Just curious
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Level 20-30 dualwield and then after that If you stay up to date on latest warrior (quest) weapons, then Arms 2H is superior by far.
Get Thrash blade (quest in Mauradon) and save it until you’re 60 and ready to dual wield.
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2h is generally superior all the way to 60, though as has been noted dual wield performs somewhat better from 20-30 (heavily weapon dependent tbh, like warriors always are).
For talent builds 2h fury is pretty solid until 40, as is 2h arms, but 2h fury has better talents while leveling (enrage, earlier access to cruelty, etc). At 40 respeccing to MS is the way to go, as that move hits crazy hard with a good weapon.
Dual wield is a perfectly viable way to level keep in mind, but generally inferior to 2h due to a few reasons.
- Twice as many weapons you need to keep up to date vs 1 (warriors also have a lot of access to fantastic 2h axes/polearms from 30-60,)
- Suffers much harder from misses/parry/dodge compared to 2h
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Stick with arms the whole way TBH or till you hit the 50’s.
Dungeon tank to keep to your 1H skills up then asses what you want to do @ cap.
From 30 to 51 I was Arms with quest are.
At 51 you can get an amazing polearm from winning AV once. That weapon beats out most other 2hrs pre raid.
Great for dmg/threat while you level up to 60.
Pre 60, 2h is usually better because the DW penalty is too severe. You incur another 19% miss on auto swings and your off hand only hits for 50%. The penalty is so bad that in many cases a caster stick is still better to swing than comparable 1hs. Yet another factor is overpower. This skill is what a warrior is expected to use to make up for the lack of hit. You have 0 hit, but overpower turns the enemy dodges into hits. The issue is that it uses weapon damage, so if you have a 2h, it’ll do exactly what its name says. If you don’t have a 2h… it’ll be considerably underpowered.
As for arms vs fury, most level as arms because this gets you improved overpower much sooner than fury, which you want if you’re using a 2h. Fury can’t get it until 51/52. That’s a real problem if you’re trying to 2h fury. Sweep is a winner as well, anytime there’s more than 1 enemy target. If you don’t want to lock into a weapon spec… then just put the 5 points somewhere else.
Fury does have its own advantages though. Since low lvl gear has no defense, craze/enrage are up practically 24 7. This is nice for tanking. You’re also not at a loss for having 2h talents when you tank with a 1h. Flurry provides a big boost to threat/rage from the extra swings. Fury is basically the tank page of choice pre 60, and even post 60 once gear can support non-shield tanking.
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when people are telling you that 2h fury is better than 2h arms, they’re assuming that you know how to spam sit to abuse spell batching to make enrage and blood craze go off whenever you want
also, people who are telling you to go dw fury, most of them are assuming that you know how to queue cancel heroic strikes in order to avoid the dual-wield hit penalty
2h Fury to 40. Sunder Armor is going to be what you spend a lot of your rage on.
At 40, respec to Mortal strike. Stay mortal strike until, at 60, you can maintain 25% crit in battle stance at while being at minimum 800 AP unbuffed (including no Bshout), 9% hit for 2h(6% for Orc/HU with Axe/Sword respectively) or 12% for DW - at which point you go back to Fury. Hit is more valuable for DW than for 2h because of the offhand miss rate but after about 12% it starts to drop off. The 25 crit is so that you can realistically expect at least 75% flurry uptime. Your crit cap is in the 33-35% range, beyond that it significantly decreases in value due to guaranteeing near 100% flurry uptime. You want at least 800 AP unbuffed before you switch because of the way BT works. MS by itself hits insanely hard and scales extremely well. You’re losing a massive amount of damage going from MS to BT and need to be able to make it up with Flurry uptime + hits landing.
For Horde, 2h Fury scales better into endgame because of Windfury (you can procfish with Hamstring). For Alliance, DW Fury and 2H fury are about equal until you start throwing BWL weapons into the mix, at which point DW Fury starts outscaling it at a near exponential rate.
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This time I started in Arms for Tactical Mastery and Cruelty from Fury, then kept going into Arms, mostly with a 2h, until 40 when I respecced to get Mortal Strike and clean up my talents for PvP. I stayed in the 40’s and played WSG for a while as Arms which was very, very fun. I felt that build gave me good versatility during the early and middle-levels for tanking, dps, solo-levelling, and pvp.
When I hit 50 I switched to Fury (with points in Arms building towards Impale) and dual-wield, which I found really good for grinding mobs/quests and dungeons, with good cooldowns and very low downtime, especially once you can start getting some +hit gear to support it. I really like how Deathwish lines up with the Diamond Flask, although I did grow to miss Sweeping Strikes while grinding in the overworld. If I were to do it again, I might do Fury/Prot after 50 instead, but I was able to DPS and tank in dungeons well enough as it was, and this was the smoothest 50-60 grind I’ve had as a warrior.
I stayed Fury for a week or so at 60, got into several dungeon groups and made most of what gold I needed for the epic mount, then went back to Arms for the tail end of the recent WSG weekend. After I make some more progress in PvP, I plan to go back to fury and work on getting a better weapon.
If you’re Alliance, or Horde without a shaman friend, I highly recommend using the Sharpening Stones from blacksmithing. They’re quite cheap and give you a nice little +weapon damage buff if you don’t have access to windfury. I also used a swing-timer addon, and a resource addon (I think it’s called Nugenergy) with really big numbers to show exactly how much rage I have.
For leveling 2H fury and respec to arms at 40
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2H all the way because there is a hit penalty for dual wielding. You don’t need as much hit if you 2H level. You put points on Fury until level 40 though but level with 2Hander. At level 40 you respec arms for MStrike.
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2H all the way. Level as 2H fury until 40 then respec to 2H arms until you get a bunch of hit gear and 2 good one-handed weapons.
I’d go Fury til 30 but once you get sweeping strikes go arms.
People saying wait til 40 are just wrong. Mortal strike is good but it’s not insane. its wep damage plus 85 and 30rage cost. Cleave is wep damage to 2 targets and 20rage cost (4targets if sweeping strikes/2 targets) 20rage 4x wep damage or 30rage wep damage plus 85.
other then that axe spec from arms is also amazing 5% crit means extra rage extra bleed extra special damage
Unless you’re horde you’re not getting the AV weapon lol.
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I’m currently working on a 2h female gnome. Liking it so far.
dont listen to anyone who says DW is bad because of the hit penalty, that is there to balance the extra white dmg from having two weapons equipped, typically a 2h will do slightly more white damage than a DW with equal quality weapons however with even like 3 points in DW spec the white dmg on DW is higher even with the miss penalty, which is not that severe if you are fighting mobs at or below your level which is what you should be doing as a warrior to minimize downtime.
I was fury from 10 to 55, I was DW from 1 to 20, DW from 20 to 33(when I got WW axe) 2h from 33 to 37 when I went back to DW and was DW from 37 to 55.
DW was definitely faster kills with less downtime and FAR more engaging because of how much more rage you generate as DW.
33 to 37 were the slowest and most boring levels for me going from 1 to 60 and I did 55 to 60 as prot.
It’s bad because of both the hit penalty and the reduced offhand damage. Not to mention that warriors have “on hit” abilities that do damage based on the weapon’s actual damage. So a slower weapon does more damage for those abilities than a faster one even if they have the same DPS.
DW has an advantage with rage generation and it’s less spiky than 2H but unless you can get a ton of +hit and some very strong one-handed weapons you’re going to kill things a lot faster with a 2H. Not to mention sweeping strikes, cleave, and whirlwind are amazing with a heavy-hitting, slow weapon.
In PVE, 2H fury to 40, respec to 2H arms, when you get to 60 and farm the +hit and weapons then go DW fury. You’ll level the fastest that way.
DW with the spec talent does higher white damage
DW generates FAR more rage than 2h does
Warrior has very few instant attack abilities that care about a slow weapon(overpower, WW and MS)
Cleave and HS are on next hit abilities which means that you have to wait for your next swing so they do not benefit from a slower weapon, since you have to wait for that swing timer anyway.
DW does not NEED hit while leveling
The math shows that DW is higher dps than 2h at all levels, due to talents that scale MUCH better with DW than 2h.
With 5 talent points it takes it from 50% to 75%. A nice talent to take but still reduced damage.
Yes, DW generates more rage. That does bring it up some.
My experience with DW vs 2H leveling is that DW has a lot more unlucky streaks which result in situations where you have to run or die. I did a decent amount of testing and 2H killed stuff far more easily than DW until I got some great hit and raid weapons.
Plus you’re not going arms with DW so you miss out on sweeping strikes. That’s a huge help in leveling, it lets you easily take out two opponents in the same time you would take out one.
Cleave certainly benefits from a slow weapon, it hits an additional target for the same rage whether or not the weapon is fast or slow. And with sweeping strikes it hits three extra times. That’s a huge boost to damage with a slow weapon.
Sweeping strikes + whirlwind + slow weapon = dead pack of mobs quickly.
Most of the warrior guides and sims out there seem to agree on this. I think that both styles are viable but every bit of evidence I’ve seen seems to point to 2H leveling.
Not to mention that if you’re on a PVP server then arms is very good for handling those situations too. Often you might only get a hit or two in while being kited, they should be as big of hits as possible.
In the end both playstyles are valid so do what’s fun for you.
I went 1-60 fury. And never once had a single issue. In fact it was the easiest of the 3 chars I leveled. Hunter(orc)/Lock(orc)/Warrior(human). All on pvp servers. Warrior was an alliance reroll so I only had money from selling herbs. But blue boes are so devalued I always had blue weapons.