When you look at top arena rated warriors there is one thing interesting (well, two if you count a prot warrior), there is a fair amount of warriors with 0 points in protection - no Tactical Mastery. I’ve already discussed 35/23/3 build vs 33/25/3 build, but those stats really got me thinking, and some people bashed me in comments for labeling 31/30 as not-really-arena build.
I’ve been thinking about Slam a lot, and I’ve been thinking about Tactical Mastery, as the arguments that you don’t actually stance dance a lot on the arenas are, duh, pretty sensible. I’ve tried 31/30 before and I didn’t like it, now I know I did some things wrong. I’ve tried to test Slam with 31/30, but I did it all wrong, I tried to use it as a main attack, timing it after white hits, so I had to be really focused about my movement, hamstrings and skill timing, while loosing the bigger picture, I’ve respecced back to 35/23/3 as Slam sucked for me. But I’ve changed again, this time to 33/28 to prove myself I was right that you can’t do arenas without TM and that Slam is shit, but after playing some 2v2 practice it made me smile.
Before I go into Slam however, I’ll point out two other things I’ve changed in my build. First thing is - I dropped Booming Voice for 5/5 Unbridled Wrath. I’ve said a lot of shit about UW in the past, but I ended my post with “so if you are finding yourself to be rage-starving, it’s something you can pick” - and that’s what I’ve done. I don’t have improved charge, and often I simply can’t charge on the beginning of the arena forcing me to bloodrage -> intercept. With 35/23/3 such start was often a tragedy, it took me precious seconds before I could gain rage to use MS so our dps wasn’t mitigated by 100% undebuffed healing. Now with flurry and UW I build up rage much faster. UW is not a huge bonus, even after the recent change it generates low rage/second, but it’s better to have that 5 more rage after some bashing and being able to use abilities faster. Flurry is also a big factor when it comes to rage generation. The problem with flurry is, after rage normalization, it’s effect on rage generation was toned down, so now you generate less rage per swing with flurry on, but you still generate more rage with flurry then you would generate without it, and it increases UW’s performance as well. I obviously doesn’t have full flurry with just 28 points in fury tree, but 3/5 is well enough, having 30% speed boost vs 20% speed boost and second wind is no competition to me. I just like second wind too much to drop it, there is a gazillion of situations when u are immobilized or stunned on the arena, if you are being focus fired or not, and even if that healing isn’t a life saver when there are 3 people on you, that extra rage makes my warrior soul fly, especially since now I’ve something to do with it…
SLAM! Forget about using it every white hit, forget about using it all the time, forget about killing someone with just a slam spam, this is not freaking PvE. Just because it doesn’t have cooldown doesn’t mean you have to use it all the time, it was something I couldn’t accept first time when I tried it with 31/30. With loosing TM I lost some utility, however Slam gave me some more utility I didn’t have before, but the key part is learning how and when to use slam in PvP situations. There are two situations when you might want to use slam: a) Your instant attacks are on cooldown; b) You don’t have rage for your instant attacks and you need to deal damage right now; In both situations it might not always be a great increase in actual dps, you might hit it just before a white hit lands, making your auto attack reset in the worst possible situations, but you shouldn’t worry about that. Of course, some timing is necessary, but it doesn’t have to be perfect, the point is not to try making Slam as much effective dps tool as it can be, the point is using it as a missing chain link in your burst damage combo. There are situations when you are standing with full rage, both MS and WW on cooldown and your enemy has like 22% hp, a single Slam followed by Execute before the poor guy gets healed can drastically change the situation, and get you out of the deepest shit. It’s something you have to train, theory crafting isn’t good enough, using Slam effectively is pure practice. I took my time at 2v2 practice arena with gimps to master it, had to loose couple of 1v1 fights with rogues and had to miss it a couple of times when enemy run out of melee range to learn my lesson, and while I might not turn into the most awesome Slam user in WoW, I then played couple rated 5v5 with my team and it didn’t fail me. More dps, more rage, I think I’m going to stay 33/28 for a while…
Terhix
