3.2, a tad late

When 3.2 hit, it felt like upside-down-world was here. I was mostly focusing on the fact that AttT and Bloodrage was getting buffed, and didn't really consider what the badge changes would do.

Now we're almost a month in and I haven't written anything about it yet - and I blame this new badges system. I know I know, cheap shot but how many out there except the hardcores didn't go "amagawd!" when it hit?

Our RF has had its problems, which meant that we were stomping around in the outskirts of Ulduar killing a boss here and a boss there without a real flow (aka Farm :P ). But the Emblem of Valor was stacking up nicely and the right loot was rolled out on the wheelbarrows.

Suddenly it started raining Emblems of Conquest over everyone and their cat. This was not even 10-man Ulduar emblems, this was 25-man Ulduar. So we had to face the fact that for some damn reason it was better to do ALL heroics everyday rather than one-clear-a-week of Ulduar. I'm not even gonna go into the fact that two freaking Emblems of Triumph can be had every day as well.

Now we have a Normal version instance that drops epics that quite a few in the RF (regulars, with all the gear they need up until now) actually wants! Not to mention the Heroic version. As far as I could see, almost every single item I've gathered during the last months could be replaced quickly and extremely easy in 3.2.

And there lies the problem. I don't raid to be first about anything. I don't raid to get "ftwpwnzor lewt". I raid to face a challenge, to get a sense of accomplishment. I can get that in our small, humble RF since the challenge is there - only different from the progress racers out there.

And at the moment I have no idea what the challenge is actually supposed to be. To be honest, I don't even care about my dps anymore. Who knows what it's supposed to be? I keep replacing gear!

What I have noticed that is a bit interesting is that ArP is getting stacked all over the place, and +hit removed at the same time. I'm actually facing the situation of struggling to keep my hit cap. Once the gearing process settles down a bit I will get back to this subject matter.

Berserking Enchant and AttT

I took my druid shopping the other day at the enchants store in Dalaran, and bought me a copy of Berserking and Your Weapons, by Ben Dover and Taye Kitt.

At first I didn't realise that the armour debuff (25%) had been changed in patch 3.0.8, down to 5% less armour. Given that the effect stacks AND refreshes, a PvE fury warrior would dual wield this bad boy of course. Before 3.0.8 however, AttT got such a spanking from a whopping 50% less armour (2 x 25% when stacked) that the AP lost was just too much for the cost of mats compared to pure +AP enchants.

Silly me for not keeping track of patch notes! Now I just need to decide if I should get one right away or if I should wait for a better weapon to drop.

Re-spec today.

My raidforce returned to Ulduar last night, and made a serious attempt at some progress after months of struggling with attendance.

We beat Flame Leviathan in record time, and finally downed XT-002 (I know, we are casuals). I got yet another item that raised my hit rating, and I have so much now that I'm 0.2% from 3% above the cap. Hence, I'm removing Precision and moving the points to Enrage (I was first contemplating Improved Berserker Rage, to give me better control of my rage gen, but I went for the passive ability instead in order to slim my rotations and hope for rage somewhere else).

On a differet note - 3.2 seems to have some fury buffs, finally, the biggest one being Armored to the Teeth (more AP). I'll write something about 3.2 in a later post I think.

Bloodthirst got buffed

3.1.3 is here, and Bloodthirst has been buffed (shorter cooldown and lower rage cost). The weird thing is that I can't see much difference on the test dummies, but I do think that my dps was a tad higher last raid. And there was definately more rage around.

I really do need to gear up a bit before I can say something definite, and I'm still curious to see how warriors scale with gear compared with Death Knights now that we have one in raid again. All I know for sure at the moment is that the DK have the upper hand from start. What's left now is to see how things are further down the path.

Still, after reading through the official forums I now know that Blizzard actually knows that dps warriors are broken right now, and they have officially said that they're in no hurry to fix it until they're happy with the PvP issues. I can sympathise with their struggle, but what exactly do they mean us PvErs should do during months and months of this?

Focus

This tuesday was actually a step up. Everyone decided to shake things up and really focus, and we almost cleared Naxx but had to stop at KT after some unluck with the Frost Blasts. We were melee heavy and one of the two healers haven't healed this fight before, so no surprise that the FBs caused havoc.

I'm happy to have had a real decent night of raiding though, too bad tonight was cancelled. I was planning on finally getting the druid back in the rotation, but it'll have to wait.

Slow night

Things are winding down in the raid force, and we're nowhere near as good a couple of weeks ago, or even a month ago.

That's just life when you're that many people with different things going on around you, sometimes you get periods of chaos and unfocus. 

I'm frustrated and unhappy that Schnee is the one that seems to suffer from unlucky raid nights, when my druid often get into the successful ones.

On a positive note, my latest dummy test got 2.5k dps, and according to the logs from last night I almost got to 2.7 under "real" conditions ( and thanks to excellent and awake healers I got away with it too :P ). So she's definately ready for at least starting Ulduar for real. But that doesn't help much at all if I don't have fun...

I will have to score some cake. Or a bun of some sort. It'll cheer me up.

Level 80 Fury Warrior for dummies Glyph Appendix

As promised, as a finishing touch to my little quickstart guide, here comes my recommendations on Glyphs.

Let's start with the Major Glyphs

They are the powerful last touches to our fury warrior, and should be carefully combined with talents to really shine.

There is one major glyph that is the bread and butter for us, namely the Glyph of Whirlwind. Must have in my book.

Next, we can  either choose between Glyph of Cleaving and Glyph of Heroic Strike (depending on which of the two you use as your rage dump, and hopefully have specced your talents for) or  take both if you want to split hairs and for example use Cleave on trash and HS on bosses *shrug*.

Since I do some PvP as well, i prefer to have Cleave for PvE purposes, and throw in Glyph of Execution to help me nuke healer classes (including Death Knights) before they can get back on their feet in PvP. 

Now, the Minor Glyphs...

These are helpers, making your life a touch easier so that you can focus less on certain little irritating aspects and more on what you're actually doing. 

Glyph of Bloodrage is a no-brainer really (less focus on what your health is doing all the time), and who can say no to Glyph of Battle? (less checking your buffs and wasting rage on renewing it). I like to add in Glyph of Enduring Victory after that, since it helps you tweak your damage output, even when there is some travel time and/or wait between battles.

Not much else to say, there aren't that many minor glyphs to choose from for a us after all.

Taking Schnee out for a spin

Things could be moved around last night, and Schnee got to do some raiding at last!

We weren't really at our best like this and one of the dps shamans had to switch to resto, which can be a bit unsettling I guess. And we were one dpser down as it was so we only cleared Arachnid.
I'm hoping that our follow-up on tuesday will have some people attending so that I can continue testing what dps I have now.

For now, I think Cleave was a success. But I have gotten some new heroic and pvp gear since last time, so I can't tell for sure yet.

To be continued...


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Fury Top Ten ---> 1 <---

2-handers! Two of them!

Yep. The one defining characteristic of the modern fury warrior (since 3.0) is Titan's Grip. Attack power and crit chance is nice enough to have, but they won't deliver much unless backed up by a couple of big honking 2-handers.

This is the way I went about it when I hit 80:

Being a blacksmith, I had no problems at all making myself a Titansteel Destroyer. It's even there in the name!

Then I got into some serious daily questing for the Ebon Blade. They have some nice stuff, including Runeblade of Demonstrable Power. This is just a temporary solution though, since once you have these and some good armour, you can try and farm Loken in Halls of Lightning for the best 2-hander pre-naxx: Colossal Skull-Clad Cleaver, which is what you really want.

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Fury Top Ten ---> 2 <---

Attack Power! The bread and water of all non-caster dps classes.

This is the foundation for all your other attributes to build on, so you want a lot of Attack Power (AP).

AP is a stat in itself, found on items and various buffs and talents. But you also get it from your Strength (Str) stat. You get 2 AP for every Str, so an item with +20 Str is better than an item with +30 AP. Since there are buffs in the game that increases all your stats by a percentage, every point of Str will give you even more AP. So if you are chosing between +20 Str and +40 AP, go for Str!

Once you feel happy about your AP, you can stop enchanting and gemming for it and Str and start working for real with your hit, crit, Expertise and Armor Penetration, in that order but more on those later.

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Fury Top Ten ---> 3 <---

Whirlwind!

The number one ability that should be used everytime it's available. Don't let the fact that it hits up to 4 target around you fool you - it is STILL a great attack on just one target too. Give it the best spot on the action bar, you'll be mashing that button from now on.

Combine it with the glyph and talent, do it now!

NOTE: be careful with your threat. Tanks usually needs a few seconds at the beginning of groups of mobs to really grab hold of them all before you do your first WW.

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Fury Top Ten ---> 4 <---

There was a time, back in ye olde WoW, when you heard people talk about Flurry warriors.

It's a 5-point talent, pretty far up in the Fury tree. The reason I like it is that you do crit a lot if you're well geared, and the extra fast attacks builds up rage at a rate that always comes in handy, as well as the extra damage output. See it as the Fury Warrior's own nitro boost!

And it has a noble history as one of the most faithful fury warrior talents of of all time :)

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Fury Top Ten ---> 5 <---

When you're not doing whirlwind, you should be doing Bloodthirst. Also an instant cast, it scales with your Attack power instead of your actual weapon damage so it'll always "stay in shape".

It's got a small health boost (can be increased with glyph but I don't think it's a good idea at 80) which is nice while leveling or maybe even during PvP.

NOTE: If both WW and BT are available to me, I go WW (see Top Ten #3).

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Fury Top Ten ---> 6 <---

Middle tier Arms talents!

Impale, Deep Wounds, Two-Handed Weapon Specialization.

Just look at them! 'Nuff said....

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Fury Top Ten ---> 7 <---

Hit rating.

Everyone except healers needs hit rating, but dual-wielders such as us needs it more. No hits, no rage, no damage. Add the fact the we usually lumber around with two heavy-ass megaweapons that makes holes in reality when swung, we do NOT want to wast all that time on a miss.

The goal is to reach the so-called soft cap at least - which is +8% chance to hit. But since you'll get Precision (ofc), +5% will do. That sums up to about 164 hit rating.

Why the soft cap? Because that's the point where all your Special Attacks (non-auto attacks like WW and BT) hits a lvl 83 mob (aka dungeon bosses, skull bosses). You don't want to waste all that rage and CD timers on a miss now do you?

NOTE: you will still get a benefit from hit rating past the soft cap, just not so much. Which means that you should gem/enchant etc for other want-to-have stats such as AP/Str and crit rating.

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Fury Top Ten ---> 8 <---

Crit rating.

This is where all your hard work pays off. You've gotten high-yield weaponry, a nice firm base of AP to stand on, your strikes are hitting nicely, and you have talents such as Flurry and Impale standing by to rock your world. Time to land some critical hits!

Not only is it an excellent way of letting your other stats out of the barn and stretch their legs, critical hits with your auto-attacks generate more rage, yay!

You get higher chance to crit with crit rating, Agility (1 Agi = 0.74 crit rating, but Agi is not so bad considering it also gives you some +dodge and armor if you like that kind of stuff) and with the Cruelty talent.

In my opinion you should have, at a minimum, 25% at lvl 80 (at which point you'll need 45.9 crit rating for every percent you want to add). Personally, I don't like to rest until 33% (rest = going for Armor Penetration and Expertise as well as crit when choosing equipment and gems) since I like the symmetry of "every third hit".

And here we touch at the difficult subject of how to balance more-oh!-more of AP and crit vs ArP and Exp.... But I won't go there now.

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Fury Top Ten ---> 9 <---

Boosters! Helpers! Winbuttons!

All those little things that sometimes are overlooked, but you need to familiarize yourself with them all.

All warriors know about Bloodrage of course. Hammer that button! (doesn't activate global cooldown (gcd) you see...)

Depending on you talent spec, Berserker rage is either very handy, or totally awesome. If you suspect that you'll get feared, save it, otherwise use it if you've got a gcd to spare.

I love Death Wish, but these days I'm so geared that I basically only use it in raids (which is the only time my enemies live long enough for this to be effective ;) ).

Bloodsurge when it procs, Recklessness if you're not worried about HP, Enraged Regeneration if you are worried, Victory Rush is free candy , and trinkets with a "Use: " effect should of course be rubbed vigorously!

If you want to save space on your action bar, do what I do and use macros. The simplest one looks like this:

/use [Trinket1 name]

/use [Trinket2 name]

Nothing complicated, it tries to activate whatever trinket on you that's isn't on cooldown. If you really want to save space, you could also add

/cast Death Wish

but I prefer to be in control when it comes to Death Wish.

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Fury Top Ten ---> 10 <---

Ok, time for the final piece of the puzzle to Fury Warrior Greatness.

Now this might sound cheesy, but the final bit that you will need to work on is you.

I save this for no. 10, not because it's not important, but because this part will take the longest and should not be rushed. It's all about learning how to play (aka l2p). I myself am currently on this stage, it's why I created this blog. So I can't say anything cool and kung fu-like such as "you must master your rage or rage will become your master", I'm not even a theorycrafter or even amongst the best of the fury warriors on my server. I just love to play it, and I'm inviting you all to join me and share our experiences here on Pretty in Plate!

But I will try and set you on the path, cause I sense much rage in you. Rage leads to fury, fury leads to dps - and dps leads to awesomeness! "Rawr rawr moo moo", as Schneekuh likes to shout when she's happy with the outcome of her battles.

First, get a feel for your rage generation in different situations. You should always know how the next seconds will go so that you can adapt your rotation of attacks and abilities to be the most optimal.

Second, get comfortable with your gcd. You want a nice, steady rythm to what you're doing. We swing our weapons in big slow arcs, we do not pepper our enemies with lots of tiny holes like rogues or enhancement shamans. Know what boosters you have that don't trigger the gcd, and get a feel for what downtime the different attacks have.

Thirdly, adapt on the battlefield, placing yourself wisely. If you have tank, stand behind the enemy. You don't get hit by cleaves, you miss less often and crit more often and you don't trigger something called "Parry Haste" (which is bad for the tank, I'll just leave it at that).

Furthermore, it is vital to learn the range and effect from Whirlwind. Yes, we wan't to use it as much as possible, but it can be a source of trouble sometimes. Be wary of CC:ed mobs, currently un-tanked mobs etc.

I'll just leave it at that for now - as I meantioned at the start of this post, this is something that you'll have to work out over time. For now, just adapt an analytic attitude and try to think about what you're doing. At least try to start l2p a week or so after you've re-specced :)

That was the Top Ten List, thank your for reading!

RAWR RAWR MOO MOO!

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