TL;DR: Raidbots sim:
Single Target Good! (really close to TG for similar gear)
50.6k patchwork at only 384 item level: report/irkiDfsCGun1D8GFjquPoc
51.7k 2nd raid report/71NrkUrT1EW9qU1imUGofN
Warcraft log of last normal pug (parsing 80’s on single target with no windury): reports/bkvdPRKQgZcwHaYm/
M+ 20-30% behind (oof, good enough for M12, bad beyond)
61.9k Dungeons Slice: report/nN6gkZ75hiN5FxZKAaN2mZ
Disclaimer: this build works better than standard SMF, but I cannot rate it compared to Reckless Abandon TG Crushing Blow due to lack of data and ability to test. Every meta lord with years of retail experience has already determined that TG is the best, probably with Reckless Abandon because Crushing Blow, a rage generator, effectively hits harder than an 80 rage spendor, it’s bonkers. This build with daggers is probably going to be less dps than what warriors with years of theory crafting experience have figured out. I’m coming in with 2 weeks of retail experience because I stopped playing when talent trees were removed and now that they’re back, fun build diversity has a chance of existing and I’m here to take fun builds as far as they can go! It’s long shot, but this build has a possibility of being meta!?
Daggers are only 5.5% AP behind Strength 1 handers. It’s laughably easy to make up for that deficit (see post 33 for AP math). Remember I’m only comparing daggers to 1 handers for SMF, Not Meta TG, I don’t have the data for that, yet. And now that disclaimers are out of the way, the actual post (revision, oh god, 15?)
Do you miss when being a berserker meant attacking a bajillion times a second? Well this build is for YOU!
Introducing DAGGERS! Which now work with all fury abilities and talents. Why Daggers? You get 25% more auto attack rage with using daggers with annihilator than you do with standard 2.6 speed Single Minded Fury Weapons and a hilarious amount more rage than Titan’s Grip. Y’know how standard Single Minded Fury builds are bloodthirsting every other GCD and occasionally running out of buttons to press? Throw that ideology in the garbage because you’re going to be RAMPAGING EVERY OTHER GCD. You stabby stab A LOT and pop recklessness every 27 seconds, leading to easily 92.5% recklessness uptime and ~45% Avatar uptime. Now 45% avatar uptime SOUNDS GREAT! And it is! When compared to standard Strength 1 hander SMF, the extra recklessness and avatar uptime probably translates to 2-8% more dps, which starts to make up for that 5.5% ap loss!
Rampage every other GCD? That Can’t be right.
It is right and I’ve been doing it for half a week now! At around 25% haste I was able to switch over to Odyn’s Fury/Dancing blades. In fact, if I rage cap with a Odyn’s Fury cast, I can Rampage three times in a row before running out of rage.
Also, because of the 44% faster attack speed, you’ll have 44% more Slaughtering Strikes stacks on your Rampage! And since you’re using it every other GCD, you’ll rarely waste potential stacks going above 5! This is worth at least a 2% rampage damage increase, possibly 3-5%.
After 1 week of her heroics/mythics Bloodthirst is better than I originally thought thanks to Blood Craze and the ridiculous amount of crit you almost always have.
Annihilator/Sidearm SLAPS with Daggers.
You lose up to 5.5% damage per hit and gain 44% more hits. ~35% increase in damage before even considering other factors like increased recklessness/avatar uptime making up for a lot of that 5.5% damage loss. Oh and the rage gain? Factoring in the same rage from white hits, Daggers will get about 35% more rage from auto attacks thanks to annihilator, or about 25% more overall rage. This is why with daggers we can Rampage every other attack, and one handers can’t.
Here’s the current AoE spec:
I haven’t tested this the most, was running TR/bleeds. Currently this Sims signficantly better though 
.
Now that you’re all aboard the Hype Train (or Hater Train) let further go over this spec’s GLARING FLAWS
Daggers, where the heck do you get them?
How are you going to get daggers if you don’t have a rogue friend to trade you their hard earned drops? Actually, EASY! and actually pretty cheap, but it will lock you into daggers for a while as sparks of ingenuity only come every… two weeks? Or so I hear.
This is how I’m getting a dagger:
(link description for those not feeling clicky, It’s link to a Blacksmithing profession tree with 150 knowledge point spent to craft mythic tier daggers)
Blacksmithing is a source of Mythic Quality weapons, but it’s expensive, resource limited, and possibly a complete waste of time actually stupid cheap to get someone who hyper focused daggers to craft something for you.
Rampage isn’t actually that good.
Yeah, so I’ve been focusing on getting SO MANY RAMPAGES, you’d think it’d be amazing right? Well if you spec Reckless Abandon: Crushing Blows, if you include the slaughter strike benefit as part of Crushing Blow’s damage, it hits harder than rampage and they’re a RAGE GENERATOR. Standard Reckless Abandon Titan’s Grip can already almost keep up a cycle of Rampage->Crushing Blow->Crushing Blow and then repeat. Maybe cast 1 extra raging blow here and there and they’re good. They’re basically already casting a better Rampage three time in a row already and that’s before considering the strength difference. The best we can pray for is that our Recklessness and Avatar Uptime put us remotely close to the damage, but I haven’t run the numbers, so what do I know!
Your Tank will LOVE or HATE you when you’re playing well.
This spec is built on optimizing Recklessness uptime. Sometimes that does mean letting it fall off for a bit so that you can have all your cooldowns up for the next big pull. Other times it means charging ahead of the tank and pulling a mob and/or pack so you can keep your recklessness rolling. Thankfully not only are you plate, you’re basically immortal for a couple seconds when you pop enraged regen, and you can even swap to defensive stance while you’re soloing a pull for cooldown reduction. Also, because you’re plate and have 10% damage reduction on top of that at all times, you can actually taunt a mob for even more rage gen and basically keep yourself topped with just bloodthirst/bleed + random splash healing your healer is already doing (not extra work for them). Can’t do it all the time, or with bad tanks and might not be viable for mythic+?
And as a final flaw, Blizzard could just make daggers not work for fury abilities.
Yep, they could just switch it to how it was, especially if somehow this spec ends up being too good. If Blizzard does nerf daggers/remove this, I’m going to claim that I won Dragonflight ^.^
So that was less terrible than I was expecting! And now for some final thoughts and wishful thinking
Blizzard has been shaking some things up a bit and letting things be more free. They’ve brought back the customizability of talent trees, which is only reason I bought dragonflight. If we have people running this spec and enjoying, who knows, maybe some devs will try it, have fun with it, and make changes that will benefit it. Blizzard has three different easy ways to make Dagger Warriors work/work better!
Blizzard could make the talent Frenzied Fury set Existing 2.6 weapons to 1.8 speed but keep the same DPS.
This would be the best fix as it changes nothing else and makes a talent no meta build is taking an AMAZING option. Technically we wouldn’t be using daggers anymore, because you could have 1.8 speed FIST WEAPONS!
Edit: Make SMF baseline and put Frenzied Flury in it’s place. SMF is already struggling with the talent point loss!
Blizzard could add strength to daggers.
Even if it’s just crafted daggers so they don’t appear in loot pools for angry titan grippers.
Blizzard could use the new recrafting system to change weapon speeds, or add strength to daggers.
This could cause major issues for non-fury warrior balancing, but if I could set existing 2.6 weapons to dagger speed via recrafting, that’d be amazing. They could even add a 35-50% strength(or agi) penalty because the weapon is “lightened,” for easy balancing. If we really want to push a recrafing wish list, we could possibly recraft to any speed from 1.5-2.6, because I’d love me a pair of 1.5 speed fist weapons, the aesthetic is -chef’s kiss.-
Originally when I came to this post, I was still bitter about how fury warriors kept getting slower every expansion. The Berseker power fantasy was very much dead, but I was wrong for shadowlands!?
Having not played a fury warrior since Vanilla and not playing WoW consistently since TBC (I was prot then!), I would occasionally look at the continued dominance of Titan’s grip, these slow chonky behmoths and mourn the loss of my zoomy 0.83 swing speed warrior from vanilla, which emulated some of the zoomy berserkers from things like D2 and WC III. Then I played a warrior for the first time in 10+ years and found, oh, while they’re auto attacks are still slow, they do something EVERY GCD and GCDS are below 1 second? THAT’S ZOOMY! That meets the APM of my vanilla fury warrior who was using every GCD and still casting 4-5 heroic strikes per Bloodthirst. So even if daggers don’t work long term, I still might enjoy playing fury because even Titan’s Grip is surprisingly zoomy when you moon stack haste. Wonderful! Still not as Zoomy as Vanilla, but close, and more zoomy in terms of mobility!
In vanilla (not classic, though I repeated this in classic phase 1) I would have to repair my weapon once a raid, or bring another one even if I didn’t die because I’d attacks so much with Eskander’s right claw it would break. I know some of you will RAGE at Eskander’s right claw, but hear me out, after BWL, I’d only use it on trash fights (no glancing blows on non-boss mobs) and during execute phases, axes were better on bosses for my orc, but eskanders CRUSHED trash pulls, gave permanent dual crusader, and had in practice 3ppm for 25% uptime of 30% haste. Leveling 60-70 with that warrior in TBC and evaporating mobs in Zangamarsh in under 5 seconds each is still a clear memory to this day in my mind from how fast that warrior was. It was parked at 70 I played with it some in dungeons during the Shadowlands prepatch and eskander’s has 100% uptime, my warrior has 80+% haste at like level 40, it’s insannneeee (highly recommend you farm it for any melee alt, soooo broken)
I’m Cut/pasting my original post down to post 27, as it’s an edited mess that I started back in August when I wasn’t even sure if I’d be playing Dragonflight. If you want to see it, go look down there.
In revising this post, there’s a couple things I forgot, would remember, then finish up another part of this post and forget them again. I’ll add them back later, this has been long post, expect more edits. I’ll be responding to any comments below as well, lets keep this discussion active and have some fun with this build together!
This post was originally from back in August, well before dragonflight. Skip to Post ~48 for the start of discussions that happened at max level. Post 73 is my first post after doing a raid.