Warrior Level 70 PvE DPS F.A.QFollow

Endgame PvE warrior DPS FAQ
Version 2.0

I will update this regularly, please post additions and correct my work.

This is up to date for Version 2.4 of Wow.

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Uber Simplified DPS Table;
1 STR ~= 2.2 AP ~= 1.05 Crit ~= 1.3 Haste ~= 1.45 AGI ~= 1.66 Hit ~= 6.5 Armor Penetration
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Max DPS has some of the best up to date information relevant to Warrior DPS. Click Fury or Arms under the Warrior drop down menu.

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Hit Rating
You will want to have at least 95, or 143 hit rating. Depending on spec.
95 Hit rating is the cap with 3/3 precision for two handed or one handed weapons.
95 Hit rating is the cap with 3/3 precision for skill miss chance negation.
143 Hit rating is the cap for two handed or one handed weapons.
143 Hit rating is the cap for skill miss chance negation.
395 Hit rating is the cap for dual wield with 3/3 precision.
443 Hit rating is the cap for dual wield.

Special note regarding 2h
You will want to cap your to hit rating. Since you depend on your white damage for rage gen. The secondary effect of this is your skills do not miss either.

Special note concerning D/w;
You do not need to cap out your to hit rating to be effective dps. Extra to hit after your minimum for your spec, increases overall damage less than crit or AP will. 9% to hit should be your minimum to hit. This is 95 hit rating with precision 3/3.


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Tips and Tads
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With the way the rage mechanic works with warriors, and the talents that are interrelated.
Warriors require math to become fully efficient at DPS.

Strength > AP. Blessing of Kings affects Strength not AP.
1 Strength = 2 AP.
W/ Blessing of Kings 1 Strength = 2.2 AP.
W/ Imp berserker stance 2 AP = 2.2 AP.
When possible, attack the mob from behind. They can't parry or block your attacks.
Slam is a 2h Warriors best friend. Slams' damage is not affected by AP normalization. A slower weapon gets more out of it. It is less threat than heroic strike. (Slam Math) Slam after every white hit.
Flurry is your best dps talent.
Impale and Imp Berserker Stance are also very good scalable talents.
Bloodthirst should always be on cooldown.
Whirlwind should always be on cooldown.
Leather and Mail are sometimes better for DPS than Plate, don't be shy about wearing it. You shouldn't be hit if you DPS right.
Get a Threat Meter, make sure you watch it. (And have the tank get one too).
Blessing of Salvation is your best DPS boosting buff. (It should increase your ability to DPS by 30%, and be able to DPS sooner)
Windfury Totem is your second best DPS boosting buff.
Blessing of Might is one of your next best DPS boosting buffs.
Blessing of Kings is AP -AND- Crit.
Blessing of Might is more AP than Kings, unless you have more than 1100 strength (or 1320 Strength with Improved Blessing of Might).
When in doubt, battle shout.
For PvE DPS Arms tree weapon specs; Sword > Axe > Mace.

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An easy way to figure how to increase your overall dps;
1. Assess current AP (add 10 more)
2. Assess current Crit Rating (add 2 more)
3. Assess current Hit Rating (Cap it out later, get your minimum, add 2 more)
4. Assess current Expertise Rating (add 2 more)
5. Assess current Haste Rating (add 2 more)
6. Assess current Armor Penetration (add 2 more)
7. Assess your current raid buffs (add 1 more )
Go to 1

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DPS Increase Part 2
1. If you have less than 9% plus to hit (depending on spec, see below) get 9% plus to hit.
2. If you have less than 25% crit, get 25% crit rate (unbuffed)
3. Get 3000 AP (Buffed)
4. Start stacking Armor Penetration
5. Get more AP and Crit, ~180 AP = 1% crit.
Go to 4

For D/w do not shy away from gear with hit rating, the more the merrier. But do not substitute hit for Armor pen, crit or AP/str.

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Enchants
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Weapon;
Executioner, 840 Armor Penetration. This will probably be your best enchant for Main Handed Dual Wield Warrior weapons.
Mongoose, 120 Agi and a small haste rating. This will probably be your best enchant for Off Handed Dual Wield Warrior weapons.
Crusader, At Level 70 this gives 60 Str for 15 seconds and a mild heal. Mongoose is a better enchant.
Potency, 20 Strength to weapon. This is a good enchant for d/w. It is a great thing to put on an offhand weapon.
Savagery, 70 AP to 2h. This is a great enchants for 2h.
Major Agility, 35 Agi to 2h. This is a good enchant, but I would suggest Mongoose or Savagery before it.
Head enchant;
Glyph of Ferocity, 34 attack power, 16 hit rating. Cenarion Expidition Revered
Shoulder enchant;
Greater Inscription of Vengeance, 30 Attack Power, 10 Critical Strike Rating. Aldor Exalted
Greater Inscription of the Blade, 15 Critical Strike Rating, 20 Attack Power. Scryer Exalted
Cloak;
Enchant Cloak - Greater Agility, 12 Agility. Enchanter
Chest enchant;
Enchant Chest - Exceptional Stats, 6 to all stats. Enchanter
Bracer;
Enchant Bracer - Brawn, 12 Strength. Enchanter
Gloves;
Enchant Gloves - Major Strength, 15 Strength. Enchanter
Legs;
Nethercobra Leg Armor, 50 Attack Power, 12 Critical Strike Rating. Leatherworker
Boot;
Enchant Boots - Surefooted, 5% root resistance, 10 Hit Rating. Enchanter
Enchant Boots - Dexterity, 12 Agility. Enchanter
Ring;
Enchant Ring - Striking, +2 weapon damage, Enchanter only. Enchanter
Enchant Ring - Stats, 4 All Stats, Enchanter only. Enchanter

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Gems
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Rare Grade Gems

Crafted
Bold Living Ruby +8 Stregnth (Red)
Inscribed Noble Topaz +4 Strength + 4 Crit Rating (Orange)
Rigid Dawnstone +8 Hit Rating (Yellow)
Smooth Dawnstone +8 Crit Rating (Yellow)
Sovereign Nightseye +4 Strength and +6 Stamina (Purple)

Epic Grade Gems
PvP
Bold Ornate Ruby +20 AP (Red)
Inscribed Ornate Topaz +10 AP + 5 Crit Rating (Orange)
Smooth Ornate Dawnstone +10 Crit Rating (Yellow)

Crafted
Bold Crimson Spinel +10 Str (Red)
Inscribed Pyrestone +5 Str, +5 Crit Rating (Orange)
Rigid Lionseye +10 Hit Rating (Yellow)
Smooth Lionseye +10 Crit Rating (Yellow)
Wicked Pyrestone +10 AP, +5 Crit Rating (Orange)

Drops
Deadly Fire Opal +8 AP, +5 Crit Rating (Orange)
Enscribed Fire Opal +5 Str, +4 Crit Rating (Orange)
Etched Fire Opal +5 Str, +4 Hit Rating (Orange)
Pristine Fire Opal +10 AP, +4 Hit Rating (Orange)
Shifting Tanzanite +5 Agi, +6 Sta (Purple)
Sovereign Shadowsong Amethyst +5 Strength and +7 Stamina (Purple)



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Math Section
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D/w offhand
D/w offhand damage is 50% (and AP)
D/w offhand damage with D/w spec 62.5% (and AP)
Example; 100 DPS Main hand/Off hand (Merciless Gladiator), and 2800 AP (200 DPS).
Mainhand = 300 DPS
Offhand = 150 DPS
W/ 5/5 D/w spec this becomes
Mainhand = 300 DPS
Offhand = 187.5 DPS (37.5 Base DPS increase)

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Bloodthirst > Mortalstrike;
DPS * Speed * 4.67 + 981 = AP Breakpoint (For 2h)
(Example; 120 DPS * 3.5 speed * 4.67 + 981 = 2942 AP (2h))

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Crit Rating, Hit Rating, Attack Power and You
1 DPS = 14 AP
1 Str = 2 AP
1 AP + Imp berserker stance = 1.1 AP
1% to hit = 15.8 hit rating
1% to crit = 22.8 crit rating
1% to dodge/parry reduction = 4 Expertise
1 Expertise = 3.9 Expertise Rating

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Gemming
8 Hit rating gem = .5% to hit chance
8 Crit rating gem = .35% to crit chance
8 Strength Gem = 16 AP (17.6 AP w/ Imp berseker, 19.36 w/ BoK and Imp berserker)
4 Strength 4 Crit rating gem = 8 AP (8.8 w/ Imp Berserker, 9.68 w/ BoK and Imp berserker) and 0.175% to crit chance
20 AP Gem = 20 AP (22 AP w/ Imp berserker)
10 AP 5 Crit rating gem = 10 AP (11 AP w/ Imp berserker) and .22% to crit chance
10 Crit rating gem = .44% to crit chance

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AP
Good reason why to stack Strength/AP. Bloodthirst is probably your single most efficient damaging ability (endgame), and Bloodthirst scales amazingly well with AP.
AP scales very well with your critical and hit rate. It also greatly impacts your other skills damage.

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Critical DPS
Critical rating dps increases are affected by Impale. To find your Impale value, multiply your Crit rate by 20% to find Impales affect of skill damage.
For example; For 30% crit rate; 30% * 20% = 6%. Thus with 30% crit rate you will increase your skill damage by 6%. For many warriors they deal a significant portion of skill (yellow) damage. This talent becomes a very valuable increase to DPS.

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Flurry
With 25% crit rate, you have the some of the minimally required odds of keeping flurry proc'd 100% of the time. With 30-33% crit rate, you have good odds of keeping flurry proc'd 100% of the time. With 33% crit rate and higher, you have nearly a constant flurry proc'd. But 33% crit rate does not equal constant flurry. Probability is that you have a 33% chance to crit, each and every attack. This does not mean that if you miss or just hit, your next attack will have a higher likelihood of criting.
Example; You roll a 10 sided dice. You roll a 1, next you roll a 4, next you roll a 6. On your next roll you have exactally the same odds to roll a 1, 4 or 6 as you did the first time you rolled.
Now the probability of a repeat roll of 1 after a 1, is what most people refer to as your odds. You have a 1 in 100 chance (1%) of repeating it. While in truth each roll really has independent chances, unrelated to each roll preceding.


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Talent Specs
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Standard 17/44 build
2h Arms, Blood Frenzy/Slam Build 4% extra physical damage for raid > 10% extra personal auto attack damage.
2h Fury, AoE/Slam Build


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Link Section
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Addons
RatingBuster gives in game tooltip info for how much % to rating is and vice versa.
KLH Threat Meter
Omen Threat Meter (I prefer it to KLH)
ABar Auto Attack timer. (Glitchy with parry, works with d/w)
Quartz Auto Attack timer. (d/w glitchy; not fully supported)
Scrolling Combat Text extremely useful.
Rampage Bar extra buff bar dedicated to rampage, battle shout, and commanding shout. Configurable and movable, very useful.

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Useful websites
Thottbot, general reference of items and abilities.
Warrior Talent Calculator
Warcraft Armory, good reference site (so far) for checking other warrior gear and specs. Good searchable item database.
WoWJutsu, progression website for guilds. Good way to find those warriors you want to be like.
Shamulator, Enhancement shaman dps simulator, can be applied to certain aspects of Warrior DPS.

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Some Spreadsheets
Paper Theory DPS, talent support. Devioususer's Personal project at curse. Warrior DPS Spreadsheet.
Tanking Threat has some very useful information. But is intended for tanking threat simulation.
Elitest Jerks Top End PvE DPS Spreadsheet














Edited, Jul 21st 2008 11:20am by devioususer

update, fairly small [atm] discussion on the difference between hit and crit here:

http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t12667-dps_warrior_hit_hugely_overrated/



hmm, i'd run some tests for the hit vs ap or crit gear as i have quite a variety of trinkets/rings but i recently respecced into and ms/fury build and since i've dropped my HS guild, i don't play enough to re-respec a few times a week.

That's efficient for 2h yes. But for d/w more to hit becomes more efficient.

The more of your damage that is based on white hits, the more important to hit is.

For 2 handed once you get 8.6% extra hit gives no extra benefit at all since two handed dps only has a 5% base miss rate on all attacks not just yellow.

For DW once 8.6% is reached extra hit only affects white dmg where as extra crit increases all dmg.

How about this;

136 (8.6%) hit rating d/w
25% crit
as much ap as possible afterwards.


Now the debate about slow main hand or faster main hand. (personally I like a slower main hand). Or slow off hand fast off hand (personally I like a fast off hand).

Ap is probably the most important affecting stat after you get your base hit and crit. More hit and crit is usually good. But AP is the driving force for your damage base and crits.

From what I gather is your disagreeing with me on that once you reach 8.6% hit, percent for percent hit and crit are interchangeable as far as dmg and rage gen on white dmg. Advantage going to crit since it procs flurry and your yellow crits are affected by impale, not to mention you won't miss a yellow attack anymore with 8.6% hit.

The way I take your posts is that you think that hit is more important than crit for DW warriors even after they reach 8.6% Is that not what your saying?

I agree that 8.6% is too low, I never said to stop at 8.6% Hell it's extremely easy to get more without sacrificing any other stats. What I said was that percent for percent after 8.6% they are interchangeable with the advantage going to crit. Meaning that if your choosing between the two (percent for percent not rating for rating) choose crit over hit. Hit percentage only increases your white dmg after you get 8.6% while while crit percentage increases white and yellow dmg.

And read what I posted, hit and crit are interchangeable as far as dmg and rage gen go until you hit your crit cap. If you only had 8.6% hit and crit every swing you would not be rage starved. Don't get me wrong though, haveing only that much hit is folley simply because you can get much more without sacrificing other stats. Netting an increase in total dmg (actually only increases white dmg, but total dmg increases none the less).

The people that get 250+ hit rating while their crit and AP suffer are the ones that need to re-evaluate their gear selection.

Also 8.6% hit with either 2 handed or DW comes first. Nothing sucks worse than spending 30 rage on nothing.

So... if white hits are 60% of your dps, an increase to your white hits increase your rage gen. rage gen = more dps. Which is something to calculate (reads: Consider) when considering to hit vs to crit with d/w.

If you increase your white damage by 1%, you increase your rage gen by 1%, thus increasing how often you have yellow attacks.

with the current way itemization is for warriors, saying dump hit for crit after you reach 8.6 hit is utterly moronic and the worst argument you can make.

hit vs. crit basically ends to be this:


once you have good enough gear to easily maintain your full dps cycle in raids [and I don't mean, do as much damage as POSSIBLE but rather, do as much damage as you can while still staying under the threat of the tank] and you are still sitting with extra rage, take out some hit gear, and put in crit/ap/haste rating gear.

when glancing blows were "nerfed" this pushed the crit cap to be a lot higher than it was, giving crit more value than it was in the past.



basically you are looking at these 3 scenarios with multi scenarios in them.

NOT LOOKING AT AP

low hit: you will have spiky rage generation and depending on your crit it might not even be spiky, it may just be non-existant, giving you very unsteady dps, thus making your dps rotations take longer to complete fully, which gives you lower dps. [very bad]

medium hit: enough rage to make your full rotation regardless of if you're really critting or not. [just right]

high hit: MORE than enough rage making your HS more, making you draw more aggro, making you have to auto attack instead of using special attacks, making you have even more rage, that you still can't get rid of. [not as bad as scenario 1, but worse than scenario 2]


if you're in a situation where threat does NOT matter [like aran for example] yes, having more hit rating will help you more there because there is no such thing as having too much rage because every other hit will just be a HS along with your BT+WW rotation, but as there are VERY few fights like this, having "too much" hit, is pointless.


from reading a few discussions about it in the past and currently on various forums, unlike what I observed [although i guess this figure can slightly changed depending on other factors] the golden hit rating is 200 before switching on to crit / ap.


the last X-FACTOR in this discussion are items that are chance on hit.

dragonspine trophy for one: on any successful hit you get haste. this works much better if you have more hit obviously. with my skyfire diamond right now for example and flurry, my decapitator goes from 2.7 to a 1.66 speed weapon, then mongooses, haste pots, abacus trinket activation[sadly, the trophy has only dropped once for me in my old guild and a rogue got it :(] i *can* get up to i want to say around .6 main hand attack speed for a few seconds.

now on the second hand, you have chance on crit trinkets : like the hourglass. the more crit you have, the more times that will activate.

the main thing that one might argue in this example is, crits are hits are they not?

yes, they are, but when you only have 8.6 hit, unless you have 91.4 crit [lol not even possible in pve even if there WAS gear for this thx to the crit cap] you're losing out a lot in the chance on HIT department. also, this make enchants that activate on hit [crusader for old times sake gets a mention, mongoose, battle master if you have it] not as effective as they can be.


STORY TIME!:

when i was heavily into hit and before i stopped raiding for progression and started raiding casually [read, from a guild that has had mag on farm since may into one that has JUST downed maulgar yesterday, yay go us!] fully buffed on boss fights I was[and still am] hitting 197 hit rating, roughly 3000 AP and depending on shammy totems and my mongooses up to 48% crit. [approx. 35% crit non-situational [no mongoose, no wrath of air, no feral druids in group, etc.] in zerker]

my gear hasn't changed in over 2 months except i have a new cloak now [the one from moroes] since I haven't raided for about that much time.

for some strange reason, the warrior that has since taken my dps roll (and a few other warriors i know that are DW fury for their ssc/tk running guilds) their dps is almost identical to mine while they run closer to 250 hit, but with slightly less crit and slightly more AP, on things like various heroics we still run together, outdoor bosses that i get invited to, other random events like ssc + TK trash because that guild has one missing, whatever.



so to wrap it all up... like i said a few paragraphs ago, 200 hit = win, more is too much, less is not enough.




final disclaimer: this is to be taken with a dash of salt, there is nowhere that i did any exact calculations, this is all based on personal experience, and other peoples' experience through them being friends, or reading about it on forums. if you want to argue with me about certain things about my personal findings, go ahead, you're wasting time, I noticed it with my own eyes, other people did too, if you FEEL that this is *clearly* wrong, submit an article to the blizzard devs so they will make this impossible ;)

I'm no raiding dps warrior, but after reading this EJ thread, I'm inclined to think that 200 hit rating is overkill...it seems that given the 1-roll attack table, you should collect what rating you need to get +8.6% for specials (which should be 136 I believe?), then the rest is gravy that comes along with your other slots (as opposed to a focus on the stat) and should instead focus on more crit/ap, since you'll be getting bonus rage on crits anyway. Thoughts?

Edit: For the tl;dr among us, the EJ thread seems to lend to the idea that w/ the extra rage generated on crits, and since crits continue to affect both yellow and white damage but hit only affects white beyond 136 rating, that 1% crit will amass the same rage generation over time as 1% hit will, thus making crit rating more valuable for dps beyond that magic 136 point.

Edited, Sep 6th 2007 12:13pm by Norellicus

Edit2: russki posted the same thing earlier and I missed it :x Sorry man, not trying to steal your thunder.

Edited, Sep 6th 2007 1:51pm by Norellicus

I did write;



Right before that.

a lot more posts on that thread were concerning getting the 200 point and AFTER is overkill ;)

it's the same forums i linked in my 2nd post.


how about including pots?

agi elixirs, onslaught, fel strength, etc.?

Your breakpoint math is wrong. Mortal Strike scales based upon average damage plus AP times 3.3, and you can't determine the damage done based simply upon the weapon's DPS.

A 3.0 speed weapon at 120 DPS will hit for less than a 3.8 speed weapon at 120 DPS (~96 damage difference). The breakpoint is DPS * Weapon Speed + 210 + AP * 3.3 / 14 = AP * .45. Doing the math to the shortest possible formula, and you get;

DPS * Speed * 4.67 + 981 = AP Breakpoint