Hello everyone, Shirley here, and welcome to my updated 10.0.5 Arms Warrior guide. We're going to go over all the talent changes today, our rotation, as well as just some general tips on how to play your Arms Warrior, with probably a little bit of PvP talk at the end.
So, jumping right in, I wanted to show off my stat alignment real quick here at the beginning because I know people like to know and ask about stats and stuff. I would say to everybody, always sim your own character, of course, for any gear you get, but on a broad stroke, you want to shoot for a lot of crits, haste, and then Mastery is going to creep up after that, but shoot for around 30 percent of these two, and then Mastery is going to catch up as you hit the diminishing return for these two stats.
Especially in any AOE situation, Mastery is going to start creeping into your stat alignment. But, on that note, looking at our new talent tree today, there wasn't a ton of changes on the Warrior side. We got a free Talent point, and Defensive Stance is now baseline, but all the major changes are on the Arms side today. This is our cleave setup, hopping over to our single target talents. This is the new single target tree, more or less.
You can obviously swap around some things, like Berserker Rage, Intervene, etc., but for DPS, this is generally going to be what we're playing with right now. As you can see, some changes from before, we're no longer speccing into the Crushing Force talent because Slam basically has zero emphasis on a rotation now. It's a last resort kind of button we're going to press. Instead, we're actually using Thunderclap with Blood and Thunder talented in our single targets, but we are still picking up Barbaric Training. We'll go over that in a little bit why.
As far as the Arms Warrior side of things, starting from the top here, Improved Overpower hasn't changed, but we are speccing into it now instead of Blood Surge because we don't need the excess rage generation so much anymore. The major one here is that we have Ignore Pain back as Arms Warriors, and we're going to be using this thing all the time. It's a great button. Who knows if Blizzard ends up leaving it the way it is right now because as it is right now, it is part of a rotation even though it doesn't actually do any damage.
But, this row hasn't changed at all. As we move down here, we got a new talent with Anger Management called Spiteful Serenity. Would not recommend it at the moment. Anger Management basically fulfills the same role of resetting CS faster anyway, so it's not that great. We're going to be using Anger Management still.
Improved Mortal Strike was removed and swapped with Massacre, if I remember right. We now have Exhilarating Blows we're going to be using, and Sweeping Strikes is now baseline, so we have two new talents here. One being Improved Sweeping Strikes, which makes it last six seconds longer, and this new fancy toy called Strength of Arms, which gives Overpower a 10% increase in critical strike chance and damage and also generates eight rage during our execute phase. It's an all-around fantastic talent, we're going to be picking that up. Moving down here, I'll go over these in a second. We're taking Dreadnought now, and these haven't changed. Massacre hasn't changed.
Spending as much rage during our Colossus smash window for the test of Might hasn't changed, and that's where Ignore Pain, Storm of Swords, and Thunderclap come in. We're taking these talents even in single target situations to spend as much rage as we can during our Colossus smash windows while still casting overpower, which is free. With Exhilarating Blows and Battlelog, we'll be getting a lot of Mortal Strike resets.
So, we'll still prioritize Mortal Strike on cooldown while burning off a charge of overpower as much as possible because we now have two charges with Dreadnoughts. In an ideal situation in a raid environment with buffs and Wind Fury Totem, we'll cast Ignore Pain right after a Colossus Smash goes up. Ignore Pain has an 11-second cooldown, and Colossus Smash with the Blunt Instruments Town lasts 13 seconds.
Therefore, in an ideal situation, we can get off two Ignore Pains during our Colossus Smash window, spending 80 rage towards our Test of Might buff. The most important part of Ignore Pain is that it's off Global Cooldown, allowing us to cast Mortal Strikes during our CS window itself because overpower is doing a ton of damage on its own now due to all the buffs it received. The idea is to spend off at least one charge of overpower before dumping rage as much as possible for the chance that Tactician procs and resets a charge of it.
Of course, we'll put up our Rend, which we always want to maintain at all times, even during execute phase. We'll Plus smash into Ignore Pain and then keep Mortal Strike and overpower on cooldown as much as possible. In between overpowers, if we have the rage for it, we'll spend off rage on Whirlwind because it's so expensive. If both of these are on cooldown, we'll also Thunderclap to spin off rage instead of slamming because Slam does less damage when it's not talented and costs less rage.
The idea is to spend as much rage as possible to reset Colossus Smash from Anger Management. In a raid environment, we'll open up with Rend before our Avatar Colossus Smash window into cooldowns. However, without Wind Fury Totem and such, I'd recommend opening up with an overpower to get your rage buffered a little bit.
That way, you can immediately throw up an Ignore Pain. You won't always be able to fit two Ignore Pains in your window; it just depends on procs and crits and how much rage you have. Ideally, we'll get into two of these. Last but not least, our other cooldown is Thunderous Roar. I'd recommend not using it with your Colossus Smash; instead, throw it at the end of the Colossus Smash window during Test of Mights.
This way, we can spend as many globals getting that buff as big as possible and throw Thunderstorm afterward. On a target, this will look like opening up with Overpower, getting our Rend, popping cool downs, Ignore Pain, Mortal Strike, Overpower, getting a proc with Mortal Strike, getting another proc, swinging Little Strike, Overpower, and throwing in a Whirlwind. We'll then juggle back and forth between these two, keeping up our Rend, and trying to fit in one more Ignore Pain. We'll spend as much rage as possible during this window.
Thunderclap comes in here to maintain our Overpowered stacks. As seen here, I didn't have enough rage to fit in another Ignore Pain. With Wind Fury Totem, Whirlwind takes priority over Ignore Pain when low on rage.
If you're off and you're just flooded with rage, you can throw it in again, but otherwise, you're going to want this to be up going into that window since it has an 11-second cooldown. So, you want it to be available, and you've got to be a little bit finicky with it. It's a lot of plates to be spinning right now, tracking all three of these cooldowns, plus procs between Overpower and Mortal Strike, in and of itself.
But it's a very engaging rotation, and I'm a big fan of it. If you have any questions about that, I know it's a little bit willy-nilly how you wanna how it all works together. It's very reactionary-based, but if you have any questions, feel free to ask them down below, and I'll do my best to answer those. Moving on to some light cleave situations, because we now have Sweeping Strikes built-in, you're basically going to be playing the same single-target spec you were before in two to three targets, and you'll just continue to do your single-target rotation like you would before but putting up Sweeping Strikes before it.
The only thing you could really swap up occasionally is if it's like dedicated to Target cleave, you could drop our Strength of Arms Talent, pick up Improved Sweeping Strikes just to give more time on that Sweeping Strikes window. Also, one thing to note with Exhilarating Blows, Mortal Strike has a 20% chance to reset its own cooldown.
This seems to be affected by targets hit, so with Sweeping Strikes up, it's like 20% per two targets. It seems to proc a lot more in AOE, so you'll find situations where this will just proc repeatedly, and you'll find yourself just spamming nothing but Mortal Strike during your Colossus Smash window just to spend as much rage in that for Testament Bites.
Moving on to the execute phase, it hasn't changed since what it was in 10.0.5, except we're no longer burning off Skullsplitter anymore. I would recommend you get up your Rend before you go on a clause of Smash because it's a bit of a wasted Global during the CS window because it doesn't hit very hard in and of itself.
You can actually cast Rend itself instead of Thunderclap in that situation just because it's a little bit less rage if you don't have a full rage bar and you're wanting to spam executes out, but that's only if you don't have a full rage bar. Otherwise, you can just Thunderclap. But, for execute, you're going to be stacking up two stacks of Executioner's Precision, basically into Mortal Strikes, and just kind of going back and forth between those two while throwing in the occasional Overpower. Trying to keep at least one charge of this rolling at all times just to generate some rage off of Strength of Arms is just gonna smooth out the execute phase and buff your Mortal Strike at the same time.
So, the cleave side of things, this is for like medic plus heavy AOE fights, that kind of thing, hasn't really changed at all from 10.0. We have a couple of extra talents we can throw around, of course. You can pick up Berserker Rage, there are some options in here. I like Storm Bolt, obviously for medic plus, but the AOE side of things hasn't really changed. We just had more emphasis on Dreadnought now because of the Overpower buffs.
Before I forget, our tier set. If you have this, you could open up with a cleave just to try and fish for a proc for the set. If it crits, it's going to give you that 5% increased damage, so that's always a good thing to throw in on, like, five targets, you know, ten targets, whatever it may be. There are only two targets here, but imagine this is five targets, you know, and we're going to do this like an AOE rotation.
So, I'm going to go in, put up my Thunderclap, try to cleave just to fish for that proc, and then I'm going to immediately hit Avatar, which is going to proc my Blade Storm from Blade Master's Torment. The reason why I'm doing it this way is to stack up Hurricane Stacks before I do the rest of my burst.
The idea is to keep six stacks of Hurricane up during Thunderstorm's duration so it's buffing this big bleed on everything. So we're going to put up Rend, cleave immediately, Avatar, Bladestorm, and then outside of that, if you didn't get a proc, you could throw in another cleave and then Warbreaker into Thunder Shore. Then you're going to use your Merciless Bonegrinder window into probably another cleave, and then use your Whirlwind and then immediately hard cast your normal Blade Storm. That's just to maintain that Hurricane stack.
If your haste is high enough, you'll be able to fit in those globals to do that. At the end of that, we're going to just burn off with cleave and Whirlwind during this nine-second Merciless Bonegrinder window, and you can fill in with Sweeping Strikes and Overpower/Dreadnought lines in between cleave.
That's basically how it's going to shake out in the long run while maintaining Rend with Thunderclap. To show all that off real quick here, we're going to go and put up our Rend, I'm going to cleave here, fish for a proc, we didn't get it, it's okay, immediately send our Avatar here, we got a proc there into a Warbreaker, Thunderous Roar, please Whirlwind, cleave, and then we hardcast and we maintain our stacks here on Hurricane, and we're going to cleave out, keep up our Rends, another cleave, Whirlwinds, another cleave at the very end, and then we're going to throw up our Sweeping Strikes and go into our general rotation, which is alternating cleave between overpower execute procs, Whirlwind when it's up, spinning rage, using Warbreaker when it comes up, and just maintaining cleave basically between every other cast while maintaining Rend with Thunderclap, and you could use Whirlwind whenever it's up, basically.
That's our general cleave rotation. Do you have any questions about that? Ask down below, and I think that's going to basically cover it for our PvE side of things today. Real quick, if you're interested, I can't - I really wish they would change that - can't swap over to my PvP build real quick here, but we're going to wait 25 seconds, and I'm going to talk about PvP just a little bit for those interested at the end here. Nothing has really changed so much, broadly speaking. Thunder Shore did get buffed; it's well - it's no longer nerfed, I should say, in PvP.
Mortal Strike once again. I'm still picking up Rend here because we have a couple of free talents. Basically, it's just an extra global you can throw in for some added pressure, especially if you're getting kited a lot. Fatality is nerfed by like 80-something silly in PvP, so it's not great, but you don't have a lot of other options that are that useful, so I like to grab it anyway. You could pick up Blood Surge or Bloodborne even, but occasionally you'll get lucky with this thing and get some nice stacks on somebody that's been kiting. In World game, it'll actually do some decent damage, so I like the potential of Fatality being there, but we're gonna play this basically just like you would on the PvE side of things, just focusing on Overpower and Mortal Strike more than anything, using Execute when it's up, of course, and going for big setup windows with Unhinged, Blade Storm, Spear, and whatnot.
So, Unhinged will cleave when you have Swinging Strikes up, so like a general opener on people and two Targets, I'd put up Rend on a couple going to a War Breaker and then use our Spear Avatar combo to cleave as many Unhinged as we can, going into Mortal Strike. Then, you could do another Blade Storm or save it just to get as many Blade Storm or Mortal Strike procs during that window as possible. So, like, I cast it two or three times there, but we got 13 hits on two Targets just because Unhinged is a pretty good build.
I'm not gonna ramble too much about PvP today, maybe a future video on that, but anyway, if you guys have any questions about Arms Warriors, leave them down below. Thank you for watching if you made it this far, and I will see you in the next one. Peace.
