A warrior in my guild proposed a novel usage of the often forgotten Curse of Recklessness (CoR) for possible use in our BWL raids. I am including it here to see if anyone had either thoughts on this or any personal experience around the use of CoR in BWL as both warlock aggro mitigation and increased melee dps—whether it's even noticeable.

Alright, I was considering the impact of Curse of Recklessness and what it means in terms of threat levels for a raid.

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Lets make these assumptions:

20% of a warrior's threat comes from their weapon's damage, as opposed to special abilities
When fully sundered, an enemy has roughly 15% damage reduction
The average enemy attack speed is 2 seconds
A warrior's basic attack in Defensive Stance generates 45% increased threat. (This is true w/ Defiance)

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Ok, So, Curse of Recklessness reduces armor by 640 and increases AP by 90. This does a DPS increase on the enemy of 90/14, or +6.4 DPS. Assuming an attack speed of 2 seconds, this is a DPH increase of 12.8. On an enemy whose standard attacks are on the level of 1K-2K per, 13 additional damage doesn't mean that much.

Now for the armor reduction side. A 15% DR level of armor means ~1000 armor. Reducing this by 640 means 360 armor remaining or a DR of 6.14% This means incoming Damage of 94% instead of 85%. 94/85 = 1.11, thus an 11% increase in damage.

The Main Tank, therefore, gets a 11 * .2 * 1.45 = 3.19% increase in total overall threat. This means that the dps of the entire raid can increase by 3.19%.
Furthermore, all Physical dps, i.e. rogues, hunters, and warriors get the same 11% dmg increase, meaning that if threat isn't an issue, damage goes up a lot.

I'm not entirely sure on the Armor w/ sunder for boses, nor the %threat from damage, but this all should be close enough

CoR is a standard debuff on raid mobs of all sorts for us, and has been since sometime in April when we were thinking about how to maximize DPS on Ragnaros. It goes on before Shadows or Elements if we're short on warlocks, as a general rule.

Don't cast it on mobs that Mortal Strike, though.

I think alot of it depends on how many warlocks you have with and if that is better than COD. I am interested to see what people think on this though. I have not done the math yet though and really cant say if the benefit would be that much but realize that with tranquil air totems down a raid should have a near impossible time on mobs that dont have some form of knockback or way of clearing aggro to do enough DPS to pull aggro. Then it all comes down to if the decrease in armor is worth it.

Original work is by Psy Human Chick Lock on Elune, Guild Celestials of Vanguard.

Why's that? Is the damage increase from a CoR'ed mob's MS significant?

Mob MS has a hefty multiplier. Take a mob with a slow attack speed, give it a bunch of AP, and then multiply that AP severalfold? Ow.

(It definitely makes a noticeable difference on Broodlord -- AP-reducing effects do the same, in the other direction.)

For sword rogues, and hunters aggro is never an issue, from an alliance perspective. At no point can I output enough damage to get aggro as a sword rogue.

Case in point. Onyxia. I clicked off my salvation, was the first one to aggro her, used BF+AR as soon as I got 5 points to S&D, and pulled aggro exactly once, at which point she punted me, and I couldn't pull again until deep in stage 3, at which point one of our HS spamming fury warriors promptly pulled off me. Consider this in light of the fact that at this point Onyxia is the ultimate rage starved scenario for our prot specced tanks.

Will this feasibly change soon? I doubt it. Maybe if some of the AQ spellbooks had a new rank of SS or something. So basically anything that allows me more damage is amazing.

I'm actually surprised you pulled aggro off of an HS spamming Fury Warrior in the first place. :D

I pulled off the tank, the HS spamming fury warrior pulled it off me :P

I had the advantage with fear ward, and I 5 point evis'd as soon as she landed. It still took me a good 20% to get aggro.

lmao. Sounds like you guys have fun raids.



Use Expose Armor next time. :lol: Ironically, our first wipe ever was when a new recruit Rogue decided Expose Armor was a Good Idea™ on Onyxia.

Some of our tanks encourage us to expose because they don't sunder anyway.

Haha, that's pretty cool. You should coordinate your paladins to DI all the tanking Warriors. :s

Wouldn't matter, anything short of BWL, if it came to me I'd just hit evasion and be near invulnerable.

Any specific reason? Simply because Imp. Expose Armor reduces more armor than 5x Sunder Armors or just because you guys like screwing around? :laugh:

well-geared - no rage - don't waste it

True that. I forgot that your Warriors probably have a hard time getting Rage on her.