What are people's opinion on Arms?

PVP Arenas
1

To me it seems lackluster.

Not necessarily damage/utility wise, because I feel like I can bring a lot of pressure and support with rally, banner, disarm etc.
But too often it feels like there’s no way I can help myself, and I am entirely dependant on my healer not sitting in CC.
It’s gotten to a point where I’m often the kill target, and my team picks enemy arms warriors as kill target.

Dstance can’t cut it alone and parry is weak against spell casters and has a huge cooldown. The only good defensive is reflect.
Unlike fury, DK, WW, feral, ret, surv and rogue, arms doesn’t have a way to sustain.

That’s at least how I experience it all, but I’m curious how others see arms.

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2

TLDR essentially.

It’s not BAD but it’s not really GREAT either.

Your experience for playing a rogue is 1000 times better than playing a warrior. Or WW monk. Or DK.

Warrior doesn’t bring anything special to the table that any other class doesn’t, and it’s the most gutted class since MoP in terms of pruning.

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3

I wouldn’t really say it’s since MoP. It’s ever since they pruned the 3 stances. Hasn’t been the same ever since. Or rather, removed the ability restriction from the 3 stances, if you wanna get technical about it. Cuz that sped up the changes to what warrs are now. Since it trivialized the 3 stances.

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4

Arms does bring something to a team, it just doesn’t bring anything for itself.
Skull Banner, Disarm, 50% HR, Duel, Rally and Storm Bolt are all abilities that can help preventing enemy setups or make setups.

It’s what I meant earlier.
If a rogue gets in trouble they can just Vanish, CoS/Evasion, if a DK gets in trouble they can AMS/IBF and go into Death Strike mode, WW can teleport/ToK and off-heal etc.
But arms doesn’t enjoy that luxary, hell you can even disarm the warrior and then parry can’t be used or does nothing as it’s mandatory to have a weapon in your hand for it to work.

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5

this one sentence literally sums up arms warrior for the past 9000 seasons with the rare exception of one week per expansion where they’re op

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6

During which it’s only fun because it deals ridiculous damage.

If they actually balanced arms warrior around class utility, survivability and other features, maybe they didn’t have to either make them insanely broken or lackluster/outright bad.

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7

They only feel lackluster because they basically became a frost DK without magic when the stances were trivialized. Or in other words, the warrior of today is entirely one-dimensional.

Those who played a warrior before then should know what I’m talking about. And no, private servers doesn’t count.

8

But stances were an obsolete, crap mechanic, that most warriors actually didn’t like.
Ppl connect it somehow with nostalgia and mistaken it for good gameplay, but back in the days you could hear the massive whining from warriors like “why am I not able to use all my abilities right off the bat like all other classes” or “why should I lose my resource just to be able to use an ability” and so on.
They added nothing. Everyone had them macroed anyway. Cumbersome outdated mechanic.
One of the best, and too few such, things blizz made to warrior class was to remove stances as a ruling mechanic.
Pruning is very different from removing stances. Pruning happens with or without stances and that’s the problem. Warriors lost a lot of stuff and that hurt them more than most classes.
Blizz try to compensate with damage, but even that is luck-luster.
They want the “slow-hard-hitting” fantasy, but fail to implement it, whenever they try, warriors end doing insane damage and nerfed 2 days after that and slowly drop down to an okish sustain damage class, which is counter-productive and counter-intuitive to the play style especially for one of the easiest to kite classes.
Combine that with being one of the worst on defense classes, as one poster above mentioned, it draws the picture of a messed up design.
Also too many classes now have healing reduction effects which was like a trade mark for the warrior making it useful in a specific way, especially on PvP.

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Only bad players who needed to l2p complained about stances before they were trivialized. The same way some people still aren’t satisfied with the one-dimensional gameplay of pretty much everything today, and still wants it dumbed down further. You know, those kinds of people.

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10

Almost everybody complained about stances, forums were full of that back then, don’t talk crap about good/bad bakc then there weren’t even arena back in those days it was all about farming the top gear.
One of the best warriors on USA (when the game wasn’t even on EU yet) warned blizz at beta test that this is not good.
Only false elitist think stances were any skill, it was all press 1 more macro, that’s not skill.
Like all skilled players played warriors with stances and the non-skilled player other classes cause they didn’t have them? Rrrriiight…
What was not good was the removal of the skills, not the removal of the stances.
Everyone is entitled to an opinion but if you so much like stances you can go play vanilla soon. They ain’t coming back to this WoW and thankfully so.
Oh and don’t forget that as the most scaling with gear class, warrior was dogs*t back then without the top gear…

11

There are so many fallacies in this. To begin with, there wasn’t a straightforward ‘build up resource->dump resource’ structure to it, which added depth to meaningful decisions. The skill to choose the best situational action (which depended on a lot of factors) was emphasized by the clear punishment of choosing wrong.
Also, you couldn’t macro everything to “1 button”, only ****** who thought sunder armor spamming was the best as a prot warr in pve thought it was good to do crap like that. Guess what, it wasn’t. Even Kungen himself stated that many warriors misunderstood the best way to play, and called 'em crap for reaching that false conclusion.

The problem with trivializing the stances is that it made the stances one-dimensional. It was a clear benefit as stated in the tooltip, and that was the end of it. There was no combination of when you might benefit more from using one ability in one stance then going back to the stance you were in, compared to staying in your original stance, and so on and so forth.

Not to mention the effects it had on resource generation and added depth by giving room to identify what stance is best to be in when. You literally have no clue what you’re talking about. Go try it in classic and get destroyed. Because only those who disliked challenges disliked the punishment of stances. Because that’s what all class designs lacks a lot right now. Clear punishments for choosing wrong more than just missing when to trade a cd.

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12

You absolutely don’t know what you are talking about or have never played warrior in vanila, just read someone else’s thoughts.
There was not that much deep decision at all. Situations were quite clear (talking about pvp). Warrior was ALL about getting the best gear and destroying everyone just standing in battle stance with the occasional switch for some very clearly outlined situations.
The hardest thing was to farm the best gear (very time consuming) and then the easiest thing was to rofl-stomp with warrior. And oh the joy with a healer warriors were unkilable machines.
It was a very polar class back then and no amount of “tactical deep play” could save you from being ridiculed by other classes if you had bad or mediocre gear. And no need to play deep tactically at all if you had the top gear you just destroyed ppl.
If you think warriors stance danced all the time making astrophysics level hard decisions you either don’t remember or have never played warrior in vanila with good gear or with any.
It was get good gear - stay in bs with occasional switches - destroy everyone (especially with a healer), or have crap to mediocre gear - be a laughing stock or in the best case…meh…

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I reached rank 9 as a warr in vanilla. Also had a shaman and mage on 60. I also tanked, dpsed and healed in pve. I was a multiclasser before it was even popularized.
You however clearly never played as a warr back then. Also, they didn’t remove the ability restrictions from stances until patch 5.0.4. You seem to think it was only a thing in vanilla, but it wasn’t.
PS:
You’d not “stay in battle stance most of the time” and then switch the way you put it. You’d switch around quite a bit, mostly between battle stance and berserker stance, or you’d be very immobile and be stuck with a lower APM count. See, just another example of bad being bad to think otherwise. Most people in vanilla had no clue how to play.
It honestly seems like most of what you’re saying is coming from private realm theorycrafting and gameplay.

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Well, grats to you, I had the nerves to get to rank 11 only cause it was a mind blowing grind, cause that’s what rank meant back then and I didn’t throw it in here on purpose, cause it was about who had most time.
I might not remember all the details anymore, but I clearly remember coming in BGs naxx geared and destroying everyone while eating popcorn.
Clearly you haven’t experienced warrior or if you have your experience had been different than mine.
Whatever suits you, when vanilla is out - go try it, I have doubts you have actually done it and I am not trying to offend you, just my impression.
let’s not hijack the thread, the OP I am sure is asking about current state of arms.

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  1. Naxx gear was overgearing even r14 gear, so yeah, I’ll bet it was quite easy for ya’.

  2. I did it all solo, because my friends were playing alliance back then. Mophisto, tauren warr on Mazrigos. I even remember the names of my chars as well as the servers I’ve played on. It was a very different experience to grind it all solo.

Look in the mirror, bro. Cuz you seem like a private realm player more than a legit vanilla player.

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16

Am i the only one who miss charge stun and intercept? I would rather sacrifice my damage output to have them back.

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17

we all miss wow before wod
well nothing can be done about it. next expac they will add a 130 talent row and pruning 5 more abilities and call it a day
meanwhile mythic raid gear will drop from rares of world quest that respawn in 5mins

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18

Well, why it is a shame if you tunnel down class x but if you were tunneled down, it’s something to talk about?! ^^

Anyways, you go warrior since you reduce dmg significantly if you do so and most of the times, warriors are playing with classes that are a lot more tanky or mobile (can escape pretty easy) or even both. It’s the same like when you see an affli+x! What would you mostly pick?

About

That’s how most of us feel. Welcome to pruning.

19

I totally agree with you.

If nothing else, Stances made warrior class unique no class had such mechanism other than warrior and later on shadow priests for some extent.

The day the removed stances it made me feel like I am playing a ret pala or DK.
Personally, I think warrior class reached its pinnacle at MOP, lots of spells with 3 unique stances.

20

The biggest copypasta of stances was the DK presences, but they were trivialized too and then also pruned later on.
But they weren’t as big copypastas as you can see happening in today’s WoW though.

Well, MoP was pretty much an abomination already, with its pruned talent template and so many passives. The banners stood out like a sore thumb mechanics-wise as well. I’m not saying warrs didn’t need the banners then, I’m just saying they kinda didn’t mesh well overall.

Warrs were turned into a DK the moment they trivialized stances though, even before they pruned them. The steps to one-dimensional design were happening back then already, everything originated from the change to talent points in cata, then the change to the talent template in the MoP prepatch, and everything that was moved to passives and added abilities as a way to compensate for these changes.

It is kind of like they took things too far in one direction, so then they overreacted and took it too far in the opposite direction, and they’re still, after all of these years, deep into that overreaction.

But yes, you definitely hit the nail on the head. The class is so one-dimensional it feels like you’re playing a homogenized melee that doesn’t stand out much when compared to the rest of the melees.
The original talent system and abilities that separated all of the classes from each other from vanilla to WotLK made for a very varied gameplay experience overall. Now, not so much. You only learn the roles now, because the gameplay itself is so homogenized and one-dimensional that once you’ve learned one of that role, you can go pretty darn far as any other of that role after just a quick rundown of sorting out the UI on any other.

Oh, and there was resemblance between warrior stances and druid shapes back then too. Druids had their own thing with the visuals, the magic and stuff though.

Just to clarify, you can see the same dumbing down of everything and homogenization of mechanics in abilities in every other class and spec. Some more than others. The game is like a hollow shell of what it once was.

Which brings me back to what I’ve asked before, what still makes this an RPG for PvP:ers? Where is that RPG element for PvP:ers? I only see a fraction of it left in the game, compared to the past. Not just in class designs, but in social designs and overall immersion as well. (This may come off as a contradiction to people, but social designs includes the designs of NPC interaction too.)