Changes Coming for the Arms Rotation

Arms Warriors will be seeing some big changes to the way that their spec operates, but fundamentally, the core idea of the rotation will remain largely unchanged. Specifically, Arms will still be about being efficient with Rage and then blowing as much of it as possible while under the effect of Colossus Smash, which of course, thanks to Sudden Death, is somewhat less predictable than it is with Fury.

In fact, most of the pieces are sticking around. Mortal Strike is still the main Rage generator and will be a central ability in the rotation. You're still going to have Colossus Smash and try to maximize its uptime.

The big change is that Overpower is going away. Overpower's old funkiness, with its activation on dodges and its bypassing of avoidance mechanics, doesn't really fit in the brave new world of no expertise. Also, while it's been a useful ability to be frugal with Rage, Arms is being re-focused on very hard-hitting abilities.

The big change here comes to Execute. The cost of Execute is getting doubled, but Arms Warriors will now be able to use Execute regardless of an enemy's health. What this means is likely that Execute will be used during Colossus Smash, and Slam will now take the place of Overpower as the "cheap" ability to use when conserving Rage.

But if you thought that sounded like a serious nerf to Execute, here's the fun part: When the enemy is actually in Execute range, your auto-attacks will generate 40 Rage. That's right: 40. That's a lot of Rage.

So I imagine that in that bottom 20%, Arms will be able to almost spam Execute (weaving in a Mortal Strike now and again.) It also makes haste more attractive, as this Execute spam will be more sustainable when in that range.

This certainly cuts down on one of Arms' rotational abilities. While I don't know that this was the spec that needed such a central ability removed, I'm eager to test out the new rotation.

Fundamentally I think the Arms Warrior is about getting in those major strikes, which makes it kind of fun that Slam is the "cheap" one, assuming it still does massive damage.

I do think that what we'll see with these changes is that Arms Warriors are going to have to plan ahead a bit more. "Do I really want to hit Slam again before I get this Colossus Smash up?" Without Overpower as a practically free ability, you might find yourself saving up Rage until you can get CS up. But on the other hand, when you are ready to spend that Rage, you'll be able to blast away with gigantic Executes. It'll certainly make for a less frantic rotation, but Arms was never one of those frantic specs anyway. The question is just how much you can slow the rotation down (and that's assuming that slowing the rotation is the actual effect of this - I'm not a very experienced theory crafter) before it gets too slow.

And as a side note, Arms' mastery (which currently feels a lot like Multistrike) will now buff Mortal Strike, Slam, and Execute, reinforcing that idea of getting off gigantic hits.