Many people know me from the fury guide I wrote, however the last couple months I have been raiding as a MS warrior. I have noticed that there is not a good pve arms guide so I decided to write one myself again. As a result you will get to muddle through my horrible grammar and spelling again. With a little luck it will be more complete in the near future.
1) Spec/Overview
2) Quartz
3) Slam Rotation
4) Heroic Strike Rotation
5) Stats/Gear/Gems
6) Improved Demo
7) Execute Phase 1) Spec/Overview:
Until very recently MS was considered a joke for raiding. Very few warriors did it and most were made fun of for not going DW fury. Now the build has been gaining momentum and becoming more and more popular. Now in BT/Hyjal you will see the balance shifting in favor of MS warriors..especially if a raid carries just one dps warrior. The added raid damage from Blood Frenzy is a large increase in raid damage and even improves the aggro generation of the tanks. There are two builds making their rounds right now. One is the improved slam build that I would say nearly every MS warrior uses but recently I have seen a few warriors drop improved slam for improved execute and pick up improved heroic strike. I have not experience with the latter build so can not offer good criticism but it is not something I would recommend. I will be giving the build a try myself sometime soon to see how it feels and after that I then I will add more information to how the build preforms.
Be warned. This is probably the most intensive dps build out there right now. If you want to be topping the charts you have to be on top of your game constantly and have to focus even on farm content. DW fury is far more forgiving of lag and laziness. That being said when done properly an imp slam build is capable of similar dps as fury and provides Blood Frenzy which adds another couple hundred dps to the raid.
Note: I include improved demo shout in all the builds but if you have someone else that is taking it you can put those points wherever you please.
I also include improved intercept in both the builds. This can easily be swapped for Improved Disciplines which will add some damage. I personally prefer the intercept because there are some fights where it comes in handy but if you wanted the maximum dps go with Improved Disciplines.
Imp Slam Build:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
Heroic Strike Build:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft 2) Quartz
Quartz is a wow ace mod that tracks your swing timer. If you are going the improved slam route then this mod is required. See next section for more info.
3) Slam Rotation
Now that you have your build and your mod you need to learn your rotation. This is the hardest part of of being an Arms warrior as your damage is directly related to how well you can execute this rotation. Slam resets your auto attack swing timer so when you use the ability is crucial. Here is how things break down:
You want your slam to start every swing as soon as the auto attack happens. To do this you need to have Quartz activated and displaying your swing timer. Ideally if you have 0 latency you will hit slam as soon as the swing timer finishes. If executed perfectly you will only loose .5 seconds from your auto attack and you will be maximizing your potential damage. Unfortunately most people do not have 0 latency so to maimize your rotation Quartz has another very use feature to help you avoid latency slowing your rotation.
When you hit your slam button Quartz will display your latency on the Slam swing timer. Remember this number every time you slam. For example if it says 300 MS then you watch your swing timer and when there is 300 MS left in the swing timer hit slam. When done correctly the slam will start as soon as the auto attack happens. The problem here is that if you jump the gun even a little you will loose your auto attack and that is much worse then being a little late on the slam. As you do this more and more you will develop a feel for it and it will get a little easier.
Now that you got the Slam part of the rotation now you need to weave in your Mortal Strike, Whirlwind, and shouts. There is an easy rotation for this:
Auto attack --> Slam --> Mortal Strike
Auto attack --> Slam --> Whirlwind
Auto attack --> Slam --> Mortal Strike
Auto attack --> Slam --> Demo Shout/battle shout
Now do not be worried if you do not have the rage to do the full rotation every time through. Slam is your priority. Slam every attack then if rage is left over go to the rest of your rotation. If I slam and then do not have rage for for a MS or WW I will use the available cooldown to bloodrage to give a little boost to the next rotation.
The last important thing to realize for this rotation is that you can not push you hasted attack speed past 2.5 seconds. Because of your cooldowns even if you push your attack speed past 2.5 seconds your rotation will still take 2.5 seconds and you will loose all the haste past that point. I use a 3.5 speed sword and have 3/5 Flurry and the Gruul trinket. When The trinket is procced and Flurry is up my attack speed is 2.52 seconds. So I make sure to avoid any more haste at all as it would have no effect on me.
4) Heroic Strike Rotation
While I have never used this build I understand the basic fundamentals which I will lay down here for now. In the future I will try it out myself but in the mean time if anyone reading this has used it themselves please feel free to expand and explain your rationale for it.
Heroic strike is never used ever for the slam rotation but it does have dps benefits past the 176 damage the tool tip says it adds. Heroic strike turns a white attack that can glance into a yellow attack that can not be glanced and gets bonus crit damage. The goal here is to limit damage lost to glancing blows and have rage to hit MS and WW every time they cooldown, something which a slam rotation rarely allows.
5) Stats/Gear/Gems Weapon:
Since you are arms you will have to pick a weapon mastery to go along with your weapon. I personally prefer swords and they will slightly out preform axes. However if you have a good axe do not be afraid to use it as axe spec is still good for pve. DO NOT USE MACES FOR PVE. You will loose a lot of damage if you go mace spec. Avoid it.
Stats:
Hit Rating: The first most important stat for pve arms is hit rating. You will not have acess to percision so the cap for all your attacks to hit a raid boss is 142. Getting to this level is very important as it is easy to obtain and provides the cheapest item budget point to dps increase ratio there is. People that know me might be shocked to hear me say this but if you have to Gem for it. 142 is not a huge number however and it is obtainable usually without even trying once you have acess to good gear. In fact it sometimes becomes a juggling of gear to lower your hit so you do not go over the cap.
Armor Penetration:
Most of the hard data is going to come from a thread at the Elitist Jerks forums. I will post the full thread here for you to browse at your leisure then I will repost the more pertinent data directly.
Boss armor values:
[RAID] Boss armor values - Elitist Jerks
Notice that all but 2 of the bosses have either 6200 or 7700 armor. A similar pattern occurs in the trash mobs: 5475/5700/5950 or 6800/7100/7400 for level 70/71/72 mobs. In terms of percentage reduction, these values result in either 34.15% or 39.15% armor reduction vs attackers of the same level as the mob.
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Armor reduction of a level 73 boss attacked by a level 70 player is 37% for 6200 armor, and 42.17% for 7700 armor. Sunder Armor x5 is -2600 armor, Faerie Fire is -610, and Curse of Recklessness is -800.
For a boss with 6200/7700 armor, SA x5 gives a damage increase of 18.36%/16.61%.
If we assume now that the boss has SA stacked x5 on it, adding just FF gives a further 4.5%/4.05% increase, CoR gives 5.99%/5.38%, and with both on they give 11.06%/9.9% increase over just SA.
Armor Penetration is a bit more complex because it comes it varied amounts. If the boss has just SA x5 on it, then the effect of ArP is as follows:
100 ArP: 0.71%/0.64%
200 ArP: 1.43%/1.29%
300 ArP: 2.16%/1.95%
400 ArP: 2.91%/2.62%
500 ArP: 3.66%/3.3%
For a fully debuffed boss (SA x5, FF, CoR) the increase from ArP is:
100 ArP: 0.79%/0.71%
200 ArP: 1.59%/1.42%
300 ArP: 2.41%/2.15%
400 ArP: 3.24%/2.89%
500 ArP: 4.08%/3.64%
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This stat is what is propelling Arms warriors up teh dps charts. It is easily possible in Tier 6 gear to get enough armor penetration so that when executioner procs you bring low armored bosses to 0 armor. In fact you can get more then this though you can lower a targets armor past 0. When you pass this point then it is wise to carry around gear for low armor bosses that has other stats. Then for high armor bosses use the extra penetration and for low armor bosses use the other gear.
Crit:
When I switched to Arms I kept the socket all str mentality and it worked for a while. Now though as I pick up more and more armor pen my AP is staying high but my crit took a dive. I am in the process of regemming to get my crit up because with all the AP and armor pen on Tier 6 gear and the lack of crit it's relative value of crit has gone up past that of Str.
Tier 6 Gear:
I recommend going for 4 piece tier 6. I go for the Helm/Chest/Gloves/Shoulders. Pick up the bloodboil legs and only use 4 pieces.
I also want to take a moment to steer people in the direction of
MaxDPS.com - News It is not a be all end all of gear ranking however it offers a crucial service in the fact that it re-evaluate all the stats values based on your current stats. While not 100% it gives a very good feel for gear and is very helpful in planning upgrades.
6) Improved Demoralizing Shout
This is something that to me is very important. That is because for a warlock to safely be able to use curse of recklessness on a raid boss someone in the raid needs to have 5/5 improved demo shout. This falls to arms warriors for several reasons mainly because unbridled wrath is very lackluster for an arms warrior so we are not loosing much. We also have room in our attack rotation to use demo shout. Curse of recklessness adds 800 armor penetration for the entire raid so it is very important for raid dps. If you raid with only 2 locks or someone else in the raid has improved demo then do not worry about it.
7) Execute Phase
Durring this phase I have two 1.5 speed weapons that I equip and I blow my cooldowns and spam execute. Now I used to keep executing the entire 20% but now I have reached a point where once my cooldowns are over and I no longer have the rage to support an execute every global cooldown I do more damage re-equipping my two hander and resuming my slam rotation.
Now the question is at what point does it become worth it to maintain your slam rotation over executing? That is something I will have to get back to you on.
