The usually silly answer: It depends.

But if you consider your ability to optimize several gear selections then a a DW Fury build is good once you have about 150 hit rating and decent crit/AP (30%/1500+) to go with it.

On the other hand if you have that type of Fury Gear and the slowest possible main hand weapon (Like the PvP ones) you will do rather good dps with devastate spam. The key to that style of play is to gear up like a fury warrior but keep your prot spec, devastate makes up for a lot of the lost dps you gain from Blood Thirst.

You also have the problem with the fury build that you need to maintain 5 stacks of Rampage on yourself (wastes tons of rage every 25 sec to do so). If you are out soloing or questing that becomes more of a negative feedback system, while it in a raid scenario is a positive system.

Fury for Soloing totally SHINES when you are killing things which are close to grey, level 62-65 things. If they get up towards level 70 you need rather insane raid gear to be happy about a fury spec.

Its a lot easier to match the gear criteria for having a decent Arms performance, since you can skip the problem of Rampage and Hit rating. Instead you get to pop deathwish if you meet a more challenging mob to smash.
 

Being a tank and a theorycrafter, I feel like I can contribute something useful...

So, first, if you want to tank mainly heroics, don't look at the raid MT builds. They do differ. Starting from the basics:

1. Always get Toughness (protection tree). Raising your armor class from ~13k to ~15k, for example, will reduce your physical damage taken my something like 7-8%. We had a lot of wipes in Zul'Aman before we found out our offtank doesn't have the armor class talent, but this one is important for heroics also, because a lot of damage comes from normal mobs' and bosses' attacks.

2. Don't ever think of removing the Improved Taunt from your build. It's pretty useless for raid MTs who just stands against a big boss competing in survivability, but it's a "musthave" talent for heroics. Imagine a reckless group with not enough crowd control - you will have to rank 3 or more mobs and once, and it will be impossible for you to establish aggro by normal means; you can only juggle mobs by cycling taunts.

3. Defiance should always be present (threat!), Improved Shield Block should always be present (avoidance), Shield Slam should always be present (basically, this skill generates most threat from one use). Improved Sunder Armor is also very important, because in any case you will be spamming Devastates. Improved Defensive Stance (-6% all damage from spells) is something which can also save your life, be it in heroics or raids. Focused Rage - always.

4. Deep Wounds from arms tree seems to be a mistake for tank, it doesn't do a lot of damage (and threat) when you're wielding 1-handed weapon.

5. Not very important talents are: Improved Shield Bash (interruption is enough, you rarely need this silence effect, and many mobs are immune to it), Tactical Mastery (it's good to have 1-2 points, but 3 is too much - you spend a lot of time in defstance and on 70 you don't even use intercept, you use intervene a lot, if you know how to use it). Improved Revenge is handy but I don't like uncontrolled stuns - maybe I see a patrol and want to drag the mob to other place and the mob is suddenly stunned... Also, you can remove some points from Anticipation if your gear is REALLY cool. But be careful.

After all this, the big holy war comes into play. It's all about what is the main spamming skill for threat building - Heroic Strike or Devastate. I'm from the last army, so I use low speed but heavy weapon, and I don't have Improved Heroic Strike at all. If you're not like me, get a fast weapon, Improved HS talent, and you will have better threat building than me (but it will be more difficult to find talent points for other talents).

The last thing is - what area do you want to be perfect in. Is it threat or damage mitigation? Threat building talents are around Improved Heroic Strike, Anger Management and maybe Unbridled Wrath from fury tree (if you have a fast weapon). For damage mitigation - get an Improved Demoralizing Shout (fury) and Shield Mastery (down in the protection).

So, my current spec is http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=LV0cZVZzEtoIMzcest (raid/heroics hybrid)
For heroics only I would recommend http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=LV0cZVZzEtsIMz0est (be careful with Revenges here)
The same but using more Heroic Strikes: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=LA0czZVZzytoIMz0est (also, Anger Management comes into play here)

Let me think if I can write something like this for fury warriors...
 

So, here we go with soloing in Fury build. Okay, you don't want to do DPS in raids, that means you don't need a lot of hit rating (this contradicts with the words of the first commenter, wolfe), but some amount of hit rating will surely help, especially if you want to kill a boss of 70+ level (this will be handy in WotLK).

Fury specced warriors lack survivability. As wolfe said, you shine in grinding low level mobs, but while questing, you will have to eat/bandage/drink potions a lot. So, if you definitely want to be Fury/Arms and not Arms/Fury, for questing and soloing you have to concentrate on your survivability, that means you have to get Blood Craze (fury), Parry (arms) and...

Oh wait. We are maximizing damage :(
So, this one will do the job: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=LAM0khbZVV0VgxRVzio (but omg I won't take it, because it lacks survivability)
This one is Fury/Arms without Bloodthirst but with Deathwish instead: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=LAMbdhboZVV0VtxoVzi
(it seems to be even more weird because you don't have Bloodthirst here, so your main attacks are Heroic Strike + Whirlwind; but theoretically this one can do a lot of damage in a short timeframe against some elite guy).
And this one is what I want to use for soloing/questing: http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=LVMhkhbZVVkhtxRVzVoc
It has less damage but much more survivability; and is more versatile, with Tactical Mastery in prot tree.
 

"you will have to rank 3 or more mobs and once" should be changed to "you will have to tank 3 or more mobs at once"
...and I should be punished for such typos o_O
 

OK, I'm not an uber-expert, but I just ground as Fury for my epic flyer, so I did a bit of reading on the subject.

I'd agree, Rampage is a pain in the ass to keep up unless you're getting a lot of rage. For soloing, I'm not sure it's a brilliant talent.

Having said that, you can work around it to a certain extent by taking lots of rage-improving abilities. I re-specced my solo Fury to include Improved Bezerker Rage, and that helped my DPS quite a bit.

A Flurry build, on the other hand, seems to work very well. You DO need decent +Crit, though - if you don't have that, I hear that an Improved Slam build with a big two-hander is meant to be scary efficient.

Prot spec, I've never really seen the point of spending talent points outside the Prot tree except for Deflection and Improved Thunderclap, both of which are awesome. I agree with TH, Toughness is a must, and Improved Taunt is also a must if you're not raiding. I really like Improved Revenge - sure, there's a small chance it'll proc when you don't want it to, but against that it's a really serious damage reduction, and a stunned mob isn't charging your healer.

It's probably easier to list the talents that I don't really rate on the Prot tree: Improved Shield Wall, because 6 seconds every half hour isn't wonderful, Improved Defensive Stance, although I'm prepared to be convinced, and oh, that's pretty much it.

So there you go. I should stress I'm NOT an expert theorycrafter by any means, but I have been tanking every week for about the last year and a half, usually in a 3-man instance group where aggro management is *really* important. So take 'em for what they're worth!
 

Hmmm... to sum the things, now I see that Improved Revenge is a great talent for tanking trash mobs before you get to the big boss - it reduces the headache of running around, taunting and pressing all the buttons at once, because the mob is stunned ;)

But the problem is that mobs who hit hard are often immune to stuns :/ And for those who don't hit hard it's sometimes better not to stun them but tank instead for some extra rage. But in this case you need to concentrate on the game much more.

In other words, having this talent makes playing easier; having some other talent makes playing harder, but makes your tank character stronger - a kind of hardcore choice.

Also, please forget my words about Improved Demoralizing Shout - this is the raid thing needed in conjunction with warlocks' curse of recklessness. In normal situations this talent gives you only 0.5% additional damage reduction. But normal demoralizing shout should of course be always applied to the enemy, it reduces incoming damage by ~17%.
 

I couldn't disagree with more on the improved Taunt. 2 talent points to taunt every 5 seconds instead of 7 is a waste of 2 talents points. If you get your tanking rotation down, you'll never have to use taunt on your main target, if you have multiple targets tab devastate target 2, 3 and 4 and switch back to skull. IMHO, save taunt for pulling mobs off your dps'ers when they've pulled aggro. It is possible, though not advisable, to tank heroics without using taunt.

Here's my tanking spec

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=Li0czZVZbEtoI0zsxst

As for the Fury spec question, frankly I think you'd enjoy farming with an arms spec over a fury spec for the utility of being able to do punishing damage in BGs when get bored of farming, and be able to better defend yourself if you're jump by the opposing faction on pvp server. But this is my opinion. I believe the fury warrior is currently broken.

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=LV0xdNbogbzbZVxzu0goZc
 

1. Tanking build:
Your requrest is a little off...you can have a great build for tanking such as this tank build but its really overkill. Its more than you need.

There are so many good talents in the prot tree that its probably easier to say which ones are NOT worth taking:
Improved Revenge - pretty much junk...everything seems to resist the stuns.
Improved Disarm - heh
Improved Taunt - not needed if you play with remotely competant people...if you play with fools this is of use but you'll just end up pulling your hair out...so save the points.
Improved Shield Bash - meh its ok but not really terribly critical at all.

Honestly I would go for more of a hybrid type of build such as this tanking one.

2. DPS build:
Ahh now here you get some fun builds! Don't listen to anyone who trys to sell you on anything other than DW fury regardless of your gear! Arms is a pvp spec and vastly inferior to DW Fury for dps regardless of your gear level.

Here you go


Responding to other commenters:

You need hit rating, it is your biggest bang for the buck dps wise until all your yellow attacks never miss. Period. After that it is still very good just not quite as important.
 

Responding to Nuff: yeah, you need it, for DPS in raid or dungeon, and Tobold asked for solo/questing DPS. Well, you still need some hit rating (that's what I said), especially for your offhand weapon, but significantly less. TBH I don't remember any troubles when farming with zero hit rating.

About Improved Taunt: well, it's not necessary to have idiots in your group to start having use of this talent. It's enough to have the group setup with weak crowd control. Simple scenario, 4 mobs' pull, one is CCed (polymorphed), so you have to establish aggro at 3 mobs. One devastate per mob is a good strategy, but if they hit you for 6-7k hp (which is possible), then the healer heals you for 6-7k hp and gets loads of threat. You know, three devastates take 4.5 secs to use and the heal is faster :/

Also, it's very strange to see builds with Shield Mastery but without Imp. Def. Stance.

- assuming you have around 200 block value, blocked 4000 dmg attack will do 3800 damage. With Shield Mastery it will do 3740 - that's stunning 1.5% damage reduction for blocked physical attacks only. Wow.
- Imp. Def. Stance reduces all spell damage by 6%. Anyone, wanna extra 6% damage from Meteor in heroic Arcatraz?
 

As a longtime warrior, and one of those people who LOVES to tweak my talent builds (to a probably unhealthy extent), here's what I'd recommend:

A quick note on weapons: for tanking, you want a fast weapon (1.5 speed-ish). For Fury DPS, you want 2 slow weapons (2.6 speedish) because Whirlwind has been changed to use both weapons. So your plan to use the same Gladiator weapon for dps and for tanking isn't optimal. You'll get by well enough, though, so no need to worry about it.

Prot build FOR HEROICS:

Aggro tanking build.

This build focuses on maximizing threat generation, and takes talents that are pure gold in heroics, but nigh-useless in raids. You'll maximize your ability to hold aggro, and let your gear do the heavy lifting on your survivability. The purpose of taking Anticipation is to free you up to stack more stamina on your gear while staying at 490 defense.

Fury build FOR SOLOING:

Fury solo build

This build skips some of the talents that are musts for raiding, in favor of focusing on pure soloing with the highest DPS possible. A few of the points are personal preference, and the previous posters have done a good job of explaining those, so I'll refrain.

I skip Rampage because I find it more of a hinderance than a help in soloing. BUT, you should probably take 1 point out of one of the filler talents and put it there in case you want to dps in a group.

The counter-intuitive part of this build is that your going to want to use Heroic Strike a lot. Normally, your melee strikes have something like a 24% chance to miss, depending on the level of the target. Heroic Strike turns your main hand attack into a "yellow" attack, which only has a ~5% chance to miss. So using your offhand and incoming damage for rage generation while heroic striking whenever possible will maximize your dps at your gear level, because you are probably low on +hit and attack power. The more of each you get, the less valuable this strategy becomes.
 

@hatch

No shield mastery? Why? Shield mastery improves you shield block value which increase your shield slam damage for more threat and increase the amount of damage block.

@Th

I agree with you that improved defense stance is a good a idea for damage reduction, I just don't think 3 talent points for a 6% increase (for a total of 16% while defensive stance) is worth it. I recongnize this more of an indiviual tanking style preference though. If improved Def stance give 10% for 3 points I'd always take it.
 

@Hatch

Ok, you're winning me over on the improved defensvie stance. I think i'll try this next time, by reducing my crit bounce.

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=Li0czZcZbEtoI0zcest
 

@ Dyslexic: It's all in the personal style, indeed. My reason for getting Imp.Def.Stance is that warriors have many ways of protecting themselves against melee damage, but almost nothing against spells. So I get the talent to have at least something against caster mobs. Well, maybe it's less important in heroics than in raids, but it's not useless. For me, 6% is still a decent value for 3 talent points.
 

Once your gear gets good enough, you won't need to spec fury to kill stuff. My warrior currently puts out 900-1000 DPS dual wielding with raid buffs at Shade of Aran, and she's specced 11/5/45 protection.

Speaking of which, I much like that particular spec for tanking. link here.

If you want to maximize your dual wield damage, you want two slow weapons (better whirlwinds), with the highest possible weapon DPS you can get. Skip daggers; they aren't worthwhile unless they are kept in the offhand and far better than your other options (e.g. Malchazeen compared to Latro's Shifting Sword. Also, if you have the ability, get executioner enchant(s). The 840 armor ignore will do a *lot*. It will raise your damage, and also raise your threat significantly when you tank with it.

Personally, I dislike improved taunt and improved revenge. Stunned mobs don't hit me, and thus I don't get rage from them. Improved taunt is only nice for PUG players who can't focus.

Everything I build for tanking is currently about generating threat, smoothing out spike damage, and maximizing HP. This means more armor, less avoidance, more stamina, more hit, more expertise.

Oh right... on a side note, pvp armor is actually also very very handy to keep around for tanking. It lacks the avoidance stats of real tanking gear, but it makes up for it because:

1. It has a ton of armor, stamina and resilience. ~200 resilience will make you uncrittable by raid mobs.
2. It doesn't have avoidance built in, meaning that you won't run into those pesky dodge/miss/block/parry strings where you're starved for rage.
3. DPS stats on the armor also provides a nice threat boost. My crit % jumps about 10% when I swap out for more pvp gear. It helps a lot; I tank Onyxia fairly regularly (30g per person for 10 minutes work) in pvp gear.

PS. My warrior is geared without any 25-mans whatsoever. My guild doesn't have the people to field 25-man raids, but we are currently farming Zul'Aman. She's Main tank for the guild.

--Rawr
 

When min/maxing a DPS warrior, I believe the most important factor to consider is the speed of the weapon you will be using. Several talent choices make more sense with fast weapons, and others make more sense with slow weapons. Obviously, a 2H weapon is slow and you choose accordingly. This topic of which is better (fast or slow 1H) is heavily debated amongst warriors, but I find that both are very viable and only spec and playstyle make a difference. The primary reason that slow weapons are often preferred over fast weapons is because of how damage is calculated with certain instant attack abilities. Bloodthirst however, is based on AP and not weapon damage. For DW and even Protection builds, it’s very possible to spec for fast weapons and have the build be very viable.

They key talents in fast/fast spec are Improved Heroic Strike and Unbridled Wrath. Unbridled Wrath generates more rage the more often you hit, good for fast and bad for slow. Needless to say, that If you use slow weapons, then you want to AVOID these talents as they don’t provide nearly as much benefit.

Imp HS is not optional for fast/fast, it’s required. This is because Heroic Strike is the most efficient rage dump for a fast/fast Fury warrior. By “rage dump”, I mean – when you have in excess of 42 rage, use Heroic Strike. This also assumes that you already have your buffs (Battle Shout, Rampage) and debuffs (Sunder Armor) up for maximum benefit.

Heroic Strike (and to a lesser degree Cleave) are interesting skills in that they are based on “next attack” and are not impacted by the global cooldown. However, they come with a rage penalty in that they count as yellow damage and you only gain rage on white attacks. In white attacks only, a 2.8 slow 1H weapon with the same DPS as a 1.4 fast 1H weapon will generate identical rage. However, when Heroic Strike is used – the 2.8 attack will generate no rage while the 1.4 will generate 50% of the amount it normally would have gained over the same period of time (2.8 seconds). Also, if you have the excess rage for it, you could get in two Heroic Strikes.

This is also why a Fury warrior can still make a decent OT or 5-man Tank. Again, remember that Heroic Strike generates a lot of threat and isn’t on GCD. With enough rage it’s possible to spam Revenge, Sunder Armor, Shield Block and Heroic Strike. If the weapon is fast and you have Imp HS, then your threat per second is higher. You’ll need to master sundering multiple targets to maintain multi-target aggro, but macros can help. “/cast [target=mouseover] Sunder Armor” can be used to simply throw sunders on mobs without changing your current target. If you go deep into the Fury tree, you are going to struggle going deep in the protection tree, so you’ll need something like that macro to act as your Improved Taunt. If you mark well with the charms, even PUGs can figure out that they wipe when they don’t DPS the skull.

One area that is tough for the Prot minded Fury Warrior is Toughness vs. Shield Specialization. Since you aren’t going deep into the tree, you need to make a call between these two talents. Keep in mind that Blocks are not avoidance, so these are really two different types of mitigation. One provides better mitigation on trash and the other helps with crushing blows. Strictly speaking, Toughness is superior to Shield Spec for mitigation – however, Shield Spec provides access to Improved Shield Block. Improved Shield Block is nice for two reasons: an extra block to assist with crushing blows and an extra block that can proc Revenge. Note that Improved Parry is superior to both Toughness and Shield Spec in that it directly impacts avoidance. Parry also has the benefit of reducing the weapon speed on your next attack by 40%, which is pretty nice for a Fury Warrior.

The other advantage to fast/fast is consistent and more predictable rage generation. For sustained DPS, this is more helpful than the burst rage that comes with slow weapons. Keep in mind that dual wielding comes at a the price of a hefty miss chance and that even with a lot of +hit, you will still miss quite a bit and misses hurt more when you use a slow weapon. On average however, it’s similar rage per minute.

The disadvantage to fast/fast is that your Whirlwind will do less damage since it’s based on weapon damage. Likewise, Sweeping Strikes will gain less benefit since the extra free attacks are with weapons that do less damage. Cleave/Whirlwind + Sweeping Strikes does crazy AoE damage, so if you plan on doing this a lot in solo grinding, consider a slower weapon. Another minor disadvantage is that slow weapons are superior in PvP. Namely, because in order to gain maximum benefit – you always need to be in melee range. Other players rarely stand still for you and a slow weapon often has time to recharge for its burst attack when you get back in range. This is also why 2H weapons (with greater burst damage) are far superior in PvP.

The other “must-have” abilities for any Fury warrior spec are Cruelty, Imp Execute, Dual Wield Spec, Bloodthrist, Rampage, Imp Berserker Stance, and Flurry. Obviously some of those are “duh” talents, so I’ll only comment on the two more misunderstood or debatable ones.

First—Rampage. If you don’t take Rampage, then you don’t have a good understanding for how your Fury build works. Most damage is done through white attacks that are made even faster with Flurry. The damage calculated from your white attacks is derived from weapon damage and attack power. In other words, attack power complements your increased weapon speed from Flurry. For the very same reason, Battle Shout is still superior for a non-tanking Fury warrior over Commanding Shout. Secondly, Bloodthirst is AP based – so this ability also compliments your primary attack. Agreed, it’s a pain in the ass—but addons can make it less of a pain in the ass. My favorite is Power Auras which allows you to create a very visable timer on Rampage so that you can see when it is going to expire. Avion is another addon that has this type of functionality. Very helpful for managing your shouts and rampage. They key is to reapply it before it ever expires. This is another one of those areas that having fast/fast weapons and better sustained rage generation is helpful. In PvP however, it’s hard to get up quickly unless you are taking a bunch of damage and getting some heals. You are better off spamming Execute and Heroic Strike on low-health cloth.

Improved Execute. This is not optional. Contrary to how the tooltip for Execute is written, building up 100 rage and then popping Execute is rage inefficient. You actually want to spam this ability as often as possible for max DPS. The exception would be when Bloodthirst is up and you have 40+ rage. Then you should Bloodthirst, then Execute. Because Imp Execute lowers the amount of rage needed, you can use the ability more often for less rage. Consider that you can get in 3 improved executes for the cost of 2 normal executes. The mistake made when looking at this talent is the idea that since you are simply holding back rage for execute, the lowered rage cost effectively translates to only a marginal increase in damage. That’s only true if you hold back rage for Execute. If you dump it at 10 rage, it’s the most rage-to-dps efficient ability in your arsenal.

If you want a fast/fast Fury build that can OT decently, then I would suggest something like this:
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=LGZVV0VgxoVuVo0xx0h

If you want a fast/fast Fury build that maximizes your DPS, then I would suggest something like this:
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=LAZVVuVgxRiuio
 

Okay Tobold every discussion about Spec has been covered over and over, maybe i'll post a quick hint on what gear i think is best.

For your tanking weapon do Heroic Mechanar, which is a popular heroic and try to get the Sun Eater. It has 80+ dps and good tanking stats, its the best tanking sword before Kings Defender from Kara.
Do NOT use a pvp sword for tanking, they are too slow and have little beneficial stats, do some research on tanking the speed of your weapon. Once you reach 390 Defence, the cap I reccomend gearing for Shield block rating and stamina, followed by parry and dodge. (If you parry, you get rage but no dmg, if you dodge no dmg but no rage.)
Shield block rating is brilliant becuase it increases the amount of dmg you block (and so does Str) but Block rating increases the dmg you do with Shield Slam one of your highest threat moves.

Definately take imp taunt, some people disagree but a PUG in a heroic is likely to over-estimate your tanking ability and try to pull aggro off you.

For Fury DPS. You want to gear your warrior with some +Hit rating. with a 2h you have 5% chance to miss a target your lvl and +1% to miss for each lvl above you a target is (boss' count as 73 for reference). But when you dual wield you have a 24% chance to miss. so adding around 110-150 hit rating will give you about +6% to hit reducing it to 18/19% miss. Once you have that hit rating.

Go for Attack Power THEN crit. You should also have TWO slow weapons. Your off-hand hits with the whirlwind so it should hit harder, and it is important that every hit does as much dmg as possible (Becuase you will miss so much). Try and reach 1800 AP with your battle shout before gearing for more crit and you should hit pretty good dps.

:D Hope this helps, coz you can have the best talents in the world but if you gear wrong its stupid.
 

A nit on the previous post: the miss chance won't effect fast vs. slow weapon, a miss chance is a percent multiplier that is not added to any other multipliers, and multiplies by the same number no matter what type of weapon. If one attack is better with a particular miss chance, it will be better with another miss chance.

the only time this might come into play is if you want your damage to be more/less bursty and random vs. flatter, in which case miss chance will have some effect combined with weapon speed.
 

@Dillon
Agree 100%. 80DPS with a slow weapon and 80 DPS with a fast weapon are statistically equivalent in how the miss % will impact both damage and rage production over a long period of time. The only difference is that slow tends to happen in bursts, while fast is more controlled and consistent. For PvP, the burst is better because you move in/out of melee range frequently. For PvE, where the mob is typically standing still, I personally prefer the more consistent rage generation created with fast weapons. While this does negatively impact your instant and “extra attack” type abilities, it’s also beneficial in other areas. My post, here, has a more involved comment along those lines.
 

A quick correction for one of the previous posters:

Testing has shown that Executioner enchant procs do not stack with each other. That means that if you get an Executioner enchant on both weapons, the second one is a lot less useful then it could be, because sometimes it will lose its procs because the first one has already procced.

Long story short, only ever get ONE Executioner enchant. Get Mongoose on the other hand, preferably. Since Mongoose is also the preferred tanking enchant, get it on your mainhand weapon if you plan to use the same sword for tanking and dps. Otherwise, go Executioner mainhand, Mongoose offhand.

I echo another poster who recommended you get a Sun Eater for tanking and only use your slow pvp weapons for dps.

@dyslexic:
I completely forgot that Shield Mastery also raised the damage of Shield Slam. I'd pull the points out of Imp. Revenge (since it's nice for heroics, but the weakest talent in the build, imo) and put them in there.

My talent build for raiding would be quite different, but I designed the one in my previous comment specifically for heroics.

My site
 

It seems i worded my comment in a confusing manner, what I intended with my remark is that using your "On next swring" abilities such as heroic strike are more rage efficient and provide higher burst dmg with a slower weapon. (Some attacks like Bloodthirst) i believe are based purely off your attack power which reinforces my statement of gearing for AP before crit. Crit is your 2nd stat. Go to Warriorpwns.com and have a look at his "Flurry uptime calculator" it will predict a % of time you have flurry up for and an estimated dps increase from that. If you reach 30% crit you should have flurry up about 80% of the time increasing your dps by around 18%

Sorry for any confusion!
 

@Dreyfus,

Maybe I'm confused about what you're saying. Since on-next-attack moves like Heroic Strike add a flat amount of damage to your attack, wouldn't it make no difference to them how fast your weapon is? If anything, a faster weapon would allow more HS burst because it would allow you to pour more rage into your HSes faster?

However, if you are using your HSes mostly to avoid the DW miss penalty (which Tobold would be, since I assume his hit rating would be rather low in the gear available to his warrior), then you are correct that they are more rage-efficient with a slow weapon because you are getting more damage through per use on hits that would have otherwise been misses.

But I'm just nitpicking, as your real point still stands: you want slow weapons for fury dps, especially in the main hand.


My Site
 

On Next Attack
The most important fact about these abilities is this: You do not gain rage for yellow damage attacks. Using a Next Attack ability does not trigger the GCD, but the tradeoff is that it turns what would have been a white attack that gains rage to a yellow attack that does not. This means that the rage lost from making your next attack yellow is part of the overall rage cost for the ability. In other words, you are trading future rage for damage now. For this reason, using Heroic Strike on slow weapons is generally not very rage efficient and you should use other abilities instead. For a fast weapon however, the rage lost from converting to a yellow attack is quite a bit less.

However, while fast is superior for HS, it’s not superior for Cleave. Why? Because it does weapon damage +extra to the next nearest target. So while you lose more rage from the slower attack, your extra yellow attack on another target does considerably more damage. If you intend to use a fast MH, then make sure to get Imp Heroic Strike. If you intend to use a slow MH, get Imp Cleave.
 

@Dreyfus, two corrections for you: You want 490 defense, not 390, to be crit-immune versus boss mobs.
Second, you are mixing up block rating with block value. Block rating affects your chance to block, while block value affects the amount of damage you block, and the damage (and therefore threat) of your shield slam. Block rating is not terribly valuable, unless you are building a passive-uncrushable set.
 

@sid64

You make a good point by noting that yellow attacks don't generate rage, so you are losing more potential rage per slow HS than fast HS. If you only consider the damage added by the HS move itself, then slow weapons make the move less efficient.

By this same rule, cleaves on a slow main hand would also be less RAGE efficient (each cleave costs more) than on a fast main hand.

But like you said, cleave can be more damage efficient overall because it doubles your weapon damage, even though it may cost more potential rage on a slow hand.

However, a similar principal also applies to HS. If one is using HS to mitigate chance to miss with the mainhand, then each individual HS is actually MORE damage-efficient on a slow mainhand.

For example, take a 2.8 speed mainhand versus a 1.4 speed mainhand. The slower weapon would do twice as much damage and thus gain twice as much rage per white his at the fast weapon. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that a 1.4 swing grants 5 rage, while a 2.8 swing grants 10 rage. So essentially, HS costs 25 rage for the 2.8 and 20 rage for the 1.4.

Where am I going with all these annoying numbers? The HS from the 2.8 speed weapon does nearly twice the damage of the HS from the 1.4. That means that the slow weapon allows more damage to avoid the hit penalty per use. So even though each individual HS costs slightly less (only 5 rage difference!), the faster weapon has to do nearly twice as many HSes to get the same amount of damage through the hit penalty.

So the rage per damage efficiency between HSing on a slow vs. fast mainhand should be roughly the same.

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