The cost of fracture is TOO DAMN HIGH!

[Kitru]

Pretty much this. I generally only use Fracture as one of my last moves from Unchained/Berserk/Internal Release.

You shouldn't be. The last move in an UBIR combo should always be Inner Beast (Unchained and Berserk should be staggered so as to not waste GCD), and, if you're going to use Fracture, it needs to be early on (the first attack with both Unchained and Berserk) so that you don't clip the SE from Inner Beast.

The optimal Fracture UBIR is this:

(start with 4 Wrath and prepped combo for Maim)>Maim(Unchained)>SE(Berserk)>Fracture(Internal Release)>BB combo>SE combo>Inner Beast

Everything but the finisher on the second SE will have the SE debuff applied, which gives you a damage output that looks like this:

Maim> 190 potency +
SE> 280 * 1.33 = 372.4 potency +
Fracture> BB combo>HS>Maim> (300 + 150 + 200 + 280 + 150 + 190) * 1.33 * 1.4 = 2364.74 +
SE> 280 * 1.33 * 1.4 * .9 = 469.22 +
Inner Beast> 400 * 1.4 = 560
= 3965.36 * 1.2 / .9 = 5275.17 potency

My standard UBIR is this:

(start with 4 Wrath)HS(Unchained)>SS(Berserk)>BB(Internal Release)>SE combo>BB combo>Inner Beast

Everything will have the SE debuff applied which gives you this:

HS: 150 +
SS: 200 * 1.33 = 266 +
BB>SE combo>BB combo: (280 + 150 + 190 + 270 + 150 + 200 + 280) * 1.33 * 1.40 = 2830.24 +
Inner Beast: 400 * 1.4 = 560 +
= 3806.24 * 1.2 / .9 = 5074.99 potency

The use of Fracture in this *specific* case (which happens to be the only one where it actually ends up being a DPS increase), gives you an extra 200.18 potency (all buffs factored in; that's the equivalent of an extra Heavy Swing w/ Maim and SE debuff) and only because it's cramming in a bit of extra base potency into the larger buffed time frame. Furthermore, this only happens once every 2 minutes thanks to it requiring Unchained and Berserk, which is a damned fine reason to take Fracture off of your bar completely: it's only useful as an extra 200 normal enmity potency on a delay (so it's not useful for burst damage) once every 120 seconds.

To explain why Fracture shouldn't be used, in any other situation, consider this: the best basic rotation is SE>BB, which has exactly 100% uptime for SE (e.g. no overlap in the SE debuff). Any time you use Fracture, you're cleaving off the debuff from one of the other combo finishers (Fracture breaks combos and, as such, you always have to start fresh after it). As such, you're getting a 300 potency attack but removing the 11% bonus from either a 280 or 270 potency attack, which is either an 11 potency loss (280 / .9 = 311.11) or breaking exactly even (270 / .9 = 300). You're actually losing slightly more than that because you're slowing down your next Inner Beast by 1 GCD as well, but that's harder to directly calculate.

If you're trying to maximize damage, the only attack you should use other than SE>BB (for any case that is *not* the predescribed UBIR attack string) is Inner Beast, because it's effectively a 400 potency attack (300 / .75), so, at worst, you're gaining 89 potency from the loss of SE uptime.

The problem with Fracture isn't the cost (it's actually pretty efficient given that it's 300 potency for 80 TP, which is 3.75 pot/TP; BB combo is the closest competitor at 630 for 190 TP, which is 3.315 pot/TP; it's "expensive" in that it increases your consumption per GCD, which, in any situation where you could feasibly run out of TP, ends up being a DPS loss thanks to buff/debuff uptime). The problem is the damage itself being too low coupled with the fact that it is a GCD that doesn't contribute to your Wrath to some extent.

Honestly, if the devs want to encourage WAR to use Fracture, if they don't want to just increase the damage, they should give it some chance of providing Wrath stacks on each tick (it's 10 ticks, so a 10% chance per tick would basically make it, over time, a single GCD for a single Wrath stack; this is more efficient compared to the other Wrath generator combos which are 3 GCDs for 2 stacks). That way, even if it decreases your damage by reducing debuff uptime (it might actually end up being a minute increase to damage via increase Wrath stack generation), at least it increases your mitigation by giving you faster Inner Beasts.