I'm relatively new to these forums, and a brand new poster, but I was curious as to the itemization of Sunwell gear concerning 33/28 warriors. I was glancing over the equipment on MMO-Champion and saw that a majority of it had haste rating, now when I think of haste rating the first thing that popped into my mind was the faster my weapon, the larger percentage of my weapon swing I'd be cutting off by using slam. Basically, what I thought was the faster my swing the more worthless slam became.

Although that may in fact be the case, I also remember reading posts by warriors who use swords (I have a Cat's Edge as well) that wouldn't even use slam in their rotation, but instead would spamstring between MS and WW cooldowns. After comparing gear (My math may be a little off because it's quite early and I've been up all night) I found that I would gain 88 AP, .75 crit, 14.2% passive haste, along with a 45 hit rating LOSS (that does drop me under the cap, but with a Draeni and 20 hit food I'm still capped) as well as 467 ARP loss.

Keeping in mind, the warriors who were using these rotations with hamstring were putting up similar numbers to those who use slam in WWS (I don't have them off hand, unfortunately) otherwise I would not have considered this a viable option in the first place.

On the flip side, the other setup would yield roughly: 148 AP gain, 462 ARP, and 26 haste, with a loss of 19 hit rating and roughly .5% crit. Using ideally the same weapon (Apolyon, the Soul-render) I'd be sitting at a passive 1256 ARP with this setup. (This is using the leather gear as well). Considering a 6200 armor boss, this sits me 100 ARP~ below the "cap".

All of these stats are direct comparisons from the gear I'm wearing currently, and I have an Armory link to it, but it's slow as usual and it has me in my pvp gear at the moment, but incase it updates: The World of Warcraft Armory

My first thought would be to go for the haste gear, simply because I think it would make my life a lot easier (slamming can be really painful at times dependant on the fight, and heroism/drums + moving + slam = sadface). But I'd like the input of some others who could perhaps give me their opinion on this, and I'm aware there are spreadsheets for questions like this as well, but I don't have access to Excel so I really can't use that option.

Thanks for the feedback in advance, and feel free to nitpick and criticize as I may have over-looked something.

I'm still struggling to understand the mechanics behind the 'no slam' rotation as well, and getting it to outdo the 'white-slam-instant' rotation. Haste favors the 'no slam' rotation so I'm guessing Bloodlust+Haste potion+DST(which I lack) has something to do with it?

For anyone who missed it:

Tier6:
http://www.worldofraids.com/2008/ptr.../onslaught.jpg

Token:
http://www.worldofraids.com/2008/ptr/24/plate.jpg

Blacksmithing:
http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/...blacksmith.jpg

And to think I was starting to regret picking up Blacksmithing solely for the Stunherald! That breastplate and gloves are all kinds of awesome compared to the T6 ones.

Imo Haste is the best stat out there after you surpass T6 level. The reason it was "Moderately questionable" etc is because the ITEMS that had haste were bad. there was never crit nor sockets on haste gear, and it was overloaded with stamina. With properly itemized loot, haste is very very high on my priority list. Its also well supported by the spreadsheets, showing haste as best stat for me to stack.

Haste is decent, but i think they're throwing too much of it on this new sunwell gear. Too much seems like it could hurt slam rotations, and I still feel crit and ap is better for fury. I really wish we could get some expertise rating on some of this gear though. Expertise is probably the most valuable stat for us and the majority of us are severely lacking it.

I dont see how haste would hurt slam rotations unless you are

- 2h fury with 5/5 flurry
AND
- have over 200 haste

or you are horrible lagged (in which case you shouldnt be using slam anyway - spec DW fury and let someone with better connection do 2h dps)

I didn't mean it would totally break them, just that it can make for tighter timings. My main point is that we should get some expertise rating thrown on our gear. It's an amazing stat that helps with both white attacks and specials. A little bit of the stuff goes a long way.

Engineering t2 goggle plans to drop in SW. What I'd be curious to learn is whether or not Blacksmithing t4 plans or something similar is planned. Dragonpwnage 105dps? Smithing BP is indeed very very solid.
I guess PTR exposure will reveal more and more- it's always interesting to see what the next line of gearing will be.

http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/...ofcontempt.jpg

Exactly of what you speak. Absolutely ideal for melee.

That would be true if you aren't having to give up large amounts of one stat to get it. It's no different than giving up 3-5% hit and 5% crit to reach high levels of ArP. In the end, regardless of what spreadsheets say, the DPS ends up being similar whichever route you decide to go. At least according to people that have access to full sets of either option. Haste is barely better than hit, which is the lowest DPS stat for a well geared Warrior. If they had never nerfed haste, it would absolutely be a good stat now, especially with how high the ratings are on some of the pieces, but a lot of this gear seems custom made for 2h builds, and only as a marginal upgrade or sidegrade to BT gear. The breastplate and bracer are great, everything else looks bland on paper. Even the T6 belt looks like it has poorly distributed stats compared to the RBoB for an upgrade. It basically allows you to trade in the same belt you already have for a *very marginal* upgrade that nets you 1/2 of the set bonus. Couple that with the bracer and you do see a slight boost, but on it's own it's not all that spectacular.

I dont know what sheet told you haste was the best stat to stack. I think haste was broken on one for a bit, might want to double check on that. Its not bad, its just that the item budget for it could be used for much better things. Compared to say rogues, who hit more which gains more energy which does more specials, warrior specials are on cooldowns. Once you have the rage to keep BT/WW on cooldown, and anyone getting the new gear should, you dump it into HS. Haste just has no effect on ~40% of your damage, depending on gear. Strength and Crit affect everything.

I am disappointed in the lack of ArP. A couple pieces have a lot, and the rest have haste. I thought ArP was going to be our big thing and rogues would go more for haste, but the gear is the opposite.

Haste brings more heroic strikes / mainhand-hits and offhand hits, so it is a lot better than hit, which basically means your off-hand will miss less, when you make right use of heroic strike.

It's not a lot better than hit, it's marginally better. You don't want to miss with your off hand, and trading hit for haste doesn't really improve upon that, it just allows for quicker Heroics and WF procs at a slight cost in rage generation. I can only speak for myself, but I can't Heroic every single swing while keeping both instants on cooldown as well as Rampage up except on a few specific boss encounters.

Are you counting Flurry and (if you have one) a DST? With something like a CE, it's already quite easy to reach ridiculously fast speeds without a single piece of haste gear.

Hm, the question then is, why is the spreadsheet valueing haste so high? I've basically written down, what the sheet was always keeping telling me the last weeks.

Any Slam Warrior using DST should be shot, or forced to spec to Fury. With 5 point flurry, Cat's Edge comes to 2.8, still requiring a bit more haste to reach 2.5s. And most Slam warriors will only have 3/5.

Only a 3.8 weapon won't go below 2.5s with bloodlust.

There's always a huge debate going on if Fury or MS spec is better for DPS. I was wondering if anyone ever tried a def spec to do DPS. Being one of the MTs in our guild I am bound 99% of the time to a def spec. However, recently I had the opportunity to try out a 17/3/41 spec for better aggro build-up. When we got to Teron Gorefiend I was even able to drive some decent DPS with this spec.

Spec:
World of Warcraft Europe -> Game Guide -> Charakter -> Talente -> Krieger

WWS:
Wow Web Stats

Equip during Teron fight:
chardev.org - A World of Warcraft character planner v.2.beta

I was very much focusing on STR on my equip because of the 10% talent spec. It's not the greatest equip but it is decent and with the numbers from WWS I was wondering if any warrior with some better equip would be interested to try out the spec a little more. For me the benefits of this spec were pretty clear from the beginning. With dual-wield you are able to gain good rage generation to be independent and not relient on a shaman with a WF totem. During that fight I only had a feral druid as a supporter. I made a macro for the following rotation: 6xDevestate, 1xWhirlwind. Most of the DPS comes actually from the WW while the Devestate provides steady DPS. While doing this rotation without a shaman it is possible to gradually gain rage which means HS can be used during the rotation to spike up the DPS. With a shaman it would be possible to add HS more often to increase DPS by quite a bit.
The idea behind this spec/rotation is quite simple, while BT and MS have a 6 second cooldown Devestate only has a GC. It is possible to compensate the damage of BT/MS by using Devestate every GC. It is also extremly important not to burn to much rage through HS so to not to loose a GC for Devestate. The other thing is that most tanks use fast tanking weapons and most tanking weapons are actually fast weapons. Using a slow weapon with Devestate can increase the DPS substantially. Right now the S3 Main-Hand or the Supremus Mace would be the best weapon for such a spec.
All in all I think this is a viable spec considering it is possible to tank decently with this setup and with some fine tweaking to do good DPS. I won't be able to try out the spec too often so it would be great if an Off-Tank had some time to maybe play around with it and give some feedback on it.


The other thing that I wanted to ask is. Would it be viable to use Slam in a 17/44/0 spec while using the LD50 swing timer mod and 2 weapons with almost the same weapon speed doing essentially 2 white swings followed by a slam and so on? Pretty much a MS slam rotation with 2 weapons.

Why exactly is that?

Wow Web Stats

This wasn't my typical spec and before a handful of upgrades. I don't need how Flurry and other random haste procs can throw off a rotation to be explained, but it's not really as black and white as you make it out to be.

Bah, loot is relative to the guild, raid, people in the raid, classes available at the time of the drop. I have a DST I never use anymore because I have better trinkets, and at the time in the raid nobody was around to take it. Those are the breaks. Silly to argue about!

Haste doesn't affect the slam cast, right?

Well, essentially the setup that I posted up there (Approx. 14.2% haste) Is 224 haste rating. So obviously that number is pretty easily attainble seeing as how there are no rings/amulet/cloak/ranged weapon in that build that even have haste. So assuming You just tack on 14% to the 15 most 33/28 warriors have you're sitting at 29.2% Which brings a 3.5 to 2.478 on your swing speed.

No one in the game has "perfect" ping and everyone is pretty much going to be chopping off more of their swing than they would want to be no matter how quick you are. The way I consider haste towards a slam build is if you have a 3.5 swing speed and are taking .5 off of that per white attack to get your slam in, you're taking 14.28% of your swing off of every rotation that includes slamming, which in a perfect scenario you'll be slamming after every white attack.

Now you consider using a 2.5 speed weapon, which some believe is the ideal speed for just being able to have globals govern your rotation, which I can't argue with because it would be a lot easier to do it that way, but that .5 turns into 25% of your swing instead of 14%.. Basically you're losing 11% MORE of your white swings using a faster weapon and continuing to slam rotate in the same manner, my logic on this of course could very well be flawed, so if someone could disprove me it would help me figure out which way I'd like to go.

Considering that those stats would be just sitting around, and don't include heroism, drums of battle (which our dps group uses constantly) and at that point slamming would just be utterly useless, so that's why I am considering going the way of spamstring and seeing the actual dps it can put out.

It doesn't no, however if you decrease your swingtimer to below 2.5 it'll normally result in one not being able to keep up the slam rotation due to, as I have understood (which may very well be wrong) it, human response time as well as the fact that if you're swinging at a 2.2 speed, you might as well just spam MS/WW and throw in some HS (or Cleave, what ever blows your skirt up).

The best way to come to a the conclusion is to take it to the extreme. Say you have a 0.5 speed weapon and slam was not on the global cooldown. You can swing constantly for X damage every .5 seconds, or every other swing you can cast slam instead for X+140, cutting out 50% of your white damage. Obviously weaving slam does more damage than not weaving slam.

Sub 2.5s, you could alter your rotation to be e.g. swing/slam, MS, swing, swing/slam, WW, swing, swing/slam. This would require more of a "by-the-feel" reaction than to try to program it because you wouldn't want to keep MS or WW off of cooldown for very long, but would be more DPS than cutting out slam entirely. Weaving slams would no longer be your priority however; keeping MS and WW on cooldown would be, and you'd weave a slam in whenever feasible.

Well lets try to use some math in the whole process. The thing to remember is, our raid caters to melee a lot. I usually run with a feral/enh shaman + we have a surv hunter, boomkin druid, ret paladin. Any raid buff to melee you can name, we do have it. Obviously it affects my SEP as it boosts all my other stats, but i doubt it will be THAT much off for other warriors.

a) "Haste affects 60% of your damage". Im not sure, for me white + heroic is over 70% right now. Id like to see the hard data for other warriors, but on low armor bosses in MH/BT its like 40% of my damage is heroic strikes, with white being 2nd then BT at below 15% etc. Lets compare it thought. 16 haste rating gives 1% boost to 70% of my damage.
So 0.7% dmg increase/16 rating = 0.043% increase per rating
Than:

* 1% crit (22 rating), increases my white damage by around 0.6%(since i already have around 50% crit in raids and 25% is glancings, and increases yellow damage by 0.75% (50% crit/impale). So 0.6%x0.3+0.75%*0.7 =0.705% dmg increase. 0.705%/22 = 0,032% increase per rating. Crit is valued at 0.75% of haste for me.

I just made this one comparison to show possible reasons why haste goes that high up - because you have NO haste atm. Its just a situation where crit/hit/ap are sort of on "diminishing returns" because they are so high. While haste is a brand new stat to stack on.

According to dps spreadsheets if crit = 100SEP then

STR =94
AGI = 75
HASTE = 140 !!
-7 AC = 140 !!
HIT = 58
EXPERTISE = 112

Now the trick is - im already at 1330 ArP with my dual wield. While i will drop SOME going to sunwell loot, its still awfully close to cap. So while its a good stat too and ill be seeking it, one needs to remain very careful.

Expertise on other hand is good, but you need to take one thing into account (and why its lower then haste). While equal amount of expertise rating will reduce dodge by 1% and increase haste by 1% - it still puts haste ahead. Most people will say "But haste doesnt affect 100% of my dmg, expertise does". True but consider: (assume you have ONE % chance to be dodged)

- Expertise will convert that one dodge out of 100 attacks into a HIT.
- Haste will make you attack 101 times, addint another SWING which can miss/crit/glance etc (and with 50% crit
decent hit etc it just makes the "expected swing damage" higher then the "hit damage" by a lot.

Thus while haste works with swings only it adds more to them then hit/expertise.