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

They’re still not going to pickup the garbage talents that are improved mortal strike or endless rage.

That’s a quote from one druid on WoW forums, I’m not going to give name or url to his post, not to make him ashamed. It strikes me how often people fail at math, it really makes me sad. Mortal Strike have 6 second cooldown, right? With improved MS the cooldown is dropped to 5 seconds, right? That’s 20% dps increase on MS. It also adds 5% more damage, right? So that’s overall 26% (1.2 * 1.05) dps increase on Mortal Strike from one talent. If improved MS increased it’s damage by 25% I guess people would cream their pants instantly, but when they see 1 sec cooldown and 5% damage they all suddenly go ‘meh’, never will I understand that. Maybe because I stopped playing WoW and I can look at it from further perspective? Maybe…

I think people just have short memory, or those who spam forums are new retards every month. Anyone remember what happened after patch 2.0 came in and Tactical Mastery was moved to prot? You could stay 31/20 without TM, or get new talents (second wind, blood frenzy, imp. MS and ER), TM and last stand. Yes, going for full Arms was the way.

Another thing is, if you love big numbers, since Deathwish doesn’t stack with Enrage anymore, the highest burst damage you can land with MS from strongest to weakest build:

1. 41/20 (25% enrage * 4% blood frenzy * 5% imp. MS, TOTAL: +36% damage on MS)
2. 41/5/14 + 1 free point (20% deathwish * 4% blood frenzy * 5% imp. MS, TOTAL: +31% damage on MS)
3. 35/23/3 (25% enrage * 4% blood frenzy, TOTAL: +30% damage on MS)
4. 33/whatever (25% enrage, TOTAL: +25% damage on MS)

I’m obviously not counting talents like 2h mastery which is in all of those builds. So as you can see, even an Arms/Prot hybrid for semi tanking - semi dps - semi PvP is going to land higher crits then uber fury offspecced peeps who think, like our fellow druid, that imp. MS and ER are garbage.

Ah yes, I didn’t say anything about ER, did I? The last build I had included unbridled wrath and 3/5 flurry (before the nerf that was +20% white dps = +20% rage over time). I could definitley tell the difference with and without Unbridled Wrath, Endless Rage is way stronger then that. If you are saying ‘lawl, I don’t need more rage’, that’s because:

a) You suck, or
b) You are used to the limits you have with your rage building speed.

There is no such thing as too much rage. Sooner or later you will find that one bitch with absorption shield, or protection pally, and you will thank God or whatever you believe in that you have those extra 80 rage. If I were to resign from such, hybrid 33/28, build I’d go with either 41/20 or 42/5/14 now (even with 3/3 defiance that’s going to be a very strong arena build with Last Stand). The advantages and disadvantages of offspeccing prot looks like this:

+ Be useful in PvE (even tho I hate PvE).
+ TM can become a must have once again, now Disarm actually has a use.
+ Last Stand, the only useable ‘oh shit button’.
+ More armor is always a good thing.
+ More initial rage from bloodrage for those moments when you get in combat before charge (and whole combat after).

- No enrage, not that big deal tho.
- No blood craze, I like it.
- No PIERCING HOWL.
- No other small talents of choice, like unbridled/booming/whatever.

I guess I’ll reactivate my account sooner or later to try it out before WotLK. I think that the more options we have to build a character, the more people people whine on forums. Long ago they would go on forums, ask for spec and were told ‘31/20′, now they have to make decisions and they are crying like little children who don’t know what toys to take, they just want them all.

Terhix

Warriors ARE the top of the pvp foodchain. After months of crying since patch 2.0.1 made it live, after having topics made by other classes asking to buff us and after nothing really happening yet (there are buffs comming next patch, but we are still the same supposed-to-be-weak class we were not so long ago) and the attitude changed drastically. Why? One word - arena. Now that we finally have REAL group pvp that’s not about capturing a flag (like wtf do I need some silk and a stick for? I want to kill those slackers!) or whatever, and now that we finally have the Armory, people started to realize what some of us knew for a long time - Warriors dominate group pvp.

Why is that a class that’s actually pretty weak in duels shine so much in groups? Well, we always were monsters, but it’s very easy for most classes to “outplay” us in 1v1 fight. In groups however, support classes counter most of crowd control that can be used to stop a warrior, that’s one thing - rage and reactive talents such as enrage is another thing and Mortal Strike is the cherry on the cake. Big, fat cherry, and actually some people believe, that this one cherry is bigger then the whole cake.

Is 50% healing debuff overpowered? Our beloved druids, who pretty much hate us now and blame for their nerfs, along with some people of other classes say it is. 10 second long, undispellable with burst damage bound to it, it’s one of the best abilities in the whole game, followed by assist train it means the guy you just hit is going to die, and that priest behind him is not going to change that! Is it really overpowered? Well, I don’t really think so, and I think Blizzard, at this moment, agree with me - tho they pretty much didn’t want warriors to dominate healing-debuffing market and gave rogues wound poison that stacked 5 times does the same. One of the best defenses of this state of things, is that it’s not MS that is overpowered - it’s healing. Healers can provide way more healing then damage dealing classes can provide damage, this is one of the main reasons why mana-based dps fail in Arenas - they can simply go out of mana while healers still have the steam. The game has to be balanced for both pve and pvp, healers being able to heal for long periods of time are desired in PvE, but PvP is a different game, and tools like Mortal Strike and Wound Poison make sure it’s not going to be same who deals more dps / who heals more / who has bigger e-peen bullshit.

The other approach I’ve seen is that MS debuff is not really a bad thing, the bad thing is it’s deep in arms and thus make arms the only way to go to PvP. I find it kind of funny how every class on earth was fine with Arms being PvP spec, Fury being PvE dps spec and Prot being PvE tanking spec for 2 years, with each of those trees being sub par at other roles, and now all of sudden they are sooooo concerned about our spec-balance.

Terhix