7.1.5 RA Opener, + RA vs DR

[Archimtiros]

Alright, I'd actually like to see the actual math behind that then. Because, just using an arbitrary high number, say, a 2 minute execute phase, then sure. It's going to hit like a mack truck at the end. But, 20 secs? 30 secs? A minute? There's some time in there where it wouldn't be higher. 10 Executes, none of them under enraged are not going to do more damage then the normal rotation. And because you aren't going to be enraged, your rage gen is going to be so low, you're not going to be executing as much as just going through your normal rotation not enraged. That's as of NOW. Yeah, w/ the 4 piece, and honestly in this scenario the 2p would be just as important to get BT to crit. The extra length of rage is helpful, and BT is going to crit more on its own. But I would love to see the timing breakpoints here.

You forget two key factors which matter a great deal to this rotation.

• First, Rage generation isn't as much of a concern when you hit Battle Cry and instantly go to 100 rage. Keep in mind Convergences knocks Battle Cry down to a ~30s CD, which makes it easy to fit at least two into an Execute phase. In the shortest of fights, you don't even need Convergence, since you'll only get a single Battle Cry in anyway and it's likely to cover most of the phase. This is different from Massacre, wherein you need a consistent Enrage to maintain rage levels so you don't starve yourself either before going into Battle Cry or after coming out.

• Second, you forget about Juggernaut. The idea behind this rotation is to build up stacks, hit Reck to enable Frothing and Enrage, thereby boosting the damage of those stacks even further, and then start dumping rage again. Even outside of Battle Cry, the direct damage and 15% Execute damage boost from 3 Executes is greater than the direct damage of Rampage and Rampages bonus damage on your other abilities; for roughly the same rage cost. Unlike Colossus Smash, Enrage is only typically a 30-40% damage boost, and while this may sound better than the 15% damage bonus delineated above, those other abilities it's buffing are significantly weaker than Execute. That logic holds true even if you extend it to 100 Rage/4 Executes to take advantage of Frothing Berserker on top of Enrage.

Now that's out of the way, aside from the fact that it's a pretty unrealistic comparison; 10 un-Enraged Executes will absolutely do more damage than 10 un-Enraged, non-Execute, GCDs in the normal rotation; even before counting Juggernaut stacks. You vastly underestimate the direct damage disparity between Fury abilities if you don't believe this. To give you a visual example with minimal Juggernaut stacks in play:

Execute's average of course gets higher with more Juggernaut stacks, whereas the other abilities remain static; Odyn's Fury has a prohibitively long cooldown, and Raging Blow can only be used every 3rd GCD. While auto-attacks contribute a lot of damage over time, if you're only looking at the Execute phase, it's a significantly smaller percentage of damage. TLDR: Execute wins.

Here's another visual example of the impact of the Execute phase:

You don't even need numbers; you can immediately see the impact Execute has on performance. This was actually a 15 GCD Execute phase, rather than 10, but it used a total of 10 Executes over the course so I think it's close enough to your hypothetical to still be valid.

Lastly, I'm really not in the habit of "showing my work" to assuage other people's disbelief. That may sound haughty, but there are couple hundred thousand Warriors in the world, an average of ten thousand in Discord every day, a few thousand tweeting at me, and at least a couple thousand on these forums; this response alone has taken me over an hour, so you understand why I don't really feel compelled to indulge every naysayer. Ultimately, anyone who disagrees has access to all the tools I do, so if they don't believe me, they're quite welcome to go figure it out for themselves. That said, there has been repeated disbelief over this rotation; so I'll indulge:

Here's a series of 100s (1m40s) simulations
"Frothing Execute" is my suggested rotation, seen above; the rest are self explanatory.
"Now" is this week, with current gearing. Nighthold is with 4p, Draught, and Convergence.


The same simulations at 200s (3m20s)


And again at 300s (5m)


It's worth mentioning that the gap gets smaller in Nighthold, largely due to the 4p bonus and Convergence increasing Reck and Enrage uptime, but there's still a noticeable drop in exchange for what is actually a more difficult rotation, and the trend continues as fight lengths increase.

The only possible case you could make for not using Execute is in Mythic+, although that's a completely different dynamic given the frequency of combat, propensity for adds, and frankly I'm not really interested in min/maxing what is largely trivial content. In raids, 100s is about the shortest encounter you're ever likely to face, and that'll only happen on total farm content that we aren't likely to see in Nighthold for awhile. Even the shortest progression fights (Guarm) are at least 300s; so I'd call all this fairly conclusive.

[Bloodwinger]

Holy shit. Thank your for all the work Archimtiros. Even such a dumbo orc like me got this after your explanation. o7

[Deleted]

so as some switched threads and barely talk on other will be asking here some thoughts and questions i might have in the not even 1 week of getting used to the not so small but also not so many of the changes we had with the coming of 7.1.5 patch

so the thing would be mostly and maybe quite some others get into this category (have legendary execute ring but no helm so far) as in i have 5 legendary items so far but no legendary helm which sucks but ye, have the ring and the cloak as to just legendary items that kinda boost the dps

now with that combo of legendary items but mostly concerned about the ring since they f**ked us big time with procs on that, as from 15-20 maybe even 25% uptime on the proc from ring got moments since patch when the ring maybe had an uptime of 5% on some tries that almost made me throw that shit in bags and forget about it.

so to get a little more exact details on it, on an almost 4 min fight on nythendra had an uptime of 8.10% on ring so 6 procs in 4 mins almost, and on ursoc on a 3 min and a half fight the sucker procs for 15.22% so had 17 procs on that 3 and a half min fight, so ye ain't as b4 but still not almost half as another fight

so ye quite similar fights but depends from 1 to another if u get shit on u, and have to move the f**k out or not, so the main question is "IS IT STILL WORTH USING THE RING OR NOT?"

from what i've seen from raid testing (so no extensive testing, just from wipes and kills in raids) the FB + RA might do more dps n dmg also with ring tho u ain't using MASSACRE anymore and its quite spammy this talent combo which is nice, but also tested also in same manner getting MASSACRE + RA which seems not as spammy and doing as much dps n dmg as the FB + RA combo talent, also with ring, but waiting for the rampage to proc from the ring chance seems kinda s**ty to get enraged to do some more dps n dmg

also asking from the prism on what i tested and not extensively, on each talent combo with the ring, but from also what i checked on some kills from warcraft logs that some players that have the ring, used the MASSACRE + RA combo and did quite some nice logs among the ones that didn't had / used ring but used the FB + RA talent combo (also found some that used the FB + RA talents with ring, with some nice logs but weren't that many to make a certain opinion on the matter)

so ye, ring worth anymore or not? since if it would be without, there wouldn't be much of a reason to take MASSACRE in any talent combo

[Drtydeeds]

@emdeka

The sad truth is the ring (which I've had since week 1 of the xpac) really dropped in it's usefulness with 7.1.5

For raids, continue to use the ring till you get the helm, then go helm cloak - done and dusted.

I was fortunate enough to get the helm awhile back (3rd legendary at the time) and had the cloak drop last night for me, so there's hope for you as well.

[DDM]

@Archimtiros: I get most parts of your posting but not everything.

What's the difference between "Frothing Exectue" and "Execute if Frothing".
And how do you use BC in the execute phase? To get RA off and be enraged or to get 100 Rage to dump it into executes even if not enraged? I'm pretty sure its in the post, but i read it know 3 times and don't get it

[AleksaMaster]

Should we use BC as soon as it is ready or wait if our rage bar is high? Is there any rage break point where you would say we don't use BC if rage is higher than that?

[Deleted]

@Archimtiros: I get most parts of your posting but not everything.

What's the difference between "Frothing Exectue" and "Execute if Frothing".
And how do you use BC in the execute phase? To get RA off and be enraged or to get 100 Rage to dump it into executes even if not enraged? I'm pretty sure its in the post, but i read it know 3 times and don't get it

Execute if Frothing = The use of execute without the buff, but Frothing Berserker skilled - in my opinion

Second question: sub 20% i dump my rage into execute whit BT just to get rage until BC is ready
So that you have some juggernaut stacks running when you can spamcrit execute

[Archimtiros]

@Archimtiros: I get most parts of your posting but not everything.

What's the difference between "Frothing Exectue" and "Execute if Frothing".
And how do you use BC in the execute phase? To get RA off and be enraged or to get 100 Rage to dump it into executes even if not enraged? I'm pretty sure its in the post, but i read it know 3 times and don't get it

Execute if Frothing means "use Execute only if Frothing is up". "Frothing Execute" was my base profile, using the rotation detailed in my guides (and repeated by another poster above). The similar names were coincidental.

BC uses the cooldown rotation also listed in my guide: Use BC (procs Frothing) -> BT if not Enraged -> Spam Execute.

[DDM]

Ok, perfect. Than i had the correct thing in mind and only got a bit confused .

[Deleted]

BC uses the cooldown rotation also listed in my guide: Use BC (procs Frothing) -> BT if not Enraged -> Spam Execute.

Is the "if not enraged" condition not quite obsolete? even if you are already enraged you still want to BT just to get a fully refreshed enraged duration for execute?!

[Arbiter]

Is the "if not enraged" condition not quite obsolete? even if you are already enraged you still want to BT just to get a fully refreshed enraged duration for execute?!

You could always Execute until Enrage is dropping off and then refresh it to continue back to Executing. This way you you can guarantee extending Enrage out a little further than the BC rather than refreshing an Enrage that still has plenty of GCDs left in it.

That or if you Rampaged just before hitting BC (considering RA gives you max rage), there's not much point in wasting a GCD on BT when you were just enraged. Though I guess during Execute phase you wouldn't really be saving Rage, but if we're talking just as the boss is approaching 20% HP and BC is ready to use then this might be the case. rather than wasting the rage.

[Archimtiros]

Is the "if not enraged" condition not quite obsolete? even if you are already enraged you still want to BT just to get a fully refreshed enraged duration for execute?!

If you mean when Battle Cry is about to fall off; yes, it's worth using BT on the last GCD of BC to maintain Enrage, if the Execute phase is going to continue for a bit after the CD ends. Typically "if not enraged" and "if enrage >1GCD remaining and you won't reliably be putting Enrage up from any other source soon" are synonymous, but one is a whole lot quicker to write than the other.

If you mean at the start of Battle Cry, no, there's no reason to use BT if you're already Enraged. You're already rage capped and would rather be dumping that rage with Execute until you need to reapply/refresh Enrage.

[Deleted]

If you mean when Battle Cry is about to fall off; yes, it's worth using BT on the last GCD of BC to maintain Enrage, if the Execute phase is going to continue for a bit after the CD ends. Typically "if not enraged" and "if enrage >1GCD remaining and you won't reliably be putting Enrage up from any other source soon" are synonymous, but one is a whole lot quicker to write than the other.

If you mean at the start of Battle Cry, no, there's no reason to use BT if you're already Enraged. You're already rage capped and would rather be dumping that rage with Execute until you need to reapply/refresh Enrage.

yeah makes sense.. damn now i have to unmacro BC+BT.