Arms Warrior PvP

Updated for Mists of Pandaria 5.2

These days Arms is the PvP tree of choice, with Fury being for DPS and Protection being the tanking build (which might be great for flag carrying and defense.) Arms does a pretty nice amount of damage and has several very useful talents.

Scroll down for remarks on talent choices and see our Warrior PvP page for some general notes on keybinds and fighting tips.

For Arms in instances and raids see: Arms PvE

Contents:

The Arms Warrior Arms in Brief Talents and builds Arms abilities New abilities Arms build Stuns The Numbers Gems and Enchants Races Professions Faster Leveling

Other Warrior Guides Warrior class guide Warrior leveling guide Arms DPS Fury DPS Fury PvP Protection Tanking Warrior PvP guide Get more gold, buy cool stuff.

 

Arms, in Brief

A brief overview of the Arms Warrior for PvP

Build:

•  see above for build and glyphs

Stats: 

• Strength & Resilience
• Hit to 3%, Expertise to 3%, then crit
• Reforge everything else into Crit
• More stat info

Enchants:

• Look for Str & Crit.
• M of P enchants start at iLevel 372.
• More enchants

Race:

• Any will do, but…
• Human (escape,) Night Elf (Shadowmeld,) or Orc (burst) might be “best.”
• More Race info

Step by Step to Level 90

Get Leveled Faster, even in Mists of Pandaria

 

Arms Warrior Talents

These are the talents for Warriors in Mists of Pandaria. Any spec of any warrior can pick any one talent from any row, for six talents at 90.

Changing talents is easy and works just lick changing glyphs. Bring up your talent page in-game, click the row you want to change, spend the indicated dust/powder/tome, and pick the new talent. Your trainer can also reset talents.

See below for actual builds.

level 15	Juggernaut – For the mobility, Charge every 12 seconds.	Double Time – You can use Charge twice in a row. Each use has a 20 sec recharge time. A bit more emergency versatility.	Warbringer – Stun, knock down, and slow the opponent at the end of your charge.
30	Enraged Regeneration – Instantly heals you for 10% of your total health, and an additional 10% over 5 sec. and Can be used while stunned.	Second Wind – Regenerate heath when at low HP, also regenerate rage.	Impending Victory – A cheap attack with a minor heal
45	Staggering Shout – Causes all enemies within 20 yards that are snared to become rooted for 5 sec.	Piercing Howl – Snares all the enemies in the area. Keeps them from hopping around.	Disrupting Shout – Area interrupt, just the thing when fighting groups with casters. Interrupt & silence all of them.
60	Bladestorm – You become a whirling storm of destructive force, striking all targets within 8 yards every 1 sec for 6 sec. During a Bladestorm you are immune to movement impairing and loss of control effects, and you can only perform shout abilities. With 5.2 you can not be disarmed	Shockwave – Area stun in a cone in front of you. More stunage is always a good thing. Bladestorm would be a good choice for heavy A of E fights.	Dragon Roar – Knock all nearby enemies down and back for a brief time.
75	Mass Spell Reflection – Everyone in your group gets Spell Reflection. This could be annoying to the opposition in BGs.	Safeguard – Run at high speed towards a party or raid member, removing all movement-impairing effects upon you, intercepting the next melee or ranged attack made against them and reducing their damage taken. Replaces Intervene.	Vigilance- protect an ally by sucking up some of the damage.
90	Avatar – You transform into an unstoppable colossus for 20 sec, increasing your damage dealt and causing your attacks to generate extra Rage. While transformed you are immune to movement impairing effects.	Bloodbath – Blood, blood, and more blood. Adds a portion of your damage as a short term bleed and slows the opponent.	Storm Bolt – Hurl your weapon at an enemy, causing weapon damage and stunning the target briefly. Deals an additional 300% weapon damage to targets that are permanently immune to stuns.

 

Arms Abilities:

• All abilities can be used in any stance, though they may work better in a particular stance. You will likely be using Battle Stance most of the time, for the Rage generation value.
• Bladestorm is now a talent
• Rend is gone and Mortal Strike automatically applies Mortal Wounds and Deep Wounds. Your Thunderclap ability also applies Deep Wounds.

Arms Spec Abiltites
10	Mortal Strike – Your basic strike, causes Mortal Wounds on the target, as well as Deep Wounds.
10	Seasoned Soldier (Passive) – More damage with 2 handers.
18	Slam – Instant whack.
26	Whirlwind – Attack everything within 8 years.
30	Overpower – Instantly overpower the enemy causing damage, with greatly increased chance to be a critical strike. Only usable after the target dodges. Also slightly reduces Mortal Strike’s cooldown.
50	Plate Specialization (Passive) – More Str is your reward for weaing all plate.
50	Taste for Blood has been redesigned in 5.2. It now causes the Warrior to gain 2 stacks of Overpower (maximum of 5 stacks) when Mortal Strike deals damage, 1 stack when the target dodges, and no longer interacts with Heroic Strike. It now requires level 20 (used to require level 50.)
60	Sweeping Strikes – Your melee strike hit an addition opponent.
80	Mastery: Strikes of Opportunity (Passive) – Chence for your melee attack to trigger an additional attack.
81	Sudden Death (Passive) – Melee hit have a 20% chance to refresh the CD on Clossus Smash.

 

New Warrior Abilities

Warriors (all Warriors) now have three Banners. You throw one of these down at your nearby group (within 30 yards) receives a buff for 30 seconds. You can Intervene to your banner. All are level 87.

• Skull Banner - Crit buff. This is likely the one that will be most used.
• Mocking Banner - all enemies within 15 yards focus their attacks on the Warrior.
• Demoralizing Banner - Deceases enemy damage by a small amount
• Symbiosis - A Druid in your group lets you copy one of his abilities and he copies one of yours.
  • The ability you gain is Stampeding Shout
  • The Guardian Druid gets Spell reflection, Feral gets Shatttering Blow, Balance gets Intervene, Resto gets Intimidating Roar.

 

Arms PvP Build

1. Warbringer – Stun and knock down the opponent at the end of your charge.
2. Impending Victory – A cheap attack with a small heal
3. Disrupting Shout – Area interrupt, just the thing when fighting groups with casters. Interrupt & silence all of them.
4. Dragon Roar – Knock all nearby enemies down and back for a brief time.
5. Mass Spell Reflection – Everyone in your group gets Spell Reflection. This could be annoying to the opposition in BGs.
6. Avatar – You transform into an unstoppable colossus for 20 sec, increasing your damage dealt and causing your attacks to generate extra Rage. While transformed you are immune to movement impairing effects.
7. view on wowhead

Other useful Glyphs:

• Glyph of Enraged Speed – for the extra speed when enraged.
• Glyph of Rude Interruption – More damage after a successful Pummel interrupt.
• Glyph of Unending Rage – 20 more Rage to play with
• Glyph of Overpower – If you’re cleaving then this will give Overpower a damage boost.
• Glyph of Colossus Smash – use if you’re Sundering

 

Stuns and Control

 

Arms Stats

Stats are really pretty easy: Str, Resilience, & Crit.

In order of priority:

• Strength - improves everything you need to do. By far your best stat, with the possible exception of PvP Power, even in Mists of Pandaria
• Resilience, now called PVP Resilience is essential. Gemming for it might not be.
• For your secondary stats:
  • 3% hit (7.5% for raid bosses)
  • 3% Expertise
  • Crit, the more the better. There is a soft cap of 40% (good luck reaching it) due to Overpower having +60% crit chance.
  • Mastery – adds extra swings, but is weak
  • Haste changed in patch 5.2 in that Warriors not get 50% added benefit from the stuff. Crit is still better, but Haste is no longer bad. Adds to white damage, due to more swings over time, and indirectly to your bleed damage (potentially more ticks over time,) plus your rage regenration.
  • Excess Hit and Expertise are useless.
• PvP power replaces Spell Penetration and it adds to your PvP damage, much the same way that attack power adds to your general damage. It does not interact directly with resilience. Point for point it’s less valuable than Str, but PvP Power gems have twice the value of Str gems, making them better. See this page for comments on Resilience and PvP power.

Reforge: 

1. Get your 3% each Hit and Expertise
2. Reforge everything else, including excess Hit and Exp. into Crit.
3. If you have the Hit and the gear already has crit then reforge to Mastery.

 

Gems for the PvP Arms Warrior

Gems with secondary stats (Crit, PvP Power, etc.) have twice the value of Str gems, 320 Vs 160. Therefore it’s going to be worthwhile to match socket bonuses, at least if the bonus is for useful stats (Str, Resilience, Power, Crit.) Str gems in red slots and green gems in other slots might not be a bad way to go, if you need some additional defense.

PvP Power might be, point for point, as good as strength. This will make PvP Power gems, with twice the Str stats, very worthwhile. It will also make Blacksmithing a useful profession since that will allows you to slot two more of these gems.

A good gem strategy to match sockets might be to:

• put Tense Imperial Amethyst in all red and blue slots, and
• Vivid Wild Jade  or Mystic Sun’s Radiance in all other slots.

If your cash flow is bad, such that you can’t buy the gems, then you should check this out.

Arms Gem Priorities
Meta		Reverberating Primal Diamond: +216 Str & Increased Crit Effect
Red		Bold Primordial Ruby: 160 Str
Yellow		Mystic Sun’s Radiance: 320 Resilience
Orange		Resplendent Vermilion Onyx: +80 str & +160 Resilience Tenuous Vermilion Onyx: 160 Expertise, 160 Resilience
Blue		Stormy River’s Heart: +320 PvP power
Green		Vivid Wild Jade: +160 Res, +160 PvP Power
Purple		Tense Imperial Amethyst (MoP:) +80 Str, +160 PvP Power
Prismatic		Bold Primordial Ruby: 160 Str
Cogwheel		Smooth Tinker’s Gear: 600 Crit - requires an engie helm, such as this.

Arms Warrior Enchants

Strength and Crit are the primary things that you want to enchant for. The only resilience enchant is for the chest and their are no higher level PvP power enchants. Head enchants are gone and shoulder enchants all come from the Inscription profession.

Short on gold? Most of the enchants below have similar enchants available, of lesser value, for less cash. We’ve linked to a couple of these. Check with the rep vendor or the Auction House for others. If you want to buy the best enchants, fund all of your alts, donate to the guild, etc., but don’t have the cash, then see what the Tycoon Addon can do about about fixing your poverty.

Arms Enchantments
Weapon	Enchant Weapon – Dancing Steel: Sometimes increases Str by 1,650. Living Steel Weapon Chain: +200 Expertise and reduces disarm duration by 60%
Shoulders	Secret Tiger Fang Inscription: +520 Str and +100 Crit, requires Inscription Greater Tiger Fang Inscription: +200 Str and +100 Crit
Cloak	Enchant Cloak – Superior Critical Strike: +180 Crit rating
Chest	Enchant Chest – Glorious Stats: +80 to all Stats Enchant Chest – Super Resilience: +200 Resilience
Bracers	Enchant Bracer – Exceptional Strength: +180 Str Socket Bracer: Requires Blacksmithing, self-only, pop in a nice gem.
Gloves	Enchant Gloves – Super Strength: +170 Str Socket Gloves: requires Blacksmithing, self-only, drop in a nice gem
Belt	Livingsteel Belt Buckle: Sockets your belt, pop in the best gem.
Leggings	Angerhide Leg Armor: +285 Str & 185 Crit rating
Boots	Enchant Boots – Greater Precision: +175 Hit rating Enchant Boots – Pandaren’s Step: +140 Mastery and Slight run speed increase.
Rings	Enchant Ring – Greater Strength: +160 Str, Requires Enchanting 550

 

 

Races

Go with what you like, even if it’s Draenei. None of the racials are that awesome, though the Humans being able to use two DPS trinkets is rather nice. Orcs are a solid Horde choice. Pandarens can be either Horde or Alliance.

Pandaren

• “Bouncy” for less falling damage. Might be just the thing when you jump or get tossed off a cliff.
• Better buffs from food.
• Longer lasting rest XP, for slightly faster leveling.
• Melee range stun lasts 4 seconds. Definitely useful.
• Choose either Horde or Alliance when leaving the starting area.
• Good with cooking.

Alliance

• Human:
  • Their racial is a PvP trinket, meaning that you don’t need to actually buy one for that escape. This allows using two DPS trinkets instead.
  • Humans also get some expertise with Axe and Sword, useful if those are the best weapons available.
• Gnome:
  • An escape is always nice and their small size really is an advantage due to being a it harder to see and a bit harder to click on (if you’re fighting poeple who click targets. )
  • Expertise with small weapons is useless to you.
  • Gnomes are good with engineering and there are some useful engie gadgets.
• Dwarf:
  • Stone Form washes away bleeds and other effects and provides some damage reduction.
  • Dwarven Ranged Weapon Expertise is useless to you.
  • Good with Archeology.
• Night Elf:
  • 2% dodge is nice, and Shadowmeld has some definite situational use, such as lurking in wait for unsuspecting targets. S”meld will also break incoming spells if your timing is excellent.
• Draenei: Tentacles???
  • Other than the tentacles you get a +1% Hit, which makes optimizing stats a bit easier,
  • and you get a small heal, which is always nice.
  • Good with Jewelcrafting.
• Worgen:
  • 1% crit isn’t bad and neither is the Sprint ability.
  • Good with Skinning, which adds some crit rating.

Horde

• Orc:
  • Blood Fury is a DPS boost and they’re tougher to stun than others. Pretty nice.
  • Expertise with Axes helps to crush the opposition, if an axe is the best weapon available.
• Tauren:
  • War Stomp is a nice stun, great for getting nearby casters to stop casting.
  • The Tauren health bonus is good for 15k+ health at 90. Not bad.
  • Tauren are good with Herbalism and that skill’s Lifeblood is a small heal with a Haste effect.
• Troll:
  • Berserking is a nice attack speed increase and
  • Da Voodoo Shuffle is nice when your trinket is on CD
  • Their Ranged Weapon Expertise is useless for you.
• Goblin:
  • 1% haste is always good, even if it’s not your best stat.
  • Rocket Jump is a nice escape to set up for another charge.
  • Good with alchemy.
• Blood Elf:
  • Arcane Torrent is a useful silence and restores some Rage.
  • Good with Enchanting.
• Undead:
  • Will of the Forsaken breaks fear, etc.
  • Touch of the Grave (a life drain and heal) replaces Underwater Breathing. It is a passive ability and will add a bit to your overall damage and healing.
  • Cannibalism let’s you eat players you just killed.

 

Arms Warrior Professions

All of the professions provide some buff or self-only ability, in addition to any nifty items that can be created by that profession. If you really want to do the min-max thing then you can level a profession just for the buff, but that’s a lot of gold to spend for a little gain.

Most of the professions add an average of about 320 Str or so. Since gems with secondary stats are twice the value of those with primary stats (320 PvP Power Vs 160 Str, for example) Blacksmithing might be the most valuable profession if you’re just looking for the buffs.

Jewelcrafting provides only 320 in any stat over non JC gems. Engineering has a lot of useful toys.

Arms Professions
Blacksmithing	gives two extra gems slots. Since gems with secondary stats have twice the value of gems with primary stats Blacksmithing might be a very valuable profession. For example, you’ll be able to socket he two gems for 640 PvP Power instead of 320 Str. You can create keys, sharpening stones, useful gear (such as your stater PvP gear,) and cool looking gear for Transmogrification.
Engineering	has lots of interesting toys, some of which have situational use, and Synapse Springs, which increases Str by 1940 for a short time. If you take this use a macro to activate it along with other short term buffs.
Jewelcrafting	Make nicer gems for your own use.
Inscription	Shoulder enchant adds 520 Str and 100 crit. Make all your own glyphs and make staves for your caster alts/buddies.
Alchemy	More effect from your own potions. Adds 320 Str and an extra hour to your main flask, also about 30% more stats and an extra hour from any other flask/elixir. Put a few potions of healing, Strength, Rage, Crit, etc. on your bars. You get better effect from your own potions than the other guy does.
Enchanting	Enchant both rings, for a total +320 Str gain.
Tailoring	Cloak enchant sometimes adds 4k AP for 15 seconds.
Leatherworking	Bracer enchant adds 500 Str.
Skinning	provides 480 crit rating
Herbalism	Small heal and 2880 Haste for 20 seconds
Mining	480 Stamina

 

Leveling Your Arms Warrior Even Faster

Ok, you’re not yet high enough level to raid or do the Arenas. Maybe you’re even level 1. Have a plan to hit the level cap ASAP and get into that yummy end-game content? Or will you just aimlesslay wander about the world, trying to decide where to go next? To make your job a lot easier you should consider an expert leveling guide for your 1-85 blast. You will never again wonder about where to go or what to do and your leveling will be faster, much faster.

Dugi’s  nearly automates the whole leveling path, from start to finish, for your Warrior. Carve your way through the world and the content at a surprisingly crisp pace. Pick your starting point and the guide automatically updates and advances as you complete quests, sets a waypoint arrow automatically, and includes the important quest info.

Take a break to do some PvP leveling, instances, or whatever and when you come back to the guide it will figure out what level you are and pick up from there. Automatically.  It doesn’t matter if you’re brand new to WoW or you’re decked out in Heirlooms and using Recruit a Friend, Dugi will get you to the level cap faster.

Grab your copy here and get leveled!