Single Minded Fury

Fury is in kind of a strange place right now with two distinct specs - single-minded fury (or SMF) and Titan's Grip (TG).

SMF seems like it was bolted on quite late in the day to the normal fury spec and suffers from balance issues. I am SMF at present in my dps spec, having been TG in the previous xpac and while levelling, and SMF plays quite differently to TG. It also seems like fury was designed and balanced around TG, and the developers have not paid enough attention to how SMF works in practice.

Firstly, note that raging blow and slam are attacks based on weapon damage, whereas heroic strike and bloodthirst are based on attack power. Admitted SMF slam hits with two weapons instead of one, but my experience is that at present bloodthirst and heroic strike blow everything else out of the water - to the extent that raging blow crits for me hit the same as bloodthirst hits non-crit. I have actually taken raging blow off my action bar because it's just a waste of rage to use it.

My rotation at the moment is bloodthirst > heroic strike, with slam when it procs. I also use colossus smash to boost damage and refresh sunders, but that's all.

This is kind of strange, and defeats the whole purpose of the new fury design which is that you are supposed to have to manage your enrage state. I just don't bother at the moment.

It will be interesting to see what happens in the patch - based on current PTR releases it looks like SMF itself is getting a flat out dps buff (approx 4%), and bloodthirst, raging blow and slam are all getting very large dps buffs (around 20 - 30% I understand), while heroic strike gets a large nerf. It will be interesting to see if post-patch raging blow will be better than heroic strike - if it is better then I will need to put it back on my action bar, but if not then the rotation will remain bloodthirst > heroic strike, and it is likely that SMF damage as a whole will be too high and need a nerf.

Sub-20% my rotation is execute spam with colossus smash when available. SMF's flat +damage bonus really shines when executing and in this phase you can put out really high dps.

One final thing to note was a tip I picked up on Kadomi's blog and relates to sunder armour. The wording Glyph of Colossus Smash says that it refreshes the duration of any sunder stack on the target, but that's not quite what it does. What actually happens is that the Glyph adds a stack of sunders if there is already at least one stack on the target, or refreshes the duration of a maxed out stack. So you need to sunder once at the start of the fight, and then when you use colossus smash you will get a second stack of sunders with a refreshed 30 sec duration. The next time you use colossus smash you'll get a third stack of sunders. You therefore only need to hit sunder armour once.