So, Blizzard still seems to be debating on whether/how to replace WW in the fury rotation. Blue posts seem to waver between indicating that they're considering it, and debating whether we really need one.
Here are a couple thoughts that this brings up for me, and mainly this is a curiosity more than anything else.
Point #1: Bloodthirst, Slam, Heroic Strike, Cleave, as written do main hand weapon damage only.
Point #2: WW is our only strike that attacks with both weapons.
Point #3: having two weapons has pluses and minuses, e.g. on the up-side, we can melee swing more often (about twice), on the downside we experience 10% damage reduction (for current incarnation of TG) and our miss percentage goes from 8% to 27%.
So, let's take a look at an idea here, suppose that we consider a Fury build that is based around only carrying one 2 hander instead of trying to dual wield. On the one hand, this is not the direction this was normalized in, but on the other hand....
Suppose our melee damage (white swings) are intended to be about 30% of our overall damage. Let's suppose that means that we have two weapons swinging at about the same time doing 30% of our damage. Let's also suppose that we've invested the large amount of hit rating needed to hit cap our white swings. Now, the other 70% of our damage (except on multi-target pulls) doesn't benefit at all from the off hand swings. Only rage generation gets any boost at all.
So, if we trade off our off hand for a single two hander, we gain 6 talent points (maybe more depending how important WW is) to place other spots on the tree (maybe handy, maybe not) including the heretofore undesirable Unbridled Wrath (who knows how this will fare in Clysm?). Let's suppose those extra talents kind of wash out some of the unmeasureable factors, i.e. suppose that those extra talent points in things like Anger Management and Unbridled Wrath cut our rage generation loss so we still generate about 70-80% of the rage we did before instead of 50%, and otherwise have no real effect.
I'll use relative terms so we can compare directly.
Now, not having TG means that our 70% of yellow damage is actually 77% now, and the 30% of white damage becomes 16.5%. However, all that hit rating we no longer need (19% hit rating = 623 hit rating currently) can be transferred to extra haste/crit (interestingly enough, 623 Haste rating = 19% haste currently). So, we can add 20% to the white numbers as well as 20% of our rage generation as well. If we also assume that we are capped on our crit rating (say 50% for a nice comparison) that extra crit + haste interaction will also generate an additional 10% for both white damage and rage generation, thus giving us a total of 30% increase to those two numbers.
So, we're looking at Yellow Strikes making up 77% damage, white strikes making up 21.45% damage and rage generation at about 91-104%.
So, in theory, at least it would seem that swapping to a single weapon style with Fury would yield about the same end result as trying to dual wield.
Rage Generation (normalized to 2H Fury)
TG fury: 100%
Single Fury: 91-104%
Damage:
TG Fury:
30% white + 70% yellow = 100%
Single Fury:
21.5% white + 77% yellow = 98.5%
I can't wait until our talent tree has a preview available so I can see how feasible this idea is.
