The Weapons Master(y)

Since my last article, I've had a few messages about "what I honestly thought" about the Warrior changes, primarily due to the fact that I go from periods of explosive rage on the MMO-Champion Forums or Twitter to being calm when I write here. I'd just like to take a minute to say that to say that the most accurate version of what I feel about a change usually gets documented here. Most of the time when I go full-out ragemode on something, it's because the initial reaction to a change is pretty bad, but then after about 10-20 minutes I've had enough time to weigh up all sides of the change and post something somewhat respectable here.

Today's plight is unfortunately just that I'm tired. I'm tired of asking, in some cases begging, that the Developers take feedback and use it appropriately. The case in point is the new Mastery for Arms Warrior, where it just increases the damage of your abilities by X%. There were two things that were wrong with this Mastery.

1) It wasn't good enough to be an even remotely valuable stat. It was beaten by Crit, Multistrike and Haste at every turn.

2) It doesn't scale with any AoE we do, at all.

Tackling Issue #1 isn't just a case of "Throw numbers at it 'til they like it" like Windwalkers got with Fists of Fury, it needs to actually be a stat that you look at and go "That's good". And you should want to. Blizzard clearly want the Spec Blurb to match your perception of the spec (See: Fury Warrior) and Arms is supposedly "A battle-hardened master of two-handed weapons" so you should look at mastery and the little RP box inside your head should go "I'm a weapon master, I should value Mastery over anything else". The issue of this of course is that Blizzard has been told numerous times and instead of tinkering with individual values and making sure they added the right amount of flavour/damage to it, they just buffed it by 40% and called it a day. Except this doesn't solve the problem because Crit is still better.

Amusingly, solving Issue #2 might indirectly solve Issue #1. Nerf Whirlwind appropriately (it's already hitting 40% harder than it's meant to) and then make it scale with Mastery. The simple fact that our main AoE ability doesn't scale with our supposed "best stat" is mind-boggling. To me, something is the best stat if it makes everything do more damage overall, regardless of whether that more damage is obvious or not (Haste Breakpoints and Colossus Smash spring to mind) Mastery right now makes Colossus Smash, Mortal Strike, and Execute do Mastery% more damage. Pretty unintuitive, though you can see that as "Oh it makes me do more damage, sweet!" Except that on AoE, it seems like we're balanced around obviously having Ravager and Dragon Roar and Whirlwind Spam (I'm not even going to count Bladestorm here as it's so horribly tuned currently). Obviously if they make Whirlwind scale with Mastery, our AoE in the next raid tier is probably going to dwarf anyone else's.

It's a double-edged sword. Don't change the Mastery and it stays worse than Crit and they may as well make our Attunement Passive into 5% Crit rather than 5% Mastery. Change the Mastery to make it scale with WW and watch as our AoE slowly spirals out of control, in which case it gets nerfed 6 months down the line.

I'd love to say that one solution is better than the other, but I can't. Each has their ups and downs, and for every thing that you fix, two more are almost guaranteed to break. I guess all I can do is hope that Warriors get a redesign for either 6.1 or the next expansion, so that we finally get the treatment we deserve after this sham of a Beta test.