Sword spec can generate glancing blows too, right? So on 63+ mobs a sword spec proc has a pretty good chance (assuming your sword skill is 300) of dealing less damage than an axe spec proc?

The 5.6% miss rate on a level 63 mob with a 2h weapon is correct... if you don't believe me, put 6% to hit gear on and run recap for the entire duration of BWL.... I have 0% miss rate when I use my hand of rag.

Course, I do more DPS when I DW with Deathbringer (outside of Suppression room), so I don't end up using my hand of rag all that much :/ (Spec'd 20/31 for 2h spec btw).

To the OP: Unless you happen to PvP quite a bit too, DEoI just isn't worth it for a human... wait until you can get something better in Naxx.

That's a bit overextended considering the numbers 2h Fury can put out with less than perfect +hit gear that is required for DW Fury. If you're mortal strike at this stage of the game (like me) then its pretty much for pvp purposes or you lack the gear to go dw fury.

Well the OP is a human, which is 305 skill. Swords do eventually pass axes, at the extreme: going from 94% crit rate to 99% crit rate is significantly less desireable than staying at 94% crit and getting an extra attack 5% of the time.

Ham-Spam changes everything:

After playing with it a bit, I am going to disagree with the "dual wield always does more damage for a well equiped Fury Warrior". At least for the Horde.

My alt is Fury Spec, with a Drake Talon Cleaver. That is a long way from elite gear for our guild. I'm competing against tanks with Tier 2.5 mixed with Titanic, Lionheart, DFT, and set ups like Claw of the Black Drake + Crul'Shorukh or Crul'Shorukh + Vis'Kagg, and 10-12% total +hit gear.

With Winfury, and a simple key that attempts to Bloodthirst, then Whirlwind, then Hamstring if both are on cooldown, I stay just about dead even with them on damage. That's with just under 900 base attack power for me. Once I flesh out my gear to 11-1200 base attack power, and another 3-4% crit, I believe that 2hand Fury with Winfury will perform equally to Dual-Wield Fury, and give me about 1,000 more HP in my DPS gear.

The Weapon I really think that will push this over the top is the Bonereaver's Edge. There has been some discussion about the armor penetration proc and with the ham-spam technique I expect that would be up all the time. The DPS would just be sick.

Ultimately I think we will eventually see the Winfury Nerf that almost happened this patch specifically because of the DPS generated by Ham-Spammers.

Unfortunately the fury warriors will really begin to pull away from you as they upgrade.

QFT... got my rep as a DPS war in my guild dual wielding back in MC... later got HoR and my DPS increased. But as I've geared up through PvP and now BWL, my dual wielding damage is either catching up, or surpassing what I can do with HoR, and this is with a spec designed for maximum DPS with HoR.

Once you're geared up, the only time 2h weapons can truly outperform dual wielding is when WW and Cleave spam are essential, like Suppression Room.

For single target DPS, dual wielding just pulls more and more ahead as upgrades become avialable.

Mortal Strike is still usefull for pve, at least the spec. If you spec 31 arm 15 prot, 5 fury you have what I feel is the best of both world currently. You can still do very high dps with MS using a good 2-hander and you get access to defiance, armor bonus and improved shield block. The only real advantage you are giving up is improved battle shout and improved execute over having 20 in fury. Unfortunatly hand of rag isn't optimal for that spec but it's still good enough. That's the spec stuff like conqueror and dark edge of insanity is made for probably. The different from those points in prot is huge as a warrior, even in full dps gear that switch fast to def and pop shield block become immune to crits even with 300 defense. Anyway. I'll try do create a few profile of 4 different "tier" of warriors and apply my dps spreadsheet and the dps spreadsheet found on this forum for a dw fury, a 2-h fury and 2-h MS, using buffs or no and maybe I'll come with something conclusive.

Fury seems to scale much better especially given the robust amount of +hit items. The two core Arms skills, MS and WW, are both limited by weapon speed normalization.

Also, Jekar: If your raid utilizes a lot of AR debuffs (Sunder/Expose, Faerie Fire, Curse of Recklessness), the BRE's proc becomes limited by the mob's AR as well as the proc rate.

I think you made a mistake.

There shouldn't be a most noticeably unless there has been a change to game mechanics I'm not aware of. There are only three things which can affect hit rate:

- Relative Weapon Skill vs. Defense
- Relative Level
- Buffs/Debuffs (gear, spells, pots, etc.)

My Rogue has +7 hit right now in items, but also +5 from talents. I have been a part of killing twin emps repeatedly. I have never missed with a yellow attack. Lot's of white attacks (dual wield), never a yellow.

When I didn't not have the precision talent though, and only +7 hit from gear, I also never missed with yellow attacks. Fully parsed runs of any raid instance: 0 misses in thousands of attempts.

If Twin emps were level 64 or had a boosted defense skill, it would show up very clearly through other mechanics.

They could have higher defense. I have never seen a miss when I use my dps gear in bwl in months of raiding, ever. The moment I get below 6% I start seeing misses.

On another subject I decided to spend 2 hours on trying a few different profile at 4 different gear level to check dw fury, 2-h fury and 2-h arm. This is what I came up with. Note that this is using my own dps spreadsheet, with it's bonus and flaws. Currently no execute damage is included and like any spreadsheet you can make tons of assumption that affect things. I'll try to do something similar with Deathwing sheet if he eventually add MS.

The profiles used: Some gear could be different but it's good enough. I decided to go with deathsting for dw warriors even though I'm convinced now that it's not the optimal choice. A warrior with buffs with that gear using a dagger main hand will lose maybe 15-25 dps versus a 2.4 speed sword for example.

http://ctprofiles.net/3009428

The first number is self buffed dps, just using battle shout.
The 2nd number include soe/wf/trueshot for horde.
The 3rd number include might/king/trueshot for alliance.

You can get the results here. This doesn't include the dps calculation since it came from another sheet, etc. Like I said I would like to use the commonly used spreadsheet but can't test this currently without adding stuff in it. My sheet is not "ready for primetime" atm.

http://www.savefile.com/files.php?fid=6692571

I'll try to put the results here using code.

Some conclusion, it's about what I expected.

Windfury help horde alot in general, but more specifically 2-handers.
Itemization favor DW atm due to way more +hit then 2-handers can really use, taking valuable ilvl points. With the lack of actual choice in dps gear, this is a problem.
It's probably true that weapon normalization and the change to removing the cap to +hit broke the system in favor of dw. You now have scaling problem with ww/ms, bloodthirst scale faster with gear and buffs and you have ton of +1 hit on gear.

This is not 100% of the picture, like someone said when you spam harmstring, it does give stupid results with 2-h horde warriors, is it enough? Hard to say, seem more like a sploit then an actual gameplay element anyway.

I hope some people find some of those numbers usefull, or at least interesting cause it took me forever to get them.

My apologies for going off topic a bit.

If you decide to get an off tank spec like MS/Prot, why not invest a few more points in Protection for a couple of really nice talents? You can get Toughness, Last Stand, Imp Shield Block and Defiance for 19 points.

31/1/19 (or 32/0/19 - 31/0/20) is a lot better than 31/5/15 imo.

Last stand is nice situationally, but not worth losing 3 crit for when you need to DPS. The whole point of a 31/5/15 build is to be a very good tank, and a pretty damn good dpser, while not quite the best at either. Personally, I like my 31/5/15 where I have 5/5 toughness, 4/5defiance, and 1/3 imp Shield Block.

As for the main topic, I play a human warrior and just recently looted a Dark Edge, but my old weapon was a Zin'rokh (lol ? ). If I had an Ashkandi as a human I wouldn't bother looting a Dark Edge, unless you pvp a lot and what to have fun with the proc.

So does spending any points what so ever in Protection :p

My point is that I believe the gains in tanking are bigger than the loss in DPS, considering it is an off tank spec.

5 points in crit is a massive DPS boost. Losing that for last stand is not something I'm looking for in this built. If I want to lose that much dps I will spec full prot and forget doing any dps at all. 5 crits is slightly less then what flurry give you btw, as a tier 1 talent.

What you lose when you go 31 arm/15 prot/5 fury as opposed to say 31/20 fury or arm built is unbriddled wrath (not that bad with 2-h and you get anger management + improved charge to boost your rage that you don't get when you are 31fury/20 arm for example), you lose improved battle shout, which suck and improved execute, another loss but it's not that big a deal.

All of those dps talents are inferior to stuff like +5 crit, sword/axe spec or flurry so you aren't losing any of the big ones. You gain some of the best prot can offer with toughness, imp shield block and defiance.

Spending 15 in protection loses you VERY little dps from a 31 arms / 20 fury build. You lose Unbridled wrath, which is junk with a slow 2H. You also improved Battle Shout, which is alright, but certainly no vast dps boost, nothing near 4 or 5% crit. And the last thing you lose is improved execute, which is nice, but rarely does a little added execute dmg make or break a fight (with a big 2h, youre probably going to be generation 15+ rage on most swings anyway).

Also tonight I changed my spec around a bit, still 31/5/15, but I got rid of Imp. Rend > Deep Wounds > Impale, after being convinced to look into the actual damage gain from Impale. Unless I'm missing something, as MS, I'm only getting around 2% extra damage from impale, assuming that 50% of my damage is white damage and assuming a 25% crit rate:

.5 x .25 x .2 = 2.5% total damage

So assuming deep wounds is 3-4% total damage, which is what recap tells me, I lost 4-5% damage when DPSing. But the freed up talent points allowed me to put 2 more points in 2H spec to net me a 2-3% damage loss, while freeing up a debuff slot, and allowing me to get 3/3 imp HS and 3/3 imp Hamstring (for pvp). I suspect the improved heroic will also help me recoup some of the damage lost from deep wounds.

Just wondering if anyone else had gotten similar results with MS builds and dropping impale.