Gladiator Leh from Tichondrius BG9, an American server. I transfered over during season 3 finishing top 10 in 2s/3s in BG1 during season 2. Been playing warrior since WoW came back, but arena was an on and off thing for me. I wanted to share some of my experiences and knowledge since Warriorpwns.com’s post were inactive.

Flurry:
DPS – More white swings = more rage = more specials = more dps
Well not really. Getting 1.5 swings every 10 swing isn’t THAT big of a dps upgrade.
Warlocks and Priests are the only classes where flurry can be good against, but then if there’s a paladin, hunter, or druid on their team flurry becomes irrelevant again. There’s also too many factors against flurry because warriors either get CC’d to death or we get blown up on a quick swap. Factors include: getting stunned, snared, immobilized, target getting freedomed, hunter traps, target swapping, switching to board/1hand, etc.

Imp Execute – Good, nothing wrong with it.

Easy to play –What’s difficult about staying in berserker stance and spamming Mortal Strike and never switching stance?
Not difficult.

Tactical Mastery:

DPS – Some would argue that it produces just as much or even more dps than flurry in most cases as a result of more usage of overpower, blood frenzy, or frequent target swaps. The ability to retain rage retains dps/utility. A team of 2 or more physical dpser would greatly benefit from 4% blood frenzy.

Utility – The ability to disarm and spell reflect is crucial for success. Disarming the warrior to keep MS off for a second or disarm rogues for 10 second could bring their target from death to full health. Spell reflecting that sheep or cyclone can be game breaking.

Harder to play – Anyone can play flurry because it doesn’t require any stance changing… but not everyone can play tactical mastery “effectively.” It just opens a lot of option in arena compared to flurry.

I agree that both specs have its advantages and disadvantages, but in “most cases” tactical mastery is more useful than flurry, which is why most of the top warriors are spec’s 35/23/3.

2s – You’ll probably be facing against a druid plus something. Spell reflecting a cyclone or root can be game breaking while reducing pressure on the druid’s CC as a result of fear of reflecting. Intervene healer into hamstring and disarm melee then intercept and hamstring back on your target works wonder.

3s – Druids druids druids. Read above. This time you can “bounce” around more often. 4% blood frenzy is wonderful in a two physical dps oriented team. Instant spell reflect saves lives against RMP on a swap. Intervening on a sheep cast when pummel is on CD is quite satisfying.

5s – 2345 (warrior priest paladin shaman mage) and 2346 (warlock instead of mage) are the most common make ups according to SK-Gaming. These make up tend to “warrior gib” and instant spell reflect saves lives. Warriors are usually on these make up and target swaps are very common.

Duels – Tactical Mastery owns more except against classes you’ve already lost before the duel starts… priest and warlocks (which flurry is best against).

Answer - Spec Tactical Mastery and learn how to play it effectively. You can always go back to flurry vs optimized make ups or you’re feeling lazy. Anyone can play flurry “effectively”, but not everyone play with tactical mastery “effectively.”

I was flurry since season 1 came out on BG1 and when I transferred to BG9 (most competitive American Battlegroup) during season 3, I spec’d Tactical Mastery and stuck with it because of its utility.

Leh

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

It’s been a while since I published and then fixed a few times my Axe vs Sword calculator. In the end of the day it just confirmed what all hardcore PvPers were saying for a long time. Some people were surprised when they’ve seen that having Flurry is not always favoring axe spec, as it seemed going 31/30 with anything but Axe was madness. By now I’m 110% positive that it’s not true and, as it turns out, for high crit chance Sword Spec works out better then Axe Spec with Flurry, and to prove my point, I give you this little toy - the Flurry uptime simulator, which is used by Axe vs Sword calculator from previous post. Flurry uptime to crit chance is a curve, much like mitigation is to armor - the more armor you have, the less impact every another point of armor will have on your mitigation, and as such it’s possible to reach a crit chance that will keep Flurry up for reasonable amounts of time without having to grab axe spec, and at that point having another 5% crit won’t have a big impact on the uptime, and in result, on the total DPS you can dish out.

Having said that, many people, when they calculate their DPS with Flurry assume they will have it up 100% of the time, that’s false assumption. When bashing your target, depending on your crit rate, you will have Flurry up on about 80% of the time, which while being quite a lot, is 20% less then what people commonly assume, meaning Flurry doesn’t produce as much dps as people can think.

There is one interesting thing you can test with Axe vs Sword calculator, launch it, test the damage done with 25% Flurry, and then test the damage done without Flurry but with improved Mortal Strike aka garbage talent. With default data set in the calculator Improved MS adds 50% more dps then Flurry! That 1 second of MS and 5% of it’s damage is vastly underestimated. There is however a fundamental difference between those two talents, Flurry will make you generate more rage, when Improved MS will make you loose more rage, so in the end, Flurry is better, right? Well, almost. There is another garbage talent that helps Improved MS a lot - Endless Rage. ER will produce more rage then Flurry, and will nicely help to fuel your MS spamming every 5 seconds. You need 20% more rage for MS to keep it up (less if you consider that’s not the only ability you use), and you get 25% more rage from ER, so in the end, you are still 5% ahead. Endless Rage is the 6th point of Improved MS, and as such Imp. MS should never be taken without ER. Now I’m not going to give you exact numbers with rage generated and lost, but when you put Flurry against Improved MS + ER, a value of every single point you put in either of those talents should be pretty much equal, if not favoring Arms talents over Fury ones. Patch 2.3 will be a very interesting one.

Terhix