Fury Warrior PvE DPS, part 1: Talents

Well, to be honest, there isn’t much to it. The more difficult part of maximizing your warrior’s dps in Fury spec is itemization, and I’ll get to that in a future post.

But for now…we’ll focus on talents!

A commonly accepted fury warrior build is 17/44/0. Arms up to Impale, Fury up to Rampage, and then the rest (3 points) is filler in Fury. This is probably the “best” “pure dps” build you’ll find. High damage, low survivability.

As for building a fury build, I won’t get into options in other trees for now, but these are the points you don’t pass up in Fury.

Fury

• 5 points in Malice
• 5 points in Unbridled Wrath
• 5 points in Dual-Wield Specialization
• 5 points in Flurry (and the obligatory 5 in Enrage, can’t have Flurry without Enrage unfortunately)
• 1 point in Death Wish
• 1 point in Bloodthirst
• 3 points in Precision
• 5 points in Improved Berserker Stance
• 1 point in Rampage

Malice: First tier of the tree, and you increase all damage you deal by 5%. This talent will also synergize with Flurry and Rampage, garnered later.
Unbridled Wrath: It has been nerfed a bit so as to be more friendly to two-hander warriors lurking into the tree from arms, but is still a base Fury dps talent. Since you are not actively being attacked and taking damage (at least not optimally) you need to be able to supply your own rage. This talent helps with that.
Dual-Wield Specialization: White damage (the damage dealt by your auto-attacks) is a large percentage of the damage you will end up doing. This will increase 33% of it it by 25%. This doesn’t sound like much, but it effectively increases your white damage and rage generation by a little more than 8% I believe.
Enrage: This is a talent that is largely useless in PvE unless you’re soloing. If you get hit by something in a raid, it probably either a) is an area-effect attack or spell that does not crit or b) kills you. The reason we’re taking this one is to get to Flurry.
Flurry: Here we have the best Fury dps talent. This increases your attack speed (read: white damage and rage generation) by 25% at 5 points, but only activates when you crit. This is where itemization gets confusing, as you have to balance crit and hit in order to maximize the effects of this talent and your white damage in general.
Death Wish: An aptly-named talent, this is your Avenging Wrath, your Arcane Power. Your cooldown-based, time-limited dps boost. However, it increases the damage you take while active so use it wisely. It would not be so necessary by itself, but it is needed for the two talents below it.
Bloodthirst: A 6-second cooldown attack for 45% of your attack power, which gives you a buff allowing you to heal a bit for your next few attacks. The healing isn’t very spectacular, but the damage is. Especially since it is not based on weapon damage and is solely based on your attack power. You can even use it while disarmed! A staple to your dps repertoire.
Precision: Warriors need something like 400 hit rating to overcome the miss chance imposed by dual-wielding. 3% increased chance to hit is 48 of that. It’s not a lot, but it’s not easy to pass up either, as you’ll ideally want as much chance to hit as you can get your hands on without sacrificing too much attack power or crit chance.
Improved Berserker Stance: A 10% increase to attack power just for being in a stance that already by default increases your crit chance by 3% is nothing to scoff at. Nab this one in full.
Rampage: And finally, a somewhat lackluster talent that you’ll get “because you’re already this far in the tree.” It will increase your attack power by 250 at 70 with full 5 stacked, but it’s unfortunately an annoying mechanic to work with and keep active. Again, hard to pass up 250 attack power, so you might as well slap that last point in there.

Finally, I don’t know if it’s necessarily a “must-have” talent, but I personally am a big fan of Commanding Presence. As a fury warrior, you’ll probably be in charge of keeping Battle Shout active, and increasing that attack power gain by a substantial amount is helpful. I include it in all of my [/edit: dps] warrior builds. Also, you’ll probably want this one instead of the others on this talent’s tier to progress, so it’s a decent choice just because of that, assuming you only went with Malice and Unbridled Wrath from earlier in the tree.