The Care and Feeding of Warriors: A Cataclysm postmortem for fury

And thus ends the Cataclysm postmortem series with a look at fury. Finally, we get a breather from Mists of Pandaria news and get a chance to look back at fury over this expansion. While summing up a whole expansion is pretty difficult, it's why they let me out of the box and at the keyboard for a few thousand words before tricking me back into it with a banana and a dart. So my thoughts on fury over this expansion, in easily digestible bullet points:
- SMF fury surprised us by being very competitive, even sometimes better than Titan's Grip fury, in the first tier of raiding and the heroics that launched with it. This was before the mastery nerf, so SMF could get enough mastery to make Raging Blow worth hitting, while its Bloodsurge slams still hit like angry, angry trucks driven by swarms of bees that mistook you for a bear. Trust me, that's not fun.
- After the mastery nerf, TG fury climbed ahead, especially once Firelands launched in patch 4.2. I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that TG fury was quite firmly ahead of SMF (which never recovered) or arms in Firelands. As you all remember from literally hundreds of screenshots, I was a tauren fury warrior in Firelands, and I freaking loved it.
- Dragon Soul ended the hegemony of fury and moreover, pushed it down below just about every single melee DPS spec. There was nobody doing as poorly as fury. The combination of directly nerfing the spec's break and butter Dual Wield Specialization and indirectly nerfing Deep Wounds by fixing a long-term bug pushed fury under the water and held its head under until people just plain gave up on the spec for progression raiding.
Filed under: Warrior, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Cataclysm







