I wouldn't worry about your rotation as much as I would worry about your gear. While you have lots of good Ulduar gear, you are WAY above your caps on Hit, Exp, and ArP.

The hit cap for an Arms warrior is 262 and you are 451.
The expertise cap for an Arms warrior like you with 2 points in Weapons Mastery is 18 and you are at 26.
The ArP cap for an Arms warrior with Grim's Toll is 496 and you are at 596. So the 108% ArP you get when Grim's Toll procs is actually getting capped at 100%. That means you are losing 8% ArP benefit.

You should consider swapping out some gear/talents to get yourself under the caps. Str gems are a good replacement for ArP once you are over the ArP cap. The spreadsheet will give you the definitive answer as to what's the best gear for you to use.

I think it would be more like a 4% increase in white attacks, possibly slightly more SD procs, but OP/slam/MS contributions should remain the same. Assuming that 20% of your damage is due to white hits, 4% on top of that would bring it to ~20.8% (not counting extra SD procs).

I wouldn't feel too bad. His WWS parse shows no Heroic Strikes, indicating he's not playing the spec to its greatest potential. On that particular fight I'm showing about a 17% DPS increase; I'm swimming in rage due to Tantrums and occasional light bomb damage, and was able to HS frequently. Sorry -- no WWS to prove it, someone forgot to start combat log last night!

I would recommend not going 5/5 Commanding Presence. The difference between 3/5 and 5/5 Commanding Presence isn't extremely noticeable, so a build like this one would be the highest personal DPS for the highest utility. If you want to have 5/5 commanding presence for the sake of maxing out raid utility, I would go with this one.

ETA: I realized I didn't spec into trauma out of habit (I have a druid tank), you could take a point out of anger management, and a point out of AttT for 2/2 Trauma. Regardless, you don't need Booming Voice. It's pretty easy to keep up Demo Shout without it. Still, my recommendation is 5/5 Demo Shout and 3/5 Commanding Presence.

Were you performing HS's frequently (or just weaving some in) previous to patch 3.1.3? What portion of your damage are these HS's? As arms I have found throwing in many heroic strikes can be more problematic than it is worth. For me it complicated rage management, especially considering the frequency with which something is proc'ing as arms. The extra complication of spending rage at a time other than my explicit choosing would sometimes leave me with moments where OP had proc'd (or MS off CD) but I wouldn't have enough rage to do it as soon as it was possible too.

Has anyone discovered some effective strategies (or just a tip or two) for weaving in more HS as arms? Does anyone have a parse they could provide of this please?

I want to know just how many HS's people are managing to weave in and what proportion of damage dealt those HS's tend to be.

I only hit HS if the rage generated from my next hit would bring me over 100 rage. Been working well so far because that way you know you will still have like 80+ rage after the HS and you didn't waste any rage by going over 100.

I think, to an extent, it comes down to player preference.

I typically HS when I'm going to land above 60 rage. That way I have the rage to Sudden Death and MS and not screw my rotation up too much. I normally end up at 4900 to 5500 DPS depending on the fight, with HS at 5% or so. (Gimick fights (XT-Decon, Hodir) not withstanding) The only time I end up dry for rage is if I Heroic Strike and land at 50 to 60 rage, and have to reapply sunder armor and demo shout then continue my rotation. But that's a lack of planning issue on my part.

I am generally doing HS @ 75+ rage and if I had a weapon that would yield a bit more rage per hit (Currently using deaths bite) I would quite possibly dare to drop down to HS on 60-65rage like one of the other posters said he did. To answer that last question of yours my HS is generally around 5-7% depending on the fight. Try to find a good addon to help you track rage if you are having issues with always being aware of it.

Another thing would be if people would post what they use, if anything, to track their rage gen. I have a couple things i've toyed with but nothing that really stuck for me.

I've read the WoW forums and the sticky's, but I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. before the TG nerf I was fine. Now I'm trying to dps as arms and I'm beating my head against the wall. To add insult to injury another Arms warrior joins my raid with gear far inferior to mine and manages to keep up with me in 10 man OS. naturally I asked him his rotation and stance and other than excluding MS he used the same abilities I did with no macro.

Basically, I charge in, hit rend and hit my first Macro to blow all my cooldowns:

/use Incisor Fragment
/castrandom Retaliation,Bladestorm

Then I use the following macro:

/castrandom Mortal Strike,Overpower,Execute,Slam

I use Heroic Strike as a Rage dump.

Here is my spec and gear: The World of Warcraft Armory

If execute is up and not used right away I will usually manually hit it instead of waiting on the macro. I know with my gear I should be pushing out way more than 2k dps, but when I barely get there and then see an undergeared warrior fight me for my spot I get a little disheartened.

Should I move some points around to get Improved Execute?

I've tried to get input on the WoW forums, but other than being told not to use macros I got little else. Can the experts chime in and tell me what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks in advance.

To be clear: I saw the most increase on Deconstructor, but I saw increases in other fights as well. Probably around 5-7% in most cases. I only posted what seems to be anecdotal data because the person I was responding to saw no increase at all, and I noticed he had 0 Heroic Strikes.

My Heroic Strike damage has gone from 3% or so to around 7% of my overall DPS. Same gear, same spec, same raid buffs week to week. I can't explain it either, other than perhaps I'm running the rotation a little cleaner, but I can't really put my finger on it exactly. I didn't expect as much of an increase, but it's there.

Swap Glyph of SS to Glyph of Rend.

With weapon mastery you are over the Expertise cap, so either swapping some gems or swapping the talent points will boost your DPS.

Being Sword Spec doesnt help you too much, try and get hold of a BoH or DeathsBite asap.

Im not sure what your cast random macros are for. Arms is a priority system of knowing which ability to use when. My priority system being Execute>Mortal Strike>Overpower>Slam and HS if very high on rage.

Your first problem is bolded. Your priority should be Execute > MS > OP > Slam > HS (when high on rage). You can't just cast abilities randomly and hope to achieve the same effect.

You're using Sword Spec which is far inferior to both Axe and Mace specs. Not sure what weapon the other warrior you're referring to is using, but if you have access to any other non-sword 2hers, use the spreadsheet to see if they would be an upgrade.

Drop Weapon Master in favor of Imp Execute, or drop some expertise gear, you're over the cap.

You have far too many blue hybrid gems in your gear. You only need two to meet the meta socket requirement, the others are better replaced by red gems than trying to get the socket bonuses. By ignoring some of those socket bonuses you'll be able to put more red gems in both blue and yellow sockets.

Finally, your crit rate seems pretty low, especially for Arms. Armory is showing you under 25%, that can really hinder your Deep Wounds damage as well as uptime of Blood Frenzy.

Cast random macro's can work well for classes that are all cooldowns. Enh Shamans for example. For arms warriors though, you can always slam. So figure you have a GCD with MS off cooldown. Theres only a 50/50 chance you cast MS in that GCD instead of slam. Then the next gcd you get a proc and can now throw MS, OP or slam. There's a 1/3 chance you end up throwing slam. Letting those two much higher dps abilities sit there ready to use.

The extra slams you're throwing will also mess with rage gen. Slam is delaying your white hits a ton I'd suspect, so even with its lower cost you might be having rage issues in fights with no ambient damage.

So, as other have said. Ditch the macro, hit the right buttons. Get a mace/ax and regem a bit. All should help out a lot.

I think a cast random macro would work well for the procs. It wouldn't necessarily be incredibly efficient or maximize DPS, but it'd be a great way to lazy your way through Naxx 25 farm runs or something.

Something like "/castrandom Execute, Mortal Strike, Overpower" then slamming once whenever the macro doesn't yield any attacks seems appropriate. That way, this guy doesn't change up his "rotation" up that much, and significantly reduces the chance of him screwing it all up with badly timed Slams.

I've noticed something similar. I've had Lotrafen and basically same gear set up for many weeks now, but in this last week or 2 I feel like I've been getting a ton more rage. My HS usage is up from 4-5% to 9-10%, but everything else seems about the same.

This is my WWS parse from last night on Deconstructor:

I am wearing the t7.5 gloves so I can maintain the 2 set bonus for slam, and i have the 2 set bonus for t8. I was wondering if that 2 set bonus for slam is really necessary.

Wow Web Stats

I would like to NOT wear the gloves, but if it does make a big difference then I have to keep them on since I need them for expertise. I have a few items in my bank that I can switch around which would allow me to wear the 7.5 shoulders instead, but I will not have the 2 piece bonus for t7.

Looking at the parse, my slam did around the same damage as my Overpower with a final result of 6.7K. Usually my slam is not that high, until I made the switch the night before to compensate for the lack of expertise from the 8.5 chest.

I did use slam more so I can proc the 2 set bonus for t8, but I did not realize it equal my Overpower. Do you think I could have gotten more DPS if I had use MS more often?

Armageddon does less overall DPS than Colossal Skull-Clad Cleaver.

I know an axe or mace will do better dps, but I need to know what the expertise cap is without weapon master before I switch weapons. Also, should I keep my crit around 30%?

26.

So should I keep my crit above 30% and my hit rating above 262?

Crit, yes. Hit, no. You want it right there, or as close to it as possible.

Yes. Execute > MS > OP > Slam, regardless of Tier bonus or not. From what I recall, Haste is a pretty negative stat, considering it reduces the effectiveness of Slam. Sorry, I can't find the math behind it.

*edit* Also, now looking at your armory, since you decided to go 3/3 Imp MS, I don't see any reason why you wouldn't keep it on cool down.

So wait, did they implement the ArP cap already?