LoDBlog

So, after (finally!) clearing out ToGC 25 man, I’ve been thinking about my own play-style and how I could maximize my efficiency as a fury warrior. To be honest, I haven’t seriously thought about this since when I first trialed with this guild. I was a major meter watcher and I took every parse very seriously, until I got settled in and became less paranoid over the meters. In a way, that’s a good thing, because ultimately you want to have fun and you should never let the meters dictate that; however, you need to be able to pull your weight in the raid and maximize your efficiency, so you must be able to balance the two. Don’t mistake “balancing” as 50% fun and 50% efficiency. You want 100% of both!

There are many things I could possibly cover that would touch on the topic of raid performance, but I want to talk about each of the Trial of the Crusader 25 man fights in particular and share with you readers my thoughts on each fight and how a Fury warrior can gain the upper hand on the encounter.

As a general comment, this raid instance heavily favors Cleave. Lord Jaraxxus, Twin Val’kyr (depending on your strat), and especially Anub’arak is very generous towards maximizing Cleave damage and pushing you up the meters. If you take a look at my spec, I just recently changed to: 2/2 Improved Berserker rage and 5/5 Unbridled Wrath at the expense of not having Commanding Presence and Booming Voice. Now before I get “AMG those are bad talents l2p!”…. I know. At appropriate gear levels, the gains of UW and especially IBR are not worth the talents, assuming single target dps.

A fight like Anub’arak will require you to cleave every single time the adds are out, which is all the time, and you will more than likely run into rage generation problems. Losing Commanding Presence is also something that you should do with caution. You do not want to gimp the raid of utility just to get your own numbers up. Always make sure you have another warrior who is capable of improved shouts and who is willing to do it. Now, onto the bosses! (I will be assuming that you are doing the heroic version of these fights, so my comments will be in that context).

Beasts of Northrend – I know I talked a lot about Cleaving, but there’s really not much cleaving you can do on this fight. Burn Death Wish right at the start. Switching targets to snobolds does lower your dps, but depending on who your guild assigns to killing those, it may or may not matter. Personally, every time I try to cleave the snobolds + the boss, it fails every time. I’ve tried this with whirlwind as well; it just never hits both targets for me. Perhaps I’m doing it wrong, but I eventually gave up trying to do that and just went single target dps exclusively.

When the worms come out, DW should be available, so use it again. At that point, I would save the next DW for Icehowl’s charge and assuming that your raid doesn’t get hit, pop a speed potion and DW + Recklessness. Judging by where your main tank positions the boss, don’t be out in the open in which you can get punted really far unless you have an Intercept ready to go, otherwise just be in front of his hit box and just suck up the few parries you’ll get – it’ll be better than having to run for 5 seconds or more without Intercept! Some warriors like to get Heroic Fury which is perfectly acceptable and highly recommended for this fight in particular if you want to get it.

Lord Jaraxxus – Cleaving comes in handy on this fight. Your #1 priority on this fight is killing the portals and volcanoes, so make this macro to spam:

/tar Infernal
/tar Nether

I spam that + Intercept and I get to the portal or volcano instantly. We have our add tanks stack on top of the boss so that cleave damage can splash to the boss, so I basically dps the boss full time and cleave whenever adds get in range. Obey all the other fight mechanics and it’s a pretty simple fight from a dps stand point.

Faction Champions – Go protection or arms for this fight. Fury is pretty terrible for this fight, I won’t lie! Whirlwind and cleave damage is cut by 75% while your only useful attacks will be Bloodthirst, Heroic Strike, and Slam!. I have a protection offspec so I hop into that spec but use full dps gear minus the shield and weapon. Spamming Devastate along with Revenge + Heroic Strike + Shield Slam + stuns and silences just feels far better from a contribution standpoint instead of being frustrated with Fury. You can also dedicate yourself to protecting a particular person who loves to die on the fight, too!

Twin Val’kyr – Depending on your guild strat, Cleave can be extremely good or completely useless. Unfortunately for LoD’s strat, Cleave is impossible to do. If your guild groups them up, by all means, go crazy! Always save your haste potions for killing shields – especially if it’s a close kill and you have a few dps dead. Also…if you think the shield is going to be too close to call, always try to queue your pummel at the last possible second before the heal goes off. With some luck, you may have been able to interrupt a cast that would have been impossible to do by normal human reaction time. Obey the encounter mechanics and stay alive – those balls really hurt for a lot on heroic!

Anub’arak– As mentioned earlier, Cleave is king on this fight. You’ll always want to have the boss targeted, but always be in range of cleave and whirlwind for the adds. If you find yourself becoming rage starved, try cutting Slam! out of your rotation. On burrow phases, you can also over agro the scarab bugs on purpose and get yourself some nasty stacks of the debuff. This will get you rage! I know I’m encouraging bad things, but it’s a viable option. Raid healing prior to phase 3 isn’t that bad at all so I’m sure the healers can help carry you throughout the debuff duration. :)

I tried to keep this fairly condensed, but I’m pretty sure I covered the major points I wanted to share with you all. Just keep in mind as you set out to achieve insane dps that dead players do zero dps, so play smart. :)