World of Warcraft™

4/6/2012: Updated with Panda stuff. http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2190890474?page=1#4

GO HERE for changes in 4.3 to rotation. http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2190890474?page=1#3
*Updated with 4.3 BIS Weapons. (Yeah, I know, I'm really late on that.)

I transferred servers, so the armory on the left will not work. This will, if you're interested in my armory.
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/stormrage/Collision/advanced

Hello everybody, this is my guide for Single-minded-fury, a subspec of Fury for the warrior class. The intention of this guide is to show the differences between the two sub-specs, and hopefully make everyone who reads this a slightly better player at the end of the day.

Talent spec: 8/31/2
http://wowtal.com/#k=BeB4St5V.aei.warrior.RDZPgB

That’s what you’ll see for most warriors. Some people drop a point in rude interruption for Piercing howl, and you can also swap out the victory rush glyph for the colossus smash glyph if needed.

Ability priority:

As SMF, one of the first things you will notice is how weak raging blow is compared to TG. This is due to the weapon speed differential between TG and SMF (Typically 3.6/3.8 vs 2.6). This is the only reason we have a different ability priority than TG.

When dealing with your ability usage, you have to look at rage as a limited resource in which you must maximize each point of rage to put out the most damage possible. Every time you use heroic strike outside of colossus smash you are losing a small amount of DPS overall, and every time you delay using bloodthirst you are also losing out on overall dps.

Each ability has an average “Damage per rage” when you use it at any point in an encounter. Ultimately you want to use your highest DPR abilities every time they’re off cool down. When dealing with TG, RB is actually your highest DPR ability and is a button that you do not want to delay pressing very often. With SMF, RB is one of your weaker attacks and you will sometimes delay using it outside of colossus smash.

Damage per rage in BIS gear
Bloodthirst - 2076
Execute - 1950
Raging Blow -1660 (With 1398 mastery)
20 rage heroic strike - 1592
30 rage heroic strike - 1061As you can see, the DPR difference between HS and BT is fairly significant. Due to this, if you learn anything from this guide, it is that you must follow these rules when dealing with heroic strike.

Generally during the encounter you will play a giant game of "Avoid using heroic strike!"

Only use heroic strike when the following conditions apply:

Rage > 80

Colossus smash is up on the target and your rage > 50

Incite proc and you have more than 50 rage. Attempt to save for colossus smash if possible, and skip out on using raging blow until you have used your incite proc, as a guaranteed crit heroic strike does more damage on average than raging blow.

Battle trance proc

It should be noted, that even though heroic strike is our least rage efficient attack, you will still be using it a lot. It generally ends up being 8-12% of my overall damage on most encounters, and with 2 piece T13 it's usually 17-20% of my damage.

General rotation/priority:

BT_BT_BT

Fill in blanks with CS > Slam > Execute > RB > Battle shout

Rage management is incredibly important here. I would highly recommend grabbing some sort of add-on that places a rage bar close to the middle of your screen. I use enraged at the moment, and I would recommend it as it’s highly customizable. You’re going to be pooling rage, and any time your rage hits 100 that means you are wasting rage which is a significant dps loss, so you want to have a very visible rage bar to avoid this.

Why do we have so many restrictions on using heroic strike? Colossus Smash. Any ability used during colossus smash does roughly 40% more damage than outside of colossus smash, so you want to “Dump” your rage out during this with heroic strike. You want to shove as much rage as possible in this 6 second window, and then “Save” up rage for the next colossus smash by following the heroic strike restrictions above.

So when Colossus Smash happens, in a perfect world it would like this:

CS-Bt-Slam-Bt

With 2 heroic strikes thrown in, I typically use the first heroic strike right after CS and then wait to use the second heroic strike 1 second before colossus smash runs out to ensure that I have enough rage to continue my rotation.

If for some reason you do not have a slam proc, it is fine to throw in a raging blow instead.

Also, it is entirely possible to use inner rage to fit in 3-4 heroic strikes into colossus smash as your gear gets better or if you get a battle trance proc inside colossus smash. I typically use inner rage on cooldown, as it will naturally line up with a majority of your CS uptime, and it is hard to predict when you will actually be able to fit in more than 2 heroic strikes.

Effective colossus smash usage is THE most important part of this rotation.

Execute phase:
Execute is no longer our hardest hitting ability as blizzard buffed everything else and to make this easy… you’re basically only going to use execute to maintain the 25% haste buff and as an extreme rage dump.

When it’s ok to execute:

Getting stacks of executioner up to 5, or when executioner is going to expire in 2 seconds.

Rage is above 50, or the boss is going to die in the next 3 seconds and you need to empty out your rage bar.

As a filler during colossus smash, if you don’t have a slam proc, you can do BT_Execute_BT instead. (Due to rage capping you will actually do this a lot.)

^ If you have an incredibly low latency (<60 MS) it's a slight dps boost to do CS-EXE-EXE-EXE-EXE as you can fit in 4 executes during a CS duration. ONLY do this if you have a mostly full rage bar going into colossus smash. If you're using 10-20 rage executes it is a dps loss. If you do this, it is probably a good idea to only use execute outside of colossus smash if you have 60+ rage to ensure you have more rage to dump out with 4 executes. It's a really really small dps gain, (maybe 150 dps at most) so if you aren't comfortable with it, don't worry about doing it.

You will NEVER use raging blow during execute, and you should avoid using heroic strike as much as possible.

Generally during execute phase your rage income is high enough that your rotation will end up being BT-Exe-Bt-(slam proc?)-Bt-Exe, with very very few free GCDs.

PRO-TIPS AND STUFF:

Go ahead and macro berserker rage into bloodthirst, you gain more dps from using it on cooldown due to the berserker rage glyph than saving it to activate raging blow. SMF naturally has a higher uptime on enrage due to more autoattacks, so it will be very rare that you cannot use raging blow when you want to.

Stat Priority:

SEP values:
1 Strength is worth roughly 3.4 dps.
Str: 1
Expertise: Cap it
Hit: .54 (Above 8%)
Crit: .62
Haste: .44
Mastery: .39

STR > 8% hit > 6.5% expertise > crit > 27% hit > haste > mastery

Higher ilevels will almost always win out, but if you can get a piece of gear that is better itemized at the same ilevel, go for it.

4.3 TIER 13 INFORMATION

Ok, so you've picked up 4 piece tier 13. What changes? Take everything that you learned from above and make the following changes:

Never use raging blow during inner rage outside of colossus smash. It's ok to use raging blow as a filler during CS if you don't have a slam proc. You will still wait to use heroic strike when you have >80 rage, an incite/battle trance proc or when you have >40 rage during colossus smash.
However, if you have more than 900 mastery (Which is hard to avoid this tier), then Raging Blow does have a higher DPR than a 20 rage heroic strike.

[b]Additionally, with 2 piece T13, your rotation becomes BT > CS > Slam > Battle Shout > RB Even outside of inner rage, raging blow is your last button to press.

Execute still does more DPR than a 20 rage heroic strike, though.

Setup a power aura to let you know when colossus smash is up so you don't accidentally overlap a 4 piece proc. Here's an example of the one I use.

Version:4.23; target:true; icon:ability_warrior_colossussmash; buffname:Colossus Smash; x:-9; bufftype:2; texture:72; alpha:1; mine:true; stacksOperator:=; exact:true; size:0.36; y:209; timer.HideLeadingZeros:true; timer.h:1.36; timer.Texture:Digital; timer.enabled:true; timer.cents:false; timer.Relative:CENTER; timer.y:39

With 2 piece, our stat SEP looks more like this:

STR: 1
Crit: .65
Hit >8%: .60
Haste: .53
Mastery: .40

Hit/haste are buffed fairly significantly, meaning once again we will want to avoid mastery whenever possible. Spreadsheet your character, as stat values will range somewhat.

During Inner rage colossus smashes, it should be very easy to fit in 4 heroic strikes almost every time. Outside of inner rage you should always get in 2 heroic strikes, this is mostly thanks to secondary stat inflation which has increased our rage generation to the point where it can handle that every time. Naturally if RNG conspires against you and you don't have the rage to do bloodthirst, don't use heroic strike. :P

[b]BUT Collision! What is better? TG OR SMF?

Thankfully this tier that's a really freaking hard question. They're really, really close. Too close to really say which one is better, so just go with whatever gives you better weapons. However, Arms blows them both of out of the water.

A rough approximation of what the "Best" trinkets for SMF are. Each bone fetish jumps up 2-3 trinket spots on Yorsajh, Blackhorn, Spine (If you're padding meters), and madness.

Best:
Eye of Unmaking (H)
Creche of the Final Dragon (H)
Eye of Unmaking
Bone Link Fetish (H)
Creche of the Final Dragon
Eye of Unmaking (Raid Finder)
Bone Link Fetish
Rotting Skull (Valor Trinket)
H Vessel of Acceleration
Creche of the Final Dragon (Raid Finder)
Rosary of Light
Bone Link Fetish (Raid Finder)
Vessel of Acceleration
H Heart of Rage
H Apparatus
Dwyer's Caber
Heart of Rage
Chilled Coaster
Apparatus
License to slay
H Crushing Weight
Fury of Angerforge
Crushing Weight
Worst:

What about weapons? Here is the list of BIS weapons for both main and offhand.

MAIN HAND LIST
Best
416 Agility 1H No'Kaled, the Elements of Death
410 Hand of Morchok Hand of Morchok
416 Souldrinker Souldrinker
403 Agility 1H No'Kaled, the Elements of Death
397 Hand of Morchok Hand of Morchok
403 Souldrinker Souldrinker
Worst

OFF HAND LIST
Best
410 Hand of Morchok Hand of Morchok
416 Souldrinker Souldrinker
416 Agility 1H No'Kaled, the Elements of Death
397 Hand of Morchok Hand of Morchok
403 Souldrinker Souldrinker
403 Agility 1H No'Kaled, the Elements of Death