So to reiterate exactly what you just said basically we can get 100% ArP from gear, +10% from BS +15% from Mace spec +20% from Sunders +4% FF + 20% shattering throw?


Is that what I am hearing? 169% ArP eh?

If that is so what is your estimate on a execute crit? 50K? Mine already crits for 20K with 40% from gear and axe spec. while not under a shattering throw.

A bit hard to believe, if anything my thoughts are that this is a glitch.

Well, for PvP there is not really a rotation. It heavily depends on the situation what you use, especially if you only play now for 2 months you just have to play a few games to get the clue.
For PvE you use every global cooldown (meaning you always smash a button when its ready) with priority on keeping rend up and then Sudden Death procc>Overpower>MS>Slam

That seems to be a bit clearer than my picture, thanks for making it. I personally find that certain people find it much easier to look at such a rotation and visualize themselves pushing the buttons, rather than looking at dry math and thinking "ok, but what does this have to do with how i play?"

One comment, your schematics are a little bit small, would you have a slightly bigger version by any chance?

On another note, i was thinking a bit about the timing of shattering throw in certain situations. Normally, it's not extremely hard when to use it. For example, on XT002 when the heart drops, we tend to have 2 warriors doing 2 sunders each, then the fury warrior does the third sunder while the arms warrior lines up his shattering throw, which i think is the most optimal timing. I am not 100% sure about this though, and was thinking it might be wiser to have the arms warrior put up rend first before he does 2 sunders, purely so an overpower is available directly after the sunders and shattering throw are applied.

Secondly, we normally use 1 or 2 shattering throws during the heroism, however due to the restrictive cooldown you can only use it once every fight if the heroism timing is awkward in relation to the shattering throw cooldown. Now, i am wondering, would using shattering throw during the heroism - and only during the heroism - really give a higher raid dps gain than using shattering about 30 seconds into the fight, then use it towards the end of the fight again when it comes off cooldown?

Just check what raid DPS you have during heroism VS what you normally ahve and calculate it!

I thought I might donate my results on a target dummy in Arms. I was testing out my rotation thinking of different ways to work Bladestorm in. This is what I come out with...

3700 DPS with Sunders
17.6% - Melee
17.5% - Overpower
14.1% - Slam
13.3% - Deep Wounds
13.2% - Mortal Strike
10.0% - Execute
8.1% - Rend
4.9% - Whirlwind
1.1% - Heroic Throw

My Rotation Priority:
1. Rend
2. Overpower
3. MS
4. Bladestorm
5. Slam or Sunder if 5 stacks aren't up / fade
6. HS (rage dump #2)

My Armory: The World of Warcraft Armory

I'd be curious how long your test was if Heroic Throw was a statistically significant source of damage. Assuming your HT crit for around 3k, that means you only did a test of around 300k damage (or ~81 seconds at the DPS you cited).

An 81 second parse isn't really long enough to get a look at sustained dps, with the RNG the way it is.

Shouldn't Execute proc's be an important priority somewhere between Overpower and MS?

Sunder armor, ff and shattering are applied to armor value. It means that with 100% arp from gear (and unless proved wrong from talents/stance) you don't actually cap it unless the resulting value is in the range of 5k.

There IS a cap and is not at 100% arp when you are fighting a 10643 armor. In that case after debuffs (sunder+ff) the cap raises to 104% if want to effectively remove the whole armor from the boss. Values over it won't change the damage done.

GC didn't say it wasnt possible to go over the cap.
It is impossible to go over 100% armor removed, that doesnt mean ARP (since he clearly stated "UP TO X%" means on a certain target you won't get the whole value).
As stated in many threads, the cap on a sundered+ff boss with 10643 armor is 104.05% ARP since the % from your gear depends on a value that is lower than 10643.
It is calculated on
no debuffs: (10643+15232.5)/3 = 8625 armor
sunder+ff: (8089+15232.5)/3 = 7774 armor

I'm still not completely understanding the fascination with "omg Tfb proc, must use it now." There's no real need to hit the overpower button immediately after proc; you have a ~5 second window (accounting for GCD, lag and reaction time). Personally I would prioritize MS over overpower most of the time since MS is on a static cool down. The only situation where I would prioritize overpower over MS is when the Tfb proc is about to be overwritten (ie lost proc) for whatever reason.

Right, I don't think anyone is arguing the cap from paper doll is 104.05% like you're saying, nor that sunder/ff/SS are a different kind, but more wondering if Mace Spec/Battle stance are part of the 104.05% (which I think is what you're saying) but my tests and others have proven that they still increase damage done. That's my question mace+stance+gear or mace+stance after/before gear.

EDIT: I just answered my own question, managed to reach cap today with armor pen and grim toll up.
Tclap damage with exact same AP.
635 - Sword/Enrage/Frenzy
695 - Mace/Enrage/Frenzy
884 - Sword/Enrage/Frenzy/Toll
883 - Mace/Enrage/Frenzy/Toll

Which means the 10% from battle stance and 15% from mace spec while grim toll is up are useless, but I can live with that.

I prioritize OP over MS because of you wait till the end of your TfB proc, you nearly cut the frequency of overpower procs. For example, lets say you OP in the 4th second of your TfB window...then you have a 6 sec OP CD. Thats 10 seconds between OP's. If you OP in the first second of your TfB proc, then its only 7 seconds. By waiting, on a 5 min fight you'll have something around 30 overpowers, and by not waiting you'll have around 42 - quite a considerable difference.

I'm a little bit at a loss in this forum, and I have searched but can't seem to figure out what I am doing wrong. I see others posting that they are hitting upwards of 7k on certain fights (XT mostly) but currently my highest dps I've attained on XT has been 4800.

I'm fairly certain that my priority rotation is going just fine, but I'm of the idea that it could be my speccing into Imp. Axes rather than swords or maces. I currently don't have any other weapon than my Death's Bite, but I am on the lookout for any higher dmg mace/sword/axe. Is my gear really being THAT much of a downer on this fight? (also I am on Demo shout/maintaining sunder duty only once every 30 seconds)

Also, has there been a solid number determined where ArPen outstacks Str or vice versa? I remember reading on a thread that ArPen actually outdoes STR in terms of stacking at a certain time, they just hadn't posted any hard numbers.

Edit: Also, if this kind of question belongs in another thread, I'll move my questions there.

Not sure what you mean? Axe spec is better than sword or mace.

As for dps, 10 or 25 man?

Do you have all of the following buffs, or their equivalents (I'm assuming as arms you are providing trauma and Blood frenzy)?
Imp Windfury
Imp SoE
Kings
Might
Flask
Dragonfin Filet
Leader of the Pack
Unleashed rage
+3% crit thing from mut rogues or ret pallies
SUNDERS, FF
Whatever else I am forgetting...

What is your fight strategy?
Are your melee on the boss + heart the whole time, or do you switch off to handle adds? Staying on heart is a big dps boost.
When does the raid bloodlust? BL while you are on the heart is a huge DPS boost.

I'm not sure, but these things come to mind as pretty major factors.

I have all those buffs, and I'm on the heart for about...75% of the time, 25% on scrapbots if they get close. Bloodlust is blown on the first heart drop. My WWS I'm quoting is 25 man. Light bomb twice, gravity bombed once. It seems to me that all the buffs/factors are in alignment but something I'm doing is off.

My priority rotation is keepin rend up > MS > TfB proc > SD proc > Slam/HS rage dump during MS/RNG downtime > Bladestorm on adds + heart.

I know this seems QQ but I am unaware of what I am missing to hit that 6k mark, and I wan't to be as good as I can be, so any other advice is graciously welcomed.

I’m right about where you’re at Zetsum. For fights like XT where I am single target dpsing the whole time I’m hitting about 4.3-k (about 4.6k on XT b/c of the heart) and typically placing 4th to 6th on the damage meters, but on fights where there are multiple targets to hit a lot of the time like Razorscale or Kologarn I’m usually 1st or 2nd. I just don’t see how people are doing 6K or 7K plus. Perhaps they are in guild’s far better than mine and have extremely fast kills. Our top, top dps I have seen on one of our runs hit 5.9k on XT and it was a frost DK and that was even abnormally high for him.

Not sure I could really get much more out of my rotation. Perhaps I need to start checking out ArP stacking, but right now I just don’t have the gear for it even if I re-gemmed everything with +16 ArP.

Btw, for reference on the lvl 80 training dummy (I don't use the 83 b/c it is always at 1% life and messes with the executes) I'm at 3800 dps consistently.

I believe the maximum dps Arms priority scale is this:

Rend > SD > TfB > MS > Slam with Bladestorms thrown in where appropriate. Try that and you should see your dps improve.

Ok, thanks for the advice, to further ask if I may, starting a PvE fight, i charge into the battle, use MS, rend, slam, and then whenever available overpower and execute. I notice as Im fighting that i cant always use slam when its available because i put the priority on MS, Overpower, and EX. Is there something Im doing wrong or is that normal?

Also do I use berserker rage every CD as well? currently this is what I am doing.

And if someone could recommend a website that can help me with my talent tree i would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks for all the help

eZp

I'm not getting what you are saying tbh. If it's additive either you place it before or after gear it doesnt matter.
It would be important if that was a multiplicative value but there is no evidence of this in any test.
It's quite obvious that IF talents are additive the extra arp over cap is wasted.

If you get up to 104.05% with gear (let's say 94.05% with battle) then if you are mace specced you better put 15% arp into STR (gemming) or changing gear for some other crit/ap and even haste.

Since GT sets a softcap the extra arp is just wasted for its uptime. If you want to know if going over softcap is worth then you need a spreadsheet cause it's very dependant on your gear.

There is not a strict rotation and even the priority list has some margin.

1) OP is prioritized once you are <1.5s from it's refresh. T4B procs refreshes on rend tick and not on OP usage, remember.

2) MS is better than Exe at higher levels of AP BUT you need to consider rage and swingtime to properly evaluate it. At 40 rage if you use MS first you are then able to use EXE after it regardless of next white swing. At 30 rage you can prioritize MS only if you have BR up or you can ensure a swing lands during MS gcd or you won't have rage after it.
At 40+ rage your decision is a bit more complicate. If you prioritize Exe you lose some MS dps, if you prioritize MS you lose some chances to proc another Exe. Considering human reaction doing one or the other won't change much your dps until MS will do constantly more damage than a 30 rage execute.

3) You don't need to keep Rend 100% uptime. If you can't refresh it perfectly on last tick you better wait 3s before refreshing it or you end up delaying your next t4b proc by few seconds. In the long therm this will give you less OP, and since it's your best move it will result in a dps decrease.

4) bladestorm should be fit between 2 MS or you end up losing another bit of DPS. Since t4b has a longer window you can OP-MS-Bladestorm-MS-OP losing only 0.5s of MS (since you generally cant keep it strictly on 5s cd).

What is more important is being able to fill every gcd. Never wait for a move to come up, if you are unsure just use slam to fill.

I was just coming to these forums to say the same thing you and Adventia said before even reading your posts. Now I went back to do more testing on the targeting dummies and couldn't get over 4k DPS again which proves my previous rotation and tests over 5 minutes had more to do with RNG. I was averaging roughly 3600 DPS with these rotations across 5 different tests today:

rend > op > ms > execute > slam

rend > op > execute > ms > slam

Both those priority rotations produced similar results. I'm still conflicted in regards to which to use first MS or Execute, but slightly favor MS as it will improve with 4 piece + higher top end future weapons. Only time it's worth using Execute first is when it procs off of itself or off of a white hit or HS just after you execute. But none of us can tell the future and I think getting in more MS' over the course of a fight will outweigh the odd time you could have got in another execute. So you risk wasting the odd Sudden Death proc at the expense of many more MS'. I think it's really close now but will favor MS in the end.

But then I finally realized, why is OP so high in the priority chain? As long as you OP every 6 seconds, it's better to just keep MS on cooldown and using execute before and even slam as well. In fact, you can safely use any 2 abilities once TFB procs before you even have to OP. So with that in mind I did 5 more tests on the training dummy each 5 minutes long and finally got over 4k dps 3/5 times. The other 2 times I was in the 3800's and 3900's. I just like the consistency of this rotation but it's not a standard rotation like the ones above.

It's more like try to fit in 2 abilities after each TFB proc before you OP using this priority sequence:

rend > ms > execute > slam

What's also so great about this rotation, it uses a lot more excess rage into DPS than other rotations. It also allows you to get more slams in as well which is beneficial with the old and new 2 piece set bonus. Now I wasn't able to delay OP for slam as much as I'd like on the training dummy because rage was an issue. So I'll toy with this more in raids. But just for now I recommend people at least delaying OP for Rend (if down) and MS & Execute when they're up on a target dummy and see how that works out for you. Just try and get 2 abilities in before using OP when TFB procs.

In raids I'll test this out rather aggressively and post some results. So if rend is up and execute isn't, and MS was just used as TFB procs, I plan to Slam, Slam, then OP to really test this theory of getting in at least 2 of the main abilities in our rotation after every TFB proc before I OP.

I read the post on page 32, but has anyone posted any math regarding if MS or rend should be the first ability used in a rotation, given threat is not an issue?

Also, has there been any numbers posted on a priority of multi-target rending? For example, on a fight like Kologarn who is easily tab-able, when should you prioritize a rend on another target? Especially at 75%+ HP, it seems like it would be valued at a decent DPS gain.

Last xt fight i did stasiscl showed me with 6200 dps, 11.9% (307,859dmg) of that was Light Bomb on the melee group, not saying that's always the case (might be a stasis only bug) but it might be what's happening on those 7k wws.