Arms v Fury, playstyle hampering Fury issues:

First I'd like to introduce myself. I'm Landsoul, and I've played Arms and Fury in a PvE setting throughout all of Ulduar including hard modes, buffed, nerfed etc. You may know me from my DPS quantifying work that is manifested in my excel spreadsheets and its community on the Elitist Jerks boards. As soon as 3.1 was released I became very dissapointed with the uneducated nerfbat approach to the Fury damage. Fury has always been my favorite style to play because it was very fast paced and unique, but now it has drifted away from that. This post will be about how Fury is now mostly inferior to Arms in terms of playability, user friendliness, and damage output.

An explainative example - The Heroic Dummy Test
I will explain in words what happens with both specs while attacking a heroic dummy (no sunders just battle shout) utilizing the various cooldowns and abilities of each spec, and their qualitative outputs. When I did these tests, they were purely to compare feeling from one to the other, and to compare the playstyle. The general gear level of the test was using 226 iLvL and some 213-219 iLvL items.

First test was with Arms. I utilized the optimal rotation with Mortal Strike, Rend, Slam, Taste for Blood, Sudden Death, and Bladestorm. The optimal rotation consists of using these abilities in a priority setting which always puts the hardest hitting ability per global in front when rage is high, and sometimes uses low rage abilities like Taste for Blood or Slam when you unfortunately dip to low rage amounts to sustain the ability use rate minimizing damage per second loss. This rotation is what I like to call very loose in which if you make mistakes, you can always cover your tracks with the wide variety of ready to use abilities with similar damage. There are a balanced amount of high rage abilities that hit harder (Mortal Strike and Sudden Death) and about the same amount of low rage abilities (Taste for Blood and Slam) which hit for a little less. The damage over time, Rend, is very cheap and is almost always up. There is only one cooldown restrictive ability, Mortal Strike, which if not used on point is an opportunity cost loss compared to using a different ability, however small due to abilities' similar damage. Taste for Blood and Sudden Death can be used anytime as long as you do not wait too long so that they overwrite themselves, which is fairly easy to prevent. Bladestorm was generally used directly after a Mortal Strike or Taste for Blood, and sometimes can be cancelled early so that Taste for Blood does not overwrite itself. Bladestorm not only is one of the highest DPS multitarget AoE in the game, but it is also a very high DPS single target ability. During the entire test, rage was never an issue and I only had to pause once or twice to wait for a swing to gain rage for an ability. I also was able to throw in some heroic striking when rage was high and using low rage abilities. After about 10 continuous minutes of whacking the heroic dummy, the Recount DPS rose to just over 4000 and was sustained for another 10 minutes.

The second test was with Fury. The general gear level was the same, if not one piece better due to hit table optimizations. I started off hitting Deathwish and Recklessness right away, having to use two full globals to put them up, and gave me enough rage to start the Whirlwind, Bloodthirst, heroic strike combination. I followed with hitting Whirlwind ahead of Bloodthirst every time they were up, while heroic striking when I had a sufficient rage pool so that my next Whirlwinds and Bloodthirsts could be used on time. This method is called rage banking, in which the player must stare at his Rage Bar after every melee swing to check and make sure he can use Heroic Strike or not. During the test, there were many times where I could not heroic Strike at all in between WW and BT. There were also some times where I could hit Heroic a few times in between. I would always make sure to not hit a Heroic before using my Bloodsurge most of the time to prevent chance over Bloodsurge overlapping. Since Bloodsurge has a good chance to proc off of abilities I was forced to use in GCD succession for the optimal rotation, it often overwrote itself causing opportunity cost losses of an entire slam each time. Sometimes also the very short duration of the Bloodsurge would expire before I was able to use it due to not having enough rage after WW and BT. Sometimes I would get 4 Bloodsurges in a row but only able to use 1 because I had to hit WW and BT. Also, there were plenty of times where I could not hit BT or WW or both on time due to not having enough rage from missing or not critting my swings. There was also some periods where I would not crit at all for a period of time, yielding my attacks slow from no flurry.