[Guide] PvE In depth guide of the Arms Warrior
Introduction:
Hello forums! My name is Thares, also known as Newruk on alliance side. I am from a horde guild called Is A Cookie which orginally came from Lordaeron but as we had cleared all content in wotlk we decided to try out cataclysm.
We started on Greymane by playing there and discovered how cataclysm was despite all the buggs that were back then with warriors doing 200k dps without trying in BWD and other classes being totally overpowerd. Later as Greymane got closed we decided to try out Frostwolf and we have been there ever since.
Back then i was one of the OT/Panic tank for LK HC and the other heroic content in wrath but when i started playing cataclysm i was very skeptical about it since i have had heard the nerfs the warrior got when cataclysm got released as well as in later patches (intercept/charge/spell reflect nerf anyone?). Despite the nerfs i tried playing as protection first but later my guild leader wanted me to try fury back in 4.0.6 and it was amazing, i loved it!
Altho when 4.3.4 came out the arms warriors got buffed and fury got nerfed so i tried arms in PvE because i only played it in PvP mostly and i've played it and tried to improve ever since. Now im here to show you how to play as an Arms warrior!
Talents and Glyphs:
http://i.imgur.com/vVL7YSu.jpg
These are my current talents. Mostly people would comment that i have throwdown in my spec in PvE but it is cruical to have it when you are doing for example: the Ragnaros encounter since it can be a life saver if a son of flames gets too close to the hammer. I might also recommend to take Blitz instead of Field dressing as well since you can stun multiple targets and get extra rage when you use rage but it's your personal choice.
I am not going to go in depth into the tallants since you can read what the tallants mean and what they do ingame.
http://i.imgur.com/55c0ea6.jpg
These are my current glyphs. You can customize your major glyphs as you like but you should have Colossus smash glyph and Sweeping strikes glyph then the 3rd glyph could be Cleaving as i have or Long charge or Resonating power.
Enchants and Gems:
Head: Arcanum of the Dragonmaw/Wildhammer 60 str 35 Mastery
Shoulders: Greater Inscription of Jagged Stone 50 Str 25 Crit
Back: Enchant Cloak - Greater Critical strike 65 Crit or Tailoring enchant (Swordguard Embroidery)
Chest: Enchant Chest - Peerless Stats 20 stats
Bracers: Enchant Bracers - Major Strength 50 Str
Hands: Enchant Gloves - Mighty Strength 50 Str or Engineering enchant (Synapse Springs 480 of your highest stat for 10 sec)
Legs: Dragonscale Leg Armor 190 Attack power 55 crit
Feet: Enchant Boots - Lavawalker/Mastery 35 mastery +8% movement speed increase /50 mastery
Two-handed Weapon: Enchant Weapon - Landslide 1000 attack power proc
Meta: Reverbeating Shadowspirit Diamond 54 Str and 3% Increased Critical Effect
Red gem: Bold Inferno Ruby 40 Str
In case you need to match a socket bonus like your valor boots for example you can use this gem
(Red/Yellow gem: Inscribed Ember Topaz 20 Str 20 Crit)
Macros:
When you need to stance dance you will need a few macros to do so here are the ones you need to learn how to stance dance:
#showtooltip Overpower
/cast Battle Stance
/cast Overpower
#showtooltip Mortal Strike
/cast Berserker Stance
/cast Mortal Strike
#showtooltip Slam
/cast Berserker Stance
/cast Slam
#showtooltip heroic strike
/cast Berserker stance
/cast Heroic Strike
Also a thing that is very important when you are stance danceing is that you don't push your macro once, you need to push it multiple times almost mashing your keys while your stance danceing. This will improve your dps by one to two k maybe but if you have high latency and cannot pull this off efficant i don't reccomend it.
Here are some other macros that i find usefull:
#showtooltip bladestorm
/cast Attack
/cast Bladestorm
This makes your bladestorm also do white swings while you do damage thus also generating rage.
/cast Charge(Battle Stance)
/cancelaura Bladestorm
You can also have Blood fury in this macro if you are an orc but i choice to not have it since i want to pop it when i do all my other cooldowns
/equip *your two hander*
/cast Battle Stance
Rotation, Burst and Cooldowns:
An arms warriors rotation should look like this:
Colossus Smash>Mortal Strike>Overpower>Heroic Strike/Slam
Now this is the basic rotation that you should do althought there are some tips and tricks you can learn to maximize your DPS. Now your standard rotation and cooldowns would look like this:
Colossus Smash>Rend>Mortal Strike>Overpower>Heroic Strike>Mortal Strike>Overpower/Heroic Strike>Mortal Strike>Heroic Strike>Herioc Strike/Overpower and refreshing Colossus Smash also fitting your Deadly calm/Trinket/Recklessness/Inner rage/Golemsblood potion (prepot and 2nd pot).
Now personally my rotation looks a bit like this
Prepot/Charge/Rend/Colossus smash/Deadly calm/Rotten Skull/Blood fury/Mortal strike/Overpower/Heroic strike/Slam/Mortal strike/Heroic strike/Slam/Mortal strike/Overpower/Recklessness/Inner rage/Mortal strike/Heroic strike/Slam/Heroic strike/Mortal strike/Heroic strike/Heroic strike (if i have rage, if not Slam)/Colossus smash/Engineering gloves/Mortal strike/Overpower/Slam/Mortal strike/Heroic strike/Mortal strike
Now this sounds like a mess and i will try to put up a video showing it but this is just a 30 sec part of my rotation but i will try to explain why and what things that can shift the situations that you use your spells for example:
Let's say i have not enough rage to use Herioc Strike but i have rage to use Slam and Mortal Strike is about to be off cooldown you use Slam but usually you are not supouse to rage starv but sometimes you need to think a bit further also but it also depends on your BT procs which is a HUGE factor in this!
Another example we can use is you have Battle Trance proccing and your Mortal Strike is about to go off cooldown and your Herioc Strike is ready, you should use Heroic Strike first combined with Mortal Strike so that the Battle Trance consumes on using Heroic Strike and then you use Mortal Strike right after that to increase the damage dealt to the target. This also works durning when you pop Inner rage and Reck. Depending on how your Battle Trance procs it can mean that you can almost spam Heroic Strike while keeping your normal rotation which is Mortal Strike is alwayse first and also you have to make sure Colossus Smash is on the target as well while bursting with Reck/Inner.
Now when it comes to the burst phase which is 20% of the fight you should switch your rotation to this:
Colossus Smash>Mortal Strike if you have enrage buff/LTTS buff already>Execute spam till you need to refresh your LTTS buff/enrage buff by using Mortal Strike and also not to forget refreshing your Colossus Smash to make your Exectue hit like a mother freaking truck to put out those crasy Execute crits.
I will tell you how i handle my cooldowns in a encounter. My advice is to pop Deadly calm at the start of the encounter as soon as you have applied Rend and Colossus smash along with your DPS trinket if you are an orc this is the time to pop blood fury along with your battle shout. Then after those cds are out it's time to pop your Recklessness along with your Inner rage and if you have Engineering gloves like i do, you should pop it as well. Also very important to pop Inner rage alwayse it's off cooldown so you can see if you can fit some additional Heroic Strikes but keep in mind you must think about your rage and your Battle Trance procs.
Ui and Addons:
Personally i don't play with a lot of addons but there are addons that you could use like to track your Colossus Smash proc and your Battle Trance procs but i usually just look at my buffs if i get a proc since i prefer a clean ui but i can reccomend some addons like: Power Auras (might be tricky to config), NeedToKnow and Classtimers. I will have addon links in the bottom of the page. Also this is how my ui looks like and yes i do click some spells, (ZOMG HES A CLICKER! HE MUST BE BAD!).
http://i.imgur.com/rvNB9Ry.jpg
Dps/Recount screenshoots:
Ragnaros 25 HC
http://i.imgur.com/VgkIgTF.jpg
Majordomo Staghelm 25 HC
http://i.imgur.com/hMnJbJQ.jpg
Baleroc 25 HC
http://i.imgur.com/6bjz2bG.jpg
Frequently asked questions
Q: Which is better Crit or Mastery?
I have dicussed this with a lot of warriors in my guild and i've seen other people talk about it and it's a nice dicussion to have since mastery is proccing your Sudden Death way more often meaning you have more times to use Colossus Smash and also a chance to do extra damage as well and your mastery actually hits pretty damn hard, people usually underestimate it but its prob in your top 5 damageing spells if not top 3 sometimes depening on how much mastery you have/gear/wep etc.
Now crit gives you the chance to reapply your enrage buff that you gain by critting with Mortal Strike which increases your physical damage dealt by 10% for 12 sec also if you crit with your HEroic Strike, your next Heroic Strike will be a garantueed crit altho the garantueed crits cannot trigger on itself meaning you can't get infinite amounts of garantueed crits on Heroic Strikes and who does not like big freaking crits all over their screen?
Now which do i think it's better? I think they are equally good so in my gear setup i have balanced out crit and mastery. At the moment with Battle Shout on i have 20.54% crit and 18.72 (1922) mastery which is 41%. It's hard to argue about which is better or what not since i think both are equally but if i had to choice i would have taken crit.
Q: Which spec is better Arms or Fury?
I've seen people wonder about this too. Since the nerf fury warrior have gotten most of them think it's useless but it's not. I would say that fury warriors actually are compareble to arms warriors altho after the fight progresses the arms warrior will prob take the lead in doing more steady dps then an fury warrior since fury has a lot of bursty cooldowns and hits really bloody hard but after a while if not played correct they lose dps very fast!
They cannot keep their dps substained as an arms does. My opinion is that they are almost equal but since arms is actually better i have to say arms, sorry fury lovers. Maybe you will be better with dual Guthlac heroic?
Q: I've seen people and warriors especailly have almost no hit and no expertise? I thought the cap was 8% and expertise was 26? Why do warriors only have 5% hit and almost no expertise? They seem to have only as low as 14-16 or even up to 18-20. Could you answer this?
Well you see the retail stats prio was usually this:
8% Hit/26 Expertise > Strength > Crit > Mastery > Haste
Altho on molten it's a bit diffrent since the hit and expertise don't work the same way as retail does. It works 50/50 but i will show you what you need to have:
5% hit/from 14-20 expertise > Strength > Crit > Mastery > Haste
Keep in mind from the last discuission Crit/Mastery might be in the same collumbs.
Since expertise is not working according to retail, we can have much lower expertise then what we should which boosts our dps! Altho i must warn you to have around 14-16 expertise since you may experience dodges and parries on some bosses for example:
Majordomo Staghelm when you have to stay in the front or Ragnaros where you also stay in the front but it has happend that bosses have dodged or parried regardless. You have to experiment that yourself but for fights like Major/Rag i think you should have between 18-20 expertise. Personally i have 21 since i have the gear to have that expertise and still have really good dps. But don't be afraid to experiment to be honest. I personally found this out when i heard expertise wasent working properly so theorycraft away. I recommend going with 17-18 expertise but it's for you to decide.
When it comes to hit you don't need the 8% hit. You only need 5%, if you are under that there is a chance you will miss but otherwise i have never seen a miss with the hit raiting i have which is 5.29%.
Q: What is the BIS list/items for an arms warrior? I want to donate some gear and i wonder what gear pieces are the best that you can get?
Well i can tell you the BIS list that i found but this may not be the case for molten since it's diffrent mechanics and stuff like that but this is the list that i think is the best that you can get. Keep in mind these are wowhead links and might not be 100% acurate!
Head: Colossal Dragonplate Helmet
Neck: Necklace of Black Dragon's Teeth
Chest: Colossal Dragonplate Battleplate
Shoulders: Backbreaker Spaulders
Back: Dreamcrusher Drape
Bracers: Rockhide Bracers
Gloves: Colossal Dragonplate Gauntlets
Waist: Demonbone Waistguard
Legs: Colossal Dragonplate Legguards
Feet: Treads of crushed flesh
Ring1: Curled Twilight Claw
Ring2: Breathstealer Band
Trinket1: Bone-Link Fetish /Creche of the Final Dragon:
Trinket2: Eye of Unmaking
Weapon: Gurthalak, Voice of the Deeps:
Thrown: Darting Chakram
Conclusion and Terminology:
Warriors are indeed one of the top classes in this patch but there are a lot of warriors which are doing very decent/low dps which maybe are not stance danceing, not doing their right rotation, slacking and having rage cap, not knowing how to spend their rage, they gear wrong, it can be a lot of stuff that can go wrong but i hope with this guide that they will improve and know how to gear and play their warriors as best as they can! I hope this guide was usefull and helpfull for old and new players. If you have any critism, questions or something else alike you can write in this thread or ask me ingame or on the forums. Thank you!
BT = Battle Trance
MS = Mortal strike
HS = Heroic strike
OP = Overpower
BS = Battle shout/Bladestorm
SD = Sudden death
LTTS = Lambs of the slaughter
Sources/Credits:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGQweiWrEhw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMeZmumCd_A
http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/classtimer
http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/need-to-know
http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/powerauras-classic
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/to...51798?page=1#7
To my fellow warriors in Is A Cookie http://isacookie-frostwolf.shivtr.com/
P.S: Since battle trance was fixed the procs are much lower now so you guys know that :). Tested and confirmed by me and some other warriors that i've talked to.
P.S.S: Fixed BIS list and color/links :)
P.S.S.S: Removed the short terms so it makes it easier to understand my guide :)
P.S.S.S.S: Edited BIS list by replacing Runescriven Demon Collar with Demonbone Waistguard. Credit to ArtificialIntel for spotting it :)
