Why warrior guides suck (DPS rage-management)

The big 4.0 patch hit warriors hard, with a giant nerf-bat called rage normalization. This, roughly translated, apparently means "Eternal rage-drought," or so the guides of the day would have you believe. A glance into the warrior community at the time was something like a glance into an apocalyptic nightmare realm, where people run around screaming, shoot machine guns in the air with zealous cries of vain defiance and kill off entire families for a scrap of food. Once-mighty warriors who had been comfortable with their class for years found they no longer had any idea what all these buttons do, how to make the red bar on their unit frame move, or what their primary stats should be. Blizzard had rewritten all the gear so that well-geared Warriors now found themselves with something like 20% hit, 35% expertise, and a whopping 75% crit; these must be the important stats, right?

Some abandoned their class; others steeled themeselves like good warriors should and funneled their freakouts into trying to make it work and failing fantastically. This led to warrior guides making some pretty strange claims. The strangest of all of these, which quickly became the accepted norm, was the need to reach the hit hard-cap of 27% in order to compensate for rage normalization.

A noob's guide to rage: every meaningful attack you use as a warrior dps costs roughly 1/4-1/2 of your rage bar, so you need to keep it reasonably full. You fill it up by using certain abilities that give you rage (battle shout, bloodthirst), taking damage (which as dps you should not do, so scratch that for now), or dealing damage. This is different than it was pre-4.0, when only the latter two options were reliable. But back then, warriors scaled poorly. In anything but the best gear, they didn't do enough damage to get enough rage. Once you hit the point (say around Tier 9.5 gear) where you could get that rage, you suddenly had more than you could ever use and your dps pretty much doubled. It was unbalanced, fun as hell, and well-geared warr dps pulled aggro like a friggin hunter without threat dumps.

This is why rage-normalization was necessary. Not to take the fun out; no, warrioring is still fun as hell. But because it was absolutely impossible to control rage. There were no tools to do so, and rage was too easy to come by at the end of Wrath, making the dps rather brainless. In order to fix this, Blizz changed it so that you get less rage from whacking things, less rage from getting whacked, and gave us buttons that we can push to garner more rage or get rid of excess rage. It was a good, proactive solution, giving us the ability to generate rage no matter what our gear level as long as we were willing to figure out the new mechanics and actually think about and use them during fights.

Warriors all over Azeroth have either not realized this or find it to be an unreasonable request.

Here's why warrior guides suck: all these courageous warrs are still afraid of rage normalization and think they can cure it by gearing poorly. The same folks who prescribed 27% hit at the end of Wrath are saying that we need 20% hit and a good deal of haste (haste! Of all things!) in order to generate adequate rage as a dps warrior at level 85. This is mind-bogglingly wrong. It is only one of many things that is wrong in warrior guides right now. But it is the key reason why warrior guides suck.

I'll dig into specifics of how to generate rage later, since it's pretty much your primary focus as a dps warrior at level 85 right now. But for now, remember: the soft-cap for hit is 8%, the cap for expertise is 27%, your most important stats other than those are strength and mastery, and use Battle Shout, Blood Thirst and Berserker Rage with reckless abandon.