HFC Warrior DPS Boss-by-Boss Guide

[fuguki]

Hiya!

I've tried to piece together a sort of quick-guide to the Hellfire Citadel encounters. I don't go into the rotational stuff, because that's covered by some people who have a lot more knowledge than me in the sticky'ed threads.
Instead, I've tried to compile the specialization, talent & glyph choices I think are the best for every encounter in HFC. I have also written fight specific advice that I think will benefit performance.

Disclaimer: I do NOT claim to be an authority on warriors, I just wrote this primarily for myself(goldfish memory) and decided it would be smart to share it with everybody because I don't think there's anything like this available currently. And most importantly in order to get feedback so I can improve on it!

The "Guide":
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...kMY/edit#gid=0

If you have any questions, suggestions or anything at all please make sure to reply to this thread so we all can benefit, or if you for some reason want it to be private you can add fuguki#2456

Also obligatory shoutout to Tyrant Velhari for being the arms dream 2.0!(Iron Maidens being 1.0)

EDIT: This is from a 4p T18 perspective.

VIDEO SECTION:

This is pretty much just play-through of the guide showing how the bosses unfold. Also, again, please give feedback on what's good and what's bad so it can become better and better!










___________

Changelog:
6/7 - Removed Archimonde infernal bit.
6/7 - Removed some pointless information on Hellfire Assault.
6/7 - Hellfire Assault changed from running bladestorm to bloodbath.
7/7 - Changed Fel-Lord Zakuun from AM to Ravager noting that: Fight less than 4mins => Ravager | Fight longer than 4mins => AM
7/7 - Changed Kilrogg from Bloodbath to Bladestorm for Visions of Death stacking. Also changed shockwave to Dragon Roar.
11/7 - Changed Assault from Arms to Fury(with tier 17 4-piece).
20/7 - Removed Kormrok note to go Stormbolt if hands die early.
21/7 - Changed Bladestorm to Bloodbath on Iskar and Xhul'Horac, and removed the note on Xhul to go Bloodbath if it was needed.
24/7 - Arms T18 nerfed. Changed Iron Reaver and Zakuun to fury. Changed Gorefiend to fury with a note explaining when arms is preferable.
30/7 - Changed Ravager to Anger Management for Kormrok.
08/8 - Changed Anger Management to Ravager for most fights as Arms. Council and Tyrant remain as only arms fights with Anger Management.
08/8 - Added which difficulty the spreadsheet is relevant to in the tab names at the bottom.
09/8 - Changed Rude Interruption glyph to Mortal Strike for Council and Gorefiend. Changed Stormbolt to Dragon Roar on Council. Changed Mannoroth to Fury.
09/8 - Added trinkets for every boss fight!
17/8 - Changed Iron Reaver from Avatar to Bloodbath. Also noted in Socrethar the difference between HC(Ravager) and Mythic(Anger Management).
11/9 - Changed Tyrant Velhari from Enraged Regeneration to Second Wind. Also added explanation to first page of the spreadsheet to say why I haven't been active on here and more.

[kubuntu]

Arms is good on single target ONLY if you got 4p t18 other way go furry
About bosses:

Helfire Asault is Fury fight not Arms
Kilrog Deatheye is geter to be Fury as well and take Bladestorm if your going in to visions
Xul'hoirac you take Bladestorm as arms only if you dont have 4p t18 other ways go BB or arvatar or go Furry with BS

Overal for most of fight not all you go arms only if you got atlest 2p t18 , if you dont getter go Fury

[Archimtiros]

Sidestep blitz, lol. Pop DBTS and ride the lightning IMO!

- - - Updated - - -

After looking though, as a personal guide I guess it is alright, but as a public release/intended reference tool, I really question some of your choices. First is the apparent intent to play Arms on every fight. You can debate as to whether or not you think Fury is better for some of those fights, but at the very least I'd split each boss into into two sections: Arms and Fury on each fight.

Second, some of your advice could be tightened up because it's predicated on iffy reasoning. Saying "save execute on short lived adds for Execute" is nice for boosting numbers, but if you are using Worldbreaker's it probably isn't very good advice, as you are wasting CS resets and potential uptime. Likewise, suggesting that you "should taunt an infernal out" on archimonde would probably be better served as "you can taunt an infernal out if needed", because most groups would be much better served with an Arms Warrior cleaving the melee add and boss over tanking one on their own (especially as ranged can do this quite easily). The point about making sure you are in the first group so as to do so might as well be erased as well, since that is really predicated on DPS (I've seen many groups not get infernals until second portal comes up).

TLDR: If you want to make a better guide, try to tighten up your wording, try to point out things that can be done, rather than suggest that things should be done, as not every group will be set up in the same manner as yours. Appeal to both specs.

[ReclusiarchGrim]

I get the feeling that you have a huge thing for Arms.

At the end of the day, yes we play whatever specs we like, but if you are looking to write a public guide, you need to write it from both sides of the story (Arms & Fury) and not be totally biased towards one side.

A very good first time effort in my opinion, but there are always things to polish up, so don't feel bad!

[Deleted]

Couple of points imo:

Basically play Arms on every fight, anything you can execute/ms cleave is going to push you above Fury if you've got T18+archi trinket.
Bladestorm on Xhul'horac isn't exactly bad, if you have a DK gripping the adds I'm fairly sure it's a DPS increase to BS them down then cancelaura for Execute cleave with SS active - at least in our raid people switch to them so rending them is fairly not worth it. I'm fairly sure hitting 5 mobs (sometimes more with the purple adds porting everywhere) is better than MS+SS cleaving, however Execute hits a tonne harder.
Presuming you're doing normal Archi, just let someone else kite the big add and go ham with 2 stacked on the boss and sick execute cleaves. 8% health per second is something in the region of 140k hps? With like 5 melee that's countered so just get everyone to switch to the 2 in the centre and kite the 3rd one to the boss for maximum execute cleavage.


It does sadden me how useless Bladestorm has become now, I used it on anything that had more than 2 target cleave last night and it genuinely felt really lackluster. Would probably not bother with it on anything except Mano, Xhul, HFA, Kormok and Iskar :/

[Archimtiros]

Couple of points imo:

Basically play Arms on every fight, anything you can execute/ms cleave is going to push you above Fury if you've got T18+archi trinket.
Bladestorm on Xhul'horac isn't exactly bad, if you have a DK gripping the adds I'm fairly sure it's a DPS increase to BS them down then cancelaura for Execute cleave with SS active - at least in our raid people switch to them so rending them is fairly not worth it. I'm fairly sure hitting 5 mobs (sometimes more with the purple adds porting everywhere) is better than MS+SS cleaving, however Execute hits a tonne harder.
Presuming you're doing normal Archi, just let someone else kite the big add and go ham with 2 stacked on the boss and sick execute cleaves. 8% health per second is something in the region of 140k hps? With like 5 melee that's countered so just get everyone to switch to the 2 in the centre and kite the 3rd one to the boss for maximum execute cleavage.


It does sadden me how useless Bladestorm has become now, I used it on anything that had more than 2 target cleave last night and it genuinely felt really lackluster. Would probably not bother with it on anything except Mano, Xhul, HFA, Kormok and Iskar :/

That first sentence isn't really true at all, but I'll ignore it in the interest of avoiding a useless fight. With regards to Bladestorm, it is less than lackluster for Arms, it is in fact down right awful against anything less than a dozen targets, as is Whirlwind. Even on Mannoroth with his pile of Imps, you don't want to use it, as they die so quickly it really isn't worth taking.

[Deleted]

My entire post was opinion (probably badly written as it's early) so don't worry about starting a fight Unless I'm looking in the wrong places I see arms steamrolling Fury?
So you're saying we should basically never use Bladestorm and stick to prioritising cleave with Bloodbath/Avatar?

[kubuntu]

If ther is fight where as Arms warrior you wona use Bladestorm its better to just re-spec Fury for it

[Deleted]

@Ashtwo I dispute "Basically play Arms on every fight" ... There's several encounters where I would (have) chosen fury for Mythic Progress, as overall DPS is not a Warrior's (any raider's) only concern. Some assingments and specific encounter timings/demands appeals to the fury specc more so than arms. In addition, your raid composition also plays a huge factor in terms of specc choice, as it'll play to the various classes strengths/weaknesses differently.

[Deleted]

I dunno, is it really worth playing Fury if you've got the T18 4 set? Arms is really strong even on pure ST like Zakuun, if you add in the class trinket I still think it'd be the same presuming you've got a huge amount of extra CS up time.

Overall DPS no, but if I'm topping the meters (as in, hitting relevant targets and happen to be #1 -not padding-) through timed execute cleaves whilst having high boss damage I can't see Fury being better, at least not until high enough crit/mastery levels so you don't need to Execute cleave for said high damage. Obviously I'm not suggesting you play Arms purely to top the meters but if you're able to SS cleave into a CS and hit the boss + prio adds (which there's LOADS in HFC) I don't see why you'd play Fury.

The only appeal to playing Fury I can see is massive burst AoE and if I'm honest if other people in the group (Warlocks/DKs) can do that, I'd probably stay Arms for the execute phase damage on boss/key targets.

I appear to have been very wrong about Bladestorm, it was only an opinion but if I'm wrong then I'm sorry my first post in this thread likely came across as me spouting facts when I'm rather just posting my thoughts.

[fuguki]

Arms is good on single target ONLY if you got 4p t18 other way go furry
About bosses:

Helfire Asault is Fury fight not Arms
Kilrog Deatheye is geter to be Fury as well and take Bladestorm if your going in to visions
Xul'hoirac you take Bladestorm as arms only if you dont have 4p t18 other ways go BB or arvatar or go Furry with BS

Overal for most of fight not all you go arms only if you got atlest 2p t18 , if you dont getter go Fury

Yeah I'm sorry I forgot to state this is from a perspective of having 4p T18.
Hellfire Assault: At first I did it as fury with the T17 4p, but when I got T18 4p I didn't feel like it shined on the fight anymore. This is just from my pulls, and by no means simulated, so take it with a grain of salt.
There is usually a vehicle that you want to focus down. More often than not, you are able to rend 2-4 targets so your MS generators are running at full capacity. Additionally, one of the harder parts of the encounter is the Felcasters, and these are only troublesome at <50% health. If you look at the metamorphosis'ed caster as an add in itself, it's executable for about 2/5 of it's HP. I just found it very useful to have CS+Execute to wipe them out before they got any casts off.
As far as bladestorm goes, upon second thought bloodbath is probably better for mythic/low-raid-dps heroic, as most of the important parts of the fight are 2-3 target cleave or single target. But if you have high dps on Heroic/Normal bloodbath won't have time to tick.
Kilrogg Deadeye: I haven't tried it on mythic yet so I'm sure much changes there(e.g. it looks like guilds are moving the add out of meele to die, which means no execute cleave from it on boss). But what I see on WarcraftLogs looking at top parses it seems the people who rank highly are fury warriors with bladestorm. But what I also noticed is that their Boss-to-VoDadds damage ratio was extremely weird. You can always pad the fight with 200% dmg increased inside the realm and keep AoE'ing the mobs inside there, but as far as I've experienced, it's quite easy to get 20 stacks(On HC) without using bladestorm inside and instead using bloodbath and recklessness outside to annihilate the boss. This is even more the case for the last VoD, where you can come out with 20 stacks and the boss being under 20% health with a hulking terror up as tfb rage generator, will fuel your executes to no end!
Xhul'Horac: I put a note on bladestorm that it can be bloodbath, depending on what the raid needs. This is very dependant on the raid aswell as how many deathknights you have! I strongly like arms on this boss aswell because of the 1st and 2nd phase having a big add up for textbook example cleave, aswell as the last phase being a low HP nuke, which arms also happens to excel at!

Again, sorry for not remembering to include in the thread that it's from a 4p T18 perspective.

Sidestep blitz, lol. Pop DBTS and ride the lightning IMO!

- - - Updated - - -

After looking though, as a personal guide I guess it is alright, but as a public release/intended reference tool, I really question some of your choices. First is the apparent intent to play Arms on every fight. You can debate as to whether or not you think Fury is better for some of those fights, but at the very least I'd split each boss into into two sections: Arms and Fury on each fight.

Second, some of your advice could be tightened up because it's predicated on iffy reasoning. Saying "save execute on short lived adds for Execute" is nice for boosting numbers, but if you are using Worldbreaker's it probably isn't very good advice, as you are wasting CS resets and potential uptime. Likewise, suggesting that you "should taunt an infernal out" on archimonde would probably be better served as "you can taunt an infernal out if needed", because most groups would be much better served with an Arms Warrior cleaving the melee add and boss over tanking one on their own (especially as ranged can do this quite easily). The point about making sure you are in the first group so as to do so might as well be erased as well, since that is really predicated on DPS (I've seen many groups not get infernals until second portal comes up).

TLDR: If you want to make a better guide, try to tighten up your wording, try to point out things that can be done, rather than suggest that things should be done, as not every group will be set up in the same manner as yours. Appeal to both specs.

Thanks for the feedback! I have removed that part from the Archimonde page now, as well as removing a couple of pointless pointers!

I get the feeling that you have a huge thing for Arms.

At the end of the day, yes we play whatever specs we like, but if you are looking to write a public guide, you need to write it from both sides of the story (Arms & Fury) and not be totally biased towards one side.

A very good first time effort in my opinion, but there are always things to polish up, so don't feel bad!

I agree. Could definitely do both speccs for all the fights. But my issue atm is that I have written this from experience on the fights and frankly, I wouldn't want to write how to play fury on, say, Tyrant Velhari because I haven't done any pulls as fury on her. But again, I agree it would be awesome if there was a complete "survival guide" for both speccs for HFC. Hell, it would be even better if we could have one for gladiator aswell(HYPE!).

[Jaybee9084]

My entire post was opinion (probably badly written as it's early) so don't worry about starting a fight Unless I'm looking in the wrong places I see arms steamrolling Fury?
So you're saying we should basically never use Bladestorm and stick to prioritising cleave with Bloodbath/Avatar?

I've said it once and I've said it again; This is the 2nd week of HFC. All Arms needs to do well is T18 4pc, everything else is just icing on the cake (it doesnt even need archi trinket). Fury needs gear, weapons, and select trinkets before it pulls ahead of Arms on fights where it should.

Give it time. You'll start to see Fury overtaking Arms on some fights in the coming weeks as people get gear.

[Bigbazz]

An example.

Simming my current Arms gear (T18 gloves/legs/helm + T17 chest/shoulders) got me around 52k dps, swapping the shoulders for T18 to get the 4set simmed it at 60k dps. The 4set for Arms is incredible and you don't need any specific gear for it, your old Horn of Screaming Spirits suddenly becomes a lot more valuable too which is pretty damn convenient! Arms doesn't need that much gear, the 4 set is all it needs.

Fury on the other hand will increase steadily and start to peak higher at the upper end of gearing, so you can't just equip the 4set and see a massive dps increase at exactly the same ilvl like you can with Arms. So yeah Arms T18 is great and a lot of people are going Arms for now, but that is mostly because Fury does not get such a big boost from the 4set, and will need more gear before it pulls ahead again.

If you look at the actual statistics then most Warriors are still playing Fury, with around 10x as many Fury logs as Arms on WClogs.

[rashy]

As much as HFC is a padstorm's wet dream, there is still very important single target priorities in all the encounters.

[bladeXcrasher]

As much as HFC is a padstorm's wet dream, there is still very important single target priorities in all the encounters.

It's only padding if the damage is meaningless. Last fight that had meaningless AoE that I can recall was Paragon's.

[Bigbazz]

It's only padding if the damage is meaningless. Last fight that had meaningless AoE that I can recall was Paragon's.

You can call padding though as doing AOE at the expense of a priority target. Our Warlocks on Iskar are a good example, they were pulling 70k+ dps or so and had lower damage on the Priest than the tank, because all of their damage was pure illusions.. Boss came back before the Priest died... In this case it was padding because while it made the meters light up it also caused us to essentially fail the dps check.

Was the same for us on Mythic Beastlord, the damage meters looked awesome but our boss damage was really quite low as a result and we took far far too long to get it to the final phase. I had to assign players to specific roles and keep nagging at them, the padders were resistant and we still never achieved what I would call a satisfactory dps balance but we killed the boss and it dropped every other time due to overgearing. In the Beastlord case it was actually stopping progress, we wiped quite a bit on that boss while having epic looking damage meters, because people cared more about epic looking damage meters.

At the same time our Feral who was bottom of dps overall was top on the boss, and it's often the case that the padders are looking at that Feral as the weak link to replace. So many guilds go through this and this is probably half of the reason why they arent top guilds, they are so focussed on the overall meters and not in the details and they get lost in the "why aren't we progressing, our dps is just as good as Methods".

My guild is no different, and being that I'm known historically as a dps whore it often falls on deaf ears, with players who almost suggest I'm jealous of their dps, when I suggest they need to focus more on one priority add/boss during progress. This is padding as it's being described here, elevating your overall damage as high as possible at the expense of a priority target, in order to ensure one is "top" of the meters.

You could argue Bladestorm does that, but at the same time it's pretty efficient for those situations... You do obviously need AOE, but the placement and spread of dps has to be right.

[FobManX]

Bazz is spot on, my guild is the same way. We didn't kill Beastlord until I told the GM about the DPS padding issue and he made sure to assign certain people to AOE/single target.

Feels like there are quite a lot of fights this tier where you can BS to inflate your place on the meters at the expense of single target. I personally have always preferred single target as ultimately that's what kills the boss, and I don't think other classes have to sacrifice the single target that we do for our AOE(i.e. speccing into Bladestorm, losing out on Avatar/Bloodbath).

[rashy]

Feels like there are quite a lot of fights this tier where you can BS to inflate your place on the meters at the expense of single target.

ExCEPt tHaT is Isn'T padDing1!11!!

It's only padding if the damage is meaningless.

Inflating your damage on meters at the expense of single target is padding. Padstorm is just slang for it, even if it is an optimal talent choice for a fight. If you choose to Bladestorm on cd and pop 3 mobs into Metamorphasis, than that is padding. Regardless of whether or not everything needs to die anyway. The very definition of the word padding is inflating your dps at the cost of efficient damage. If you don't single a priority target quickly enough than it is all a waste anyway.

All these "talent choices by fight basis" threads is all going to be wrong and change over time week by week, raid by raid. Hell, I even stopped using Bladestorm already on Kormrok after just 1 week. If your raid is having trouble with Xhul or Mannoroth in final phase then Bladestorm probably isn't your best option. You can pad the whole fight but if you can't meet the single target requirement then it is just that - padding.

[bladeXcrasher]

Warriors historically have given up the least amount of single target to fill the burst AoE niche, and to the Xhul and Mannoroth comment, there is no need to us BS in either of those fights, the first one being debatable for even going fury at all given the almost constant 2 target cleave until the boss is at 20%.

[fuguki]

Warriors historically have given up the least amount of single target to fill the burst AoE niche, and to the Xhul and Mannoroth comment, there is no need to us BS in either of those fights, the first one being debatable for even going fury at all given the almost constant 2 target cleave until the boss is at 20%.

I agree with you to an extent regarding Xhul'Horac(I don't like him). In my case, the imps are almost getting casts off during second phase, so I opted in to doing everything in my repertoire to control them, which includes dpsing them. However, I see instances where bloodbath would be the better option.

Mannoroth bladestorming is just silly. The fight is a cakewalk in the beginning compared to the last phase, and during the last phase imps don't spawn anyway. Bladestorm is, in my opinion, 100% padding on Mannoroth.