fury as the new pvp buildFollow

i kinda hate to say it, but my observations and experience up to this point lead me to believe that arms pvp may very well be dead as we know it.

why?

1. burst damage. fury has higher burst, and it tends to be more controlled. death wish, recklessness, heroic strike > whirlwind will generate well over 8k damage on a clothie (this is with easily obtainable level 80 weapons and armor) in the blink of an eye. its rage-heavy yes, but comparatively far less so than the best burst arms has to offer (sudden death). fury burst is also, as noted, more controllable by a good margin (and in the case of bladestorm, doesnt CC you for six seconds).

2. heroic fury. its basically an anti-root trinket with a 45s cooldown that has the side effect of refreshing intercept.

3. deep wounds with two 2h's. getting a string of crits can really load up on the DW damage. ticks for over 500 are pretty common, and the max ive seen in pvp was over 1200 on a druid turtling in bear form. 1200 unmitigated damage every 2s is pretty crazy, and you have a decent chance to more or less refresh it every time you swing.

4. intensify rage. 20s CD on zerker rage means you never fall behind the psychic scream timer. 2 minute cooldown on death wish and 3.5 minute CD on recklessness means you get to use those skills that much more often, which translates into them being available more often.

5. bladestorm. AWESOME burst. long cooldown (about 30s too long) and the self-CCing nature of it makes it a niche move; great if you can set it up properly (sweeping strikes before hand is a must) but lackluster if you cant (and its easy to really minimize the damage you do with it).

6. the oft-mentioned "bipolar" nature of some arms talents. taste for blood and relentless assault (among others) make you want to stay in battle stance to keep rend up and keep using overpower. casters, kiting, and the restriction of pummel/intercept to zerker stance make you want to stay in zerker (the 3% crit is nice too). getting the new talents in arms generally means two things; you stay in battle stance a lot, and youre, strangely, even more proc reliant than before mace stun was removed.

7. the "randomness" of arms. when sudden death procs on a guy with about 30-40% life and youre sitting at 70 rage with a glyph of execute and recklessness up....life is good. you can GUARANTEE that sucker dies. however, those kinds of event combinations are exceedingly rare. taste for blood and rend/overpower are another example of the randomness. you potentially have great burst, but it all requires MS to be off CD and two procced abilities to proc within a short time of each other. so while technically arms burst can equal or even exceed fury burst, the sheer unpredictability of the burst hurts arms more than it helps.

what does arms bring over fury?

well, first off, mortal strike. you use it, it hits, its on the enemy, done deal. furious attacks, due to the PPM nature, has a tendency to fall off from time to time. this is mitigated to a certain extent by the sheer burst fury has, but sometimes itll fall off at the worst possible time, and then the fight gets more or less reset. arms has a leg up on fury over this.

secondly, axe spec, endless rage and second wind. we all know the power of second wind, so i dont need to go there. axe spec got a much needed boost with the addition of extra crit strike damage bonus, and endless rage, now that it works properly, really does give you a lot of rage to work with. but that, as far as i can see, is about it.

thirdly, the gear. arms, just by virtue of the fact that you have a lower hit cap and only one weapon to worry about, is easier to gear for. TG fury needs a goodly amount of hit AND crit to perform best. you want at least 25% crit in zerker stance (more as resilience becomes a factor) and a minimum of 7% +hit before talents (precision will cap your specials at 10%). so for those warriors who are a bit undergeared, arms may still be the favorable route due to the gear constraints of fury.

i can see arms working in certain arena compositions, mostly 5's, maybe a few 3's. you want someone or something with a large aoe root or snare, so mage, hunter, or unholy DK is probably necessary. this allows you to set up some pretty overwhelming burst damage with a reck'd sweeping strikes > MS > bladestorm combination. the MS keeps heals down on the focus target, while the bladestorm and the sweeping strikes spread damage all over hell and creation, which further stresses healing. with the addition of a second MS effect (hunter or rogue) you can quite easily pull off a target switch mid-bladestorm, potentially knocking two targets out in the span of six seconds or less.

aside from that, fury i think brings better, more controlled burst DPS potential. if you can overcome the handicap of furious attacks and have the gear to make it work, my opinion is that fury greatly outperforms arms. as a long time fan of arms, im a bit saddened to say that, but my own experiences tell me its true, at least in terms of BG's and wintergrasp combat.

Edited, Dec 4th 2008 7:34am by Quor

Have you tried prot pvp yet quor?

While it won't serve the same purpose as fury or arms pvp (burst dmg with a healing debuff) I believe it will find it's place in 5's very comfortably.

The sheer amount of mobility and control it exibits (especially against casters) is rediculous. Add in the fact that prot is no longer the brick wall with no spikes on it and your more than just a nuisance.

Offensive dispell, armor debuff, AP debuff, attack speed debuff, 5 and 4 second stuns that don't require combo points or have very long cooldowns. With a properly set up spell alert mod you can see that incoming sheep or cyclone on one of your allies and reflect it if timed right.

Also you could just run your raid gear. Given you'll be crit more often but you'll also be sitting at 30k+ hp with more mitigation than anyone would dare try to burst down. (weakness being a heavy caster opposition)

I could easily see a War(prot), War(fury or arms), Shaman(elem), Priest(disc), Paladin(holy) team working quiet well.

Why an elemental shaman? With 2 warriors, wouldn't an enhancement shaman be better for windfury?

fury is the one with the disarm reduction yo. thats actually another mark against arms i forgot to put in; if you go down to bladestorm, you cant pick up weapon mastery, which means you need a weapon chain on your weapon or disarm effects CC you for 10s.



a little. when 3.0 dropped i didnt really have the gear to make it work, and i kinda feel that prot pvp requires an even steeper level of gear than fury pvp does. the best prot pvp'ers i heard of in 3.0 were the ones with a large number of T6 (for the 4-pc) and four pieces of the arena set (s3 or s4). the problem with gearing prot for pvp is that you need block value for it to be really successful (among other stats of course) and warrior pvp gear lacks that. until (if) they put in a prot pvp set that has lots of block value AND resilience, pvping in tank gear will be as much of a detriment as it is a boon. casters will still be ignoring all your armor, and youll have no resilience to chew away at that extra crit damage.

id really like them to put in a prot pvp set however. that would be quite full of win.

I agree a pvp prot set would rock. Could be itemized exactly how raid gear is except replace defense rating with resilience. I don't have a clue what their respective item values are but it's a start.

Also disarming a fury warrior doesn't completely disable him. Bloodthirst requires no weapon.

True, but Dismantle also removes your shield unless they've changed it.

Shockwave (Prot) and Disarm though will both work without a weapon though.

Maybe I'm wrong but shields are not main hand weapon so for most disarm ability shields can't be disarm except by rogue who can disarm main/off hand/throwing slots at once.

Did you not read what I said? Dismantle doesn't matter for a prot warrior lol. We have ways to deal with it.

EDIT: Now dismantling a hunter is ******** because it makes them basically utterly worthless. They can't do anything without their ranged.

Edited, Dec 6th 2008 10:55pm by ZerosMayhem

That's a bit of an off statement though. Judgement of Justice is on a 10 sec CD and it > Sprint, a 3 minute CD.

If you disarm an arms warrior (compared to a TG warrior), you're removing only 61% of the white damage for 100% longer ... so actually, disarming an arms warrior is more devastating to him that it is to a fury warrior.

Edited, Dec 7th 2008 8:24pm by robertlofthouse

I can't cleanse... All I can do is cloak or trinket. Which means I'm still wasting either a 1 or 2 minute CD to counter a 10 sec CD spell. While you're right that it's kind of lame that dismantle can > shield wall, I'm just saying that you can't really state that it's per definition ******** that a 1 min CD > a 5 min CD.

I understand your point. From a basic statistical view point...1 is not greater than 5. Following that simple line basically makes dismantle an OP skill. When a rogue dismantles me, I can not pop shield wall for the 10 seconds. I don't even think weapon chain works here either. Because the chain must be applied to a weapon, I don't think you can attach it to a shield (I could be wrong).

However you CAN counter dismantle by disarm. While the rogue removes your shield, your method for defense and mitigation, you remove their MH, their method for dps. It cancels out. That's a counter. Throw in shockwave and intimidating shout and you've got a decent amount of choices there.

Also, I do not believe that dismantling WHILE I'm under the shield wall buff, removes the buff. Yes, I know that it would make sense that it would...but following the spell wording and how buffs work, I don't think it does. Again I could be wrong.

So this goes back to my point. While it does suck to be dismantled, it doesn't make you useless. I understand you want things to be fair and balanced but this game has been trying to do that for 4 years. If dismantle is the worst thing a rogue has against us, I'm not gonna complain.