Warrior 3.1 ARMS it is!!! (and a bladestorm tutorial)

Well I haven’t posted in a bit because my Arena partner has been working me like a dog. I respeced yet again (GOD I gotta get duel specs) and went arms with my titan steal destroyer. I did this for two reasons.
1. More stamina = more life = longer fights = more wins
2. Ignore Armor

I also picked up my pvp neck piece and my pvp boots from Wintergrasp. My resilience didn’t go up to much because I was using the Saronite boots before and sadly they have more Resilience than Hateful Gladiator stuff.

So I’m down to needing my belt, cloak and two rings to be completely PVP geared out. Now after all the hustle and bustle about not really know which way to go with ARMS or FURY after 3.1, especially for PVP, especially for those of us who haven’t gotten a chance to finish up and/or win a good weapon of Nax I’m back to proclaiming ARMS:Mace Spec as the way to go. With one small adjustment, and sadly it’s not towards the spec, it was with a glyph. I dropped the bladestorm glyph and picked up the rend glyph. Crazy right? Crazy Wrong actually.

The rend glyph basically tags your target for an additional 6 seconds. Now this might not sound like much, but when speced properly your rend damage can Overpower. In addition you have an additional 6 seconds of DOTS on a target, which, believe it or not, won me 3 matches last night.

I was eating up a mage, his healer didn’t have LOS on him and he blinked even further away right before I could finish him off. Well the next 4 seconds resulted in him dying and then me turning around to dump on his priest.

So all in all PVP ARMS: MACE is much more effective than the axe was. I was able to get to a 1k+ rating last night and hope to add to that tonight. What’s killing me right now is the utter lack of MONEY I’ve been having. Literally as soon as I log on I’m in an arena and the que times on the arenas are at most 20 seconds. So I haven’t even had the time lately to post titan steel bars in the AH.

As for PVE the rend glyph actually helps in this department too. Same reason as it helps in PVP.

What about bladestorm? IT is both a blessing and a curse.
First why it’s a blessing.
It get’s you out of snares and ice. It’s nice to pop on clothy healers, if you’re on a lock and you don’t have your trinket up and your berserker rage is on CD and he’s going to start to fear juggle you it’s a nice way out of getting feared and you can generally hit a caster 1-2 times during a long CC type spell before you have to pop BS. The best use I’ve found for it though is to use it against rogues that are trying to kill my healer. What I like to do is make sure my healer doesn’t get out charge range. I then play stupid and go attack the other teammate. Usually this is when the rogue thinks it’s GO TIME. He saps, my healer says NOW, I turn around, charge, rend, hamstring, then bladestorm. While blade storm doesn’t deal an awful lot of damage, when you’re doing it to a leather wearer with no real armor buffs all it takes is for 2 of your swings to crit for him to be at less than 1/4 of his life when the BS is done. From there it’s a quick mortal strike and Boom rogue down. Even if the rogue vanishes he’ll un-vanish because of the rend. If he sprints he’s only going to go so fast and by the time he’s done your charge and or intercept ability should be ready to go. Charge or intercept and finish him off. So there’s the little rogue buster combo.

Now for the Curse that is Bladestrom.
Well first it’s nerfed. So for 6 seconds you might average 1k-1.5 k damage or 6-9k damage over 6 seconds. When you think about the proc rate of instant execute (2x1-2k), Overpower(2x1-3k), and MS(2x2-4k), along with normal white swings(2.5x600) = 9500 -19500 during that same time frame. Now the range is bigger because things depend on procs and such but overall you’re going to do more damage in the same 6 seconds.

Bladestorm can also work against you if you don’t have your target properly snared and if you haven’t been paying attention to their blinks, sprints, charges, and intercepts. Lets say you jump into a fight and start off with bladestorm against a mage. First thing he’s going to do is blink away and toast your ass from a distance. Same thing with a warlock. He’s going to simply dot you up and take the damage. Then when you’re done you get feared and chaos bolted. Hunters are the same, do it to early and they pop back and work you while you’re spinning like an idiot.

So just remember that BS is a good snare breaker and nice for rogues, but be warned using it at the right time on the right class can mean the difference between your arena partner telling you “Awesome Job” or telling you “WTF was that?”

I’m looking for 1200 rating tonight so wish me luck. I keep promising must have PVP macros and I’ll put them on tonight. So check back later on today for some simple yet very effective macros to help you out in a jam.