DPS Warrior FAQ

[power]

The Hit Table and Itemization

To the best of our knowledge, warrior attacks are based upon a roll table. This may not be the exact way Blizzard’s system does it, but it has been confirmed by Blizzard to give the nearly the same results as their system. It works very simply. Every attack you deal and receive is based off a roll table similar to:

0-28: Miss
28-33.6: Dodge
33.6-58.6: Glancing
58.6-78.6: Crit
78.6-100: Hit

This table is assuming you have no +hit gear and 20% crit, and you are fighting a normal level 73 boss. Say you roll a 10, that would mean your next attack would be a miss.

It is important to note the change when you add, say, 1% hit. The table would now look like this:

0-27: Miss
27-32.6: Dodge
32.6-57.6: Glancing
57.6-77.6: Crit
77.6-100: Hit

While adding 1% hit obviously increased the hit on the table by 1%, it also reduced your miss rate by 1%. The same thing happens when you add crit; you gain 1% crit and lose 1% hit.

Note that this table is different for yellow attacks. Since yellow attacks only have a 9% miss rate and cannot glance, they have a correspondingly higher hit rate.

Crit Cap

As you might have noticed from reading above, there is a point on the table where you will have removed all hit from the table. At this point, adding more crit would be useless, since it would be ignored. This occurs at 42.4% crit for white attacks against a standard level 73 mob. You can, however, raise this cap by adding hit. Every 1% hit you add increases the crit cap by the same amount. Since there are no ways to reduce the dodge or glancing rates (except possibly weapon skill, who’s effects are still relatively unclear), there is a maximum amount of crit you can stack. This occurs for white attacks when you have capped your hit, which means the maximum useful amount of crit occurs at 69.4%. Note that yellow attacks have a much higher cap since they only have a 9% miss rate and they cannot glance.

“Perma Flurry”

This is a myth. Unless you have 100% crit, there will always be a chance that flurry can drop off. 33%, 30% or any similar numbers hold no special value.

Diminishing Returns on Crit

Deep Wounds- This debuff ticks every 3 seconds, but this counter is refreshed every time you crit. Therefore, as you gain more crit, this debuff will refresh more often, and tick less often.

Flurry- Imagine you have 1% crit. Every time you crit, you will most likely consume all three flurry charges afterwards. Now imagine you have 98% crit. If you added 1% more crit, the returns from flurry would be negligible. The chance of flurry falling off would be so low, that the 1% crit you just added would have almost no effect on your flurry uptime.

Hit vs. Crit

Hit and Crit both cause around the same increase in damage. 1% hit adds one attack in every hundred hits, and 1% crit doubles the damage of one hit in every hundred hits. Hit has the added value of triggering trinkets and procs, such as Dragonspine Trophy or Mongoose. It also causes more consistent rage generation, which is an underrated feature. Crit has the added value of triggering Deep Wounds and Flurry, as well as being modified by impale. Crit has a slight advantage, though they are pretty even overall. Thus, you can say that 1% hit is roughly equal to 1% crit.

However, hit caps complicate this. While white attacks cap out at 28% hit, yellow attacks cap out at only 9%. As you can probably realize, stacking hit past 9% will only effect your white damage. An average fury warrior’s white attacks usually make up around 50% of his overall dps. Thus, you can very roughly say that 1% crit is equal to 2% hit once you have over 9% hit.

Note that stacking hit past 9% is worthless for any build which uses a two-handed weapon.

“But you can’t crit if you don’t hit.”

Yes, you can. Adding hit does not increase your chance to crit (unless you have some sort of proc associated with hiting, such as a Dragonspine Trophy). The only exception to this is if you are at the crit cap, which has been explained above.

Crit vs. AP

This is a very tough comparison to make. Crit and AP scale inversely. As you gain more crit, AP becomes more valuable. As you gain more AP, crit becomes more valuable. Because of this, your personal gear, buffs, and group layout can have significant impact on the values of both stats.

The best way to determine which is better for you, is through actual dps testing during a raid. If you don’t wish to do that, you can also try using the spreadsheet.

In general, however:

AP is significantly better when self buffed.
AP is slightly better when raid buffed (no group buffs).
AP is slightly better if you are grouped with a feral druid.
Crit is slightly better if grouped with enhancement shaman and no feral druid.

Crit is superior in a Mortal Strike build, due to normalization.

Haste

At low levels, haste is very comparable to hit. Adding 1% haste will cause 1 extra attack in your next 100 attacks, similar to hit. For example:
Going from 0% haste to 1% haste takes a 4.00 weapon to 4.00 / 1.01 = 3.96.
Going from 98% to 99% takes you from 4.00 / 1.98 = 2.02 to 4.00 / 1.99 = 2.01.


How to Itemize or “But don’t I need 200 Hit Rating?”

There are no magical numbers when it comes to warrior damage. Achieving say, 200 hit rating does not suddenly increase your dps. When deciding on an item to equip, just figure out which item will increase your dps by the largest amount. Don’t equip an item just to hit a certain value. In the end, your stats should even out due to blizzard’s itemization. Due not trust generic values such as “AP is worth 1 point, Crit 2 points, etc.” These values can change and vary significantly between players.

Specific Gear

Trinkets

[Madness of the Betrayer] Rumored to have a 2.4ppm proc. This would give it a static value of -120 armor.
[(-300armor*10seconds*2.4ppm)/60seconds]

[Tsunami Talisman] Rumored to have a .9 ppm proc. This would give it a static 51 attack power.
[(340ap*10seconds*.9ppm)/60seconds]

[Dragonspine Trophy] Rumored to have a 1.5 ppm proc. This would give it a static 81 haste rating.
[(325haste*10seconds*1.5ppm)/60seconds]

[Bloodlust Brooch] The “use” function will add 46 attack power if triggered on every cool down.
[(278ap*20seconds)/120seconds]

[Hourglass of the Unraveller] Rumored to have a .9 ppm proc. This would give it a static 45 attack power.
[(300ap*10seconds*.9ppm)/60seconds]

[Abacus of Violent Odds] The “use” function will add 21 haste rating if triggered on every cool down.
[(260haste*10seconds)/120seconds]

Slow MH vs. Fast MH

Slow MH- Larger Whirlwinds, More rage efficient Cleaves

Fast MH- More Heroics Strikes and Cleaves

The slower the MH, the better. However, DPS is still king. If there is a significant difference in DPS, a fast MH may be used. In this situation, you may want to prioritize heroic strike over whirlwind.

Slow OH vs. Fast OH

There is very little difference between the two. The weapon with the highest DPS/stats will win. However, a fast OH is usually preferred since it provides more consistent rage generation.


Talents, Specs, and Abilities

The cookie cutter build is 17/44, laid out like: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Improved Whirlwind

Improved Whirlwind will provide the smallest DPS improvement among talents, which is why there is usually only 1 point put into it. Some people choose to take piercing howl instead of this talent.

There is another advantage to putting one point in improved whirlwind. It causes your whirlwind and bloodthirst cool downs to line up exactly. For example:

0- Bloodthirst
1.5-Whirlwind
6-Bloodthirst
10.5-Whirlwind
12-Bloodthirst
18-Bloodthirst
19.5-Whirlwind
Etc.

Heroic Strike

Keep in mind that this ability costs extra rage. It costs the 15 rage to cast, plus the rage that would have been generated if it were a white hit. Also keep in mind that this is a yellow attack, which means it only has a miss rate of 9% and can't glance.

Slam

Slam's main draw is the fact the it is not normalized. It's damage is calculated using this formula:
Damage=Base Weapon Damage + (Weapon Speed * Attack Power / 14)

Normalized abilities, such as whirlwind and mortal strike, are calculated using this formula:
Damage=Base Weapon Damage + (X* Attack Power / 14)

X is a constant, it does not vary upon your weapon's speed. When you are using a two-hander, this value will be 3.3. When using a one-hander, it is 2.4. For a dagger, it is 1.7.

The extra damage really becomes obvious with very slow weapons. Take for example, a [Stormherald] on a player with 3500 AP.

Slam=579 + (3.8*3500/14)=1524 + 140=1664

Mortal Strike=579 + (3.3*3500/14)=1404 + 210=1614

As you can see, Slam can actually hit harder than MS. It also costs half the rage. The only downfall is that it resets the swing timer. Improved Slam has a casting time of .5 seconds, so if it is used immediately after a white hit, you should only lose .5 seconds + your latency off your swing.

Note that a slower weapon will not greatly increase damage over time. As long as your weapon + buffs stay at less than 2.5 speed (so you can complete the rotation), the extra instant attack damage will be mostly made up by a faster swing time.

Threat

Battle Stance and Berzerker Stance have a passive -20% threat generation mechanic. This combined with salvation (-30%) will usually let you go all out. If you are still having trouble, you can do a number of things:

- Use [Prism of Inner Calm]. This reduces your threat by around 10%.
- Get soulstoned, and die to wipe your agro.
- Limit your heroic strikes.

“Couldn’t I replace Heroic Strikes with Cleaves to do less threat?”

Yes, this is an option. Cleave does actually do more threat per bonus damage. However, the total threat added is lower than heroic strike. Because of this, you can do it more frequently and take advantage of the benefits from impale and and yellow damage.

Rotations

Dual Wield Fury

100%-20%

In this range, always ensure that you have rage (and that you abilities aren’t on the global cool down) to use Bloodthirst every time it comes off cool down. Whirlwind is your next priority, keep it on cool down, but Bloodthirst has priority if they both come off cool down at the same time. Keep rampage up when Bloodthirst and Whirlwind are on global cool down. If you have extra rage after that, spend it on heroic strikes. Additionally, if you extra rage after using heroic strike on every auto attack, you can throw in some hamstrings between Bloodthirsts and Whirlwinds.

20%-0%

Execute. Don’t save a full rage bar for this phase. If you do go into it with a full rage bar, Bloodthirst than start executing. The key to maximizing dps in this phase is to ensure that you can execute on every global cool down. Equipping a fast MH usually helps to do this, by smoothing out your rage generation. Something like [King's Defender] works well. Also, if you have more than 2989AP, Bloodthirst is more efficient than execute.

(30 Rage Execute=1245 Damage; 2989AP Bloodthirst=1245 Damage Thanks Zoroaster)

Mortal Strike/Improved Slam Build

100%-20%

In order to get the most out of your slams, you will want to time them to hit immediately after a swing. To do this efficiently, you will want a swing timer. I recommend using either Swinger or Quartz.

You will than have a rotation like this:

White Attack->Slam->Mortal Strike->White Attack->Slam->Whirlwind->White Attack->Slam->Mortal Strike->White Attack->Slam->Hamstring/Shout

Make sure that the global cool down is free after after a white attack, so you can cast slam freely. "Spam Slam" is not an efficient form of dps. The 1.5 second global cool down means you can only get around 2-3 slams in place of white attacks. Heroic Strike won't be used much here because this rotation is very rage intensive.

Keep in mind that slam basically has a built in /stopcasting macro. You can watch your latency, and start you slam early. For example, if you have 200ms, you can start your slam .2 seconds before your auto attack lands.

If your hasted with something like heroism, or very high end gear, or you have a relatively fast two-hander, you may wish to drop Slam from your rotation. There is a point where cutting .5 seconds off your auto attack is a bigger loss in dps than you gain from the slam. This rotation is also impossible if you swing faster than 2.5 seconds. Again, you would want to cut slam out of your rotation if this occurs.

20%-0%

Continue the same rotation above. Execute spam is not very efficient with a two-hander. If you have heroism, or drink a haste pot, or something similar, than start spamming. Those buffs will make your weapon fast enough to not waste rage. You will still want to keep MS on cooldown if you have the rage. Alternatively, you can equip a couple fast one-handers. If you have around 9% hit, than this can be effective. However, if you have low hit like many MS warriors, you may miss too much to get off consistent executes.

[elliotthehobo]

wow great guide

[Dougford]

nice guide!

[brynz0rz]

Probably copy pasted from somewhere else, but always nice to post I guess.

[~OddBall~]

that's a guide and a half cheers. This is the sort of thing that deserves +Rep

[KTTnVST]

At lest give credit to the person who wrote this.

/slap the people who give rep to people who copy and paste.


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