Rammy's Arms Warrior Guide - Part 1: Rotation and Stance Dancing

Our guilds Arms Warrior has been spending some time writing a couple of very interesting guides for anyone who is interested in knowing a little bit more about how to succesfully play an arms warrior. I liked them so much I asked for permission to post them on my blog, and he was foolish enough to grant it *evil snicker*. So I will be posting a couple of arms dps guides, that in no way have been written by myself, all credit goes to Ramago!

This will not be a begginers guide (if you want I'll write one later), here I'll talk about the Arms rotation and how encounters affects it. So, the rotation will be either MS - Spell - Spell or MS - Spell - Spell - Spell, this depends on the MS timer. MS is a 4.5 CD spell, which means it allows two spells in between. Everyone who plays meele classes knows the real GCD is not 1 second, but 1.5 seconds, if you didn't, then you know something new.

So why if it allows two spells in between, you sometimes have to do two spells? That's because of Rend and TfB [Taste for Blood, Zinns edit] procs. 

Click for bigger picture

The red vertical lines are second markers. As you can see in my shitty-home-made table, you can see how TfB procs if you use MS every time it's on CD. You might be asking "why didn't you proc TfB on the line where everything lines up?", that's because it might or not proc, depending on your latency and stuff, but idependantly if it procs there or there, the last shown proc will proc where it is shown.

As many of you have noticed while playing Arms, it's very annoying to not know when TfB will proc and go crazy not knowing what to fill your GCDs. That's why you want to line up your MS with your TfB CD, so you can control and force your procs and be in your confy zone. This is why sometimes you want to do a MS - Spell - Spell - Spell parse instead of a MS - Spell - Spell one, just to get the proc.

So the question is, when do we do it? You can make a timer that shows the TfB CD, or you can do it by instinct. As you saw in the graph, the rotation is a pattern, so after a time playing you know in which part of the pattern you are. I could tell you it's MS - 2spells - MS - 2spells - MS - 2 spells - MS - 3spells, but that's nice on a Dummy, in a raid or in a dungeon, when you have to move, or change targets... that won't work. It needs practice and time, you'll get the hang of it.

So... in other matters... Stance Dancing. To be able to do this you need macros, lots and lots of macros... and an organized spell bar. 

Battle Stance

Berseker Stance

As you can see here, I have the same spells in both spell bars, so as to have no trouble when switching stances. Macros I use for Stancedancing are: 

#showtooltip Colossus Smash
/cast Charge
/cast Colossus Smash

#showtoolrip Execute
/cast Berserker Stance
/cast Execute

#showtooltip Bladestorm
/cast Berserker Stance
/cast Bladestorm

#showtooltip Slam
/cast Berserker Stance
/cast Slam

#showtooltip Mortal Strike
/cast Berserker Stance
/cast Mortal Strike

#showtooltip Thunder Clap
/cast Battle Stance
/cast Thunder Clap

#showtooltip Rend
/cast Battle Stance
/cast Rend

#showtooltip Overpower
/cancelaura Bladestorm
/cast Battle Stance
/cast Overpower

You can notice I placed a /cancelaura Bladestorm on my OP macro. That's only to stop swirling when I need it. Examples are when you are starting to draw aggro, to stop it from happening, or when only one or two mobs remain. With these you can do your rotation without thinking. The only problem Stance Dancing has is that changing stances has a 1sec CD, so you'll be in trouble if you can't chance stances to OP because it's on CD. You just have to be careful with that, which means, no fucking up your rotation. If you pressed the wrong button and switched stances when you shouldn't, then it will cost you... a lot.