Angry Man, Edgar Allen Poe, and Heavy Metal Pyrotechnics!

Sorry for the long time between posts. I had recently got involved in both the Diablo 3, and now MoP Beta!
I meant to be writing an Arms guide for 4.3 but it's kinda fallen by the way-side. (Blame my Diablo addiction.)

I decided to list my thoughts on Warrior changes in MoP, I'm going to start off with the things *I* like. Because then you can read the things I like then skip the things I'm overly negative about! (Won't that be fun?) Once I list these, I'll go into detail about the ones I deem important. Feel free to leave a comment if you'd like one of them to be discussed in depth!

Things I like.

• NEW ICON ART!!!
• Deep Wounds is the new Rend that auto applies!
• Charging as Fury!
• Thunderclap as a viable AoE ability!
• Dragon Roar!
• Die by the Sword baseline for Arms/Fury!
• Disarm, and Taunt no longer has a Stance Requirment!
• Intervene no longer has a minimum range!
• Awesome Minor Glyphs!

Things I dislike.

• Fury RNG.
• Glyph of Sweeping Strikes not being baseline.
• Fury RNG.
• Die by the Sword's Duration.
• Arms not needing to use Heroic Strike.
• Lack of any mechanic that lets Mastery or Haste scale better.
• Fury RNG.
• Still having crappy Warcraft 3 Icon Art.
• Level 75 Talent Choices.
• Avatar and Storm Bolt being on the same tier at level 90.
• Too many Major Glyphs that are good.
• FURY RAGE RNG RAGE.

Icon Art.

If you've hung around me before, I've probably said something about how tired I am of the Warrior's WC3 icon art. While it was cool and retro at first, it's now a plain annoying. Almost all classes have been getting art updates lately. So it's a very nice to see Raging Blow, Avatar, and Storm Bolt 's art icons change. Hoping this trend continues.

Major & Minor Glyphs .

According to Blizzard, you will be changing glyphs for your personal needs. Warriors go from having jack shit, to so many choices it's not even fair that half of these are not baseline. Ignoring unused Major Glyphs, for both Arms and Fury I'll point out some of the best.
Recklessness, Cleaving, Colossus Smash, Enraged Speed, Mortal Strike, Bloodthirst, Raging Wind, Resonating Power, Victory Rush, Sweeping Strikes, Rude Interruption.

Recklessness, Victory Rush, Mortal Strike/Bloodthirst, Enraged Speed, Cleaving/Resonating Power are currently the most interesting and in my most used list. Colossus Smash, looses value now that there is more useful glyphs. Guardians Druids are looking pretty overpowered too, I expect an influx of them. Rude Interruption is extremely gimmicky, will probably be used on interrupt heavy fights. Raging Wind is decent, but I'm assuming that Fury will move away from Thunderclap as a AoE ability and more to using Cleave/Whirlwind. Sweeping Strikes on the other hand, Why isn't this base line? This has been around since Wotlk and has been taken every time!

Personally, I'll probably be running MS/BT, Victory, Cleaving/Resonating.
Recklessness loose points in my eyes simply because healers are use to it. I'd rather increase my self-healing or healing received than decrease the damage I take for 12 seconds every 5 minutes. Enraged Speed basically turns Berserkers Rage into a mini-Sprint. And hopefully as Fury with enough uptime, I could replace my boot's enchant with a full dps enchant...maybe. (Thank you Kurn and Jaymz for both teaching me the value of MSI) Joking aside. Enraged Speed also looses some value to me as well, we can Charge, Heroic Leap, Intervene to get around. Is 20% MSI really needed, much less at the cost of developing bad habits? Like using Berserkers Rage between a fight in a 5 man then needing it 15 seconds later to Enrage myself for Fury's Raging Blow.

Useless duds: Overpower, Hoase Voice
Going to be brief here. Arms currently cannot support the rage cost of  using both Heroic Strike and Slam, much less Cleave and Slam. Battle Shout currently has a 1 minute cooldown, and most everyone should be use to this by now. Glyph'd or not, you'll have the same amount of rage generated at the end of the fight.

Moving on to Minor Glyphs..

Just going to list these fast as these have become my new favorites and they needed nick names.

• "Angry Man", My friend Jaymz calls Guardian of Ancient Kings "Angry Man" and I'm stealing it!
• Edgar Allen Poe, Execute's damage pretty much rolls anything, Thus this glyph makes total sense.
• Heavy Metal Pyrotechnics...need I say more?

Die by the Sword.

Hopefully a nail in the coffin for Shield Wall macros. I'm not totally happy with the duration. I'd like a Glyph (Minor one at that!) that reduced the parry to nil, but increased duration. Otherwise we're going to see a lot of guilds stacking Warriors on the next tight enrage fights like Baleroc, or Chimeron. Don't forget that Taunt no longer requires Defensive Stance.

Fury RNG.

Fury is currently a mess, Flurry no longer proc from Crits, and Enrage only procs from Crits. (Flip'd basically.) With non-talented, and low crit chances it's practically impossible to have good uptime on Enrage which enables Raging Blow, as well as fueling our entire rotation. Due to a bug Bloodthirst currently does not offer the 40% crit as advertised, which only complicate matters.

Another let down is that Fury still currently scales either amazingly well, or amazingly shitty. In this example, Fight duration is 300 seconds (5 minutes), we'll be following Cata Formulas, and that only thing that changes is how much haste rating equals 1% Haste,  and that 12% Haste doesn't happen by accident in T14 gear. Also, we're ignoring misses, and offhand swings right now.

Formula: Time/Swing Speed = Number of Swings | 6.5*Weapon Speed = Rage Per Swing | RPS*NoS = Total Rage

3.6 Speed Weapon, 0 Haste = 3.6 Swing Speed, 1950 rage from Swings.
300/3.6=83 | 6.5*3.6=23.4 | 23.4*83=1950

3.6 Speed Weapon, 12% Haste = 3.21 Swing Speed, 2187 rage from Swings.
300/3.21=93 | 6.5*3.6=23.4 | 23.4*93=2187

Point is, 12% Haste will only give you 237 extra rage over a 5 minute stand still fight. That's pretty shitty scaling for something that doesn't happen from having a couple of pieces of gear having haste. Getting more crit thus a higher enrage uptime is a better use of stats, which also makes our mastery useful in the first damn place.

Now, That's an example of how scaling is amazingly shitty, but what about the Amazingly well? Just go back to T12, Alysrazor as Beta Fury. With the flying buffs, it would become a cycle that fed into itself.

Massive Haste = More Swings = More chances to Flurry = More Rage = More Abilities Used = More chances to Crit = More Enrages = Even more Rage = More rage dumped into Unproc'd Wild Strikes and  Heroic Strikes = More Damage. While Flurry branches and loops back to feed Massive Haste...

Moving on, another annoying factor is just how high our White Damage is for no justified reason. It's one thing to do a lot of white damage because I pressed a Savage Roar-esque button that increased it's damage because I  had a great uptime. It's a whole different animal when it's baseline, what's to stop Warriors in T14 LFR and 5 Mans from just AFK'ing through fights? Currently our white damage is SO high that unless you knew better you might actually be thinking that Warrior who was at the lower end of the "middle pack" in Skada was okay.

Unless Blizzard pulls their heads out of their asses and gives us a DECENT amount of crit, baseline and scale us around that. Fury is going to be a major problem. Cata design was horrible. Being nerfed every tier was an annoying sight. But when your class is balanced around only having maybe 10% crit but yet somehow you kept up with everyone else for the top spot for only one tier, you're going to cause problems next tier when Warrior's crit jumps up to 20%. Both for PvE and PvP.

Anyhow, I've covered what I wanted to say and I'm getting tired so I am going to leave this off here.
I'll be posting more content later about the Beta! I'm really excited to have it an to actually post feedback!
Comment if you'd like something explained in more detail or think my basic math is wrong or too open ended! =P

-Zelix

The Idiot Helm

I'm sure this is pretty late into 4.3 to rant about this, but I still want too.
People on my realm, posters on Warrior forums, even saw 8/8H DS Warrior who runs a blog is using this item. I've was whispered by someone and called stupid for still wearing Greathelm of the Voracious Maw instead of The Idiot Helm. I really hate this thing, it's a plague and every class that wasn't designed to wear it, Is wearing it. I don't care if it's cheap, or you're casual, or that it is easy to obtain. You just should not be wearing this if you're a Warrior. The helm out of the Hour of Twilight Instance will hold you over until you can get at least the Raid Finder tier.

Now, in all fairness it seems like I'm hating on this item for no reason. (Or because I am a elitest snob.)
But I'll present logical reasoning as to why that helm is horrible for an Arms Warrior.

Arms Stat Weighs, AKA (Which gives me the most DPS.)
Strength -> 8% Hit -> 26 Expertise -> Critical Strike -> Mastery ->> Haste

Hit and Expertise is Accuracy Stats, They make sure you hit the boss.

Critical Strike allows you have a higher chance to do double damage with abilities, and procs a stacking DoT called Deep Wounds. Mortal Strike crits cause you to Enrage, and when you crit you deal 30% additional damage.

Arms Mastery: More mastery increases the chance to deal extra damage and proc Sudden Death.
These extra strikes can crit, which adds to our Deep Wounds damage.

Haste decreases your white swing timer, and allows you to cast Slam faster...BUT.
Having a 3.6s or 3.8s Weapon Swing time and only having off maybe 0.02 seconds doesn't do a lot.
And Slam already casts at a 0.5 base cast time (Less than a GCD) so there is no need to lower it more.

Logically, If you look at the secondary stats. GotVM will beat TIH.
But what about Strength, it's suppose to be the BEST stat, thanks to reforging, reaching Hit and Expertise caps is a breeze. But the thing about Arms is that Crit is so important that it can even rival strength's value of DPS gain.

- Zelix