Upcoming HC/Mythic Trial; Tips/Advice appreciated (arms)

[Calm]

As the title says, I have an upcoming trial with a heroic/mythic guild next Friday. This is a pretty big deal for me, since our guild can't down normal imp or anything but kargath heroic (I'm our top dps and I end up having to make calls in mumble because our raid leader won't, but we won't bench people who need to be.) Also, I can only raid on a weekend schedule and there are very few guilds on mythics that raid weekends, at least on my server. Since the arms buff I have been rolling arms as I've discovered its not all bad. Execute phase really shines and sustained cleave is pretty nice. That being said, I still have decent gear for fury (2 Butcher Weapons w/ Shattered Hand.)

So, I'm not quite sure on a few things I'm hoping you guys can clarify on!

1) Scabbard. I don't have one currently. I have enough to pick one up, but it would blow through a lot of my money (probably would have ~10k left in the bank not counting what I make in the upcoming week.) I know that scabbard is what can really make arms execute phase shine even more than it already does, so is it worth it at this point in the expansion? It is likely to stay BiS for CMs, so there is some potential gold to be made out of it in the future, but I don't know if BRF will make this trinket irreverent or not, or if I should just pick it up to cover gear disparity.

2) Should I be staying Fury for some fights? I do pugs through open raid every week, and on heroic Imp the raid leader kicks anyone who is under 20k if we wipe. Since we don't really reach execute phase, I struggle pretty hard to stay at 21-22kish, and if bad rng happens (no crits, I have to move out a lot) I come pretty close to that 20k mark. For fury I know I do a lot better sustained damage for that fight; since there are really not to many sustained aoe portions (add usually dies by the time bladestorm ends), and most wipes happen around the 20%ish mark, I end up looking like a turd. Will this be a problem for a trial environment? They are 3/7 mythic and 7/7 heroic, we will be doing heroic mostly on my trial afaik.

3) Should I prioritize staying alive at all costs? Sometimes you get into those impossible situations where you have to stand way away from the raid because of something or other, and it makes your DPS go to shit. Normally, I would just be safe here anyway, but then again, I need to make sure I have decent percentiles as well since I'm not proven. Should I be taking 0 risks and making sure I live, or take small risks in order to keep my DPS up? A good example would be in p3 of tectus when there's barrage all over; sometimes theres a small pocket melee get caught in. Should I be staying in there and DPSing non stop and taking advantage of when arms looks great, or heroic leap out and take the dps loss while tanks move the motes?

4) Should I be using Defensive CD's when I normally would? Like I said, our raid leader is kind of inactive about actually making calls, so I use all my CD's when I think I should. Should I keep stuff like Rallying, vig, etc under my hat until a RL calls it or use it when I think the time is right? Also, I have a bad habit of interrupting whenever I see the cast, so it can cause some issues with pre-determined interrupt stacks, same thing with popping Rallying during another raid wide and being redundant. This isn't really a problem in my normal guild because most people ignore mechanics anyway, so I don't have to worry about one of mine being redundant.

Any other advice, hints, tips, etc would be MUCH appreciated. I'm really trying to make this a good foot forward on my part, please help me out if you can!

Here are some logs from tonights PUG
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...f=6&source=186

and my armory
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...%B6rt/advanced

**Someone was cooking/burning something durring kargath, I looked like an idiot because of the smoke and got dead:/ Also I got a bug where I dropped stance so I lost my bar on twins, so I just standed there pressing execute like an idiot without a stance up because I couldn't figure out what happened and rend, sweeping strikes, mortal strike, etc are on my main action bar

[Ooglar]

Disclaimer: I am only 2/7 Mythic exp working on Brackenspore right now, but I do feel that I can still answer these general questions that can pertain to any raid looking for progression.

1. Scabbard is a beast of a trinket. I bought one recently myself. To my knowledge I do not think the sims are our just yet pertaining to its viability to against Mythic BRF trinkets. If it still is BiS paired with another trinket then I think it is worth every penny. Especially if you can find a deal on it.

2. I myself have abandoned fury at the moment for ST fights. Arms ST is very competitive (if not better) with the other warrior DPS specs. Warcraft logs shows parses all the way from 50th and on as having Arms over Fury.

3. Staying alive should be top priority. Dead DPS = 0 DPS. That being said, being comfortable with boss mechanics will allow you to maximize your DPS. If you can subconsciously execute boss mechanics, you can devote time to bettering your rotation. Any good guild will be looking at your DPS, but they should also be looking at the amount of damage you're taking.

4. Personal cool downs should be used accordingly. The less healing required on you the better. Just try to coincide their use to heavy unavoidable damage. Or keep one for an "oh shit" moment. Also remember to bring Healing pots as opposed to relying on Health stones as they are subpar. Def stance is also one of our better ways of staying alive that a lot of people tend to forget. Good tanks and Raid Leaders should be calling for external/raid CDs. If your raid is comfortable with using them at your discretion keep RC for periods of heavy raid wide damage that aren't filled with other CDs, or when the healers can't seem to keep up.
4.1 Interrupts are awesome. We even benefit in DPS gains from it. People will take notice at the players that aren't being lazy and are using interrupts on trash. Interrupting is so far away from a bad habit. If you are assigned to interrupt on something like Decay then just be cognizant of that and use when needed.

Any other advice I can give for trials: Be ready. There is nothing more disappointing to a guild then showing up not prepared. You are wasting 19 other people's time. lastly, pore over your logs every time. Find areas where you didn't do something well, whether it be avoidable damage or CD management for DPS. Manage your strategy based on your raids kill times from the week previous.

[Deleted]

1) Scabbard. I don't have one currently. I have enough to pick one up, but it would blow through a lot of my money (probably would have ~10k left in the bank not counting what I make in the upcoming week.)

Buy a scabbard. If you need gold, run old 25man heroic instances like Firelands and Dragon Soul. You can get 2.5-3.5k gold per clear after selling all the drops and it takes about 30-40mins. If you have geared alts, do it on them too!

For your other questions, I am a prot warr so can't really answer most. Regarding raid cooldowns, talk to the raid leader prior to the raid about it and do whatever it is he prefers. It doesn't matter what the best way of handling it is, you want to pass your trial so you will do what *they* want you to do, no matter if it's stupid or not (this goes for everything, not just raid cds..). After you pass your trial you can discuss with them about maybe changing the stupid things to smarter ones. If you're very brave you can risk trying to suggest changes while still on trial, a good guild will like it and it will help your trial, if they are good suggestions, but a worse guild may take offense at any suggestions no matter how good they are. You'll have to feel the waters for the general atmosphere of the leadership and how open to suggestion they are.

For your issue of always interrupting, you may need to rein that in, though for mythic brackenspore once you get the correct (assigned) timing of your first interrupt, every remaining interrupt will be whenever yours has come off cd. Still, always trying is better than never doing it at all.

[Deleted]

I'm not going to answer all questions but I will comment on the logs because they are super bad..

First off your rend uptime is horrible, take Twin Orgon as an example. That fight is made for Arms warrior and you still end up with only 74% uptime, I know pugs can be bad but I always have 90-99% uptime on rend. Sometimes it's okay to have less if your tanks are just not doing what they should but generally it should be >90%. Same with your Sweeping Strikes, you almost didn't even use it. I suggest you take a look at the guides on the forum and start pugging normals to train or you wont make your trial spot.
Not trying to bring you down but with the performance you show via the logs I doubt that you will make it if you don't step up your game.

I suggest you start pugging normals A LOT just to DPS and train, you really need to learn the fundamentals of your class before you can get better.

[Calm]

I believe I said during my OP that at twins i had the drop stance bug and I didnt know what was going on so I was stuck just spamming execute after ~25 or so percent (rend is on my main action bar, and my main action bar disappeared). I'm not saying my rend uptime is the best, but that probably has something to do with it.

[Deleted]

I believe I said during my OP that at twins i had the drop stance bug and I didnt know what was going on so I was stuck just spamming execute after ~25 or so percent (rend is on my main action bar, and my main action bar disappeared). I'm not saying my rend uptime is the best, but that probably has something to do with it.

Then you should go pug again and link us some real logs or giving you tips is going to be hard.

[Deleted]

As Gurbak said, the logs are not optimal to work with but there are a few misstakes that can easily be fixed here. The most important one being (as said before) that your rend uptime really needs to be atleast above 90%. You were at 84% on Butcher where you should have close to 100% uptime on it. Sweeping strikes is the next big thing you gotta keep up, during fights like twins it should be up constantly. Download TellMeWhen or WeakAuras to keep track of these abilities.

Secondly you are missing some CDs that could have been used more frequently. Take Ko'ragh for example, you used Reck once on a 7+ minute fight, make sure you don't save your CDs so that you miss out on a use. This will be even more important if you buy Scabbard as you should be stacking them, if you save either too long they will be out of sync for the second use of reck.

[Sliske]

Looked at your twin ogron log...

- 40% up time on sweeping strikes, should be 95%+
- 5 ravagers in a 6:52 kill
- 50% up time on rend, per boss. You can tab rend both, obviously. You should be doing so.

Arms isn't a very hard spec, especially on that fight. Keep rend on both, keep SS up, MS in every CS, never bladestorm without SS. Never execute without SS. If you crit 250k-300k, you just lost 125k - 150k damage, plus the multistrikes.