Little background real quick...

Currently my guild is on Nefarian. We haven't downed him yet, but we've gotten him to 23% as our best effort. We've killed Skeram in AQ40, and cleared AQ20 / ZG no problem.

This whole time, we've had maybe 2 MS warriors and 0 fury warriors.

We currently have one MS warrior with HoR, and one "backup" geared in mostly blues with a few epics (Drake Talon Pauldrons, Draconic Avenger, Lionheart Helm).

In the UI thread, I see screenshots of damage meters with warriors consistently high up either above or mixed in with rogues.

Several guilds I've talked to and other random people from high end guilds insist Fury warriors scale better than rogues, and can put out more DPS over a longer period of time. I have no real experience as a fury warrior or MS warrior, I've been a tank since before we got our first Lucifron kill, so I don't really have any frame of reference for how useful or powerful a good fury DW warrior can be as opposed to a "cookie-cutter" MS spec warrior with say, UTB.

I'd like to try being a DW fury warrior and see how I do, but currently my guild needs me more as a tank, and our guild leader's opinion was "If I wanted more melee DPS, I'd bring more rogues."

So bottom line, what I'm wondering is, what kind of experience have you all had with both 2h Fury warriors and DW Fury warriors as DPSers as opposed to MS warriors and rogues in end game raids? Are they as valueable as I've been given the impression of? Or basically equal to an MS warrior without the healing debuff?

The major value of a DPS warrior is that they make competent offtanks and bring comparable, although *typically* inferior, DPS compared to a rogue.

You're not bringing DW fury warriors because they DPS better than rogues. You're bringing them because, when you need a 3/4/5/6th tank, they can tank, but when they don't need to tank, bring better DPS than any other class which can fill that same offtanking role.

Fury > MS for DPS, though. We've had all 3 of our hardcore DPS warriors swap over to fury from MS (2x 2HF, 1x DWF atm, although partially that's due to our horrible luck on 1H weapon drops - the DWF is only DW because he got a TF) and all of them experienced DPS increases. Since that left us without any MS warriors (Ebonroc *sucked* that week) one of our tanking warriors switched over to a hybrid 31/5/15 style spec.

So, to answer your question: they're valuable because they provide required offtanking when needed and solid DPS when not.

If you're horde with windfury, fury doesn't become much better until you really start cranking out the attack power, hit, and crit on your armor. With BWL gear you're not likely to see a dramatic difference, though I'm not sure how it plays out alliance side

I don't know what you're talking about, I make an excellent offtank. :P

Me too.

For 15 seconds. :p

Once every half hour.

You mean every 5 minutes. :P

... wait a minute...

What are some goals to aim for here? I've been told various things, so I'll just post my stats in my best +hit gear.

~950 AP
22% chance to crit
+8% to hit

Damage and rage generation are nice, but not as good as they could be with a fury build (I'm currently 9 / 11 / 31).

I can get up to 1050 AP, a little more crit, and maybe +4% to hit if I switch to my 2H gear and don't worry about +hit for DWing.

>_____<

Assuming DW means "dual wield", you *definitely* want to worry about your +hit. Rogues, for example, have a 24% miss rate on white damage attacks. The more +hit gear you get, the more you reduce that number. It kinda compounds (but not technically) when you're looking at "better" gear - ie 60+ DPS weapons compared to 50 dps weapons.

+hit is an excellent statistic to pile whenever you're talking about some sort of build that includes an OH weapon.

If you don't have super-excellent gear you will probably be better served by 2H fury than dual wielding. People pooh-pooh MS now-adays on the WoW forums but at the gear level most people sit at it's still a competative spec. However, once you accumulate enough AP/Hit DW Fury begins to outdamage the rest. With my current gear I need to accumulate a bunch more %hit and AP for it to compete with a 2H Fury spec. If I'm not mistaken the current benchmark for when DW is a viable choice is about 1000 AP and 10% hit. 2H Fury as horde is an easier spec to gear for though. No worrying about %hit (since you get enough just by wearing the good DPS plate anyhow) and less competition on weapons, at least in my guild.

I understand the need for +hit...that part was just for the "switch to 2h gear" stats.

Windfury is a huge consideration when deciding between 2H fury and DW fury. While DW is still the reigning king of DPS specs, it benefits significantly less from WF than MS/2H fury builds do, so for horde the gear required to make DW better than 2H is very high.

A well-geared DW/Fury warrior will blow an equally-geared MS warrior out of the water on damage. The catch is that DW/F is really expensive in terms of raw amount of items you need to loot, the expensive consumeable buffs you will become addicted to, and the repair costs you will pay pulling aggro needlessly until you learn your limits :)

While I don't disagree with your point, a big problem is the majority of people saying this are nowhere near the level of gear required for this to happen. As horde MS remains a solid spec for a while.