Ialaman wrote:
An arms warrior does marginal DPS in raids, can be comparable to a ret pally.
I definitely would not go so far as to say that. I raided as an arms warrior for quite a while and I was doing a good amount of damage. (And no, my raiding parties were not incompetent or bad) I would usually be up in the top 6-8 in DPS, which is not amazing, but is also not bad. And I would definitely not go so far as to say and Arms warrior does comparable damage to a ret pally. All the ret pallies that raided with with my arms warrior did far less damage than me.
The main problem I experienced with raiding as an arms warrior were issues with raid utility (other than BF and MS, what do you have?). Ialaman, you probably have just not raided with a very good (not saying incompetent) arms warrior.
As someone else said, you may just have to get used to the respec costs. While they are quite a bit, you would probably only be respecing once every three or four days.