Originally Posted by Tuhalu
As overpowered as the 2t4 head/shoulder combo is for dps, you can afford to put tanking enchants in your T6 gear for those slots. Either one would make up for the loss of the tanking enchant on the wrist (especially the [Glyph of the Gladiator]).
Str and AP are virtually interchangeable. 630 AP vs the loss of 30 str (equivalent to 68 AP with kings + talent) is a 562 AP increase. And honestly, I don't see why you would drop the 4t6 at all. You would simply retain one piece from the old T6 to keep the bonus in a threat tanking set. Given those factors, there is no way the extra bleed damage from Lacerate (which does not count for anywhere near as much threat as the initial hit) is going to outdo swipe for pure threat. |
That was, perhaps, a poor abbreviation on my part, the AP there was Armor Pen, not attack power.
Now as for the bracer enchant, even with both the my helm and shoulders enchanted for defense, and jewelry with defense on it, along with a shadowmoon insignia, I'm still not defense capped unless I put defense on my bracers or gem for defense (and defense to bracers is far better in terms of budget then).
Honestly, I see no point of removing a superior piece of gear to gain the 4T6 set bonus, unless you are tanking several mobs at once and swipe threat actually matters.
If lacerate outperforms swipe without 4T6, and swipe barely outperforms lacerate with 4T6, at the cost of a worse piece of gear, why bother? Even when you reach the point where swipe puts out more than the base threat of lacerate (which is 285 or 290 I believe), there's still the bleed damage. Despite the massive threat reduction on the bleed damage, it is still a decent amount of threat, and I don't think swipe currently reaches the point where it is more efficient to simply spam swipe entirely and ignore at least keeping lacerate up (all theoretical of course). Now we're talking about really minor differences in tps here anyway. So looking at it like that, unless you're actually using swipe to tank multiple mobs, or the extra tiny bit of damage matters that much, I can't see a reason to swap out a piece to get 4T6 swipes, instead of just using lacerate.
Course swipe does benefit from all that armor pen, while lacerate doesn't really. ><