Holidays and Chop Chop Carnage with Arms

Well, I'm currently writing this from the desk of a guildy as they had a PC built for me so that I could still raid from a lovely little town in Sweden while i'm here for all 36 days of my holiday. Just a quick update on things while I have some downtime before LFR.

In regards to Arms Warriors at this current point in time:

I respecced to Arms to see if it was any fun, regardless of the damage, and I have to admit that even if the Arms buff doesn't match Fury's dps, I'll probably still go arms anyway. The spec feels so fluid, the cleave is awesome, there's big numbers all over my screen, it's fantastic.

In regards to current raiding with the fantastic community in The Undecided:

We blasted down Jin'Rohk on 25m HC and managed to get Horridon onto the third door after a few tries so we were all pretty hyped about that, but it's a bit difficult doing it without everyone at least fully normal geared.

Just as I'm writing this I finally got my last Titan Runestone so now I can get my legendary cape, finally! Though whether to get the DPS one or the Tanking one is a hard choice.

Anyway, will be back to updating this more regularly when I get back to the UK. As for now, keep it real and seeya!

So... This Trinket...

So this trinket got changed slightly and all of the abilities now reduced are:

Recklessness
Skull Banner
Die By The Sword
Shield Wall
Rallying Cry
Shattering Throw

The change to have Skull banner on there is somewhat better, bringing Reck and Skull Banner down to a 2.5m CD currently on PTR, so the tooltip is a bit buggy perhaps. But it at least means that this trinket is a bigger DPS gain for your raid than it is for you.

I already feel like a walking Skull Banner as it is due to Warrior damage being complete pants in this tier of content. To fully understand this, I'll show you the most recent parses just for Melee DPS in 25m HC Throne of Thunder:

If you play warrior as DPS in a 25m, you're either -really- good, or you're there for a Skull Banner. Arms Warrior is getting a decent buff and with higher iLevel might get up to "average" dps. However with that, all of the DPS specs that use agility will scale more and more out of control as they get more out of Agility than Strength-users get out of Strength.

Intellect gives Spell Power and Spell Critical Strike

Agility gives Attack Power, Critical Strike and Dodge

Strength gives Attack Power and Parry.

Obvious problem is obvious.

If this could be changed in 6.0 so that Strength gave Critical Strike as well, that would close the gap a bit, though you may as well revamp Warriors, DKs and Ret Paladins which would allow Strength to not give crit and still be just as good for Strength classes as Agility is for Agility users.

New Trinkets and Warrior Buffs....

Looking at the buffs that they're making to Arms Warrior, I may contemplate playing it again in PvE. I like the spec, I just don't like the damage it does, and considering that Warriors are below average in terms of damage output, I think arms needs to at least be kicked up to be on-par with Fury, if not better. More Slam damage is awesome, the passive cleave that's being added in will be a good boost to it's 2-3 target damage, and the AoE increase from the Blood and Thunder change will be awesome.

Protection Warriors needed some love too, and the addition of Riposte in combination with the new style of Enrage for Prot may swap around stat priorities a bit. In case you don't know how Prot currently works, they become Enraged by critically blocking, which makes Mastery their best DPS stat. With the new changes, you'll become enraged by critically blocking OR by critting with Shield Slam or Devastate, Riposte will serve to increase this as whenever you parry or dodge and attack, 50% of your combined Dodge and Parry PERCENTAGE will be given to you as Critical Strike PERCENTAGE, ratings are ignored. This will probably be giving you around 15-20% bonus Crit Chance (assuming you're in full ToT normal [iLevel 522] gear).

Now, these new trinkets that got datamined look pretty decent, however there's a major flaw in the one that made my jaw drop:

http://ptr.wowhead.com/item=102298

This is the trinket in question, and the abilities it reduces the CD on are: Shield Wall, Rallying Cry, Shattering Throw and Recklessness.

Shield Wall and Rallying Cry are purely utility based, and for damage purposes are of no use at all. Shattering Throw on a 5 minute cooldown is pretty long, but it is a raidwide 20% armour removal, and so lowering the CD to 3m to line up with everything else would be the only decent change.

Now the reduction in CD of Recklessness is actually BAD. It drops Reck to a 1m 50s CD, which means It lines up with NO COOLDOWNS WE HAVE. Bloodbath will be on CD for another 10 seconds, you used CS 10 seconds ago (assuming use on CD), Skull Banner (and Avatar, if you run with that) will be up in another minute and 10 seconds. It is of absolutely no use at all as there are other trinkets with the +Str Proc. the trinkets I'll be using until maths dictates otherwise are these two:

http://ptr.wowhead.com/item=102308

http://ptr.wowhead.com/item=102305

Which will passively grant me:

+1959 Strength
+13% Critical Strike Damage, Mastery and Haste (Scales your current values up, not a flat addition)

And the combined equip effects will give:

Your melee attacks have a chance to trigger Cruelty for 20 seconds. While Cruelty is active, you gain 1175 Critical Strike from every melee attack, stacking up to 20 times
Your melee attacks have a chance to grant you 11759 Strength for 10 seconds.

So if we add up everything and assume perfect conditions with all procs active, as a warrior you will have:

+14759 Strength (Trinket + 2xDancing Steel)
+23500 Critical Strike (Nearly 45% Critical Strike)

Not sure about you guys, but I can see Fury damage being pretty damn good.

BETTER NERF WARRIORS.