Summary

Arms Warrior

About the author

This guide is written by Zachx, a raider in Midwinter, formerly Blood Legion. I started playing the game in 2006, but didn’t start raiding until the release of Karazhan in Burning Crusade. Be sure to also look at Dasimah’s Fury Warrior guide if you’re interested in playing that spec as well!

Class Overview

Arms Warrior is a spec that performs well at sustained AoE and Cleave. The spec feels like you deliver slow hard-hitting blows to the mobs you’re attacking, especially during the execute phase. In Blackrock Foundry for fights like Hans and Franz and Iron Maidens, Arms warrior performs very well. Also, in the lower gear levels before reaching viable amounts of crit rating, Arms Warrior performs well there as well.

Arms Warrior revolves around huge Executes, and on fights where you can keep Sweeping Strikes up and dump all your rage into execute, you will be doing massive amounts of damage. Arms might feel like it has sub par single target, until the execute phase where it does quite well and can make up the ground and them some. If you take Bloodbath as a talent, your execute phase becomes even more powerful. You may have heard or even practiced yourself, but Arms Warrior may not seem like that difficult of a spec to play, and in my opinion it’s not, until you get to the sustained cleave 3 target execute phases. Because then you’ll have to maintain your Rend on three targets, and practice when to dump your rage into your Colossus Smash windows to do the huge numbers. If you can put theory into practice and do the execute phases correctly, you will be competitive on the meters.

Links

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Changelog

• 5/19: A guide is born

Abilities

Abilities

Resource System: Rage

Rage is one of the Unique resource systems in the World of Warcraft. For the Arms Warrior, you have resource spenders, and resource generators.

Rage generators – Auto-Attacks, Charge, the talent Taste for Blood, and the Glyph of Sweeping Strikes

Rage Spenders – Execute, Mortal Strike, Whirlwind, Sweeping Strikes, and Rend* (When talented with Taste For Blood this ability is actually a rage gain)

To manage Rage as an Arms warrior, the key is patience. You need to gain enough rage to be able to spam any and every ability during your Colossus Smash Debuff windows, as well as pooling rage to use during the execute phase and cd uses.

Core Abilities

Colossus Smash
This ability is key to the warrior toolkit. You need to save rage to dump into this 6 second window that this debuff is on the target. Do not use this ability if you are not going to be able to fill every single global with a dps ability inside the debuff window.

Execute
This ability can be used once the mob is at 20% health. If you have lots of rage and/or colossus smash is on the target, you will hit the mob for huge numbers. This ability hits like a truck, and is the biggest thing you can do in the fight as an Arms Warrior.

Mortal Strike
This ability is your main source of damage through the entirety of the encounter minus the execute phase. Use this ability twice during your Colossus Smash window, and on cooldown outside of it.

Rend
This ability when combined with the Taste for Blood talent is one of your major rage generators. Try and maintain a high uptime with this bleed effect.

Whirlwind
This ability is your filler as well as go to AoE ability. If you need to dump excess rage and the above abilities are on cooldown, this is the button you hit.

Sweeping Strikes
This ability is great for sustained cleave, and helps mow down enemies when you use execute with sweeping strikes up. Very useful in the Arms Warrior toolkit.

Defensive Abilities

Die by the Sword
This is one of your two main defensive abilities, can be very useful in situations where you feel like you’re about to die or if you know you’re about to take massive amounts of damage. This ability could also fall into the Utility section of this guide. If you want to save the raid, you can possibly taunt pop your cooldown and tank a boss for up to 8 seconds while a tank is being resurrected or if you are close to a wipe and you want to try and extend the encounter for as long as possible to let dots tick on the boss to get the kill.

Defensive Stance
This is the other of your two main defensive abilities. If you stance dance into Defensive Stance, you will take 20% reduced damage for the duration that you are in the stance. You really want to just be in the stance when you take the hit of damage because staying in this stance for long periods of time is a dps loss. However, this ability is one of the best CD’s in the game because there is no cooldown outside of the 1.5 second global for stance changing, so you have on demand 20% reduction whenever you want.

Shield Barrier
If things are looking really bad and you know you are about to get absolutely destroyed and don’t think you’ll live a hit with the two abilities above already popped, Shield Barrier can be your last ditch effort to stay alive. Its a dps loss to use this ability, but it could save your life, in which you will do a lot more damage alive than you will on the ground. This ability should be last ditch effort, and only if you know you’ll die if you don’t use it.

Rallying Cry
You can say that this spell falls more into the Utility section, but this ability can be used as a personal cd as well. if you take damage that gets you really low and can anticipate that you’ll take more damage on top of that soon, Rallying Cry may be your ability to grant you that extra health to stay alive. This ability is great for the raid though, if you use it to give your raid extra health (note the 30 yard range at all times) you can help prevent massive blows killing members of your raid with one touch of the button. Learning how to use this ability in clutch situations as well as planning to use it as a raid cooldown could be key to defeating an encounter.

Enraged Regeneration
This Ability is an on demand heal. You can help your healers and give yourself some healing, as well as get you out of bad situations. If you are taking damage and need to get some health back quick, this is the ability you use. Very useful ability, as it doesn’t require you to be hitting the boss like the other two talents in the level 30 talent choices.

Utility

Pummel
This is the warrior interrupt ability. Use this to interrupt enemy spellcasting.

Heroic Throw
When combined with the Glyph of Gag Order, this ability enables you to silence a mob and help the tanks group casters up.

Rallying Cry
This ability is great for the raid. You use it to give your raid extra health (note the 30 yard range at all times) you can help prevent massive blows killing members of your raid with one touch of the button. Learning how to use this ability in clutch situations as well as planning to use it as a raid cooldown could be key to defeating an encounter.

Mass Spell Reflection
This ability could be useful if you have an ability being cast on the raid that spell reflection works on. You can prevent a big chunk of damage and in turn, damage the enemy with their own spells.

Vigilance
This ability can help save a tank or a raid member with a damage dealing debuff in key situations. Easy to set up with a macro or even a mouseover macro. Very useful in almost all situations.

Rotation

Rotation

Opener  – I assume there will be cleave, as you wouldn’t play arms otherwise because fury is better single target.

  1. Charge
  2. Rend and use Sweeping Strikes as well (Sweeping Strikes is off GCD).
  3. Colossus Smash as well as your offensive cooldowns you have talented: Recklessness, Bloodbath, Trinkets, etc.
  4. Mortal Strike
  5. Whirlwind until Mortal Strike is off cd
  6. Dragon Roar

Please note, use whirlwind not dragon roar inside colossus smash windows as dragon roar does not benefit from the Colossus Smash windows.
Also, if you have the Sudden Death talent, execute takes precedence over any other ability except for Colossus Smash.

Basic rotation 100-20%

  1. Apply and Maintain Rend
  2. Save rage for Colossus Smash
  3. Mortal Strike make sure to fit inside the Colossus Smash window. Outside of Colossus Smash use on cooldown.
  4. If you have the Siegebreaker talent, fit inside the Colossus Smash window.
  5. Whirlwind as a filler.
  6. Dragon Roar

If you have the Sudden Death talent, execute takes precedence over any other ability except for Colossus Smash.

Arms “lol” advanced rotation 100-20%

  1. Apply and Maintain Rend
  2. Save rage for Colossus Smash
  3. Mortal Strike make sure to fit inside the Colossus Smash window. Outside of Colossus Smash use on cooldown.
  4. If you have the Siegebreaker talent, fit inside the Colossus Smash window.
  5. Thunder Clap when combined with the Glyph of Resonating Power
  6. Whirlwind as a filler.
  7. Dragon Roar

If you have the Sudden Death talent, execute takes precedence over any other ability except for Colossus Smash.

This “advanced” rotation helps you maximize a little bit in the rage game. Thunderclap with the glyph is 10 less rage and does similar damage, however doing this makes you lose utility elsewhere in your glyphs.

Execute Rotation

  1. Cast Sweeping Strikes as well as offensive cd’s and Colossus Smash
  2. Dump as much rage into the Colossus Smash window with EXECUTE!!!!
  3. Maintain Rend on up to 3 targets in your downtime waiting on Colossus Smash to come off cooldown, use Execute to dump any and every bit of excess rage while saving to max for Colossus Smash.
  4. 60/100 Talent you chose
  5. Sit there and wait for more rage to execute for huge numbers.

Make sure to pool as much rage as you possibly can before the execute phase begins. You will be consuming extra rage to do extra damage during the execute phase so your rage will go down quick.

If you can sit on Recklessness and your level 90 talent (other than bladestorm) until you get a trinket proc in a short execute phase it’ll be worth it.

This is the Arms Warrior’s bread and butter phase. You will make or break yourself on the fight with how much damage you do during execute phase. Again, I emphasize to pool rage for Colossus Smash windows, that is very important.

 

Talents

Talents Cheat Sheet

Level 15: Double Time and Juggernaut is based on preference or need. Double time normally wins out for me personally.

Level 30: Enraged Regeneration is the go to talent here. Its off the gcd, and can be cast at range, while costing no rage.

Level 45: Taste For Blood is the go to talent in this tree, the extra rage you gain from rend is very important rotationally, especially during execute phase.

Level 60: Dragon Roar is normally the ability you’d take as an Arms warrior. Grants some AoE damage as well as giving you a knockback. Please remember to emphasize using this ability *outside* of Colossus Smash windows.

Level 75:  Vigilance. An on demand damage reduction for anyone in the raid has great value compared to the other two talents.

Level 90: All three talents can be viable options. Bloodbath can add lots of single target during execute phase. Bladestorm is an amazing burst AoE talent.

Level 100: All three talents can be viable depending on the situation. Anger Management can be useful based on fight length, or if you can lower the cooldown on other abilites such as bloodbath during execute phase to grant you enough single target you need to push your raid over the edge in terms of killing a boss. An example of a specific situtation could be for killing Marak on the Iron Maidens encounter. Ravager can be very useful in AoE burst situations. And Siegebreaker can be useful if you need to gain some single target throughout the course of a fight and don’t need to reduce your other cooldowns with Anger Management.

Talents Advanced

Level 15: Juggernaut, Double Time, Warbringer

Juggernaut
This talent reduces the cooldown of Charge by 8 seconds.

Double Time
This talent gives you an extra use of Charge however, please note you can only gain rage once every 12 seconds if you are using this talent.

Warbringer
This talent gives you a little change in utility. Your Charge now stuns instead of roots.

Level 30: Enraged Regeneration, Second Wind, Impending Victory

Enraged Regeneration
This talent gives you some on demand healing as well as a healing over time buff, very useful.

Second Wind
Whenever you fall below 35 percent health, you gain 25 percent leech. This talent is not very useful in the PvE enviornment.

Impending Victory
This is the only ability in this talent line that grants a rage to health ability. On a 30 second timer, I don’t see this being better than Enraged Regeneration, you can use the rage elsewhere in most situations.

Level 45: Taste For Blood, Sudden Death, Slam

Taste For Blood
This talent is the go to talent for Arms Warriors. It grants extra rage when it ticks, and that is very useful to be able to press your execute button, especially during sustained cleaving, i.e. Iron Maidens.

Sudden Death
This talent can proc a free BASE execute, you can still consume extra rage for the big executes, so be careful with this talent if you’re trying to save rage to spam execute.

Slam
This talent gets stronger if you cast it back to back, however, you’re normally going to be pretty low on rage, and the rage to damage ratio just generally isn’t high enough to select this talent right now.

Level 60: Storm Bolt, Shockwave, Dragon Roar

Storm Bolt
This talent gives you a ranged ability, plus a stun from range giving some utility. Its on a pretty short cooldown, but only hits a single target.

Shockwave
This talent gives you a big AoE stun, however the damage isn’t great, but if you can hit three or more targets, the cooldown is reduced by 20 seconds. Can be useful for utility.

Dragon Roar
This talent gives you an AoE knockback, so could be used for some utility as well as damage. Its also worth noting that this ability does not take advantage of the Colossus Smash debuff. So please emphasize use outside of the window.

Level 75: Mass Spell Reflection, Safeguard, Vigilance

Mass Spell Reflection
This talent grants anyone within 20 yards of you spell reflection. Could be useful in some situations, rare to be able to find a situation that makes it better than Viligance though.

Safeguard
This talent replaces intervene. Lets you intercept the next melee attack at the target (you will take the hit, so if you take this talent, use a cooldown). Safeguard also gives the target a 20% reduction for 6 seconds.

Vigilance
This talent is the go to talent for Arms Warriors. It grants a 30% reduction in damage to anyone in the raid you cast it on. If cast on a tank, the tank can spam taunt for a short duration.

Level 90: Avatar, Bloodbath, Bladestorm

Avatar
This talent grants you 20 percent increased damage for 20 seconds, as well as removing a root or snare on you.

Bloodbath
This talent gives you a 12 second buff, during the buff, 30% of any damage you do is replicated as a bleed effect on the target. Also applies a 50% snare. Very useful when you sweeping strikes execute.

Bladestorm
This talent makes you spin to win for six seconds. During the six second window, you are immune to movement impairing and loss of control effects. Grants massive amounts of AoE damage.

Level 100: Anger Management, Ravager, Siegebreaker

Anger Management
This talent reduces some of your cd’s by 1 second for every 30 rage that you spend. Could be useful depending on fight length. However, the couple fights you play arms as this tier, when this talent is combined with bloodbath, you will do massive amounts of extra execute damage, and you lower the cooldown significantly due to the amount of rage you’re spending.

Ravager
This talent gives you the ability to place a sustained AoE over an area for 10 seconds. Can be useful in burst AoE situations.

Siegebreaker
This talent gives you decent single target damage (especially inside colossus smash windows) and also gives you the ability to knockback enemies.

Glyphs

Glyphs

Major

Glyph of Unending Rage
Mandatory glyph, makes the cap 120, allows for more rage to be spent at any given moment.

Glyph of Sweeping Strikes

Gives you more rage return and more of reason to keep sweeping strikes up.

Glyph of Bull Rush
Nice bit of extra rage, useful in many situations.

Minor

Glyph of the Subtle Defender
Removes the threat bonus from defensive stance. Allows you to use defensive stance easier as a defensive cooldown without worrying about pulling threat while stance dancing.

Situational

Glyph of Rude Interruption
Interrupt to gain a increase in damage.

Glyph of Wind and Thunder
Can help if your targets are a little more spread out than they need to be.

Glyph of Heroic Leap
Gives a speed boost, can help close a gap even more.

Blackrock Foundry Gear

Gear

Slot Item Source
Helmet Blackhand’s Faceguard Kromog
Necklace Vertebrae Protector Hans and Franz
Shoulder Overdriven Spaulders Blackhand
Cloak Cloak of Sanguine Terror Iron Maidens
Chest Blackhand’s Chestguard Flamebender
Bracer Fleshmelter Bracers Blast Furnace
Gloves Blackhand’s Handguards Iron Maidens
Waist Uktar’s Belt of Chiming Rings Iron Maidens
Legs Blackhands Legguards Blast Furnace
Boots Doomslag Greatboots Trash Drop
Ring Seal of the Savage Howl Beastlord Darmac
Weapon The Black Hand Blackhand
Trinket Horn of Screaming Spirits Flamebender
Trinket Vial of Convulsive Shadows Iron Maidens

Please note, if you roll warforged or socketed tier items, this list may not be accurate. For example, if you roll Warforged or socketed shoulders off of Thogar, the Gauntlets of Dramatic Blows may be a good alternative.

Blackrock Foundry Boss Guides

Blackrock Foundry

 Hans’gar & Franzok

Talents
Taste For Blood, Bloodbath, and Siegebreaker

Strategy

When both bosses are down, keep Sweeping Strikes up and make sure to keep Rend on both targets. Fit your Siegebreaker  inside of your Colossus Smash windows. Save every cooldown and pool as much rage as you can before the 10% mark. When both bosses are down at 10% you have to go as hard as you can on the Execute button. The entire fight revolves around being able to do the 10% to zero correctly.

 Blast Furnace

Talents
Anger Management, Bladestorm, Taste For Blood

Strategy
Keep Sweeping Strikes up and Execute mobs when you can. Save rage for Primal Elementalist windows, this will allow for good primal damage as well as maintaining free cleave. Arms warriors can do well on this fight, lots of Bladestorm damage as well as a ton of Execute damage.

 Iron Maidens

Talents
Taste For Blood, Bloodbath, Anger Management

Strategy
This fight is what Arms warrior live for. Maintain Rend on all three targets, keep your Sweeping Strikes buff up, press Mortal Strike on cooldown, and spread your AoE through Bloodbath. However, when you get to the execute phase is when things start to get interesting. Go into the phase with max rage, Rend on all targets and get ready to Execute. When the Colossus Smash window falls off, take a second to re-apply and rends, then continue to execute. If you can generate enough rage to press your Execute combined with Bloodbath you should feel satisfied at the end of the encounter.

Stats

Stats

Weapon DPS > Strength > Crit > Mastery = Multistrike > Versitility > Haste

Mastery and Multistrike are both good stats, neither is bad, however, with as much as you will be playing fury, I would suggest going with mastery over multistrike.

Strength is a primary stat that provides 1 Attack Power. Just think of it as raw damage increase.

Critical Strike increases the chance to critically hit with all abilities.

Arms Warrior Mastery increases the damage of your Mortal Strike, Colossus Smash, and Execute by a scaling percentage.

Multistrike gives chances at extra damage of your abilites. It also procs on self healing.

Versatility increases all damage done, and reduces damage taken.

Haste avoid. makes everything go not noticeably faster.

 

Enchants

Rings: Enchant Ring – Gift of Critical Strike
Cloak: Enchant Cloak – Gift of Critical Strike
Neck: Enchant Neck – Gift of Critical Strike
Weapon: Enchant Weapon – Mark of the Thunderlord
Gems: Greater Critical Strike Taladite

Consumables

Food: Pickled Eel
Potion: Draenic Strength Potion
Flask: Greater Draenic Strength Flask

Addons & Macros

 Addons

Weak Auras
This is the only addon that I would say is required for any aspiring raider. Here are some weak aura strings you can import that I use myself.

Warrior Power Up Buffs

Pop a Defensive

Tier 17 raid debuffs and need to knows

Macros

Cancel Bladestorm

#showtooltip

/cancelaura Bladestorm

Vigilance

#showtooltip Vigilance

/target (insert main tank or offtank name)

/cast Vigilance

/targetlasttarget

OR

#showtooltip Vigilance
/cast [target=mouseover] Vigilance
/run SendChatMessage(format(“Vigilance on %s”,select(1,UnitName(“mouseover”))),”SAY”,nil,nil);

Recklessness

/cast Recklessness

/cast Avatar

/cast Bloodbath

/use (insert trinket name)