Warrior Arms Talent Builds

Arms Talents:

Improved Heroic Strike - “Reduces the Rage cost of your Heroic Strike by 1,2 or 3 Rage points” Max 3 Points - Heroic strike isn’t really all that great of an ability, since this talent gives you a cost saving of 3 rage, but that still doesn’t help with the limitation that Heroic Strike has, which is that is "on next strike". Arms/MS warriors really should waste rage on heroic strike, and fury and protection warrior should always have enough rage coming in so that this talent isn’t as useful as it first seems.

Deflection rank - “Increases your Parry chance by 1,2,3,4,or 5%.” Max 5 points. - Parry is a great skill and makes a great way to start going into the Arms tree.

Improved Rend -“Increases the bleed damage of your Rend ability by 15,25,35%.” Max 3 Points. - This is a horrible talent. I doubt anyone would take it unless it wasn’t a pre-req for Deep Wound. Rend at Rank 7 does 147 damage offer 21 sec; this talent increases that by 51 points. Sure Dots ignore armor, but it is still a drop in the bucket. Deep Wound and Impale make taking this almost mandatory.

Improved Charge - “Increase the amount of rage generated by your Charge ability by 3 or 6.” Max 2 Points. - Charge gives you 15 rage at the start of battle, with this talent that is increase to 21. Now the first hit has no swing timer and if it hits, as an arms warrior this is more then enough for an immediate Mortal Strike Follow-up. With High Crit gear and some luck, you can severely damage opponents with this opening.

Tactical Mastery - “You retain up to 5,10,15,20 or 25 or your rage points when you change stances.” Max 5 Points. - The most important talent in the tree, being able to switch stances quickly at the right time causes a mediocre warrior to be great. This talent makes sure that you have a good amount of rage available to activate the ability that caused you to switch stances.

Improved Thunder Clap - Reduces the cost of your Thunder clap ability by 1,2,3 points.” Max 3 Points. - Thunder clap is VERY situational of a talent. It is really only useful in long PVE fights were the mob is hitting so hard that a 10% slowdown in attack speed actually makes a large difference on the damage output. 20 rage is expensive, but if you are a dps warrior on a boss fight you should have rage available every 30secs to refresh it on the boss.

Improved Overpower - “Increases the Critical Strike chance of your Overpower ability by 25, 50%” Max 2 Points. - Great talent for Arms warriors. Not so much for fury. This talents causes rogues nightmares. Rogues already don’t have a lot of health and an overpower cannot be dodged, blocked or parried. Thus, when overpower is up, you are very likely to get a crit. With large 2 handers that is a power hit. Dual Wielding Fury players are usually in berserker stance, and since you need to be in battle stance to overpower, this isn’t as useful nor as damaging since it only takes the main hand weapon damage.

Anger Management - “Increase the amount of time for your rage to decay out of combat by 30%”. 1 Point. - This ability is currently bugged, but not in a bad way. Rage fades out of combat at a rate of 3 rage per tick. Now, this talent makes it so that you only lose 2 rage per tick, and it does this by giving actually giving you 1 rage point per tick. The bug occurs when you are in combat. The 1 rage point per tick is still active, so you gain 1 rage every 6 seconds. Some what handy.

Deep Wounds - “Your critical strikes cause the opponent to bleed, dealing 20,40,or 60% of your melee weapon’s average damage over 12 sec.” Max 3 Points. - On a critical hit you, put a debuff on the target that cause 60% of you average weapon damage in 12 seconds. Now this doesn’t stack, and is only refreshed on another successful critical in the 12 seconds but it does add up.

Two-Handed Weapon Specialization - “Increases the damage you deal with two-handed weapons by 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5%.” Max 5 Points. - Rather generic, I personally prefer to specialize in one of the specific weapon choices, but good during leveling when you don’t know what weapon you will find.

Impale - “Increases the critical strike damage bonus of your abilities in Battle, Defensive and Berserker stance by 10 or 20%.” Max 2 Points. - 100% Grade A Good. Things can be immune against it though.

Axe Specialization - “Increases your critical strike chance with axes by 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5%.” Max 5 Points - If you want to life by burst damage critical hits is the way to go.

Sweeping Strikes - “Activate to cause your next 5 melee attacks to strike an additional nearby opponent. Cost 30 Rage, Requires Battle Stance, 30sec cooldown.” 1 Point. - Well, everyone takes it to get to Mortal Strike. But Sweeping Strike is useful in solo PVE when fighting 2 targets at the same time, with a lucky string of criticals you can kill both targets with the 5 swing charges that sweeping strike has.

Mace Specialization - “Gives you a 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5% chance to stun your target with a mace.” Max 5 Points. - Some people swear by it, others can’t stand it. I personally believe you need a specific weapon like earthshaker in order to take advantage of stunning people.

Sword Specialization - “Gives you a 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5% chance to get an extra attack on the same target after dealing damage with your sword.” Max 5 Points. - The tooltip is a bit misleading. Yes you get a 5% chance to hit someone again but now after every swing, your overall weapon swing timer gets reset. So if it does proc off of a special attack, then you will still get another hit, but you will wait your full swing timer again. Example you have a weapon with a 3.8 sec swing. Now you attack, wait 2 seconds use Mortal Strike and Sword Spec talent procs. You hit with MS and the extra Swing, but you now have to wait again 3.8 seconds for your next regular attack and not 1.8 seconds.

Polearm Specialization - “Increases your critical strike chance with polearms by 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5%.” Max 5 Points - Same as axe spec.

Improved Hamstring - “Gives your Hamstring ability a 5, 10, or 15% chance to immobilize the target for 5 sec.” Max 3 points. - Hamstring is the worse of any character slows in the game. This improves it so that it so that a little. Good for PVP, but not all that useful in PVE.

Mortal Strike - “A vicious strike that deals weapon damage plus 85, 110, 135, or 160 and wounds the target, reducing the effectiveness of any healing by 50% for 10 sec. Cost 30 rage, 5 yard range, 6 sec cooldown, 4 Ranks” 1 point. - Arguably the best melee attack in the game. It shines in both PVP and PVE. The debuff makes is the kicker in PVP, the 50% heal debuff on the target causes nightmares for all healers. The weapon damage was normalized in patch 1.8 so that all 2 handed weapons are set to 3.4 attack speed, meaning that slower, high damage weapons no longer have an advantage over quicker weapons.

Arms

Arms talents tend to be useful for all Warriors, containing much that helps with soloing or PVP. Slow two-handed weapons often benefit the most from Arms talents, although many different weapon specializations can be found in this tree. Mortal Strike is the trademark move of any Arms build.

Talent	Prereqs	Ranks	Description
Improved Heroic Strike	none	3	Reduced rage cost for Heroic Strike.
Deflection	none	5	Increased Parry chance.
Improved Rend	none	3	Increased bleed damage by Rend.
Improved Charge	Arms 5	2	Increased rage from Charge.
Iron Will	Arms 5	5	Increased chance to resist stun and charm effects.
Improved Thunder Clap	Arms 5	3	Reduced cost for Thunder Clap plus increased damage and slowing effect.
Improved Overpower	Arms 10	2	Increased critical strike chance for Overpower.
Anger Management	Arms 10	1	Generates 1 rage per 3 seconds.
Deep Wounds	Arms 10	3	Critical strikes will cause bleed, dealing damage over 12 sec.
Two-Handed Weapon Specialization	Arms 15	5	Increased damage for two-handed weapons.
Impale	Arms 15 Deep Wounds 3	2	Increased critical strike damage bonus on yellow attacks in all stances.
Poleaxe Specialization	Arms 20	5	Increased critical strike chance with Axes and Polearms.
Death Wish	Arms 20	1	When active, increases physical damage dealt by 20% and grants immunity to Fear effects, but increases all damage taken by 5%.
Mace Specialization	Arms 20	5	Mace hits gain a chance to generate 7 rage and stun the opponent for 3 sec.
Sword Specialization	Arms 20	5	Upon dealing damage with a Sword, an extra attack may be gained.
Improved Intercept	Arms 25	2	Reduces the cooldown of your Intercept ability.
Improved Hamstring	Arms 25	3	Gives Hamstring a chance to immobilize the target for 5 sec.
Improved Disciplines	Arms 25	3	Reduced cooldown on Retaliation, Recklessness, and Shield Wall and increases their durations.
Blood Frenzy	Arms 30	2	Rend and Deep Wounds will also increase all physical damage dealt to that target.
Mortal Strike	Arms 30 Death Wish 1	1	Deals weapon damage plus X and wound the target, reduce effectiveness of any healing by 50% for 10 sec.
Second Wind	Arms 30	1	When struck by a Stun or Immbolize effect generate rage plus a percentage of total health.
Improved Mortal Strike	Arms 35 Mortal Strike 1	5	Reduces the cooldown of Mortal Strike by 1 second and increases its damage by up to 5%.
Endless Rage	Arms 40	1	Generate 25% more rage from damage dealt.