I see this way too often on forums, random people coming asking why Enrage and Blood Craze are not stacking. In fact, I had this in my page about warrior bugs a while back. The thing is, there is no bug. Why are you seeing BCraze activate without Enrage and vice versa? Here is how it works:

1. An enemy hits you.
2. Game checks if you have any resilience, and you do have some.
3. Game doesn’t know if that hit was a crit reduced by resilience or just a normal hit, so it takes your resilience % (let’s say 10%) and checks if you have any on-crit talents…
4. Game found BCraze and rolled a random number for it with 10% chance for it to proc.
5. Game found Enrage and rolled ANOTHER random number for it with 10% chance for it to proc.

In simple words, when you get hit (not crit) you will have two separate rolls for enrage and BC, and as such they will very rarely proc at the same time on non-crits. They do not collide, if you have 10% chance to proc Enrage on non-crit, you will have 10% chance to proc Enrage even if you didn’t have BCraze, they don’t even know about each other.

Terhix

In previous post Veritas is trying to prove something that’s impossible to prove, and he is using many words and numbers for it. I’ll make a short post that will prove why is he wrong.

Fact: your white dps needs to be below 40% of your total dps for Flurry to produce less per-talent-point dps then BF.
Fact: with rage normalization BF adds about 2% to rage gen, which won’t be even noticeable as rage is rounded to small numbers making it negligible.

In scenario where you are using Slam, MS and WW, you need pretty much 500 rage per minute to keep that up. Now when you are using Slam to slow your hits down, let’s assume you are hitting once per 4 seconds (you don’t have Flurry, yet), that means you have to generate 33.3 rage per hit. With good gear you should get what? 20 rage per hit on cloth? To generate that amounts of rage from damage done only you would need to have 66% crit and hit a cloth guy with 0 resilience. Good luck.

Dropping white dps below 40% of your total dps is really hard, there are problems with rage, there are problems with cooldowns and there are problems with global cooldowns, you can’t magically toss hamstrings, pummels, MS’s, WWs, Slams whenever you like and feel like it, without being rage starving and having constant GCD conflicts, it’s just not fucking possible.

Fact: There is no way BF will ever produce more dps-per-talent point then Flurry if you are the only physical dps guy in the group gaining rage from damage done only.

Now I don’t know about Veritas, but I can always find a way to burn my rage down with something, I’m never at 100 rage, ever. There is no such thing as too much rage, the more rage you generate the better, and for that reason, Flurry beats BF by infinity, since BF generates so much rage it’s… nonexistent.

BF is different then Flurry, it has an advantage for when you are not the only physical dps in your group, which is what it was designed for. You take Flurry to greatly increase your single-target dps for when you are ignored, dealing damage when you are not ignored was never a problem, and in 5v5 when you are not ignored, you are running around in def stance trying to survive, at which point it pretty much doesn’t matter which one you picked.

Terhix

One of the big decisions a warrior has to make in his pvp talent spec is between the flat 4% dps increase of blood frenzy and the 15% white dps increase of flurry.

Now, I don’t know too many people who will argue that BF isn’t immediately superior if you add another physical dps source to your target, so I won’t waste time arguing that. Add a rogue or hunter on your target and BF pulls double duty, surpassing flurry easily.

But if it’s just you doing physical damage, how big is the gap between 3/5 flurry and 2/2BF? Not as big as you might think - in fact its virtually non-existent.

I based my calculations on the following assumptions. Note that the actual figure for “avg dmg per hit” isn’t that important because both abilities scale. Higher crit should favour yellow damage due to impale, but 33% is pretty easily obtained by any warrior.

In order to compare the talents I needed a figure for how much of your dps comes from yellow and how much comes from white,  because flurry only affects your white dps. For reference, I calculated that without using slam/hs/cleave, white damage makes up 44% of your dps. If you insert 1 slam every 10 seconds, white damage drops to 35%. I did not model for execute, hs, or cleave. Hamstring and pummel damage is pretty much negligible.

The scenario:

A 1 minute fight, using 16 white hits, 10 MS, and 5 WW (I dropped the 6th ww because GCD for MS and WW collide every 30sec, thus you could not actually do 10ms and 6 ww in 60 seconds)
A 33% crit rate (1 in 3 hits are crits)
A normal white hit of 700 damage.

The Shakedown:

3/5 Flurry provides 6.6% more overall DPS.
2/2 Blood Frenzy provides 4% more overall DPS.

BUT

Flurry costs an additional talent point. There are 2 ways to look at this:

Theoretical: BF is 2% dps per talent point, Flurry is 2.1% per talent point.
Practical: With 1 more point you could put it in 2h wep mastery for an additional 1% to your 4% of BF (5% total for BF vs 6.6% for Flurry).

You might not put it there, but that’s effectively what its worth since you could actually do that if you want max dps.

BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!

The original calculation does NOT include the use of slam or cleave/Heroic strike. I did not model the test to use hs/cleave as they are hugely rage inefficient and would be unfair comparisons. Everytime you use them you lose 1 of your white hits, so they quickly make flurry look terrible.

I did however re-model it to see what happens if you throw in some improved slams. The number of slams you can use in a minute is entirely dependent on your rage generation. If you had infinite rage, you’d never even do a white hit, instead slamming everytime MS was on CD. So flurry would do 0% dps in that case.

The fact of life is we don’t have infinite rage, and rage generation can vary wildly. If you’re rage starved, you might never slam. If you’re critting and getting second wind/mace procs, you might slam every other white swing. I chose to see what would happen if I slammed 6 times during that 1 minute fight, i.e. 1 slam every 10 seconds, which seems pretty reasonable.

The result?

Flurry would drop to a 5.25% overall dps increase (1.75% per talent point vs BF’s 2% per talent point).

Why is that you ask? Because flurry only increases my white DPS, while BF increases both white and yellow dps. The more my damage that comes from yellow sources, the less flurry is doing for my overall DPS.

Also, each slam takes up 0.5s of my dps time, so right away if I do between 1-7 slams, I lose 1 white swing (3.6s to do 1 swing). 8-14, I lose 2 white swings. etc. I modeled on 6 slams so dropped from 16 white swings to 15.

As you can imagine, its even worse for HS/Cleave, because every SINGLE cleave/hs eliminates a white swing. As I said, there’s no point modelling this as it will make flurry look horrendous very quickly and we know that’s not accurate.

I did not bother trying to factor in execute damage because it’s nearly impossible to do - it depends how much time your target spends below 20%, how much rage you have, etc. It’s there, and its more yellow damage - probably a significant amount, but its nearly impossible to quantify. For my model I guess just assume the target never went below 20% in that 1 minute :p

So… Are there any redeeming qualities for flurry?!

There is in fact 1 very significant advantage to flurry. Because it affects white dps, it affects rage generation. Flurry produces 11% more rage from white damage than BF does.

Thats roughly like having a half-point in Endless rage.

This is mildly mitigated by the fact that you can take Tactical Mastery with BF but not with flurry. The more you stance dance, the more rage TM is “generating” (by saving 15 per switch) for you, in addition to opening instant disarm/spell reflect doors.

So what’s the bottom line?

In the absolute best case scenario for flurry (you never use slam, HS, or Cleave), it will do 2.6% more dps for you than blood frenzy would.
If you insert a few slams, and compensate for that missing talent point (consider it at worst a 1% dps increase), flurry does pretty much identical dps to blood frenzy.
If you add another source of physical dps, blood frenzy completely blows 3/5 flurry out of the water.

Flurry’s advantage is producing 11% more white-dmg rage than BF, which is like half-endless rage. It’s primary disadvantage is that you can’t take tactical mastery, which opens doors to instant-reflect/disarm/ww and saves rage when switching stances.

When all is said and done, 3/5 flurry and 2/2 blood frenzy are almost identical in terms of dps and utility. (unless you’re a noob who never uses slam, and never pvp’s with other physical dpsers, in which case flurry will give ~1.6% more dps than BF)

But at the end of the day we’re talking 1% (or less) dps difference, and you don’t see people funneling points into 2h mastery, nor re-rolling human/orc for the 1% crit. The choice really is yours.

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Veritas

You probably saw it coming. With patch 2.3 changes done to weapon mastery, sweeping strikes, along with new imba enchant 33/28 got stronger then before. Weapon Mastery is what really made me respec, I wasn’t taking it into account, but if I consider it as a -2% dodge and the ability to have an enchant (I would be pretty much forced to use weapon chain without it) it’s one of the best if not the best two-point talents we have atm.

41 arms is nice, but it doesn’t have an edge over any, hybrid or not, common PvP build. Seeing they are fixing defiance to give 6 expertise outside of def stance in 2.3.2 I’m 100% positive that Blizzard moved DW and Intercept to arms to make 41/5/15 - 42/5/14 viable. It makes sense as on BlizzCON class discussion they noted how warrior could perform extremely well in many aspects of the game (PvP / PvE dps / Tanking) but couldn’t do so without respeccing. Now with changes to defiance, TM and after talents swapping it’s possible to make a build viable in all aspects of the game, not the best in any of them, but good enough for a casual player who wants to do some heroics, BGs and arenas, which should be the majority of players. I’d also bet my money that Kalgan is using 41/5/15 or 42/5/14 by now on his supposed to be rocking with S3 weapon within first week of S3 warrior.

I need to practice Sweeping Strikes now, since I respecced 33/28 from 35/23/3 long time ago I didn’t use it that much as I found it really not-handy to stance dance for SS without TM. It’s extremely potent talent, and when grouped with druid/pala in 2v2 where there is no risk of breaking CC like poly, you can give your enemies a big surprise and make them think “WTF did just happen?”.

Update: OK, I didn’t think about Intercept when talking about WM, imp. Intercept is our best 2 pointer hands down ;).

Terhix

There are things in WoW I call ancient mechanics, it’s things that are completely broken, retarded, yet still in game for some odd reason, for example one of them is the fact that deep wounds break cowering in fear effect of intimidating shout, effectively making us unable to CC someone after we crit, it’s the fact that blood craze reset whenever we get critted without giving us a tick and few other small things.

One thing that is recently floating over forums is not as minor as deep wounds/blood craze problems - it’s the Berserker Stance penalty. It was taken to public in past, before TBC, without results. We all know how berserker stance works:

An aggressive stance. Critical hit chance is increased by 3% and all damage taken is increased by 10%.

If you are not familiar with the warrior class, you can probably already smell the bullshit. 3% crit has became so minor buff since epix started to rule the world, it’s not really all that good anymore, warriors usually have extremely high crit chance, and with resilience being in game, 3% crit is not a big dps increase. Now let’s discuss this from 3 points of view: Lore, Common Sense and WoW Balance, here we go:

1. Lore

What is berserking? It’s fighting madly without worrying about self, as such berserker stance makes sense? Not really, no. Let’s take a look at similar mechanic: Barbarian’s Rage ability in mother of all rpg mechanics - D&D (3.5 version):

A barbarian can fly into a rage a certain number of times per day. In a rage, a barbarian temporarily gains a +4 bonus to Strength, a +4 bonus to Constitution, and a +2 morale bonus on Will saves, but he takes a -2 penalty to Armor Class. The increase in Constitution increases the barbarian’s hit points by 2 points per level, but these hit points go away at the end of the rage when his Constitution score drops back to normal. (…) A barbarian may prematurely end his rage. At the end of the rage, the barbarian loses the rage modifiers and restrictions and becomes fatigued (–2 penalty to Strength, –2 penalty to Dexterity, can’t charge or run) for the duration of the current encounter (unless he is a 17th-level barbarian, at which point this limitation no longer applies; see below).

And the last “ranks” of Rage:

Tireless Rage (Ex): At 17th level and higher, a barbarian no longer becomes fatigued at the end of his rage.

Mighty Rage (Ex): At 20th level, a barbarian’s bonuses to Strength and Constitution during his rage each increase to +8, and his morale bonus on Will saves increases to +4. The penalty to AC remains at -2.

Armor Class is not what Armor in WoW is, AC increase one’s avoidance and is used for describing everything like dodge chance from Dexterity, Monk’s increased avoidance from Wisdom, Duelist’s increased avoidance from Intelligence and (of course) AC from Armor protecting body and/or shield. So, in the end how does Rage affect Barbarian in D&D? Let’s make a break down:

• Increases his damage thanks to increased STR.
• Temporarily increases his HP thanks to increased CON (I died once in D&D: Online when my rage ended while I had like 8 hp left).
• Increases Will saves to help against spells that work against mind (fear, charm, paralyze etc.)
• Reduces avoidance due to lowered AC.

Barbarian becomes stronger and uncontrollable but is unaware of attacks, you don’t care about taking a hit when in Rage, but does it says anywhere that you take more damage while in Rage? No, if anything you are tougher due to temporary hit points.

Now WoW doesn’t work same way, but we can see some similarities, while in berserker stance we can use berserker rage ability that breaks fears (Will saves from morale in D&D), we have, technically, slightly higher damage done due to 3% crit (woohoo!) and take a whooping 10% more damage then everyone else in the game. Death Wish, which (despite of being moved to Arms) is a similar category of abilities also increase damage done, and again increase damage taken by 5%. It’s worth to note that in past Death Wish used to lower our Armor and Resistances by 10%. I find it funny that original developers of WoW assumed we would have some spell resistance on our gear in endgame when implementing this ability, I mean, it would make sense for a tank class to be durable against spells back in the past, but since Kalgan is taking care of WoW PvP logic is not a strong part on Blizzard. From Lore PoV it would make sence if Berserker Stance lowered our dodge/parry chance, or even lower our armor (increase damage taken against physical attacks), being Berserk means you are going offensive, you don’t defend yourself, but there should be no penalty against things (spells) you already can’t defend against.

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Terhix