Arms is all over the place and instead of design by Class Fantasy it’s design by fear of what Warriors were in 2005 due to faulty game-mechanics instead of faulty class mechanics.
My proposed Warrior Changes
With the changes of Warriors in Shadowlands alpha is that while they’ve been buffed on paper it’s just more of the same as it was in BfA. The changes are bad and while it may be what people want to see in the Warrior it’s far from what they need. Warriors need a remake from the bottom-up.
My suggestions, these are all narratively consistent with the class fantasy and numbers can always be assigned later to make them balanced.
Warrior:
2 uses of Charge baseline.
Storm Bolt would be baseline.
The Talents Double Time and Storm Bolt are replaced with:
Impact (New) (Arms, Fury): The Warrior’s Charge no longer roots the target instead it knocks it down. This counts as a stun that’s off the Diminishing Returns.
Bringing the Thunder (New) (Arms, Fury): The damage of Storm Bolt is doubled, and the duration of the stun is increased by 0.5 seconds.
Alternatively, the base-line Double Time can be replaced with
Unstoppable (Passive) (New): Any Stun, Snare, or Immobilise effects have their duration reduced by
20%. The Troll Racial Flip Out and the Orc Racial Hardiness only adds 5% to this.
Narratively, which is their class fantasy, warriors are supposed to no-nonsense that get stuck in and are then difficult to shake off you. Taking the mobility and counter-mobility into the equation this is far from the case and they’re extremely easy to shake. Balance-wise mobility having to talent either that mobility expected from the Warrior Class in PvP or the stun that’s needed in PvP, makes the class feel incredibly unsatisfying. No other Class in the game is forced to do this, just imagine the outrage if other classes had to do this where they were forced to talent either mobility or a stun to get either?
Another alternative is that the range teleported on Fel Rush an Blink gets halved, This would give either an element of skill to use as it would no longer be using them and then get all the benefits and would also make Charge feel more special as it has twice the range. Right now, Charge just feels like a vastly inferior version of both.
Arms:
Arms needs a major overhaul on the mechanical front as the spec is unwieldy, boring to play, fully dependent on others, random, and requires the right everything to even be workable and even then, it still has a low level of enjoyment.
The resource-name Rage should be replaced with the resource-name Momentum. It’s exactly the same as Rage, however, just hearing it brings to mind the calm fighter whereas Rage brings to mind a furious barbarian, which is the Fury sped. Rage is the opposite of what a calm and tactical mind would run on.
Momentum is generated in lowered amounts than Rage currently is from auto-attack from auto-attack. Only having one resource-generator effectively turns Arms into a static DPS only. It’s horribly for anything that requires target-switching since if it happens at low Rage you have to wait for a sing in order to do anything.
The Affix Explosive is a good example. I did a run with that as Arms and I could do nothing to the orbs as they tended to spawn whenever I was at low Rage and if I saved up Rage to do a target-switch my DPS would plummet.
Momentum is generated from using Overpower. Overpower is central to the spec and having it generate Resources that can be used on other things makes the gameplay of Arms a lot smoother and no less predictable.
Tactician (Passive) (new): In addition to having a 1.40% chance pr. Momentum spent to reset the cooldown of Overpower, it also applies Expose Weakness, which is a cumulative, stacking buff of +the previous chance.
Overpower is central to the spec, if it generates resources even more so, and Tactician has no “bad luck protection.” This further decrease the value of talents such as Juggernaut since there’s no guarantee that you can get a benefit of it. It’s anecdotal evidence only and I have multiple times experience going a full cooldown of Overpower without any proc of Tactician, as such my gameplay felt like it grounded to a halt as the proc at least gives you something to do between auto-attacks.
Overpower no longer increases the damage of Mortal Strike. Because Overpower now has a use in resource-management it’s desired to be used. It’s also going to happen more often and there’s no need for it to have an interaction with MS. This will also reduce the Burst damage that Arms can do, which is a goal.
This also makes the resource-generation smoother and Arms will feel more involved.
Veteran Soldier removed. Critting only gives basic Momentum. Right now, Arms is way too random, ironically you can predict nothing in the supposedly predictable spec as the even the resource you get can be boosted because a random event happened and what you can do now takes a drastic turn. The sheer unpredictability creates frustration in players instead of exuberance over being able to do more. There’s no reason to get additional resources from auto-attack when you already get plenty from Overpower.
Being able to do more since Overpower is now a resource-generator the individual damage pr hit can be reduces while the overall DPS remains the same. Which brings me to my next point.
Return damage to be primarily front-loaded. Having it back-loaded as it is now via the DW mechanic is unsatisfying from a gameplay perspective and pure mechanical-wise the only reason Arms is still viable is the MS debuff and that’s good in PvP only as it does little in PvE. Ret used to have a similar mechanic and it was met with outrage by the Ret community as they were useless in all aspects as they had no MS debuff. I’d rather see the effect of the MS debuff lowered than being a melee DoT class.
The Mastery Deep Wounds is removed. For the reasons I explained earlier. It just feels wrong and when I simmed myself recently Deep Wounds was my number 1 damage by a wide margin, then came Execute as half of that, and in 3rd was MS with 2/3 the damage of Execute and that’s just all kinds of narratively wrong.
New Mastery: Overpower: Increases the damage of Overpower by X%. With the Mastery increasing the damage of Overpower it feels narratively right as Overpower is now an ability you want to use rather than one you feel you have to use in order to make MS better,
Due to a large part of the resource-generation being tied to Overpower the entire spec is now centred around it. Because of that both Tactician and Overpower has to be made baseline for the Arms Warrior at the level where the specialisation is chosen.
Tactician and Overpower are now a part of the Arms Warrior basic package since the spec is unable to work without either.
The problem with Arms damage is that without the Deep Wounds Mastery it’s both high and applies the MS debuff. This is of course a balance problem as it makes Arms supreme in PvP if damage is returned to being direct.
The MS debuff is in a unique place in that it does little for PvE and too much for PvE.
My solution is to replace the Mortal Strike ability with
Lethal Strike, 6 seconds cooldown, 30 Resources: The Warrior strikes a mighty blow that inflicts high damage
And
Mortal Strike, 30 seconds cooldown, 30 resources: The Warrior inflicts a dot on the target that causes it to bleed for 10 seconds and reduce all the healing the target receives by 25%. This ability can never hit multiple targets with Sweeping Strikes.
This way the Arms Warrior still have access to the MS debuff for PvP and it’ll also rise the skill ceiling to be more than “just smash MS when off CD in PvP,” as using it at the right time will be the difference between a player that plays Arms well in PvP and one that plays it poorly.
Then the direct damage of Arms can be reinstituted without it causing the issue of the Arms Warrior having both high burst and a healing debuff on the same attack. Arms Warriors will also know that they still have MS, it’s never been taken away from them just changed in nature. It’s a win/win as those who’ve played Arms before BfA want the direct damage back so they can make the big hits and they would still have the MS debuff just in an altered form.
And I see what you’re going for with Ignore Pain being basic and it’s never going to be used. For Arms the set cost of 40 Rage is too expensive as it aligns poorly with every other ability and effectively Arms DPS is only going to happen at 70 Rage in situations where it wants to use IP, which in turn will make the DPS of Arms crater. What I suggest instead is:
Vanguard (Arms) (Passive) (New): The Warrior is healed by 1% for each XX Resource used.
All other DPS specs have a way of adding a tiny amount of self-healing. Making it a passive makes it unique and feeds into the class fantasy of the Arms Warrior as it’s a steady way to stay in the fight instead of gaining a sudden burst of power. Arms is mostly about the long haul instead of a sudden burst.
The effect of Victory Rush has been lowered to compensate for this. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. If passive healing is gained, then active healing has to be reduced or else things will go out of hand.
This will also affect Talents, more specifically Second Wind.
Second Wind (New): While the Warrior is at or below 35% health the effect of Vanguard is doubled.
In general, it should be like this for Arms:
Damaging abilities such as Mortal Strike, Slam, and Whirlwind now costs resources and generates a small amount of resources in return.
This feeds further into a narrative idea that once an Arms Warrior gets going, their momentum keeps them going up to a certain point. This would also make things such as sudden target switches feel a lot smoother.
Anger Management removed and replaced with Perpetual Motion.
Perpetual Motion (New): Every 20 Momentum that you spend reduces the cooldown on Colossal Smash and Bladestorm by 1 second.
More of a name-change to keep in line with the class fantasy since Rage is no longer a part of the spec there’s no need for a talent named Anger Management…
My final direct suggestion for Arms would be the removal of the talent Ravager and replacing it with Analytical Insight.
Analytical Insight (Arms) (New): The cooldown of Sweeping Strikes is reduced by 12 seconds and the chance for Tactician to take effect is increased by +15%.
This makes an existing effect better instead of adding a new layer of gameplay and Ravager is bad and in the grand scheme of things does little for the spec, also the name Ravager implies an emotional desire to destroy something. And letting your emotions control you is something that I would expect of Fury rather than the rational precision of Arms.
There are two ways to curb the burst damage of Arms. One of them is making their damage back-loaded as it is now, this also feels bad because it’s diametrically opposed to how Arms has always been.
The other way is to make their abilities happen more often by making their resources more plentiful so the DPS remains the same while the individual abilities hit for less.
Right now, the situation is that is that because the resource gain is slow the abilities have to deal high damage with the front- and back-loaded damage combined as the abilities are so limited.
Protection
Remove the self-healing from Indomitable and make it base-line else the talent will be mandatory and 10% better since it has the effect of also increasing stamina by 10% which in turn would make the healing better.
Making the healing baseline would then make that row about getting better use of the healing in either Last Stand giving you some protection to use it and make it better for a short while, Indomitable for making it better all the time, or Never Surrender giving you more time for the healing to work unaffected.
Talents in general
There are way too many talents in general for the Warrior of all specs which adds a new element of gameplay as it gives a new mechanic instead of reinforcing an already existing one. This is especially bad for Arms and gives the, accurate, impression that Arms needs the right everything in order to work, and even if you have the right everything it works instead of working pleasantly.
This is what I sent to Belular.