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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Arms 101
This week, The Care and Feeding of Warriors continues its look at the warrior specs with Arms 101. Matthew Rossi spends some time this week talking about that peculiar form of finesse that involves smashing things with a two handed weapon. We've talked about protection, the tanking spec, and we've talked about fury, the Tasmanian Devil spec. This week, we're talking about arms. We defined fury last week as the spec for people who want to kill things, and that's fair, but if fury is that, what's arms? Well, fury is the 'kill it kill it kill it until it's dead and then kill it some more' spec, defined by Blizzard as the 'screaming barbarians in woad'. Arms, however, is the finesse spec. Yes, that's right, I'm defining the spec that relies on using a great whacking axe, polearm, sword or mace as 'finesse'. Welcome to the warrior class, where the fanciest Dan at the party is still a hulking madman in plate. As the class Q&A put it: However, we would like to reinforce a little more the kits of Arms and Fury. Everyone (I hope) gets the difference between Frost and Fire mages. Arms is supposed to be about weapons and martial training and feel "soldierly." Fury is supposed to be about screaming barbarians in woad. You get a sense of that, but it could be stronger. Indeed it could, and for my money, eventually will be, but that in a nutshell is arms. Fury is about grabbing anything big enough and beating on things until they're paste. Arms is about style, about finesse, about perfect control of your weapon, and about taking advantage of openings for huge, devastating blows that get around normal conventions and defenses. If you like the idea of being really, really good at hitting people with a sword the size of a barn door, then arms is for you.
