A guide to being successful as SMF warrior (4.2)

As the Americans have had a thread like this for quite some time now I think it’s a good idea to start a similar one at the our forum and bring the SMF community together. Hopefully we can have just as interesting discussions over here as I've always believed it to be a great part of what I enjoy in a game like WoW.

First of all I’d like to say that SMF is still standing strong. We might be slightly behind TG and it isn’t going to get any better but later on in this thread I’ll be adding a lot of tricks and we’ll just pretend that TG warriors won’t read this thread and miss out on those.

First things first:

Spec

http://wowtal.com/#k=BeB4St5V.aei.warrior.RDZPxp is the default spec. In the current tier you want to lose 1 point in Rude Interruption and get 1/3 Blood Craze or 1/2 Die By The Sword. 2/2 Booming Voice beats 1/2 and 0/2 even with the set bonus on our tier.

Glyphs

Quite straightforward. Get Glyph of Bloodthirst , Glyph of Raging Blow and Glyph of Slam as Prime glyphs. Glyph of Cleaving, Glyph of Colossus Smash and Glyph of Death Wish as major Glyphs and Glyph of Battle, Glyph of Bloody Healing and Glyph of Berserker Rage as minor glyphs. If you’re in a 10 man raid without anyone bringing stamina to the table you obviously want to use Glyph of Command instead of Glyph of Battle

Gearing

Stat priority: 8% hit > 26 Expertise > Strenght > Crit > 27% Hit > Haste > Mastery

As SMF has a lot less weapon damage than TG and doesn’t rely on RB damage mastery is our weakest stat. When reforging you’ll always want to do the following (after getting your yellow hit cap and soft expertise cap):

a) Reforge all mastery to crit. If the piece has crit on it reforge to hit.
b) Reforge all haste to crit. If the piece has crit on it reforge to hit.
Some add a “C” section to this which says that after this you want to reforge hit to crit but in practice this scenario doesn’t exist as every piece that’s left now should only have hit and crit on it. The only case in which it can happen is when you’re using a PvP weapon with hit and resilience but thank god Blizzard decided to itemize the current PvP onehanders with crit.
A note on the priority list is that hit becomes a matter of “feeling” after the 8%. I wouldn’t suggest going for crit over hit in every single case once you beat the soft cap. Out of experience I can say that my current 14% hit feels a ton more stable than the 9-10% I had about a month ago. There isn’t any real “magical” point where things go really smooth (even at 14+% hit I experience miss streaks). However things change pretty rapidly the higher hit you have. At 14% you can rest quite assured that 3 miss-streaks will only occur a couple of times in a fight at worst.

Gemming is pretty simple too:
Red sockets -> Bold Inferno Ruby
Yellow sockets -> Inscribed Ember Topaz if the bonus is 10 strenght or better
Blue sockets -> Etched Demonseye if the bonus is 10 strenght or better
Meta gem -> Reverberating Shadowspirit Diamond

In the current tier you want to get hold of 2 Obsidium Cleaver. If you lack the luck and money to acquire these you can get 2 PVP weapons which are nearly as good (thanks to them having crit) by just getting your conquest cap every week. As crystallized shards are extremely rare and wanted by a lot of classes your best guess might be to get Mandible of Beth'tilac after your tanks get it as it’s better than Obsidium Cleaver. Sad but true. Another option is going for 2200 rating and getting the better version of the PvP weapons which are extremely close to HC cleavers due to having a high amount of crit on them. If somehow you don’t have access to these weapons yet the next best thing is Lava Spine or the exotic version of the Al’akir sword with strength and hit.
Ideally you’ll be using chest, legs, gloves and shoulders as tier items and getting the helm from Alysrazor as offset piece. Realistically though it’s mostly going to depend on which bosses you’re killing first. In the end you want to do maximum damage WHILE progressing so waiting for items that might drop in 4 weeks is only going to hold you back. The entire “BIS” discussion is kind of pointless and you should pretty much rely on the size of the upgrade compared to the others that want the item.

The “bis” set can be found at http://chardev.org/?profile=165561

Trinkets have been discussed quite a lot without any real definate conclusion but the list is pretty much like this:
1) Vessel of Acceleration
2) Apparatus of Khaz'goroth
3) Vessel of Acceleration
4) Apparatus of Khaz'goroth /// License to Slay
5) Heart of Rage

Apparatus WILL beat License to Slay if you’re good enough at timing it properly and surely will outperform it on any fight with a modified damage % phase or burst phase (think magmaw/alysrazor/ryolith phase 2/..)