Yeah, kinda odd that it wasn't mentioned at all how Haste fits as a stat for both dps specs, good or bad.

Because Haste is such a gods awful stat for Arms Warriors it doesn't even deserve mention.

@Matthew Lets hope its the second one :D

@Natsumi I'd imagine Haste would work well with the Arms Mastery. Hence, why I asked.

Some amount of haste will be vital. Generally, we won't be able to generate enough rage for all our abilities without haste, from both gear and the 10% melee haste raid buff. Like most stats, it plays well with others - obviously synergy with crit, but also with mastery as it increases uptime for Enrage for fury warriors, it increases the number of Strikes of Opportunity an Arms warrior gets. The interactions are actually pretty involved, with more haste leading to more Colossus Smash uptime, but negatively effecting Slam (since 0.5 seconds of lost attack time constitutes a larger amount of white damage).

However, once we have some sufficient amount of rage (not quite a hard-cap on rage), it's pretty clearly the worst stat for warriors. It'll only benefit white swings (and Strikes of Opportunity), so probably only 25% of the damage of a rage-capped warrior.

The caveat, the big caveat, is that the exact amount of haste needed to ragecap is uncertain, considering that raid damage contribute rage, and much debate rolls on about the best ratio of haste to crit/mastery. Once Inner Fury shows up, it'll be practically impossible to rage cap, but even then, it won't necessarily be the biggest dps increase on a per-point basis. My fury warrior seems to be having good results keeping mastery at baseline and having twice as much crit as haste, while maintaining hit/expertise cap, but that's just anecdotal. I can't definitively say that my 20% haste, 40% crit is any better or worse than 15% haste, 44% crit or 25% haste, 36% crit.

The reason it's so bad for Arms is that Slam holds the swing timer, making Haste much worse than you'd think. Let's say you use Slam as your Rage dump (as we are expected to, confirmed by the big Crab) after stacking a bunch of haste to get more Auto Attacks in. Your weapon speed is now a crazy 2.0 (down from a 3.5, super haste stacking FTW). If you hit Slam your swing is now 2.5 (.5sec cast added for each Slam). That means that you just wasted .5 seconds worth of Haste.

Mastery on the other hand is never devalued by Slam. Something to note here is the misconception that SoO only procs off auto attacks, it procs off any MELEE attack. As all but 3 of our attacks are melee (Heroic Throw, Shattering Throw, and Thunderclap) it can (and does) proc from Slam and other attacks, so throwing that extra Slam in there doesn't devalue the stat, in increases it instead.

Now, there is a third group of Arms Warriors out there and they say, "To hell with Slam, I'm using Heroic Strike instead!" They are reporting that HS gives better DPR and DPS than Slam does on live and on the beta. These Warriors may find Haste much more valuable than normal, as Slam isn't messing with their swing timer and the extra attack speed brings the rage in faster. HOWEVER, GC himself put out a statement on the Forums that pretty much says if Arms is choosing HS over Slam then we may need to buff one or nerf the other (link at bottom of post). I haven't tried this out but then again my guild hasn't raided ICC since 4.0 hit. This would be the only way that Haste would be a good stat for Arms unless they remove the Swing Pause from Slam.

As for stats, after the hit and expertise caps are reached, crit should be around 30% unbuffed then stack strength and mastery. Avoid Haste if you can, and Reforge Haste to useful stats, like Mastery or Crit, if you can't.

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/130295/arms-rage-concerns-pve

Regarding slam: I'm not sure how it is on the beta, but for fury, this has what has been getting the best results for me:

Priorty BT->HS->RB-> if all are on CD and you have bloodsurge, then Slam above 20%

Priority below 20%: Execute, nothing else (more dps and dpr than all other warrior abilities, for me at least)

Slam isn't worth the rage cost at any point in the fight, for fury anyway. Also, the prot talent that makes your 2nd heroic strike an automatic crit does 2 things:

1. It devalues the level of crit (see: elemental shaman auto crit mechanic)
2. It devalues any other rage dump (see: slam, still hitting like a wet noodle), unless your other rage dumps hit way harder than HS (see: Execute, finally worth using below 20%, but possibly overpowered).

Frankly I don't care if slam is removed from the fury rotation; I think blizzard probably will buff it because why else have a talent to make it instant? Maybe a good way would be to have slam be free with bloodsurge proc (if they don't want to up the damage), because as it is right now, it seems dps would be better to just wait an extra second for HS to come off cooldown and hit that.

taking a look at some top 10 logs from saurfang, I see top fury warriors hitting slam about 2-5 times during the encounter (likely in the few times when BT, RB, and HS are all on CD), and not even close to using all of their Bloodsurge procs. They were all spamming execute under 20% too (13-18 executes), checked the logs on that, only Execute below 20% for the logs I viewed for some of the top 10 fury dps'ers on Saurfang.

@Pyromelter
Bloodsurge procs a free Slam on beta now, so I think that that should solve this problem nicely. :)

http://cata.wowhead.com/spell=46915