Not so long ago I worte about Berserker Stance penalty, today I’ll stop for a while and try to summarize the state of Battle Stance and Arms overall.

What is Arms specialization, and what it’s used to be?
There are no doubts what Protection tree is about, it’s about tanking, mitigating damage, threat and overall enhancing your abilities, mainly in defensive stance. There are no doubts what Fury tree is about, it’s about dealing damage, fast and hard, it increase your performance well and do it best in Berserker Stance. With improved Berserker Stance talent Fury warriors are bound to the stance, they stay in zerk and deal tons of damage really really hard, that’s their job. Now when you ask what Arms tree is about, the answer you can hear on forums is one - it’s about PvP. What a deep answer isn’t it? Two years ago Arms was well defined, it was a blend between all 3 stances, it was an ultimate, universal tree, nothing strange since it was the tree where Tactical Mastery - a talent allowing for effective stance dancing - was. What has changed since then? Everything. Since 2.3 Arms tree is genderless mish-mash, don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to say it’s weak, it just doesn’t have that thing.

The lackluster 41-pointer
I’m a strong advocate of Endless Rage, there is nothing wrong with 25% more rage from damage done, the problem here is - it’s not enough. I’ve been watching recent patches, and the more Rogue changes I read, the more I’m in awe. Shadowstep out of stealth, shadowstep affecting all abilities, shadowstep without minimum range, shadowstep generating extra combo point, coming 2.4: shadowstep will make everyone in 100 yards automatically /dance. Now I really think these changes really does make sense, and it’s cool that Blizzard does everything to make rogues specialize for 41 sub. What did Blizzard do to make us specialize for 41 arms? They swapped Death Wish and Imp. Intercept to Arms, what a failure:

Most popular arena builds according to geekboys.org:

1. 35/23/3
2. 33/28
3. 31/30
4. 17/44 <- LOL!
5. 33/25/3

No 41 arms. Even a PvE dps build is more popular on arenas then 41 arms. I don’t know if folks at Blizzard are happy with the variety of our PvP builds, but I’m not. Seriously, Blizzard, it’s time to roll up sleeves and say: “We fucked up Arms and something has to be done about it!”. Note how I don’t really mention Arms tree but Arms as a whole, it’s not only the tree that’s defining a specialization, it’s also the set of abilities we got from trainers, and it’s not a secret that Arms tab in spell book is the least attractive one.

Where to go: blending or Battle Stance specialization?
There are two ways to make Arms tree what it’s supposed to be. One way is to bring back it’s glory from the old days, read: bring TM back to Arms. It’s a pretty cheap solution and really a required one. Moving TM to protection, while being a big step forward balance, was a huge step backwards in terms of Warrior Class design. Personally, I don’t think this is required, there is another way to get out of this, and the way to do it, is to make Battle Stance viable on it’s own for Arms Warriors. How to do that? It doesn’t take much of a research to understand why PvPing warriors prefer Berserker Stance over Battle Stance…

Battle Stance = One Button Stance
What abilities can we use in Battle Stance? Let’s take a look:

Heroic Strike - yeah, not really a two-hander thing.
Slam - yeah, useless unless talented, and talents are deep in fury tree.
Mortal Strike - our 31 pointer from arms tree.
Overpower - usable only after an enemy dodge, not reliable source of damage.

That’s it, being full arms in Battle Stance leave us with 1, literally ONE, reliable and effective damage dealing ability, and it’s coming from talents. How sad is that?

Whirlwind for everybody!
Why slam, an ability that’s useless without talents put into it (and those talents are in fury tree) is available in every stance, while Whirlwind, an ability that could benefit everybody (including tanks for aoe-tanking) is available in berserker stance only? There is nothing “berserky” about whirlwind. If I had to do my lore reference I did while analizing berserker stance penalty, in the same D&D whirlwind is a feat that’s available pretty much only for highly specialized Fighters who has at least 13 INT and DEX (read: they are smart and agile enough to rotate around fast and smash faces). Wow also have Cleave ability, which sounds more “berserky” and brutal, and it’s also, like Slam, available in all stances, while the ability that makes most sense to be available in all stances is limited to Berserker Stance.

It really makes no sense at all how I can grind mobs for hours in Battle Stance when specced for 33/28 with Improved Slam (fury ability), while I was forced to grind in Berserker Stance with 41/17/3 since being in Battle Stance meant generating a lot of rage and having no button to release it.

The curse of Berserker Rage
You know this little icon, you have used it millions of times. If you ask any warlock or priest what’s so special about Warriors the answer will be one: “they are immune to fear”. That’s it, it’s what define the Warrior class - we are fearless. There is however a price we have to pay for that, that price is staying in Berserker Stance. Why? Because Berserker Rage is the only ability you can’t stance dance for. You can stance dance for overpower, you can stance dance for disarm, you can stance dance for whirlwind, but you CAN’T stance dance for Berserker Rage. Why? Because you can’t change stance when being feared, stupid!

Endless Berserker Rage
Ok, so here is the deal: Endless Rage is lacking, it’s not bad, but it’s not good, not good enough for a 41 pointer. To make warriors able to PvP in battle stance without worrying about stance dancing, we need an alternative for Berserker Rage… or, an ability to use Berserker Rage in Battle Stance. So how about give ER an additional perk allowing Berserker Rage to be usable in Battle Stance? First, Berserker Rage is an ability that increase rage generated from damage taken, so it’s a nice synergy with ER which increase rage on damage done, secondly it would allow high Arms specced warriors to fight in Battle Stance against opponents that normally require you to stick in zerk 95% of the time (lock/priest), and since Tactical Mastery no longer belongs to Arms, Arms should no longer be blend between stances, but should be rather bound to battle stance. We would still have to dance to zerk for intercept, but that’s about it.

Terhix

There are things in WoW I call ancient mechanics, it’s things that are completely broken, retarded, yet still in game for some odd reason, for example one of them is the fact that deep wounds break cowering in fear effect of intimidating shout, effectively making us unable to CC someone after we crit, it’s the fact that blood craze reset whenever we get critted without giving us a tick and few other small things.

One thing that is recently floating over forums is not as minor as deep wounds/blood craze problems - it’s the Berserker Stance penalty. It was taken to public in past, before TBC, without results. We all know how berserker stance works:

An aggressive stance. Critical hit chance is increased by 3% and all damage taken is increased by 10%.

If you are not familiar with the warrior class, you can probably already smell the bullshit. 3% crit has became so minor buff since epix started to rule the world, it’s not really all that good anymore, warriors usually have extremely high crit chance, and with resilience being in game, 3% crit is not a big dps increase. Now let’s discuss this from 3 points of view: Lore, Common Sense and WoW Balance, here we go:

1. Lore

What is berserking? It’s fighting madly without worrying about self, as such berserker stance makes sense? Not really, no. Let’s take a look at similar mechanic: Barbarian’s Rage ability in mother of all rpg mechanics - D&D (3.5 version):

A barbarian can fly into a rage a certain number of times per day. In a rage, a barbarian temporarily gains a +4 bonus to Strength, a +4 bonus to Constitution, and a +2 morale bonus on Will saves, but he takes a -2 penalty to Armor Class. The increase in Constitution increases the barbarian’s hit points by 2 points per level, but these hit points go away at the end of the rage when his Constitution score drops back to normal. (…) A barbarian may prematurely end his rage. At the end of the rage, the barbarian loses the rage modifiers and restrictions and becomes fatigued (–2 penalty to Strength, –2 penalty to Dexterity, can’t charge or run) for the duration of the current encounter (unless he is a 17th-level barbarian, at which point this limitation no longer applies; see below).

And the last “ranks” of Rage:

Tireless Rage (Ex): At 17th level and higher, a barbarian no longer becomes fatigued at the end of his rage.

Mighty Rage (Ex): At 20th level, a barbarian’s bonuses to Strength and Constitution during his rage each increase to +8, and his morale bonus on Will saves increases to +4. The penalty to AC remains at -2.

Armor Class is not what Armor in WoW is, AC increase one’s avoidance and is used for describing everything like dodge chance from Dexterity, Monk’s increased avoidance from Wisdom, Duelist’s increased avoidance from Intelligence and (of course) AC from Armor protecting body and/or shield. So, in the end how does Rage affect Barbarian in D&D? Let’s make a break down:

• Increases his damage thanks to increased STR.
• Temporarily increases his HP thanks to increased CON (I died once in D&D: Online when my rage ended while I had like 8 hp left).
• Increases Will saves to help against spells that work against mind (fear, charm, paralyze etc.)
• Reduces avoidance due to lowered AC.

Barbarian becomes stronger and uncontrollable but is unaware of attacks, you don’t care about taking a hit when in Rage, but does it says anywhere that you take more damage while in Rage? No, if anything you are tougher due to temporary hit points.

Now WoW doesn’t work same way, but we can see some similarities, while in berserker stance we can use berserker rage ability that breaks fears (Will saves from morale in D&D), we have, technically, slightly higher damage done due to 3% crit (woohoo!) and take a whooping 10% more damage then everyone else in the game. Death Wish, which (despite of being moved to Arms) is a similar category of abilities also increase damage done, and again increase damage taken by 5%. It’s worth to note that in past Death Wish used to lower our Armor and Resistances by 10%. I find it funny that original developers of WoW assumed we would have some spell resistance on our gear in endgame when implementing this ability, I mean, it would make sense for a tank class to be durable against spells back in the past, but since Kalgan is taking care of WoW PvP logic is not a strong part on Blizzard. From Lore PoV it would make sence if Berserker Stance lowered our dodge/parry chance, or even lower our armor (increase damage taken against physical attacks), being Berserk means you are going offensive, you don’t defend yourself, but there should be no penalty against things (spells) you already can’t defend against.

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Terhix