I tried it last night, it seemed to work better than running high hit the night before. I spammed less HS, obviously, but my RB was hitting really, really hard. First part of first tendon damage ranged from 1.3-1.54 million damage.

Standing in grasps for rage, and especially rolling an Execute stack into the tendon burn helps mitigate miss streak RNG considerably, not to mention that your guild will probably lust you for one of them.

That isn't to say it won't eventually happen and screw you, but hit builds run aground sometimes as well.

There are occasional attempts where my damage is lower than a million per burn phase (obviously on ones where I don't have DW/Reck up), but I'm hitting my highest numbers with the build. The first part of the first tendon burn, I peaked at 1.61 million. Once we get to the lust phase on the 3rd one, I can fully expect to break 2 million on that tendon burn.

During DW, mastery almost equal streangth in value. However hit/haste should still be better then crit when those ratings are so low and you have the 2p 13. The best DPS gain for tendron should be to reforge everything to mastery with hit as second priority.

What data is this based off of? Note, I'm speaking to the comment about TG>SMF. SMF represents a very small portion of Fury players, and looking at logs, Reptile has been posting very high end numbers compared to his TG counterparts. I was even able to rank well as SMF Fury on a few fights, 59 H Ultra/9 N Ultra with no Heroic gear. Reptiel had the top overall parse as SMF for Hagara, and Collision has had very high rankings as well for some of his heroic kills. From what I've ascertained from logs and experience, the gap between SMF and TG is gone, yet many warriors cling the notion that TG>SMF. What I'd like to see are the facts and evidence to back this up.

It's not necessarily that TG is automatically superior to SMF (though in the case of BiS, I can't imagine that TG with H Gurth wouldn't be miles ahead of SMF), but Gurthalak is just that good. The discussion about this is strewn about in the Arms and Fury threads. That said, Arms with Gurth is already better on at least half the DS bosses; I can't imagine giving that up just to spec SMF with one heroic weapon (which is what he's asking about doing).

It's also worth noting that you can often find WoL parses of some ridiculous player doing something that most others can't; that doesn't represent necessarily what the "average" raider like you or me could do.

The problem with that is that I'm pretty much the only "competitive" SMF warrior with enough WOL logs to consider when comparing to TG. After having a discussion with the people who sort out simcraft for SMF we concluded that a lot of stuff hadn't been implemented correctly. Arms is without a doubt better than Fury right now but when you're simply making the choice between going SMF or TG I'd personally think twice.

Errors in the recent simcrafts were:

The fact that Heroic Strike is favored over RB during Inner Rage or whenever you're close enough to make it to your next Inner Rage without capping rage.
Second minor thing was that Gurthalak procs were overestimated. As we know now it doesn't simply just proc off everything in the main and offhand.
The third error was that initially Simcraft did not use Heroic leap on cooldown which is another (minor) SMF advantage due to the 20% overall bonus damage.

A last thing to keep in mind is that there are heroic weapons (although not BIS) available to SMF throughout the entire progression phase while Arms will effectively be using a normal ilevel weapon until the patch (and expansion) is cleared, which imo makes the entire "bis" issue debatable as it won't really contribute to your performance when it matters.

Considering fights like Hagara where proper cleaving on ice tombs can be a considerable boost to your dps I'd also guess SMF to be the most favorable spec on that fight due to cleaves being a lot stronger.

You would need to take into account the timing of the exposures. If you are killing the amalgamations fast enough you won't have death wish back up for the second exposure. This would greatly reduce the benefit of a high mastery build. You can offset this slightly by popping DW 5-8 seconds early for the first exposure.

In regards to a high mastery build I would be interested to see what would happen if you force procc'd heroic Soulshifter Vortex (3278 mastery). It could obviously require you to stop damage for about 10 seconds before the exposure. The biggest problem I could think of would be if you were getting to the exposures before the ICD was back up.

With a high mastery build I hit 2173 rating (79%) which is a 35% death wish bonus. Proccing the trinket= 5451 mastery (181%) causing death wish to do 56% bonus damage. This would also affect your bonus damage from enrage.

This would cause insane burst for the first exposure, but low damage for the second exposure, and possible rage problems from the low hit rating.

One of the things that SMF has going for it is rage management. Faster swings lead to more room to "play" with your rage. Weapon misses aren't as damaging when you have low rage which mean you can expend more rage during colossus smash, and on the flip side you can allow your rage to get closer to capping without actually capping due to the smaller chunks of rage you gain from each swing.

I would recommend SMF to newer fury players as rage management is easier, which can lead to dps gains over TG as mistakes aren't punished quite as much. Also, once this new player has gotten used to the rotation, they can take advantage of the additional "play" room and dump more rage into colossus smash in comparison to TG.

Unfortunately, arms is just so much better than fury at this time that it's just kind of silly to use fury at all unless it's on heroic spine. However, SMF is probably better than TG before Gurthtalak, where TG pulls ahead slightly.

For those on Heroic Spine and considering what to do. This is what I found that worked with me.

The Valor on use trinket should be one of your trinkets. On our first few attempts before our kill, I went with a low exp (15) and low hit forge tactic. Which helps you get bigger RBs and more damage for DW, but be ready, you will miss/dodge/parry alot on the Hideous, which is almost just as important to dps down fast, especially on the 3rd plate, with all those bloods spawning up.

On our kill attempt, I went with a 24 exp and 11% hit. Which made a big difference, dps on the hideous went up and burst damage on tendon, suffered only like a 200 dps lost. Which shouldnt make or break your overall raid's dps on the tendon.

Also before I went fury, I did try arms. Per tendon I was doing around 1.3mil per tendon and as fury I was steadily doing 1.7mil per tendon. Damage varied, but that was on average. So atleast for one fight, I can say fury is better for burst damage on tendons than arms.

Anyways this is what I found that worked for me.

With the 15% nerf to the tendon, is reforging out of all expertise as possible still necessary?