Post by krystalmeth
There's no question about it, rampage. You lose way too many vital options for fury dps when trying to get axe spec. The two basic ones would be precision and improved berserker stance.
The talent point precision gives a total of 3% hit. Although this may sound very small and as something you could easily pass up, you would be horribly mistaken. Fury warriors, or any class that dual wields for that matter requires heavily on hit rating, the reason being for that is dual wielding adds a 19% chance to miss, increasing your chance to miss an astronomical 24% chance. Getting a passive ability such as precision decreases this to 21% chance. Added with additional hit rating increasing gear, you will reduce your chance of missing by a great deal, the 3% is just a really nice helpful tool.
Another important part around getting rampage is the improved berserker stance. This gives a passive 10% increase to all AP, and reduces threat by 10% while in berserker stance. What does this mean for you? Well, if you look at Bloodthirst you will notice that it is not based on weapon damage at all, but rather your total attack power. So essentially that 10% increase to your attack power means an additional 10% damage that's constant. The additional 10% threat reduction is extremely nice as well, seeing as how fury warriors do not have an aggro dump like other classes, it allows you to pull out more damage with less worry about pulling aggro.
Now the whole point of this topic, rampage. Rampage at it's highest level gives an additional 250 AP for a total of 30 seconds. The rampage buffs stack very quickly, in about 1-5 seconds depending on your swing timer and miss ratio. The rage cost is very low due to the fact that as a fury warrior you will be generating a great deal of rage consistantly as long as you have the proper weapons. As previously stated Bloodthirst is based on attack power, not weapon damage, so an additional 250 AP only increases your over all damage by a substational amount. Having ran my own tests to see if it was worth it I found that while using rampage I had a 200+ dps increase over all than when not using rampage. If you are able to time your abilities well enough you will have that 250 AP through out the entire boss battle.
How is this better than 5 additional crit from axe spec? Well, first off you would be stuck with axes, if you wanted to switch over to a different weapon you would have to completely respec. Not having axe spec allows you to simply use any weapon of your choosing (I personally used the merc gladiator's fist weapons). Additional when my warrior was fury all I had was kharazhan epics, and I was still able to reach 30% criticial strike rating. You really dont need much more than that, having any thing about 30 is pretty much over kill. I suppose you could say that having that additional 5% crit would allow you to increase your hit rating more freely, but I don't believe that's true either, as I had 217+ hit rating on my fury warrior at all times as well.
Tl;dr version:
Don't get axe spec, get rampage and all the goodies that it holds along the way.
To give you an idea of what type of dps I was doing with it, here's some screen shots:
Scholo:
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f52/Rakkashu/dps3.jpg (Just an idea of how much you can do)
TK (voidreaver):
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f52/Rakkashu/dps2.jpgTK (voidreaver2):
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f52/Rakkashu/dps1.jpg(don't mind the sulfuras, my game's hex code got messed up and it was stuck like that for a month. If you think it's private server look up my character "Rakashu" on the Gorefiend realm).
