Class Talents
The Warrior class talent tree seems relatively unique by comparison to many other class trees in that there is a lot of damage being offered as opposed to almost solely utility.
Pathing through the general tree offers a good amount of free points to choose what type of utility or survivability you want to take as you move down the tree.
Some key notable talents always worth taking are:
- Defensive Stance
- War Machine
- Rallying Cry
- Leeching Strikes
- Heroic Leap
- Furious Blows
- Crushing Force
- Reinforced Plates
- Bounding Stride
- Barbaric Training
- Double Time
- Armored to the Teeth
- Wild Strikes
- Two-Handed Weapon Specialization
- Avatar
- Blademaster’s/Warlord’s Torment (situational)
The above talents will not let you reach the entire way down the tree but are some talents which I feel are always worth taking. There are some strong optional talents to let you round out your build. For example, on the right side of the tree below Furious Blows, we are left with a choice in order to reach further down the tree to Barbaric Training which we definitely want. The choices are Storm Bolt, which is mostly useless in raid situations, Overwhelming Rage, which is a great choice but would require a 2 point investment in order to go further and Sidearm/Concussive Blows. Sidearm is a small amount of extra damage for 1 point and Concussive Blows is only useful when interrupts are involved. The situation can highly influence your decision about which of these talents you would choose.
As it stands, there are no talents in the Warrior tree that would be completely useless for Arms Warrior.
Talent Builds
Single Target
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Patch 10.1 brings no major changes to talent builds with only minor quality of life improvements. Bloodletting has been changed so that Rend will be refreshed when you use Mortal Strike against a target under 35% HP.
Consider swapping between Bounding Stride and Honed Reflexes depending on how much mobility is required on each individual raid boss or M+ dungeon.
Cleave
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There isn’t much call for change between the single target build mentioned above and a more cleave-based build as, fortunately, we no longer have to spec into Sweeping Strikes. For a mostly 2 target fight (like Kurog), swapping Strength of Arms for Improved Sweeping Strikes is a good play, but this will heavily depend on the fight.
Mythic+
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A standard Bladestorm build, similar to the one being used in Season 1, offers high uncapped AoE damage during cooldowns and very good sustained AoE damage from Cleave. However, Cleave itself is somewhat less effective without the 10.0 tier set but still contributes a significant portion of damage.
The main issue with this build is its relative lack of single-target damage, particularly when compared to Fury.
Alternative Mythic+:
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This build still keeps Bladestorm but drops Cleave in favor of gaining a little bit more single-target (ST) damage instead. The idea behind this build is to use Dreadnaught and a long Sweeping Strikes to cover most of the sustained AoE, as well as utilizing the Arms 4-set stacks to enhance that.
This approach may feel odd at first but is definitely worth sticking with, particularly on Tyrannical weeks or dungeons with lower mob density.