Also on AOL
- Autos
- Technology
- Lifestyle
- Gaming
- Finance
- Entertainment on AOL
- Lifestyle on AOL
- Sports on AOL
- Travel on AOL
- More on AOL
Featured Galleries
Joystiq
© 2013 AOL Inc. All rights Reserved. Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | Trademarks | AOL A-Z HELP | About Our Ads

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
8-20-2010 @ 9:30PM
Natsumi said...
@Pyro
You've obviously never played a Warrior (at least not Arms) so your grasp of the complexity of the Arms priority system is flawed at best, completely lacking at worst. When you use each button (and why) varies by specific spec, gear, and gem set up. If you are Strength stacking your priority list is quite different than if you are Soft capped for ArPen which is different again from being ArPen capped, which changes back to what it originally was when you're capped and throwing Strength Gems into most of your slots (hard cap for a Mace Arms Warrior is 75% due to the passive 10% from Battle Stance and 15% from Mace spec). On top of that, you don't want to clip Rend and you want to wait the 3 seconds after Rend falls off to reapply it so you aren't wasting procs on Overpower.
Then comes Bladestorm, which has 2 uses in PvE content: Trash Pulls and when you aren't generating Rage fast enough to keep up with procs AND Bloodrage is on CD, Bladestorm allows you to continue putting out DPS while generating a bit of rage from your white hits (it also allows you to flex your fingers every now and then, for 6 seconds you can take your hands away from the keys without losing a significant amount of DPS). I guess it has one other use, and that's it's CC prevention aspect (which doesn't always work, that line that says can't be stopped unless killed or disarmed is a complete lie).
Okay, now on to you assumption about the number of buttons Arms uses in comparison to Fury. Fury, without Macros, uses exactly 5 buttons (not including Bloodrage, Deathwish, and Berserker Rage). Those buttons are Heroic Strike/Cleave, Bloodthirst, Whirlwind, Slam, and the occasional Victory Rush. When you macro Victory rush into Heroic Strike/Cleave (which are off the GCD, allowing both buttons to be pressed at the same time) you drop to 4 buttons. When you ignore Victory Rush and macro HS/Cleave into all your other buttons (like the majority of Fury Warriors do) you're down to 3 buttons, which is a whole 1 button more than your preferred class, the Mage. Arms on the other hand has Mortal Strike, Execute, Overpower, Victory Rush, Bladestorm, Slam, Thunderclap (for AoE pulls or if your tank(s) need the debuff and can't provide it themselves), Rend, Heroic Throw, Shattering Throw, and if there is extra rage that must be bled off HS/Cleave. Unlike the Fury Warrior, you cannot macro HS/Cleave into all your strikes without starving yourself of rage, so your buttons number 12. Last time I checked 12 was 9 more than 3 and 8 more than 4, much more than 2 by my math. Either way, both use more buttons that your 11112 rotation (or is it 1112?).
And I think you missed the point of Rossi's tongue in cheek comment about Bladestorm, he said he apologized to the 1 undead guy that he killed, meaning singular. Bladestorm is now a joke and has become the trash ability that people in the Wrath Beta predicted it would be, only really useful to break snares and slows (which it doesn't even do anymore anyway, at least, it doesn't break Frost Nova, man I felt stupid while spinning in place while the mage used /lol at me) or as a second (third for humans or people that actually wear a PvP trinket) fear break (but you can't use it while feared anymore).
My report card for Arms is slightly different than Rossi's:
Naxx: A- Able to top the charts on 75% of the fights, usually 500 or more DPS over better geared Fury warriors (at least I was)
Ulduar: C+ Only topping 25% of the fights and completely useless on General due to having to either stay in Berserker Stance for Pummel, or dancing back and forth, never having enough rage to do much. My opinion may be skewed a bit though as I has to take a break from WoW before we got Thorim down and came back a week before ToC dropped.
ToC: A+ Have to say that once I caught up in ToC if I wasn't #1 on the DPS meter something was wrong for that night. Before ICC dropped my average DPS was between 6k and 7k.
ICC: D- Only getting a passing mark because it edges out comparably geared Fury warriors by a few hundred DPS on specific fights (we all know what they are) and being a requirement for Heroic LK (though I'm not likely to see that before Cata drops, being on another forced break from WoW, seriously, the economy sucks). As fury I've pulled 12k in ICC 25 single Target, as Arms I've pulled 9k single target (don't even get me started on trash pulls) and my Arms set is actually better than my Fury set.
PvP has been a downward spiral each tier of gear for Arms, being at the bottom of the spec heap for Warriors for control and second for burst. The bigger the Health pool of your target the worse off you are. Overall I'd give Arms PvP a C+.