Beta Feedback 13/08/2020

[Arcana-earthen-ring (Arcana)]

Posted my recent experiences in the feedback thread for Warriors.

13/08/2020

After the patch last week, I copied over my main and leveled her again, deciding this time to do it without upgrading to r1 gear when I could to get a more accurate picture of Arms power in the leveling process.

Starting Secondaries:

At lvl 50 I had 44% Haste and 35% Mastery.

Ending Secondaries:

At lvl 60 I had 13% Haste and 19% Mastery.

Upgrades

To improve my character power, I had to downgrade some gear to get better secondaries because Arms is so dependent on them. I had to skip many ilvl upgrades because they would have been performance downgrades for the same reason. This is especially noticeable since there’s no ilvl scaling the first time around.

Secondaries

From my start to my finish the drop represents a massive loss in performance that could be felt hard because so much of the spec is passive. Resource generation is passive, a lot of the damage of the spec is from a passive secondary as well.

Going from, say, Haste to Critical Hit because it’s on an item and the item is an ilvl upgrade is a massive hit in performance. Assuming both gain and loss are the same at 2% then the Haste loss is a 2% performance loss in return for a 2% increased random chance.

Some loss in power is expected when you level. However, this is an absurd loss in power. The worst part for balancing is that it comes back in reverse once you gear up above what is set as the benchmark for Haste and Mastery, and it’s going to be even more absurd now that Arms has been returned to dealing front-loaded damage.

The end result is Mortal Strike used more often that hits for a high level of damage. This is right back to the standard of Arms underperforming at the start of an expansion cycle and the overperforming near the end as the Secondaries have risen in value far beyond what’s set as the benchmark.

The only way to solve this permanently is to give Arms active resource generation and make the Mastery just be a straight-up, individual duration, stacking bleed instead of adding more damage passively to the Warrior. The latter will give the Mastery Secondary Stat an ever-increasing value throughout the cycles.

[Arcana-earthen-ring (Arcana)]

Supplimentary

The Haste loss is especially noticable in dungeons as you get a predetermined profile when you enter.

I got onto Mists of Tirnas Scithe and was reduced to lvl 55, at the time I had around 20% Haste, inside the dungeon I only had 10. Prior to entering MTS I could engage somewhat with the game. Inside however I had to go for long times waiting for auto-attacks to build up Rage in order to engage with the game.

The only reason I had anything to do in those moments, other than watching paint dry, was because I had Skullsplitter and Dreadnought.

The passive aspects of Arms creates a situation where Haste and Mastery are primary stats. I had to skip out on items that were 27 ilvls higher than the ones I was wearing because they had neither Haste nor Mastery. That’s how good those secindary stats are. Choosing the alternative is going to lower your performance drastically.

With the change of Arms damage from being back-loaded to being front-loaded it also creates another problem that we’ve seen in the game before. It’s going to make Arms scale madly with gear. Arms is going to start lvl 60 under-performing, then with the gear they can get in patch 9.0 they’ll slowly reach the benchmark set for them, and then with every content patch after that their performance will just improve exponentially.

It worked in BfA because most of the damage of Arms was something where Haste and Mastery had a relatively little effect, namely that Arms did massive DoT damage and hardly any direct damage. In SL currently the situation has been reversed.

There’s also another issue with Arms having passive generation only. Since using abilties often is impossible at the start of the expansion then they have to hit harder in order to reach the performance benchmark. Then as Arms gets more and more Haste those abilities can be used more often and Arms Warriors get closer and closer to being able to use every GCD. Which, as mentioned before, have to do increased damage since they’re designed to sometimes being used after the GCD or CD becomes available. And now they’re being used as close to when those two ends which is a situation they were never properly designed for.

There’s only one way to curb Arms’ ludicrous scaling and that’s by making Rage-generation active and removing the damage increase from Mastery and put that damage out on the abilities so the two secondaries become secondaries instead of primary indicators of Arms’ performance.

I’ve also had some opportunities to tank. And Indomitable with the self-healing is by far the best talent on that row, mainly for the self-healing. It by far outshines any of the other alternative choices in that row to the point that it’s a false choice.

The other two comes with conditions. If you use IP at 75% health and then it’ll count as being used at 75% health no matter what you drop to. And getting IP when you use Avatar is severely limited even with AM due to the loss of CD reduction on Demo Shout so you’ll get less Rage/s than before.Indomitable works all the time and you get the effect just by using basic gameplay.

Please make the heal baseline. As opposed to the other two it has actually saved my hide. Nothing those other two talents do can measure up with seeing my health rise seven percent when I use Shield Block and IP. Unless it becomes baseline there’s no reason to take either Bolster or Never Surrender at all.