70 Fury Warriors and Raiding - A WoW Guide

Welcome to my World of Warcraft (WoW) level 70 dual wield fury warrior raiding guide. This is a collective how-to based on things I've learned on my own (I currently raid end-game as a fury warrior and have also been playing a warrior for the past two years), and from others I've come across in my travels. The goal is to explain the mechanics of a fury warrior, the necessary stats, and how to perform at an optimal DPS (Damage Per Second) level in raids. Also included are all sorts of nifty things that hopefully answer questions new warriors might have; like weapon choices and how to socket gear.

Note: This is for PvE (Player versus Environment) only, not for PvP (Player versus Player). For PvP you'd want to go with a 2-handed weapon and spec into the arms tree for mortal strike. With that cleared up let's get to it!

For the OPTIMAL dual wield fury talent build, please visit the link provided in the Resources section.

First let's go through the basic stats a fury warrior should focus on. The key stats in no particular order are strength/attack power, critical strike rating, hit rating, and stamina. Why are these important?

Strength/Attack Power
These two stats, while they are different in wording, provide the same benefit to the fury warrior in a sense. Both increase the damage the fury warrior will output. There is a conversion of strength-to-attack power, but not vice versa. This means that one point of strength will give your fury warrior two attack power, but two attack power won't give you one point of strength. This is important to note, especially when choosing gear. If you have a choice between a helmet that gives you +15 strength and a helmet that gives you +25 attack power, the assumption would be that you would take the helmet with +25 attack power over the helmet with +15 strength. This assumption is wrong. You'd want the helm that has +15 strength because it will actually increase your attack power by +30. There is also another catch with taking strength over attack power; it scales with Blessings of Kings. Blessing of Kings is a paladin buff (almost always available in a raid) that increases all of your stats (Strength, Agility, Stamina, etc) by 10%. Attack power isn't a true stat, and is not increased by BoK, strength on the other hand is, so by choosing strength you will be getting a 10% bonus to your attack power, where as you wouldn't otherwise. Fury warriors should try to get at least 1700 attack power without buffs, but closer to 1900.

Critical Strike Rating
For fury warriors, critical strikes are very important! Not only do they provide extra damage, but whenever you get a critical strike you gain a buff called Flurry, which increases the speed at which you attack by 25%. So how does a fury warrior increase critical strike rating? You can do it by wearing items with agility, or with critical strike rating on them. The critical strike rating is different than your chance to get a critical strike which is a percentage, however critical strike rating improves your percentage. It takes about 27 agility to equate to 1.00% critical strike chance, and about 22 critical strike rating to equate to gain 1.00% critical strike chance. A fury warrior that would like to DPS in raids should have at least 25.00% critical strike chance, but preferably closer to 30.00%.

Hit Rating
(Note: all given hit ratings assume you have gotten 3/3 Precision in the Fury talent tree)
Hit rating is another very important stat for fury warriors because missing an attack means you deal no damage. Before we delve into this tedious subject, let's go over some key points regarding the attacks of a fury warrior. First of all, there are two kinds of attacks a fury warrior has; there are white attacks and there are yellow attacks. White attacks are damage done from your auto attack, where a yellow attack is damage done from the fury warrior's ability like Whirlwind or Bloodthirst. The difference between these two types of attacks is the chance to hit rating each require. Sounds confusing I know, but it's really quite simple. In a nutshell and without the horrible math behind it, for a yellow attack to "never" miss, and I say never in quotations because even if you maxed your chance to hit, there is still a 1% chance you will ALWAYS miss regardless; you need a hit rating of 95. As far as white attacks go, which again are the fury warrior's auto attacks, you need a hit rating of 200 ideally, but when you are just starting out as a fury warrior 95 will be the minimum so at least your yellow attacks "always" hit. But, at a hit rating of 200 your white attacks will rarely miss.

Stamina
There isn't much to be said about stamina, except that it's good to have because it keeps you alive and allows you to take more damage without dying as quickly. A fury warrior shouldn't ever be getting directly hit by a monster or a boss in a raid, however almost all bosses and most trash mobs (monster before bosses) have AOE (area of effect) attacks that damage people in a certain radius for X amount of damage. So for a fury warrior stamina is pretty important, since you will be standing behind the boss and most likely get hit by AOE damage. Do not make stamina your main stat, but keep it in mind when choosing gear. Stamina converges into hit points, with one point of stamina granting 10 hit points for a furry warrior. As a fury warrior you need at least 8,000 hit points to survive the raid boss encounters at level 70. This base will scale with your gear as you get better armor and weapons.

The Gear
Now that we've discussed the key stats for a fury warrior, let's talk about proper gear.

For armor, rings, amulets and trinkets you want to try to find plate gear with a combination of the stats we discussed above; strength, crit rating, and hit rating with a dash of stamina. The main thing you want to try to remember is to have a balance of the strength/attack power, hit rating and crit rating. If you severely lack hit, but have tons of attack power and critical strike rating, you'll do a lot of damage theoretically, but you will miss all the time so it will be negated.

What weapons should you choose as a fury warrior? You have a choice of using the following one handed weapons; swords, maces, axes, daggers, and fist weapons. You always want the slowest weapon you can possibly find for your main-hand so you can get the most damage out of your instant attack, whirlwind. A weapon with a speed of 2.70 or 2.60 will generally fall into the axe, mace, or fist weapon category as they tend to be slow speed. Swords and daggers tend to be faster weapons. Daggers will never go above 2.00 speed, in fact you probably will never see one above 1.80. Swords usually don't go above 2.40 speed. For the fury warrior that raids, it's preferable to dual wield two slow weapons of the same speed, like two 2.60 speed maces for instance. This is because if you have a fast weapon offhanded it will eat through flurry which grants you 3 attacks at an increased speed of 25%. So if you have a 2.60 speed main hand and your off hand weapon is 1.60, you will be attacking twice as fast with your offhand (and also missing more) and technically "wasting" flurry in some circumstances. However those with high crit don't need to worry about it much. Also, dual wielding slow weapons of the exact speed will sometimes grant you 4 flurries instead of 3. There is an up-side to having a fast offhand however, you will gain more rage (which is required for special attacks) and you will have a chance to proc flurry more often providing you have a high hit rating and crit rating. Choosing whether to have a fast offhand or a slow offhand really depends on what kind of equipment you have access too, both work great but some fury warrior prefer one over the other.

Gems, gems, and more gems! Almost all armor at level 70 that's from a raid boss will have slots to put gems in. I'll refer to putting gems into items as "socketing" which is the term used in WoW. A fury warrior should never ever socket their gear with hit rating gems. Hit rating should be obtained naturally (as long as you have at least 95) through gear with hit rating as equip bonuses. You should socket strength gems and critical strike rating gems in your gear only. Which you choose is up to the individual fury warrior and is based on what you lack in a certain area. Also, armor that has gem slots will have an "equip bonus" which will give you a bit of an extra stat if you gem the exact colors in the item. For example, your chest piece may have two red gem sockets and a blue socket, with a +4 strength socketing bonus that you would get if you socketed two red gems and a blue gem. I usually avoid these socket bonuses as I find I can gain more attack power or critical strike rating by just putting other gems in it and not getting the meager socket bonus.

The Basics of Play
Now that you have the proper stats, armor, and weapons lets discuss HOW to attack something to optimize your DPS as a fury warrior. First of all you will want to have battle shout and rampage up at all times, no excuses! This will give you an increase of around 650 attack power, and is ideal for increasing your damage. Start off auto attacking something to begin generating rage. When you have about 50 rage (half of your rage bar) start using special abilities. First you should bloodthirst, then whirlwind. Bloodthirst has a six minute cooldown, and whirlwind should have a nine second cooldown. You want to be sure you have enough rage to always satisfy both of these attacks when they are available after the cooldowns. If at any point you have more than 50 rage, add in heroic strike as well to increase damage and use up your excess rage points.

And that's it! It might take you a bit to get properly geared to keep up with your comrades but once you do you will be contributing a lot of viability to your guilds raids, fury warriors are great to have! Be patient and have fun with one of the coolest classes in the game, the dual wield fury warrior.