Execute has became a hot topic on EU warrior forums recently. At level 60 execute was a killer, when your enemy went below 20%, he died. TBC changed everything, facts:

1) People have a lot of stamina today, no one has less then 10k hp, not even mages, meaning that 20% execute range is at least 2k hp.

2) People have a lot of resilience, meaning your execute is going to crit for less damage and do so less often.

3) Execute don’t scale with gear.

Without taking Enrage or armor mitigation into account, execute does 925 damage + 21 per rage point, which means that non improved execute done with 30 rage will do 1240 damage. Full S3 geared warrior will have at least 2k attack power. For the same 30 rage Mortal Strike done with max weapon damage from S3 weapon will deal about 1261 damage (non crit, without enrage or other damage multipliers on 0 mitigation). On average MS still does a bit less damage then 30 rage execute, but come S4 and even better gear, and MS will exceed execute in damage / rage, while execute can become useless with people getting even more defenses and hp. Execute makes you loose all your rage, in arena, especially when you are the only dps, this often means that if your execute is not a killing blow, MS debuff will fade from the guy you are trying to finish and he is going to get healed for a large number, and you can’t afford that.

Execute is our eviscerate, but unlike Rogue’s constant-damage ability, Execute was not changed to scale with gear, which makes it really really bad the better gear everybody around have.

The question you might ask is - how do you scale damage/1 rage point not to make the ability overpowered. My answer is - you don’t. All that needs to be changed is the constant 925 part of execute damage, 925 is fine for blue geared warrior, an S3 warrior should do 1110 (20% more) + 21 / 1 rage damage executes. On the other side, this can be a problem with dps fury warriors, the better gear those folks have, the more rage they generate, so when the boss goes down below 20%, they technically do more damage with execute with better gear, as their rage generation goes up. In PvP it’s a different story, when we often struggle with rage and don’t have time to do 20 executes in a row before our enemy dies, it’s just not happening.

Execute is one of the things that needs to be improved come WotLK, as in my opinion, it’s one of the abilities that define the class and adds a lot of badass factor, it would be a pity for it to become a cosmetic ability that no one use because it’s damage / rage is not good enough to loose the debuff of our primary attack.

Terhix