DPS as a Warrior (Part 2)

The sole defining talent of the Fury tree in Wrath is definitely Titan's Grip. Having seen a multitude of balances ever since its inception, TG is now straddled with a 10% damage reduction component when wielding a 2-handed weapon in one hand. On the bright side, patch 3.1.3 brought some life back into the Fury tree, namely, reducing the cost of Bloodthirst(BT) from 30 rage to 20 rage, and reducing its cooldown from 5 seconds to 4 seconds.

After some testing on the heroic dummy, I noticed a marked increase in DPS from what I used to have. When the 10% damage reduction to TG went live, many warriors were noticing, and suffering from, rage starvation at some point or another, due to a drop in white hit damage. As in the link in the previous post, GC has said that the rage formula hasn't changed, and the TG nerf did take white-hit rage generation into account, but warrior DPS was a tad too low. Still, it doesn't explain where large chunks of other warriors' DPS went. Now, with this fix, Fury DPS cycles seem to be much smoother, allowing more Heroic Strikes, and rage starvation issues should be a thing of the past. Let's just hope that this is not another band-aid fix on top of what promises to be a great talent for warriors.

A Fury warrior's DPS cycle is somewhat priority-based. Fury warriors have 2 instant attacks, one proc-attack, and a rage dump. Most of the time, it does not matter whether you hit BT first or Whirlwind(WW) first, its just that WW provides a bigger initial damage boost. Bloodsurge procs, however, are a different story. There exist differing opinions on whether to prioritize WW before instant-cast slams, or BT before instant-cast slams, but a good rule of thumb is to fit your instant slams into a free GCD whenever possible. Keep in mind that while you are doing all this, you should also be diligently queueing Heroic Strike, never letting your rage bar fill up completely.

In an infinite rage situation (think lots of raid damage), all your mainhand attacks should be Heroic Strike. Of course, sometimes there is little raid damage, and your offhand white damage doesn't generate sufficient rage for you to do that. Thats where rage generating talents come into the equation. Bloodrage, Berserker Rage, Glyph of Heroic Strike, and Anger Management are all your friends. Even with such a wide array of tools at your disposal, you might still find yourself short of rage. This is where its time to think about a weapon upgrade, or more Strength/hit.

A standard cookie-cutter Fury spec would look, therefore, something like this.

Gearing as a Fury warrior is relatively easy. You'll want pieces with high strength and crit, while hit, expertise, armour penetration, and haste are mostly secondary. 8% hit from talents and gear will be sufficient, although 3-4% above this number will help to smooth out rage generation. 6.5% expertise is recommended for bosses, to ensure that none of your specials get dodged. Finally, you should be primarily gemming for Strength, anything else is mostly sub-optimal.

As for glyphs, must-have major glyphs would be Heroic Strike and Whirlwind, while the third slot could possibly be filled by Glyph of Execution. Minor glyphs are quite standard; you'll want Glyph of Battle, Glyph of Bloodrage, and Glyph of Enduring Victory.

Next: DPS as Arms.