Slayer Arms Warrior FOR DUMMIES (WoW Midnight 12.1) transcript

Tank hit. >> AoE. >> Hi folks, my name is [snorts] Rag. I'm a multit/ cutting edge raider with a few years of pretty much only warrior gameplay under my belt. With the new release of Midnight Season 2 and how much has changed for Slayer Arms and how much popularity we gained as a spec, our Discord seems to be bustling with life and newcomers. I've decided to try and work on this relatively simple guide and go over some basic warrior concepts alongside some more niche gameplay advice.

Quick disclaimer, this guide will probably be only relevant until the next set of warrior changes or until something happens to us, such as 12.1.5, etc. Keep this guide with a grain of salt. 95% of your warrior gameplay can and should come from Wowhead as Artiros does a wonderful job alongside the APL team with making sure that it's an accurate and good source while being as simplified as possible. Again, Wowhead is not a bad source for warrior gameplay.

They try to simplify it the most while keeping it as upto-date and as precise as it can be while leaving out the most, I would say, niche or unnecessary optimizations. so that you as a player can perform the best without worrying about the smallest most minute detail. I'm going to very briefly talk about the difference between talent trees. Realistically, there's only three talent trees that you can choose from and they vary very slightly.

The gap between ST in its purest form, two target cleave and three target cleave and so forth is not so big, but we're going to touch it very quickly and very briefly so we can see the differences. This would be an example single target talent tree that you can probably take from Wowhead and I'm going to link it below as well so you can copy it if you want to. The major differences that I like to do is possibly remove interpose or intervene.

Grab something along the lines of second wind for raiding if I feel like I need it. I'll probably stick with relentless pursuit because it's nicer during raid to charge and get the move speed than it is to use vicious agility. Plus, I don't really feel like it's a big deal. We're going to pick fierce follow through because the gap is not existent in single target. So, it's very much not a big deal to just not track opportunist at all and just not play it at all.

One of the reasons opportunist becomes stronger later is because you pair it up with dreadnot for AoE. So then in raid multi talent, we grab broad strokes, for example, we grab dreadnot and we possibly grab powerful momentum for two target cleaning and so on and so forth. certain bosses, for example, Vashnik, maybe some Oolletch, you can drop blood search to grab fervor of battle, so you can have a bit more cleave usage.

If you get any value from fervor of battle, as in multiple cleaves throughout the fight can get the extra funnel damage, it's generally speaking not a bad trade-off to take. Wool has a pretty decent intermission phase. It's not a bad idea to have it there. For example, the same goes for Vashnne, especially during heroic. I've noticed that I could funnel a lot of boss hits with cleave. At least three to four cleave strikes while the ads are up.

Even a couple would be nice just to get usage out of it, some mileage long-term kind of in quotation marks. And then for mythic plus, again, it's not a vastly different output. We go for for battle and then we just grab collateral damage as well to help us with mass AOE, but that's really it. Realistically speaking, you can kind of alter these on the fly. I don't see a reason why you would need to have 15 pages of talent trees.

Two or three should be fine. You can alter them as you go. I think more than three talent pages is kind of egregious. As explained before, there are numerous talents we care about in particular, especially for Mythic Blush. We're going to try to focus on talking about most of them so we can kind of understand what they mean, how they affect our gameplay, and what are the implications while we're playing. Starting off with fervor of battle.

Fervor of battle means that if clever woman hit three or more targets, you also slam your primary target. This particular slam also deals additional damage. This is big because it means that heroic strike procs off this, which is why we never heroic strike in AoE. If we do so, we are losing on the potential extra 50% damage that we do through heroic strike, and we are wasting a GCD that can go somewhere else because it's already automatically applied through this talent.

The next talent we talk about is collateral damage, which leans towards the mythic plus side more than the raiding side because in raids we're probably going to be playing fatality since the damage gap between the two is very minimal, but the rotational gap means that fatality is a lot more forgiving and so it's easier to reach the potential that you want to reach damage-wise without playing collateral damage. In Mythic Plus, however, collateral damage means that we're going to do more priority damage, and it also means that in a two-target scenario, we're going to be placing cleave with max stacks above a mortal strike.

This means that if we're playing a two-target fight, for example, the second boss in Ruby Life Pools or the second boss in Voice Arena, we would like to cleave when it has three stacks and then mortal strike because the damage there is slightly leaning towards cleave becoming a stronger ability. The next talent we talk about is executioner precision and it's quite a big one. This just means that on two stacks of executioner precision, you always send a mortal strike because it'll deal a significant 70% more damage.

You never want to mortal strike without having two stacks of executioner precision during execute phase. Bladestorm through unhinged casts mortal strikes, which means that if you start your bladestorm having two executioners precision stacks in advance, it will consume them. So when you leave your bladestorm, you would have to do two more executes so that your next mortal strike has the buff again. Another important talent is tactician.

One of the reasons it's so important is because it allows us to juggle between execute, overpower, cleave, and potentially mortal strike in single target and make sure that we're pressing slam as little as possible. That's why in Wowhead it states that your rotation revolves around cleaving as much as possible followed by making sure that you're consuming your sudden death proc so that you're not at two and over capping followed by making sure that you're overpowering so that you're not at two stacks of overpower and over capping.

So in AoE dreadnot is quite important because it procs off sweeping strikes but it doesn't really change your rotation as much as it changes how you move around the map and how you navigate around the mobs. red knot kind of works where it comes out of the mob behind it sort of in a weird janky line. So you want to try to position yourself where the line that comes out of the mob hits as many mobs as possible. And also because it procs off sweeping strikes you want to make sure that you're cleaving the line in itself if that makes sense.

It's quite strong and that's also why overpower is so strong in AoE in mythic plus and in your overall. Our next talent, sudden death, directly affects execute and our rotation. As you guys know, this talent stacks up to twice, which means that it's a very powerful talent, and we need to keep track of it because we don't want to overcap the stacks. Sudden death means that our next execute costs no rage, is usable on a target regardless of their health, and would deal damage as if we spent 40 rage.

That's big because it works directly with anger management and it works directly with wanting to create as many execute windows as possible alongside some of our slayer procs that work specifically with a sudden death proc. However, on that note, we want to play around imminent demise mostly in single target and mostly in our first opener because there's a 99% chance that any other bladestorm past the first one will have three stacks of imminent demise purely based off the fact of how many sudden deaths we proc before we even get a bladestorm again.

That's why our single target opener plays with a execute before we bladestorm so that we have at least one imminent demise stack so that we're guaranteeing an extra mortal strike. This becomes significantly weaker in AoE where that mortal strike doesn't contribute much to your AoE damage but rather you'd like to execute after your bladestorm to try to reduce its cool down because more bladestorms in AoE translate to more damage.

Tactical edge is mostly used for two things. The first is to instantly get a sudden death proc for imminent demise right before you bladestorm in single target. And the other is to make sure that you're able to somewhat line up your bladestorm with your colossal smash. An example would be if you have three stacks of executioner, which we'll talk about in a second and then you have a colossal smash lined up and your bladestorm's on cooldown, you can potentially send that colossal smash into an execute.

If your bladestorm has say 20 seconds or less of cooldown, it'll just be able to be used almost immediately right after because you've reduced the cool down knowing you're going to successfully proc the sudden death because of tactical edge. Speaking of executioner, this is how it works. Executioner stacks up to five. Each stacks of executioner reduces your bladestorm's cool down by 5 seconds. That's huge. It's kind of hard to play around because they selfbuff and they're not multiplicative, which means that you can have five stacks and then drop to four while the other three or four stacks exist.

It doesn't go from five to zero. So, it can wave and change a lot. That's why it's kind of hard and finicky to play around, but you can sort of try to predict it if you know what you're doing. That being said, the average player, and if you're someone who just wants to play the game and kind of not worry about it too much, can just simply pretend like it doesn't matter and it shouldn't affect your rotation too much because you're going to be pressing your rotation regardless the way you should on Wowhead for maximum damage.

This is mostly for situations, but it's good to keep an eye on it because you can play around it. in particular, end of a pool where you can try to fish for some procs so you can get your bladestorm up for the next pool, for example, or if you know you're about to line it up with a colossal smash. Another quick note about this one in particular is that starting a fresh single target fight, meaning that you don't have any previous buffs from a previous pool or maybe it's a single target raid fight, usually means that you don't have any executioner stacks to begin with. which means that when you open her on the boss and you send your colossal smash and you gain your sudden death through tactical edge, there's no guarantee you even have any executioner procs to reduce the cool down of blades to begin with.

Which is why we kind of are okay with sending that imminent demise proc in the beginning because you're just going to get more damage through the extra mortal strike through imminent demise and unhinged and then later on you're going to build up your executioner stacks to give you coolown reduction after bladestorm already ends. Another small niche talent that you might want to look into, but you're not guaranteed to or you don't need to in particular is shown mercy.

This means that the more stacks of executioner you have inherently, execute will deal more damage regardless of sudden death, which is why it's quite good at four or more stacks to use execute basically on CD if you're on an execute phase on a small pack of mobs because then you're guaranteeing to get a giant bladestorm cool down reduction. Plus, execute itself is just going to heat hard enough to be worth pressing over other abilities.

Plus, it's gonna inherently remove cooldown so much because execute costs so much rage more than mortal strike or cleave on any other ability because it can go up to 40 rage, which means that execute in tandem with anger management, shown of mercy or other talents can essentially be an insane cooldown spammer that is worth spamming in the end of a pool. But this is more of a niche thing to look for when you already have the rotation down and you're understanding the spec a bit better.

Another reason why a lot of people just tell you to always send your cooldowns and if you're unsure, you should probably send is because of anger management and how it works, especially during execute phases and at the end of pools. Because you execute so often and you can spend up to 40 rage. That means that you can reduce the cooldown on both Colossal Smash, Bladestorm through executes, and Avatar by two or more seconds almost every GCD.

So a 45 second cooldown can look more like a 15 or 20 second cool down if you just spam the right buttons at the end of a pool, which means that you can just get so much more value out of your cooldowns if you know what you're doing. Again, this is relatively niche and shouldn't be looked into too much past when you're comfortable with the spec and with the rotations and with the fundamentals of the spec. For the majority of players, I would recommend to just try to play the game as it goes.

Follow the rotation and have fun and improve yourself to the point where your fundamentals are good enough for you to know when anger management becomes worth it. So there's a funny trend with warriors and stacking things up to twice such as executioner precision, sudden death procs, overpowering itself, and opportunist. That begs the question, is opportunist worth tracking? Should I keep it up to two times before I use it?

And the answer is realistically not really. Opportunist is good and on two stacks, it's actually stronger than a natty execute or a singular sudden death proc. But the mental brain power of trying to track opportunist or caring about it too much is not worth the minute damage gain. So if you want to track it and you don't mind and it's something that you can actually handle, go ahead by all means. But the damage gain that you're going to get from trying to work it out is not something you should write home about.

That means that if it makes it easier for you to not track it and not worry about it, that is completely viable. Another niche but very important talent is stance mastery. in particular, defensive stance mastery. This means that you essentially have a 30% DR on a 3-second cool down that lasts essentially indefinitely. This puts it at the top alongside AMS and spell reflect for being the strongest defensive in the game.

So, if you're a warrior and you're dying in a key and the reason you died isn't because you ate avoidable damage, which is inherently your mistake, it's probably because you didn't press defensive stance or used the potion or impending victory or really anything else. You can probably survive almost everything alone. A quick note on Master of Warfare and why it's not a big deal to not track it or to not look at it too often is because everything about it is something you're already prioritizing. you're already cleaving which procs heroic strikes in AoE on CD so it's not the end of the world and you're already prioritizing heroic strike and single target above mortal strike.

So for the majority of us this does not matter. You're already going to be procking it as much as you can alongside the four-piece as well. Please do not try to track the four-piece. It's absolutely pointless. You can track Master of Warfare if you really want to, but it's not going to change anything about how you play the game. A super important yet super small detail about Rend and Cleave in this case would be that through the talent bloodletting, we effectively gain a 5% crit chance against any target that is affected by Rend.

That's why Rend is so high on our priority list when it's not applied. And that's why we cleave on our opener before doing anything else so that it lasts through our entire Colossus Smash window. That's also why we apply Ren on the pandemic window. And that's also why we refresh it if Colossal Smash is about to be up and Ren has more than 10 seconds left so that it has its full duration upon applying our opener or cooldowns.

In past seasons, this wouldn't matter as much, especially for slayer, but in this season, it does even in single target. Now, in single target, mortal strike does apply rend on its own automatically below 35% health, meaning execute phase, so you don't have to worry about it as much, but during AoE, you still kind of have to keep track of it. That means that it is worth noting and worth paying attention to, even if via name plates or your own debuff tracker.

So, you make sure you keep it applied. Last but not least, and the reason why cleave is so important in AoE, is reap the storm. When you actually cleave something for more than three mobs, you have a 20% chance to unleash a flurry of steel. Basically, free AoE. It also applies overwhelmed, which means that it makes it so that you deal more damage to the mobs. This is the particular reason why cleave is so strong, even if it's not buffed by collateral damage, and why every third GCD in AoE should be potentially a cleave under almost every single circumstance.

While it is true that certain mechanics with opportunist can become a damage gain or certain other mechanics, for example, like sending a bladestorm with two stacks of execution precision during execute phase to proc unhinged and then not have to press mortal strike manually can be a damage gain. It is truly such a minor damage gain at this stage in time. Whereas not doing these things is just simply so much easier and such a minimal damage loss that it's a safer option to ignore these things and play the rotation properly and use fundamentals properly to yield more damage by not pressing the wrong GCD.

If that makes sense. For example, if I'm going to try to always think about opportunist, I'm probably going to miss out on some things that matter more, like never wasting a GCD, or if I'm going to try to stack executioners uh precision before I'm bladestorming, I might delay my bladestorm, which I shouldn't do. And these things can cause damage in the long run. Even if you're thinking you're playing optimally because you're sending your opportunistic stacks when you need to, at the end of the day, you might be hurting yourself by wasting GCDs or by prioritizing the wrong ability when you should press something else instead to maintain the flow of things.

What I mean by that is at the end of the day, Slayer Arms in particular plays more around just having a good flow rather [snorts] than just saying this is better or this is optimal. It's generally speaking better to just nuke your GCDs properly than to try to look for what does the most damage at any given time because at the long run things just flow well. What I mean for example is if you press rent on opener as you should usually after around 14 15 seconds you're going to need to press rend again and then around 10 seconds later you're going to get your cooldowns back up and then you're going to press rend right before your cooldowns come back up.

So it naturally lines up. While it might sound kind of to say, at the end of the day, you're playing for the class and you're not playing for yourself. And so that's why people value target dummy practice so much because it lets you kind of go into a flow state where you're just familiar with the class and the buttons and what you need to press more than you become with just saying, "Oh, but this doesn't apply in Mythic Plus or in Raid." But it does.

It lets you think less about what you need to do during these scenarios and focus more about the actual scenario. For example, if I'm very familiar with my abilities and I'm very familiar with the encounter and I'm very familiar with my spells, it'll probably be easier for me to use my rotation, even if it's slightly suboptimally, and to dodge a mechanic, than it is for someone to try to look at their bars all the time or think about their next GCD.

Let's talk simming for a second and kind of what benefit you can get from simming and how to do it sort of properly. >> Warrior doesn't really benefit from variations of simming outside of simply just doing a regular one target 5minute default sim. And the majority of the reasons for it are the fact that the way warrior plays doesn't really get affected too vastly by either stats or target count. What I mean by that is, for example, you can argue that in AoE, an armored warrior would prefer having crit and mastery and haste loses value, but realistically speaking, you're still going to sim for single target because the gaps are not that big and you still want to prioritize doing more single target.

That's why most raiders or most high-end mythic plus players will probably sim for a one target five minute or if they really want to be pedantic or nuanced, they might run a one target 4minut with mythic plus talents or an eight target one minute with mythic plus talents to kind of simulate those and then cross reference those sims that they're doing to see what can benefit them the most for all types of content. Usually for the average player, you can just finish the day with a regular default Sim.

So, we're going to load up our SimC add-on by doing SLSC in chat, copying it, and then we're going to go over and open raid bots. We're going to put in our information, and then we can either top gear, drop, or quick sim to see whatever we want to see. In this case, I'm going to top gear and compare different types of gems, for example, to see which one might be the most beneficial for me with the talents that I'm using.

Let's do a quick mythic plus sim. Everything is standard except for the 4minute instead of 5 minutes and we'll just run it. >> Again, these sims don't change too much and the reason we don't really care for them is because especially when we're gearing or we don't have the absolute best gear. Everything changes very quickly and very fluidly. So, usually it's better to just stick to the same sim to maintain the fact that our simming is going to be as standardized and as precise and as consistent as it can be.

If we're running too many different sims, we're going to be in a position where at the end of the day, we don't know what actually matters or what actually to prioritize. And that c creates a conflict where we're just left unsure about what to do. You can do many different sims. You can sim different potions, different flasks, different gems, different jewelry to make sure that you really equip what you want to equip.

But at the end of the day, just do a regular sim. Trust it for the most part. And every now and again, maybe once a week or whenever you feel like you want to test out something a bit more niche, run in another sim with those specific adjustments in mind. That should cover you for 99% of use cases. You can also see here in my current sim, my 4minute one boss target sim, that changing gems doesn't really drastically change my damage output.

It reduces it by maybe at worst 1%. That's not a big variation and it's nothing to be scared of. You can see in AoE for example, a similar situation might arise where I can change these gems and maybe have the exact same output or I can again reduce my gems and maybe lose8% DPS. So this is a 1 minute eight boss account. Also, this is with BL. So there's a solid chance that if I drop the BL, haste might seem better or might seem worse.

So, this is why these things don't matter too much and you should just go with the flow. This proves that for the majority of us, the Sims are just touch and go. Follow the robots guidance and you should be mostly okay. Regarding gearing, stats, and so forth, your best bet is honestly to just sim it. You'll know what to do. This is insanely vital because at the end of the day, half of your gear is sort of set in stone already.

You want to get all of the Ult gear and you want to get all of the coiled alter gear because they're 344, so they have the best stats and the best item level on them regardless. Until then, it's kind of hard to judge what works best for you. Or why does the game tell you to play with mastery even though Wowhead says you should play with crit haste? There's a very solid chance that the reason it says that is because you already have enough crit haste.

Take for example our tech champion track necklace. It gives me crit, haste, mastery, and verse. It's stronger than a heroic track alter of fangs necklace. But a heroic track alter of fangs necklace gives me both crit and haste a lot more than the acubane vilicquary. Which means that the sim might say you already have enough of these stats. You should go for more mastery. That's why it's pointless to try to look at what should you get as a strong and hard line and just go based on what the sim tells you for the time being.

Just sim yourself every week while you're gearing. And then at the end of the week, try to go for another sim. And then once you have the proper items that you need to from raiding, you'll be good to go. At the best, you're going to do a couple of percentages more damage. At worst, you're just going to feel shitty. So just sim yourself and stop worrying about, oh, my crit is a bit low, or oh, if my mastery was a bit higher, I would have done more damage.

That's probably not the case, and you're probably just pressing your buttons wrong. Our single target opener is quite simple. We're going to start off on pool with our charge to get some rage into a cleave to apply ren for 5% extra crit chance on our abilities. We then throw in avatar and colossal smash and whatever unused trinket we might have. Then through tactical edge in our talent tree, we will get a sudden death proc which we're going to send before we bladestorm so that our bladestorm can proc an extra mortal strike and spin one more time.

Extra damage is free. If we need to, we can send a storm bolt during bladestorm for some extra extremely minor damage. If we're lucky enough to get a heroic strike proc, which we might or probably will happen, then we throw that right after Bladestorm ends. And then we continue on our priority, which will probably be mortal strike into overpower into whatever it may be. Keep in mind, however, that if for some reason you gain sudden death procs, say you gain one proc during your bladestorm, you're going to hold that for a bit so that you can generate some executioner stacks to actually reduce the cooldown on bladestorm.

That's why one sudden death proc is not high on the priority, but two are because you don't want to over cap on them. In AoE, we will pre-cast sweeping strikes on pool, which means on the 10-second mark or on the 15 or 20 second mark or whatever it may be. Then we follow with a charge as usual. Then a cleave to apply rend and also for damage because we're doing AOE rotation followed by our avatar colossus smash cooldowns, whatever it may be.

We don't execute before our bladestorm because this time we're going for bladestorm cooldown reduction. It has more value in AoE because our mortal strike A not only does not sweeping strikes cleave but also doesn't do much in AoE as opposed to cleaves and cleaves generate more slayer strikes because of how they work. Which is why we kind of want to cleave on GCD and why we want to send executes to reduce bladestorm cool down more so than to build imminent demise stacks.

In two target, we're going to be playing our single target rotation. However, we're going to be prioritizing trying to use as many sweeping strikes as we can to maintain its uptime. The way we do this is by again trying to pre-cast sweeping strikes before the pull begins so that we can have the cool down ticking as we go. And the second way is by trying to land sweeping strikes and casting it when you have six or less stacks of sweeping active.

Because if you have it when you do it on seven, for example, or eight, you're wasting the 12 that you gain. And if you're doing it on five or four, you're wasting GCDs where sweeping strikes cool down could have already started ticking down, which would be efficient if you're trying to lay it up so that you gain more value from sweep because then you can play around maintaining the uptime through Colossus Smash in itself as well.

During mythic plus on bosses, you should generally speaking have maintained your three stacks of uh imminent demise from pools prior to that. So you shouldn't have the issue of sending your execute in advance. You can actually hold it as you would do for AoE to get some bladestorm cool down reduction. In AoE on the first pool, you'll try generally speaking to get some pre-casts of some sudden death procs on gather to see if you can land some demise stacks.

And if you can, great. If you can't, you're not going to try to fish for it when the pool begins. Rather, when all the mobs are gathered, you're going to send your as usual. The reasoning for this is quite simple. In gathering, we don't lose much by just attacking stray mobs here and there, trying to fish for procs. But once the pool is gathered, then we go for our pool rotation and our opener because we want to do as much damage as possible.

So throwing an execute when you can blaze and then possibly blaze again during that same pull has way more value. That's why we're fishing for those procs and why we're playing around cleave a lot more in AoE. In two target, we're pretty much playing single target. However, we're trying to cleave using sweeping strikes as much as possible. Not the actual ability cleave, but rather just cleave the targets with sweeping strikes is what I mean.

Basically, two target is single target with sweeps. Multi-target is cleave on GCD. That's the gist of it. As a result, the way we want to play AoE is simple. Always be cleaving. Cleave happens every three GCDs, which means every three GCDs is going to be a cleave. So you're going to open up the pack, cleave something something, cleave, right? Or alternatively, cleave cooldowns, bladestorm. By the time Bladestorm ends, cleave again, which is surprisingly what the Wowhead rotation says you should do anyways.

If you read through the priority list in Wowhead, it kind of indicates that as well. It places cleave, even without three collateral stacks, right below two sudden death procs. And the only reason you're sending those two sudden death procs is so that you don't over cap. Not because it's stronger, but because it just enables you to cleave and bladestorm more. You're just playing for cool down reduction and cleaves. That's it.

Your entire rotation in AoE is to cleave as soon as you can and to not slam. In single target, however, it's kind of the same deal except with mortal strike. And then during execute phase, you replace Mortal Strike with a two execute Mortal Strike. That's it. That's all you have to think about. Press the ability with the highest priority as often as you can. And once you do it, your damage will skyrocket. That naturally also works with cooldowns.

You have them so often, you should probably press them as often as you can. Sweet. >> Let's talk about positioning and hitboxes and why they matter so much. Cleave and dreadnot from overpower are incredibly finicky and they're also very strong, so we have to play around them and it's very clunky, but we have to try our best. especially if our tanks don't respect that. So, what we're going to notice first is if we overpower, especially during sweeps, we're going to see two lines coming outside of overpower.

And those would be our dreadnot lines. As you can see, they went two completely different directions. Even though I strike one target, one went over here while the other went over there. You can see it applying here. For example, if I do this, they go out in such weird directions and it just matters a lot in understanding where to aim certain things. The same applies for cleave. We can be here and cleave like this and we're completely missing this one.

He's out of the picture. However, if we move slightly more forward, suddenly he's being cleaved. So, there's a very small area, very small window where we kind of know what we want to aim for. In this area, we're not cleaving this target dummy. In this area, we're not cleaving this target dummy. It's important to understand our strengths and weaknesses. If we're standing here, we might potentially not even cleave this target >> right here.

You can see that our sweep is not being consumed. So, this target dummy is not being hit. And that's really bad because this means we're not procking favor of battle at all. If we play here, we can notice that the dreadnot still works. it comes out of there. Which means that the problem with this is that if the packs are tightly packed right here and all the mobs are here and we're pressing an overpower here and it hits this mob through sweeping strikes, this dreadnot line here just doesn't hit anything.

So instead, if we come here and we do the exact same thing, >> now we're hitting more things potentially speaking, of course, because it's still incredibly finicky. The same thing applies to our slayer strike. When it comes out, you can see that it's spinning around me. As a result, if I'm closer to the mobs, I'm going to do more damage to you. It comes from within where you're standing. The same thing applies for blaze gone.

All of these things have a certain hitbox and a certain radius. You want to know where to stand in order to proc. These are important because it means that if you're positioning yourself poorly, you're missing out on a lot of damage. And if you're positioning yourself properly, you could be clicking the same buttons as someone else and doing triple the damage he does. Which is why so many times so many warriors in Discord show up and they say things along the lines of, "I've compared logs and this guy and me had the same amount of casts or fleeves, but his cleaves hit way more mobs or his cleaves did way more damage or why did his overpowers do 30% more damage than mine?" Well, it's because he's built diffy.

But no, it's probably because he positions better and the tanks help him gather better as well. There's a lot of different variations, a lot of different variables. Don't overthink it to the sense where it's something you nitpick all the time. Just pay attention to where you play the game. It's very, very important. Arms because of how our cooldowns work as well and how uptime reliant they are also inherently means that they're weaker cooldowns.

If you compare an enhancement shaman or elemental shaman's ascendance to our colossal smash, their cooldown brings so much more value and they're so much more important. That's why we need to deal as much damage as we can all the time. If you've watched all 30some minutes or if you've skipped here, feel free to watch another two minutes of me crashing out of random Discord messages. Thank you for watching the guide. I hope you've learned something and if you didn't, that's also okay.

Maybe I'll see you at the next one. I haven't really decided yet to be honest, but I hope this was okay for you guys. Take care. I'm going to try to answer some questions that I saw on the Discord just so that some of them can get out of the way. In single target, shouldn't I use sweeping strikes? The answer is no. Is mass execution good or overpowering finish? 20% or 15% is no joke. You're correct. They're not good for slayer.

I got a question about rotation when having four piece. As I understand, we send mortal strike as much as we can on single target or two target. But how about in cleave? Well, you don't send it in cleave. You send cleave and cleave. And cleave proc slam. So, it doesn't matter. Just so I'm clear, we only send bladestorm in single target with smash. In AoE, do we send it whenever available? Practically, yes. Doesn't really matter, but as long as you have colossal smash up by 10 seconds or more, you can probably send it lazy.

How do people seem AoE for arms? We don't. You either see a one target five minute regular fight sim or you can potentially sim like an eight target one minute, but it'll probably sim relatively similarly stats-wise to your main sim anyways because we barely change our rotation and our stats remain mostly the same. In execute phase with no sudden death proc, do we overpower over execute? No. It's in the Wowhead guide.

You execute over overpower unless you have no rage. Do you care about EP stacks in AoE? No. Is spending collateral stacks not our number one priority in AoE outside of sweeping strikes? Well, you cleave, so you you spend it, so I guess no. Do I care about collateral stacks in two target situations, or do I just use cleave to a fire end? Well, I mean, in Mythic Plus, you can technically care about it, but it's like not the end of the world, so you shouldn't really have it in raid unless it's a very big ad phase or a very big ad boss.

So, I would go to lords.io and have a look at it. Quick question. I'm a bit confused. I did a sim and it says that I should have more haste than crit. Shouldn't it be crit haste mastery? >> The sim told you you should have more haste. Get more haste. It's not that deep. A quick super important note. We don't play around our fourpiece. We don't. It does nothing. We don't care about it. It's a passive damage increase. The reason is the exact same as before.

Rotationally speaking, trying to play around the four piece will result in either the most minuscule damage gain or actually a damage loss, trying to press the wrong buttons, trying to pretend like you're making something else do more damage. It's important to just let it go. Do not worry about your fourpiece.