The Cataclysmic fury Warrior Guide

[Khilbron]

Would just like to mention to people that were dreading the impending nerfs, they are nolonger nerfs, Fury is getting a sizeable buff. This info is still PTR, and is subject to change, but as we sit, DAMAGE INC.

Fury:
Cleave now scales from 45% of Attack Power, down from 56.2% of Attack Power.
Bloodthirst now scales from 80% of Attack Power, up from 62%.
Raging Blow now deals 145% weapon damage, up from 80%.
Unshackled Fury now Increases the benefit of abilities that cause or require you to be enraged by 44.8% (up from 37.6%). Each point of Mastery increases enrage effects by an additional 5.6%. (Up from 4.7%)

Arms:
Heroic Strike now scales from 93% of Attack Power, up from 75% of Attack Power.
Juggernaut now also makes your Charge ability usable in all stances.
War Academy now increases the damage of "Mortal Strike, Raging Blow, Devastate, Victory Rush and Slam" instead of "Heroic Strike, Cleave, Victory Rush and Slam".

With the exception of colossus smash these changes mean every ability we use in our rotation is getting a 25% or higher increase, and in the case of Raging Blow, a 55% increase.

[mallevolent]

Inner Rage has been redesigned. It now reduces the cooldown on Heroic Strike and Cleave by 50% (to 1.5 second) for the next 15 seconds. 1-minute cooldown. It still cannot be used during Deadly Calm. This ability was originally designed to help warriors with rage capping, but the Heroic Strike and rage normalization changes seem to have solved that problem on their own. This new design will still allow warriors to burn off excess rage faster, at their discretion.

Slam cast time is now affected by haste.

[Kazeyonoma]

INNNNNNNNNNTERESTING hrmmm

[Baba]

VERY nice changes! Inner rage is interesting, still requires more rage than I have right now, but I can see using it, unlike the current Inner Rage which I have never used and never put on a toolbar.

[Baba]

Something about mastery.
Acoording to maxdps my enrage time is arround 84%.

That seems extraordinarily high enrage time for a fury war.

[Baba]

Would just like to mention to people that were dreading the impending nerfs, they are nolonger nerfs, Fury is getting a sizeable buff. This info is still PTR, and is subject to change, but as we sit, DAMAGE INC.

Fury:
Cleave now scales from 45% of Attack Power, down from 56.2% of Attack Power.
Bloodthirst now scales from 80% of Attack Power, up from 62%.
Raging Blow now deals 145% weapon damage, up from 80%.
Unshackled Fury now Increases the benefit of abilities that cause or require you to be enraged by 44.8% (up from 37.6%). Each point of Mastery increases enrage effects by an additional 5.6%. (Up from 4.7%)

Arms:
Heroic Strike now scales from 93% of Attack Power, up from 75% of Attack Power.
Juggernaut now also makes your Charge ability usable in all stances.
War Academy now increases the damage of "Mortal Strike, Raging Blow, Devastate, Victory Rush and Slam" instead of "Heroic Strike, Cleave, Victory Rush and Slam".

With the exception of colossus smash these changes mean every ability we use in our rotation is getting a 25% or higher increase, and in the case of Raging Blow, a 55% increase.

These sound too good to be true reading it for the 3rd time, especially an increase to HS.

[Yves]

Inner Rage has been redesigned. It now reduces the cooldown on Heroic Strike and Cleave by 50% (to 1.5 second) for the next 15 seconds. 1-minute cooldown. It still cannot be used during Deadly Calm. This ability was originally designed to help warriors with rage capping, but the Heroic Strike and rage normalization changes seem to have solved that problem on their own. This new design will still allow warriors to burn off excess rage faster, at their discretion.

Slam cast time is now affected by haste.

i like the pieces in bold, though i don't see how they think we could rage cap a lot.
At least i am hardly ever rage capped, in raids probably more ofc.

[Symph]

Our DPS is definitely going to go up because of the buffs mentioned and how well the buffs are gonna scale with Raging Blow. Not only is the Raging Blow weapon damage component increased, but our mastery is also getting a buff (although not quite that huge), thus increasing flat Raging Blow damage more and indirectly by more mastery = more damage from enrage = higher raging blows. We honestly probably won't see a huge change at first (regarding mastery), but once we get to higher tiers (with much more stats, generally having more mastery on gear. And once we get to a high enough gear level where we won't have to reforge all our mastery to hit or crit (of course depending on how out of control they make crit rating this expansion)) it'll definitely be noticeable how huge the effect of mastery has on Raging Blow.

Inner Rage is still gonna be fairly useless. I'll just copy/paste what I basically wrote on my guilds forums, Inc wall of text and I had to edit some of it for langauge (lol):

Can't say this change isn't a good thing in the long run. While it doesn't improve current DPS at all, it's still in the right direction and is a good bit better than the old mechanic. Currently, I don't even use HS on CD, unless it's during heroism and I get really lucky and don't miss, but I pretty much NEVER rage cap or find myself with so much rage that I can't use my abilities quickly enough. I simply don't have enough rage to really do that and keep up my standard rotation. I still don't see many warriors using this ability (this is completely excluding prot warriors) unless there's a ton of raid damage in future encounters (why I didn't say now, I'll explain in a few), but even on fights with heavy raid damage (such as Nef or Chimaeron), the damage is spiky and inconsistent, and of course by inconsistent I mean that I realize the RAID damage may be consistent and there is always something to heal, but most of the abilities are either targeted or only happen every so often with a decently long cool down. So basically when Nef's electrocute happens or Chimaerans massacre hits, it immediately bumps me to full rage. But these abilities are paced and not constant, so it's not like I have a steady income of rage from raid damage.

Also even after I rage cap from getting hit incredibly hard, I have absolutely no issues at all spending all my rage using my abilities (Colossus Smash = 20 rage, Heroic Strike (30 rage) + Bloodthirst (20 rage) = 50 rage, Raging Blow = 20 rage, that's 90 rage. Bloodthirst is on a 3s CD, which means I can use it every other GCD, so after I unload all those attacks, I can use Bloodthirst to dump 20 more which puts me way below the rage cap. And yes that all ends up costing 110 rage, but of course I'm gonna be gaining rage from auto attacks while all of this is happening, and if for some reason I still have more rage, Heroic Strike for another 30 rage. This is how easy it is without the use of the current bad Inner Rage and this change will definitely will not cause me to use the new one, meaning the new Inner Rage is not gonna help at all (DPS wise) and I don't see myself ever using it. I'm just happy they at least realized it was a flawed design before and they made it useful for tanks (could be wrong here of course, maybe a tank can confirm this better).

Again edited out a bunch of stuff including PvP effects and some harsh language. Also I apologize for it being really dumbed down but I was trying to explain it to people who don't play warriors and didn't wanna retype the whole thing. Anyways, that's just my opinion.

These sound too good to be true reading it for the 3rd time, especially an increase to HS.

It's still gonna be a nerf to HS because of War Academy.

[Thegreatme]

I remain incredibly skeptical about these supposed HS buffs, When I get home later today I intend to play around on the PTR to see if this is in fact the case. As for the inner rage change, it's more or less awful. it's just making the talent more situational than it already is. in current gear levels it's not going to do much, but that will more than likely change later in the expansion

It's still gonna be a nerf to HS because of War Academy.

no, if it is indeed .93*ap, then it's a buff even with losing war academy by about 8%

[Baba]

I don't see why they just don't do something simple with Inner Rage. Keep it as is (or increase its cost to 100 rage) BUT remove the double-rage penalty maybe. As it is, we got (like all classes) only 3 new skills from 80 to 85, CS and Heroic Leap are great, Inner rage is virtually useless. I assume they'll fix it eventually, but only if we keep attesting to its uselessness.

[Symph]

no, if it is indeed .93*ap, then it's a buff even with losing war academy by about 8%

Mmmm yeah you're right. I didn't read into enough the patch notes and assumed that the 20% less damage meant 20% less AP to the coefficient. My apologies. Unless that is what it means then I don't understand how it isn't a nerf, if you wouldn't mind explaining your math because clearly I'm doing something wrong in my calculations.

[Mutah]

Really nice guide. i have a fast question.
I have heard that cap for hit rating is 27% or at least you should aim for that? is that a lie or is there something about it ?

[Pek]

8% Hit is for specials. 27% is for dual wield white swings.

[meode]

Reccomendations for valor points? Ive already bought the trinket, and have the tier legs from argaloth, thinking going for the chest for the 2piece is gonna be best, sitting on about 2k points now

[Sennex]

Really love the guide, but I have a question here.
I stopped raiding just before Cata came out, and I had stopped tanking a few months before that. I just want to play the solo/ rep grind game while I finish my degree (16 more weeks WOOT). That being said I am insanely interested in the SMF Fury spec.

Is there an "optimum" spec when working towards only using one hander's? Or do you guys have any suggestions? Fury is completely out of my comfort zone as I have been tanking for the last 4 years or I would just "wing" it

[Speech]

TG and SMF specs are the same, save for that one point.

[Onetuth]

Okay....another thank you post!

Huge thank you TGM! Been following your posts for a long time now!
You never fail to deliver!

[Dreadstro]

with the buff to HS, do you think it would be worthwhile to take a point out of deep wounds and add it to incite?

[Loganisis]

HS Buff?

http://www.wowhead.com/patchnotes=4.0.6-ptr

Heroic Strike damage has been reduced by 20%.

[alwaysme]

Hi, thank you for making this guide, without it i would be totally lost (somewhere near the bottom of the divine damage meter no doubt). I just have a couple of questions that have been nagging me.

Execute spam - Should i wait for 30 rage before pressing it?

The stat weights - They've changed recently. It used to be just haste in the square brackets, hit was above crit and haste was above mastery. What prompted this change? Were the previous weights just wrong or have the weights changed to account for the HS nerfs and main ability buffs next patch?

Adequate rage - This is a very grey area, i assume by this you mean you can do your base rotation (with very little rage dumping) without having to miss a gcd due to low rage more than a couple of times a fight. Would about 15-18% hit (including precision) be a roundabout amount to be able to do that? I understand that you simply can't give a number due to the number being different from warrior to warrior, but surely a rough estimate is possible?