Warrior dps, and Macros

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werries2

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I have been asked to dust of my warrior and get her ready for raiding again. The only problem is I have always sucked with warrior dps (compared to my hunter or mage). Last time I raided with her as dps was during TBC, speced arms. It was so bad that I nearly deleted her...
I have however decided that I could do with the challenge of getting her into shape and a contender for top dps spot.
I know there are a few good warrior dps'ers out there in South Africa, so I will direct my questions to them.
I have decided on Arms spec for now, with iLVL ~350 gear and a ilvl 333 sword I can already push 10k dps on the boss training dummy (self buffed, no flasks/food). Which I think is decent for a char that have not even entered level 85 dungeons, heroics or raids.
Velocity on Shadowsong Eu, if you want to look her up on the armory. I just used her to make gold, and lots of it she made just through selling gems ;)

Some arms concerns I have however...
Arms is all about using GCD as efficient as possible. With stupid latencies of around 200-300 in SA, this seems to be the biggest challenge? Slam seems to eat up much more than just a GCD when used, should I rather just HS?

What Macro's are you using?
Specifically, stance dancing macros? Beserk to do MS and back for Battle to do OP?
 
I can't help you much with arms, I have only played it in arena, and not so much in PvE, mostly because I couldn't get it to do close enough to fury, nor did I have a top dps 2h ever.

Arms however is mostly about using slam in-between globals, and yes it is what will bring you to the top with Arms on single target, far more important to spam Slam over HS, HS only when you have spare rage for it.
A South African that allegedly does really good in Arms: http://www.wowprogress.com/character/eu/sylvanas/Lynanda
However doesn't look like he plays a lot anymore, used to see him post and stuff on ej.

As for fury, very easy, simple priority based system (no rotation really) with a slight difference between SMF and TG.

SMF is my favourite and that is what I currently play.
SMF Prio: BT -> Slam(if procced) + HS -> RB -> HS if you have more than 60 rage.
Important to note, if slam procced, use it and HS simultaneously. The reason being, HS is not on GCD and slam uses very little rage to no rage. Now most websites will say CS -> BT, but if you want to push for the top, you need to optimize the use of CS, by means of using only BT -> Slamprocs so to let your rage build up to 90-100 rage, then you use CS -> HS + BT -> Slam if procced -> RB -> BT -> HS. The idea is to make use of those few seconds that CS is up to do as much damage as possible. Keep this in mind also when you blowing your cooldowns (recklessness + deathwish). Don't think I need to mention you want to blow those at the start of the fight so you can use them again as soon as they are off cooldown.

TG Prio: BT -> RB -> Slam proc -> HS (at least I think thats what it is, haven't played TG in a while).
Same story with CS, you wanna make use of it as much as you can. I could add try to time it with Landslide procs if you can.

And that is about it.
 
Thanks, I may yet change to fury, if the arms does not work out for me. Seems a lot of warriors are going fury anyway to get the best of the new two set bonus. Arms have enough rage, and the extra rage will benefit fury possibly more?
 
Possibly, but you will find there are times you are rage starved, happens to the best of us as well sadly. It is one of the reasons I prefer SMF over TG, the rage build up is smoother, smaller chunks thus incoming rage more than with TG which still get it in bigger chunks. But according to the TG warriors in my guild its much better nowadays than it was in 4.0-4.1

I forgot to add, I don't really make use of macros while I dps, which is my mainspec, however my offspec Prot, I can't do it without at least 8 macros. PvP however I also used to have a lot of macros, but its mostly for stuff like spell reflect, changing weapons and shieldwall/shieldblock, which none I need of in pve as dps.
 
I can see that fury warriors require little regarding macros, asp the stance swapping. After all you are already in Berserker stance dealing the max dps you can. If arms want to utilize the extra 5% dmg from stance swapping it is difficult to do without the use of macros. Having played mage, hunter and paladin I am so used to be macro dependant, that I feel naked using no macro's currently on my warrior.
 
Raided for the first time last night with warrior as arms. Part from the horrible lag I experienced from 8-9:30, it was quite nice to average around 15k dps with my mostly still crap gear ;)
Using abilities just a few ms before the GCD finishes it was quite easy to weave in slam and not loose my MS or OP procs. I did find however that OP proced either slower or faster than my experience on training dummies... Still quite a nice experience.
We had a fury warrior in the group as well, and though he is much better geared, I could manage to keep up with the dps. Though fury seems to be king when it comes to trash aoe? Only times I could beat him on trash is when I could pop Bladestorm and retaliation at the same time.

Mage and hunter in the group were top dps, but then again also much better geared.
 
werries2 said:
I have been asked to dust of my warrior and get her ready for raiding again. The only problem is I have always sucked with warrior dps (compared to my hunter or mage). Last time I raided with her as dps was during TBC, speced arms. It was so bad that I nearly deleted her...
I have however decided that I could do with the challenge of getting her into shape and a contender for top dps spot.
I know there are a few good warrior dps'ers out there in South Africa, so I will direct my questions to them.
I have decided on Arms spec for now, with iLVL ~350 gear and a ilvl 333 sword I can already push 10k dps on the boss training dummy (self buffed, no flasks/food). Which I think is decent for a char that have not even entered level 85 dungeons, heroics or raids.
Velocity on Shadowsong Eu, if you want to look her up on the armory. I just used her to make gold, and lots of it she made just through selling gems ;)

Some arms concerns I have however...
Arms is all about using GCD as efficient as possible. With stupid latencies of around 200-300 in SA, this seems to be the biggest challenge? Slam seems to eat up much more than just a GCD when used, should I rather just HS?

What Macro's are you using?
Specifically, stance dancing macros? Beserk to do MS and back for Battle to do OP?
Click to expand...

I played a Warrior DPS when I just started WoW. I eventually deleted him after playing him in TBC.

My take and it's prob worthless since allot has changed since then.

1. Protection = Tank.
2. Arms = PvP.
3. Fury = DPS.

I have noticed that allot of DPS even now in the groups I tank on my Gnome warrior are Fury, I haven't seen an Arms DPS as yet. (This doesn't means they aren't there though) Since I'm only doing random heroics so far.
 
Pitbull said:
I have noticed that allot of DPS even now in the groups I tank on my Gnome warrior are Fury, I haven't seen an Arms DPS as yet. (This doesn't means they aren't there though) Since I'm only doing random heroics so far.
Click to expand...

I've seen about 3 Arms warriors out of 50 random hc's with dps warriors
 
As arms you should be do more AoE than fury, even without bladestorm. You need to do this.

1. Spec blood and thunder.
2. Make sure you have cleave glyphed

When you aoe on trash its easy: Charge -> Rend -> Thunderclap -> spam cleave -> Thunderclap -> spam cleave.

The cool thing about rend (and serpent sting spread on surv hunters) is that, aoe does less damage the more mobs there are, BUT rend dmg stays the same on ALL mobs, thus the more mobs, the better your AoE dmg. This is why prot warriors do so much dmg on aoe packs as well.
 
Oculate said:
I've seen about 3 Arms warriors out of 50 random hc's with dps warriors
Click to expand...

So Fury seems to still be prefered for PvE I suppose?

I personally love arms since I have done so much of PvP in that spec. Don't know much about Fury tbh.
 
Arms seems to be a much more specialized dps build than fury. i.e. its great for pvp and similar to fury for raids, but not as good as fury for dungeons.
 
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