My Dps Sucks

[marcopolo]

I am specked 33/28 typical Blood Frenzy spec and my DPS is so low I am about to cry. I am comparing my DPS to a lesser geared warrior who easily does twice as much damage. Last night in a heroic 5-man the freakin Prot Tank did 30% more damage than me.

My main problem is that I never get enough rage. I use slam and do my instant attack and then I have to wait forever for rage to get up to repeat. I use stance dance and bloodrage but still my rage is so low.

I am suspecting my problem is, that I am not allowing enough time for my white hits to raise my rage. I play a Rogue as my main and I constantly spam Sinister Strike without ever waiting.

Can you give me some pointers and some help?

[Taelas]

First off, do you have a swing-timer? If not, get one -- it's a huge boost to Slam-usage.

The key to using Slam is to use it as soon as possible after a white attack hits -- and only once, unless you are swimming in rage (but then that's the situations I'd be 'saving' Mortal Strike for; it's expensive and rage-gain as Arms/Fury isn't the best). Spamming Slam will only result in you going rage-starved. You need those white hits.

White hit, Slam, Mortal Strike as Rage allows, Whirlwind as Rage allows, white hit, Slam, etc.

[Marsellus]

Slam should be your 3rd priority. Only use it if you have extra rage while MS and WW are on cooldown.

I've never DPS'd as arms, but this is what I've been told.

[Crimsonstorm]

Slam is your rage dump, not a primay attack. Its the heroic strike of 2hers, in a way. You want to have enough rage for MS and WW, and only then if you have a lot of rage, time a slam in right after an autoattack, when MS and WW are on cooldown.

Dont stance dance, it wastes rage. Stay in berserker when dpsing unless there is a specific reason you must do something else.

[Crimsonstorm]

Gearwise, you want:

1) Enough hit rating to be capped, but no more. 142 vs a level 73 (9%). Vs trash somewhere around 80-100 is optimal depending on the mob level.

2) Slowest possible, highest dps weapon you can get.

3) For gearing 1 Str > 2 AP > 1 Crit >> other stuff. Gem for Str. Agi sucks.

[Taelas]

*shrug* I've never DPS'd as Arms but I've always been of the opinion that Slam is of higher priority than both MS and Whirlwind for 2-hand PvE DPS. Slam costs only half the rage of MS and deals comparable damage, and it's both more rage efficient and deals more damage than Whirlwind. I would at the very least prioritize Slam over WW.

[Crimsonstorm]

Slam resets your swing timer, so you lose some autoattack damage to cast it, and some rage that you wouldve gotten from that autoattack. How much depends on how well you time it. With .2 sec lag and .5 sec cast time with Imp Slam, a well timed Slam costs you .7 sec of autoattack dmg&rage.

[Taelas]

The damage bonus from Slam more than makes up for it, in my estimate. But like I said, I've never DPS'd as Arms.

[fastidius]

Isn't this the exact reason why fury is easier to work with for PVE?

I'm not saying you can't do it of course but the rage generation is the problem with arms. In a pvp world you are looking at burst damage which is generated by Bloodrage,charge MS and the fact that if your in direct contests you will be taking damage also increasing rage.

In a PVE world you are ganging up on mobs and thus need to generate your own rage, Fury has the talents that make faster swings worth while. The whole problem with fury is that it is based on a balance between swing speed and dmage generated. Also all the damage boosters like AP & Strength come into play every swing.

I personally haven't tried PVE with arms because its not as pretty as Fury and now with Sweeping strikes it can be a good farming tool also. I would have thought arms would be more isolated to PVP & Raid due to the amount of work required to generate the rage without receiving damage.

In a raid you can have a mob beating on you as an OT or the mobs do an AoE/special giving you all the rage you would normally be striving for in a 5 Man.

5 man PVE is probably the least suited to Arms spec in my mind and thus you most likely will begin to hate it sooner than love it.

Having said that i think that if you are commited to the spec you may find that opening up with a Fast weapon and then swapping weapons to the big 2 hander once you have some rage may be helpful as a fall back on the above mentioned methods. IE assist with dual wield equipped and then macro a weaponswap on the first MS and start your slam cycle.

It depends on how much rage issues you are having. Personally with a dual wield spec i go from empty to full in well under 10 seconds and can't burn rage fast enough with HS going. With cleave & Sweeping strikes going i'm in a similar boat but i do manage to end up with less than a full bar. I'm intending on getting a slightly slower mainhand soon to resolve my over rage issue but that is all on when stuff drops.

To me it seems like your fighting a battle with your spec rather than the mob.

Good luck with it however, I'd like to see a really good arms warrior in PVE to see how close the DPS can be. I have seen raid parses with them high in the list but it always seems to be that a fury warrior is easier to get the dps on.

[Horgar]

I kinda lean toward improved slam being better dps than WW on single targets. And better dmg per rage than WW. But like HS you can't take its tooltip cost and full damage at face value. Is slam normalized? It's not listed on wiki under either category. To not hijack the thread too bad - what are your stats and weapon and level? We're so gear dependant that in greens with a green weapon we're pretty sad. It's not til you get blues your lvl or better you start to break into acceptable group dps.

If it's not normalized .5 slam is superior to ww in every way. 1.0 is probably still so much more rage efficient that ww should only be tossed in as an extra even though it probably puts out less dps but 1.5 sec slam is pretty weak and very inefficient after delay costs. If it's not normalized slam at .5 is possibly better than MS in a raged starved environment. I did a bunch of rambling math in this post then moved it to a text file. It's all crap if slam is normalized.

Anyway if you don't have imp slam it's not an issue. Don't use it except as rage dump. On paper .5 slam seems superior to MS in rage efficiency so slam>MS>WW seems like it would be the ideal way to go if you can time the swings just right (quartz is good here) but in practice I think I'd go with MS>slam>ww unless i'm just reeeeaaaallly rage starved (like you're describing).

edit: if you're in a heroic you should have a 109 dps 3.6 speed 2h and 1500+ unbuffed AP with ~25% crit to expect to even come close to competing with a dps class. Again with the gear dependancy.

[Heero]

I've been 33/28 for about half an year in my raid and recently switched to fury (got yesterday the Talon of Azshara <3)
Being rage-starved is the biggest problem in 2h - builds and it isn't easy to compensate it.
At first, you really need a swing timer, without it, playing with slam is really painful. The purpose of it is, to use slam really after the white hit and not a millisecond before - you're losing the white hit and the rage of it.

Also, slam is really superior to WW and after a certain AP - margin better than MS. And because of the "casttime" of slam, it is not normalized (@Horgar).

Next, a slam - build also has a style rotation to get the best use of the cooldowns. The typical rotation is:

White Hit, Slam, MS
White Hit, Slam, WW
White Hit, Slam, MS
White Hit, Slam, Free Cooldown
-> repeat

You will see, that you cannot always stick to this rotation but when you're having the rage, do it so. If rage is an issue, so do the cycle until that rage - starved point and let the MS/WW - cooldown free. Then repeat the whole cycle again, because of the "non - ordered" cooldowns.
In raids, a windfury totem is a must for not getting to this situations.

[Kru]

Optimally you should press slam before your white hit lands, not after. Just like with spell casters, you can compensate for lag by pressing slam early and counting on the fact that the message won't get to the server until after the white hit lands.

This makes a sizeable difference if you're in the 300ms lag range, and once you get a feel for where on your swing timer the sweet spot is for your lag, it's not too hard. Lag isn't constant though so you will miss one every now and then if you're too aggressive.

[Morthengel]

Two other problems with 2h slam dps:

1)Dynamic fights where you should be moving while dpsing hinders your dps.

2)You should be watching bigwigs/DBM bars and warnings, not quartz on a boss fight. You can easily die while timing the best slam rotation. Or maybe it was just me.

Gone fury months ago, and never looked back.

[gazhkull]

It takes quite a bit of work to do competitive dps as a arms warrior. It bears repeating: very good gear, imp. slam and a swing timer. And even then you'll find yourself rage-starved at times, so it helps if you can consistently get a shaman in your group for windfury. If you play across from the other side of the planet like me (i.e. 400-500ms latency), then that's one more obstacle to getting a good rotation cycle down. Really needs more timing and concentration to make it work than dual wield.

Practice on mobs to get a feel of it, but even when you think you got the cycle down there will be some fights that have too much going on to keep up an effective rotation (especially if you are helping out with interrupts and such) and you get comments like "Hey Gaz, when did you go back to protection?"

[Georgiee]

Caesar's slam guide: http://www.honorbound.se/Slamdps2.pdf

That's the best guide to read up if your wanting to do slam dps Personally I think its just a world easier to spec full fury, dual wield and dps!