Arms Warrior PVE Guide [2.4.3]

I wrote this guide a while back, on old ******* server. Well since its dead it makes more sence to post it here for new Warmane Outland server and its players. Rest of the text is copy-paste, enjoy. For all questions post bellow or ask me ingame (I will add nick and faction later on)

Hello TBC Warrior lovers, I decided to make this guide duo to all wispers/ questions I received ingame about my build/ rotation/ DPS etc. I will write all I know about this spec, if I miss something or skip it feel free to add it in comments below I will add it to guide as soon as I see it. So lets start!

Content of my guide:

1.Intro
2.Talents
3.Stats and priorities
4.Gems and enchants
5.Rotation and gameplay
6.Proffesions
7.Food,Flask, Buffs
8.Addons and UI
9.Endgame items

1.Intro:

Arms warrior isn't the best DPS spec (on Recount) for Warrior in TBC, but when you count in 4% that you give to all mele DPS in raid, you are close to Fury DPS, sometimes maybe even better. It takes some time to get use to gameplay and rotation so if you can't get it 100% perfect at start don't give up, it is the most fun spec in my opinion.Why play an Arms warrior?

-It has a fun rotation.
-It boosts raid Mele Damage by 4% all time.
-It can do PVP in free time without changeing talents (Not best PVP build but still good).
-It is not played in PVE so offten so you will have a raid spot almost 100% of time.

2.Talents:

Arms tree:

-3/3 Improved Heroic Strike
-3/5 Deflection
-5/5 Iron Will
-1/1 Anger Management
-3/3 Deep Wounds
-5/5 Two-Handed Weapon Specialization
-2/2 Impale
-1/1 Death Wish
-5/5 Sword Specialization
-2/3 Improved Disciplines
-2/2 Blood Frenzy
-1/1 Mortal Strike

Fury tree:

-5/5 Cruelty
-5/5 Unbridled Wrath
-5/5 Commanding Presence
-5/5 Enrage
-2/2 Improved Slam
-1/1 Sweeping Strikes
-2/2 Weapon Mastery
-3/5 Flurry

3.Stats and priorities:

-Stats converting:

15,75 Haste raiting = 1% Haste
16,47 Expertise raiting = 1% dodge/parry reduce
22,08 Crit raiting = 1% Crit Strike chance
30 Agility = 1% crit
1 Strenght = 2 Attack power
15,83 hit = 1% hit raiting
1 Armor penetration = -1 Armor on enemy

-Stats priority:

First of all get at least 90-100 Hit Raiting!

142 Hit raiting is hit cap for Arms Warriors but I tested it and I got more DPS if I regem hit to crit, but if you have <90 hit rait you will have a lot of time with no Rage.

(No Rage ---> No spells in rotation ---> No DPS)

Also try to get MGT Heroic trinket for Expertise raiting as soon as possible!

Armor penetration (soft cap) > Crit Raiting/ Strenght > Haste

Armor penetration is best stat you can look for in gear you wish on your Arms Warrior. Each boss in TBC has set Armor value (6200 or 7700 in T6 raids,Void Reaver for example has 8800) and with all raid debuffs on boss armor value will be around 2200, so if you got 1350 Armor penetration from gear and your weapon enchant activates, the boss should be at 0 Armor!

If your raid has Feral Druid or Prot Paladin as MT and Rogue gives Exposed Armor debuff you need only 875 Armor penetration. (on 6200 armor bosses)

Crit rait should always be as higher as possible without loseing too much Armor penetration or Attack power!

Haste is not so good on Arms Warrior becouse it speeds up your Mele Attacks and you don't have time to finish your full rotation! Don't overstack it!

Actual Table for TBC bosses:

Serpentshrine Cavern:

Hydross the Unstable: 7700
The Lurker Below: 7700
Leotheras the Blind: 7700
Fathom-Lord Karathress 6200
Morogrim Tidewalker: 7700
Lady Vashj: 6200

Tempest Keep:

Void Reaver: 8800
High Astromancer Solarian: 6200
Al'ar: 7700
Kael'thas Sunstrider: 6200

Hyjal Summit:

Rage Winterchill: 6200
Anetheron: 6200
Kaz'rogal: 6200
Azgalor: 6200
Archimonde: 6200

Black Temple:

High Warlord Naj'entus: 7700
Supremus: 7700
Shade of Akama: 7700
Teron Gorefiend: 6200
Gurtogg Bloodboil: 7700
Reliquary of Souls:
Essence of Suffering: 0
Essence of Desire: 7700
Essence of Anger: 7700
Mother Shahraz: 6200
Illidari Council:
- Gathios the Shatterer: 6200
Illidan Stormrage: 7700

4.Gems and enchants:

-Gems:

Best Meta: +12 Agy and 3% Critical Damage
Best Purple: +5 Strenght +7 Stamina
Best Red: + 10 Strenght
Best Yellow: +10 Crit raiting
Best Orange: +5 Strenght +5 Crit raiting
Best Green: +5 Crit raiting +7 Stamina

Use Purple and Green Gems only when socket bonus is good or when you need those colors for Meta gem!

-Enchants:

Head:
+34 attack power+ 16 hit rait (if you have low hit raiting from gear)
+17 strenght + 16 intelect (Paladins King buff gives 10% strenght)

Sholders:
+30 attack power + 10 crit rait (Aldor)
+15 crit rait +20 attack power (Scry)

Cloak:
+ 12 agility

Chest:
+6 all stats

Wrist:
+12 Strenght

Hands:
+ 15 Strenght

Legs:
+50 attack power + 12 Crit rait

Feet:
+12 agility (if you have enought hit)
+ 10 hit (if low on hit)

Rings: (If you have enchanting):
+ 4 All Stats

Weapon: Executioner (All time)

5. Rotation and gameplay:

-Normal Rotation:

Auto Attack - Slam - Mortal Strike - Auto Attack - Slam - Whirlwind - Auto Attack - Slam - Mortal Strike - Auto Attack - Slam - AP Shout

-Rotation if you are low on Rage or your Attacks miss/parry/dodge:

Do all as Normal Rotation just skip Mortal Strike or Whirlwind until next Auto Attack and more Rage. Always Slam after Auto Attack!!!

-Rotation when your Attack speed goes under 3.0 (BL /Hero/ Burst time):

Auto Attack - Mortal Strike - Auto Attack - Whirlwind - Auto Attack - (if >60 Rage) Heroic Strike

So just do Auto Attacks for Rage and do Mortal Strike and Whirlwind on cooldown, when Mortal Strike and Whirlwind are on cooldown and you have more then 60 Rage do Heroic Strike untill you can press Mortal Strike or Whirlwind again. Never do Heroic Strike with less then 60 Rage becouse you won't have Rage for Mortal Strike and Whirlwind when they get off cooldown.


-AOE Rotation:

Auto Attack (until >75 Rage) - Sweeping Strikes - Whirlwind - Cleave - Auto Attack - Cleave - Whirwind on CD

So basicly stack rage untill 75 becouse tanks need to get aggro, pop Sweeping Strikes and instantly go Whirlwind for high AOE and press Cleave so next Auto Attack does big AOE also. After that big burst do Auto Attack for Rage, if you have 45+ Rage do Cleave ( Cleave 20 Rage + 25 save for Whirlwind when it gets off cooldown). Do this untill Sweeping Strikes ends and WATCH AGGRO!

Muru wipes are almost 100% gonna happen if you pull 2/3 adds on phase 1. Tip for that, don't use AOE rotation before Mage add dies and AOE 2 adds after that, you will always have Sweeping Strikes off cooldown for those 2 adds.

-Gameplay:

As for Gameplay, you will learn by time how to use your cooldowns. Some fights are slow and you can use for example Death Wish 2-3 times during it but sometimes its better to save it for Burst/BL time and pop it with all other cooldowns. You will learn and get feel for this on each boss when you do it 2-3 times.

In general:
-Save all Cooldowns for BL in short fights.
-Pop short CD on start of fight so you can use them again on BL part of fight.

Cooldown list:
-Death Wish 3 Min
-Berserker Rage 30 sec
-Bloodrage 1 Min
-Recklessness 23 Min

6.Proffesions:

For Arms warriors Blacksmithing is a MUST!

You can craft best chest in game for Arms warrior with it + you can make really good Sword for start of your adventure.
-Chest (Hard Khorium Battleplate)
-Sword (Lionheart Executioner)

Your secondary proffesion should be JC becouse best neck for Warrior in game is crafted.
-Neck (Hard Khorium Choker)

But you can go for Engineer also, it can craft almost best in game head for Fury and Prot Warriors and it makes a lot of gold.

If you want to help Raid DPS the most efficient proffesion is Leatherworking. It allows you to make Drums that buff your group with haste! It is not so good for you but it helps your Raid DPS a lot.

7.Food, Flasks, Buffs:

-Choose food depending on gear and stats, if you are low on hit take hit food if you are low on attack power take strenght food etc.

-Use Scrolls (Strenght V and Agility V) if you have gold for them or if you want to test your Max DPS on some boss.

-Always ask for all possible buffs in raid and if you are makeing PUG look for Balance druid for more Hit rait.

8.Addons and UI:

Best UI I found for TBC:
Video shows how it looks and has download link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfNJCdwl8dA
Video shows how to set-up UI step by step. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNJKILZwU7I

Most important addon: Quartz

It shows timer on your Auto Attack and doesn't bug on target switch.

9.Endgame items:

-Head:

Onslaught Battle-Helm for 4xT6 bonus

Crown of Anasterian Best stats in game

-Neck:

Hard Khorium Choker

-Sholders:

Mantle of the Golden Forest

-Back:

Cloak of Unforgivable Sin Best (stats+ Gem)

Dory's Embrace (for Armor penetration)

Shadowmoon Destroyer's Drape (for +Hit rait)

-Chest:

Hard Khorium Battleplate

-Wrist:

Onslaught Bracers

-Hands:

Gloves of Immortal Dusk

-Belt:

Onslaught Belt

-Legs:

Leggings of the Immortal Night

-Feet:

Onslaught Treads

-Rings:

Band of Ruinous Delight

Stormrage Signet Ring

-Trinkets:

Madness of the Betrayer

Berserker's Call / Shard of Contempt (depending on what you need)

-Main weapon :

Cataclysm's Edge

or if you have enought ARP from gear

Apolyon, the Soul-Render

-Ranged weapon:


Golden Bow of Quel'Thalas

Well thank you for sticking to end of this guide, hope it helps you and that you will have fun playing Arms. For more questions post below or wisper me ingame when im online!

got some pre raid bis item list ? =) and is hit + exp cap the same as in guide ?

Hi, I lost account I wrote guide on...

Hit cap for Arms Warrior (or any two hand user) is 142 hit raiting. As I wrote I got more DPS with crit gems when I had 100+ hit from gear. But thats in almost BiS gear.

As for exp rait Im not sure what is cap, but you will get enough from gear alone when you hit SWP progress. For now I would use MGT trinket (when it gets relesed on this server).

If you have any more questions feel free to wisp me ingame I play on Horde , name is Permaban and Permastun.

which gems should i use Bold? Smooth? Inscribed?

and do you got Stat weights?

thanks for the guide

Not hit capped and don't even know the expertise cap?
OK, I respect you for spending time on it.
But I don't think anyone should take this guide for serious purpose.

Same as the one above, thanks for the effort but you are wrong so many points that I advise players looking for advice to NOT take this guide as reference.

To name a few issue, no minor speed mention for boots enchant, why ever Heroic strike when you can just get another slam in to dump rage ? You are wrong on hit, you MUST be hit capped, softcap on arm pen does not exist (have even check how arpen works ?), you NEED to be LW throughout all expansion and should be BS until SW comes out, BiS list is wrong, Haste reduce your GCD and is a good stat for arm warrior (its just worse than ARP or STR).

Haste only reduces GCD for casters.
As far as I know doing more than one slam per melee swing is a DPS loss, but don't quote me on that.
Softcap on ArP does exist, it's the point where executioner gets the boss armor to 0 - at that point the value of static ArP drops, while still not useless.
You replace your stage 3 BS weapon already at kael'thas unless something is up with the sword proc rate on here.

While I'm not too deeply into arms theorycrafting it's perfectly possible to find items that simply outweigh getting hit or expertisecapped. Expertisecapped especially considering how hard the stat is to get.

Nvm for haste. As for slam, considering 100% flurry uptime (reducing weapon speed to roughly 3.0s), doing a 2nd slam is a loss of 2s on your swing (1st slam triggers GCD + 0.5s cast on the 2nd time) which means :

2 Slam
AA (t=0s) > Slam (t=0.5s) > Slam (t=2.5s) > AA (t=5.5s)

With HS
AA (t=0s) > Slam (t=0.5s) > HS (t=3.5s)

Having Slam and HS hitting for rougly the same amount, you have 2 white + 3 Yellow in 5.5s vs 1 White + 2 Yellow in 3.5s

Thats roughly 0.285 AA/s and 0.57 YellowHit/s for HS cycle and 0.36 AA/s and 0.545 YellowHit/s for the 2 Slam cycle. Of course if you have MS / WW coming up, its better to free your GCD by using HS, but overall above 3.0s AS, spamming slam is better in an infinite rage situation.

Executioner Arp "soft cap" is not a soft cap, it doesn't change anything beside switching from Executioner to Mongoose once you start getting below 0 armor with proc. A soft cap is like hit (or haste for caster) where it affect 2 different mechanics aka yellow and white hit in dual wield and cast time / GCD for caster.

KT sword is indeed BiS, but all your BM will also want it and its not guaranteed that you will ever see it dropping, and even if it drops, the bonus you will get from rerolling Enchanter or JC before SW release arent really worth the trouble. Anyway since you will be BS for a good part of your progression, I believe it should be mentioned in the guide.
Concerning hit, 1% hit means 1% dps, so unless you have complete potato dps, in term of pawn value should place it above anything on a 1 for 1 scale basis (bar strength at low gear level). Crit is good but I assume the test were conducted on a mannequin without raid buff, which removes about 10% (5 kitty, 3 paladin, 2 from agility) from your gear and therefore crit gets overvalued when weighted this way.

The problem with gearing ArP past the cap with executioner and switching to mongoose is that you'll need to be quite far past the "cap" before making the switch is worth it, and you can quite possibly obtain better stats by dropping some ArP on the gear and focussing on other stats, while keeping executioner.

I've yet to do any math on it as fury, but just glancing at it, it is very plausible that simply getting more crit/AP is worth it compared to overstacking ArP and getting mongoose.

Edit: is it even possible to get to 7700 ArP passively? I mean it's the last armor points that are really worth it, which executioner nets you.

There is a softcap for Armor Ignore, the meaning is as it's always been described. That is when you hit the cap while procs are active (Madness/Executioner), where a hard cap is when you hit the cap passively. Best example of Softcap is to look at WOTLK, where in T8/T9 it was common to use Mjolnir Runestone trinket proc and gearing armor pen around making 100% with the trinket up, which was by far the most popular gearing route. In TBC it's more complicated, since boss armor varies and armor ignore is a static armor value, not a percentage.

As for this guide, it's too hastily and amatuerishly written, but it does at least have some helpful pointers that could help a beginner. But giving advice like not taking the hit cap is a bit dumb, of course crit will do more damage if you're lucky enough to not have misses, but if you take an average over a long period of time the hit rating will post superior numbers, that's why we run 10,000-100,000 iterations in simulation craft in retail WoW, to iron out RNG inconsistencies.

On the subject of Executioner vs Mongoose when past the Armor Ignore soft cap, as Kiszh alluded it doesn't necessarily mean just because you're past the cap that you drop Exe for Mongoose, Armor Ignore gets stronger per point the closer you get to 0 armor, even if you're wasting some of the proc it can be stronger than Mongoose, you'd need an accurate spreadsheet to find that threshold with all of your stats considered.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by doci89

30 Agility = 1% crit

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99% sure this is incorrect.
It's closer to 27.

Edit:
Actually, I'm wrong.
The game has a base value that you need to subtract. The actual ratio is 33 agility = 1% crit.
This dataset proves it (me equipping different agility pieces):
http://i.imgur.com/06bnQLK.jpg
As you can see the sum of agility needed to get 1% crit increases as you get further from the base (91).
Subtracting the base from the max (262) yields 171 agility.
Doing the same for the crit% yields 5.18 %.
Dividing the 171 agility by the 5.18 % crit results in 33 agility / 1% crit, which is in good accordance with the theoretically expected number, if you dig back through the old guides.

and 30 with kings

Ok lets get something clear here.. First, I wrote this guide on last server I played on. I tryed putting gems with +HIT to get cap but after few raids I tested +CRIT and it did more DPS.. In theory HIT cap should give me more dps but in practice it didnt.. Maybe here scipts are diffrend and it would be a MUST to get HIT CAP as soon as possible.. this are all private servers, you cant expect all stuff to work as intented (like on retail).

2nd.. "Soft cap" for Arp is point where your Arp from gear + Executioner proc (+ ALL OTHER ARMOR REDUCTION DEBUFFS ON BOSS) get boss down to 0 armor. As I remember with all Arp items you can get maximum of 2240 Arp ( Not sure, didnt play TBC for a while). After 1900 Arp from gear its good to switch enchants from Executioner to Moongose. (one more time to make it clear, Boss with ALL armor reduction debuffs from all classes will have about 2200 ARMOR).

3rd... Heroic strike rage dump > More slams as rage dump... NEVER do more then 1 slam per Auto attack... NEVER... If You do AA+Slam and you are left with lets say 50 rage.. If you do one more Slam you will reset swing for your next AA and waste some of your rage.. If you do AA+ Slam and are left with 50 rage and you do HS you will do more Damage then AA and dump rage in process AND YOU WONT RESET YOUR AA SWING...

4th... Haste... Haste doesnt bother your rotation when you have small amount of it.. after you get a lot of HASTE gear, your AA will go below 3secunds and you just wont have time to do normal rotation.. its a BIG DPS LOSS.. if you dont belive me just test it and then say something to me...

Thx to all for kind words for this guide, Im glad I can help you. For all of you who find mistakes in it please give me valid argument for your opinion. I still state that at least 95% of guide is correct (5% for not giveing exact numbers for lets say armor left on boss after all debuffs are applied etc)

Stats converting:

15,75 Haste raiting = 1% Haste
16,47 Expertise raiting = 1% dodge/parry reduce
22,08 Crit raiting = 1% Crit Strike chance
30 Agility = 1% crit
1 Strenght = 2 Attack power
15,83 hit = 1% hit raiting
1 Armor penetration = -1 Armor on enemy

It is in guide at part 3. :) you are welcome..

And yes its with King buff from Paladins :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by xrabbit96

Stats converting:

15,75 Haste raiting = 1% Haste
16,47 Expertise raiting = 1% dodge/parry reduce
22,08 Crit raiting = 1% Crit Strike chance
30 Agility = 1% crit
1 Strenght = 2 Attack power
15,83 hit = 1% hit raiting
1 Armor penetration = -1 Armor on enemy

It is in guide at part 3. :) you are welcome..

And yes its with King buff from Paladins :)

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This isn't correct, both Hit rating and Haste rating are 15.77 rating per 1%.