This is the 4th edition of my guide with updates from the latest patch. Some of the sections are not 100% finished but I had enough ready that I felt it warranted being released. If you see errors please post and I will fix them. They might even be fixed already on my internal version.
1: Talents
2: Hit Rating vs. STR/Crit: Why to never gem for hit
-Weapon Expertise
-Armor Penetration
3: Attack Table: Why hitting more does not mean you crit more
4: Heroic Strike vs. Cleave
5: Slow or Fast Offhand?
6: Skill Rotation
-Should hamstring be a part of my skill rotation?
-Threat
7: PvP
8: Execute Range
9: Weapon Enchants
10: Haste
11: Gear
12: Gemming
1: Talents:
This is one of the main areas that changed from the last patch. There were several changes made to the fury tree that changed the build slightly. The points in arms are unchanged. You are still building towards impale. For fury there was debate about what to do. I have tried out some of the choices and have decided to drop improved execute and pick up weapon mastery. I know my current armory spec is different but that is because I was testing things and have not returned to my intended spec.
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
There are several reasons that I gave up improved execute. For one when execute range hits I pop out my fast mainhand for two fast weapons and I am confidant I can use execute at the same rate as I did when it was not improved. They will do a little less damage each time...105 pre mitigated...to be exact but the most important part is that you are able to use execute. On top of that I am on the verge of getting two piece tier 6 which will cover most of the loss.
Now a lot of my reasons are covered because of the level of my gear. If you are in a situation where improved execute is the only way you will have enough rage to execute consistently then that would change things. It becomes a matter of how often you are missing executes and many other factors. I did not test any of this myself because it is not an issue for me but my guess would be that if you are just starting fury and need the talnent to make execute feasible the best place to take the points from will be improved dual wield.
2: Hit Rating vs. STR/Crit:
Here I will provide a basic overview and provide some links to places where people can look at math to their heart's content.
Hit Rating: 15.8 rating grants 1% hit chance
Critical Strike Rating: 22.1 rating grants 1% critical strike chance
These following statements are assuming your target is a raid boss. If a mob/player is your level the miss rate is 5% for yellow and 24% for white attacks.
While dual wielding your white attacks will have a 28%(rounded up) chance to miss. Your yellow attacks still have a 9%(rounded up) chance to miss. This means that if you have precision you will want to stack hit until you reach 95 hit rating which will mean you will not miss a yellow attack.
With the introduction of hit and crit ratings item budgets now work so that 1 str = 1 agility = 1 crit rating = 1 hit rating and so on and so forth. That leaves warriors with the question of which stats to stack. Until you reach 95 hit rating take hit over everything else. After this point hit is now your least effective dps stat. It is very important to realize that it is still a very important stat and simply ignoring it can be disastrous. The point of bringing this up is that a lot of warrior have stacking hit at the cost of everything else, something that used to be an effective gearing method. This is no longer the case and pure hit stacking should be avoided.
The way item budgets work is that the more of one stat you have the less total budgets the items gets. This means that items that have a variety of stats will have more overall stats allocated. Items with hit/crit/str together are generally better items then just str/crit. Find gear with balanced stats when you can and use this to keep your hit rating high. Then gem for str/crit in these items.
It is also important to note that the lower your level of gear the more effective str is. If you are just starting to gear up STR is by far your best stat. As your gear improves the value of crit will rise and at certain levels of raid buffs even marginally pass str. This means that for very low levels of gear stick to +8 str but as you improve you can phase in 4str/4crit gems to finish socket bonuses.
The reason that hit is less valued is that strength and crit affect every single one of your attacks while hit rating only effects white damage. All three of the stats are closely related though and as any of the values change the relative worth of the other two change also.
A good place to go to in order to find the relative value of each stat for your current level of gear is:
[Warrior] DPS Spreadsheet 2.3 and beyond - Elitist Jerks
Current File:
Elitist Jerks - View Single Post - [Warrior] DPS Spreadsheet 2.3 and beyond
I have not checked on either of these myself so use at your own risk.
The spreadsheet is not meant to be an absolute guide. In fact I have never actually plugged my gear into the spreadsheet myself because it is currently flawed. I link this post because there is very good discussion throughout and it is an incredible resource for posting specific item questions and getting reasonable answers. Even when working the spreadsheet is no more then a rough guide. Use it with caution.
Here you can enter your gear and get a rough value of how useful a single point of str, hit, and crit is for you right now.
For the love of all that is good on this earth I am not advocating staying at 100 hit and never increasing it from there. All I am saying is to stop stacking it ahead of str/crit. Hit is still a very good stat and one you will need. Just use it in moderation. Weapon Expertise:
Replacing probably the most confusing dps stat ever Weapon Expertise is now on every piece of gear that used to have Weapon Skill. What weapon expertise does is lower an enemies chance to dodge and parry by .25% each per point of expertise. For dps this means is that expertise is weighted identically to hit on gear(they are both 3.9 rating per point in hit/expertise). However reducing a mobs chance to dodge your attacks benefits white damage AND yellow damage. This is a huge difference. Unfortunately there is no plate dps gear currently out there that has expertise. There are a couple leather pieces that might be worth picking up depending on what you are using and if you can pry them away from rogues. Also humans and orcs get expertise for specific weapons from their racial talents.
Armor Penetration:
Short story: Armor penetration is good!
Long story: Most of the hard data is going to come from a thread at the Elitist Jerks forums. I will post the full thread here for you to browse at your leisure then I will repost the more pertinent data directly.
Boss armor values:
[RAID] Boss armor values - Elitist Jerks
Notice that all but 2 of the bosses have either 6200 or 7700 armor. A similar pattern occurs in the trash mobs: 5475/5700/5950 or 6800/7100/7400 for level 70/71/72 mobs. In terms of percentage reduction, these values result in either 34.15% or 39.15% armor reduction vs attackers of the same level as the mob.
|
Armor reduction of a level 73 boss attacked by a level 70 player is 37% for 6200 armor, and 42.17% for 7700 armor. Sunder Armor x5 is -2600 armor, Faerie Fire is -610, and Curse of Recklessness is -800.
For a boss with 6200/7700 armor, SA x5 gives a damage increase of 18.36%/16.61%.
If we assume now that the boss has SA stacked x5 on it, adding just FF gives a further 4.5%/4.05% increase, CoR gives 5.99%/5.38%, and with both on they give 11.06%/9.9% increase over just SA.
Armor Penetration is a bit more complex because it comes it varied amounts. If the boss has just SA x5 on it, then the effect of ArP is as follows:
100 ArP: 0.71%/0.64%
200 ArP: 1.43%/1.29%
300 ArP: 2.16%/1.95%
400 ArP: 2.91%/2.62%
500 ArP: 3.66%/3.3%
For a fully debuffed boss (SA x5, FF, CoR) the increase from ArP is:
100 ArP: 0.79%/0.71%
200 ArP: 1.59%/1.42%
300 ArP: 2.41%/2.15%
400 ArP: 3.24%/2.89%
500 ArP: 4.08%/3.64%
|
As you can see the higher your armor penetration gets the more valuable each point of it becomes. It is an incredible stat in that it is the only one that scales with itself AND with other stats. Now I would be careful before making the plunge into armor penetration if you are not ready for it. It used to only be in BT/Hyjal making it impossible to stack it until you were ready for it. In the last patch with the new badge gear it is easier to collect before you can truly support it.
As mentioned it does not truly shine until you can get several pieces of it and it is not worth destroying your crit/hit to gear to get 2 pieces of it. That being said armor penetration is the future of dps stats so learn to love it.
3: Attack Tables:
One of the popular arguments for stacking hit is people tell you that the more you hit the more you crit. As much as that sounds like it makes sense it is not how the WoW combat system works. Wow uses an attack table.
Attack table - WoWWiki - Your guide to the World of Warcraft
The way the attack table works is that every time you swing there are a few things that can happen and they are prioritized in this order(assuming you are behind a mob so parry is not counted)
1) Miss
2) Dodge
3) Glance
4) Crit
5) Hit
Lets say you are duel wielding and have 0 hit and are attacking a raid boss from behind. Your attack table is going to look like this:
1-28 = Miss(28%)
29-37 = Dodge(9%)
38-62 = Glance(25%)
That leaves 37% open at the end of the table. This means you can have up to 37% crit before you are capped if you ahve 0 hit, 0 expertise, and 0 points in weapon expertise or percision. If you have less then 37% anything left at the end will be a plain hit. For example if you had 30% crit that would leave a 7% chance to get a plain hit.
Now no one is going to have 0 hit and you will most likely have talents such as percision adn weapon mastery which will raise the crit cap much higher. You have to try very hard and wear very unusal gear to hit the crit cap.
4: Heroic Strike vs. Cleave
Heroic strike and cleave are the two contenders for a rage dump for fury warriors. They both have bonus damage, they both are not on the global cooldown, and they both turn a white attack into a yellow attack. This means that an attack that would of had a 28% chance to miss, 25% to be a glancing blow, and only crit for 2x damage now becomes a yellow attack. It only has the base 8% miss, no glancing and 2.2 crit from impale. They both also have bonus threat.
In an effort to try to lower their threat people have been floating the idea of using cleave instead of heroic strike. This is a matter of confusion due to blizzard listing on heroic strike’s tool tip that it has bonus threat and not on cleave’s. However this far into the game you should know better then to believe something on Blizzard’s tooltips.
Heroic Strike - WoWWiki - Your guide to the World of Warcraft Cleave - WoWWiki - Your guide to the World of Warcraft
Heroic strike adds 176 damage for 196 threat. That is 1.1 threat per bonus damage.
Cleave adds 70 damage for 130 bonus threat. That is 1.8 threat per bonus damage.
Something worth noting however is that if cleave hit two targets the bonus threat is split between the two making it preferable threat wise if you have a second target to hit.
As Natural pointed out to me this is not the entire story.
For example, let's say that "removing glancing blows and reducing chance to miss" increases the expected damage of an attack by 200. This is a completely out of the ballpark example, I'll look at some WWS logs in a second.
This changes your calculation as follows:
Heroic strike adds 176 damage (+200 for hit/glance) for 196 threat. 1.92 damage/threat
Cleave adds 70 damage (+200 for hit/glance) for 130 bonus threat. 2.07 damage/threat
Here, cleave is the victor. If you can calculate the value of these other bonuses (no glance, +hit, +10% crit damage), THEN you can calculate what is better damage per threat.
|
This means it becomes hard to tell exactly how much threat each one causes without calculating factors from all your gear. It would appear that the better your gear the more in favor of cleave it will be. That being said Heroic Strike is still the better choice as points in improved cleave are a waste of valuable talent points.
5: Slow or Fast Offhand?
Whirlwind now swings with both your weapons meaning there is a real benefit from having a slower weapon in your offhand. However WW is still not a huge part of your damage and the difference between a slow and fast offhand is not a big one. If you have a fast offhand with good stats I would not replace it with a slow weapon unless they are comparable. Be looking for a good slow weapon to offhand but do not commit yourself to one.
Slow weapons also waste less flurry procs. The common counter argument to this is that faster weapons proc flurry more. In fact it procs more flurry effects in an identical ratio to the amount of flurry procs it uses. This is true when all your attacks are white hits. However you also have to factor crits from yellow damage. These flurry procs have no relation to the speed of you weapons so the slower they are the more effective they are. Overall this is a pretty minimal effect but one worth mentioning as a benefit of a slow weapon. Also the higher your crit rate the smaller this effect is.
Also of note is the fact that is both your weapons are the same speed you can get 4 charges from flurry instead of 3. This works because when your weapons are in sync the game seems to be unable to determine which attack should land first so it ends up giving the haste to both weapons. If you weapons get out of sync while attacking, something that will happen occasionally, you will loose the benefit. If you can it is worth picking up two same speed weapons.
6: Skill Rotation:
The standard fury build has ½ improved whirlwind. This allows you to make a solid skill rotation with blood thirst and whirlwind.
Seconds into fight:
0: BT
1.5: WW
3: Global cool down free
6: BT
7.5: Global cool down free
10.5: WW
12: BT
13.5: Global cool down free
15: Global cool down free
18: BT
19.5: WW
This allows you to use both abilities as they cool down. Also leaves some nice places to use a global cooldown on something else. Use these times to refresh a shout or rampage or possibly a hamstring.
Assuming threat is not a concern use heroic strike if you go over 50 rage.
Should hamstring be a part of my skill rotation?
Before the windfury nerf hamstring used to be a vital part of your skill rotation because it could proc a windfury attack. Now that it no longer procs windfury it is less clear whether or not to use it. Hamstring can crit and proc flurry, and it can proc enchants and haste procs. Hamstring also has 181 bonus threat per use. In the end it is up to you. If you have the rage and you are good on threat feel free to use a global cool down on a hamstring. Generally speaking I will use heroic strike before I use hamstring. This is because they both have the same amount of bonus threat and I generally feel heroic strike will add more damage. This is really up to personal opinion though.
Threat:
Threat is no longer a concern on the majority of fights as long as you got your trust salv buff.
7: PvP: Arena:
No death wish or imp intercept in the tree anymore. GG. Stick to battlegrounds unless you do not care about your rating.
8. Execute Range
This is your time to shine and make up some spots on the damage meters. If you have decent fast weapons equip them now as they will give fast steady rage. If your rage spikes above 50 use a Blood thirst then go back to executes.
R.I.P. Death Wish
This is also the time to pop reck and go wild.
9: Weapon Enchants:
Blue 71 dps weapons: Potency x 2…at this level of gearing a crusader on main hand has been shown to be a decent main hand enchant. If it is cheaper then potency or you feel some nostalgia go for it.
Epic 80-91 dps weapons: Executioner main hand potency offhand.
Season 2 arena and SSC and beyond: Executioner main hand and mongoose or potency offhand.
Note on Executioner: Unless things have changed since the PTR this encahnt does not stack. That is why it is never recomended to enchant your offhand with it.
10: Haste
The haste nerf has been live for a while now and the dust has settled. Warriors and rogues alike lost damage but it is not as bad as I had feared. Dragonspine trophy is still a good trinket but it is no where near the godly state it once had. It is now eventually replaceable.
Dragonstike is still the best blacksmith weapon but not by as much, much smaller margin and BT weapons will surpass it, something that previously did not happen until Illidan legendaries.
For items with static haste: They are still good items but if you can find an equal level item for the same slot without haste that second item is probably going to be better.
11: Gear:
There is now a sight out there that has come a long way in terms of item evaluation. It is not 100% and it is probable that no site can ever be 100% for gear evaluation but it is currently the best out there. I monitor it now and then and send suggestions and the creater has been very good about adressing them.
The site is Maxdps.com
What makes the sight great is that it is easy to use and you put your current stats into sight and it revaluates every item based on your current stats. You can select what gear is available to you and search just those sections.
I strongly recomend this sight for getting an idea of how gear is rated for where you are right then.
12: Gemming:
The way I gem is pretty simple. If I do not want the socket bonus I gem 8 str...generally the only sockets bonuses I go for are +str or +crit ones.
If I do decide to pick up a socket bonus here is what I do:
Red: 8 str
Yellow: 4 str / 4 crit
Blue: 4 str / 6stam
Meta:
Relentless Earthstorm Diamond. It is fixed again and working fine and would be the only meta I would seriously consider for pure dps.
Edited thread title for brevity!
