WTF does one play Arms?

Good question. Hmm, lets start with a short recap of dps warriors.


Once upon a time in vanilla.
Back in classic WoW Arms warriors, otherwise known as MS (mortal strike)-warriors, where the dps warriors. Fury was not working very well, this might have been due to suboptimal gear (this would later become a trend with fury and also arms to a lesser extent), and so arms reigned supreme.


Fast forward to WotLK aka the rise of fury.
Titan's grip. Now fury could suddenly wield twohanded weapons in one hand. This together with increasing crit and ArP from endgame gear made rage generation for fury insanely high. This alone made fury in endgame WotLK the ultimate melee dps class. Endless rage made it possible to use Heroic Strike on every attack and with Whirlwind working the way it did nothing could hold fury down. Single target or multi targets made no difference.


But the most significant thing about fury was; It was easy to play.
Yes I said it. It was damn easy to play. Add to that fact that if you could find your way to any sort of decent gear you would be putting out huge dps numbers and you have one hell of a onesided looking balance of dps warriors. Everyone (face)rolled a fury warrior. (Now I'm not saying that people that excelled at fury where just facerolling, but excelling at anything requires effort so)


Ok so what about Arms?
Arms is not easy to play.  ...Yeah that's about it.
If you where a good arms warrior in Icecrown Citadel you would be putting very big numbers out and if you where playing with anyone but people that knew exactly how to play their class you would outpreform them, unless they where better geared. I personally was constantly finding myself at the top spot(s) when it came to boss dps. This was very surprising to since all I heard from people was: "Arms can't dps".


Now the problem with arms in WotLK was that the class was capped, at some point arms could just not conjure any more dps. Arms didnt have the endless rage that fury had and that made using Heroic Strike a tricky business because of the fact that the used the "...on the next normal attack swing" mechanic. That always created, at least for me, the fear of: "What if my rage is not there when it goes off?".
I am at 85 rage, I hit HS, I continue my rotation, my rage goes down to 35 and then HS goes off leaving me ragestarved -_-
I always hated that mechanic and I love what Blizzard did with it in Cataclysm. If we would have had that in WotLK things might have been different.


So what is so great with Arms then?
People that play arms know and it is hard to describe but playing arms feels more ..real.
Think of arms as an arcade fighting game take on WoW. It is a frantic hammering of buttons, constantly knowing that if something procs you must react fast and make sure you dont lose that mortal strike/execute/rend/sunder-debuff/battleshout you've got rolling. There is no steady flow of rage comming in, it crashes in on you slapping you in the face screaming: "Omfg HS!".
Executing a perfect bossbattle in terms of your rotation is next to impossible and every single bossbattle is different from the previous one. You're constantly adapting, fighting to stay on top.
It feels excactly like a battle should feel.


In the end I can't really put into words what makes playing arms so rewarding.
But people that play arms know.