Originally Posted by Gronx

I've been wondering about exactly that problem, the heroic strike threat vs damage issue, that we even now, as dual wield dps warriors, runs into.

So, what can we, with the way the warrior mechanics currently works, do?

Right now i'm playing around with 2-hand fury, which actually seems to have alot of potential, and before you go "dual wield or MS" on me like the typical 2 hand arms warrior.

What i'm currently playing around with is basically to try to apply the basics of how hunters dps' to a warrior mechanics, centered around the use of improved slam.

Improved slam is one awesome skill, not AP normalised, and when timed perfectly, you get a full non normalised attack, affected by impale, capable of proc'ing windfury (with a 2hander), for 0.5 seconds of lost auto attack time, if you apply it directly after a white attack.

Applying a slam after each auto attack is the basics of what i try to do currently, then apply a special afterwards, and wait those 0.3 seconds for the next white attack.

This also gives you an allmost 99% flurry uptime, as you basically have 2 special attacks for each white attack, all of those capable of proc'ing flurry, which means that the calculation for flurry would start to say 100% - the chance that i haven't landed a crit the last 8 attacks.

assuming a 100% flurry uptime, this gives the 2 hand fury warrior, with a speed 3.7 weapon, an attack cycle looking like:

You lose some BT damage here, as there'll be (if you add a bit of lag) 7 seconds or so between the BT's, there's also the issue of WW only being applied roughly each 14 seconds, due to the cooldown not being up when the next "time to apply a non BT speciel" comes up, this gives time to apply shouts + rampage though, so not exactly wasted dps time.

A sidenote here, is that this build benefits greatly from an additional haste effect, a dragonspine trophy proc for example, would put the auto attack timer at 2.38, which with the 0.5 sec slam cast time, would give you a close to optimal 3 second cycle, with auto - slam - special - ready for next auto attack.

Lets try to look at the differences between 2 hand fury and dual wield fury again:

Dual wield gets:

Roughly 20% more white damage (was what playing around with the spreadsheet gave me)
A higher and more steady rage income (which is close to a non issue, as our ragegain in a raid enviroment is high)
the ability to apply a weapon buff to your offhand

Two hand fury gets:

A higher flurry uptime
Benefits more from windfury, as the build will be landing roughly as many mainhand + special attacks as the dual wield fury build, while proc'ing a big fat 2 hander hit, instead of a one hander attack.
A pure damage to threat ratio, without HS adding additional threat.
The bonus from 3/5 two hander specialisation, which you can get without missing any important PvE dps talents
A higher percentage of damage comming from specials, thus making impale a better dps talent.
No low offhand crit's canceling one's deep wound effect, thus making deep wound actually tick for ok ammounts relatively often.



In a lagfree enviroment, this seems like two hand fury is more than capable of doing equal damage to a dual wield fury build, but if you take lag and human errors into equation, it becomes way more even.

I've just started to play around with two hand fury, but it seems viable, i'm still cancelling some of my auto attacks due to making mistakes with slam and such, and still i'm close to the level of dps i had while dualwielding before.

Aside from all this, it's also fun, at least to me, to try out something new, and this actually demands more from the warrior than just spamming skills, it requires some ammount of timing and adapting to haste proc's and such, thus making it more fun to play, at least for me.

I sadly cannot find a dps spreadsheet taking these things into account, and since Excel hates me, the one i worked on myself, seems to have been corrupted, yay. But, if any of you could run this theory through a spreadsheet, it would be nice to see, even though i probably will be proved wrong in saying that 2 hand fury have as much a potential for dps as dual wield, without as much threat.