Rammy's Arms Warrior Guide - Part 3: Stats

Welcome to part 3 of my guildie Ramagos guide on how to play an arms warrior!

Since I'm running out of advanced strategies, I'm going to talk about simpler stuff... like stats.

Haste, what good does Haste do to us? Someone wants to share with the class? Any hands? Yes, you in the back, what does Haste do to us? ... Very good! It makes our melee swings faster so we have more Rage to use more HS. One point for Griffindor!

What else? No one? Of course no one is raising their hands, because Haste has nothing more to offer. Unlike the rest of the classes, our DoTs are not affected by Haste. That's it, neither Rend nor DW will tick faster the more Haste you have. If you think Rend ticking faster would do weird stuff with the TfB proc for our OPs you are mistaken, since if you remember our first lesson, we try to force Rend ticks with MS.

The drawback Haste has is Slam, since when you are casting it, you delay your melee swings, reducing the value of Haste. As I said before, roughly every 7 Slams you lose an entire melee swing. In a normal 6 minute fight you get to do around 40 slams, meaning you lose 5 melee swings during the course of the fight. 5% Haste gives you roughly 1 melee swing a minute which is roughly 1 extra HS a minute.

Soooo, Haste does seem a bit attractive, let us look what Mastery has in store for us. An X% chance to perform an extra attack that deals 100% weapon damage, seems nice, right? An extra attack means more damage, right? Yes, but, how good is an extra attack compared to Haste and Crit? Let us see the good and the bad of Mastery.

The Good: It can proc of every single melee attack and melee spell, it can crit and it can also proc Sudden Death.

The Bad: Does not generate Rage, has an internal CD of 0.5 seconds so it can't proc of itself and it only does 100% weapon damage.

It is basically an extra melee swing that doesn't generate Rage. It is nice, indeed, but doesn't look specially more appealing than Haste. We do know one thing, though, since it has a 0.5 CD, it will have a cap, so the closer we get to the cap, the less value Mastery will have.

Last of all, we have Crit. Let us see what do we get from Crit. Our main rotational spells have an added value of 120% instead of the normal 100% melee crits have. Our crits also apply DW, which deals 48% weapon damage (not the spell damage like Fire Mage's Ignite) over 6 seconds. DW is affected by the 30% Bleed buff we apply, so it's actually 63-64% weapon damage. DW does suffer munching the same way Fire Mage's Ignite do, although not as much, since it's weapon damage and not the damage done. Crits are devastating with ThunderClap in AoE as well, since they spread DW around.

But 120% crits is hardly reason enough to consider Crit above the other two stats. But wait! What do we have here? MS crits increase our damage done in 10% for 12 seconds? Mmmm, interesting.

Let us see stuff in action with some logs:

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/sbp7bbs1etr2iqdz/details/8/?s=2350&e=2711

As you can see, Mastery (Opportunity Strikes) only consists of 7.2% of our total DPS while DW alone consists of 9.2% of our DPS. And we are not counting the damage done by all the crits. I have 6.25% Haste, which is 1 extra melee swing and 1 extra HS per minute, the fight lasted 6 minutes, so the effects of Haste were 6 HS (of 36 which is 1/6th of the 5.8% total DPS HS did) and 6 Melee Swings (of 84 wich is 1/14th of the 10.5% total DPS melee strikes did).

So in total we have the following numbers:

Haste: 0.9686% HS dmg + 0.7497% Melee dmg = 1.7183% total dmg
Mastery: 7.2% total dmg
Crit: 9.2% DW dmg + 32% MS dmg which is 4.9% total dmg + 50% OP dmg which is 7.05% total dmg... 3 spells makes 21.15% total dmg, should I go on? It will probably reach 27-30% total dmg.

Those extra 6 melee swings, 6 HS and 82 Opportunity Strikes would most certainly have procced some SDs, giving DPS indirectly by means of CS, but we are also not counting the DPS we gain every time MS crits and gives 10% dmg for 12 seconds.

It is true those are my logs and I'm reforged to favor crit above all else, So when I get home I'll do 3 dummy runs of 5 mins each, each one specced favoring Haste, Mastery and Crit respectively and post the details here for you to see.