The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Fury Talents
by Matthew Rossi 
Feb 5th 2011 at 8:00PM
Tanking is what we've talked about for the past couple of weeks, so let's switch it back up. DPS warriors come in two varieties, arms and fury, and for the next couple of weeks (depending on if/when patch 4.0.6 comes out), we'll be talking about the talents of each of those DPS trees and what you can use them for. Fury's going first because I despise alphabetical order and all of its works. Do you hear me, alphabet? I do not fear you. Well, except for when I try and spell Cataclysm. I always get the Y and the S flipped around.
With some of the fights in Cataclysm being among the most unfriendly to melee DPS of any expansion, it's important to consider that taking survivability and mobility talents can be just as important for PvE as for PvP. So let's take a look at fury and its talents.
At this point in time, I don't think I can overemphasize mobility and survival talents. Why are they important? Because right now, most heroics and raids have tons of avoidable damage, and tons more area damage that often cannot be avoided. Being harder to kill and more able to escape said damage is crucial. In Wrath of the Lich King, there was a mentality that said that all talent choices should increase our DPS. This was at least in part because in Wrath, healers had enough mana to heal through just about anything up to and including stupid. In Cataclysm, it's often not at all the case. You're expected to avoid as much damage as you possibly can and to do at least something to help out with unavoidable damage.
This doesn't mean you're not expected to spec for more damage. You are, after all, a DPS warrior. The good news is you can usually pick up most if not all of the DPS talents with some room left for some utility/survivability/mobility talents.
Fury talents
Okay then. What are the talents in question?
- Blood Craze The downside of having played in the beta is that I remember when this talent was phenomenally good, instead of what it is now -- merely okay. It's still much better than it was in Wrath or indeed at any point before that. I don't recommend it wholeheartedly, but if you find yourself dying a lot in the close moments of a fight, you might want to pick this up. 3% of your total health over 5 seconds isn't world-shattering, but it can happen any time you take damage. Excellent for leveling and soloing and not awful for PvP.
- Battle Trance Yes, this is intended to be attractive to all three specs. But with rage normalization as it is and most warriors struggling to get enough rage due to very high hit caps, a 15% chance after every Bloodthirst to get a next yellow attack free is pretty attractive. If you're not feeling a need for Blood Craze, this is a good alternative for your first tier points.
- Cruelty An extra 10% chance to crit on Bloodthirst is an extra 10% chance to proc Flurry on every BT. Not terrible for two points.
- Booming Voice The second tier of fury talents is just chock full of good stuff, and Booming Voice might be the best talent of the lot. The amount of rage this works out to if you use either Battle or Commanding on cooldown is three times what you'd be able to generate using shouts without it. A 30-second cooldown for 30 rage a use vs. a 1-minute cooldown for 20 rage a use? That works out to 60 rage every minute with this talent vs. 20 rage a minute without it.
- Piercing Howl I get a lot of use out of this talent in PvE content. Any time something needs to be kited and burned down, if it can be snared or slowed, PH usually works on it. It's cheap, easy to apply, and doesn't cost much rage either. It's also good for PvP. You can justify leaving it out, but it does have good utility use.
- Executioner This talent made me love execute range again. It's bloody awesome. It may be slightly too good, to be frank.
- Rude Interruption I'm pretty solid on interrupting. With Pummel or Shield Bash being so important nowadays when anything that cuts down on anyone taking damage is good or abilities like Arcanotron's that just need to be interrupted, a talent that ups your damage for doing your job isn't a bad deal at all. If you know you're not going to be interrupting, don't take it; otherwise, at least consider it.
- Death Wish I wish this talent didn't increase the damage we take. Seems a holdover from when Berserker Stance did the same thing, and not typical of other classes' damage cooldowns at all. But it's an enrage effect (so it's boosted by the fury mastery) and it can be used at will, which is lovely for when you know you're going to want to output as much damage as possible. And it only costs a point. Really, no fury warrior should be without it.
- Flurry A mainstay of warrior DPS since vanilla. It's still really good.
- Enrage Considering we need to enter enraged states to use Raging Blow and get the full benefit of our mastery, Enrage is pretty much a must-have. It's also much better than when it required us to take damage, rather than deal it, to activate.
- Die by the Sword I wish I liked this talent. On paper, the sound of a talent that gives me 100% to parry when I fall below 20% health sounds like it would be a pretty hot survivability talent. Unfortunately, very rarely does a boss turn to me and start whaling on me for purely physical damage -- and when it does (like when I got overzealous during the raid tonight), at 130k health, I'm not going down to 20% health before the tank gets it back. No, what's killing me is either standing in something I shouldn't be or AoE damage at a bad time when the healers are already overstressed, and this talent wouldn't help with either of those.
- Heroic Fury This, on the other hand, removes any immobilization effects and refreshes the cooldown on Intercept. It's hot for PvP or PvE nowadays.
- Rampage 7% crit (and 5% crit for your party or raid). For one talent point, no less. Boring, but you'll take it.
- Raging Blow Solid enough damage and fills the spot that we used to Whirlwind for single targets, and because it is only usable when enraged, it inflates the value of all abilities that proc an enraged state. Since it is only usable during said enrages, it also gets more damage for every point of mastery.
- Furious Attacks The problem with this talent is the same as always. You can't guarantee it will be up, it may or may not apply on any auto-attack. Combining this weakness with the fact that it is a measly 10% healing debuffed, and it seems a pretty hard sell for me compared to putting those points elsewhere for more mobility or survivability. I'd rather have Die by the Sword for PvP than a Mortal Strike I can't even be sure will be up.
- Intensify Rage This lets you break fear more often and use both of your main DPS cooldowns more often and, of course, enter an enrage at will more often, which lets you using Raging Blow more often. It's good.
- Meat Cleaver This talent won't be as good in 4.0.6 because the base damage of Cleave is going down and it won't be included in talents like War Academy anymore. It will probably still be worth having for heavy trash when CC isn't needed or can't be used (it's awesome for parasites on Magmaw or poison on Omnotron), but it'll be less of an absolute must-have compared to right now.
- Skirmisher I unabashedly love this talent for both PvP and PvE. I love Heroic Leaping out of the area when something awful is being cast and then Intercepting right back in once it's safe. I love it even more combined with Heroic Fury, which means you can Intercept, Heroic Leap, reset and Intercept immediately. It's not strictly speaking necessary for PvE, but I love having it.
- Bloodsurge With the value of Slam going up in 4.0.6, you'll probably want this talent. Right now, even with all else being equal, you'll probably get more DPS out of a HS than an instant Slam. My current spec has this talent purely out of habit.
- Single-Minded Fury I've tried this talent out repeatedly, and while it does seem (using equal ilevel one-handers to my two-handers) to generate a smoother rage flow, it just doesn't seem to deliver the output that Titan's Grip does. It's a good, solid but unremarkable talent, and I don't think at present it's better than TG, but if you have a solid pair of 1H weapons and they're your best, you could definitely make good use of this talent.
- Titan's Grip Me trying to evaluate Titan's Grip fairly is a fool's errand. I've written two love letters to it on this site. Blizzard removed the damage penalty from the ability in Cataclysm, so... yeah. Titan's Grip is probably slightly ahead on damage and definitely looks amazingly awesome. You don't have to take my word for it, either -- just ask my cat Puck.
- War Academy (War Academy patch 4.0.6) Right now, War Academy does a lot to make Meat Cleaver good and, in general, props up a heavily Heroic Strike-oriented fury playstyle. In patch 4.0.6, the changes to it will emphasize Bloodsurge and Raging Blow in a fury DPS rotation more than now. EIther way, it's a must-have talent.
- Field Dressing Remember, you only have 10 talent points to spend outside of fury, but chances are good you're going to at least put two points into Deep Wounds. That means you'll need five in the first tier in arms, and this talent is a much better choice for you than Blitz.
- Deep Wounds You may max it out, or you may only take two points in it to go full Incite. Full Incite makes it a sure thing after an HS crit to be able to prolong flurry, which is why I usually go two in DW myself, but you'll see a lot of theorycrafting back and forth on the issue. You'll always want at least two ranks of this.
- Incite Pretty much the only prot tree talent for fury, but right now a heck of a good one. Once 4.0.6 comes around and HS damage decreased (and the ability loses even more damage from War Academy's change), the balance of DPS between this talent and Deep Wounds may shift. The ability to extend a flurry is hard to pass up, though.
At the center of the dury of battle stand the warriors: protection, arms and fury. Check out more strategies and tips especially for warriors, including Cataclysm 101 for DPS warriors, a guide to new reputation gear for warriors, and a look back at six years of warrior trends.Filed under: Warrior, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Cataclysm
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Karch Feb 5th 2011 8:15PM
I should throw this out here while it's still early: Blood Craze is good for a few things, particularly for soloing old content. Its heal is tiny, but it has no cooldown and can even clip itself. When you're pulling big packs (admittedly a tanking spec thing) of much lower level mobs, they can't keep up with the HoT ticks. I'm currently grinding spiders in Terokkar to make the Aldor love me, and uptime is around ~100%.
loop_not_defined Feb 5th 2011 9:19PM
Yeah, pretty much this. I'm finding I get more survivability soloing BC Heroics in Protection spec (never lose more than maybe 2k health), but soloing Fury isn't far behind due to Blood Craze. Fury also has the benefit of taking 20-40 second fights (often longer in Prot) down to...literally...3-5 seconds due to this handy formula:
Death Wish + Recklessness + Berserking (Troll) + DPS Trinket = dead
Which proves that a good offense *can* be the best defense.
Pyromelter Feb 5th 2011 10:57PM
"Which proves that a good offense *can* be the best defense."
I imagine that when you pick the "fury" specialization at level 10, the fury warrior people give you a grey t-shirt with this motto written on the front of it.
Kroof Feb 6th 2011 1:22AM
Indeed, for soloing of any kind Blood Craze is a fantastic talent. It procs reliably off of any type or amount of damage. I have it consistently proc while doing my cooking daily in orgrimmar when I pick a prickly pear fruit.
I solo old content all the time as fury, this talent alone makes me able to survive for much longer than otherwise would have been possible. Many of the old raid bosses put dots on you that tick for less than the heals from Blood Craze.
Combining blood craze and bloodthirst spam I can solo most old raid content, including Magtheridon as Fury.
Funny little bug. My blood craze healing ticks will often proc my hurricane buff on my weapon. Go figure.
dj.clayden Feb 5th 2011 8:17PM
I pretty much agree with what you've sai-
*distracted by kitt-
Holy hell, that's a scary cat. Don't do that to people.
Big Shoe Feb 5th 2011 8:31PM
Thanks for the great article, Mr. Rossi. I agree on pretty much all points, and like you, I was curious about Single Minded Fury, enough so to give it a try before heading back to Titan's Grip. This talent sounds good on paper, but currently falls flat in execution, even with the minor 4.06 buff. Granted, the faster swing speed and smoother rage generation of using two 1H weapons is attractive, but still not enough to even things out. The raw stats on 2H weapons prove roughly a 10k health boost (much more useful in the melee unfriendly world of Cata than it ever was in Wrath), and upwards of 300 points of strength, plus more crit, haste, or what have you. The final strike against SMF is the considerable loss of stats like hit and expertise, which could be fixed by baking some extra hit and expertise into the talent itself. I want to like SMF, but it just needs more buffing to be competitive.
I'll miss HS and Cleave, too. I find it amusing that Blizzard never intended HS to be a primary damage button, yet they made two talents specifically to buff it. The 4.06 changes seem to have made HS a rage dump again, so here's hoping Bloodthirst will step up to fill in the gaps. Overall though, Fury feels fun again, and hitting things with big weapons is equally viable in heroics and progression raiding. Now if only they would give us even one genuine crowd control ability besides the poor-man's CC of Piercing Howl and glyphed fear shouts... :-)
Veras Gunn Feb 5th 2011 8:37PM
Death Wish DOESN'T increase the damage we take, at least not with Glyph of Death Wish. If you have Death Wish without the glyph you kind of deserve taking the extra damage.
Necromann Feb 5th 2011 11:02PM
I'm surprised he didn't mention it.
VSUReaper Feb 5th 2011 9:10PM
Something that you didnt mention about SMF and TG - SMF is easier to gear out than TG, but at the cost of looking like a pansy.
I use my offspec to dps, and I tried out arms and SMF - I decided that if I'm going to bother going fury, then I might as well look like a BAMF - and SMF just doesnt deliver in that category.
In the meantime, I'm on the hunt for a 333+ 2h for my offhand, and nothing will drop. :(
Anaughtybear Feb 6th 2011 1:25AM
I love Fury so much that it's also my second spec. For real. You heard me: DUAL FURY SPEC RAWWWRRR.
JBcani Feb 5th 2011 9:12PM
Shouldn't Puck be speaking lolcat?
psychoticdream Feb 5th 2011 9:31PM
he's a smarter kind of cat.
Fletcher Feb 5th 2011 9:46PM
Deep wounds is worth taking then? I could swear I read somewhere that the lower Cata crit rates made it so-so. Might have been in the Fury 101 column here, even.
Pyromelter Feb 5th 2011 11:07PM
Well you have talents and modifiers that give you a boost to crit. Also, with flurry, and generally hitting a button on every gcd, you will have a good chance at having it rolling quite a bit.
Also, warriors have traditionally scaled with gear better than other classes. Deep wounds is one reason why. Looking at a semi-famous fury warrior who is in all heroic 372 type gear, he's sitting on the armory around 22% crit.
I think the major question is whether to fill out deep wounds, or to fill out incite - on one of them you have to leave a point. The famous warrior i looked at has 2/3 deep wounds, and 3/3 incite right now.
Boobah Feb 6th 2011 5:02AM
As if there's any reason to try to 'roll' Deep Wounds as Fury. Arms might care, but only because if Deep Wounds is up they can get a DPS boost by allowing Rend to drop off for a GCD while Deep Wounds maintains Arms's bleed debuffs.
Deep Wounds is purely extra crit damage. It'll do the same damage (on average) whether the procs are tightly spaced or evenly spread out.
With one caveat: like Ignite, it's possible for Deep Wounds ticks to be munched. In fact, the biggest difference between the two talents is that Deep Wounds looks at weapon damage instead of the damage of the ability that caused the proc.
Deep Wounds is also, incidentally, another place where SMF falls behind, since with more frequent weapon strikes it's more likely to have some of those ticks get munched. I suspect that even without munching, it'd still fall behind because the larger Deep Wounds procs that TG produces outweighs the more numerous procs SMF produces on autoattacks.
Pyromelter Feb 6th 2011 5:40AM
Boob, agreed, I didn't mean you should actively aim to roll it, just that it would give you more damage overall than any other talent you can take at that point. The commenter was wondering whether it was worth it at all, and I think it's clear that while it's not as crazy good as it was in wrath, it's still worth taking in cataclysm.
And great point about SMF. Less strikes with bigger crits are better for deep wounds and ignite type mechanics right now.
thebitterfig Feb 7th 2011 1:19PM
As to Deep Wounds v. Incite, it's mostly a matter of gear currently. Crit rates are lower, and thus the benefit of Deep Wounds isn't as large as it could be. Likewise, lower base crit rates increase the value of Incite. If we had wrath-like crit rates around 50%, taking DW would be a no-brainer. Combined with the 4.06 HS nerfs, I'd expect Deep Wounds to be clearly superior at some future gear level.
With regards to the Deep Wounds difference between TG and SMF, even if we leave aside the possibility of munching ticks, TG will wind up ahead. DW bleeds started from white swing crits will probably roughly equal (more procs from SMF, but larger ones from TG), the crits from special attacks will be significantly stronger for TG warriors.
rkaliski Feb 6th 2011 2:04AM
With all that has gone on with warriors and reading how melee unfriendly the fights are it might be time to hang up my warrior. He has soldiered through Vanilla from Scolo to the Spider wing in Nax. In BC HE WAS PREPAIRED and sat on Illidan's corpse while the loot was handed out. Dammit I almost snuck out the pieces of Frostmourne but the dammed warlock tattled on me.
Through it all I've put up with the nerfs and the tears from other classes every time we even started to make parity. I am afraid that most raid leaders and guild masters see us a a liability through most of an expansion and that we are only good when gearing up for the last tier.
Got to do some hard thinking. I might swap the plate and the in your face attitude for my mage. I'm am tired of being the plate wearing salmon swimming upstream against the rapids of ignorance in this game.
Natsumi Feb 5th 2011 11:04PM
Just make sure you're Fire specced, know how to sheep/resheep, and don't mind sharing all your gear with the other 6 cloth DPS specs, oh and forget soloing anything really cool, you won't be able to take the hit.
Oh, and did I mention you have to wear a dress? Yeah, you have fun with that, I'll be over here not getting 1 shot by bosses AND wearing pants.
Pyromelter Feb 5th 2011 11:20PM
Things will get better. Just go with what you find is fun. For me, I have a warrior and a mage. Why? Well, I love to blow stuff up (mage). On the other hand, blasting the crap out of people with 2 very large weapons in each hand is also very fun. Warriors aren't that far behind the general melee.
If you're an arms warrior and refuse to play fury, well, unfortunately, arms hasn't been up to par so far in this expansion. But looking at state of DPS, fury is right smack between assassination and combat rogues. Yeah, you have less utility, but you have a very solid interrupt type ability that actually helps your dps.
I think you wouldn't see a guild stacking warriors like they would stack rogues or mages or holy paladins, but bringing a warrior or 2 or 3 wouldn't hurt your raid's overall dps.