Opinions on Fracture outside of Berserk for Warrior

Hello! I've been wondering if I should use Fracture at 60 outside of Berserk. I fit it in during my Berserk combo, but I was wondering if it's worth keeping up 100% of the time, or only using it during Berserk and letting it fall off. Is it a DPS increase to use it all the time? Or is using it outside of Berserk a waste of a GCD?

Edit: I should clarify, I'm asking about this in the context of off-tanking and maximizing DPS while in Deliverance.

Fracture is always a DPS increase on WAR. As long as re-applying it doesn't make you lose Storm's Eye (which could happen depending on the fight and its mechanics), keep it up.

I've done some math on the idea of keeping 100% uptime on Fracture with 100% Deliverance uptime, and things seem to point to Fracture being a slight DPS loss if kept up during Deliverance. It still remains an increase in Defiance, however, and the ability to swap into Deliverance for TP gain makes it much less detrimental to use while MTing. Of course, if a boss is about to become untargetable or you need to step away from it for a moment, it's a good idea to stick it on no matter your stance.

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Originally Posted by Donjo

I've done some math on the idea of keeping 100% uptime on Fracture with 100% Deliverance uptime, and things seem to point to Fracture being a slight DPS loss if kept up during Deliverance.

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Do share that math to help sustain your claim :P

I'd be curious as well. Fracture is 300 potency if its not clipped for a single GCD and thats with no buffs and no qualifiers. There's not a whole lot that can beat that for potencies on WAR. Although I could be wrong as I haven't mathed it out with Fell cleave rotations, but it seems like you'd have enough downtime to throw it on.

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Originally Posted by karateorangutang

I'd be curious as well. Fracture is 300 potency if its not clipped for a single GCD and thats with no buffs and no qualifiers. There's not a whole lot that can beat that for potencies on WAR. Although I could be wrong as I haven't mathed it out with Fell cleave rotations, but it seems like you'd have enough downtime to throw it on.

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It's worse than that, because most of that potency doesn't benefit from storm's eye. All other considerations aside it has to beat out 20% of a Fell Cleave aside from comparing it to your average potency per gcd.

It's a dps loss in most cases, either stance, barring a few exceptions like being at the end of your rotation with 3 seconds remaining on berserk, or possibly cases where you fit it in while trick attack and/or hypercharge. Probably both.

And I don't think there's any relevant fights right now where an untargettable mob still takes dot ticks so that's also out.

It's a DPS loss on Deliverance, every time you use Fracture, you're delaying Fell Cleave by 1 GCD, which is, in the long run, a DPS loss, only times I apply it's on my opener, when I have berserk/ str pot or ninja's trick attack or when I have to move away from the boss due to mechanics (Like A3's "Wash Away" where it knocks you back to the edge, although, you can just Holmgang that shit and avoid the knockback too xD), but I don't have it 100% of the time.

More people claiming it's a dps loss on deliverance, but where's the proof for it? :P

Fracture is always a DPS increase on WAR. Yes, that takes SE not buffing the dot but just the initial hit into account.

Average GCD potency of the stack-building skills after modifiers (Deliverance, Maim, SE) is 286.44, assuming the ideal SE/BB rotating.
Fell Cleave potency after modifiers is 693. It takes on average 7.5 GCDs to build up a Fell Cleave, which means that the potency gain per GCD per Fell Cleave is 54.2~. (i.e. 406.56/7.5).
Fracture is 390.6 potency with the modifiers accounted in for.
Keeping Fracture up will net you nearly 50 potency after modifiers, and realistically, a bit over 20 potency because you will do a double SE to sustain both - SE and Fracture, at times. (Thus losing some potency from skipping a BB combo).

Will this result in a DPS loss from taking longer to build up subsequent Fell Cleaves? No, as you Fracture every 12th GCD or so to not clip it, and because it takes ages to build up a full Fell Cleave-ful from the "lost" time going into Fracture GCDs.

Took longer than I expected to get a reply, so I'll follow up on Tranquil here.

It takes 9 GCDs to perform a fracture combo:
Heavy Swing -> Maim (1) -> Storm's Eye (2) -> Heavy Swing -> Skull Sunder (3) -> Butcher's Block (4) -> Heavy Swing -> Maim (5) -> Fell cleave (0)
Whichever combo you personally prefer aside, let's just use the one I just mentioned for now.
Total modifier would be:
Maim 20%
Storm's Eye 10%
Abandoned 1% for each stack (2% crit rate increases damage by 1% on average)

With these modifiers, total potency of a full fell cleave combo (9 GCDs) would be 2822.95 potency
To lose a full fell cleave combo because you're using fracture, it'll take 9 fractures. With the modifiers mentioned before (except for abandoned) the total potency for fracture would be: 3348 potency

That's 525 potency difference with abandoned modifier advantage to the fell cleave combo. Of course, it takes 9 fractures before you get this potency gain, which is at least 270 seconds. One could argue that "it's not worth the TP", but do warriors really have TP issues in fights where the target lasts at least 30 seconds?

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Originally Posted by Tranquil

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I can't match your numbers. My slapped together spreadsheet going through all the rotations with and without fracture puts me at 334.11 average potency for no fracture (bb>se with fell cleaves with 5 stacks) vs 337.83 with fracture for a rotation that starts with fracture and end when you'd have to apply the next fracture. It will only get worse if you add more rotations because you will get more fell cleaves in the no fracture rotation. I'll freely admit it's early and I could have made a mistake, but it matches what pretty much every other guide out there says about fracture, only use it at the end of berserk when you have the triple cleave off.

It looks like I did 3 fracture rotations full fracture rotations and matched the no fracture rotation until I had the correct globals. But like I said, there might be errors, found 3 since I wrote the original post.

I'm pretty sure that calculation isnt correct. You have to work on average potency per GCD, and you can't stop a calc after the Heavy Swing. You also have to take into account the fact that Vengeance, Raw Intuition and Berserk add a free stack outside of the GCDs which further reduces the benefit of Fracture.

To work out whether it's a DPS increase to include fracture you need to take the full potency of an -entire rotation- (maybe 60+ seconds worth) and divide by the amount of GCDs in that. Then see whether the average potency is lower or higher than the 300+modifiers of the fracture.

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Originally Posted by Sapphidia

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I'm not sure if you're saying Tranquil's incorrect or mine. But assuming you're referring to mine, how is it incorrect? A full fell cleave combo takes 9 GCDs, so it takes 9 fractures throughout the duration (be it 270 seconds or 350 seconds) before you "lose" a fell cleave combo to fracture. Regardless if you use the total sum of either or the average potency/gcd for either, it won't make a difference.

If you're still not convinced, point out where it is not correct.

A full fell cleave combo doesnt take 9 GCDs, it sometimes takes 8 due to instant casts. You also can ONLY calculate dps via average potency per GCD because fights last variable amounts of time. Fracture doesnt make you -lose- a Fell cleave, it just pushes it back one GCD.

Thus, lets say you do two rotations for 18 GCDs without fracture. If you were to put a fracture in there it would become a 19 GCD rotation. You'd still have the same amount of fell cleaves, it would just take longer. To work out whether it was a DPS increase, you'd have to see if the total potency of the 18 gcds / 18 was better or worse than (total potency + fracture potency) / 19.

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Originally Posted by Sapphidia

I'm pretty sure that calculation isnt correct. You have to work on average potency per GCD, and you can't stop a calc after the Heavy Swing. You also have to take into account the fact that Vengeance, Raw Intuition and Berserk add a free stack outside of the GCDs which further reduces the benefit of Fracture.

To work out whether it's a DPS increase to include fracture you need to take the full potency of an -entire rotation- (maybe 60+ seconds worth) and divide by the amount of GCDs in that. Then see whether the average potency is lower or higher than the 300+modifiers of the fracture.

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So even if its a DPS loss in deliverance it would still be a DPS gain in Defiance due as long as Path and Eye uptime isn't an issue.

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Originally Posted by Habien

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The value of 286.44 up there is for the average potency per GCD, which is reached from applying the modifiers (Deliverance, Maim, SE) to the combo components that you use to build stacks. (HS: 150, Maim: 190, SE: 270 & HS: 150, SS: 200, BB: 280 at baseline - and repeat). I did not add FC into that per GCD value, but seeing as a post-modifiers FC is at 693 potency, and seeing as it takes on average 7.5 GCDs to build up sufficient stacks for a FC, you get to the value 54.2~ potency per GCD, when measuring the DPS boost of a FC. (As you're looking at 693-286.44, which becomes 406.56, which you then divide by the amount of GCDs it takes to build up a FC on average, which is 7.5).

If you then add up the base per GCD values from building up stacks via SE/BB alternating with the average potency increase of a FC used every 7.5 GCDs on average, it becomes 286.44+54.2, i.e. 340.64.

Fracture is at 390.6 potency post-modifiers, which means that technically with this methodology, using Fracture is a DPS increase of 49.96 potency. However, seeing as you will have to do a double SE to maintain both SE and Fracture, you can substract the potency gain from a BB combo, which then post-modifiers becomes 22.2~ potency. Any loss from this 22.2~ potency increase would happen from losing out on subsequent Fell Cleaves, but if you use Fracture every 12 GCDs, it would take 90 GCDs to behind a full Fell Cleave-full, had you not used Fracture. At which point having lost that much potency over time will not equalize or boost the DPS from having 1 Fell Cleave more.

This is the result I arrive to, but I will gladly be proven wrong in my scrubtastic ways if someone can do some advanced math.

One final note, this is just for the basic vacuum math, not taking into account Berserk and Raw Intuition for stacks (or even Vengeance), but at the same time, it also doesn't take into account how a Fracture would benefit from 5-stack snapshotting for more crit, etc. Keeping it a bit basic.

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Originally Posted by Sapphidia

A full fell cleave combo doesnt take 9 GCDs, it sometimes takes 8 due to instant casts. You also can ONLY calculate dps via average potency per GCD because fights last variable amounts of time. Fracture doesnt make you -lose- a Fell cleave, it just pushes it back one GCD.

Thus, lets say you do two rotations for 18 GCDs without fracture. If you were to put a fracture in there it would become a 19 GCD rotation. You'd still have the same amount of fell cleaves, it would just take longer. To work out whether it was a DPS increase, you'd have to see if the total potency of the 18 gcds / 18 was better or worse than (total potency + fracture potency) / 19.

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A full fell cleave combo does take 9 GCDs:
1: Heavy Swing
2: Maim (1 stack)
3: Storm's Eye (2 stacks)
4: Heavy Swing
5: Skull Sunder (3 stacks)
6: Butcher's Block (4 stacks)
7: Heavy Swing
8: Maim (5 stacks)
9: Fell Cleave

If by "instant cast" you mean Berserk/Vengeance for stack gains, both situations where you use Fracture or don't use Fracture would gain the same stack. It doesn't matter as 5 uses of berserk/vengeance would mean an extra fell cleave for both situations.

Also, 9 fractures does make you lose out on a fell cleave combo. Let's stretch that out to 270 seconds and forget about letting fracture fall off and assume they're applied perfectly without losing stacks.
270 seconds would equal 108 GCDs. If we assume the following rotation
Heavy Swing -> Stack -> Stack -> Heavy Swing -> stack -> stack -> heavy swing -> stack -> fell cleave -> stack -> heavy swing -> stack -> stack -> heavy swing -> stack -> stack -> fell cleave -> repeat
That's 18 GCDs for 2 fell cleaves (or 9 GCDs for each fell cleave), so 12 fell cleaves in that rotation
For the fracture rotation, you'd lose 1 GCD to fracture every 30 seconds. For 270 seconds that's 9 fractures or 9 GCDs, leaving us with 99 GCDs out of the 108 compared to the fractureless rotation: 11 fell cleaves.

Yes, it pushes it back by 1. But if you push it back to the amount it takes to perform a fell cleave combo, you'd lose out on one combo (as stated above)

Even if we were to consider fracture not being on and the actual timeframe is 350 seconds, rather than 270 seconds, it's still 9 fractures within 350 seconds. Meaning it's still one full combo you've spend on fracture, rather than on gaining stacks for Fell Cleave.

I'll try and do this simply then. Going to ignore the Maim debuff as that affects everything equally, and just go with SE for now. Going to ignore all off-gcd moves and assume just a basic alternation of the two primary combos, with a Fell cleave thrown in every 5 wrath stacks.

Wall of napkin math incoming, tell me if this is incorrect:

So, let's take a basic rotation of SE combo (150+190+270 potency) -> Butchers Combo (150 + 200 + 280). That's 4 stacks of wrath, for 610+630, so 1240 potency across six GCDs. Average of 207 potency per GCD without doing any fell cleaves.

To make the math easy to work with, lets do that pair of combos FIVE times, because 4x5 is 20, so that gives us four Fell Cleaves at 500 potency for every five 1240 potency 6-move combo pairings. (1240x5)+(500x4) = 8200. So that's 8200 basic potency of moves across 34 GCDs. That's now 241 average potency per GCD. All of that is affected by Storms Eye so it becomes boosted by 10% to 265 average potency.

You can already tell that putting in a Fracture that lasts its entire duration is going to be a DPS increase here, because Fracture is 300 raw potency. Only 100 potency of that is boosted by Storms Eye so that becomes 310 potency. Because this is higher than the average potency of the rotation, it's a DPS increase to use it as much as possible.

Thus, slipping in a Fracture in a rotation where you JUST use the six basic combo moves and one fell cleave every 5 stacks is definitely a DPS increase provided it ticks enough to get most of its potency out. It's 20 potency per tick for 10 ticks plus 110 initial hit, so to be better than the 265 potency average it needs to tick for at least 8 ticks (24 seconds). This would barely be a DPS increase. 9-10 ticks though would be either a 25 to 45 potency increase every 30 seconds due to the way dot clipping averages out. You'd basically want to use it every FOUR combos with higher skillspeed to guarantee you dont clip too many ticks and make it not worth it.

HOWEVER - as soon as you start factoring in the use of Infuriate and the extra wrath stacks gained by using Raw Intuition, Vengeance and Berserk, you start raising the average potency of your rotation. In our hypothetical 34 GCD example (which takes over a minute) you're getting four cleaves. If you instead add in an Infuriate and make it a 35 GCD rotation with a fifth fell cleave, you're making it 1.1(8200+500)/35 which is an average 273 potency over 35 GCDs. It would still be a DPS increase to use Fracture here but less of an increase than before.

Extend the rotation and take into account the extra wrath stacks from berserk and raw int/vengeance and this further narrows the increase, but you're not going to hit an average gcd potency of 310 I believe, as this requires more stacks than you can gain.

However, it DOES seem that even though Fracture doesnt benefit from SE, it's still a small DPS increase to use - somewhere between 25 and 45 potency every 30 seconds or so depending on skillspeed and where you slip it into the rotation. It becomes more efficient if you don't clip the dot at all but with a small sub-3 second clip it's still a dps increase.

Whether or not the 25-45 potency increase every 30 seconds is worth the 80 TP cost of the skill along with the risk of the DoT not fully ticking if a boss goes invulnerable or a target dies early is up for debate of course.

So whilst our maths is somewhat different, I do agree that Fracture in Deliverance is a DPS increase to use even outside of Berserk, provided you dont heavily clip the dot duration.

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Originally Posted by Seaninator

Hello! I've been wondering if I should use Fracture at 60 outside of Berserk

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It does the over amount of dmg over the course of 30 seconds as hitting BB (the ability, not the whole combo) does. In other words, over the course of 30 seconds, Fracture does as more dmg than 1 of our higher damaging abilities.

I've parsed myself a few times in Deliverance
Either refreshing Fracture each time or only using Fell Cleaves.

Funnily enough, Fracture refresh won over :/

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Originally Posted by Arkenne

Funnily enough, Fracture refresh won over :/

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It's not surprising to me, really. Tranquil and I made posts about Fracture being a potency gain.

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Originally Posted by Lyrica_Ashtine

More people claiming it's a dps loss on deliverance, but where's the proof for it? :P

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Logic and understanding how GCDs work?

I've seen a post on reddit some time ago now with maths and Fracture refresh won even in Deliverance. I parsed with and without Fracture to confirm that and I had an obvious DPS gain while refreshing it compared to not using it at all. A 300 potency GCD will always be a DPS gain when most of your GCDs (all of your combos basically) are below that. Only Fell Cleave is above, and no, delaying it to apply Fracture is not a loss at all. You can compare Fracture to an Inner Beast every 30sec without spending any stacks damage-wise. That's no joke.

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Originally Posted by Kaonis

Logic and understanding how GCDs work?

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Someone hasn't been reading. That or in complete denial of fracture being a dps gain and refuses to admit it

The maths ARE very simple for proving why it's a gain. All that matters when calculating the DPS of a rotation is Average Potency Per GCD. Storms Eye + Butchers Block = 1240 potency over 6 GCDS. Gives 4 Wrath stacks. It's 241 potency per GCD on average when you extrapolate it across a full rotation (in this case, 30 GCDs of combos giving a nice round 4 Fell cleaves). 265 potency when you factor in the SE debuff. Fracture is 310 potency with SE debuff.

An interesting piece of maths. Let's calculate the absolute worst case scenario where Fracture might possibly be a DPS loss. The more Fell Cleaves you can get into a rotation via "free" wrath stacks, the worst Fracture is because you're raising the average gcd potency from putting in more 500 potency fell cleaves. To illustrate this let's make the really silly assumption that a.) you always have a single OGCD move to add a fifth wrath stack on every single SE/BB combo pairing and b.) let's make the even more silly assumption that Infuriate has a 15 second cooldown (bear with me on this).

This would give you a rotaton of SE combo -> BB combo -> two Fell Cleaves. It's like doing your double fell cleave opener constantly. What's the potency of this? 1240 for the SE+BB, and then 1000 for the two fell cleaves. 2240 total, over 8 GCDs, which is 280 potency. Multiply by 1.1 to factor in the Storms Eye debuff and you get 308 potency.

Fracture with SE factored in is 310 potency. Even in a mythical hypothetical situation where you can get two fell cleaves every 8 seconds, which is impossible, Fracture is STILL a dps increase to use provided it ticks for its full duration.

If you think of WAR's DPS rotation as a 90 second cycle (from the time you pop Berserk until the time it's off cooldown), you only really have time for 5 Fell Cleaves (3 in Berserk, 2 after). Using Fracture doesn't stop me from fitting those 5 in, and it always gets applied with 4 or 5 stacks of Abandon for the crit buff. It's been a DPS increase in almost every parse I've done.

A bit of a necro-bump but I just wanted to thank everyone for their opinions! Seems like the consensus is that it's a DPS increase. I'll keep that in mind. Thanks again!