(1) It is the conventional wisdom that if you want a hybrid warrior spec, you go 31 arms / 5 fury / 15 protection, or something similar. Some folks advocate prot/fury as well. My question is this. A full fury build will be something like 34 fury / 17 arms. It seems the only talent from arms which significantly affects raid dps would be impale and imp. HS. I would assume deep wounds would get knocked off, and rend is crap. At the same time, 16 points in prot gives one a lot of tanking functionality. So the question is, why not go 31 fury / 4 arms / 16 prot, or something to that effect? How much fury dps does one give up that way?

(2) How much raid dps do humans get with their +5 to swords? I have heard something like 6%.

I have tryed fury / prot builds and so on. The lack of tm can be annoying but it certainly is viable for pve dps / tanking since there really isnt that much to switch stances for expect zerk rage and intercept when you roll without imp over power.

In most fights were you have to stance dance for fear breaking the lack of tm isnt a problem since you will get the rage back very fast.

I'm trying the following build out at the moment to see how it works for mainly a DW dps role with some occasional tanking on the side. But I'm not sure I'll like living without TM

8/32/11

DW fury suffers from not having all 34 of the available really good DPS talents, but 2H fury suffers less and you don't have to worry about stealing the rogues weapons.

As soon as you give up improved overpower and tac mas, you give up any reason to bother switching to battle stance when doing DPS; you're guaranteed to lose at least 20 rage, and often 30 or 40 by switching at a less opportune time, but then that makes doing your best possible damage output a simpler matter.

The 16 to 18 points you can put into prot makes a big difference with your tanking, and IMO, a fury/prot build gets the better of both worlds compared to an MS/prot build.

There's another post about this.

When going MS/prot, you get deflection, toughness and defiance, at the expense of crit. You can sacrifice defiance/toughness for more crit, depending on how much you tank(31arms 1fury 19prot for full prot talents, 5fury 15prot for full crit)

When going fury/prot, you sacrifice deflection for defiance/toughness, or last stand for deflection, or a combination of those. You can't get deflection, toughness, last stand and defiance all maxxed.

The dps gain from being 2h fury vs 2h ms, especially on horde, when your main job is tanking(which means you'll spend time/points on tanking gear before dps gear) is pretty minor. However, the loss from being fury instead of arms in terms of pure tanking abilities is big enough that I chose MS over fury. Depends on your guild loot system, and your role really, you can manage just tanking adds on 3+tanks fights like adds on faerlina and stuff with a fury prot build, but if you get assigned to stuff like patchwerk offtanking, you want full toughness/deflection.

1 missing point from toughness/deflection is no reason to gimp your damage. The previous poster mentioned improved overpower + stance switching as being a fundamental part of a full fury build. Has there been any work done on how much that improves fury dps over just 31 fury + deflection?

It's a lot less of a problem than you might think.

Depends if you ever want to PvP

I'm at the moment 5/36/10 skilled.
The points in arms being into "deflection" and in prot into anticipation (i had reasons for this) and toughness.

As far as i can initially tell, my DPS went down roughly 5-10% (missing the impale line and talented HS i previously had). So this was an acceptable price for me to pay for the possibility to play an OT (not MT!) in Naxx in some key encounters (Noth, Faerlina and PW), should our real OT be missing.
Up until now it worked quite well. And in my experience stance switching is very rarely needed on OT duty.
And even then could be made up for with blood rage/improved berserker rage to a certain degree.

Hope this helps.

regards

P.S PvE only!

Lack of MS hurts far more than lack of TM in PvP. I PvP a fair amount (ok, I'm only blood guard right now, but obviously I raid heavily and as our guilds raid officer I have to spend a lot of time into guild work, so PvP time is rare), and I really don't miss TM that much. With Improved Berserker Rage I can easily switch to zerker stance and intercept (handy that rage and intercept have the same cooldown), and to be fair, I stay in zerker stance almost all the time anyway. I generally only switch to battle stance whilst mounted, so I can quickly dismount->charge->hamstring->zerker stance, and only to defensive stance whilst flag carrying, when I stay in def the whole time.

Sure, I do not notice not having TM in PvP, and it'd be nice to have it, just like if I was MS/Prot I'd miss having Death wish, and wish I had Piercing Howl.

+5 swords is a 6% increase to you white damage against 63's. Basically equivalent to +6% to hit.

31/5/15 and 0/34/17 are both very viable hybrids imo. I've played both on my alt, but I prefer the fury hybrid (and the number of 1h axes for my orc make my highly biased). Both have some decent cross-spec damage mitigation and aggro holding skills and they both grab the must-have talents for tanking.

Arms gets better parry, cheaper heroic strikes, and a weapon mastery buff to dps if you wield the 1h version of your weapon spec (sword spec is especially nice for humans with quel :(). I agree with Chalon, it is much better in pvp because it can reduce healing and smash rogues pretty quickly. However, you can't get imp shield block, last stand, AND a full 5 points in defiance if you go this route (unless you do something like 31/3/17).

Fury gets imp demo shout or unbridled wrath (demo for damage mitigation, wrath for threat), flurry, and enrage. None of those are that exciting for a pure tank, but they're marginally useful for reducing damage and pretty useful for holding aggro. You also have the points to get a full 15% in defiance along with imp shield block and last stand. All of those are very useful when tanking and an MS build will not be able to afford a full 5 points in defiance along with the other talents.

Personally I think the fury hybrid is much more effective in pve dps, but that may just be my playstyle and racial choice/gear. Improved demo shout and battleshout are decent for group pvp. The loss of at most 25 rage on a fear switch really isn't that big a deal imo. You really aren't a MT in this build, so I doubt you'd be MT'ing Nef. Intercepts are not an issue since most 34/17 builds have imp berserker rage, and as Moogul said, the cooldowns are the same. When you dps, you just stay in zerker stance the whole time and demo shout when you need to.

The problem is that if your 2 best weapons are 1-h and you want to be an "hybrid" set you don't really have the choice to go fury/prot. You will have to lose important talents though, you NEED 5 in parry. 5 in parry is huge right of the bat mitigation and passing on it would be stupid.

That leave you with 31 fury/15 prot/5 arm built without TM.

If you have a good 2-h you have the choice to do a similar spec or go MS. It's really helpfull to have something like ashkandi+ to go that spec. I have sulfuras, a non optimal MS weapon but I still do very well in general. Yesterday me and few other dps warriors pushed on the drakes with no comsumables and we were in the 450-500 dps range with shaman buffs. 500 dps when I also have 15 in prot and can in fact easily tank something like nef with the right gear is exactly what this spec is about. Stance dancing own in general too for alot of things, for farming in general, etc.

This is maybe less true for alliance since I don't think 2-h MS would do that much damage.

Now after the 2 last drakes it came to me that the talent I miss the most is improved execute cause both times I was ahead of the 2 other full dps warriors and lost at the end due to executes spam. When I checked the total execute damage for each warriors indeed, the major difference was in execute.

Yeah, Imp. Execute is especially nice in Naxx fights where bosses have 4 million+ HP.

Again it all comes back to what you're comfortable with. Your benefit from parry is only [1%-(mitigation)] per point. When you have upwards of 60% mitigation from armor alone (70% or more in def stance), parry really isn't "huge" for someone who isn't expected to be a maintank (toughness looks better in a sustained fight when I look at the numbers). Sure, I agree a maintank wants every ounce of mitigation they can get, but I don't think these are post-BWL specs for a MT.

Stancedancing for dps doesn't matter if you don't have improved overpower. You can compensate for the lost dps of overpower crits with talents like deathwish, flurry, and dual wield spec. All of them are more than adequate for the task if you have appropriate gear.

Imp execute doesn't matter when you're reckless/deathwish executing. :)

My tanking spec is 5/11/35. I can definitively say that no TM means very little to a tank when dancing with a fear boss. Yes I'm alliance, but I have main-tanked onyxia, magmadar and nefarian without dwarf priests in the raid (and of course no tremor). Simply put, the boss hits you hard enough that losing all your rage on a switch is totally irrelevant. Add to the fact that 'zerk rage increases the amount of rage you earn per point of incoming damage, and it persists in def stance once you switch back means you always have more than enough rage to do whatever you want.

As to offtanking - when I was in this position, I was typically dual wielding in tank gear and in def stance spamming sunder/hs. I keep a handful of rage pots and there's always bloodrage in case I get stuck in the wrong stance, but it's happened so seldom that I have to buy new rage pots maybe once every 4-5 weeks.

The only time I miss TM is if I duel or pvp - or if I have to dance with Yauj. Yauj is my absolute least favorite boss in the game. But that's ok because we skip the bug trio now - they're simply not worth the effort imo. Even so, I'd usually put a full dps spec fury war tanking Yauj just because they're better at it.

I like my spec, although it's getting a little dated now that I have decent tank gear. I'm not sure unbridled wrath is worth any points if you're main tanking - it's great for offtank hate generation with DW. And Piercing Howl I use seldom enough that I'm not sure if I'll keep it. Though I'll hang onto it till I've seen a few more naxx encounters I think.

If you're interested in details, this is Silverstreak: http://ctprofiles.net/72112

By the way, what do you guys think about the following 'protection' spec. I put protection in quotes because it only has 19 points in protection and they aren't very deep. However I feel like this gets the vast majority of tanking functionality, while having useful utility from other trees:

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=pA0xzZVxzVMZxizox

No offense, I think that spec would suck to play. I'll go one further and say I can't think of why I'd spend a raid slot on a build like that.
I can see what you're trying to accomplish, but the jack-of-all trades doesn't really work with a warrior spec because the 3 31-pt talent abilites are all individually easily worth burning 31 pts to get.

I'll go out on a limb here and say none of the raiding wars who read this will actually be playing a spec that doesn't have BT, MS or Slam.

If you want a general purpose war build, 31/5/15 really is a good place to start. Yeah, it's not as 'sexy' as the current fad Fury war builds, but its purpose is to do decent damage, have a good debuff (MS), and be a reasonable tank too.
If you want to tank full time, take those points out of fury and dump them into prot. If you want to dps full time, take those points out of the prot tree, and dump them into fury. Either way would be a significant improvement to the spec you've listed.

I think you'll find that build tanks as well as a MS/prot hybrid build (i.e. adequately) but with the effective dps of a full prot spec. It's only strengths (battle/demo shout) I already have from fury wars that also bring crazy damage to the raid.


Anyway, this came across fairly negatively, but I really don't think that type of build would actually work.

I actually prefer Fury in pvp, maybe i'm just wierd. Being starved of rage in 1 vs 1s isnt fun. and Deathwish = real burst damage imo :)

I've been considering a 7/31/13 build with 2 in TM and 3 in defiance. But the problem is it's a bit half hearted, missing out on some of the few talents that make prot worth having.

@Silyas Tank build:

In my experience warrior builds without an 31 point talent simply dont work.
I have tried some, e.g. a very heavy proc centric fury build (TF, HoJ, Sword Spec, swords in both hands, +hit galore) and they were awful. Disastrous.

The point is the 31 point palents of the warrior tree are good. Are ALL good. And you are really mising out on them considering the relatively low cooldown (6 sec) und the fact that warriors have to spend rage as they gain it (rage pool max = 100). Without them you are really lacking an efficient way to spend your rage. HS et al are no subsitutes.

Never player another class. But have seen many of them without endtree talents. So warrior tree seem kinda unique in that sense.

You are gimping yourself if you omit a 31 point talent.

regards

Yeah, fury is especially good against priests where they will use PW:S to starve you of rage - going into the fight by hitting bloodrage, berserker rage to get 25 rage, then popping death wish and hamstring (or piercing howl if they run well) and hitting them like a truck whilst being fear immune for 30seconds is a great way to open on a priest.

Works a lot better with DW than 2H though, where unbridled wrath helps even more and you get a lot more interrupts. Plus, I don't think I could live without deathwish - I have a long history in my guild of popping death wish at hilarious times whilst tanking.

7/31/13 is something I've thought about in the past, but I feel that if I'm going to get any prot talents, I absolutely *have* to have imp shield block and 5/5 defiance. I'm a bit of a shield whore, and generally try and scrounge every +block value item I can. The controlled mitigation of imp shield block is just that awesome.

For real fun listen to the healers when an Orc Fury tank gets MC'ed and pops death wish and the orc racial.