Weapons for a fury warrior

[Meshuggah]

How do I chose weapons for my fury warrior alt? What speeds do I want, what stats do I want, and why?

The way I see it so far is that
- I want AP, so +str or +AP is good for me in either hand
- Slow weapon in main hand is nice for WW, fast MH weapon is nice for more crits..
- Damage output from offhand is pretty small, so go for a really fast weapon (for more crits) and get the best stats you can get off of it..
- Weapon max dmg isn't important other than for WW and MS...

Am I wrong here?

My situation is that I'll probably not see instances like MC, ZG, AQ in a while as I'm still playing my main in there, so I'm pretty much stuck with what the outside world has got to offer.
As of now, I'm sticking with my Frostbite with +15str enchant on it, and trying to get a bonescraper from Baron Rivendare (1.4 speed, +30AP). Other offhands I have availible are Serathil, Mirah's Song and Boneslicing Hatchet. Another offhand I could go for is Distracting Dagger.. (1.5 speed, +6 daggers). I also have the option to buy a Lobotmizer, but I'm not sure that's what I need.

As of now, I have around 900AP without BS, +10%tohit and ~22% crit in zerk.

So.. What weapons am I looking for, and why? aaaand.. what enchants? +15str? +15agi? Crusader?

Any thoughts appreciated.

[TheDragoon]

I've seen lots of questions about Fury Warrior weapons and my response is usually "Get the best one-handed weapons you can and use them." Frankly, trying to pick a specific weapon for a Fury Warrior always seemed like a good way to get frustrated. My approach has always been to use whatever good weapons dropped into my lap. Originally, this was Quel'Serrar and the Axe that Ras Frostwhisper drops. More recently it is Crul'shorukh, Edge of Chaos and Ancient Qiraji Ripper. In my experience, I've never really had a situation where it wasn't blatently obvious which weapons I should use. :P

That said, here are some things that I would use to evaluate weapons if I got 2 weapons that were very similar:

Speed
Weapon speed is interesting. Slower weapons (in your main hand) hit harder on cleaves and whirlwinds so if you're in areas where you're doing a lot of cleaving, it is usually best to put the slower weapon in your main hand. Faster weapons, in general, give you more rage. The other interesting thing to think about is placement of weapons. Your mainhand weapon will hit for more damage than your off-hand weapon, generally, because the off-hand has a damage reduction on it, *even if the main hand weapon is faster*. Therefore, for single target DPS I like to use is a slower off-hand weapon and a faster main hand weapon. This means that when I get a crit and so end up with 3 attacks that are affected by Flurry, more often than not 2 of them will be my harder-hitting main hand. This means that your main hand is effectively getting a higher damage boost than the off-hand, from Flurry, so you get more bonus damage from the Flurry procs.

Stats
Another thing to look at in weapon choice is stats. Off-hand weapons can often get away with being lower DPS if they have other good bonuses like +hit% or +crit%. Those numbesr affect all damage from both hands so it can often make a very large difference in overall damage output. The best way to evalute this is to use some form of damage meter. If you are generally putting out 200 DPS, then +1% crit will give you about 2 DPS (a little more since flurry would go off more often). If you are putting out 400 DPS, +1% crit is going to give you about 4 DPS. This is why I used Brutality Blade for so long (and eventually replaced it with the very similar Qiraji Ripper).

Crit Gear
Critical hits are very important to a fury warrior. Each crit not only doubles the damage of that strike, but adds quite a bit of damage to subsequent white hits. This is huge as far as damage output and rage generation is concerned. However, there comes a point where +crit% items don't add as much damage because you are in an almost-constant state of flurry. For me, this has happened around 25% chance to crit in battle stance. Once I got there I stopped worrying about it as much and focused on loading up on stamina and attack power gear.

Hit Gear
+hit% gear is very nice to have as a Fury Warrior. When I used to have very little hit gear I remember going through times where I would miss 5 or 6 times in a row. This would often make a fight go from easy to very difficult when soloing or just completely nerf damage output when playing as DPS. Also remember that while white hits have a base miss rate of 24%, specials use a 5% base miss rate. Therefore, once you get past that the base miss rate for special attacks (5% vs. level 60 mob, 8% vs. level 63) you won't get as much of a damage boost from +hit% gear. Since white damage usually accounts for 50% of a fury warrior's damage, this means that once you get past that cap you only get about half as much damage for each additional +hit%.

Finally, damage isn't everything. I am a stamina hog on my warrior because it helps make it easier to heal me when I get aggro. As my gear has gone from blue -> purple items, the biggest boosts I've seen have been to my attack power and my life total. My warrior has lots of +stamina and +life enchantments on her DPS gear to try and even that out. She currently has 4850 life (unbuffed), 997 AP (without battle shout) and 25.6% crit (in battle stance). I could swap some of the life enchantments out for strength (for more AP) but I prefer to be more well-rounded.

[Meshuggah]

Interesiting thought to use a slow offhand, and a faster main hand to have 2 of the flurry hits with the main hand....

Nice and thorough post! Thank you.

[ima_nerd]

Dal'Rend's. All the way. The stats are amazing, the DPS is about the highest you can get in blues and they look cool:)The drop rate is an issue. I got lucky and got both swords to drop each time on two successive Rend kills. Yes, 2 of each sword on 2 kills. Thank God they were guild runs so myself and the other Warrior each got them (one Rogue already had them and the other was hardcore into daggers) and not a Hunter:ph34r:As for enchants, I would go with dual Crusader. They can proc at the same time (they stack) and you get X procs per minute for each enchant.

All those weapons you listed are good weapons. Fury has the unique trait of the type of weapon really not mattering a damn. You might squeeze out an extra .2% dps by using weapon A with the .3 second faster swing time than weapon B but in the end ... use what has the best stats and DPS. I swapped between a Barborous Blade and my Dal'Rend's for a change in pace without much of a damage loss. Of course, dual wielding brings Unbridled Wrath with it making it overall better than a two-hander when the weapons available are comprable.

My Warrior in all blues ended up with 1200 AP self buffed and 4,000 life or so unbuffed while wearing damage gear. I wish I could have raided some with him to compete with our equally pimped out (in blues) Rogue for top damage spot:D

[Xanthix]

Anyone think it's possible to be successful as a fury warrior with a 2-hander? If so, what do you think would be most important for the weapon - speed, stats, max damage?

[Icebird]

Absolutely Xanthix. Just try one of the Public Test Realm Askhandi warriors with a Flurry build and see how fun it is. A couple of our guild warriors were 2-handed fury for a while, and routinely appeared near the top of the damage charts.

I think I'd just go for most damage. Slow weapons become a lot less slow when Flurry procs.

If you decide to specialize in one or the other, it may influence your talent choices. You can skip the points in Dual Wield Specialization and pick up stuff like Improved Execute and Improved Intercept instead (not that a dual wielder would necessarily skip those...).

In the arms tree, the Rend->Deep Wounds->Impale line is better for 2-handers, while Improved Heroic Strike->Improved Charge->Improved Overpower is a better line for dual wielders.

(When dual wielding, Deep Wounds damage will be less, and more likely to to overwritten before it runs its full course. Heroic Strike is a cheap rage dump while waiting for the Bloodthirst/Whirlwind cooldowns).

Just my two cents,
Chris

[TheDragoon]

Anyone think it's possible to be successful as a fury warrior with a 2-hander? If so, what do you think would be most important for the weapon - speed, stats, max damage?

This is essentially what is known as a "2-handed Fury" build. If you do a search or check the WoW Warrior forum you'll be able to find more info on this. But basically the idea is to make use of having a high AP (using the +str and +ap bonuses on the big 2-handers) to make bloodthirst and whirlwind more powerful. The big advantage of a 2-handed Fury build is what when you use whirlwind you'll be hitting for 1000's of damage rather than 100's of damage, like you do with a standard dual wielding Fury build. Cleave is similarly crazy for this sort of build.

Since they made AP bonuses for whirlwind standardized, weapon speed doesn't mean as much for this. In general, slower will mean bigger whirlwind hits while faster means more rage via Unbridled Wrath. It's important to note that Flurry doesn't prefer one weapon speed over another(you'll get flurry more with faster weapons but it won't have as much of an effect) so the only thing that weapon speed affects is the base weapon damage on the weapon for instant attacks. Again, I think you could use just about anything so long as it's a good weapon, though I'd probably opt for a slower weapon, if given a choice.

[Concillian]

2H fury has two additional bonuses:

1) the need for +% hit is significantly reduced, and that is a godsend in blue / early purple level gearing

2) you get the most from enchant procs (Crusader primarily, but Lifesteal or Fiery work too)

2H weapons are slowest, and the way an enchant proc works is on a proc per unit time average, then applies a % to the weapon. say you have a fast weapon with 5% chance or a slower weapon with 10% chance. Each additional attack has a significantly higher chance of triggering the proc with the slower weapon. This further synergizes with the tendency to prefer WW as a 2nd rage dump (after bloodthirst) for 2H fury vs. heroic strike or cleave for DW. Since WW is an instant it provides an extra chance to proc.

Personally I think TUF (The Unstoppable Force) is the weapon of choice.

For dual wield I think the only pair that can potentially measure up is persuader + Lobotomizer, and persuader costs a ton in mats to make, and will probably also involve a stiff crafting fee since the neither the plans nor master hammersmiths are terribly common.

Because of flurry, I'd definitely choose crusader for the main hand or a 2H weapon. Off hand is a bit of a toss up between 15 STR or a 2nd crusader.

For raiding, I think the combination of Lobotomizer + distracting dagger is one of the better starting combinations due to the rareness of +weapon skill stats. But it doesn't sound like you'll be raiding with your set, so this would not likely be preferrable.

As equipment scales, the stacking of LOTS of % hit, AP, DW spec and very high DPS weapons eventually bring Dual Wield back into preference, but at pre-raid level gearing, I think 2H fury is probably overall superior DPS, especially when taking into account the current itemization. If Dal'rend's set was epic and available it would be a strong competitor. But you have to give up 6 DPS on your main hand vs. Lobo to get the great stats for a dual wielder, and for 2H TUF is just sitting there with even better stats than the Dal'rend set AND it has the base DPS of an epic.

Assuming you have a reasonable amount of gold (~200g, enough to buy TUF and respec), and it seems you are exalted with AV, I'd transfer 2 copies of your current warrior to the test realms and spec one for DW and one for 2H fury. Use Lobo + Revered dagger on one and TUF on the other. Kill stuff. This way you can compare damage with your current gear. There will either be an obvious difference or the difference will be too small to worry about, in which case you go by personal preference.

[TheDragoon]

2H fury has two additional bonuses:

1) the need for +% hit is significantly reduced, and that is a godsend in blue / early purple level gearing

This is the big advantage of a 2-handed fury build in terms of initially gearing up. Also, it is easier to get one good two-handed weapon than it is to get 2 good one-handed weapons.

2) you get the most from enchant procs (Crusader primarily, but Lifesteal or Fiery work too)

2H weapons are slowest, and the way an enchant proc works is on a proc per unit time average, then applies a % to the weapon. say you have a fast weapon with 5% chance or a slower weapon with 10% chance. Each additional attack has a significantly higher chance of triggering the proc with the slower weapon. This further synergizes with the tendency to prefer WW as a 2nd rage dump (after bloodthirst) for 2H fury vs. heroic strike or cleave for DW. Since WW is an instant it provides an extra chance to proc.

I don't quite agree with this. It is true that you will tend to get more procs per enchantment with a two-handed weapon vs. a one-handed weapon due to weapon speed but it is very questionable if this makes you "get the most" from it. Dual crusader procs are very nice and you can only get those while dual wielding. I have found dual crusader to get better and better the more +crit% gear you have since it scales up with flurry (more attacks gives more chance to proc crusader which means a greater chance to have them both up at once). :)

[Lok]

The slow/fast v. fast/slow question is really dependent upon your build. I am running 13 arms, 38 fury build now and I love overpower. Since overpower damage tracks your mainhand, this means I put my slow weapon there. I am running with Deathbringer (onyxia) and Ancient Hakkari Manslayer (ZG). Also I can cleave and WW for decent damage while dual wielding this way. Yellow damage does not suffer the DW penalty and therefore lands more readily and is a greater component of my damage with my 9% hit rig. Perhaps if I had a solid 13% hit rig things would be better. I have a fast offhand because that swings more and generated dodges which I capitalize on by overpowering.

If instead I had a really find fast mainhand weapon such as the Silithid claw, I would then probably respec to something like 8 arms, 43 fury and spend all of my time in zerk stance, never bothering to overpower, just cleaving and heroic striking stuff to death. I think again such a build's performance really tracks your +hit gear, and at 9% I would probably be a bit borderline.

[Ynir]

Spangles is beginning to acquire the heavy weapons and gear that make the Fury build effective. The game is changing for her. (I will paste in the url to her stats when ctprofile.net is working again.)

Here is a discussion on the ways & means of the end game DPS warrior that is thematic, rather than anecdotal ("... this seems to work for me ...").

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.h...=11601287&sid=1

Fury is not about the burst, it is about consistency.

yesss

I build my fight on a smooth rage ramp, and hate on-next attacks that cause deadband.

One main theme is doing damage while minimizing threat. To me, that is a subtle point in an instance where uber rogues are in an eternal pissing contest with each other, pulling aggro left & right.

I should worry? Tankers should be grateful that I remembered to switch out of defense to avoid accidental taunts.

Prot tankers should have defiance, eh? Besides, I usually don't start hitting things until long after they are nailed to the floor. And, I want a place on the hate table if the tank goes down.

My personal baseline for the Holy Trinity is 25% crit in Berserker, 1000AP unbuffed (that means without Battle Shout) and 10% +hit.

The author is somewhat out of my league, he talks about "getting TF to proc", and 10% +hit exists only on my wish list profile.

He doesn't seem afraid to let stamina drift downwards.

Now, what you may notice is that Stamina is not part of the Holy Trinity. Some of you will swear up and down that you need stamina. They're entitled to their opinion, but I happen to think differently. The tradeoff you make for more DPS is you take a hit in survivability. If you are doing your job properly (ie, you don't draw aggro and get yourself killed) the only damage you should be taking are from secondary sources, and most of those will not kill you outright even if you do only have 4k hp unbuffed.

Another degree of freedom (you can let an important stat float if you play skillfully enough.) How uber.

As for the crit/AP comparison, the tool I need is a mod that streams DPS vs. time to disk, annotated for procs. I know this is possible because I see the info I want floating into the air like soap bubbles when I use CST.

And a non-negative linear optimization mod that selects the combination of available gear to maximize DPS, so I don't have to spend hours fussing in the bank

PS. This is a bit off-topic since it refers to gear obtained in instances inaccessible to the originator of this thread. I didn't like it when others did that to me. All I can say is that the Fury build is rough sledding until you obtain T2 stuff in BWL. The improvement is sudden and dramatic, unusual in the incremental world of WoW.

[Artega]

Some sample 2H Fury builds for you via CTProfiles, including a suggested talent spec and gear. Note that these are made with PvP in mind (hence +STA enchants instead of +STR, as well as a weapon chain instead of the standard Crusader.) Also note that it includes pieces from the rank 10 PvP set and exalted items from the various battlegrounds; with the advent of cross-server BGs, neither of these are impossibly hard to attain, though they will require dedication (rank 10 items will, at any rate.) Might need to give up other computer games for a week or three if you want to get the rank 10 items. If you can't get the rank 10 items, I'd suggest replacing those pieces with Heroism items; I'd include some Heroism items in the setup due to superior stat spreads, but gaining a dozen STR or AGI isn't worth losing the 4-piece bonus (in terms of PvP, of course) if you ask me.

The profile I made up in a few minutes leaves you with this:

22.55% crit
900 AP
5490 HP
4518 Armor
+3% Chance to Hit

It strikes a good balance between damage and survivability, which is ideal for PvP. If you intend on doing only PvE (why would you want to if you can't raid?), you could easily sacrifice the STA enchants and such for additional STR, and you could start swapping in mail and even leather to gain more crit, hit, and AP, since you'd be very unlikely to be taking direct damage.

EDIT: Might be useful to actually link the profile. It's here: http://ctprofiles.net/2424558

[Meshuggah]

http://www.reloaded.se/roster/char.php?nam...&server=Outland

this is my most common PvP setup now that I'm farming AB rep. Silent Fang will get either +15str or even a crusader enchant. Wonderful weapon, wonderful proccrate.

I'd like to reach rank 10, but I'm not too sure that will ever happen. So the backup plan is to get the very last T0.5 quest done for that sweet chest, and then get to EX in AB for cloak and shoulders.


I've never tried to PvP with 5000+ HP, but even with only 4200, I feel I'm doing well. Mages are of course impossible (unless silent fang procs), but no other class feels impossible.

I recently went for zulian slicer / lobotomizer over Frostbite/Serathil, and at least it FEELS like I do more damage now, tho I'd really like to try that fast sword from the Baron in my offhand, to see what wpn speed amounts to..

Amyways... Warrior is a wonderful class to play. You have to be THERE to play it well, and use the right abilities at the right time.. Glad I'm done with AV which was pretty much Charge -> Piercing Howl til death -> Repeat

[Darian]

But basically the idea is to make use of having a high AP (using the +str and +ap bonuses on the big 2-handers) to make bloodthirst and whirlwind more powerful. The big advantage of a 2-handed Fury build is what when you use whirlwind you'll be hitting for 1000's of damage rather than 100's of damage, like you do with a standard dual wielding Fury build. Cleave is similarly crazy for this sort of build.

On a lark, I grabbed UTB off Razorgore one night when it was going to be disenchanted; although I'm still very much interested in getting my hands on a CTS or AQR for dual-wield purposes, I'm loving 2H fury, especially now that I've moved comfortably into the top 10 in a typical raid's DPS chart despite only having respecced Fury and started gathering DPS gear over the last couple of months. UTB is sort of the killer app for this, I think... perhaps even better than Ash'kandi, although someone with more number-crunching capability can answer that more definitively.

The only drawback is that building up the rage necessary to spam ww/cleave/bloodthirst can be painful, but if you play your cards right you can manage it.

[Artega]

PvPing with over 5400 base HP is actually quite fun, especially when you have over 7000 Armor and block for 115:)

I've definitely had fun with Silent Fang in the past, and it's definitely a great weapon, but I find that its scope is too narrow for me to use it too much. The proc is definitely a ton of fun, but it often procs when it wouldn't be very useful to begin with (e.g. the Mage has already burned Blink and/or Frost Nova, the Priest has already refreshed Shield+Renew, the Warlock has already hit me with Death Coil), and it seems only Paladins are going to be standing around long enough for me to reliably proc it on them, and Silencing a Paladin is somewhat pointless (since merely interrupting them is about the same) in my experience. I'd much rather have a better weapon in my main hand, with the weapon's speed dependant on how much burst I need (and how much I want to swap out to a two-hander for instants.)

For general Fury gearing, you're going to want to pick stats over procs and other such things. A recent example came up when a guildie had a shot at a Halberd of Smiting (which ended up going to an MS Warrior who was slightly behind him in DKP) while he was already using a TUF. While the Halberd's proc is just plain sick, the TUF's superior stats make it an overall better weapon for Fury, while the Halberd's proc (which will proc more often due to Mortal Strike) makes it a better MS weapon.

Essentially, the same thing goes for dual wielding; ideally you'll be swapping in a giant two-hander for instant attacks, so weapon speed shouldn't matter a great deal for either hand. If you don't want to play the weaponswapping game, though, I'd go with a slow mainhand and a fast offhand.

[TheDragoon]

The only drawback is that building up the rage necessary to spam ww/cleave/bloodthirst can be painful, but if you play your cards right you can manage it.

One interesting idea I had heard about, before, was to build up rage via dual wielding and then swap to a big weapon to whirlwind/slam off the rage for a big DPS increase. Obviously, this only works if you have decent one-handed weapons in addition to the big two-handed weapon, but I always thought it sounded like it might be fun to try, some day. :)

[Kevin]

One interesting idea I had heard about, before, was to build up rage via dual wielding and then swap to a big weapon to whirlwind/slam off the rage for a big DPS increase. Obviously, this only works if you have decent one-handed weapons in addition to the big two-handed weapon, but I always thought it sounded like it might be fun to try, some day. :)

This is what I do with Gnolack (prot spec now). One handers I use are a Quel and a Brutality Blade. The 2 hander is an untamed blade. Though I do still have an Eskhandar's, I need to test it on the rage building since that proc affects the main hand and the offhand and without sword spec anymore it doesn't matter much what 1 hander gets used. It works better than anything else I've tried to do DPS as a prot spec and it works pretty well.

[Concillian]

For general Fury gearing, you're going to want to pick stats over procs and other such things. A recent example came up when a guildie had a shot at a Halberd of Smiting (which ended up going to an MS Warrior who was slightly behind him in DKP) while he was already using a TUF. While the Halberd's proc is just plain sick, the TUF's superior stats make it an overall better weapon for Fury, while the Halberd's proc (which will proc more often due to Mortal Strike) makes it a better MS weapon.

Umm, I think you're backwards... Fury builds are superior to MS builds for getting procs to proc.

Fury has the instant attack (BT) and the flurry bonus that stack proc chances, where MS only has the instant (MS). Everything else is pretty comparable between the two from teh standpoint of getting things to proc.

[Artega]

Umm, I think you're backwards... Fury builds are superior to MS builds for getting procs to proc.

Fury has the instant attack (BT) and the flurry bonus that stack proc chances, where MS only has the instant (MS). Everything else is pretty comparable between the two from teh standpoint of getting things to proc.

Last I checked, BT can be used regardless of whether or not you have a weapon equipped. That would suggest it does not affect a weapon's or enchant's chance to proc. I could be wrong, though; been a very long time since I've been Fury or Arms.

At any rate, I'd rather have more stats than rely on a proc, even if it means lower burst DPS.

[ima_nerd]

Regardless, a large majority of procs are proc per minute, not percentage<_<