I should have had this up long before now, especially since there are already a few guides out there that are giving the wrong information. I’m not going to rat them out, but since a lot of people come to me for what they need, I need to make sure that the record is set straight.
I’m not going to go into too much detail – we all know that I’ve got a tendency to get wordy, and it’s best avoided here. Frankly, every Arms Warrior is going to play a little different based on choices and situations, so I’m only going to focus on single-target outputs.
Ability Changes
Mortal Strike now has a 6-second cooldown, up from 5, and generates 10 rage. With the way Overpower functions for us on Taste for Blood, I suspect that this change was put into place in order to keep the original feel of TfB and its internal 6-second CD for Overpower from the old Rend ticks.
Rend is gone, replaced by Deep Wounds which appears from use of Mortal Strike. Deep Wounds itself lasts for 15 seconds, but Mortal Strike only has a 6-second cooldown, so on single target fights, you won’t see Deep Wounds dropping off.
Taste for Blood now has an additional effect for Overpower. There is a 30% chance that Overpower will enable a followup use of Overpower, and will add a stack counter to increase the damage done by Heroic Strike. Initially, I found this change to be frustrating (you all know what a proponent I am for kicking the old Heroic Strike to the curb), but after working with it pretty extensively after the patch, I have the utmost confidence in the way the Overpower/Heroic Strike symbiosis works. Overpower also no longer costs rage.
Stat Changes
Fortunately, things have changed for slightly better here. You will need 7.5% hit and 7.5% expertise for boss fights. Right now, at 85, that works out to 768 rating for each, unless you have racial bonuses that work in your favor. Fortunately, the stat screen on your character window will show you just how much you have (including your bonuses), so it’s easy to see how much of a gap you have to cover.
Our relationships with Crit, Mastery, and Haste remain unchanged – we love the first two, and loathe the last, because it doesn’t do enough for us.
Talents
Key for single-target fights, I think, is Dragon Roar. Bladestorm still locks us down for ability usage, so that’s out unless you’re fighting a boss that summons a ton of adds regularly. Shockwave would also be purely situational. Dragon Roar ignores armor, and crits automatically – no need to worry about boosting it with something else before use.
Glyphs
I’m a little indifferent about our glyphs save for one: Unending Rage. A rage bar that fills to 120 is incredibly useful, and is the only must-have I will recommend. For the other two, I only suggest that you use what you know you will make the most use of. Me, I like Long Charge and Rude Interruption.
Priority
Things have changed a little bit since before 5.0.4, and it’s going to feel a little weird adding Heroic Strike to the mix, but you have to. Here’s your priority:
- Dragon Roar
- Colossus Smash
- Overpower (TfB Proc – only one!)
- Mortal Strike
- Execute (below 20%)
- Overpower
- Heroic Strike (only with 2+ stacks of TfB)
- Slam
So let’s break this down one piece at a time.
Dragon Roar comes first. As we said before, it already ignores armor (no need to burn Colossus Smash beforehand), and always crits. It hits all enemies within 8 yards, and also hits them with a little bit of a knockback and a knockdown. The knockback isn’t that noticeable on regular mobs, and on bosses, it’s non-existent, so there’s no need to worry about too much movement.
Colossus Smash to prep for Execute under 20% health, or Mortal Strike and Overpower above 20% is always a must. No question there.
Mortal Strike, and Overpower to follow up. Obviously, at the start of the fight, you won’t have Overpower just sitting there waiting to be used, so you have to force the proc with a Mortal Strike. The key here, though, is that as long as Overpower continues to proc, use it until it isn’t anymore. If you have an Overpower proc waiting to be used, but you Mortal Strike instead, you’ve just wasted an Overpower and a chance for a TfB stack. There’s an important caveat here, though: Do not use more than one GCD to delay a Mortal Strike. It’s an important DPS ability, and if you’re just chewing through Overpowers instead of using it, your output will suffer. Fortunately, it’s rare to run into it, but if you do, keep that in mind. If you’re playing your cards right, you’ll start to see a pattern between what you can do with the Mortal Strike/Overpower/Heroic Strike chain, which we’ll cover in a moment.
I’ve seen a couple guides out there telling you not to use Heroic Strike unless TfB is at 5 stacks. Some guides even tell you to use Heroic Strike with just one stack, even over Slam. Don’t pay attention to either one. The first situation is completely unrealistic – you’ll be able to count on one hand, two at most, the number of times you’ll get to five stacks in a single RAID, let alone a single boss fight. The second situation is a waste of your resources. Slam does 215% weapon damage plus 997 at level 85; Heroic Strike with a single stack will only do 210% weapon damage, plus 499. Even if the latter portion of the equation gets doubled, it’s still only 998, which means you’re losing out.
The key here is to make sure that you’re always using Heroic Strike at 2+ stacks, but only use HS when the TfB stacks are just about to drop off – you’ll almost always be able to try to sneak in one more MS+OP combo with 3-4 seconds to spare on the stacks, so if it doesn’t add another stack, you can still burn HS without much trouble.
That’s pretty much everything. For those of you who use Weak Auras (or are interested in doing so to help you keep track of things like TfB stacks and the like), once the display bugs are worked out in the menu, I’ll be posting up my export strings for anyone to use, as well as including some screenshots.
Slay well, my friends.
Good to see you posting again.
Alas, you’ll need to change the priority system a bit. You never, ever want to delay Mortal Strike – it’s almost exclusively a DPS loss to do so, even if you’re fishing for Taste for Blood procs which are RNG. Secondly, Dragon Roar just took a huge nerf that isn’t reflected in the tooltip. What exactly that does to its priority I don’t know, but the nerf is in the region of 50% according to some reports.
Additionally, it’s a little funky.
You don’t use it while Colossus Smash is up because you’re wasting a GCD by doing so, and you’re not going to use it while Recklessness is up because of the same reason. I’d treat Dragon Roar similarly to Bladestorm, in that it’s more of a cooldown than a rotational attack. Anyone seeing that differently would hold just as valid an opinion.
Lastly, I like the way you put Taste for Blood. It’s an ugly mechanic to have two rage dumps, but that’s what you get with bad developers. Essentially, “use it when it stacks to five or is about to drop off” is probably the simplest way to track it, but it also has an impact on the priority system because it’s off the GCD. Roughly speaking, if it’s not at five and is in no danger of dropping off then Slam starts to take precedent at higher rage levels.
I’m glad you’re learning to live with it, but it’s probably the ugliest mechanic I’ve ever seen with warriors (over half a decade playing).
@Zellviren – Yeah, I realized last night when I went to bed that there are a few caveats that I forgot to address.
Fortunately what I’ve seen so far is that Dragon Roar rarely, if ever, seems to fall in with a Colossus Smash debuff just due to its nature and being on a minute-long cooldown. I also see it as a good way to go when you’re a little rage-starved, which is why I place it so high on the list. I’ve seen it crit for up to 75kish on boss fights, so unless they adjusted it in the hotfix, that’s pretty good, and worthy of use on cooldown.
The Mortal Strike thing typically sorts itself out. One thing I forgot to mention is that delaying MS for more than one GCD is bad, so just chaining OPs in the face of using MS instead shouldn’t be done. The proc rate on TfB pretty much guarantees, though, that the times you’ll be using Overpower and run into MS coming off cooldown is rare enough that it won’t be crippling to output. I wouldn’t call it fishing for TfB procs so much as fishing for an above 20% execute (Heroic Strike crits at 5 stacks are NUTS).
I don’t disagree that it’s an ugly way to go, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call the developers bad – just unpolished. The classic game went its whole life without seeing a DPS warrior in a raid, and they’ve been struggling to balance us with everything that’s left ever since. I think it would have turned out better with better beta testers instead of just letting the masses play the game early, but I don’t run the company and I don’t get to make those decisions. Just gotta roll with the punches.
The issue with Mortal Strike isn’t necessarily it’s damage per GCD, more the fact it’s the metronome that everything else hangs off. It guarantees you an Overpower proc, it applies/refreshes Deep Wounds and it can generate an Enrage (possibly its strongest contribution). It’s not just these additions, however, but also that there’s never a wrong time to hit it – every other attack in our arsenal has conditions that change its priority.
The priority and/or value of Mortal Strike never changes.
As for the quality of development, I’m going to stick with “bad”. This group inherited a wonderful working Arms model from WotLK, a model that only had one legitimate weakness to address (terrible scaling). Since then they’ve ruined its PvP viability due to an ArP attack, reintroduced Heroic Strike spam after vowing to be rid of it, changed rage into runic power and introduced a priority queue that fluctuates practically every swing (with the exception of Mortal Strike).
Though I’m known for dramatic overstatements, I’ve been comfortable for a long time in the belief that the current warrior development team don’t actually play the class at all. The constructive feedback they’ve received in the “consolidated list of issues” is some of the best feedback they’ve EVER gotten in beta, yet they still think Sudden Death procs from white swings adds value to haste.
Perhaps “bad” is harsh. Perhaps “clueless” is closer the mark.
I’ll agree that it’s the lynchpin ability; it always has been. But Enrage only comes from MS and CS crits last I saw, and either way it’s a gamble until our crit chance isn’t horrid. Perhaps it’s more about how much you’re willing to gamble. It’s not perfect, but it’s what the devs made for us.
I won’t get into an extensive debate about the devs, but I will say that even if the entire team plays a warrior, there are still no guarantees. I’ve been on both sides of the dev/player coin, and balancing is *hard.* You’ll never get it perfect, and the solutions you find are often not what people expect, nor for the same reason.
Okay, so I just wrote a post on the subject of Arms and why I find it so damn painful to play:
http://unwaveringsentinel.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/my-problem-with-arms-50.html
It’s understood that some people probably like the new Arms, but the vast majority of people whose opinions I value are drawing similar conclusions to mine.