DPS Warrior Specs

[Concillian]

I updated for the helm... it made a pretty huge difference, for a single piece of gear, with +20-30 DPS

That doesn't make the decision any easier. I kind of wanted to stay arms, and previous gearing comparisons showing little damage difference the decision was easy. With this kind of specialized gearing showing growing differences, it's tougher to say definitively that arms is the way to go.

For your spec, I chose axe and switch the weapon to the blacksmithing 1H axe. This helps twofold... lots more rage through crits and it increases the "flurry factor"

20% -- 550 / 670
30% -- 482 / 587
40% -- 413 / 503

If I do battle stance instead, and assume 5% dodge rate (I had assumed that already, but now if I do overpowers on 65% of these dodges... to accoutn for some timing issues with bloodthirst), then DPS is actually higher than zerker:

20% -- 559 / 676
30% -- 489 / 591
40% -- 419 / 507

It also has the most rage of any of the other builds, with over 3 rage per second unused in my analysis, this is slightly ahead of the pure Fury build in terms of rage... but Fury needs to use slightly less than 1 rage per second on keeping rampage up, and this build doesn't. I moved 2 points from DW spec to imp. slam for using the rage, so the analysis assumes 3/5 DW spec. This build is a little behind the Fury build because of the rage-to-damage conversion... this is where the bottom part of the Fury tree really shines. Perhaps the biggest advantage of the build for me is that it has a strong axe option, so I could go axesmith and make both axes, then use the 1H if I went DW and the 2H for full arms, but then I'd also have to take primal nethers to upgrade both if I wanted to stay current, and that wouldn't be fair at all to other crafters.

I have a tendency to believe that this build may actually be better given the chance to take advantage of overpower opportunities, as well as being able to re-apply thunderclap a LOT easier than a full fury build. It does have the rather severe disadvatage of 0/3 in tactical mastery, but I may try it out anyway. This is a spec I overlooked, thanks for bringing it up.

Sweeping is useful in 5-mans but rarely in raids. It's also REALLY nice for destroying old instances when helping someone with a new toon.

Modeling mace spec proc, it ends up being VERY close to the rage gained by UW or anger management... that is about 0.33 rage per second, assuming a WF totem is around so you are using a proc-able attack every ~1.7 seconds.

Also, improved Heroic strike is pretty junky now. They buffed Improved Thunderclap so much, that you are better off dumping the rage through thunderclap and not losing the rage on the next hit. Counterintuitive, but true. 12 rage + rage on the hit for 208 damage or 16 rage with no loss for 246 damage. for these weapons and this high AP you're looking at about 10 rage per hit, so heroic strike is really looking trashy.

Compare improved slam which is weapon damage + X for a partial loss in white swing due to delaying the white swing. you only lose say ~1/2 a swing (or less, depends on how good your timing is, it's not an easy thing to time if WF totem is constantly resetting your white swings) instead of the full swing from HS, which makes the overall damage gain and rage loss significantly better.

Kind of amazing, but they changed the paradigms dramatically. I'm pretty confident that improved slam is the 2nd best way to add damage for DW. WW may be right up with it, but I'm not 100% on that. But yeah, Tclap and slam are now better than HS... definite paradigm shift.