Single-Minded-Fury
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The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Single-Minded Fury redux
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. In my first draft, I started this article off with a detailed explanation of what my main problems with Single-Minded Fury are. I still want to talk about those. But first, I want to say this about the talent. It's crazy-fun. I've been raiding, Raid Findering and 5-manning with it all week, and frankly I love how smooth the rage generation is. If you ever played fury back in The Burning Crusade or even vanilla, before TG was a gleam in a designer's eye, SMF will be familiar and yet different to you. What's changed? Well, you don't use Whirlwind as your second attack anymore; it's purely a trash ability now. Raging Blow and Bloodsurge instant-cast Slams give you more to do but take the concept of rotation and shake it up, meaning that you're watching for procs more than ever. Colossus Smash gives you a very-long-cooldown ability that you're always going to prioritize. But for all those changes, the talent is still you dual-wielding smaller, faster weapons. If you were the fury warrior with the Vanir's Fists in late BC, you'll recognize what this talent does for fury. If you leveled a fury warrior in Cata, it's exactly how levels 1 through 68 went. It's a fairly simple concept to grasp. You're not the warrior crushing everything in his path with raw power, and you're not the one using discipline and weapon control to make precise strikes, either. No, you're the one with speed and relentless assault over finesse.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: A tale of two furies
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. Well, all we've heard from the PTR for warriors is deafening silence. As I said before, my general distrust of patches has been fully awakened with patch 4.2's complete lack of enormous nerfs. The past week has been pretty active for me. While every boss in every raid who can drop shoulder armor of any kind has endlessly refused to, Cho'gall finally coughed up my axe, so I'm happy about that. I'm also working to gear up my other worgen warrior (he's pretty solidly ilevel 356 by now) and have started the climb on my tauren warrior. I just missed ol' hornhead so much that I'm willing to put up with Warchief NoNeck. I've also been running parse after parse on both my 85 warriors, in both SMF and TG specs and various gear sets -- literally dozens of parses. Why? Because I had a nagging voice in the back of my head after I recently argued that hit now totally overshadows mastery as a fury DPS stat. I want some Nutter Butter cookies, the voice whispered. Even though they don't sell those up here in Canada, I want them. Thankfully, after I got it some lesser cookies, it shut up about that and instead insisted I test my assertions out for myself. The results kind of surprised me.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Cultivating single-minded fury
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host. I tend to fill whatever role our raid needs, from raid leading to tanking to DPSing. As a result, I don't tend to be able to get very comfortable in any one role right now at this point in the expansion's early life cycle. In part, this is why I spent the last four columns talking about tanking -- because frankly, I can tank in my sleep in a high wind on a greased pole in the middle of a rhino stampede. DPSing as a warrior has always taken more work for me. One of the reasons is that I tend towards fairly heterodox ideas when it comes to warrior DPS, and the other reason is because in the back of my head, that tanking voice is always screaming at me to watch my threat. Seriously, that guy will not shut up about threat. He's always in there, yelling at me every time I start to get comfortable as DPS. It has taken me the past several months to simply get to a place as a DPS warrior where I feel comfortable and able to get in there and cut loose and trust the tanks to keep aggro. That's their job. My job is to kill things.
