Fury Stat Primer

[Archimtiros]

As some of you may be aware, Haste has recently been simming stronger than expected beyond the suggested target points. Despite the confusion, I've kept fairly quiet thus far due to wanting to gather more information, rather than lead everyone in a collective kneejerk reaction. Over the course of the past several days I've tested extensively and collected data from a variety of different setups to attempt to ensure our information doesn't change all over again a week later (potential balance changes notwithstanding).

Rather than simply changing the guides, I feel like this topic merits a more thorough explanation, so here we are; though for the sake of brevity, this won't be super in-depth, just enough to give a better understanding of the relationship between different stats with various amounts of gear.

New stat priority:
Haste > Mastery > Vers = Crit

20% Haste


45% Haste


Note: Keep in mind that unlike the major disparity between stats with many specs, these stats all remain fairly close together. This means that while Haste may be the new strongest stat and Crit/Vers are the weakest, the gap between them is notably smaller than that of Arms stats, so you won't see nearly as exaggerated gains or losses when changing from one to the other.

Haste
Haste is the strongest stat by a notable margin until ~45-50%, after which it tends to fall below Mastery/Vers.






Mastery
Mastery is fairly consistent as the second strongest stat. After 45% Haste it jumps around a bit, rarely leapfrogging Haste, but overall the two remain fairly consistently. With high enough Mastery (~60%), it does fall in favor of Versatility, though that point isn't obtainable right now and might not even be by the end of the expansion, so I suggest ignoring for now and revisiting later if the need arises.





Versatility
Versatility doesn't really compete with Haste or Mastery, until very high levels of both, but it is tied very closely to crit. Generally speaking, the stats are close enough to be interchangeable, however, it's probably worth favoring Vers slightly more due to its secondary properties of increased healing and damage reduction.



Critical Strike
While it seems completely backwards that Crit is now Fury's worst stat, it's pretty simple when you consider the two largest factors devaluing it: Rampage triggering Enrage and Battle Cry granting automatic critical strikes.



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As I said, this is by no means completely exhaustive, just an overview of findings so far at a variety of levels of gear. So far, I've only tested with the primary talent setup (Massacre/IR/DR), but considering how vastly superior that setup is over any other, even if using another talent does impact the stat weights, it's very unlikely to be worth pursuing.

To head off some obvious questions (that I know will be asked anyway):

• This doesn't make Fury single target anywhere near competitive with Arms.
• "Haste is good until 50%" does not mean "you need 50% before Haste is good". (it's alarming how often this is misunderstood).
• Higher Haste does mean slightly more self-healing, though only slightly.
• The stats really are pretty close together, so don't feel like you absolutely need to craft and upgrade a full set of Haste/Mastery gear. The difference between Haste and Crit for Fury is nowhere near as large as the difference between Mastery and Crit for Arms (ex: trading 1000 crit for 1000 haste results in a difference of a mere 500 dps, or +0.169%).
• No, this doesn't make Frenzy worth using over IR.
• Massacre is still much better than Carnage for ST, especially with Juggernaut.
• I'll be reviewing Trinket lists in the near future, but I doubt they'll change considerably. That said, they always change slightly based on personal stats/gear, so it's worth doing your own comparisons.
• This doesn't have any real impact on any of the Legendaries; they're still pretty poor overall.
• Changing small amounts of Haste can do weird things in the sim, such as going from a 100 Haste to 150 Haste gem, to sometimes reduce DPS slightly. To give a simple answer, it's due to RNG and coincidence causing Furious Slash to be used slightly more often in some iterations, which is so weak it actually results in lower overall damage. If you do an inordinately long simulation (~2 million iterations) you'll see the variance converge, but the TLDR is not to worry about it. I'll be rewriting the action list to handle this better as it's largely caused by the higher prioritization of Haste affecting certain conditions.

[Phabulous]

You're doing the lord's work Arch.

[Cyclonus-WOW]

Awesome. Thank you.

[Deleted]

Quality work as per, Arch.

[Deleted]

Thanks for the effort of getting this together for the rest of us. One quick question. As you mentioned all stat weights seems rather close to each other. So say a 840ilvl haste+mastery might be same or a tad better than the worst stats of an item of 845ilvl with crit+vers. But beyond that extreme trade off anything that is higher ilvl will be basically an upgrade (unlike arms or what we used to get previous years).

I will admit it still feels weird, considering enrage, how crit is so low.

[Archimtiros]

Thanks for the effort of getting this together for the rest of us. One quick question. As you mentioned all stat weights seems rather close to each other. So say a 840ilvl haste+mastery might be same or a tad better than the worst stats of an item of 845ilvl with crit+vers. But beyond that extreme trade off anything that is higher ilvl will be basically an upgrade (unlike arms or what we used to get previous years).

I will admit it still feels weird, considering enrage, how crit is so low.

After going through all the gear I'd been hording, it seems that ilvl is king excepting two conditions:
1. poorly optimized v small ilvl difference - in other words, a 845 crit/vers is typically worse than an 840 haste/crit or mastery.

2. sockets - typically seem to be worth 5-10 ilvls, depending on the other stats in question.

The nice thing about very closely balanced stats is that it's easy to find upgrades; the bad part of it is that you're not going to feel like you hit the lottery gaining a perfectly optimized piece.

[Wishblade]

Well I guess it's nice that the stats aren't too far apart so gearing so far has been slightly ruined.

Thanks for the work though, good to know.

[Rastlin]

Thank you Archimtiros, that was an informative read.

This comes close to the results I had while trying to sim my character. The stat weights on low haste are so close that it almost does not matter which one you take.

[Eraganos]

Great Work, Arch.
Thanks for the effort.
Do we still need the 30% Crit or is it Haste to 45-50% and then Mastery?

[Deleted]

Hey man. Thanks for the work.

Did you have to make any chance to simcraft's APL to get this results, or should we continue using our own characters weights ?

[Deleted]

Very helpful, nice work
Don't really know how to feel about "ilvl is king" but I guess its a nice change for fury for once.

[Deleted]

Great Work, Arch.
Thanks for the effort.
Do we still need the 30% Crit or is it Haste to 45-50% and then Mastery?

did you even read what he wroteDDD

and thanks archi really helpfull

[Oneer]

Top man, with this people should now have full confidence of what crafted pieces they should be investing into for next reset.

[Deleted]

I'm not experienced with interpreting these numbers. Is it possible to assign stat weights with this available information?

[Oneer]

I'm not experienced with interpreting these numbers. Is it possible to assign stat weights with this available information?

Best thing to do would be to download the latest version of simcraft at downloads.simulationcraft.org and the ingame simcraft addon (type /simc and it generates a string consisting of your gear/talents/artifact ect. that simc models your character to) which will allow you to generate dynamic weights based on your own character's current gear.

[Deleted]

So, we no more focus on crit until a cap? We can now play fury warrior with 2% crit?

[Rastlin]

Crit is basically a waste stat now, since more haste will get you better Enrage uptime due to higher rage generation and more frequent Rampage. Crit is no longer mandatory for Enrage, since Furious Slash can somehow resolve bad BT RNG. It's just a fun stat which does not influence gameplay greatly.

[Deleted]

But, massacre ?

[Ezyah]

So,

given that Fury ST is trash at the moment, I leveled both arm and fury having in mind that i would use fury for heavy AOE fights.

With that in mind (using fury mostly for AOE), i guess crit is stull highly valuable since i rarely use furious slash since my filler is WW ?

[Archimtiros]

C'mon people, I spent a few hours writing this, not including research time; the least you can do is spend 10 minutes reading it!

I'm not experienced with interpreting these numbers. Is it possible to assign stat weights with this available information?

If you can't do your own stat weights, there are samples in the post, literally the first two pictures at the very top.

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But, massacre ?

I don't even know what this means, but Massacre is far better for ST raid content, especially with Juggernaut. Carnage is a better choice for short content and sustained cleave (dungeons).