Friday, May 22, 2009

When should you execute? To spam or not to spam, that is the question.

Ok, so I've been looking at some numbers and here's my official information regarding when to execute as an Arms warrior.  

Execute is a funny ability.  Even though it scales up to give us a burst damage as high as 12K+, the actual damage/rage from a properly talented and glyphed Execute actually decreases the more rage you put into it.  The reason for this is that the first 10 rage (remember you have it properly talented?) which is spent to initiate the attack returns you the huge damage bonus of over 1400 + 20% of your attack power (I assume at the very least this is 3K +) so you're looking at an initial damage of 2K (before crits are taken into account) for the first 10 rage points (which you get back, by the way, so really it's even cheaper than that).  And once you add in the Glyph of Execution you took, you're really doing 2380 damage with those 10 rage points.

So it's pretty simple, 238 damage per rage > 38 damage per rage which is the additional rage that is added per rage point you have over the initial expense.  So once you get up to where you're spending 100 rage points and your damage is up in the 5800+ range, Notice that you're now getting only 58 damage per rage.  

Now, this comes with a tradeoff.  If, for example, you're using this ability in PvP, you want the high burst of damage, because it's harder to heal through.  Taking a 12K critical hit will completely wipe out most clothies, especially if it's preceded by a Mortal Strike + Rend + OP combo that wipes their effective healing to zilch.  So in PvP you want to wait until you're full of rage prior to using this, in order to increase your chance to kill the target.

In PvE, however, which you should do depends a lot on your rate of rage regeneration.  If you notice that you build rage fast enough to accumulate at least 62 rage in 1.5 -2 seconds (the global cooldown plus some possible lag waiting for Sudden Death to proc back your 10 rage) then you should definitely be waiting and doing an Execute every other global cooldown.  
If you don't generate rage that quickly, then you should be using Execute every gcd, because essentially, that's the amount of extra rage it takes for you to double your damage.  If, for example, you earn 20 rage per second, so over 2 seconds you would get 40 (ish) then you're better off spamming Execute every time it pops during those last 20% of the bosse's health.   Every time, that is, except the once every 15-18 gcd's where you need to refresh your Sunder stack, or if OP procs.  This is because OP is your best damage per rage attack doing 170% (check the talents, my friends) weapon damage and costing only 5 rage.   A crit with this attack can easily hit for 5K+ and even not crit for just under 2K, so compare the 400 damage per rage up to 1K+ damage per rage you get from Overpower to the 238 or less you get from Execute and you can easily see why that's the one attack you should use a gcd for.  In order to proc it, you may also want to spend one gcd every so often on a Rend also. 

So my basic rotation in PvE on most bosses after they hit the 20% is to choose:

OP (if it's up) > Sunder (if the stack is going to fall off) > Spam Execute > Mortal Strike or Rend if I feel like the rotation is getting boring.  Although, to be fair, Mortal Strike is fantastic earlier in the fights, but later on, it's not nearly as rage efficient as your low rage executes or Overpowers, so I'd stick with Rend if you get bored since it will proc your best attack occasionally.  Otherwise stick with the basics.

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