some option to get jaggernaut or maybe WM if you need expertise, but probably theory fails to achieve the real results from experience.

Imp execute is a staple in my talent choices and it will remain unless there is large evidence that other options are more valid. Optimizing execute use is the first thing to do to understand it's real power.
If we will ever be able to swing under 2s in an execute phase for ex, it's damage will raise, if we lose procs it lowers.. it is very random and to get a proper percentage you should evaluate a very big sample, sample that should include many execute phases (so a dummy isnt the best option to test this).

Heroic strike is very risky for arms, since rage generation can drop cause of few unlucky swings (glancing and hits don't always provide the rage to sustain the rotation) and abusing of it will lower dps.
HS increase is not even that big if you consider we are already hit capped.

- you remove 25% of glancing ~= 18.75%
- you add a static 495 before armor and buffs (the more AP you have the less the static bonus will contribute)
- you gain 15% crit and impale. 3% damage + the increase from crit.

So with Incite you can add (being generous) 30% damage from a swing.

Depending on the ratio white:hs this value will shift the damage in favor of hs, but will also consume more rage and can probably reduce the rage burned with sd procs. It's not possible to factor this appropriatedly.
When SD wasnt capped to 30 rage it was better to use HS only at 95+ rage.

Even with the change there are too many variables to use efficiently HS and until we get a ratio of at least 1 HS per 5 swings it will not a big increase in dps.

Simulators can take decisions in microseconds and still the damage over dozens of hours isn't better than 5%

Trying to make the most out of my rotation I'm considering the stance dance again. Yeah, I can make it good without it, but still... It needs raid testing or someones math magic.

In an attempt to slam less and get every white hit I can, I often go zerker to ww. So far I haven't used a SD proc in zerker, just a quick swap and OP/MS combo is right there on time. I always spec for tactical over iron will or parry anyway, just because it offers nothing extra for dps other than the occasional stun. Also, I carry Last Laugh and Wall of Terror for those, "Oh shi-", moments. It helps.

Anyone try this or have numbers for it?

Here's a general rotation I keep for it:

Starting with rage built - using Bloodrage and waiting 9 secs & charging if possible (need to go in with 30+)

MS-Rend-Slam-OP-MS-[SD-Slam or Zerker-WW]-OP-MS

From there it's a choice at keeping the slam-op-ms and what to fill the hole with. SD, Rend, Heroic Throw, Bladestorm... whatever is allowed for the timing vs SD proc. No glyph of rend was used here.

I use the Zerker-WW if I have 2~ secs left on my OP-MS combo c/d.
Timing isn't always working out right & rage seems to be just a bit under what I need if rage gain isn't just right. I did peak at 3.5k though with 3.3 sustained. Rage came into effect then. Not by a lot, though. It seems to be a good c/d filler to keep white hits in as max dps instead of resetting it too early.

Last night i found a bug that could hurt our dps on some fights. i don't know what exact skill is but there is one skill that over powers my rend. It also wasn't my own rend due to attack power bonuses, i think. i noticed this in a recent video i posted on you-tube. We did Malygos in 6mins and after there were 2 sparks down i couldn't apply my rend anymore.

I had/have similar bug with rend - "more powerful spell is on target" or something like this. I cannot reproduce it unfortunatelly.

Reason for this is, that Rend scales with AP and weapon damage. If one of them is affected by a buff - the Rend is "stronger" and you can only re-apply it if you've got the same buffs or even better ones.

Trauma affects only the damage of a tick not the entire damage of the dot.
This means also that debuffs on target aren't taken in consideration (BF).

This is true. Buffs ON YOU modify your weapon damage and then your "buffer" of damage made by Rend.
This should also work if you rend with a 2h weapon and then swap to a 1h or a faster weapon and try to refresh before Rend is expired.

It's quite annoying since "missing" a refresh make you waste precious gcd time.

In most situations, isn't it best only to reapply Rend after the last tick anyway? If you aren't trying to refresh Rend mid-duration it's never a problem.

You should apply either on last tick or after 3s otherwise you lose time on tb4 procs btw.

Well here is the boss kill from last night with the bug.

Yes this is me, and the guild I'm in. I was top dps over a fury war and some other classes. I also got Vigilance and still managed to push the threat meter.

YouTube - Seraphim Vs Malygos 6mins 10man (Arms) [You Don't Have An Eternity achievement]

I've posted my armory link if you wanna look at my gear.
The World of Warcraft Armory

DEATH TO THE ENEMIES OF THE HORDE!

AOE

I havent been arms for a long time. How does sweeping strike work now? I found that sweeping strike last 30 sec and SS+WW on two targets uses 2 charges instead of 1. How to use SS most effectively?

Does it help if I keep a stack of glyph of bladestorm in backpack and socket it before any boss needs AOE?