How To Improve As Arms Warrior — Midnight Pre-Patch (12.0)

Applicable to most classes, though particularly relevant to Arms Warriors, due to the reliance on auto-attacking for both Rage generation and damage. Any time spent off target is lost damage, with minimal means to recoup lost resources, unlike energy-based classes which will continue regenerating their resource up to its cap.

Due to the high mobility innate to the Warrior class, it is possible to play around boss mechanics and minimize downtime. If the boss is casting an area effect which requires players to run a certain distance away, a Warrior can instead continue attacking until the last few seconds, Heroic Leap away and immediately Charge back as soon as the danger has passed.

Although Arms has many free global cooldowns due to a lack of Rage, planning for and ensuring you fill as many global cooldowns as possible during the Colossus Smash debuff is paramount to maximizing Arms Warrior damage. When outside of those burst windows, its better to let Rage accrue, and only spend it so long as it will not keep you from casting a follow on Mortal Strike.

While Arms does not generate Rage very quickly, it can be bursty, and there are effects such as Bladestorm which can cause you to continue generating, but stop spending Rage. Because of this, it is just as important to ensure you do not waste resources by hitting the Rage cap as it is to not starve and be unable to cast at all. This is especially important when using Overpower and Sudden Death right before or after Bladestorm, which can easily align with an auto-attack swing to create unexpected bursts of Rage.

Just as problematic as overcapping Rage is starving out. Because nearly every ability spends it, care must be taken to ensure that resources do not run dry due to over use of Slam or Execute, to the point where Mortal Strike is unable to be used.

Even with the most knowledge, it is difficult to assess small statistical changes in gearing, or the mathematical impact of different talent choices on your own; there are simply too many variables involved. Using Raidbots to sim your own character is therefore highly recommended to ensure that you are making the most of your options.

Generally speaking, the simulation will be able to tell you the correct gear, talents, and choices to make based on what you have available, rather than the theoretical best stat combination on items you might not yet own. This is particularly important due to getting higher item level pieces of gear from the Vault, that you might not otherwise have thought to use because of less optimal itemization.

Along with this, simming is now much more accessible with little need to understand SimulationCraft syntax or manual installation. All you will need is the in-game SimulationCraft AddOn and the Raidbots website. Below you can find a video on how to sim your own character using the website.

When it comes to identifying and improving your mistakes, we strongly recommend the website WoWAnalyzer — it will analyze your logs and give you a report detailing how you did on the problems above and more.