They are different things, consistent has (mostly) to do with hit %, smooth has to do with speed. Say you can have 100 rage every 5 secs or 20 rage every second. Both are consistent and both are the same avg rage/s, but 20 every second will give you a better cycle if there is any chance to miss. Now this isnt true if you have more rage than you use anyway, but at that point an extra couple % flurry uptime isnt going to do much.

A quick query in regards to the type of weapons that would be best suited.

Bliz have been kind enough to give us slow OH's, obtainable via Arenas, clearly aimed at warriors and shammys. However, if you wish to dual wield anything other than fists you have to purchase the more expensive 2.6 speed twice.

I've noticed that the slow sword has different min-max damage (214-322 for the sword compared to 187-349 that all the other s3 2.6 speed weapons have axe,mace,fist).

As far as I can understand, in 2.4 the expertise bonus for being human will apply to each weapon held, thus holding two swords will yield 10 expertise.

Is there any variation in dps in choosing the two swords with the different min-max over say the axes or fists?

While impale isnt the best of talents, its not that bad either. Simple math shows for 2h warriors:

- Usual white damage = around 45%, with deep wounds and such MAYBE 50%.
- remaining 50% damage is affected by impale on crits, increasing damage by 10%. Now common mistake is "If i crit 33% of the time, it means impale affects 33%*50%=16.6% of my damage, aka increasing my damage by 16.6%x10% = 1.66%. 2h spec is better for 2 points". Well thats wrong.

33% (Pretty LOW crit rate for a 2h warrior) crit means, that crit is already responsible for 50% of your damage (33%x2 = crit damage, 66%x1 = non crit damage). Using this for your calculations impale increases the damage by 50%x50%x10%=2.5% and is better then 2h spec. In general impale goes ahead of 2h spec if your crit is above 25%.


It actually remains interesting if maybe impale is the talent to drop for pvp builds (crit rate below 25% on resilience guys , and crits doing reduced damage). However I dont know how impale coexists with resilience reduction, and im to lazy to give it more effort then just mentioning it.

Wouldn't this sort of activity run counter to the practice of speed-sync'd weapons? pushing more toward the 2.6/2.7 setup for DW? The basic theory - with unsync'd weapons, you won't (necessarily) be forced to wait 2.6(7) seconds to regain flurry after this bug. Also, you still have the basic principle of slower OH to force more flurry charges to the MH. It's late, and I'm not that great at showing the math. Anyone care to compare this? I also realize it'd be kinda hard to represent these random occurances as solid numbers, as they're mostly a 'probability' factor. It's at least food for thought.

A DW-Warrior doesn´t have any attack which scales with weapondmg so only the dps matters if the speed of the weapons are the same. You have nothing from burst dmg and the different min/maxdmg will equal out by time.

But you do !not! get 10 expertise when 2.4 goes live. Every hand will be calculated seperatly so you will have 5 exp for MH and 5 exp for OH if you wear two Swords. Thesame if you wear one Sword and one Mace.

Plus only the sword is expensive at the arena, there is a cheap 2.6 OHaxe and a cheap 2.6 OHFist.

Going on form this, I'm a human but i don't relish the thought of spending 2650 x 2 to obtain two slow sword's, whilst i still require my Chest and to upgrade my Stormherald (though i will get the s3 2h then bank for season 4 armour)

Would i be better going S/F swords or S/S Sword/Fist , i know that the 5 expertise equates to roughly 4.1DPs but i am unsure of the dps of the added damage from using a slow offhand.

So basically would i pull better numbers going s/f swords or s/s sword/fist

Edit: Some grammar

According to Grim´s Spreadsheet I would do better cycledps when using Sword MH and a slow OH, Axe for example (as a human on my gearlvl). This is due to BS & HS gain the benefit from the MHexpertise and only WW is affected bye the loss of the expertise on OH, but the slow speed of the weapon will equal this out. You will see some more OH-misses but i think with propper ragemanagment you won´t see any difference at all.
With slow+slow you will see more WW dmg and a slighty higher flurryuptime. I suggest that you should get a sword in MH and a slow weapon in OH no matter what kind of weapon it is (sword preferred)

I've actually done this...and its seriously not bad. The spec is something like 26/35/0. Back in our SSC farming rotation there was room to try out new things and one of them was DW Sword spec. In a night of SSC, sword spec actually came out SLIGHTLY ahead of 17/44, and this was with inferior weapons (talon w/ potency + unenchanted S2 offhand vs T3 BS axe w/ mongoose and OH S2 mace w/ potency).

HOWEVER, its spikey. Higher highs and lower lows, and no threat reduction from imp. zerker stance. Giving up 10% AP and that 250AP rage dump to some seems unthinkable, but for deathwish and extra attacks, its not a bad trade-off.... and will definately turn some heads when they inspect you.

Edit: I think DW sword spec should be listed as a viable spec.


BTW, great thread. Been looking for something a bit leaner than 3,200 posts....

It'd be nice to get a similar gear comparison at higher levels of gear. It seems like DW sword spec would scale better than DW Fury, someone trying it out seriously and posting some results would be very interesting.

Problem with DW SS build scaling, is that it stressed factors that arent compatible with warriors in general.

- More stress on hit. Sword specs proc off hits, so you cant miss too much, Hit normally is of low value for warriors, and pumping it up just for sword spec seems meh.

- Favors fastest offhands possible. Oh sword specs proc MH swings, so you are looking for a setup with biggest possible difference between MH and OH - something like Warglaives to be honest. Other setups at t6 content level would be i guess vengeful sword+mother OH. Again its counterproductive with other warrior abilities.

- More stress on white damage. Your BT/WW will hit for less with lower ap, so heroic/white damage will be a bigger % in your damage. So more stress on haste/crit.


P.S. People really need to reevaluate the "matching speed" weapons. At best it seems to produce 2-3% bigger flurry uptime due to flurry actually hastening partial swings (which means if you have 2.6x2 weapon then 3 flurry charges will haste 4 next swings. However with 2.7+2.6 weapon, 3 flurry charges will hasted all the OH swings and 5.2 sec of MH swings aka 5.2/5.4 = 96% of the MH swings.). If you look into that model further , you will see that flurry actually speeds up at LEAST 2 full swing of the faster weapon and 1.5 of the slower if the speeds arent too far apart. All in all AVERAGE haste is applied to approximately ~3.5-3.75 of the swings, instead of 4. And thats only if the flurry actually drops. With chain proccing there is obviously little difference. Add it up to the raid buffed crit of 45%+ with feral/ret etc (flurry uptime over 95%) and you will see that you are lucky if matching weapons gives you 10 dps.

DW SS is probably only interesting because of the ridiculous speeds of Warglaive MH vs OH. But with those weapons in mind, it's probably the best DPS you can get out of a fury warrior.