Which spec do you recommend?

I have a decent amount of fun on my warrior with Arms and Fury; as well as have the recommended essenses and available traits, but Im not sure which one I should stick with for PVE progression and stomping on the 5-mask visions with.

I have enjoyed Fury since vanilla, so I might be biased, but that’s what I’d recommend. I hear the current iteration of Arms doesn’t have much solo survivability, and I find tank specs to be horrendously boring. Fury currently has both good damage output and survivability with bloodthirst providing pretty good in-combat self heals.

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So certain people and guides will tell you that Arms has a higher top end than Fury. And this is technically correct. However, this comes with a couple very important disclaimers.

One is that reaching that top end requires a fairly specific combination of the right Azerite traits, right Corruptions, and generally high ilvl. The other is that top end Arms performance has a much higher skill requirement to pull off and punishes small rotational mistakes fairly heavily.

Really, the choice comes down to what you enjoy more and feel most comfortable playing. Is that Arms? Arms is solidly competitive, even without the skill and specialized gear to realized the top end performance. Is that Fury? Fury performs very well, has amazing self-sustain, and is a lot more forgiving of small mistakes and less than perfectly optimized gear.

If you’re uncertain, why not go hit a training dummy with both specs? It’ll give you a chance to see how comfortable the rotation feels, it’ll let you measure how much DPS potential you’re actually hitting with each spec, and it costs you nothing but a little time.

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These are certainly valid points, though I’d like to add a couple of things…

  • In PVE, fury outperforms arms in M+, and doesn’t suffer behind arms much in raids. Fury is probably - and arguably - easier to learn, though.
  • Don’t just practice against a target dummy. Go try them out in the real world, and possibly in some dungeons and visions.

Arms is simming massively higher with the exactly proper gear and build, but it’s much worse until then.

Fury is safer, easier to learn/play, and allows for more mistakes that you can heal through.

Higher end content with the proper gear and equal spec skill = arms.

Better sustainability, easier to learn/more forgiving, easier to gear for = fury.

Arms does actually outperform fury on damage at higher key levels, but fury is definitely the safer pick and better in lower keys (stuff dies too quick for DW to be as efficient on arms). Arms has the issue, as well, of minimal defenses and no self sustain so it requires better mechanics and less mistakes.

If you had perfect gear for both, arms would sim higher, but it is also more nuanced. Both are VERY viable for all current content, hell there was even a fury warr in the arena tournament yesterday.

Edit; I didn’t see your visions part, I’d absolutely go fury for visions. It’s just much more faceroll, I respec fury and don’t bother swapping gems or enchants but it just makes them free.

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For PvE, definitely stick with Fury.

I’ve been bouncing back and forth between Arms and Fury. I’ve been more successful with Fury. I’ll probably play Arms again after the SL pre-patch goes live. It’ll be easier to maintain multiples specs when azerite traits, essences and corruptions are gone. I like Arms, but Test of Might sucks all of the fun out of it.