The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Fury in Mists of Pandaria
by Matthew Rossi 
Mar 31st 2012 at 4:00PM
Now that we've had a week to play around with the Mists of Pandaria beta, I've gone ahead and done some dungeons and played around with specs. This week, I'm going to look at Single-Minded Fury and Titan's Grip fury warriors as they're currently shaping up. Some caveats:
- This is not a damage pass. The beta is not balanced yet, so aside from some general "This feels underpowered" or "This is brokenly good" if I think it warranted, I won't be talking much about DPS or damage.
- Emphasis is on rotation, how the spec feels to play, and how hard or easy rage is to come by. Right now, I'm more interested in discussing how the experience is playing as fury in the beta, not trying to argue for buffs or nerfs when it's simply too soon.
- With the new talent system, there's simply not a cookie-cutter build yet for either. Since all fury warriors can go TG or SMF depending on what weapons they have (both are baseline abilities fury warriors all get) and any warrior can take any one of three talents per talent tier, there's no right or wrong yet.
- While familiar, there's enough changed to make the fury priority system require relearning. It's not alien, to be sure, but the addition of Wild Strike, the removal of Slam, and the changes to rage generation and stances have altered the spec.
Up with weapon damage and DPS
While I said that this isn't a damage pass (and I mean that), I did want to point out that across the board, weapon damage and DPS has increased on the beta. The above screenshot of heroic Ataraxis shows you exactly how extreme that increase is at level 85. As far as I can tell, every weapon in the game going back to level 60 gear has seen some DPS increase. By the time you hit Cataclysm gear, the increase is double. In part, this is probably due to the change in many abilities like Bloodthirst so that they scale off of weapon damage instead of attack power and partially due to our losing our ranged weapon slot and the statistics that come with it. Since even quest greens and level 90 heroic drops are conforming to this new DPS pattern, I can only assume it's deliberate. You'll also note that Ataraxis' strength and stamina as well as its secondary stats are unchanged from live. It's only the weapon damage that's increased.
As for the spec itself, so far it feels good to play. I find SMF is easier for rage generation, which isn't surprising with the two faster weapons, but even TG works OK with three methods (charge, Battle/Commanding Shout, Bloodthirst) to generate rage. With Bloodthirst extended to a 6-second cooldown (the way it used to be, way back in prehistory, also known as vanilla WoW) and the addition of Wild Strike, Heroic Strike has been pushed fully into the hit this if you are absolutely about to cap on rage category at least so far in 5-mans and questing. The best rotation I came up with for soloing was Charge > Colossus Smash > Impending Victory > Bloodthirst > Wild Strike > and then check your rage situation. You want to be careful not to spam Wild Strike outside of a Bloodsurge proc, and it took me some getting used to the idea that you want to use Wild Strike as a rotational attack but alter how you use it when Bloodsurge goes off.
While I said that this isn't a damage pass (and I mean that), I did want to point out that across the board, weapon damage and DPS has increased on the beta. The above screenshot of heroic Ataraxis shows you exactly how extreme that increase is at level 85. As far as I can tell, every weapon in the game going back to level 60 gear has seen some DPS increase. By the time you hit Cataclysm gear, the increase is double. In part, this is probably due to the change in many abilities like Bloodthirst so that they scale off of weapon damage instead of attack power and partially due to our losing our ranged weapon slot and the statistics that come with it. Since even quest greens and level 90 heroic drops are conforming to this new DPS pattern, I can only assume it's deliberate. You'll also note that Ataraxis' strength and stamina as well as its secondary stats are unchanged from live. It's only the weapon damage that's increased.
As for the spec itself, so far it feels good to play. I find SMF is easier for rage generation, which isn't surprising with the two faster weapons, but even TG works OK with three methods (charge, Battle/Commanding Shout, Bloodthirst) to generate rage. With Bloodthirst extended to a 6-second cooldown (the way it used to be, way back in prehistory, also known as vanilla WoW) and the addition of Wild Strike, Heroic Strike has been pushed fully into the hit this if you are absolutely about to cap on rage category at least so far in 5-mans and questing. The best rotation I came up with for soloing was Charge > Colossus Smash > Impending Victory > Bloodthirst > Wild Strike > and then check your rage situation. You want to be careful not to spam Wild Strike outside of a Bloodsurge proc, and it took me some getting used to the idea that you want to use Wild Strike as a rotational attack but alter how you use it when Bloodsurge goes off.
My level 85 talent spec as of this writing for both SMF and TG. One of the interesting things about the new talent system is how it changes things. As an example, I have an extra attack on a 30-second cooldown with Impending Victory that you may decide not to take. If so, your rotation will be simpler than mine. If you decided to take Shockwave, you'd have a frontal cone AoE stun every 20 seconds, as opposed to my Bladestorm every 1.5 minutes.
New elements of play
Combine this level of customization with the change to stance mechanics, and you start to feel some of the depth of the new system. It's not foreign to experience it, of course. It's still World of Warcraft, but it has elements I never expected from this game.
For starters, something I'm still getting used to is that there are no stance requirements for any attacks. At present, when you switch stances on the beta, all that happens is that you get different benefits. Battle stance is your default single-target DPS stance, Defensive your tanking threat stance, and Berserker is your AoE damage stance. I've slowly gotten used to popping over to Zerk when I pull a pack, know I'm going to hit Bladestorm or otherwise expect AoE to be important. (I got some use out of a bad macro I wrote on the fly to swap me into Zerk whenever I hit Whirlwind, but I need to go back and rework it if I intend to actually use it.)
Spotting early drawbacks
Now, not all is sunshine and kittens. I'm now imagining a plate-clad kitten with two enormous weapons cavorting in the sunshine and bashing in monkey-people brains. Anyway, I did have some quibbles that are worth addressing.
At present, it's very easy to forget that Wild Strike is fairly expensive (30 rage), and you really don't want to spam that thing until you get a Bloodsurge proc. You absolutely need to keep hitting Bloodthirst every 6 seconds if you're a TG warrior, and it gets to feeling like you're playing a metronome. Heroic Strike almost feels like an appendix that Blizzard just hasn't removed instead of an attack. When running Jade Serpent, I felt almost like the stance switching mechanic ends up being stay in Berserker until you hit a boss, then switch to battle unless he has adds.
Now clearly, Blizzard's not done yet. And I certainly think that as of right now, fury is on the path to being a good, solid DPS spec. The new glyph system means that you can pick glyphs based on what you enjoy rather than compulsory DPS glyphs, so I have no complaints there. While I don't have a DPS parser addon presently (since last I checked addons don't work yet), nothing took very long to kill, nothing felt grueling, and I seemed to be keeping up fine in the dungeons I ran. I think, with a few tweaks, you'll really be able to go with either flavor of fury depending entirely on weapon availability and preferences.
Next week, we're going to talk about protection spec.
At the center of the fury of battle stand the warriors: protection, arms and fury. Check out more strategies and tips especially for warriors, from hot issues for today's warriors to Cataclysm 101 for DPS warriors and our guide to reputation gear for warriors.
New elements of play
Combine this level of customization with the change to stance mechanics, and you start to feel some of the depth of the new system. It's not foreign to experience it, of course. It's still World of Warcraft, but it has elements I never expected from this game.
For starters, something I'm still getting used to is that there are no stance requirements for any attacks. At present, when you switch stances on the beta, all that happens is that you get different benefits. Battle stance is your default single-target DPS stance, Defensive your tanking threat stance, and Berserker is your AoE damage stance. I've slowly gotten used to popping over to Zerk when I pull a pack, know I'm going to hit Bladestorm or otherwise expect AoE to be important. (I got some use out of a bad macro I wrote on the fly to swap me into Zerk whenever I hit Whirlwind, but I need to go back and rework it if I intend to actually use it.)
Spotting early drawbacks
Now, not all is sunshine and kittens. I'm now imagining a plate-clad kitten with two enormous weapons cavorting in the sunshine and bashing in monkey-people brains. Anyway, I did have some quibbles that are worth addressing.
At present, it's very easy to forget that Wild Strike is fairly expensive (30 rage), and you really don't want to spam that thing until you get a Bloodsurge proc. You absolutely need to keep hitting Bloodthirst every 6 seconds if you're a TG warrior, and it gets to feeling like you're playing a metronome. Heroic Strike almost feels like an appendix that Blizzard just hasn't removed instead of an attack. When running Jade Serpent, I felt almost like the stance switching mechanic ends up being stay in Berserker until you hit a boss, then switch to battle unless he has adds.
Now clearly, Blizzard's not done yet. And I certainly think that as of right now, fury is on the path to being a good, solid DPS spec. The new glyph system means that you can pick glyphs based on what you enjoy rather than compulsory DPS glyphs, so I have no complaints there. While I don't have a DPS parser addon presently (since last I checked addons don't work yet), nothing took very long to kill, nothing felt grueling, and I seemed to be keeping up fine in the dungeons I ran. I think, with a few tweaks, you'll really be able to go with either flavor of fury depending entirely on weapon availability and preferences.
Next week, we're going to talk about protection spec.
At the center of the fury of battle stand the warriors: protection, arms and fury. Check out more strategies and tips especially for warriors, from hot issues for today's warriors to Cataclysm 101 for DPS warriors and our guide to reputation gear for warriors.
Filed under: Warrior, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
MoarHeroisms Mar 31st 2012 4:33PM
Where does Raging Blow fit in the SMF/TG rotation?
Matthew Rossi Mar 31st 2012 5:20PM
It's basically the same as it always has been, hit it, after BT if possible (as in, if BT has less than a GCD to cool down) - with BT being a chunk of your rage gen, it becomes very necessary to keep hitting it as fast as possible, but with the six second cooldown you have time.
However, I did find myself not enraging as much as I was used to.
jfelixmv Mar 31st 2012 4:43PM
Just as a helpful tip to readers, remember that no addons work, but uploading logs to worldoflogs work perfectly, so you can see how your dps it's going.
Shrikesnest Mar 31st 2012 5:09PM
Even though it's a millimeter above pointless at the moment...
jfelixmv Mar 31st 2012 5:36PM
Knowing is never pointless... Though the numbers are all over the place, it always help.
Shrikesnest Apr 2nd 2012 10:05AM
No. Before the numbers passes, your DPS is literally useless information. Your DPS is going to be affected by all sorts of half-finished systems and stuff that isn't yet implemented. They want to make sure abilities don't crash the game and get them into a finalized form before doing all the numbers work on them.
Frankly, the meter obsessiveness around here drives me crazy. This is early beta. Our DPS a this stage does NOT matter, and all checking it constantly will do is encourage "blizz y my dsp so low!??? y u hate warrs blizz?" instead of actual beta testing.
MTLyon5 Mar 31st 2012 5:34PM
Personally with TG I had no problem with rage and even managed a few heroic strikes tossed in there. My main concern is with the lack of almost ever using Raging Blow. Right now your beserker rage gives you 6sec. So basically 1 raging blow. Outside of that I haven't found enrage proc'd very often at all to use it. I found Wild Strike to be the bread and butter ability. Although it does hit pretty hard, I might even say harder than Raging Blow.
Martogg Mar 31st 2012 6:21PM
Personally I was not a fan of the enrage requirement for Raging Blow. Unless you get very good gear as fury it was difficult to be able to reliably use it as part of your rotation.
Does the addition of Wild Strike make the rotation feel less bland than it is on live? I've had had long streaks happen for myself where all I could do is hit Bloodthirst and Heroic Strike when waiting for Beserker Rage to come off CD or an Enrage to proc. I loved TG fury back in Wrath but in Cata it has felt like such a slow, plodding playstyle. I hope something can be done to address this and bring it back to its more furious roots.
Rojslade Apr 1st 2012 2:17AM
I really don't get why people say it's bland now. And I've been finding several people saying that now too.
I like the way fury's rotation is right now. It feels tight and fast paced like I imagine a dual-wielding berserk would be like...when one has ample rage. The only reason it may feel slow at times is not the moves themselves, but the way rage generation has changed in Cata. If it was closer to how rage was generated in wrath, I imagine there would be much less downtime. I hate those auto attack missing streaks one gets that makes you wait 5 seconds before being able to hit anything due to lack of rage. That's the only thing I see it being lacking at the moment.
And yeah, giving Wrath version of rage generation back may again arise the gear scaling issue. But I thought that one of the reasons for removing the talents would let them fine tune our damage better, so that point would be moot. I think they should do that rather than redoing rage....again....
Not only that, but from the sound of how it is now in the MoP beta, those streaks of downtime might be even more frequent. Even though I will reserve some judgement till I try it for myself at level 90, I am not looking forward to how much they have changed Fury. From Mr. Rossi's description, they're trying to make it feel like the waltz-tempo-ed arms, whether intentionally or not. I like that Fury felt unique compared to arms and am a little sad that it is being changed so drastically.
Sidfish Mar 31st 2012 7:16PM
"As far as I can tell, every weapon in the game going back to level 60 gear has seen some DPS increase. By the time you hit Cataclysm gear, the increase is double. In part, this is probably due to the change in many abilities like Bloodthirst so that they scale off of weapon damage instead of attack power and partially due to our losing our ranged weapon slot and the statistics that come with it."
Blues have stated the weapon damage adjustment was to help balance low level pvp. The change to Bloothirst is a simple scaling fix. As for ranged weapons, or stat sticks for Hunters, we we're supposed to recoup those missing stats on our weapons but that doesn't seem to be the case currently.
Ilmyrn Mar 31st 2012 10:15PM
Maybe because hunters don't need to recoup that stat loss. Yeah, you're losing melee weapons as stat sticks, but everyone else is losing their ranged weapons stat sticks too. So it all balances out.
Boobah Apr 1st 2012 12:56AM
While it doesn't mean much if the melee weapons don't get more stats to account for losing the ranged slot (since that affects pretty much everyone) it's kind of odd for ranged weapons to not get stats the equal of a two-handed weapon.
For comparison, at the moment Windrunner's Bow has 127 agi and 192 sta, while Axe of the Tauren Chieftains (a two-hander from the same dungeon) has 406 str and 611 sta.
On the other hand, we've got a larger discrepancy with the existence of Titan's Grip, so maybe they won't bother.
Bart Apr 1st 2012 8:06AM
Will Fury be Viable for PvP in Mists of pandaria due to the new talent system?
Jordan Apr 1st 2012 2:17PM
I think with the right talents AND can be... but fury's biggest drawback in Pop has been rage generation. If you can hit the target you get no rage. So if your fighting a rogue who knows his stuff your done, same for a DL or a mage who can keep you away with out hitting them. That's why Arms anger management is so attemractive for papers. Arms will have the rage. If they can fix this, the fury can be viable. Until the I will continue to decimate my fury brothers while in Arms.
Barleyhop Apr 2nd 2012 9:51AM
Couple questions. If the first is silly, i apologize.
1. Thinking about weapon availability, what happens if you equip a 2-hander and a one-hander at the same time? Does the new fury really allow you to equip the two best weapons you have, period?
2. It sounds like capping on rage won't be nearly as detrimental as running out of rage, and I personally won't miss heroic strike. Do you think the devs' intention was to make Fury warrior think more about the rotation and less about the resource.
All in all, warriors are becoming a lot like Death Knights. The stances in MoP will work much like DK presences, and the rotation will be more about hitting abilities at the right time rather than overly worrying about resources. This doesn't bother me as I've greatly enjoyed my DK in the past, but I can foresee groans from more traditional warriors.
*Side note. The level 75 talents are pretty bland for dps. While stance no longer matters (as much), I assume we will still have to macro a shield equip to reflect a bunch of spells?
Shockazulou Apr 2nd 2012 1:17PM
Matthew you have Bladestorm in your fury build but other than the fact that you have it. what are your impressions of it as a fury warrior? did you find that hitting with both weapons felt like it hit hard?