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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