Figure I’ll try to kick off some spec discussion.

I plan to use my T6 prot gear to level using this build:
Level 70 Prot Leveling Build

My gear is good enough that I likely won’t need parry or dodge to tank instances, so I focused on maxing my DPS.

I plan to transition into this build for tanking at level 80:
Level 80 Tanking Build

I view Impale as being not worth the talents I have to give up to get to it. I am paying closest attention to impressions of Puncture. If people conclude that it’s not very valuable, I’ll probably move those points. Maybe to Improved Disciplines, but even with a four minute cooldown, I don’t imagine I’ll be using Shield Wall twice in a fight. Maybe to Imp. HS.

Well, good news (for my sanity at least). I went in with a level 70 warrior, TG, 0 hit rating. With Recklessness up every attack against the level 80 training dummy was a parry, dodge, miss or glance. Against the level 70 training dummies they were all crits or misses. Lots of misses. Hit tables haven't changed.

I haven't tanked an instance since the target limit was lifted. Prior to that and post the thunderclap damage nerf tabbing was still an issue.

Considering the 3.0 patch is coming out relatively soon, and we'll have up to a month of raiding with the new talent trees before getting the extra 10 levels to complete any spec, what would be the preferred change to a standard 17/44 fury build now?

Obviously if you have no two handers available to you, I'm guessing stick with some sort of 15/46 build?

If we have a couple of equivalent 2-handers good to go at level 70 would a TG/Incite overtake it? I'm assuming the build would be something like 0/53/8 since picking up TG would eliminate the ability to take Impale/Deep Wounds

I have a sneaking suspicion that if TG stays at it's current state it would be a DPS loss to spec into it. With people talking about it hardly being competitive at 80 with that level gear I'm doubtful as a 70 it will be of much use.


As to Puncture.... I think the usefulness of this talent will be totally based on rage generation. If people are able to saving 3 rage on a devastate is meaningless if we don't have rage issues. Those are 3 points much better spent elsewhere where you will see a static increase in DPS or tanking ability.

Damage/Dps wise at level 70, I was seeing considerably higher dps using a 2/51/8 spec compared to varations of the old 17/44/0 one-handed specs. Considering the huge rage generation with titans grip its easy to keep up a rotation and use heroic strike heavily, with the spec heroic strike was making up a huge part of the overall damage (which i didnt expect with 2 handers, but im talking 30%+ of total damage).

Its likely that as soon as impale is available (through leveling) people will spec out of incite and go further into arms, to eventually get the 2handed weapon specialization. After playing around with the new specs i honestly dont see much space for a one handed fury warrior, while the dps isnt bad its just trailing a fair bit behind titans grip, and that seems to be the general opinion of the warriors i have spoken to who have played with the new talents. I'm not the type of person who will sit down and work out the math around it, however i am the type of person who will sit there with notepad open, a stop watch and recount running, and i did a lot of 20 minute combat tests on the level 70 dummies, with titans grip continuously outperforming other specs, if only by a small margin in some cases(Not done enough testing on arms, still havent decided whether i like battle stance or berserker more, though i'm leaning towards the latter, battlestance is very GCD heavy).

That said, i havent tried it all above level 70, but i do think the general idea will be, that if you have decent 2handed weapons titans grip is probably the way forward for fury warriors.

I really wish people would stop saying this. Some guy started the rumor and everyone else is just jumping on the bandwagon, so let's clear this up once and for all: TG gives you an additional 15% miss penalty on specials. In raiding gear we will have 12%+3% from precision which nullifies that. That leaves 9% miss chance on yellow damage. Let's do some napkin math:

Assume a 50% white/50% yellow split. It's a pretty low yellow damage portion because 2h's will hit harder with autoattack and I doubt WW alone is going to do much of a difference.
That means you are losing 9% on half your damage = 4.5% DPS loss compared to if you were special hit capped. Add the "missed" yellow crits on top with an assumed 40% crit chance for another ~3.6% DPS loss (remember, two-roll system for specials).

Now is dual wielding 2h's going to make up for that? S4 1h's have 108 DPS and S4 2h's have 140 DPS. That's 30% more DPS per weapon alone and that's not even including the better item stats on 2h's.
So yeah, TG is not a DPS decrease. It's a DPS increase.

Battle rez and innervate. Don't be fooled by thinking just because there are overlapping buffs that classes still don't bring unique buffs. What other class gives battle rez, innervate, blessing of kings, judgement of wisdom/light, etc. I could go on but you get the point. Also another point that was brought up: why bring a warrior when you can bring a class that does just as much dps but can either bring a unique buff or has 10x the survivability? Rogues can cloak, sprint, vanish while all we do is take 10% more damage.

The 1/5 imp demo shout is a fair point, as well as BoMight/battleshout crossover. Improved Might is (so I'm told, at least) a tempting talent for Holy Paladins. Meaning they'll be giving 30 min improved battle shout, leaving your dps warrior to potentially pick up commanding presence to keep up improved commanding shout. There aren't alot of great alternatives in the early parts of the tree (cleave, piercing howl, blood craze, UW).

Keep in mind that I believe that Unending Fury (the 46-50 fury talent) is being switched to a 10% damage bonus on those abilities rather than a rage reduction, so I'm not certain that 50+ fury and incite wouldn't be better even with one handers - should at least be close.

I totally agree with you about TG is DPS increase, at least for 3.02 .


On PTR with 8/8 T6(it's my offspec, so i don't really have good non-set) MS-Slam-Rend-OP spec give me around 2000 DPS on Testing dummy lv70
With that same gear and DW 2 Blade of Habringer (150 badges Polearm) i do around 2300DPS on testing dummy with 0/53/8
And 1H Fury 16/45 spec giving me about 1900~2000 DPS.

So... yes, Titant Grip is like 10% DPS increase just for 1 point talent. And i have about 14% total hit, it's no where near the hit needed for -15% penalty and -5% from misses VS lv70 mob.

TG is a dps increase yes, but it REALLY bugs me when people say this:

That base weapon damage is such a small small portion of your dps at higher gear levels. The majority of the benefit of the 2h weapons doesn't come from the paltry 32 dps you get at high AP levels. That 32 dps from base weapon damage will be 32 dps at all levels, it's never a 30% dps increase unless you have 0 AP. The majority of that benefit is really coming from the difference in weapon speed and thus instant damage (or non-normalized damage via Slam). Whirlwind has a cooldown and thus there are only so many times you can use it per fight. Slower, heavier hitting weapons will generate more Whirlwind damage over the same amount of time, there's no two ways about it.

Base weapon damage has little impact on your final dps:

At 1400 AP you gain 100 dps from AP. Add in base weapon damage and you get 208 dps with a 1h.
At the same AP with a 2h weapon you STILL get 100 dps from AP and you now get 240 dps with a 2h.
You don't get 30% more dps from 2h base weapon damage. That extra chunk of dps is coming from the instants.

Assume you have 6000 AP raid buffed (which according to current consumables + raid gear is within the realm of possibility). That's roughly 429 dps from AP (rounded). Now add the 140 dps from the 2h and you get 569 dps. 32 dps from 569 is a 5.6% dps increase. Nowhere close to 30%.

The dps increase gained from higher normalization values however is much higher. Whirlwind normalized at 2.4 (1h) vs Whirlwind normalized at 3.3 (2h) is going to be a 37.5% increase, not including the higher base damage. It should be roughly a 43.1% increase in Whirlwind damage, with that being reduced by the hit penalty to something like:

15% hit from gear + talents, 9% miss. 40% crit.

91-100 -> miss
0-91 -> hit

of hits:

36.4-100 -> hit
0-36.4 -> crit

That's a direct 9% reduction, and an additional 3.6% indirect reduction because of the two-roll system. so 12.6% reduction out of 43.1% is going to be a 30.5% total increase in Whirlwind damage by using TG. Where Whirlwind used to be about 8-10% of our dps, it should now be closer to 10.5-13%.

Like I said though, TG is a dps increase, a relatively substantial one even with the counter-balance. The only way that it actually reduces our dps is if you only consider Bloodthirst dps. Our Bloodthirst dps will go down a small amount because the hit penalty and indirect crit penalty affect Bloodthirst more than the added stats from a second weapon.

Edit: So funny enough, I'm doing some napkin math about overall dps with a TG spec and when you think about it, the new Unending Fury more or less completely negates the TG hit penalty with 14% hit (disregarding Heroic Strike for now since it's affected by TG but not UF). With top notch Naxx raiding gear, consumables and buffs/debuffs I came out at about 18% hit. So the Unending Fury talent now more than makes up for the damage reduction on BT/WW/Slam, and the excess damage gained via UF goes a long way to making up for the penalty on HS. Anyway, long story short is the new Unending Fury seems to basically be what many people were suggesting: remove the TG penalty at a cost of 5 talent points, making TG effectively 6 talent points, and therefore about 2% dps per point.

Good post and helpful numbers, Voxx, thanks. I do have one nit to pick though:

While this statement is, of course, true, two-handed weapon damage _does_ scale better than one-handed weapon damage; it's not the same at all gear levels. At Kara level, TG would be a ~26.5 weapon dps increase (compare Fool's Bane to Despair), while at the top of the gear levels, it's a 34.3 weapon dps increase (compare Hand of the Deceiver to Apolyon). So what those people should be saying is "In addition to the superior stats on two-handers, you get like 8 more weapon dps over 50 ilvls and three tiers of raiding!" Or you could go the easy way and just say it's like getting weapons three tiers ahead of your current ones. :P

As for TG spec, i find that when both WW and BT close to finish it CD. Pior WW over BT will give me better DPS even when i use 4P T6 bonus.

I don't have a pair of Warglaive to test, but 2k DPS for 1H Fury and 2.3k DPS for Titan Grip spec. I really wonder if Warglaive 2 set bonus can make up the 300 DPS different. The haste proc and Extra AP VS Demon .

And can anyone confirm/deny about this. I find that En-Shammy with 2/2 Imp WF actually giving us more than 20% Haste. To me, it's look like 23 or 24% Haste .
My math for haste and weapon speed on my Gear is fine with En-Shammy that 0/2 WF that giving 16% haste.

What about second 2H enchant - did some1 do some math with Savagery and Mongoose?

I see a lot of people still spec 5/5 in Shield Specialization and I'm wondering why. I'd much rather spec Improved Thunderclap and Bloodrage and save the talent points in Shield Spec for other talents.

Shield Specialization is a far, far worse deal in terms of ratings budget than Deflection, Anticipation and Cruelty and on top of block rating doesn't have the diminishing returns effect of dodge and parry rating, so you can gear for it and make up the difference.

On live I've always wanted to spec out of Shield Specialization, but I couldn't because of Improved Shield Block. I'll gladly take the chance now.

One could argue that 2 points in Shield Spec is better than 2 in Impr Bloodrage, but I really like the ability to do a Shield Slam or Thunderclap as the opening move of a pull. That has a benefit on the smoothness of a run (5/10 man at least) far outweighing the last 0.x% in optimizing you single target tanking IMO. And the extra rage isn't so hot anymore either.

With that in mind currently I'm thinking about the following levelling build
Level 70 Prot Leveling Build

I skipped Puncture because with some playing around with SSO dailies on the PTR I found I didn't use Devastate all that much and I didn't have any problems with rage anyway. Also for doing instances during levelling I expect Devastate to be pretty low on priority too with at least Thunderclap taking up a spot in the rotation and often other skills too. I picked Improved Charge because it's used every cooldown with Warbringer while grinding/questing, giving more rage than Puncture in that situation and giving it when you need it the most.

Up to level 80 I'd pick up Cruelty, Iron Will and Impale. Although I'm waiting for the talents to stabilize and some good spreadsheets to come out to see whether Impale will really be worth it.

Yeah, that's what I get in my calculations too, the UF change pretty much negates the hit penalty on BT, WW and Slam. Only thing that still suffers is Heroic strikes which are less useful than before (although if you have Incite at lvl 70, that more or less negates the hit penalty). In my opinion TG builds look about ready to be shipped, looking forward to try it in real raiding in a couple of weeks (Illidan has to die before WoTLK).

edit: Thanks for the numbers on weapon damage. The higher weapon damage of twohanders makes for a white dps increase of up to 30% (30% being the 0 AP limit), nothing more nothing less. The weapon damage grows less important as you gain more AP, but this is the same for both 1h and 2h weapons.

There is absolutely no point in Bloodrage anymore apart from prebuffing shouts. Before we had to use it to slightly mitigate avoidance streaks, now we can just charge with Wrathbringer (so no more fumbled charges just because you got in combat one second before you would have gotten a charge off, and that's all in Defensive stance). Bosses don't crush so even prebuffing Shield Block is not needed anymore (and if you wanted to, you still can since it costs no rage). That's why Imp BR is pretty much useless for a tanking spec (it's better for PvP I guess, but ironically there it just doesn't give enough rage to matter much).

Shield Spec on the other hand offers mitigation and some small amount of rage every block. Make no mistake about, blocking 5% more when your BV is up there in 2000+ regions is no trivial amount of mitigation.

Having an extra 3% chance to block (I'd spec 2/5 Block Spec) doesn't sound too good for me, especially @ 70, where my BV won't go much over 1k (if it gets to that).

It won't help Damage Shield much - and Imp Def Stance lasts long enough that an extra 3% chance to proc it won't matter.

Of course, if I end up seeing I might need the extra block and definitely not need the extra threat, I will respec back into it, but..

Damage Shield - Spell - World of Warcraft It occurs on any melee hit *or* block. It still only increases mitigation.

I'll be grabbing it because revenge is far and away my highest damaging ability (though I haven't done the math on scaling - if I'm not wearing Str. heavy gear, then I imagine Shield Slam will start to pull ahead). Regardless, without the "I want to revenge" version of shield block, it won't always be lit up/on cooldown as was the case before.

Heh Bregonn, I posted the same thing almost word for word a week or so ago. Wasn't all that well-received then either.

Call me a skeptic but I just don't see Charge serving all our pulling needs. Too often you end up pulling more mobs than you intended and wiping the group. So when you get to a tricky pull what do you do? I'd rather have extra rage on every pull.

And yeah we'll have more block val, that's why block rating is about 8x more valuable than it used to be. But when you're buying 1% at the same price as dodge/parry (anticipation/deflection), it's still much much worse.

Personally I'm going to be skipping it for lvl 70 and picking it up at 80, since I expect threat to be easy, at least for a while, and there aren't other survival talents to get. But if threat turns out to be an issue, those will be the first 5 points to drop.

I don't really understand the problem:

Heroic Throw/Range pull the caster then back up a little and charge into the pack when they are sufficiently away from the next pack and TC.