Questions about fury spec

[Darkroman]

So, I'm an arms guy when it comes to warrior DPS, but I'm pretty sure at my item level I COULD do better in fury. Hell, my DPS in arms is pretty consistent. An example I did 71.5K DPS on Gara'jal a little bit ago (no food, flask, or potion), and I get 71.9K DPS on SimulationCraft using the same variables (so yes, my arms seems good). My fury seems to be lacking and is very inconsistent, often behind my arms DPS (I have the same weapon for off-hand if you look at my armory). http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...roman/advanced

Though that all may be true, I'd like to get better at fury. My questions are a little in-depth.

1. Should I always open up with bloodthirst, and when bloodthirst and colossus smash come off CD at the same time, which is the higher priority?

2. Wild strikes.. when should I use them? (at what amount of rage should I choose to use it or not)? When should I take advantage of the bloodsurge procs for wild strike?

3. As I understand it if I read SimCraft's action priority list right; with heroic strikes, I should do them when I have colossus smash up and have over 40 rage, and if I also have deadly calm up with colossus smash, safe to do so at 30 rage? Otherwise if neither.. 110 rage. Does that sound right?

4. When should I use heroic throw, battle shout, or impending victory? What are the situations to use them?

5. What's the best time to pop berserker rage? Should I only pop it when it's off CD and I don't have a raging blow buff up? Should I also pop it when I have CS up and I already have 1 raging blow buff, or save it?

[Tengenstein]

1. Bloodthirst. it procs every thing, Blood surge, enrage, your mastery, Raging Blow.
2. Blood surge procs should be used ASAP after the BT that procced them, and ideally Back to back to not delay the next BT or stall the GCD cycle. Otherwise don't use WS outside of CS or trinket procs.
3. Yes
4. Use them to fil empty GCDs
5. pretty much on CD

[Darkroman]

1. Bloodthirst. it procs every thing, Blood surge, enrage, your mastery, Raging Blow.
2. Blood surge procs should be used ASAP after the BT that procced them, and ideally Back to back to not delay the next BT or stall the GCD cycle. Otherwise don't use WS outside of CS or trinket procs.
3. Yes
4. Use them to fil empty GCDs
5. pretty much on CD

Thanks for the speedy reply! I appreciate the answers given. I do have a follow-up question to #2. What if everything was on CD (battle shout, heroic throw, impending victory, bloodthirst etc etc). Should I still fill my GCD with a wild strike, no matter how much rage I got? (As long as I have enough rage that is). Also what about bloodsurge vs colossus smash?

[Aggathon]

Imo wild strike should be a filler and it does more damage than HS. I've found that if I use HS below 100 rage I end up getting rage starved further down in my rotation. So... wild strike is the filler when nothing else is up. I try to save battleshout for if I get rage starved. I actually have deadly calm bound to hs. If I'm above 100 rage and get a bloodsurge proc I hit my wild strikes and hs at the same time. That's about the only time I use HS and I still have prettt bad gear and keep up with very well geared fury dps in lfr.As for colossus smash I always use it over everything unless I'm about to lose a raging blow or blood surge proc or I'm less than 30 rage and bt is up. You should be able to use it and still get in the blood surge or raging blow, those abilities tend to do more damage, and you shouldn't have any rage issues at that time.

[Tengenstein]

Simcraft says that if everything on GCD except WS, you let the GCD hang. I'm not too sure about that as generally WS is greated DPR than HS but simcraft says otherwise. you want to prioritise a Bloodsurged WSs over CS Mainly because if you end up having to wait half a second after the first WS for BT to come off CD or delay it by half a second if you got 2 WSs in, Either way you end up with a lone BS charge after the BT which if you don't overwrite which throws off the next BT like the first.

EDIT: Essenmtially you want to fit all 3 bloodsurges back to back between to BTs or wait until after the next BT to use them.

[Aggathon]

@Teng. I've tried it the way simcraft says to do it. I do more damage my way. /shrug

[Tengenstein]

Same Agg.

[Darkroman]

Simcraft says that if everything on GCD except WS, you let the GCD hang. I'm not too sure about that as generally WS is greated DPR than HS but simcraft says otherwise. you want to prioritise a Bloodsurged WSs over CS Mainly because if you end up having to wait half a second after the first WS for BT to come off CD or delay it by half a second if you got 2 WSs in, Either way you end up with a lone BS charge after the BT which if you don't overwrite which throws off the next BT like the first.

Cool thanks. I also just noticed in simcraft that it says it is safe to use WS if everything is on CD, but only if you have 80 rage or more. I also took a closer look at the sample sequence and from what I gather, raging blow and bloodthirst seem to have priority over even a bloodsurge proc. If you mouse over each of the letters you'll see, and even colossus smash seems to have priority over bloodsurge. Hmm... this is confusing.

[Tengenstein]

Ignore my earlier posts. They are wrong. Bloodsurged wildtrikes should be lower inpriority that CS/RB, and you should feel free to delay a BS by Half a second due to squeezing an extra BSed WS in.

[Aggathon]

Ya, the simcraft stuff is confusing because I've found the priority to be very rage dependent and a lot of people are holding on to wanting to use HS when really it should be RARELY used imo. Wild Strike is far more important that HS. The reason it's all so rage dependent is because in that instant it might be more damage or whatever, but if you use something like HS, or delay a BT at the wrong time, it can lead to a GCD where you can't do anything because you're rage starved, which is going to be lower DPS than anything else. That's why I try to save battle shout for situations where that occurs.

[Darkroman]

Ignore my earlier posts. They are wrong. Bloodsurged wildtrikes should be lower inpriority that CS/RB, and you should feel free to delay a BS by Half a second due to squeezing an extra BSed WS in.

I'm not saying you're wrong, and I'm also not saying the simcraft is right. Don't assume that. I'm just saying simcraft is saying other things. Honestly I try it all sorts of ways, and I'm still not sure. One thing I can say about heroic strike though is the beauty of it is that it's not on the GCD. So it can be used with other abilities as well. Couple that with deadly calm and it's DPR is greatly increased. BT + DC + HS = BT + HS at the cost of 10 rage total. Something like that...

I see why bloodsurge is an important proc though. It gives 3 WS in 3 seconds for price of one WS, where as in 3 seconds you'd spend twice the amount of rage for 1 less WS without it.

Anyway basically what I'm looking for is in-depth discussion on the matter. I see that wild strike does more damage than heroic strike (clearly), and I'm also trying to figure out what the best way is to pool your rage while still keeping up decent DPS. I've only done mainly trial runs on the dummy so far with my arms vs fury, but I'm about to run MSV LFR again to see what how it goes.

Anyway I thank you both for your advice, I will take it and use it. I know simcrafts are not always the go-to thing for real-WoW-world results.

[Aggathon]

HS is 20 rage with deadly calm up, so it's still a lot of rage to spend especially if you're using other abilities. Like I said it's not necessarily about the DPR but whether or not it will rage starve you and cause you to lose GCDs, that's why the best time to use it is when a blood surge proc is up and you're just floating in rage (like 100+rage). You can probably refine that down, but the rotation gets dicey down the line if you get unlucky and go for a while without a bloodsurge proc.

[Darkroman]

So I ran LFR MSV and did Gara'jal. With fury I did 4k more DPS (75.5k compared to 71.5k). That confirms my suspicion that fury scales much better with raid buffs. Anyway for this trial run, what I did was basically have BS procs be a lower priority (only used it when everything else was on CD), EXCEPT when I had colossus smash up AND I was NOT enraged. If BT came off CD and I still had BS up, I used up my remaining WS, and then used BT (but only in that specific scenario.. colossus smash up, and no enrage, to reiterate, RB was still higher priority than either of them). Plus I WS when I had around 85-100 rage with no CS up. I only ever used HS if I had above 110 rage, or if I had both CS and enrage up, and then I spam the crap out of it, even if I didn't have RB up, I'd use WS with it, I usually gained enough rage back for the burst phase.

With no food, flasks, potions, and getting rid of heroic leap off of simcraft (which is what my circumstances were in LFR), I actually DPS'd 2k higher than simmed. Probably RNG, but still...

[Tengenstein]

I don't think there's any doubt that Fury scales better. Fury gets more out of str, exp, hit Mastery, and a hell of alot more out of Crit,than arms does, and whilst arms does get slightly more out of haste than Fury it's not an attractive stat for either spec.