Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Why You Should Dual Spec Titans Grip.

To get back into the swing of things I'm going to start with a self serving post justifying why I have two dps specs and not dps/prot.

Arms > Fury.


Lets start with the basics. If your raiding with max dps at the moment your raiding as arms, this may well change when you have most of your best in slot Ulduar gear, but until then, no questions asked, dps wise Arms > Fury ... deal with it.
(If this is not true your not doing it right, more on that in a later post)

Is Fury Still a Viable Raiding Spec?

Hell yes. Lets look at a few of the reasons why.

DPS: Yes Arms provides higher dps that fury but even as fury you can provide decent dps and the gap between the two specs closes the better your gear gets.

Buffs: A lot of the time as a dps warrior your main job is to provide good dps while filling in the buffs missed by other classes. Pretty much all our buffs can be supplied by other classes and our job is to, as it were, fill in the blanks. So lets take a look at the three main buffs you provide as a dps warrior (there are more but these will be covered in a later post). These are Blood Frenzy (Arms), Trauma (Arms) and Rampage (fury). Deciding which spec to use depending on buffs you have too look at your other raid members. A Feral Druid will provide a better version of Rampage and an inferior version of Trauma (although they will love you if you can provide it since they don't have to mangle). A combat rouge will provide the same buff as Blood Frenzy.

What does this mean for you? This means that if you have a Feral Druid but no Comabat Rouge you should go arms. If you have A Combat Rouge but no Feral Druid you should go Fury. If you have both or none do what ever the hell makes you feel happy :)

Fight Mechanics: Take a look at the nature of the encounter you are going into. Any high motion fight or a fight with haste buffs will better suit the Fury play style. Where as low motion fights or fights that require high burst damage will better suit Arms.

Interrupts: This is a pet hate of mine so be warned I'm going to be having a little emo rage while writing this section and it may come through in the post.

Firstly if your assigned interrupt duty that means the spell has to be interrupted now, if not it's normally a case of "Congratulations you just wiped the raid". This means that if the spell isn't on a timer that you can see you have to be sitting in Berserker Stance waiting to Pummel or in Battle/Defensive stance with a one hander and shield waiting to Shield Bash.

What does this mean for you as an Arms warrior? (This is where the emo rage happens) Well as an arms warrior this means you might as well just sit there auto attacking and relieving this itch on your genetailia while waiting for that all important spell to come up so you can interrupt it. This is not much of an exaggeration.

The first time I was put on full time interrupt duty I stated that I would (politely paraphrased) have to gimp my dps to do so. I was told by a hunter ... a mother loving hunter ... that we all would have to do the same. I nearly had a fit. There was no way in hell that other classes wasting one global cooldown per interrupt was the same as an Arms warrior wasting 1 glyph, 2 main rotation skill and 9 F###### talent points for the entire F###### fight (we don't waste the global cooldown since our interrupt is not linked to the GCD). If I have voice activation on vent instead of push to talk he would have heard me yelling and screaming about how he shouldn't for a god damn minute think he knows a god damn thing about my class or spec unless he god damn plays it. However he's an officer and I like my raid spot so instead of ranting at him I punched a wall then got on with interrupting auto attacking and relieving the aforementioned itch. (Emo rage ends here)

What does this mean for you as a Fury warrior?
It means that you can provide decent dps and you don't even waste one global cooldown per interrupt, all you need to do is ensure that you have 10 rage at all times (easy to do with a 40 second Bloodrage and Improved Berserker Rage).

In conclusion I feel completely justified in having Fury as my dual spec under normal circumstances, if there is a chance that I will need to tank I will of course switch it for protection but the rest of the time I'm DPS/DPS.

So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Welcome back.

I'm no expert but I was under the impression Fury started with better baseline DPS and Arms scaled better with top end gear. I could be wrong though.

That interrupt thing, i agree! I leveled as prot which has Shield Bash+Reflection then I fiddled with Arms and it took a bit to realise that no I don't have any interrupts without equiping a shield or dancing over to berserker stance for Pummel.

I didn't find it a hug issue, but it is annoying.

Stuntyone said...

Thanks for the welcome :)

Ever since the great Titans Grip nerf of 3.1 fury has been under preforming compared to Arms, but scales much better with raid haste and strength and by the time you have most of your BiS and 1 or 2 Voldrethar ( http://www.wowhead.com/?item=45516 ) it should scale above arms again.

The problem with stance dancing into berserker is that

1) it causes a 1 second GCD that you would otherwise not have and that combined with lag (my connection is not great 150-180ms)and player response time can cause me to miss a 2 second cast quite often.

2) you dump all but 10 rage and considering that one auto attack provides anything from 20 - 60 rage this means that my rage bar is almost permanently full when not using heroic strike and both of my high cost nukes. this means that one Pummel can cost between 10 rage (if your lucky on your timing and insanely fast on your dance-pummel-dance) to 160 rage (if you get unlucky on your timing and an auto attack hits while in zerker)

Similar problems occur when using a shield equip/shield bash macro. You don't lose as much rage but thanks to the PvP changes quite some time ago changing weapons resets your swing timer. There is also a bit of lag involved as well.

These problems become even more apparent in PvP when you factor in the other players lag as well. If you've done much arena (I'm not very good at it but do like to play) you'll know the pain of being sheeped by a mage AND ending up with shield bash on CD or even more painful is being a sheep wandering around with spell reflect up :( ... not entirely relevant but these annoy me also :)

ChicagoWOWplayer said...

This was too f'ng funny. I googled warrior arms interupt and found this and just love the rant. I can only assume it's pvp related, if not it seems silly for pummel to not be able to be used in arms.