So here I am, an MS warrior with pretty much the best dps gear I can get for the level at which my guild is at (farming Nef, just killed Huhu, 1st two Nax bosses dead), and I find myself hard pressed to keep up on the damage meters with warriors who have those goofy fury/prot hybrid builds (no imp. overpower or impale) and worse gear than me. Therefore, I'm looking to jump on the bandwagon, at least until it is nerfed. My greatest confusion as a fury neophyte is over the value of DW spec. Does one's offhand weapon contribute enough damage for such a large talent point investment? To me (again as a total DW noob), it would seem as though the ideal fury offhand has great stats and is blazingly fast (my dream weapon at the moment is Iblis), to maximize rage generation and flurry procs, and thus the damage it does is kind of secondary. Further, those are 5 wasted points if I need to switch to a 2-hander for whatever reason (e.g. ae, doing dps as an offtank after my mob is dead). So to all you fury vets out there, is DW spec worth it or might those points be better spent in something like imp. cleave (which could be like a heroic strike without the high threat component - a good rage dump) plus imp. berserker rage? Thanks for reading.

Dual Wield spec is very much worth 5 points assuming you have two good 1H weapons. It bringer the OH from 50% damage to 62.5% damage, and Flurry only makes those 5 points stronger.

Fury spec is not going to get "nerfed", it is just the Flurry scales very well compared to Arms talents.

I don't think imp Cleave is a good investment of points. With Fury you have BT/WW/HS or Hamstring if Horde to eat your rage.

62.5%?

Its 62.5% damage for warriors

That said, if you are going full dps warrior, 17/34/0 is the best you will get.
if you want to OT, 5/31/15 works better than expected for both tanking and dpsing.

The best part about a fury build is that you can use any weapon you want with it. 2h will do good dps with decent survivability if you have to switch to tank, dual wield can do excellent dps and 1h shield + tank gear does good tanking. Your current gear would probably work fine for 2hfury and a few gear upgrades and some good 1hers and you are good to go for dual wield too.

Be ready to fill up at least 2 bags of gear for alternate dps/tanking situations and another 1 bag for whatever resist gear you need.

Thanks for the responses, fellas. The reason I would not be surprised to see fury nerfed is because, well, a plate-wearing class that can complete with those delicate little rogues for top dps? Enjoy that while it lasts. And yeah, the bag thing is not new, damage set, tanking set, fr/nr gear, alchemy supplies... ugh, just ugh. Blizzard needs to put armor lockers in inns or something.

Keep in mind that DW spec isn't just added damage... its also added rage.

If Fury gets nerfed it will be because Blizzard pulled an EQ and broke the balance via itemization. Until AQ, Fury warriors who did top of the meter DPS sacrificed a hell of a lot of suvivability to do so but with AQ40 Blizzard added plate gear that is damned good for both tanking and DPS.

As an alternative, if you are well geared for MS dps and bored, try 2H fury, it will save you the trouble of getting 2 new weapons and you can slam things to death :P. Unless of course you are alliance and dont have windfury :(

Hehe, I'm Horde (the other side just looked too vanilla). Actually tried 2h fury a while back and found it to be underwhelming outside of the almighty deathwish. To be fair though, I really didn't give it much of a chance and my gear is certainly better now than it was then.

I don't think anyone has a problem with warriors doing dps. They might have a problem though with the main tank class in this game competing for the top damage as well. Funny enough that EA change on the patch likely would have fixed things. Well at least for dropping warriors dps compared to other physical classes. It would have increased physical dps quite a lot, but since warriors don't have any agro reduction abilities, they wouldn't have been able to make as much use of it as hunters or rogues.

MS is a better 2H spec until you get enough attack power for Bloodthirst to balance out the Flurry vs MS parity you get, but this comes a lot earlier than most people realize. I'm a 2/31/18 Horde OT with Sulfuras, which puts me about on par with pure DPS MS warriors with slightly better gear for most jobs. Anything I can slam though; it just stops being fair. It's definately a lot of fun :D

Since Warriors get rage when they hit things, Hit is very important to a dw fury warrior. I would guess they are just about equal in DPS importance.

Luckily, a lot of good DPS plate has hit on it.

Rogue has 1 aggro reduction skill and 1 aggro dump (with cheap reagent). DW Warrior has nothing on aggro reduction against that. DW warrior is not limited by the raw DPS he/she can put out. DW Warrior is limited by how much aggro they can safely put out.

Fetish of the Sand Reaver FTW

Just had my first experience of raiding on alliance side with my human warrior tonight. DPS dw fury specced since I just haven't had luck in getting tanking gear. Still suboptimal gear at about 800 AP unbuffed, but around 1500 or so raid buffed. Other warriors and rogues there had better gear, some mage even had some T1 and such. But I demolished them on the dmg meters. Was quite fun, a far cry from raiding with my mage. Nearly doubling my next closest competitor on Luci was fun. :) God I love dw fury..

You get more rage from crits too.

Crit and hit are close to equal up until 5%, then Crit becomes much more powerful for the same reason as it does for rogues. This topic has been gone over at least several times so dont get your hopes up about getting a more comprehensive response.

Believe me, once you have a reasonable amount of +hit, an execute cost of 10 rage and recklessness on, you will be an addict!

Our MT changed for a 2H fury build to get a change in normal tanking duties (we have 3x full wrath tanks and 1 7/8 wrath tank anyway so doens't matter that much) and his dps seems to have grown by a nice amount. Or atleast he usually ends up tanking with his Ashkandi anyway nowdays, even when in DPS duty :P

And another friend of mine said that he uses Cleave even against single mobs/bosses when DPS:ing to lower his aggro-levels against normal HS spamming. His argument is, that its no use HS'ing because the risk of getting aggro is too high and he's anyway competing in DPS Top3 in their damagemeters. He plays an Alliance Warrior with a nice BWL-level furygear (Claw of black drake, Crul'shorukh, draketalons, onslaught etc..) and some 14/37/0 build (or something similar deep fury).

Dual Wield Specizalization: "Increases the damage done by your offhand weapon by 25%."

Offhands do 50% damage.

What is 25% of 50%, 12.5%, 50+12.5=62.5. So your offhand does 62.5% damage. The rogue talent is +50% dmg for your offhand, so a rogue with DW spec does 75% with their offhand. DW Spec is worth picking up for warriors/rogues without a doubt.


About your +hit question, my current raid DPS set has +16% hit, and I am in top 5 on every fight that melee can participate in, and often #1. Now what you really need is a balance of hit/crit/AP, at lot say 10% hit, 25% crit, 1000 AP (without Battleshout) is the goal to shoot for and then go with crit/AP, but I like a bit more +hit. The more +hit you have the more rage your offhand and mainhand will generate, also you cannot buff +hit, there are lots of ways to increase your crit/AP. For example on Patchwerk last night, I was DPSing and I literally could not burn all my rage, I had HS lit up the entire time and I was using BT/WW as soon as their cooldowns came up. Also if you can manage to get +weapon skill somehow, get it. It increases your white damage a good amount.

Here is the damage meters from Patchwerk last night, I realized at about 30%ish that my hunter was out of range for TSA, while Wowee had TSA the entire time. We have very comparable gear, he has slightly more crit, and maybe 150-200 more AP but 5% hit less.

Not sure if this is true or not, but I heard there was some kind of food that gives you +2 to hit. I forgot to ask the person who said they used it, next time I get on I'll do that.

This was only during the fire festival.

Rogue have superior aggro control with 29% less compared to a warrior's 20% (it may change again). Also, come the expansion, Rage will not scale as well as it does now.

Shadow strikes is very nice since it is magic damage on a physical damage class.