i don't see my changes reflecting at all
This is a very common issue and it is mostly related to configuring your IDE , maven and tomcat properly. The tomcat maven plugin can be configured to run with any server , be it internal ( eclipse configured ) or external server.
First I want to make it clear that maven is a build and project management tool and it has absolutely no link to deploying your application to any web-server. Even if you look at the tomcat-plugin , it just issues a move command to move your war file to your desired location ( webapps of tomcat ). The same goes for tomcat:start and tomcat:run commands of maven ( they just issue the startup.sh and shutdown.sh commands , no magic ) .
So my first question would be , is it any particular reason you are using the tomcat plugin to deploy ? Why not directly use the tomcat server configured inside eclipse and add your project to the context of this server? This way your deployments will be managed from within eclipse as soon as you make changes and save your resources. Tomcat plugin is mainly used when for some complex scenarios e.g like when you have to deploy your web application modules to multiple servers or remote server deployments when your tomcat server exists in a remote destination ( it can be configured as such ).