That's the thing is we don't know how it will play out once we hit 85. Two handers will have advantage with higher rage income from having two slow weapons. You also benefit from higher first and secondary stats. The downside is their slowness may not give you enough rage income and you need to stack A LOT of haste to make them attack faster so you can sustain enough rage for your current and next attacks. For one-handers, you won't need as much haste and you can focus on Mastery, for example.

From my personal feelings, I don't want to go back to one-handers. That's just not us and it doesn't make us look unique and feel like warriors.

If anything, 1 handers give LESS rage due to having less crit/hit/haste/expertise.

With the items I have seen so far on Beta, hit capping a fury warrior is gonna be hard to do seeing as it requires 2803 rating to hit the 27% mark. Anyone else actually raiding on Beta and have tested less hit rating on bosses for more haste or mastery?

with proc slam beeing instant AND free makes it a valuable "dmg per rage" attack ... without proc? bloodthirst first, slam second.

without the proc casting takes away much of the edge slam could get over bt. at least thats my impression in 3 samples 4mio dmg and raiding icc25hc.


regarding to 85 ... would love to tell you more, but sadly no beta-account and just looking on the item-stats is as good as throwing bones ... and id love to hear someone testing those items in beta giving us some insight on that matter

I strongly suspect that Slam will remain on the back burner due to it's relatively low damage.
The high DPR is going to be nice for when you're at low gear levels and are still having trouble with rage generation, but once you hit 85 and get back into some purples I have a feeling slam is going to be relegated to only being used when you have a Bloodsurge proc and RB, NT, and HS are all on cooldown at the same time.
Until they up the damage on it I don't see it superceding any abilities except in niche situations.

I don't actually have a beta account, but I've been checking out the gear as I can and I'm concerned about the attitude of hard capping hit like you are. While it is completely feasible to do now, and a good idea in order to stabilize rage generation, I don't think it is going to be feasible to do the same thing in Cataclysm without severely dipping into damage potential. Which leads me to trying to figure out how good of a stat mastery is going to be for fury warriors during raiding at 85.

As far as I can tell, fury mastery will affect:
Berserker rage (no gain except for meager amounts of rage)
Enrage
Death Wish
Inner Rage
Raging Blow

The only "good" abilities that can be kept up or used with any sort of reliability are enrage (1 in 11 chance to proc) and raging blow (enrage, berserker rage, and death wish enable it). The gains of mastery don't seem to actually be worth it at this point and thus maxing it out like people tried to do with ArP would definitely not be a good idea.

To me, it seems that haste and crit are going to be our primary stats to beef out after getting to a certain point with hit, as it has always been (TG or SMF). Crit for flurry uptime and haste to make swings faster. These are primarily due to the fact that it'll keep enrage up as long as possible, hopefully chaining enrages, 9 second uptime with 2 melee swings at or under 3 seconds gives at least 6 opportunities of reproccing enrage, which is about a 43% chance at 6 swings, about a 53% chance at 8 swings. I'm not sure if HS, BT, RB, or any instant special has a chance to proc enrage at this time as I keep forgetting to check my combat log, but if any of them do, it increases the chance of keeping enrage up at all times. This, of course, also assumes that hit has not been ignored and that all hits have a good chance of landing (in the above calculations it is assume all hits land).

So going back to point, in my opinion, hit penalty should probably be only halved unless there is just that much of it available in Cataclysm. Strength is probably itemized enough that the white hits that do manage to hit, will make rage generation less of a factor if hits don't land. Without an actual beta account, I can't confirm this. But after seeing the discussion so far and toying around the talents/abilities introduced, I just can't think that Blizzard would penalize fury warriors so much to the point that they'd need to hit cap entirely at 27% to do as much damage as possible. Granted, hit capping entirely would reduce the chance of enrage not being procced, but without crit and haste, it'll be even harder to keep the buff up and I see that being our most important buff for dps at this point due to it increasing damage and enabling the use of RB.

Edit: Messed up on enrage proc percentages.

re: Fury mastery

You have Death Wish, with a ~21% uptime.
You have Enrage which is up about 50% of the time Deathwish is not, giving it an overall 40% uptime
Raging Blow which is roughly 10% of damage at 8 base mastery.

So at baseline mastery you have a +37.6% enrage effect, each additional point is +4.7%

At baseline, Raging Blow goes from 110% to 151.36%, enrage goes from 10% to 13.76%, and Death Wish goes from 20% to 27.52%

Every additional point of mastery increases Raging Blow's damage by 5.17% weapon damage, or +3.4% to raging blow's damage. Since raging blow makes up ~10% of damage at base mastery, every point of mastery increases total damage by .34% via Raging Blow

Then you gain .47% damage with a 50% uptime via Enrage, and a .94% damage with a 21% uptime. That translates into .4324% damage from those two effects.

So the total gain is ~.7724% of damage for one point of mastery based on these relatively quick calculations.

That's definitely less than crit with deep wounds in the picture, the real question is how does that compare to 1.4% worth of haste?

If anything it feels its the opposite Firynth. Obviously haste affects both smf and tg fury almost equally with following caveats:

- TG generates slightly more rage due to more stats on weapons, so haste might be a bit better for SMF (generally the less rage you have the more "precious" extra amount becomes).
- TG hits less. so has lower enrage uptime, and haste can affect it more (or less , since the amount of yellow hits is higher as % with TG - that all depends on values).

Overall though the effect is about same.

Now as far as mastery goes, it affects SMF a lot less, since raging blow is based on weapon damage, and thus is far less important for SMF.

Im running mastery heavy build now (at 80) and it actually seems to be best possible with ICC gear. It might not be visible in math as easily - but remember that the sole effect of deathwish (which is around 40% dmg increase for me), is huge when you account that you use it during heroism/procs/pots etc. So there is definitely potential in mastery for LATE expansion. But early on - crit is way too valuable - not because of deep wounds only, but it actually affects your flurry uptime a lot, We cant realistically hit cap without sacrifice, and rage generation will be on the low side. So no, i dont expect mastery to be of much use, and probably the prime stat to reforge, unless you actually min max as a raid.

Right now DK unholy frenzy can be tide turner for mastery. Mastery actually affects the "size" of it - you can get as much as 60% haste increase from it with mastery heavy build - something that renders hit/haste a lot lower priority and frees stats for mastery. That of course depends on your raid attitude/setup, but a chain of 2 DK frenzies+heroisms can basically give you enough rage to not worry much about hit/haste as stats if you manage your rage well. Its also the best what DKs can do with unholy frenzy so it does make sense from min-maxing point of view.

Haste affects all weapons equally, regardless of their base weapon speed. The statement that it has a lower effect on one handers is false.

Haste will result in a haste% increase in white damage, and a haste% increase in rage generation.

You could make the argument that Haste has a lower effect due to SMF having a lower percent of its damage being white damage, but I'm not sure that's true. With a flat 15% buff to all damage, SMF likely has similar white damage levels, and possibly higher white damage at a certain level of AP.

Indeed, some quick math shows 11k AP resulting in SMF having a higher weapon dps than TG with ilvl359 weaponsm which would translate directly into higher white damage and thus higher haste scaling. Though the difference is marginal enough to be negligible.

359 1hander: 462.3 dps
359 2hander: 623.3 dps

11k AP = 785.7 dps

1 Hander: 1248 DPS * 1.15 = 1435 dps
2 hander: 1409 DPS


Edit: Shha beat me to it

I'm sorry, what I meant by haste affecting 2h weapons more so than 1h was purely based on the mechanics of how haste is applied.

For example, you have a 2h weapon with 3.8 swing speed with 25% haste. The result of the weapon speed after should result in 2.95 swing speed, unless I've completely misunderstood the mechanics of haste. In which case, that's a difference of .95 seconds.

For a 1h weapon with 2.6 swing speed with 25% haste, the result should be 1.95, for a difference of .65 seconds.

It still affects 1h weapons to some degree, but the effect is less pronounced than with a 2h weapon. 50% haste on both of the above weapons would result in a difference of 1.9 second reduction versus a 1.3 second reduction, which is the point I was kind of trying to drive at. It doesn't seem as you need as much haste with 1h weapons as you would with 2h ones, which you could then apply to mastery or something similar to get a better damage increase instead. The discussion so far was dealing with mostly hit, crit, and haste. I think that the viability of fury mastery comes into play much better with SMF and 1h weapons over mastery with TG, purely due to the ease of getting haste to high enough level to ensure flurry and enrage are up more often. With mastery, the enrage buff increases, which should increase damage output for those who decide to go that route. TG and 2h weapons already have high damage output for the most part already, so quickening the hits, which haste should take more off of the swing times, would provide a better and more consistent source of dps. I think this has almost been proven in this thread already.

So that's why I had the afterthought concerning SMF and mastery. Mastery increases both RB damage and the percent of Enrage. If you can gain enough points in it by dropping haste itemization due to the fact that it doesn't take off the same amounts of the swing times, based on purely percentages of numbers, I'm starting to think that SMF will be comparable, if not better, in the right hands in Cataclysm. Even if it doesn't feel all that unique anymore.

That's actually what I was kind of implying, so maybe we're talking past each other.

Haste = better enrage uptime for TG by increasing the number of swings per 9 seconds more so than with SMF
Mastery = better enrage buff for SMF due to it already being able to keep enrage uptime easier with faster hits

Hence, the rage generation from the increased damage from the better modifier that enrage provides would benefit SMF, whereas haste would provide a better enrage uptime for TG and a more fluid source of rage generation due to the better speed of the attacks. Haste would still be needed, but you could assume that TG would need close to 30% compared to SMF possibly getting by with 15-20%, and flurry affecting the swing times further for both.

Seems my own napkin math might have been wrong though. I only started thinking about it in terms of increasing the number of swings in order to keep enrage up as often as possible, which I realized that since haste works in terms of reducing it by a percent, there's a higher impact on the swing times for 2h weapons over 1h weapons, which means that 1h weapons need some other way of comparing to 2h weapons in terms of damage for rage generation/dps. And the only way I could think of that happening was with buffing enrage a bit more.

If someone could try it out with a test dummy, it might confirm whether or not this is viable at all. Otherwise, I imagine we wait until people hit 85 and start testing out various things.