- Updated 2009-03-06, version 1.2.
Changed the part about rotation to match current patch.

PvE DPS-Warrior For Dummies (Fury) v1.2

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Since I've started playing once more I decided to update this thread, enjoy and continue posting constructive feedback. :)
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Have been working on and updating this on my guild class-forums, thought I might aswell share it with the public in case it helps a few people. :)

NOTE: This "compendium" will only cover PvE Raiding as a Fury Warrior, nothing else!
It's meant to answer common questions and give you the gist of the information you need to perform good in a raid-environment. For in-depth discussion and calculations I suggest visiting the EJ forums. :)

This is a work-in-progress and will be updated when I have the time and something to add, constructive criticism and helpful tips are always welcome.

I do not in any way claim to be the worlds best Furywarrior or anything, yet I do have quite some experience raiding as a furywarrior and consider myself to be decent at least. I've written this to help people who are unsure about how their class works and to collect the important information in one place.

Playing a Furywarrior to it's fullest in PvE pretty much consists of the following:
- Speccing properly
- Gearing properly
- Gemming properly
- Enchanting properly
- Using proper rotations
- Maximizing your ToT(Time on Target)
- Glyphs

All of these points of course are vital for every dpsclass, but since most of these work differently for each class I'll be going over each point from a Fury-warriors point of view.

Speccing:
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=LN0c0fhZGx00E0ubeRVkAo (18/53/0)

Speccing as a furywarrior isn't that hard, and there aren't a lot of variations if you're looking for the optimal PvE-DPS Raid-spec. In arms you max out improved HS, then put points as you wish until you can reach Impale & Deep Wounds which you both max, then you max out 2H Specialization and proceed to the Fury-tree with the rest of your points. In my view the only points that are interchangable in the fury-tree would be Booming Voice(For 2 points in UW or Imp Demoshout) and in rare cases Dual Weild-spec for Enrage.

The downside of enrage is that it's only better on the fights where you take constant unavoidable damage, while Dual Weild-spec is ALWAYS in effect and providing you with additional weaponscaling on your offhand 2H'er, and also better ragegeneration not to mention higher damage on your whirlwind which hits with both weapons.

Though on those few fights where you take constant damage Enrage might in some cases be superior. I prefer speccing for things that are always of use instead of situational stuff, and since Enrage does not proc from ALL kinds of aoe-dmg at the moment it's not really worth it.

Heroic Fury is much better than some people seem to think and is in my eyes a mandatory talent. This will be further explained under the Time on Target-section.

The reason you should still pick Commanding Presence even though BOM now provides the same bonus in raids is of course to buff Commanding Shout to the raid. If you have another warrior with this on a reliable basis and don't care about getting worse Battle Shout for heroics then feel free to distribute these points where you see fit.

The rest of the talents should be pretty obvious why they're superior so I won't even bother explaining them since it's pretty much a case of ”Take those talents, end of story” when it comes to raiding-speccs.

Gearing, choosing the right stats & upgrades

Warriors are somewhat special when it comes to gearing them up, as we scale good with more stats than many other classes. Our bread-and-butter stat is of course Strength/Attackpower. If in doubt, attackpower is always a good choice.

The stats we benefit from is: Strength/Attackpower & Crit(Either from Crit Rating or in some cases Agility), Hit, Expertise, Armorpenetration & Haste

There are however a few goals you should aim to reach as soon as possible before focusing on the primary stats. These are(values for a boss-lvl mob and in order of importance):

Hitcapped for specials (Total of 10% hit from gear plus the 3% from precision, 5% with precision after 3.08 patch)
Expertise softcap to remove dodges (The generally accepted ”cap” is 6.5% dodge-reduction, which means as a warrior you only need 4.5% because of Weapon Mastery)
Getting crit up to around 30% unbuffed (in Berserker Stance, not counting rampage)

Strength/Attackpower:
Your primary stat after the above mentioned goals are met. You can never have too much attackpower and it will only scale more the more of it you have. The best stat you can gear for point-for-point.

Crit:
Your secondary stat. Always good to have and benefits all your damage in some way. Besides making your attack crit it also keeps rampage & flurry up and at the same time proccs Deep Wounds which does a pretty big chunk of your damage nowadays.
Don't go too overboard on this by sacrificing attackpower for it though, it'll come naturally as your gear improves.

Armorpenetration:
A "trash-stat" that starts to show it's real strength the more of it you have. It's value actually increases the more of it you have and vice versa. Though it has been greatly nerfed since TBC, it still directly affects both your yellow and your white damage as opposed to haste.
However at Naxxramas 10/25-man level there isn't enough of it available to make it viable to focus on, if it will ever be. I personally prefer it over haste where available though for the single reason that it benefits your instant attacks as well as your whites. In the end both Armorpenetration and Haste is a "trash"-stat that's of way less importance than your other stats, though nice if you get it on top of the other stats.

Hit
Hit is invaluable until you've reached the magic number, and after that it's value goes downhill really fast. Since it only affects your white swings which is only a portion of your damage it's nothing you should really care much about. Never gem/enchant for this after hitcap, and don't sacrifice better stats for this. It's a nice bonus if you get it on top of everything else, but nothing more. If you're having problems with an uneven rageflow you might want to try to get a piece or two with more hit but don't go overboard on it since ragegeneration will scale pretty fast once you get your crit & AP up to decent levels.

Haste
This is another one of blizzards "trash-stats" for warriors. Do not go out of your way for this stat and never enchant/gem/gear for it on purpose if you have a better option.
Haste only directly affect white swings, hence it's value is about the same as Hit(after hitcap), but the difference being that hit is one of your best stats to a certain point while haste is always a minuscule bonus. As with armorpenetration, a nice bonus as long as you don't sacrifice other stats for it.

Note: Haste does affect some of your yellow attacks(HS, and because of this it'll help proc Bloodsurge from patch 3.08 and onward) by a small amount, making it a tad bit better than Hit providing you're hit(specials)/expertisecapped. However it also scales rather poorly, and the above points are so marginal they don't skew things in haste's favour enough for it to be worthwhile purposefully gearing for.

Expertise
Similar to Hit, this stat is among the best you can get until you reach the cap.
The difference is that when you've hit the expertisecap it looses it's value completely unless you have a habit of standing in front of raidbosses while dps'ing or if you are fighting a boss with higher than normal dodge-chance(I personally know of no such bosses in current Wotlk-content).

(Stolen/Borrowed from EJ forums)
Here's a table with the expertise-rating values you need with different talents/races and vs trash & bossmobs. Expertise assumes 5.0% dodge against trash and 6.5% dodge against bosses.


Against trash mobs (lvl82)
Expertise rating cap (0/2 Weapon Mastery): 164
Expertise rating cap (2/2 Weapon Mastery): 99
Expertise rating cap (0/2 WM + Orc/Human racial): 123
Expertise rating cap (2/2 WM + Orc/Human racial): 58

Against bosses (lvl83)
Expertise rating cap (0/2 Weapon Mastery): 214
Expertise rating cap (2/2 Weapon Mastery): 148
Expertise rating cap (0/2 WM + Orc/Human racial): 173
Expertise rating cap (2/2 WM + Orc/Human racial): 107

Gemming, setbonuses, Metagems
When it comes to gemming in general, warriors are very simple. Gem STR. The only times you gem something else is if there's a socketbonus that by choosing the right gemcombo gives you the same or more attackpower while buffed with kings and then something more on top.

You will in all cases be forced to put in something but a STR-gem in your gear to activate your Meta-gem. There are two metagems to choose from as a furywarrior, and that's Chaotic Skyflare Diamond and Relentless Earthsiege Diamond. The difference in crit given by the two gems is very small(and by small I mean around ~0.1%), but the Chaotic requires you to socket 2 Blue gems while the Earthsiege Diamond only requires 1 Blue, 1 Yellow and 1 Red to function.

The way I would say is the optimal way when it comes to metagems is using the Relentless Earthsiege Diamond and putting one prismatic(Prismatic = Matches all gemcolors) gem in one slot thus activating your meta with only one gemslot and enabling you to only gem strength in the rest. If you're a jewelcrafter you have access to special prismatic gems only you can use, otherwise use the Enchanted Tear(+6 to all stats, matches all slots, maximum of 1 of these in your gear).

If this doesn't fit your tastes you could just use one green gem(matches blue + yellow) in one slot since the rest should be filled with red gems anyway.

Enchants
As most will have guessed Strength/Attackpower is superior also in this department.
Blizzard have slacked abit on STR-enchants in Wotlk though so make sure to check that you're using the optimal enchants. For a furywarrior you get a 10% scaling on attackpower passive so the only thing really making you want STR is Blessing of Kings. An example here is the glove-enchants. Compare 15STR vs 35AP and you'll get the following results:

15STR-enchant
15STR *1.1(modifier from kings)*2(1STR=2AP)=33AP*1.1(Modifier from Imp Berserkerstance)=36,3AP.

35AP-enchant
35AP*1.1(Modifier from Imp Berserkerstance)=38,5AP

In this case the 35AP comes out ahead both with and without kings. However in this case there's an even better AP-enchant for gloves(44AP), but I chose to compare these to show that strength isn't always the best for a furywarrior when it comes to enchants. Do the math yourself on the available enchants for each slot and choose wisely.

When it comes to weaponenchants you basically have three choices: 85AP for lower-end weapons and poor people, 110ap and Berserker(400AP and 25% reduced armor, ~1PPM without counting instant attacks).
Most people argue that the best combo is Berserker MH and 110AP offhand, and I've found that to be true from my observations as well.

While that may be true in a spreadsheet environment and in the long run, it most likely won't be for every fight since it is a proc and thus is subject to a bit of randomness if you only look at one particular boss fight by itself, the length of the fight might also skew things abit. Choose for yourself which one you consider superior, 110AP for reliable damage on every fight or Berserker for potentially higher damage while sacrificing some of the reliability of a static enchant. All in all Berserking is the better choice in most situations.



DPS Rotations
PvE-rotations are fairly easy, use the following prioritysystem:
Whirlwind => Bloodthirst => Bloodsurgeprocced Instant Slams. Heroic Strike when you're high on rage(~60+, you get a good feel for this as you go).

During execute-phase either continue your normal rotation or substitute Heroic Strikes(and in some cases also Slams) with smart use of Execute as rage-dump. Spamming execute only will lower your dps. This is another one of those things you get a feel for after you've gotten some experience.


Heroic Strike is another staple of our dps and is one other thing few other classes(if any, possibly druids in bear with their maul) have to our advantage when dpsing(and when tanking). Even though HS does add some damage to every attack that's not our main reason for using it. Since HS is an on-next-swing-attack that consumes rage instead of generating it it's actually rather terrible on it's own as a dps skill if you count it on a pure damage-per-rage ratio.

What makes it good is that it converts your next MH-swing into a yellow attack instead of a white attack. What's so good about that you say? Firstly, a yellow attack cannot become a glancing blow. Second, a yellow attack requires less +hit to land, which is another reason +hit is such a mediocre stat for a warrior after the yellow hitcap. The third reason is that only yellow attacks are affected by Impale which gives you 20% more damage on a critical strike with yellow attacks.

How often you can use HS depends on your buffs and gear. With good gear and full raidbuffs you can pretty much use HS on most if not all your MH-swings. A general rule of thumb is that as long as you save enough rage to be able to do BT/WW as soon as they're off cooldown it's safe to use HS. This is also one of the things you'll learn as you go since you get a feel for your ragegeneration the more you raid. A common mistake inexperienced warriors make is that they use HS too much, resulting in delays of their instants and a loss of dps.

ToT, Time on Target
This is another thing that separates a good melee-dps from the bad, and this applies to every dps-class but melee in particular on some fights. It's as easy as it sounds:
To maximize your damage output you also need to maximize your time hitting the target.
This is where Heroic Fury can show it's strength. You may think it's no big deal, but in some cases this might actually be the talent that gives you the highest DPS-increase point-per-point in all your talent-trees, and it's only 1 point so it would be stupid to skip it.

Simply put just do what you can to stay on the boss as long as possible, without causing the raid/healers trouble of course. But consider this: You're at a boss that periodically does an AOE you must avoid. If you stand out 2 seconds longer than you need to you will have lost quite a bit of dps, especially if you add up all the wasted time on the entire encounter if you're being slow. Try to avoid this wherever possible and you'll most likely see a noticable increase in your dps.

Glyphs
For a Furywarrior there aren't really that many glyphs that increase our boss-dps. Glyph of HS & Whirlwind(post-3.08) are pretty much the ones that affect your single-target dps. What you choose apart from those is a matter of taste.

Reserved for future use.

Reserved for future use.

Reserved for future use.

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Q u o t e:
Speccing:
The downside of enrage is that it's only better on the fights where you take constant unavoidable damage, while Dual Weild-spec is ALWAYS in effect and providing you with additional weaponscaling on your offhand 2H'er, and also better ragegeneration not to mention higher damage on your whirlwind which hits with both weapons.

Though on those few fights where you take constant damage(Sapphiron is a perfect example) Enrage is superior. I prefer speccing for things that are always of use instead of situational stuff, make your own choice here.

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A huge amount of AoE effects don't proc Enrage, making it next to useless.
And I think with current content Heroic Fury does hardly effect your time on the target, since you always still have the normal intercept at your disposal.

Other than this, this guide is not bad.

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Q u o t e:


A huge amount of AoE effects don't proc Enrage, making it next to useless.
And I think with current content Heroic Fury does hardly effect your time on the target, since you always still have the normal intercept at your disposal.

Other than this, this guide is not bad.

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Changed the wording about enrage to clarify this.

Though I'd say that compared to what you could put the point in otherwise, I can't think of anything that point would fit better in than heroic fury. Of course you could switch it to for example AM in arms, but seeing as it's such a minuscule amount of rage I'd rather have the option to free myself from an immobilizing effect and/or resetting the cd of Intercept at will. Matter of taste I guess, I still stand by my point on this one. ;)

Excellent guide. Reported for sticky.

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Q u o t e:


Actually anger management isn't just a miniscule amount of rage. It also helps out keeping up your rage out of combat.

Btw another nice "trick" is if you'd spec 2/2 imp berserker rage you can actually build up your rage to 100 before every bossfight and start out the best way possible :). Possibly also doable with 1/2 but haven't really tried it yet.

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1 rage per 3 seconds is miniscule, over the course of 4 minutes it translates into a total of 80 rage gained. That's like two white crits. ;)

And to be honest, I usually take it easy the first 4-5 seconds after the tank has picked up the boss since we're prone to some sick burst(plus I always pop cd's early to be able to use them a second time during the bossfight), and under those 4-5 seconds you're already at 100 rage through white hits.

Speccing improved zerkrage or not might aswell be a matter of taste, but truthfully, if you need to spec that to keep your ragegeneration flowing you're most likely at a lower gearlevel or using too much heroic strikes. When you have a pair of decent weapons and some pieces of naxx-equivalent loot you shouldn't have rageproblems on a regular enough basis to warrant throwing talentpoints into AM or Imp Berserker Rage. Sure it might happen, but honestly the few times it does it's more often than not because you go overboard on HS. At least from my experience.

Plus, if I do happen to find myself in a position where I'm missing that last amount of rage when an instant attack is about to come off cooldown I just use bloodrage, which is in my humble opinion way better since it's off the global cooldown which zerkrage is not. I personally can't recall the last time I felt the need for another ragebuff within the cooldown of bloodrage.

By the way, glad to see constructive comments for once, rarely see those on this forum nowadays, hence why I haven't bothered writing this for the public until now. :P Keep 'em coming!

Great guide, I loved it.
However, can you please find out what the hit cap for main hand and offhand white strikes are after the 3.0.8 patch?

Also, I don't like your rotation, Whirlwind does the second most dmg, and should in my opinion have the first priority.

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Q u o t e:
Great guide, I loved it.
However, can you please find out what the hit cap for main hand and offhand white strikes are after the 3.0.8 patch?

Also, I don't like your rotation, Whirlwind does the second most dmg, and should in my opinion have the first priority.

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Since TG only affects special attacks it'll be exactly the same as it is now. ;)

And yes, Whirlwind does do more damage. However, as of right now it is on a 10 sec cd, BT is 5 sec cd. 2 BT's > 1WW in total damage done. Add to this fact that BT has a rather high chance(depending on your crit ofc but still) to procc an instant slam. So as of right now I'd still argue that BT should have priority over WW in your rotation. After the patch that might change, yes, but I haven't seen any tangible proof to go WW>BT rotationwise either now or after the patch in fact. I'm crap with math though, and haven't even tried calculating how it'll be after the patch but unless someone else does it for me I will think it through when I get some time over. :)

Concerning heroic fury I think it's useless for naxx pretty much, if you need to use it you %#*@ed up some easy thing like a tailswipe, or if you actually want to reach a add 1 or 2 seconds the first time then yay go for it. Otherwise it's crap, improved zerker rage I find useful due to the fact that it's very common you'll be sitting without anything except heroic strike to use so I tend to use it then. And well I also have a lot of free points since I have 6.5% exp without wep mastery

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?warrior=340003002330000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000305043000505310053120501051&glyph=080421010203

This is a build I'm thinking of trying since slam is a very small part of my total dps, it would decrease my total damage on some bosses but others I'd get a very nice increase on.

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Q u o t e:


Since TG only affects special attacks it'll be exactly the same as it is now. ;)

And yes, Whirlwind does do more damage. However, as of right now it is on a 10 sec cd, BT is 5 sec cd. 2 BT's > 1WW in total damage done. Add to this fact that BT has a rather high chance(depending on your crit ofc but still) to procc an instant slam. So as of right now I'd still argue that BT should have priority over WW in your rotation. After the patch that might change, yes, but I haven't seen any tangible proof to go WW>BT rotationwise either now or after the patch in fact. I'm crap with math though, and haven't even tried calculating how it'll be after the patch but unless someone else does it for me I will think it through when I get some time over. :)

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Ah, valid statement indeed.
I based my comments on heroics mainly, because there's a lot of trash, and there's a chance for my main hand and offhand to crit.
But enough about that :D

One thing I wonder about though ; why do you say that capping yourself (5%) then going for str/ap and crit is best? Why not get some extra hit to get some more hits on your offhand? The damage the offhand gives is totally better then a little higher dmg and a little more crits, or?

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Q u o t e:


Ah, valid statement indeed.
I based my comments on heroics mainly, because there's a lot of trash, and there's a chance for my main hand and offhand to crit.
But enough about that :D

One thing I wonder about though ; why do you say that capping yourself (5%) then going for str/ap and crit is best? Why not get some extra hit to get some more hits on your offhand? The damage the offhand gives is totally better then a little higher dmg and a little more crits, or?

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Do note that as stated, this thread mainly(or rather, only) deals with PvE Raid content, and generally mostly single-target dps. For heroics that's basically all about the trash(since bossfights require little to no more organization or even time than most trash) of course your aoe-skills will have priority most of the times. It goes without saying that if you have multiple targets within range that are being tanked you prioritize your aoe-skills. ;) And since I'm talking about dps in a raid environment I'm also assuming you have most if not all of the buffs that come with 25-man raiding.

And about the part about capping yourself for yellow attacks(through both hit and expertise of course) and then going strength/crit vs going for more hit: More hit is gonna come naturally whether you want it or not in enough quantity to easily make a normal rotation viable in a raid setting. The thing is (when you're capped ofc) you're not supposed to purposefully choose gear based on the hit if it means sacrificing AP/Crit. Why? I had hoped it'd be obvious, but perhaps I need to clarify that segment. :)

The reason is mainly because it's simply higher damage in the end, we scale alot better with attack power than with hit after the yellow cap is reached. AP/Crit benefit ALL your attacks, hit doesn't. After the cap it merely provides you with some higher rage generation(which AP/Crit ALSO does on top of benefiting your yellow damage as well) and some higher white damage(again, which AP/Crit also does). You simply get more use out of every item point used by focusing mainly on those two stats when you choose your gear, gems & enchants and letting the secondary stats come by themselves "for free" so to say. More hit is not BAD, simply not as good as your more important stats, Attack Power & Crit. :)

In conclusion I could sum it up with this: AP/Crit makes the most noticable difference (after hit/expertisecap for yellow attacks) simply because it benefits all your attacks. AP is the most important stat by far but Crit should be sought after wherever possible without going overboard. I'd never switch an item that made me loose 20AP to gain 0.2% Crit, but I would most likely sacrifice 0.2% crit to gain 20AP. If it where 20AP for closer to 1% crit I'd most likely switch (depending on what my current stats with the gear I have is.) though.

Hope that cleared it up a bit. :)

Is throw weapon a good idea to use in the rotation?
Im not sure, but I think it resets the swingtimer, so you gotta pay some attention.