The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The Furious Ones

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more with The Care and Feeding of Warriors, or close the wall up with the dead of the other faction. We hate those guys! Matthew Rossi plays warriors of several races, which often leads to the cognitive dissonance of a night elf trying to take Stormpike Graveyard. It seems when the blast of war blows in his ears he cannot tell a tauren from a draenei.

The problem with playing a warrior, and also one of the most satisifying aspects of the class, is that it can do three things exceedingly well. We can PvP. Some will say we can PvP too well, of course, but then again everyone thinks everyone else is overpowered in PvP... witness how Warlocks think fear has been nerfed to hell while everyone else thinks fear is overpowered. Except priests, who think they're the ones who get nerfed when locks pwn everyone. (I still remember when warriors got nerfed over fear. Ah, everyone was surprised in AQ20 when the warriors couldn't fear everyone anymore.) We can tank. Whatever you think about other tanks and their advantages, it cannot be denied that the single best tank for a boss fight is a warrior and that a protection specced warrior can tank any instance in the game hands down. We have the best itemization for tanking, we have some of the best mitigation on our gear and some of the best talents for getting and keeping aggro and some of the best moves for pushing our defense and heading for uncrushability. And we can DPS, of course. With the right gear and spec, a warrior is capable of rather impressive damage and can be entrusted with roles like solo killing all of the adds in Black Morass. In fact, yesterday I respecced from protection to fury/arms just so that I could help some guildies get their Karazan keys in three back to back to back Black Morass runs. Some nice stuff finally dropped, too.

But that's also the rub for the warrior. Are we powerful? Yes, we're powerful, in our limited ways. Are we flexible? After a fashion we're flexible. But the key to our power and flexibility lies outside our gear and in the hands of something else. We have to respec to unlock our flexibility. You cannot, as a warrior, switch from tanking gear to DPS gear if you're specced full protection and expect to really do any significant damage. You simply won't have the tools you need to increase your AP, throw out instants and otherwise become a whirling wall of steel that hews your enemies down. A prot spec warrior is a tank, plain and simple, and one without much of a cannon on board. A fury specced warrior is a mobile gun, all damage and not much survivability against a boss or multiple elites. Arms is a baseline, a light tank with a decent burst weapon. You have to play with the talents if you're going to get the most out of your warrior, and that costs. I won't lie to you, if you want to go between dedicated tanking and PvPing, you may have to respec twice a week, going prot for your guild runs and going arms/fury for Arena and BG's. And if you're like me, and are in a guild where there's another excellent warrior who is more geared for tanking? (Hi Vish!) A guild where there's a feral druid who also wants in on the tanking? (Hi Vash!)

Well, then sometimes you're going to be asked to come along on an instance run as pure DPS. Sometimes people will ask you to burn down the adds in Black Morass, or to help with offtanking and DPS in Shattered Halls, or to come along on a Slabs run because there's five people on and you're one of them. And that means respeccing fury, my friends. Say hello to the talent trainer. Bring 50 gold.

So let's talk about fury DPS. It's conditional on spec, of course. I'm still not comfortable with my default fury spec, it's bursty as hell. I sometimes spec 31 arms/ 30 fury or 41 arms/ 20 fury to try and PvP and DPS in one spec, but lately I'm trying out a more heavily fury oriented spec for jobs like slaughtering dragonkin and whelps in BM and unleashing devastation on the six pulls in Slabs. If you look at the spec you can see where I accidentally spent a point in protection on Imp Bloodrage. Hey, it's fifty gold to respec, I'll live with it, it's not the worst talent in the universe. I really considered going for fury 2h dps with a slam build, and if I do any serious raiding in Kara or Gruul with this build I will definitely rethink it, but for now my main DPS seems to be towards a dual wield model. (This changes from run to run, and sometimes I can't sing the praises of 2h fury enough.) I'm sure warriors with more experience in raid DPS in the expansion can show you where my build sucks, besides that one point in protection. But it works for me.

Fury started off when the game went live as the red headed stepchild of the warrior trees. No one liked it, no one wanted to spec in it. It gained viability with the changes to Bloodthirst and the synergy between Enrage and Flurry. Making BT an instant attack based on AP freed it from being compared to the big Arms talent, Mortal Strike, and the two passive abilities of the tree (no one 'pops' enrage, it comes up when you are crit, while flurry procs when you crit someone else) moved to center stage. A fury warrior found himself hoping he'd get crit and could crit in return to help jack up his attack speed and damage, some achieving some truly astounding levels of damage. (So much so that the abilities have been nerfed several times and yet are still good.) Right now, with items like the Dragonspine Trophy and the Abacus of Violent Odds in game a warrior can maximize his flurry damage even more with the addition of the haste mechanic.

I said before that fury DPS is conditional on spec, but it's even more conditional on gear. In fact, fury as a PvE dps spec may be even more dependent on gear than even main tanking is. You need strength for attack power. You need stamina to stay up and deliver the damage. You need to minimize the chance of missing when dual wielding, so you need +hit. (This is less important if you're using a slam build with a big 2h.) And finally, you need to crit, as often as you can, to proc flurry and increase your attack speed. You'll also want as much haste rating as you can get. That's not an easy shopping list to satisfy before you start heroics and raiding, and if you're going fury before you fully have the gear for it, you can expect less from the build. Don't believe the hype. Speccing fury does not instantly catapult you to the top of the DPS charts. Precision only gives warriors a +3% chance to hit, and if you're dual wielding you'll need more. How much more? Well, there's a flat 5 percent chance you'll miss and dual wielding adds 19%, that's 24% chance to miss. Missing means no damage, no chance to proc flurry, and for those with enough points spent in fury no chance to trigger Rampage for a healthy dose of AP. If you don't want to miss, you'll need +25% to hit. It takes 15.8 hit rating at level 70 to get 1% to hit, meaning you'll need about 395 hit rating if you don't have precision, and 348 hit rating if you do. That's if you want to minimize misses as much as is possible, of course. And that is not terribly easy to find. A heroic ramparts run will get you this, and the Doomplate set has some hit rating on it, but outside of endgame raiding I think you'll have a hard time finding that much hit rating. If you're both an armorsmith and an engineer you could craft Bulwark of Kings and Furious Gizmatic Goggles, but in general I think you'll be missing some attacks when you start out.

However, as you go further and further towards Black Temple, there is a good amount of +hit on DPS set gear and other drops. So if you're raiding or doing Arenas you can get a decent hit rating. This is the secret to how those guys can do the damage they do - they don't miss as much. The gear is out there... there's a nice crafted set whose plans drop in Black Temple with +hit and haste for the fury warrior. But never think you're going to roll into instances in quest greens and just destroy the damage meters. Fury requires the gear.

Fury is, ultimately, the dedicated PvE DPS tree. Just as a dedicated main tank is geared and specced to optimize his ability to tank, a warrior who wants to deal out damage needs to dedicate himself to it if he wants to excel. Now, with melee haste, sufficient hit and crit, the right mix of strength and stam and experience a warrior can be a DPS monster, since rage lends itself very nicely to long fights and we have Execute when the bosses dip below 20% health. I do very nice damage even in my blues with my minimal hit rating, and as I gear up for it I expect to see more damage, but I'm not inclined nor do I really have the luxury to really dedicate myself to it: I'm asked to perform too many other roles. A fury DPS warrior is just as specialized and dedicated as a main tank, especially if he or she's a good one. She may well be near the top of the DPS charts, but to get there, she had to specialize to a great extent. You will not see this dedicated a player tanking very much, as the idea that they will have the DKP to take tanking gear until after everyone else has it is laughable (there are always exceptions, mind you) and trying to tank in gear without defense or block is, well, painful.

Heck, I didn't even mention aggro, did I? Well, Battle and Berserker stance both have a small aggro reduction built in. And there are a few pieces of gear a warrior can get with threat reduction, and there are some cloaks... and that's about it. Pull agg and you're a smear and the raid can wipe. Blessing of Salvation? Please? Can a warrior get Salv over here? Why are you laughing at me, mister Pally?

I know I'm missing a lot of the nuances of fury... there's just not enough time or room to go into them all. Therefore, I once again turn to you and the comments to help flesh out these bare bones. Once more unto the breach, dear commenters, once more.

Edited to add: Check out this link, posted in the comments by rmcdonough50, for a better overview of threat and +hit for fury warriors. The consensus seems to be that I'm weighting too heavily towards +hit and you really only need enough to ensure that your specials will hit.