Welcome to Tankspot's fury warrior class guide. My name is Thegreatme and in this guide I will be discussing what you need to know in order to play a fury warrior.
The Information in this Guide is only accurate as of patch 3.2.2 and as such in the future some or all of the information may become invalid.
This guide is meant to be a general guide for all PvE related uses of fury, however the main focus will tend to be oriented towards 25 man raiding, rather than 10 mans and 5 mans.
In this section I am going to be discussing Fury talents, and where you should be putting your points.
Filler talents:
Early on in the fury tree there are a few talents which could be considered "filler" talents, these talents include:
Booming Voice: Increases the area of effect and duration of your Battle Shout, Demoralizing Shout and Commanding Shout by 50%. Improved Demoralizing Shout: Increases the melee attack power reduction of your Demoralizing Shout by 40%. Unbridled Wrath: Gives you a chance to generate an additional rage point when you deal melee damage with a weapon. Improved Cleave: Increases the bonus damage done by your Cleave ability by 120%. Commanding Presence: Increases the melee attack power bonus of your Battle Shout and the health bonus of your Commanding Shout by 25%.
How you choose these talents is dependent on your gear, and the needs of your raid.
For example as your gear improves you will naturally generate more rage and therefore you might find it acceptable to take points out of unbridled wrath and put them somewhere else.
Another example would be if your raids generally have a retribution paladin that is spec'ed in to vindication there is very little need for an extra attack power reduction debuff so you could skip improved demoralizing shout and put those points elsewhere.
If you are having trouble trying to decide where to put these early talent points talk to some of the other warriors in your guild and see where they have put their points. Ideally you want to spread your filler talents out evenly so that your raid has all of the best possible abilities.
Other than these filler talents there are not too many variations of the fury spec. This is because the talents that you do not pick up are ones that are generally very mediocre for PvE situations and therefore there is no need for you to get them.
Required talents:
Armored to the Teeth: grants you three attack power for every one hundred eight armor you have.
Precision: increases your chance to hit with melee weapons by 3%.
Death Wish: gives you an ability that costs ten rage and when you use it, it will increase your damage done by 20%, and your damage taken by 5% for thirty seconds.
Flurry: causes your next three swings after a critical strike to be twenty five percent faster.
Intensify Rage: decreases the cooldown of your Bloodrage, Berserker rage, Recklessness, and death wish abilities by 33%.
Bloodthirst: is ability that costs twenty rage and does damage equal to 50% of your attack power and has a four second cooldown.
Improved Whirlwind: increases the damage of your whirlwind ability by twenty percent.
Improved Berserker Stance: increases your strength by 20%, and decreases your threat generated by 10% while in berserker stance
Rampage: causes your critical strikes to cause all party or raid members within forty five yards of you to gain a buff increasing their melee critical strike rating by five percent for ten seconds.
Bloodsurge: gives your heroic strike, bloodthirst, and whirlwind abilities a 20% chance to cause your next slam to be instant.
Unending Fury: increases the damage of your bloodthirst, whirlwind, and slam abilities by 10%. Titans Grip: allows you to use two handed weapons in one hand at the cost of doing 10% less damage.
Arms Talents:
Most fury specs will also put points in the arms tree in order to get:
Improved Heroic strike: Reduces the cost of your Heroic Strike ability by 3 rage points. Impale: Increases the critical strike damage bonus of your abilities by 20%. Deep Wounds: Your critical strikes cause the opponent to bleed, dealing 48% of your melee weapon's average damage over 6 sec. Two Handed Weapon Specialization: Increases the damage you deal with two-handed melee weapons by 6%.
This requires you to spend at least eighteen points in the arms tree, but other than getting these four talents it does not really matter where you put your points.
Examples of talent point allocations:
A typical spec for warriors who recently hit 80 (not very well geared, and not min/max oriented): Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
A pretty standard spec for warriors who are pushing top tier raid content (IE well geared and min/max oriented): Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
There are lots of other possibilties out there. You have lot's of options with your filler points. As stated before the best thing to do is create a spec around the needs of your raid, and the needs of your gear.
__Glyphs___________________________________
Major glyphs:
For your major glyphs you should have: Glyph of Whirlwind, which decreases the cooldown on your whirlwind abilities by two seconds.
And either: Glyph of Execution, which causes your execute ability to do damage as if you had ten additional rage (at level 80 it adds 380 damage per execute)
OR Glyph of Cleaving, which causes your cleave ability to hit an additional target.
If there are two or less targets you should be using a glyph of execution, and if there are three or more targets you should be using a glyph of cleaving.
Minor Glyphs:
For your minor glyphs you should be using:
either: Glyph of Battle, which increases the duration of battle shout by 2 minutes
OR Glyph of Command which increases the duration of commanding shout by 2 minutes Glyph of Bloodrage , which decreases the health cost of bloodrage by 100%. Glyph of Enduring Victory which increases the window of opportunity in which you can use victory rush by 5 seconds.
__Abilities/Cooldowns________________________
In this next section I am going to be covering what abilities and cooldowns you will be using as a fury warrior.
Ideally you want to be using these cooldowns every time they come off cooldown, but you also want to be using them in conjunction with raid cooldowns such as heroism or bloodlust.
For those of you interested in knowing when the ideal time to use your cooldown:
The reason why you want to use your cooldowns at these spots in the rotation is because it takes at least 2 GCD's to pop you cooldowns, and using them at these times will reset your rotation allowing you to start at 0.0 once you have popped your cooldowns.
a few minor advanced comments about cooldown usage:
when you are using your death wish and recklessness abilities you want to be using recklessness BEFORE you pop death wish. This is because recklessness and death wish both invoke the GCD and because you want to get the most GCD's used possible while death wish is up, it is better to use recklessness first because that way you won't "waste" that 1 GCD. there is no downside to doing this because death wish isn't a damage dealing ability it won't use up any charges of recklessness.
Personal opinion: because recklessness by its self isn't that amazing of an ability I tend to only use it when I am also using Death wish so I get the most use out of it. This is just my personal preference though so this is neither the correct way of using it nor the wrong way of using it (as far as I know)
__Hit/Expertise Caps ________________________
As a Fury warrior it is important that you are above the soft hit cap, which makes it so your abilities can't miss, as well as to be at the expertise cap for dodges, which means your attacks can not be dodged under normal circumstances.
Hit:
The soft hit cap (before talents) = 8%
but because you have precision which gives you 3% hit you only need a minimum 5% hit from gear 5% hit = 164 Hit Rating
Expertise:
The expertise cap for dodges = 26 26 expertise = -6.50% chance to dodge/parry 26 expertise = 214 expertise rating
Because reaching these caps are so important if you are unable to meet them by your gear alone it is acceptable for you to gem for them, though ideally you should never need to gem for hit or expertise.
One thing to note is that after the soft hit cap having additional hit rating is not necessarily a bad thing. this is because even though your abilities can't miss, your auto attacks still can so therefore you can still get some DPS increase from having additional hit rating, though, hit after the soft hit cap is not as vital to your DPS as it is under the soft hit cap.
On the flip side you do not want any additional expertise after the dodge cap because you are not going to get parried when attacking the mob from behind and therefore any additional expertise will be wasted.
__Rotation__________________________________
Now I am going to be discussing your standard DPS rotation as a fury warrior.
One thing to note about DPSing as a fury warrior is that rage generation, and rage management are absolutely vital in order to DPS properly. If you are unable to manage your rage well you will not be able to do the DPS that you are capable of, it is one of the most important parts of playing the spec.
the basic premise of the DPS rotation as fury is that you’re are going to use
While you are doing this rotation you will also be using Heroic Strike, but because of the nature of the ability I am going to be discussing it a little bit later.
Now the issues with this rotation can come from those 1 second waits because it is very possible for you to accidentally use another ability eating up a global cooldown if you are not careful and paying attention to it.
another problem with sticking just to this specif rotation is you can lose a LOT of slams. to help combat this if you get a bloodsurge proc after T=3.0, or you need an extra GCD (for shouts, sunder, etc.) you can use a slightly modified version of the rotation:
doing this rotation you are actually going to lose whirlwinds because you are delaying the use of it by 0.5 seconds, and 0.5s is the same as 1/16th of a whirlwind. the reason why pushing whirlwind back like this is ok is because you are gaining 1 full slam, which is going to do much more damage than 1/16th of a whirlwind.
I will be adding some math eventually but I am still figuring out how to make it as easy to understand as possible while still being an accurate description.
No warrior is perfect at rage management
you will always be able to make a mistake.
Never assume you can be perfectly fine with your ability to manage rage because will make mistakes at times.
The better you are at managing your rage the less likely it will happen to you. So always practice it, always make sure that you are managing your rage properly, be very careful with it, pay attention. This can take a long time to master, but the longer you play the spec the better you will get at it.
Jumping to cancel accidental slam casts:
The reason why I jump to cancel the slam cast when I accidentally hit it when I don’t have a blood surge proc is because of the fact that slam pauses your swing timer, and therefore you will not auto attack and that is actually a DPS loss if you let it go through. So if you accidentally hit slam, just simply jump to cancel the cast.
If you find your self accidentally hitting slam a lot you can make a macro that will help you stop slam from casting:
Code:
#showtooltip Slam
/cast Slam
/stopcasting
this macro works most of the time but I have seen it randomly not work. in fact one of these random macro failures took place when I was making the video for this guide, and was in the recording.
__Heroic Strike ____________________________
Now I am going to be discussing Heroic Strike, which is our rage dump.
Heroic strike is a very deceiving ability for a few reasons:
even though it says it only costs 12 rage if you have 3 points in improved heroic strike, it actually costs much more than that. This is because whenever you use heroic strike, your next main hand swing will not generate any rage, which could easily be as much as 30 rage. So in reality it means that heroic strike costs somewhere around 40-45 rage, just for an ability that does 495 damage.
Which leads me to the next deceptive aspect of heroic strike: its damage.
A very common misconception about heroic strike that some warriors make is that heroic strike does a lot of damage. They say this because they see the numbers on their screen and in their combat log that says heroic strike did a lot of damage. While this is ok that they see this, the important thing to note is what you don’t see. And what you don’t see is a main hand auto attack. Most of heroic strikes damage which you see on your screen and in your combat log is actually damage that would have happened anyway.
if you did not que up a heroic strike because you would have had a normal auto attack from your main hand, so you would have done the same amount of damage, just 495 damage less.
please note that using heroic strike will prevent your mainhand swing from being a glancing blow, as well as making it affected by Impale. This means that over a longer time scale the DPS increase of using heroic strike will be more than just because of the addition of 495 damage. However this still does not make heroic strike an amazing DPS ability, you should be using Heroic strike as a rage dump and not an ability that can boost your DPS by a large amount.
The reason why we use heroic strike in our DPS rotation is because even though we do not want to become rage starved, we also do not want to become rage capped, which means to be at 100 rage. This is because when you are at 100 rage your auto attacks will not generate any additional rage which means that you are essentially wasting rage that you could have had and heroic strike is what helps use keep from hitting 100 rage.
this quote from Ariedan's Prot warrior guide is another great explaination of how Heroic Strike and rage dumps in general work:
Source: Ariedan
One thing to keep in mind is the nature of rage. A lot of the time, you have more rage than you know what to do with. But at times, you will find yourself having a difficult time gaining rage. In those situations, you need to be careful so you do not rage starve yourself. People refer to rage dumps as a "gas pedal," where you must learn to let it go every bit or so to gain rage. You should never rage starve yourself to the point of lacking rage for your rotation.
A general rule for using heroic strike is if you have under 50 rage you should NOT use heroic strike, and if you have more than 50 rage go ahead and use heroic strike but only use it once or twice.
Never spam heroic strike
always be in control of when you use it.
Please note that my definition of "spamming" means to be mindlessly hitting the button. with full raid buffs and high quality gear it is very possible to be able to use HS on every main hand swing. there is nothing wrong with doing this, but just make sure that you can recognize when you should not use HS and act accordingly. Using HS is fine, just don't make it cause rage problems.
When raiding with high amount of crit (50% or more) while using a glyph of heroic strike the negative effects caused by mindless heroic strike spam will be noticeably negated. this does NOT completely stop these negative effects of mindless HS spamming, you will still be able to rage starve your self if you do not pay attention to it.
NEVER, EVER, spam heroic strike. It is not worth it.
__Execute___________________________________
Execute is an interesting ability because it doesn't scale nearly as well as a fury warriors other abilities so even though it used to be our bread and butter when a mob was under 20%, times have changed and execute is pretty mediocre now.
Execute has a terrible damage per rage value compared to your other abilities and once you are in naxx gear all of your other abilities will be more damage per rage, and more DPS, than execute.
sub 20% your rotation will not change. The only difference is that now you can use execute during your free GCD if you do not have a bloodsurge proc:
to help illustrate this lets put some numbers in to the arguement:
lets assume that fully raid buffed you have 10000 AP (which is doable if you are in mostly BiS gear) and you have a 258 Justicebringer
Execute will at most cost you 45 rage (15 rage base + up to 30 additional rage burned) so lets calculate it's max and minimum damage
NOTE: armor is not being factored in because it just complicated the math and it has the same effect on both abilities so it can be ignored
1456+(10000*0.2)+(38*r)=Damage
1456+2000+1140=4596 max possible damage
1456+2000=3456 min possible damage
Now lets calculate slams damage:
average white damage = weapon DPS*weapon speed
281.7*3.6=1014.12
added damage from AP = (AP/14)* weapon speed
(10000/14)*3.6 = 2571.43
Total slam damage:
1014.12+2571.43+250=3835.55
now lets compare the two abilities:
4596-3835.55= 760.45
so an execute from 45 rage does 760.45 damage and 760.45/1.5=506.66DPS more than slam but it also costs 30 more rage. meaning that each additional point of rage is doing 760.45/30= 25.348 damage per rage, which is pretty terrible.
now because the glyph of execution simulates you having 10 more rage, that means that it adds 380 damage per execute.
so with glyph of execute:
380+3456=3836 minimum possible damage
380+4596=4976 maximum possible damage
this means that if you are using execute at 15 rage with the glyph of execute you will do about the same per use as slam, with 45 rage you will do 1140 damage more than slam per hit.
At 45 rage with the execute glyph your execute will do 1140/1.5=760 more DPS than slam, but the damage per rage for that extra DPS is 1140/30=38 damage per rage. which is interesting because that makes it in line with what the tooltip says (meaning I probably screwed up somewhere, or blizzard screwed up... it was probably me though)
If you are in an infinite rage situation, I would say go ahead and replace slam with execute sub 20%. The rest of the time I personally prefer to keep slamming and use execute when I don't have a bloodsurge proc.
__Shattering Throw _________________________
Because you need to switch stance in order to use shattering throw, I am going to be discussing what it looks like when you actually do that.
Because when you switch stances you will be unable to do your DPS rotation properly ideally you want to switch when you have the most time left on both cooldowns of whirlwind and bloodthirst
This point in time occurs when you use bloodthirst immediately after a whirlwind:
In reality however it is ok to switch stances at any time.
Once you do switch stances, get your shattering throw off as fast as possible, and then get back into berserker stance as fast as possible. As you are switching back it is a very common practice to use a rend in order to burn a little bit of rage that is going to get wasted anyway from switching stances.
Making the "rotation" look something like this:
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GET THIS! This is by far the best spreadsheet for DPS warriors out there and is pretty much the standard. Want to know if ArP is better than Str for you? This spreadsheet will tell you.
I know I didn't specifically cover itemization and other topics of that nature (enchants, gemming, etc.), this is because the value of each stat is very variable based on your gear so I didn't feel comfortable making generalizations about that. I may add a section about it in the future if people want me to but only time will tell.
If you notice any spelling/grammar/etc errors let me know so I can get them fixed.
If anything is unclear please say something. I don't want there to be any confusion with what I am saying.
Wow, awesome, i've been subscribed to you on youtube for quite some time now! Welcome!
__________________
Source: loquatious
Think of block rating as being the chance you can hold a Phonebook between you and a guy who has a High Powered rifle pointed at you. Interposing the Yellow pages can't hurt but it sure doesn't help a lot.
I wonder why you didn't include Heroic Throw and execute in your rotation. At least if Bloodsurge hasn't procced or because Heroic Throw doesn't cost any rage when rage starved. It is not a dps loss, is it? I'm also wondering if it's worth using slam after whirlwind but before bloodthirst, just in case that bloodthirst proccs another instant slam. That would completely destroy the fixed rotation though.
How much DPS can you pull off on the boss test dummy without any raid buffs with your current gear? Do you think that fury warriors do less dps compared to other classes since the patch 3.1 nerf or are just much more gear dependant?
BTW you can avoid the slam casts by using a macro like this:
/cast slam
/stopcasting
So it automatically aborts the cast time if bloodsurge didn't procc.
Last edited by blaubeeri; 11-07-2009 at 05:38 AM..
I noticed that your "Slam Alert" addon is working. With mine, it doesn't work. I've been downloading this addon but it always tells me it's out of date, therefore, it won't work. Any suggestions on how to fix this problem??? Thanks so much.
Source: blaubeeri
I wonder why you didn't include Heroic Throw and execute in your rotation.
BTW you can avoid the slam casts by using a macro like this:
/cast slam
/stopcasting
So it automatically aborts the cast time if bloodsurge didn't procc.
Use of heroic throw in melee range is a DPS loss becuase it resets your swing timer. also I sort of did say you can use execute if you didn't have a bloodsurge proc indirectly because I said that that was your Free GCD.
also I have and use that macro, and it still will cast some times it. it's very rare but it just so happened to be in the clip when I was recording so I figured I would mention it
One question to the talent specs: do you really believe, that 5/5 unbridled wrath are better, than commanding presence?
assumed that you haven't imp. BoM or another warrior with imp. battle shout with you.
Wotlk Fury Warrior Guide
