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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: A Taste for Blood
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. Let's just jump right into it, shall we? Ghostcrawler - PTR Class and Set Bonus Issues Warrior - For Arms, we are going to try Overpower proc'ing Sudden Death instead of autoattacks. This will make haste slightly worse (which we can fix) but we hope will help make the rotation slightly more compelling, since autoattack procs can feel really random. With Overpower you can anticipate it a little more. - Likewise, Overpower will cost no rage in Execute range. We agree that saving rage for Overpower and spending it all on Execute don't play well together. - We haven't made a tuning pass on Arms (or any spec) yet. Don't fret about DPS numbers at this stage. source I actually like this change quite a bit. Yes, I am capable of liking things. It's not all whining about haste over here. What I like about it is that it emphasizes Overpower over autoattacks, which are fairly unimportant for an arms warrior anyway. You hit cap at 7.5%, which is absurdly easy in comparison to fury anyway (which is why no fury warrior bothers to try, leaving hit a fairly pointless DPS statistic... but we've talked about hit and expertise before) so you're going to land those slow hits and generate rage with them... and that's pretty much all they should do, in my opinion. With Mortal Strike and Colossus Smash both so important, giving Overpower more to do is fine by me. I also absolutely agree with the idea of making Execute completely discount Overpower's rage cost. In fact, I agree with it so strongly that I'm sort of bemused here. Usually I don't wholeheartedly endorse a proposed change.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Arms waits and waits and waits
Remember those arms changes we keep hearing about? They still haven't dropped yet on the PTR.In fact, the whole state of warriors on the PTR is pretty static. They've decided not to change stances and how rage interacts with them although I can attest that yes, they've added armor pen to battle stance (I was running around Un'Goro on my tauren looking for the Ravasaur trainer) and they've already fixed the potential TG bug I mentioned so that there's no way you can switch specs and have both 2h weapons equipped. Shattering Throw is indeed fun in mass PvP: I haven't had a chance to test it yet outside of a few melee's around a summoning stone, though. I did get to make that one ret pally very unhappy, so yes that's nice. But all in all, I'm still waiting for arms to get, well... buffs. Yes, all three stances got small to medium buffs, and there's talk of removing the penalties altogether on stances. I won't pretend I won't welcome the day where stances don't have penalties aside from the rage dump aspect of switching, but that's hardly a buff to arms warriors.We've been told repeatedly that arms warrior DPS is too low in PvE. And I know that they can't think that changing Taste for Blood to a 100% chance to proc with a built in 6 second cooldown is going to do it. Buffing Blood Frenzy? Not really enough. There have to be arms changes somewhere at least going internal testing.So when do we get to test them already?
