Warning: Lots of opinion beyond this point, please ensure your pinch of salt is ready for use. Also, I'm writing this assuming that the reader (that is, you) know relevant details that I may mention.
Continuing on from yesterday, I'd like to go into Arms Warriors on Beta, and why Gastropods are petitioning Blizzard to have their speed reduced to compensate. Arms in Mists has been a bit of a rollercoaster, from the Taste for Blood fiasco in 5.0, to Slam being a truck with spikes on in PvP in 5.4, to the kind of "meh" period in the middle where everyone played Fury anyway.
Arms in Warlords is a completely different beast. Gone are the multitudes of attacks from Opportunity Strikes, fast Overpowers and Deep Wounds ticking all the while. Gone are the days of proccing multiple CS resets and being able to have Colossus Smash rolling for an entire Bloodlust. Instead, you have Mortal Strike, Colossus Smash, Rend and Whirlwind. Riveting isn't it?
Obviously there's talents and whatnot to fill this out but is that what Warriors have been reduced to now? Talents are meant to be a cool extra, something that provides some flavour or adds something to your rotation. They shouldn't be there to either:
A) Turn your rotation from boring to engaging.
B) Add spells to your rotation so that you actually have something to press when you play like trash and waste resources.
C) Be a bandaid fix to a core class issue.
Unfortunately, this is the current deal with the Level 45 Talents for Arms in Warlords of Draenor. Lets go a bit into detail here.
Taste For Blood - Gives you 3 Rage per tick of Rend. Does what it says on the tin, amazingly boring, ensures that you can press Whirlwind a bit more than you were before. Makes Rend rage neutral after 9-12 seconds of being on the target and generates you 8 Rage total if it runs it's full duration.
Sudden Death - Lets you Execute people above 20% health. This was recently nerfed so that it doesn't consume any extra rage to deal damage, meaning it's a 120% WDmg attack. It's 1/3rd of a Mortal Strike for free, very meh.
Slam - The new Slam is Arcane Blast for Warriors except the buff is 2 seconds long which means you have to keep Slamming to maintain the buff, as of yet Theorycrafters haven't worked out if it's worth keeping the aura or just using a /cancelaura macro on Slam to make sure it never hits 2 stacks. Fantastic, already working against the idea of the talent itself to make it good.
This is a major issue, and one that again, the developers seem to either be ignoring or unable to process why the players don't like these talents. I understand that they're trying to cut the game right back and then add flavour to it, but replacing a utility tier of talents for these is amazingly bad. We lost an AoE snare (Fury happens to keep Piercing Howl for some reason) an AoE Root, and an AoE Interrupt in favor of 3 pretty bad talents.
I've seen the idea thrown around somewhere (if it was you, let me know and I'll edit the article) that these talents should actually all just be baked into Arms and the utility tree brought back, and honestly I think that would be a very good idea. No class should have utility options removed in order to make room for bandaid fixes that should have been dealt with in the initial stages of a class rework. If they wanted to rework Warriors a la Warlocks then they should have contacted a few prominent Warriors for each spec and worked with them to redesign each spec. Not this half-assed monstrosity that now Warriors are going to have to deal with until either:
A) An actual rework arrives.
B) We get bandaided throughout all of the next Expansion.
I hope that someone at Blizzard gets a copy of these two blogs that I've written from Warriors because while I normally don't like to be rude to people who are doing things for me, I honestly don't have a bloody clue what they were thinking with these Warrior changes. To reiterate from the last blog, Warriors did not need sweeping changes. They needed small QoL changes and then they'd be fine. They spent a lot of Mists working on getting Arms to a state where it was enjoyable, competitive and not overpowered, and while they might not have gotten there, the time spent working on the spec for Warlords could have done that.
Here's a list of stuff I would have changed, had I been in the Developer's Chair:
1) Visualize what I wanted Arms to be - Here I agree with the Devs, Arms should be this tactical master of weapons that carves his way through enemies with big meaty hits from a two-handed weapon.
2) Ask myself what doesn't fit this vision - That would be the 1.0s GCD Overpower which hits like a noodle, and the Mastery.
3) Implement any potential changes necessary to evolve the old spec, cut down on button bloat and still fit the vision - Merge Slam and Overpower into one button, bring back Sudden Death Executes as baseline, change the Mastery to increase damage of Overpower, Mortal Strike, Execute and Sweeping Strikes. Make Deep Wounds only apply on Mortal Strike Critical Hits, remove Enrage from Arms. Tune accordingly post-change.
These changes would then, in theory, remove 1 button (slam), add a bit more flavour to the spec with Sudden Death proccing Execute rather than Colossus Smash, which then adds value to CS, the Execute proc, and your Rage management. I haven't even done anything to the talents, and I think that this would play better than what Arms is currently Beta.
I want to say more about something but unfortunately I'm drawing a blank. Something something no beta something something.
Again, I'll take any feedback that anyone offers about my articles, you can contact me in-game via BattleTag (Exhil#2759) on Twitter @ExhilMD or by email at exhilmd@gmail.com. Alternatively, talk because I like talking about Warriors and/or I don't bite. I'm bad at Feral.
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