long story short, an orc fury warrior in my guild with nef axe/noth axe and some of the best fury dps gear in the game (minus lionheart helm) wants to get dark edge, respec MS, and do better DPS because of it. we have 5 nax bosses down and are working on patch, so you have an idea where were at in terms of raid dps output. the warrior forums on the wow site are utterly unreadable, so id appreciate it if some of you experienced dps warriors could provide my guildie some insight.

You could probably try the search function that would no doubt point you to Deathwing's DPS warrior spreadsheet that essentially proves that an intelligent fury warrior will plow a MS warrior's damage given similar circumstances.

And because you're too lazy, http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewtopic.php?id=7030

Learn to use search and actually attempt to find the information you're after, rather than mindlessly creating a new topic.

Oh and learn to fill in your profile. Put in a bit of effort if you're asking people for help.

Edit:
http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewtopic.php?id=6577

Looks like EJ mods are not needed anymore... :P

Edit: And update yer' server list for the profiles. sheesh.

This thread is proof this forum is great.

We can't actually ban them when the time comes.

Also, I completely fail compared to Kaubel's magnificent abilities when it comes to giving people insulting titles.

Not really! Wasn't posting like that more akin to being the fat kid at school? I'm sure the students are allowed to laugh at and cajole the fat kid much more than the person up the front of the room with the big ruler :)

The reason you get a Dark Edge and respec MS is either because you're bored and need a change, or so you can swing your peen in the BGs. If he's claiming to want an increase in dps from it, he's either lying or confused.

And yea, this has been gone over a million times in every WoW forum in existence so I'm leaning more toward lying than confused.

I also said tons of time that 31 arm/15 prot and 5 fury is a much better off tank spec then 31 fury15 prot/5 arm and you can still do ton of dps with a good 2-hander. The difference for horde is much smaller then for alliance though.

2-h gear generally give you more hp too.

MS still got it's use. BT is getting nerfed back to 40% too eventually with MS at +300 for lvl 70, who knows how the balance is gonna be once the expantion hit.

Source? Also, BT is a relatively small portion of fury's dps.

Give him dark edge, also 9/9 DN just to be sure he has all bases covered.

How so? In terms of fury DPS, all you really lose is imp zerker rage and dual wield spec, and imp overpower. Expressed as a percentage of your dps, that number would be in single figures. If you're specced fury/prot, either you "like to play differently" or you're specced entirely for PvE. 31 fury for the best dps, and 15 prot/5 arms for tanking. The loss of TM makes a minimal difference in PvE. You'd definitely still out-dps a 31/5/15 warrior.
Again, generally only useful in PvP. The only reason fury gear is known for giving you low hp is the lack of stam on items suck as titanic leggings / lionheart helm. If I'm pvping or in a situation where I'm likely to take damage (nef P1 for example) I'll toss on helm of endless rage and scaled sand reaver legs. Along with other gear.
Not many people would disagree with MS being better than BT. I've also never seen any post that BT is getting nerfed. Your last clause is the most correct - who knows how balance is going to be when the expansion hits. For now, however..

People sometime make it sound as if fury was doing 1000 more dps then 2-h arm. It's alot more closer then that. Going from 45% to 40% would make BT lose maybe 15-20 dps and going from MS +160 to MS +300 would give back around 15-20 dps to arm too making the 2 trees much closer (which is the goal btw). The source of the BT nerf when expantion hit is undisclosed atm but it make sense from a balance standpoint. BT scale too fast versus MS, it's bound to cause problems.

What still need to be seen is how much fury get from the new talents and the 10 more points. The sad thing atm is that's it's better to go 31 arm/30 fury with the current talent set for single target dps or worse case 40/21 for blood frenzy and deathwish. Flurry/deathwish give greater benefit to arm then fury get from arm specs.

I'll try to check 41 fury now a bit more and see what I come up with. It seem that with a 40% BT, it's better to try to get a 2.6 speed weapon and take MS in a dw setup over BT if you have less then 2k attacks.

I'm not quite sure how this relates to 31/5/15 being superior to 5/31/15 for an offtank. Seems to be a lot of theorycraft about the expansion which we don't have solid info on, and is subject to change anyway. Balance testing will go on for a long time in the beta of TBC, making assumptions that bt will be nerfed is at this stage, pointless.

So what you're saying is bloodthirst doesn't hit as hard as mortal strike (duh) and you've got no real basis for your claim that it's going back to 40%?

Allaince side the diffrence betweem ms and dw fury can be 300 dps, not something many would call close. I know horde side its closer, but im fairly sure it still doesnt compare.

Did you even pause to consider what you were typing or did it all just come together when you bashed your head on your keyboard? This is not TBC, those talent trees/skill trees are even verified, all that matters right now is the present warrior situation. In this case a guy with two of the best 1H axes in the game, playing an orc fury warrior wants to switch to an MS build for some unknown reason.

My money is on the "unknown reason" being SCT.

Our best Fury dps guy (rank 14, orc, double HWL axes, you know the drill) with a lot of the best DW stuff got a Dark Edge and went MS.

Come Patchwerk, he dropped from being #1 to #8-ish or lower, behind some mages. And I'm still up there top3 spot with my little below par Crul MH Doom's Edge OH. He was higher then me on trash tho, but that's easy with Cleaves and WW's with a 2hander :)

If you want a good mathematical reason, use the spreadsheet above. There's nothing wrong with a change of pace because hey, I've been MS with an Ashkandi, big numbers are fun. But the more dps thing is bullshit, he probably thinks this because he sees bigger numbers now. Patchwerk is a really good fight to measure your max dps by, just let him get his ass kicked by rogues and the other fury guys on a few fights and he might come around.

To be fair though Rane (and no, I am no lover of well-geared MS specs) the trash too does count. The dusty 31/5/15 spec is still pretty reasonable PvE single target damage, quite good multiple target PvE damage and fairly good tanking. It's a compromise and one could argue that it sometimes is a better compromise than 5/31/15 in terms of flexibility even if we are only talking PvE.

A lot of that hinges on the idea that dpsWarriors are aggro-limited on real targets though and increasingly that is not the case. For Horde though, it is still a decent spec even if it is not terribly interesting. Of course though, spreadsheets do not lie and especially when they are bourne out by many, many real parses. If you are looking for a maximal single-target spec and choosing deep arms, you are choosing poorly.

By "plow" he means 10-15% more damage through the entirety of non tanking time given "equal" gear for each respective build. Both Arms and Fury will do similar on trash. Both have WW and both have Cleave. Arms has better burst for the single target crap that is going to die very fast anyway, and Fury has somewhat of an equalizer with Imp Execute. Flurry, the main "sustainer" really only vastly out performs on mobs that are going to be up for a while i.e. bosses, otherwise Arms and Fury are very close.

I think the OP's guildmate is just getting bored with his current build. He won't be doing "more" DPS on a raid with a DEOI Arms build. The DPS will be good, and it will be super in PvP (if he enjoys doing that), so it's definately not a bad choice...but if he really wants to up his raid DPS, he should be going 2h Fury with that. Although the biggest limiting factor anymore for maximum DPS is aggro, not so much the gear.