Hello,

I've come to a problem that i can't seem to get a full grasp on, here's a little background. I've been playing WoW since the Friends and Family Alpha as a warrior and I have been through all the changes and have been fury all my WoW career and only recently have I reached a point where it seems that I have to severely penalize my damage in raids because I don't seem to be able to control my aggro by spending all my rage.

My agility is nothing special gear like titanic legplates has put me at an average crit rate of 24% with a self unbuffed attack power of 1019, with totems, mark of the wild and improved battle shout with the new rank I regularly break 1600 attack power, a crusader proc pushes me even further up there but not quite enough to ever break 2000.

I constantly have more rage than i can use because I am unable to use my abilities without pulling aggro on untauntable bosses, a good example of this is Hakkar which my guild rolled through the night before last. I did absolutely nothing but auto attack, bloodthirst, whirlwind and overpower yet I still pulled aggro at 48%, when i noticed I had reached this peak I let myself die, got a battle res and went back in, assuming it would be theoretically impossible to pull aggro again after an aggro wipe below 50% I went all out with heroic strikes, whirlwinds, etc and still ended up pulling aggro AGAIN at 3%, at which point I just tanked him with my 2h execute spamming until he died.

Thus, my question is, what do your DPS warriors do in raids to put out massive damage without pulling aggro? The warriors tanking when I'm not are doing everything I have told them to (I'm the MT, fury spec'd) and it really doesn't seem to be an issue of something they are doing wrong but rather I'm doing too well, just a hurdle I am finding extremely irritating that I can't seem to deal effective damage without pulling and ultimately dieing because I have no way to dump or release my hate.

So, what do you do? :(

blessing of salvation ;)

We make Fury warriors who always get aggro respec to protection and MT.

OK no, but I am really interested in reading this discussion. I suspect that Crauch can shed a lot of light on it because OH GOD DPS.

Haha. I'm the MT for our guild as http://www.wowhead.com/talent/?LhhxbhbZVVhVzxoio i've never really had a problem generating aggro without defiance (I usually put myself in line 2nd or third on vael but have done fine as first). I respec'd out of Dual Weild because the aggro generated there was even worse.

This great aggro generation is unfortunately affecting my dps ;)

I think using Hakkar is bad example.

The problem with Hakkar is the MT (Or the OT) is never building constant agro (since they are MC'd for some time), while you can rail him with no loss. It would be like asking the question of "Why does Chromag stick on me if I am the off tank for TL after the 4-5 TL?"

If you said "I pull @ xx percent on Broodlord/Vael/Nef(Dont know how you do this, but our dps fury warrior did)" then it would raise a better question.

Yea, you simply have to accept the fact that you cant do dps on any kind of boss with a deagro (unless you can use that deagro yourself). In fact the only reasonable argument anyone can make for the rage mechanic not being broken is that in general a warrior cant full out dps untill the boss is on farm. While its cool to be at or near top dps for a fight as a warrior, its hard to even come close to that on new bosses.

I was kinda getting down on the whole fury/dps warrior thing, untill we started wroking on cthun B)

You can try limited Invuln pots on fights like broodlord, but that doesnt work on everything.

I pulled agro on our last Nef kill as a fury Warrior. Between Berserker Rages that give 10 rage (and make me immune to fear), Death Wish (which also makes me immune to fear) and pretty much unlimited rage due to SoE/WF/raid buffs, it's extremely easy for Fury to pull agro on Nef.

There are a few things you can do to throttle agro. The first step involves not going batshit insane. Does your guild have a Thunderfury? If not, switch to Arms every so often and burn some rage on Thunderclap for the slow. Got booming voice? Toss some Demo Shouts out there. Buy the subtlety enchant. Maybe try speccing for improved slam and dumping rage on that instead of HS (I'm DW fury btw, some 2 handers swear by slam, I personally don't like it. Play around with it to see how you fair.) While it's fun to see how much rage you can dump on HS/BTs, toss some extra rage out there to debuff the mob. Your damage may come down a little bit, but it will keep you from pulling out one too many heroic strikes.

Unfortunately there is no magic answer to your question. Warriors have no innate reduction and better tanking weapons/skills aren't exactly flooding the market at this point. Realize that although we can do some sick dps, we are not a DPS class. Plan accordingly.

I was under the impression that the only way you can avoid pulling aggro on untauntable mobs was simply to go more slowly than normal and give the MT some time to build up initial aggro. If you want to use Hakkar as an example, our runs generally ask DPS to do nothing until after the first life drain, just so tanks can beat on him for a while and get a decent hate level established. After that, I havent seen anyone pull off the tanks. In fact, we had a tank disconnect during Hakkar last night and, even though he wasnt even auto-attacking, he was still 2nd on the aggro list with rogues and hunters opening up on Hakkar.

Short answer. Nothing. This is the fundamental problem with "DPS" warriors. You are completely limited by aggro, and constantly choking your DPS so you don't die. You have no de-aggro. You have no way to shed aggro should you get it (iceblock). Every upgrade means you spend more time auto-attacking, and sitting around with a full rage bar. Combine this with the fact that if you compute dmg done vs danger of wiping the raid by pulling aggro, and DPS warriors are simply terrible.

Who wants popcorn?

This is pretty much it.

You can get a http://www.thottbot.com/?i=52783 but it will only help, not fix, the problem :)

Yeah, but MD Imp and Nemesis 8-piece gives you some threat reduction :P.

If you aren't tanking or trying to pull aggro, the Heroic Strike button might as well be labeled the suicide button. It pulls a lot of extra threat that you just don't want.

My wife's Warrior is hitting the same problems (31/5/15 build with Ashkhandi, etc). On long fights when not tanking she can't push her DPS as hard as possible knowing she will kill herself and possibly endanger the raid if she pushes her damage output any further.

She's going back to swapping in lower DPS gear with better survivability, like using the Hakkar legs instead of Titanic and Helm of Endless Rage instead of Lionheart. Warrior DPS hits a plateau without any kind of threat reduction.

Xi kind of summed it up.

Wear 3 pieces of wrath so you can BS your rogues and keep putting on better survivabilty gear until you're no longer tanking.

I don't consider having to put 30 talent points into a by and large lackluster talent tree to be a viable form of deaggro. Some warlocks do, yes. But I'm not one of them.

Nemesis 8-piece is GREAT now let me have it before I do the Broodlord fight for the first time. It takes probably dozens of runs through the very mobs I need the deaggro for before I have the deaggro.

Neither of these addresses an innate 20% deaggro with no talent cost. I don't necessarily feel they should, because if everyone has 20% deaggro it's not really anything special. I'm just saying neither is a viable solution without heavy talent investment or extremely heavy time investment.

In addition to what Gilliam said, it seems to me that wearing something such as full nemesis would gimp my damage anyways (similar to wearing more 'survivability' gear).

It seems to me that a fury warrior should be able to dps as well as a rogue that doesnt vanish or feint. It seems good enough to me considering that rogues have very little other purpose in a raid.

All in all, I think you should look to your hunters/rogues for high dps during agro sensitive fights.


When it comes to something such as nefarian though I really dont see how you pull agro unless you are spamming heroic strike? With the amount of rage that nef should be giving your warriors and the fact that the tank is the only one able to revenge, it seems to me that given just a bit of a headstart, you shouldnt pull agro.

I have heard warriors boasting of 1000 single target dps, I suppose if those numbers were true you could generate enough threat, but it seems to me that even with no salvation, a fury warrior in berserker stance should be able to output upwards of 600-700 dps without pulling agro.

Like other people have said, using Hakkar as a basis for this problem isn't a good idea because of the Mind controls. However, I have heard of this happening from time to time, and seen it happen to me. It mainly seems to happen to me on bosses that will fear / do a slight deaggro; especially if I get a string of UTB/Crusader procs.

One thing you can do, especially if you are Fury specced, is to use Cleave instead of HS. While it has less damage, it does not generate a high threat just for useing the ability. This can not fix the problem by itself, but it can help.

I would be interested in seeing what other people have to say about this though.

L2Cleave.

Warriors are less aggro limited at full potential than mages and warlocks are, unless you are stupid and use HS.

It was an issue in BWL, but in AQ, it just doesn't matter anymore. Then again, we have BoS.

I'd say it's totally different on the Horde side. Horde Warriors in DPS mode get the opposite of a threat reduction buff. Instead of a 30% threat reduction blessing they're doing ~30% more DPS thanks to totems. In a lot of situations they're definitely aggro limited even with pro tanks and never using extra threat generating abilities.

I like the idea of leaving on 3 pieces of Wrath for the BS bonus. Time to number crunch the Wrath set pieces versus the damage plate alternatives to see which 3 are best to wear.

I can only suggest to get gear to lower your crit rate while upping your attack power: bloodsoaked legplates exemplify what I'm thinking of here.

My opinion is that you're probably critting too much: when you crit you get the extra threat generation from doing the extra damage plus an extra bonus amount of threat on top. Imp. overpower would make this worse, not better.

But again, Hakkar and all de-aggroing bosses aren't going to be your playground to begin with.

Edit: I realize that you need crit to keep up flurry.

For serious encounters, our dps wars usually do. The improved BS on the warrior + 2-4 additional rogues adds a whole lot more damage than the slightly superior dps plate does.

For group DPS we general put a priest, warrior, 2 rogues, and a hunter. Thats an additional 362 attack power, 100 for trueshot aura, 262 from myself *arms warrior with 3 piece wrath bonus / AQ BS book*

For a warrior that doesn't have the3 book its still about 332 attack power for that group.