Midnight Season 1 OverviewArms Warrior Guide
Learn about the iconic abilities and talents that might still exist in your spell book but you likely won't be using in Season 1.
Collapsing Star - Devourer DH
Hogstrider - SV & BM Hunter
Melee Healing - MW Monk
Healing Rain - Resto Shaman
Heroic Nostalgia
A fan-favorite ability long removed from the Warrior toolkit, Midnight reintroduced Heroic Strike to Arms Warriors by way of the new Master of Warfare apex talent - temporarily replacing Slam with a much more powerful version that triggers an additional damage bonus. While the return of this beloved ability may seem to be cause for celebration, it's marred by the newfound association with Slam.
Although called Heroic Strike, it's more like Slam+, reminiscent of Crushing Assault.
Since its inception, Slam has been a contentious ability for Warriors, undergoing several transformations from the clunky hardcast that reset the melee swing timer in Vanilla WoW to the relatively weak rotational filler it is today. In truth, many players would be just as happy if the ability didn't exist at all, though despite how infrequently it may be used, Slam continues to fill an important role in filling the rotation while Mortal Strike and Overpower are on cooldown - contributing to Tactician and Anger Management. Although Heroic Strike is a major step up in terms of power and keeping the ability relevant for more than 65% of the rotation, asking players to press that button more often, whether under a new name or not, can be a hard pill to swallow.
Despite this, Heroic Strike performs reasonably well. Although it does not proc often enough to show up as a major source on the damage meter, its individual hits are fairly competitive - typically the second strongest individual attack behind Mortal Strike (which is buffed by a variety of different effects, including Heroic Strike itself).
Heroic Strike actually deals a decent amount of damage, even if it doesn't hit often enough to show high on the meter.
Missing Multitarget
Another thing to consider is that the Apex doesn't trigger as often in multitarget content. The initial proc which enables Heroic Strike to be used in place of Slam is explicitly triggered by single-target abilities, which notably does not include Cleave or Fervor of Battle.
Important distinction: Fervor of Battle will cast an already primed Heroic Strike, but it can not itself trigger a use of the ability.
Between the already low cooldown on Cleave and Crushing Combo, area attacks make up more than 40% of an Arms' Warriors rotation in multitarget content... which means less chances to trigger Heroic Strike and less resulting stacks of its buff. Sweeping Strikes compensates for this by giving each single target ability a second chance to trigger the effect, but still we end up with a disparate amount of procs.
Averaged over several thousand iterations, this difference isn't RNG, it's a disparity with the actual proc rate.
Of course, 19.7 to 22.6 isn't a whole lot, though it's still 15% less Heroic Strikes, which would be much more noticeable if it were 15% less Sudden Death, Battlelord, or Tactician procs. In this case, it's hardly crippling, and there would be little cause to care if the Apex felt powerful in its own right. Instead, it contributes to the Apex not feeling particularly impactful when it shows up even less often than expected.
Mismatched Cooldown Reduction
Form and function aside, the biggest issue facing Arms Warriors in Midnight is that investing all four points into the Apex doesn't result in any payout. In fact, it's actively worse than taking no talent whatsoever!
Averaging 20 procs every 5 minutes, that's one extra Colossus Smash... which does more harm than good.
Promoted as a high impact capstone justifying the other three points spent to get there, Arms' final Apex has just one straightforward effect: reducing the cooldown of Colossus Smash whenever Heroic Strike is used... which sounds good on the surface, but such an insignificant number of extra Colossus Smash casts results in cooldown desync that harms the rotation more than it helps.
With Anger Management now affecting Avatar in addition to Colossus Smash, the two are kept in perfect unison... until the cooldown reduction from the 4th point in Master of Warfare desyncs them. You wouldn't think that getting cooldowns more often would be a bad thing, but layering the damage bonuses of Colossus Smash and Avatar with other effects like Crushing Combo, Celeritous Conclusion, or Violent Euphoria has a powerful multiplicative effect - disrupting that is actually worse than any other talent or not even taking a talent at all!
Apex 4 is objectively awful and needlessly complicates the rotation, while most of the power is counterintuitively in the second and third points.
In Blizzard's own words, the first point should provide a large boost while the fourth point is meant to create a "complete and cohesive package," but in Arms' case, the first and fourth are significantly weaker than points two and three. Moreover, Heroic Strike and Colossus Smash have no explicit interaction with one another, so this complete sense of cohesiveness remains unfound.
The first point is spent on an initial keystone that provides a large boost in power and introduces new gameplay. The next two-point node emphasizes the Apex Talent or a few core abilities for the specialization. The final point applies to a capstone that brings the Apex Talent into a complete and cohesive package.
As a result, most Arms Warriors should be skipping the fourth Apex in Midnight, and while the first three points are still worth using purely due to the resulting damage buff, there remains a distinct lack of excitement about them.
