Our Warrior of today and of the future!
I’ve been playing my Warrior as of late as I’ve been out of touch with my Rogue for a while now and my Death Knights are not really holding much appeal to me right now. Furthermore, there are some things I dislike about the DK class mechanics that are simply not making me want to play (Specifically, there is a set priority system in which you can do absolute great dps with but requires a glyph I just loathe.)
Having ranted what I needed to rant, I’ve been playing my Warrior in the idea of making him a tank. At this point, I got him up to 80 and decided that instead of being judged upon by the lack of gear to tank things, I’d just go as DPS, and get tanking gear, then switch at one point. This sounded like a good idea...until I realized that I’d be enjoying DPSing on my Warrior more than anything. (Go figure, this has happened to any of the tanking classes I’ve played, save the Druid where I prefer healing on him.) So safe to say, I’ve now been working on DPS specs, specifically Fury.
Fury in itself is actually a spec that I enjoy the most. Arms to me just seems like, as someone put it, a casino machine where you push the right button when the certain situation arises. Fury falls more into the fighting style in which I enjoy: Follow a rotation of sorts, and smash things dead in the face. But one thing has bugged me while playing this class and it’s becoming more and more of an issue: Slam.
As it stands now, Slam just feels like an odd attack out. It simply doesn’t work with Fury. I understand that Blizzard is trying to give Fury warriors the extra attack they desperately were asking for at the end of BC, but the Slam mechanic simply isn’t it. I find myself either prioritizing WW or BT over it, and most of the time, I’m throwing another attack to help out the raid (Demo shout if we don’t have a paladin tank, refresh Battle shout/Commanding shout/Sunder to get up to 5, etc etc etc.) This leaves me with little to no chance to hit that pretty Slam button, and if I do, it turns out that I clip either BT or WW which turn out to be more damage than Slam ever will be. What is worse is that this isn’t constant: it’s an ability (namely Bloodsurge) that makes the attack instant and allows you to slide the attack into the rotation. Although it wouldn’t affect your dps negatively if you ignored the attack, it’s two points in your talent tree used and the possibility of added DPS with that extra attack. By ignoring it, you’re ignoring the added dps that Slam can give you. But exactly how ‘useful’ is Slam if you’re regulated to other roles?
If the ability was more constant, we could probably work a rotation around having Slam in our rotation and still give out the added bonuses of Sundering if need be or doing the debuffs necessary in the raid to help out. This is why I propose my first change for Cataclysm, in the form of potentially a Mastery:
Slam Mastery: Placing a point in this mastery allows you to make your Slam ability instant.
What this would allow is to put Slam in our rotations and finally get us our third attack we’ve been so desperately working on getting. However the problem is already noticible: 1) What will Bloodsurge do, and as well as the Arms talent: Improved Slam? 2) There’s no global cooldown on the attack, will it just be useful to Slam instead of doing any other attack as you can simply hit it as often as possible? These two things will be discussed below:
1)Bloodsurge/Improved Slam changes.
Naturally if we put that Mastery into play, both Bloodsurge and Improved Slam lose their appeal. With this in mind, we will have to change what both attacks will do. Bloodsurge actually is easier to work with it’s current incarnation; simply remove the instant attack portion.
Bloodsurge: Your Whirlwind, Bloodthirst and Heroic Strike attacks have a x% to make your Slam attack cost no rage.
This would really make slam a nice addition the Fury rotation and make things quite interesting in the spectrum of things. It would also need the least reworking as it simply removes it’s current function of resetting the slam timer to 0 when used and simply keep it’s no rage cost mechanic.
Improved Slam is a bit trickier, but something easily fixed as well. Simply make it 25/50% extra damage when they use Slam.
Improved Slam: Your Slam ability now does 25/50% extra damage when used.
This will boost up Arms damage as Slam will now be a stronger tool in their arsenal and could potentially juggle the importance of Slam in their rotations. It would take more rework coding wise, for sure, as you’re really changing the skill from a time cast decrease to a damage increase, but I would think it would be possible to do.
2)Slam’s no cooldown
Unfortunately, this is where some people may begin to dislike the idea: To incorporate this attack change, you will have to put a cooldown on Slam. Having an instant slam as Fury that costs only 15 rage will throw out the other two attacks hands down. Arms may grumble at this as slam really is their last resort attack and having a CD on it may potentially cause it’s utility to be wasted and for them to resort to Heroic Strike, but it is simply how it goes and I don’t think it will affect them as much as they would think. To be honest, I would like to argue that the CD may most likely not affect Arms at all as Slam is mostly used as a last resort anyway and the CD will probably be burnt down. As such, I would like to give a cooldown of 6 seconds, or in that regard. This may end up affecting rotations in the end for Fury, but this would make the most sense as you will want to have it in between your Bloodthirst and your Whirlwind. It would allow for more rotations to be formed and more ideas to be thrown about as to what to do when you have that extra cooldown. Of course, this doesn’t mean you have to use Slam: you can still use other attacks if need be to help out with the raid (Sunder, etc..), but if the buffs are there, you have Slam to fall on instead of the rather clunky Heroic Strike.
Addendum: Heroic Strike
I’m not going to go into detail with HS/Cleave. Blizzard has already stated numerous times that they dislike the mechanic and want to rework it therefore I would rather just let them work on that instead. But it would be nice to see HS actually disappear from the attack board from Fury and not have an attack that has extra threat linked on it used by DPS specs. This would sincerely regulate some of the threat issues that Arms may have if they must use HS over Slam (I believe at one point HS actually becomes better than Slam.) and it would ultimately give Fury the attack sorely needed. But like I said, they’re doing something with HS/Cleave and on every ‘On Next’ attack so it’ll be interesting to see what they plan on doing.
End thoughts:
In conclusion, I believe that the idea of Slam being the extra attack in both DPS trees in the Warrior class a good idea to go, but right now, the implementation of the attack is simply not working out for either specs. Either one spec has a timer on it and simply can’t use it unless they’re stationary (And let’s face it, there’s not many fights out there anymore that allow you to just sit down and beat the snot out of things.) , or the other spec ONLY uses it when a proc happens, which really doesn’t alleviate our missing attack. (It does, but only at times, and by this point, we’ve regulated ourselves to working with debuffs instead if the party needs it, or just using our dump.)
I leave this to the rest of the community to discuss: What do you think of the Slam mechanics for Fury/Arms? Do you like/dislike them? Do you want something changed? Are the ideas mentioned above a good/bad idea? This thread’s more to discuss the mechanics of Fury but Arms warriors are more than welcome to chime in to add their thoughts and propositions. In the end, let’s try to get a nice thread going about DPS mechanics involved in Fury and Arms and make our Warrior class that much more fun!
