So let's talk Arms Warrior in PVE

Classes Warrior
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Well, I don’t want to start negatively so I’ll start with I love warrior class, I love arms and I’ve played Warrior effectively since Vanilla, seeing the end game of both pvp and pve. This is going to be a lengthy post so get ready :slight_smile:

Now to get to the topic at hand, let’s talk arms warriors and the issues we currently are facing :-

  1. The core of the gameplay is unfun, doesn’t promote heavy input and involves a lot of waiting to get rage.
  2. Inability to react to surroundings or control it especially when there is unavoidable damage.
  3. Doesn’t bring much to the table.
  4. Lack of or rather complicated self sustain.
  5. Talents are a mess.
  6. Most of the damage comes passively.
  7. The mastery is flawed in design and the class is suffering because of it.
  8. Needs some Quality of life changes.

I’ll discuss the topics of the issues I find in arms warrior and try to suggest some solutions, note that solutions aren’t a take all thing, it’s different suggestions or approaches to how to fix the issue, putting them all together would make the warrior brokenly OP :laughing: ( not that I mind :muscle: )

Also note that the numbers I will provide are relative and may or may not be entirely true, they are based on experience, numbers taken from my own details and trying to portray the issue.

And final please note when I say warriors in this topic I mean arms warriors ^ _ ^

First Topic : Core Gameplay

Atm arms warrior’s gameplay revolves around maximizing haste and crit to get more rage, which gives you more cdr, which lets you use warbreaker and bladestorm more often all the while making sure that deep wounds is up all the time, which may mean sometimes you gotta skip whirlwind/slam just to have rage for your next mortal strike.

What is the problem?

First, there is too huge time gap between using abilities, you have windows where you are just waiting for the next auto attack to be able to do something.

Second of all, Passive damage makes up to 50% of your damage, with 10%-15% being cooldowns ( Warbreaker + Bladestorm ) and 10% being execute damage, that means your direct input makes for about 25-35% of your total damage, the rest is all passive damage and cooldowns.

What this does is that it makes you change your gameplay from thinking about your rotation, how to execute it, what to do to basically how can I reduce warbreakers cooldown so it can buff my damage.

This means that the rotation, the gameplay just doesn’t matter all you have to do is press mortal strike on cooldown, throw in a couple of OP/Whirl/Slams and make sure you warbreaker. You can’t control your dps and there is no effective or efficient game play or rather they don’t really make that much of a difference.

Thirdly, our cooldowns feel redundant even though they are useful and do good enough damage, the scenario where they bring in an AWESOME moment is niche, unless the tank pulls a couple of groups in m+ you’ll sit there contemplating whether you should bladestorm or not.

Suggustions to fix first problem : -

  1. Lower the rage cost of mortal strike and whirlwind
  2. Make overpower generate rage
  3. Give a filler ability that generates rage
  4. Make versatility directly affect rage generated ( 5% versa = 5% generated rage )
  5. Make Bladestorm deal more damage to the warrior’s primary target, or give it high damage that scales proportionally to the number of targets like the new trinkets in bfa ( Bladestorm deals X damage divided between all targets affected by it, the damage increases proportionally to the number of targets being hit )
  6. Introduce a more appealing and synergizing mastery instead of deep wounds ( discussed later )
  7. Make Anger management baseline but nerfed or completely remove it.
  8. if deep wounds is to stay Shift damage from Deep wounds back to other active abilities.

Second Topic : Reacting to your surroundings.

Atm warrior’s cannot really react to their surroundings, you have pummel, intimidating shout, rallying shout and DBTS which is basically 30% dmg taken reduction, Impending victory and defensive stance if you’ve specced into them, leap and the niche charge.

These are mostly ineffective and weak reaction abilities, intimidating shout is basically a 0.1-1 second disruption.

Rallying shout is 15% Max HP 3 minute cooldown which is really niche to make use off, if a party member takes damage it’s probably going to be much more than 15% of their HP even if the damage is passive. It is only useful when the party is already struggling, it’s a in case of fire press button instead of preventing the actual fire.

Die by the sword is one of the weakest self defense abilities in the game if not the weakeast, a 3 minute 100% parry and 30% dmg taken reduction for 8 seconds, you don’t get to use it that much and you nearly never use it for the parry, ontop of that it only lasts 8 seconds and reduces damage taken by 30% when abilities are hitting you for 50% + hp.

Impending victory is also an incase of fire press button it doesn’t give you the ability to control how the surround effects you, rather it’s a 20% heal which again is not very affective when stuff hits you for more than that all the time, it also sacrfices a talent slot in order to get it.

Defensive stance is a cool ability, it actually gives the ability to react, albeit in a weak manner and after sacrificing a talent for it and some of your damage, it’s not part of the core kit.

The warriors in M+ or Raid environment feel helpless and dependent on others when others should depend on them, by name they are warriors. atm No one wants them because they cannot do anything other than dps, and everyone else have that. They are helpless and cannot react to whatever happens around them, they can put little insignificant input when they should be putting much more.

Suggestions to fix the second problem :-

  1. Give warriors an ability to negate incoming damage and counterstrike ( in an arc infront of them ) to heal damage, a 0.5 sec ( during which warriors can’t act / will do a cool getting ready animation ( Think dante royal guard / Samurai stance / etc ) stance ability that negates the next incoming damage ( Non dot / Non bypassing / none avoidable damage ).

This will give warriors a cool niche which they can test their skills in negating damage, attacks like Tol’daggors last boss cannon/cross iginition / explosive bursts can be " parried ", Tol’dagor’s wolf boss jump can be parried etc etc. it adds a cool thinking, patience and predicting game while giving warriors the ability to react to surroundings in a cool way.

  1. Make second wind a built in passive for warriors, make it not fall of with avoidable damage, reduce the healing it does.

It’s a cool talent, I love it but I still think it’s not worthy to be a talent, especially when there are many unavoidable damage that make it fall off, by unavoidable I mean damage like the lightning ring ( not shield ) on Adderis and Aspix in ToS, making it go through these and have it heal if you don’t take avoidable damage promotes healthy gameplay and provides warriors with a way to directly deal with their surroundings by not taking avoidable damage ( Cleaves, lightning shields, frontal attacks on mobs, direct hits, swirlies, fire etc are all avoidable damage and should stop the healing )

  1. Make impending victory baseline, make non Killing blows give charges, every X charges act like a killing blow

  2. Give us spell reflect as an ability, just like the tank one, this can be effective on randomly targeted spells, helps us survive more and can make for some quite interesting plays for warriors.

  3. Double the health from Rallying cry, reduce it’s cooldown.

  4. During the duration of rallying cry, characters can’t die, reduce cooldown.

  5. Die by the sword should deflect incoming spell damage too.

Third Topic : doesn’t bring anything worthy to the table.

The game has evolved much more from just damage, everyone has something they bring to the table, Warrior don’t and all the little things they can bring to the table are easily replacable by the same or even better benefits.

There isn’t a scenario were people want a warrior, there isn’t a group that says, hey maybe we want an arms warrior in our group since it brings x,y,z.

Suggestions to fix the third problem :-

  1. Charge is usable on your group/raid, negates next incoming damage
  2. Give the warriors the ability to knock down enemies around them, the one where they have to stand from in order to be able to fight again, effectively giving warriors a cancel auto attack and cast ability
  3. Give warriors the ability to stun Big mobs and mini bosses.
  4. Like above rallying cry should also prevent affected party/raid members from dying.
  5. Battle cry should increase all damage done by 10% and reduce all damage taken by 5-10% for arms warriors, making it a unique buff and something others would desire them for it.
  6. Intimidating shout should have 70% reduce movement speed and a 2-3 no leash seconds were the fear won’t break
  7. Give the warriors a body check ability, where they reduce the targets melee damage, works at reduced effectiveness on bosses. I’d imagine a 1 min cd, 6 seconds 30% reduce dmg that becomes 3 seconds 10% damage reduce on bosses.

Fourth Topic : Lack of or rather complicated self sustain

Warriors have a very niche type of self sustain in victory rush, when you constantly get killing blows you are immortal but that situation is nothing but a pipe dream, you can opt in second wind but a lot of unavoidable damage drop it off, so you are left helpless while having one of the weakest if not the the weakest defensive cooldown in the game making you more unwanted on top of not being able to bring in something desirable to the group.

Suggestions to fix the fourth problem :-

Some of the already mentioned suggestions above can work as fixes for this problem so I’ll reiterate them and afterwards ill add the new suggestions.

  1. Add a counteract ability to negate incoming damage and counter attack in an arc that heals the warrior a % of the damage done.
  2. Make Non killing blows give charges until they reach a certain then they act as a killing blow and the charges reset while you get a free victory rush
  3. Make Second wind base line, nerf it’s healing and make it not drop of unavoidable damage
  4. Give warriors a spell reflect ability the same as prot wars
  5. Make warriors passively take less damage instead of having them sacrifice a talent and damge for that
  6. Give warriors a mannoroth bracers like baseline passive but tuned down abit, enough to matter, not enough to break the game.
  7. Give the warriors a % deflect chance based on their primary stats in which damage and spells maybe deflected.

Fifth Topic : Talents

Talents for arms warrior are a total mess, and in many cases you are left with no interesting choice I’ll discuss them row by row and apply my suggustions for each raw individually.

First row : level 15

War machine and Skull splitter are fine, although it would be cool if skull splitter was of GCD. Sudden rush however is not that reliable, and since warriors want to maximize rage gains, it’s not good enough and should be replaced with something else.

Suggustions

1- Every X attack is an extra attack, this incentives memorizing which attack you are on, adds anticipation and planning, and is a much more calculatable and dependant outcome.
2- Increase attack speed, this should reduce the haste stat weight, could act as an alternative for warriors who don’t like the haste stat a lot of ones who have been less unfortunate stat wise, or simply for warriors who like to attack fast.

Second Row : level 30

Double time doesn’t make sense, it’s useless unless its in pvp, it should be a built in pvp passive that works as soon as you enter warmode or instanced pvp, Impending victory should be a base ability and Stormbolt is usually useless because you always have people who can stun… multiple times… in aoe…

Suggestions :-

  1. Instead of Double time add, Charge can be used on friends to nullify the next incoming hit
  2. Instead of impending rush add sweep, which knocks down enemies effectively canceling and auto attack and casts.
  3. Add a crash ability instead of stormbolt that gives a 3 second true stun ( doesn’t share gcd with other stuns, works on mini bosses and non stunnable elites.

Third Row : Level 45

This talent tier has 2 real choice one of which is only used in niche scenarios and very rarely, I think the whirlwind talent in it is fine, however massacre talent should be modified and rend should be removed and replaced.

Suggestions :-

Massacre now makes your execute cause your next mortal strike to be free on top of the % health for execute increase

Add sunder armor instead of rend which makes all targets in an arc front of the warrior take increased Physical damage or have reduced armor.

Third Row : Level 60

I think this row is one of the most messed up, Second wind doesn’t work unless you know you won’t take unavoidable damage and it should be base line, Bounding stride should also be base line and defensive stance should be reworked to be included as talent in the new talent row

Suggestion :-

I think the talent should feature 3 different stances, that can be used in a niche and nearly equal manner that suit the players more.

  1. Assume a battle stance, instantly resetting your auto attack cooldown, the closer you were to the auto attack the more rage you gain, gain % damage based on overflowing rage.

  2. Berserker stance, for the next 3 seconds, attack speed is increased a lot, take 50% more damage and heal for 100%

  3. Defensive stance, assume a defensive stance for 3 seconds, giving you rage and increase damage by 1% for each 1 rage generated, new stacks reset the duration.

Fourth Row : Level 75

Let’s be real here, only war breaker matters, the other 2 can nearly ever have a situation where they are useful, unless you have 2 bosses stacking on top of eachother collateral damage would never work, I think Warbreaker should just be baseline.

Suggestions :-

  1. Collateral damage reduces sweeping strikes cooldown and makes it attack 2 additional targets.

  2. Warbreaker becomes baseline and a new talent gets added in its place

  3. Gushing wounds, deep wounds has a chance to becoming a gushing wound, dealing damage to the target and all enemies around it.

  4. Cleave stays the same but gets a numerical buff.

Fifth Row : level 90

The fifth row has some interesting choices however I feel like avatar deserves to be in the level 100 row, while deadly calm is useless atm, I feel a cool fix is to play by raw damage percentages and hastes.

Suggestions :-

  1. In for the kill stays the same
  2. Avatar changes with a passive damage, crit chance, crit damage and attack speed per enemy nearby.
  3. Each second spent taking unavoidable damage gives the warrior attack damage and speed, until reaching the maximum at 30 second in which they gain even more bonuses, taking avoidable damage resets the stacks to 0

Sixth row : level 100

I feel like anger management should be removed even though the class is dependant on it as its one of the reasons arms is still doing good yet is also one of the reasons that is making arms feel bad or have it as a baseline but nerfed to an extent, its too much needed, and atm makes the class, it’s why haste if super important and without it the class is nothing, so I feel it should be passive but in a nerfed state.

Suggestions :-

  1. Breaker : Warbreakers damage taken buff damage is increased by x%

  2. Dreadnaught, Overpower becomes an Aoe slash around your primary target.

  3. Ravager stays the same.

Sixth Topic : Most damage is uncontrollable passive damage, a simple fix for it is to have some of the damage shifted to back into the original warrior kit.

Seventh Topic : Mastery doesn’t feel good and is flawed.

The flaw is that it changes the gameplay to focusing on cdr more than actually dpsing, I think deep wounds mastery should be changed to something that doesn’t promote passive damage, rather I think it should be something that supports or smoothes the warriors damage not make up most of it.

Suggestions :-

  1. New Mastery : Extra attack, your attacks have a chance to extra attack
  2. New Mastery : % of your damage is put as a bleed, this additive
  3. New Mastery : Reduce the rage cost of your abilities by X
  4. Reworked deep wounds : small insignificant dot, grants % verstality and haste for every second its on an enemy, caps at X, cap is increased by Y until Z for every other enemy that has deepwounds, X shouldn’t be reached fast.
  5. New Mastery : A filler skill, this filler skill generates rage and % damage, capped at a really high number, but isn’t something you can cap easily or strive to cap, rather promotes calculated gameplay, the % damage increase is increased a little bit for each abilitiy used before this filler skill depending on the ability, the % damage generated duration should be small, and the higher the % damage the smaller the duration, capping at 1 seconds, so if you fill up too fast you will lose damage and you want to stagnate this as much as you can.

Eighth Topic : Quality of life changes

  1. Can second wind appear as a buff when its working on me whether healing or overhealing, I think warriors should be able to tell when they are benefitting from it so they can act accordingly

  2. Can we leap while charging, atm if you charge then leap it bugs out and nothing happens :frowning:

  3. Charge should go back to stunning again

Other Changes

1- During bladestorm warriors should be able to overcap on rage, after which they no longer generate rage unless they go below the rage cap.

2- Charge cooldown should be reduced.

3- Herioc throw should have it’s damage increased or generate rage or taunt the hit mob.

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Yeah I just popped this in and realised there are 3100 words. Give me a minute.

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Not in a position to write a long detailed answer but I’ll get a few words off.

Some of it I like some of it I don’t. I’m all in for more rage regen and defensive abilities, but I dislike that you want to keep Second Wind in its current design.
The whole meaning of second wind is to gain a sustain boost that puts you back in the mix. Doesn’t really fit with Please Don’t Poke Me Wind.
Making it a passive that triggers when you reach a certain HP threshhold for a large and fast heal over time makes more sense to me.

I agree that more abilities needs to be baseline, even those from PvP talents (Warbanner would be amazing and unique to a team comp).
I also agree that the mastery needs to be changed up.
I disagree with all the attack speed increases you have.

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0 clue about arms ^^ thats why u post as rogue ^^

edit read a part of “core gameplay” … you have absolut no clue about arms…
arms is designed as heavy hitter not as smooth / gcd / spam class … its not all about waiting for rage for doing a MS ^^… its more about execute sniping… keep up your Mastery dots up / spreading them… and time your CDs for AoE / Execute!
… and the whole gameplay of “test of might” or before that" Executioneers presicion" you totally missed… so u play like LFR main … 50% from bleeds ? sorry youre bad af … bleebs are 20-30%

ill dont read the rest of your sh*t

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tl;dr
Even if that post made sense it’s a common knowledge that no blizzard “real” employee reads the EU forums, all the commotions are on the US.

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Ok? I’m not sure what you are getting at here when you are insulting me, especially when you didn’t even bother to check who I am.

And it’s shown clearly you haven’t read the post or understood it correctly, as I said nearly 50% of our damage comes from passive damge, not just bleeds.

As for the no clue about arms, I really don’t wanna make it an epeen measuring contest so I’ll just leave it at that, if you have something good to add to the thread then do, if you have criticism then do it in a proper manner, thanks.

As for the rogue posting the thread, I choose the rogue as my posting char way long ago as it’s the character and class I currently like the most after playing warrior all the way back to vanilla, simply it doesn’t matter what I post on.

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First of all, I appreciate ur thoughs and ideas about arms.
I was maining arms since years but when BfS released (especially 8.1) I needed to respec Fury. Actually I didnt like Fury for PvE and especially PvP. But then I realised that there isnt any other option to do atleast any dmg/dps compared with other classes.
We just need a better and smoother gameplay, something like Rend baseline with disarm/reflect.
Remove the whole deffstance and give us a permanent -10% dmg taken since we have 0 selfheal (beside victory rush).

The Arms gameplay on Legion was definitely better, especially the colos smash procs. It was so enjoyable.

Also I dislike the current mastery-style, its kinda boring when ur bleeding does almost the highest dmg. I mean we’re fcking warrs and not any feral/rog or whatever.
We are supposed to hit like a truck and eat dmg like a truck. Right now we’re hitting like a wet noodle and earning dmg like 10 trucks hit us.

I just hope that they will fix anything in the future.

You have good ideas, few of them might be too good like second wind.
I would greet the beserk-regeneration as it was in Cata.

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It seems to me that is you who have no clue about how Arms works. Execute sniping? Heavy hitter??? Begone, troll.

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i agree about all what u said but i want them to bring back old colossus smash
and give us another burst ability

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What do you suggest as another burst ability?

I really do like deadly calm if they managed to make our rage dumps feel way more powerful.

I really dislike bladestorm as a single target burst tbh and would rather some flashy move ( Blade combo from king Dazzar in King’s rest looks very cool and fitting ) or a trance state to be our unique burst.

A window of burst like the current Colossus smash could work, maybe some ability that powers up the next Colosus smash making it deal more damage and increase the enemies damage taken more?

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Battle Trance:
You enter a trance of rage and focus for 10 seconds.
While in this trance, the rage cost of all abilities, except Execute, is reduced by 100% and you’ll passively generate 10 rage per second.
Additionally, while the trance is active Execute may consume up to 100 rage and be used on any target regardless of health percentage.

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Arms war was fine in pre patch or bfa launch. I rerolled my main but after some changes it felt and was garbage. But I have never ever had rage issues, I think its because ppl dont think or care about the swing timer. If you play properly you will swim in rage. Get a swing timer and charge during down time if you lack rage. I know it sucks but if you miss a swing you basically failed as arms. I dont mind that, its just a heads up.

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Back in the days arms used to be the big heavy hitter.
Right now thanks to the haste if you are under 20% you are still heavy hitter but not so big.
They changed arms into feral gameplay in plate? Dot 'em and ?

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Arms warrior was hyped in pre-patch as a very good designed class, but then the damage shift to mastery happened, and the fact that M+ was designed with more control in mind and warriors lacked that now.

For rage generation missing a swing does mean you messed up, but the system itself doesn’t feel rewarding and rather lacking, you either bathe in rage or are starved or forced to wait because there is nothing you can do now, and luck plays a huge part of it because of the Seasoned soldier passive.

After doing all that you can do to get rage there will be downtime where you are just waiting for that swing, since there is nothing more you can do and that’s my problem with the current iteration of the rage system, I feel like giving us warriors a filler ability that generates a small amount of rage would go a long way in solving the " downtime " issue.

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Feel like most of it can be fixed by adjusting the abilities we already have.
Make Overpower generate 10 rage. Boom, now you got something to generate rage with at all phases.

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Doing some m+ atm, the extra threat generation for warrior’s is really annoying, I felt like im hallucination at the start or somethin, but when the DH is doing 60k dps and im doing 40k, and mobs are aggroeing me something is really wrong.

I’m always having a threat problem even if I didn’t do anything that special in terms of dps.

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Arms is pretty strong in AoE/cleave, in other words, in M+. Feels good to play imo.

Lacks utility.
High threat.
These 2 make it weak compared to other dps classes in M+, not the damage, damage and rotation are great, most fun.

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finally a warrior who knows it !

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I like how you 2 say arms is awesome for m+ as aoe/cleave like its fine, and yet you only tank and never dps m+ above +10 from what ive seen.

I would like to be able to play arms agian on a high lvl in both pvp and pve, right now its just garbage in both scenarios compared to fury

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what ? im both seasons 1500+ as arms ^^