Topic
Arms and Mastery
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Has anyone else not really seen the point of Arms's current mastery skill? It seems all but useless. Definitely not game-changing. I personally would rather have Deep Wounds as the mastery skill.
Mastery - Deep Wounds: Your critical strikes now cause your opponents to bleed 48% of the damage of the strike. Also increases all bleed damage by X% per X amount of mastery. Just an idea. My personal thought on my warrior since WOTLK is that the arms tree is largely based around making opponents bleed, since the addition of both Taste for Blood and Blood Frenzy. There is a lot of complaining about arms warriors in pvp, even by top-notch players, which I won't go into detail about. But the class is supposed to be a hard-hitting juggernaut with limited mobility, and in all reality I don't think they hit that hard, especially when they are kited most of the time even so by other melee classes. This is not meant to be a complaining thread. Give me your thoughts! |
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Edited by Pestilent on 2/21/12 1:08 PM (PST)
I kind of said this at one point and was rapidly shutdown by most warriors stating its homogenizing us closer to ferals, but I honestly think better bleeds would allow for more sustained damage and better tuning for the entire spec.
It would also make us less susceptible to ranged classes, bleeds would at least chug away at their health, instead of watching the frost mage never drop below 90% while your being dropped 50% each shatter. Though I also similarly wanted unholy DK to turn more into Warlock Dotter in plate gear...that didn't happen either, and I sense amping warrior bleeds wouldn't as well, but it seems nice in theory. |
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Edited by Fourohfour on 2/21/12 1:37 PM (PST)
I kind of said this at one point and was rapidly shutdown by most warriors stating its homogenizing us closer to ferals, but I honestly think better bleeds would allow for more sustained damage and better tuning for the entire spec. You're exactly right. As far as 'homogenizing us closer to ferals' go, haters will hate. Look at mutilate rogues' mastery, increasing poison damage. Or affliction lock mastery. They both are not bleeds, but as dot is a dot is a dot. |
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Ferals are the bleed melee spec. Warriors may have bleeds, but that doesn't make us the bleed spec.
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So essentially what you're telling me is you feel that Mastery - Strikes of Opportunity, giving you an X% chance of getting an extra white hit every once in awhile is just as effective as other class/spec mastery, such as a frost DK with a 36% overall damage increase from his mastery. |
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Edited by Pestilent on 2/22/12 7:44 AM (PST)
No use trying, half the warriors (generally PvE heroes) will fight tooth and nail to not change, just because ferals have good bleeds doesn't mean we couldn't as well, it simply is a better scaling mastery system, which generally the classes scaling better mastery are the ones doing a lot better off.
Amping bleeds would be the appropriate choice to helping sustained damage alongside ignoring more armor in pvp, which with the excessive nerf to colossus smash coupled with strike dmg nerfs and slow ramp up LTTS with low timer, its exactly what we need, an armor bypass that isn't bypassing on burst, instead bypassing armor on sustained damage. Also, the utility debuff we apply (same as ferals) increasing bleeds, it would kind of make sense to take advantage of it even if a feral wasn't in the group. |
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The extra strike Mastery is average at best, and not worth expanding, hence why you don't see mastery stacking Arms warriors, if it was possible to take every bit of mastery stat and put it into crit, I can tell you now I would push more damage, its near worthless.
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Uh, if most people are opposed to your idea, why do you think it's a good idea?
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Because ignorance is bliss, and trolling is fun to a lot of people is the likely answer I would give....aka Hooves/Samayael...some other avid forum posters who literally post something constructive one in every 50 posts.
If you want to play Devil's advocate at least give a good reason to hate seeing this change. The current mastery could be improved by moving it to a bleed damage increase, equally making it a more desirable stat in the process, most people on these forums have no creativity or theory crafting, they just like accepting the way things are, it is quite silly in my eyes, but to each their own, I still don't see how anyone would see the idea as worse except for the 'OMG NO HOMOGENIZE' randomness, which is one of the most annoying and worthless arguments, since half the game consists of homogenized abilities (just cause its a different name, doesn't mean it isn't identical or nearly identical) Why do you feel the need to berate someone for postulating better ideas which blizzard can use freely to improve gameplay? I think is the better question. |
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Edited by Hooves on 2/22/12 8:00 AM (PST)
One stat will always be mathematically better for DPS.
Mastery for example would probably be head and shoulders over crit with if it procced, uh, 150% weapon strikes, I'm pretty sure. Changing what it does won't necessarily change its value. What's the point of changing it to a bleed-centric mastery? Change for the sake of change is entirely needless. Also this made me lol. Please go over any thread that is actually asking for help that I've posted in. |
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I've always viewed Strikes of Opportunity as an extension of melee swings — passive, (mostly) easily controllable damage from a development standpoint.
With manual bleed application completely retired and TfB's interval increased, I wonder if Arms' rotation could be shaken up a bit by making SoO procs allow a free, lower-damage Heroic Strike — especially since Blizzard seems to have given up on its Cataclysm goal to keep players from wearing out their keybind. Balance might involve a longer ICD or a brief, stacking buff for multiple procs (kind of like the T10 Fury bonus). |
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Edited by Pestilent on 2/22/12 8:24 AM (PST)
Leave it to Arms becoming a better PvE spec and all the fury re rolls think they have a better perception on the spec.
As I had said before I don't see it coming to fruition based solely on the community who would rather be negative about any change from the current or what blizzard puts in writing. If they turned around tomorrow and allowed us to be bleed-centric by changing mastery, you same people would be like 'Oh yeah that's a nice change', I posted my thoughts so, whatever, done with this, OP I agree with you, but naysayers will hate. There are thousands of different mastery iterations that would be better than the current, it simply has been something inside the game in one way or another via 'Sword specialization' since early release, so its seen with nostalgia and deemed a safe bet. |
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Deep Wounds also has been around since the start of the game. Why would you think it's any different from Sword spec as a viable mastery option?
Thanks for not responding to my actual argument btw. And again, change for the sake of change is needless. They're not changing Arms mastery in MoP because IT FITS ARMS. It makes sense that a master of weapons would be able to get in a bunch of extra swings. Yes, it also makes sense that they'd also swing harder or some crap and proc bigger Deep Wounds, but again, why change it if it's working fine? I don't get it. Why do you want Mastery to be the best stat? What does it change? Just because you reforge to Mastery instead of Crit doesn't make it more interesting of a stat, or whatever. It's just a different name for a stat. Hell, for all it matters to Arms right now, we could have three (non hit, non exp) secondary stats, called DPS stat 1, DPS stat 2, and DPS stat 3. DPS stat 1 (crit) is better than DPS stat 2 (mastery) which is better than DPS stat 3 (haste). Neither of them affect your playstyle in any meaningful way; I mean haste is really the only one that comes close, with rage gen, but it doesn't generate enough rage and Arms already generates a ton anyway (especially with Anger Management and Blood Frenzy's 20 rage procs). So again. What's the point? |
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Edited by Pestilent on 2/22/12 10:19 AM (PST)
Ok let me break it down better for you.
Duplicating strikes == little more rage and extra damage from Strikes (burst) if we changed it to bleed %'s (assuming of course they kept 2 bleeds, both deep wounds and rend, which they aren't apparently...making it kinda a moot point) We go from a system that does not scale well, and to increase effect requires buffing actual burst/strike abilities, or overall damage. whereas bleed % based mastery could scale based solely on the stat itself...which is what most classes use, equally why other classes mastery that scales that way becomes a primary stat. Crit is already low, and requires talent boosts to equalize us somewhat to other classes. So why do I think its better, because it scales better, and doesn't require tuning Strike/burst damage nonstop which usually in the long run hurts or gimps a class. Again it won't happen anyways, but its not change for the sake of change, it could be a smart choice if they retooled the class, which they do every expansion anyways. It just feels like at this point its close minded arguments, the OP mentioned a suggested change, I agreed on part, its an idea I could see working with the class, would it involve some changes, yes, but again they change things every expansion, retooling the class wouldn't suddenly make us casters or not be 'Master of Arms', we would still maintain everything short of having another more modifiable stat with a type of damage that would help combat ranged classes more so, and make use of our +30% bleed utility debuff. Hell look at the new talent Bloodbath, in a roundabout way its putting us halfway to adding more bleed sustainable damage in. There is a great number of Cataclysm changes I would argue were change for the sake of change, and it didn't pan out well for us, really feels like the community is so adamant against any change at all, its an idea for god sake's you can't just berate it as i said with 'no' or 'it's fine', doesn't really give any logic either. |
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Why do you think it doesn't scale well? Arms Mastery actually scales perfectly with AP - attack power directly increases melee swing damage.
We're at the end of an expansion, and scaling issues have not in any way impacted Arms. It's basically a 30% damage increase, in the form of bleeds. That's pretty simple. Like what? The removal of armor penetration was entirely warranted, even if its fix (CS) wasn't that great. It was too important of a stat and scaled too well as you got more of it, exponentially. If you're going to say stuff like this, give actual examples. Also, mastery procs don't give rage for Arms. Flat damage increase % modifiers are not fun. On top of that Deep Wounds wouldn't be a flat damage increase % anyway, at least not obviously. You would need to crit in order to proc it in order for the mastery to take effect, so even if that was the mastery it would STILL be weaker than crit (unless its scaling was absurdly high). |
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Edited by Hooves on 2/22/12 10:53 AM (PST)
How is crit not RNG? Deep Wounds would be the definition of an RNG mastery.
Our mastery is not that RNG. It has a simple chance to proc, and once it procs it's basically another auto swing - err actually I'm pretty sure it works off how specials do and cannot be a glancing blow, so it's even better than an auto swing. It procs very often, it procs off melee swings and specials including HS, and possibly itself, and it can either hit or crit (after it passes hit/avoid requirements, since it acts as a special maybe). On top of that, it can proc Gurth. There's really nothing to complain about there. It scales with weapon upgrades, it scales with AP even if you don't get a weapon upgrade, it procs Deep Wounds if it crits, has a chance to proc Blood Frenzy. It also has a chance to proc off any hit of a Whirlwind/Thunder Clap, and it procs Sweeping Strikes. I mean seriously, what are you complaining about here? |
