With the new season started it seemed time for a thread for us to discuss exactly how viable fury is in arena and in rated BGs. Doing some experimenting with it today fury seems even more mobile than arms and with mortal strike being dropped to 10% the proc MS in the fury tree is less of a reason to avoid fury. In addition, with talents like heroic fury which no only break roots but reset intercept's cooldown I would argue fury is now more mobile than arms; especially with how much dispels cost for healers.


The damage fury puts out as well is great. Stacking recklessness with deathwish can net you 30k raging blows (at least with how low resilience is still) and in most cases its possible to simply outdamage a healer and/or kill them in an interrupt. This type of damage output will put most teams on the defensive and force them to focus solely on peeling that raging fury warrior off their clothy.

As far as survivability, fury has some downsides. The greatest of which being forced to use berserker stance. Against an arcane mage the increased damage is significant and if you get caught in a stun in berserker you will take a lot of damage. However, talents like Die by the Sword it will be hard for a melee heavy team to land a kill on you without significant and well timed CC. The only issue with DbtS is facing requirement and disarms.


Also: 4-piece bonus on warrior gear is 5 second reduction on intercept making it a 15 second cooldown.

120k as a fury warrior in pvp gear. Most people dont have resil yet though so it'll calm down once that happens a bit.

Fury's mobility is alright now with Heroic Fury and Heroic Leap, but arms still outshines it with Juggernaut and Bladestorm(!) and thus makes it a better flag carrier. But all things considered - fury's amazing with it's burst damage. Popping a few cooldowns can make you so very effective at sniping healers and flag carriers, no matter what their armor class is. I often switch to fury for WSG and Twin Peaks for these reasons.

At 2600+ resilience I'm starting to feel as if Fury's actually more durable than arms. All of the Berserker Stance issues you mentioned above can be avoided with proper play, and with Bloody Healing glyph, insane self healing through Enraged Regen, Second Wind and a full melee damage stopper with Die by the Sword, you can really outlast almost anything. Actually DbtS saved my ass few times in 2v2 last night against some really horrific Feral Warriors.

I think I prefer SMF over TG at this tier(S9) level. Additionally I think for SMF builds, I'd skip Flurry for Battle Trance and stack mastery over all the other stats, even crit and hit. This is because the damage of weapons haven't scaled high enough just yet in comparison to the temporary attack power you can get through buffs like Blood Fury, Swordguard, Landslide and trinkets. So essentially SMF buffs HS and BT that seem to hit the hardest right now.

Also I'd at least soft-cap expertise as soon as possible, as failing colossus smash is brutal.

Hi,
I do fury pvp since vanilla and I must say it was never in a better state than now. Althogh you can reach a 2k+ rating in arena right now, I think fury suffers too much from various problems. I did a very long post on the official english Wow-forum (Link: Fury PVP - Constructive feedback - Forums - World of Warcraft), in which I gave contructive feedback and some suggestions about fury pvp.
The major problem I see in arenas is, that your damage reaches from non-existend to very high burst. The reasons I see are the exponential damagebuffs, the uptime of enrage and the rage-generation.

An example: If you choose to play fury, you gain 10% damageboost from dual wield specialization and 10% from berserkstance. Instead of 100% damage you now deal 121%. So what happenes when you are popping death wish? Death wish gives you a damageboost about 42% (with mastery-trinket popped). Now the 121% multiplies with 42%. Thats about 171%. You see what I mean? Instead of 42% more damage you gain 50%. And the more mastery you are stacking the more it is exponential rising.

Without the enrageeffect fury wars hit like a wet sponge. Neither can we use our talented Raging Blow, nor can we get the damageboost, which would make us doing moderate damage.
It is just punishing when fury wars have to hit the hardcap for hit to get a sustained rage generation. Fury is the only spec in the game, whose resource generation is linked to the hard cap of hit. In PVP gear it is almost impossible to hit this cap. So for fury, you often stand behind your target and wait to get some hits to get that killing blow.

Another point is, that after the next patch it seems, that if you want to play effective pvp as fury you are forced to skill Titans Grip, because of that heroic strike change.

As for the moment in 3on3 arena you could say, that you have better chances with a 3-DD combo. I did a ~2100 rating with a ret-paladin and a shadow-priest. The main tactic here is to burst someone down and cc the healer, if present.

Think of it like gambling. You start with twenty dollars, and turn that into 100 dollars. Now, while it's only in chip form, it's still "money" - just all prettied up. You lose this money and go down to 10 dollars. So, did you lose 10 dollars, or 90?

So while you don't necessarily take more damage than usual, you have the choice to take less in Battle Stance; therefore, you are increasing damage taken.



My two cents: 2v2 and 3v3, use Arms for right now while specced into Shield Bash/Heroic Throw silence. For 5v5, Fury will be a very mobile, high damage assist.