If you're going for an arena 2hander I suggest getting the sword.

You should have 9% hit to reach the cap (which is around 150ish hit rating).

Anything around 30% crit unbuffed is good.

AP depends on your gear but if you're in a BT/MH guild I'd say you want to aim for atleast 1800++ in arms gear for starters.

I'm an Orc. Do you think the sword would still benefit me more so with my racial traits?


Also what enchant would be better.....executioner,mongoose,str?

Hmm, if you're threat capped with salvation, subtlety and imp zerk stance I think the problem is not you, maybe it's the tanks. Are you a lot better geared than the tanks? I'm nowhere near being threat capped with BoS, despite using HS whenever I have rage for it (but then our tanks are pretty well equipped). Anyway, starting slow is always a good idea.

Macro works just fine if you have rage to sustain it and press it all the time. I would lose more dps on keeping track of two keybinds than I do by using the macro (but maybe that's just me )

Axe with executioner.

/signed

Because of your racial bonus, I'd go with this. If you have low end gear, it's also good to have extra crit so you can keep BF up consistently.

I haven't been able to get a single WWS in 3 weeks on Teron, ghost hate me a lot. However, been seeing very similar numbers (about a 50-100 dps variance) between 17/44 and 3/43/15. When they change defiance's expertise to work in all stances, I'm pretty sure 3/43/15 will be my spec of choice.

Also for all the posters clamoring for crit, don't. For every item except [Dreadboots of the Legion], [Bold Crimson Spinel] should go in every slot. This of course excludes the one or two items it takes to get your [Relentless Earthstorm Diamond] requirements. I chose [Onslaught Shoulderblades] and [Red Belt of Battle] to socket properly, as those are both the best in their slot, as well as have decent bonuses.

As for threat, with 17/44 and full buffs, I got 1900 dps before I got ghosted about 3 minutes in (before execute/recklessness) I was about a little over half of my tanks aggro. I literally don't even watch threat meters on fights anymore past the first 30 seconds, expertise is that overpowered. Point your tanks to the Protection Warrior thread on this forum. He really knows what he's talking about :P.

[Furious Shackles] for me are less dps than [Bracers of Eradication], but [Deadly Cuffs] are the best bracers currently in-game.

[Furious Shackles] Should really be re-itemised, they're just not any good. On another note the flurry bug and whirlwind offhand not proccing flurry is going to be fixed. After 2.3.2 though. Don't see why they can't just hotfix it. Which should result in a nice bit of extra flurry uptime.

Speaking of which (re-itemization); Why isn't [Belt of Seething Fury] being re-itemized?

I have it, I've never used it. I took it, hoping that it might get buffed/tweaked some day.

As a long time DPS warrior I continually see posts referring to go with at least 14% hit, now it's 9-12. Max crit! Max AP! Now add in armor penetration. I used to be an AP/+hit freak and decided to join the bandwagon and drop some of my +hit and AP for alot more +crit. We are now 3/4 TK and 5/6 SSC and more armor pentration gear is cropping up in random places. What's interesting is that certain min maxes of attributes follow your progression. For example, I'd say that more hit and AP are important while learning KZ and Gruul/Mag but as you get into SSC/TK you'll see more of a push towards Crit and of course with BT/Hyjal guilds it seems like armor penetration is all the rage.

So my question is, from the experience of EJ posters, especially around armor penetration and given the fact that the more the better, at what point do you start feeling good about ditching crit/hit/ap for +armor penetration? I have the trinket from heroic BF and can easily get some of the S3 honor + arena point gear to start pushing it but it's really hard to quantify the trade off. Is it best to hold off on Armor Pentration until you can say get at least x number of armor penetration to make it worth it?

I suppose the fundamental question is what is the valuation of armor penetration and what are the latest benchmarks for the key attributes.

Unbuffed with BS I'm at..
33.5% crit
2k AP
226 hit rating
17/44/0 spec

Stats are interconnected and scale differently.
There is no particular point in progression where anything with a certain stat by default becomes better.
All stats contributes towards the usefullness of an item. Armor penetration might be a really good stat but choker of the serated blades is not going to be better than choker of endless nightmares simply because it isnt itemized as well.

You need to look at an item as a whole and not at the particular stat types it has.
This is why things like SEP values and spreadsheets are useful, they allow you to evalue things in a broader perspective.

Now, I've been wondering about this the last couple of days. Up til recently, I'd been a strong supporter of strength over all (taking into account Bok, Imp Zerker, Bloodthirst etc. you can easily see how good strength is for warriors), and socketing all my slots with +8str (My guild only killed Kael last week, so no BT gems for me yet). However, a few days ago after thinking about some in depth gear changes, I decided to re-download the warrior dps spreadsheet (which I had not used in a long time). Setting up my current level of gear (~3 pieces T5 level, the rest T4/Karazhan/Heroic), the latest version of the spreadsheet said that socketing crit instead of strength would be a dps increase for me - I think it was about 1-2dps per gem changed.

Now whilst the spreadsheet has been going through quite a few changes recently, this still suggests to me that maybe we're undervalueing crit. I recently set up a Power Auras icon for Flurry, so I have an obvious visual cue for when I'm flurried and when I'm not, and it's quite enlightening how little time I actually do have flurry up. I guess partly this is due to the current flurry bugs (which supposedly will be fixed in 2.4), but it still seems that with flurry, impale, and RED, that it's not entirely possible for crit to be better than Str.

Does anyone have any evidence other than the spreadsheet for either point of view?

Trying to compare two items, and would like some insight. Comparing the S3 legs and Greaves of the Blood Warder, socketing with +8str/+4crit +4str/+4str +6stam. So you'd have...

[Vengeful Gladiator's Plate Legguards]
51 str
70 sta
12 hit
47 crit
84 armor ignore

[Greaves of the Bloodwarder]
69 str
52 sta
0 hit
35 crit
0 armor ignore

Is the +18str of GotBW enough to tip the tides over the stat increases across the board of the S3 legs?

For an arms warrior. Initially, I'm thinking AP isn't playing as big a part to an arms warrior over a fury warrior, so the other stat increases are a much better bet.

With a 33/28/0 build, I find that I have flurry up pretty much the entire fight. I'm aware it's a bit different comparing arms kit to fury kit and I have a crit of somewhere around 43% or so iirc (can't check armory atm).

A few months ago, I drew similar conclusions to you, that +crit gave an overall greater dps increase than +str, but that it was a very marginal increase. The thing is, the better gear you get (and the higher your base hits are) the more valuable +crit is in comparison to +str.

Mostly I have socketed an even mix of +crit gems and +crit/+str orange gems, with 2 green gems for the meta bonus.

In all, I believe it to be a balancing act, rather than there being a clear favourite. You need to keep your STR high enough that you inflict sufficient non-crit damage to gain rage to power your rotation, for when you're in an unlucky streak of non-crits.

It's not just the AP, you're comparing:
+18 str
vs
+12 crit rating
+12 hit rating
+84 armor ignore
+18 stam

The S3 legs win easily for both Fury or Arms dps. If you're arms, and you don't need the +hit (you already got 9%) then it means you can afford to lose +hit from another location as an upgrade.

Simply put though, +12 crit rating and +84 armor ignore is better than +18 str, but not by a huge amount. Add in the extra armour, stamina and that +hit and the S3 legs are a clear winner.

That's the problem in and of itself. Even as it is now with my fury build, in a raid situation I'm never rage starved and I'm throwing up HS on most of the available GCDs. Question now is to simply just do more damage with what I've got available to me. Naturally, the biggest improvement will be in just an upgraded weapon (decap + s2 fast OH) /hate alar + tidewalker.

Agree here. It feels like they left a stat off of them.

As for crit vs str...the spreadsheet starts to value crit over str at about T5 levels of gear, with full raid buffs. As you get better gear, crit gets even more heavily favored. Obviously crit scales better than AP but how accurate is the spreadsheet? Not sure. If you favor STR or CRIT or a mix, with your gems, I dont think you are gimping yourself.

[Grips of Deftness] give 15 expertise rating, not 15 expertise. Wowhead says 15 expertise rating = 4 expertise, so you should only have 5 from the racial and 4 from the gloves so you should still be well under whatever the actual cap is for dodge..

Thank you for the clarification. That helps alot.

Anyone know how to take it apart backwards through item budgeting to find out if it is in fact not itemized correctly? If it was you could submit it as a bug to be looked at. >_>

I found a link on wowwiki to a item budget calculator. It says it's for TBC but it doesn't have support for gems. Anyway, I compared Rage's bracers against Lurker's and found a 10-ish level difference which is about right. While I agree that these bracers stink, I think it's more an issue that other bracers are really good. For example, Lurker's bracers are low stamina, have a socket, and split item budget between 3 damage stats.

Well my post was mainly referring to the posters who were stacking crit in excess of 35%+ unbuffed. Personally I did follow my socket colors, because crit still was useful until I reached a comfortable number in which I felt that flurry uptime, as well as incoming rage generation was acceptable. It was about 32% crit unbuffed in berzerker stance.

The problem that warriors have to realize is, while all of our stats are good, they increase the value of each other, so stacking any one stat, be it STR/AP when you have 25% unbuffed crit, or 37% unbuffed crit when you have 1600 ap, or 300 hit rating when you have 1600 ap and 25% crit is silly. Get a reasonable amount of hit rating, but never gem for it. Follow socket bonuses until you have a decent amount of crit, then stack strength gems. Get the item that is best itemized for dps in every slot and go from there.

I had 34% crit unbuffed recently, switched 2% of it, for some ArP and saw a pretty huge increase in damage, and my flurry uptime didn't take that big of a hit either. Hopefully the hot fixes will also raise the flurry uptime as well which reduces the dependance on crit even further.