<Set Course for Pie> remains one of my all-time favorites. Haven't seen them around much lately though.

Back on topic, where does this info come from? Is it just from empirical testing or is there some data somewhere to back this up?

Personally I've seen no evidence to back this up. I've seen no difference in aggro pulling when wearing heavy +crit gear or heavy +damage gear. +crit gear just gives the chance of bigger damage spikes whereas +damage gear means its spread more evenly.

I just tested this then, and didn't find any bonus threat for crits. The setup was

1) Warrior body pulls mob. 0 threat
2) Mage casts level 5 frost bolt. Crits for 1119 damage. Mage has x threat.
3) Warrior taunts, and keeps aggro. Warrior now has x threat.
4) Mage does autoattack until he gains aggro. It is known he will draw aggro when he exceeds 1.1 x threat. He draws aggro after 115 damage, not 109 damage.

This gives a range for x of 1090 to 1150. As a multiplier, the highest value for critical threat bonus is +2.8%. The value of +0% is about dead in the middle of the error range.

It seems more likely to me that people associate crits with pulling aggro, because you are more likely to pull aggro on a crit than on a normal attack, so they assume there is an extra value for crits. It's also possible that the effect doesn't exist for frost bolts and does for other spells or abilities, but that seems unlikely to me.

I would test again without using taunt, as it has always been slightly mysterious.

Have person A body pull.

Mage B crits.

Person C auto-attacks unarmed until he pulls aggro.


Then re-test but with a non-crit spell.


Repeat several times to get a good average, and to account for Person C's varying auto-attack crits.

I had an 18839 ignite tick going on Chromaggus last night. Didn't pull aggro, raped the damage meters, and continued to keep a high crit rate. Balance is the best thing you can do. Although, I'm hesitant to believe the crit modifier to threat as I've never seen proof of this through our raiding (our combat rogues pull aggro just as much as dagger rogues)

Actually I think Kenco figured out how taunt works like 2 months ago. I would like to see more tests done though, since a lot of people do think that crits generate more aggro (per damage).

The variable multiplier to threat from crits is something we discovered during our empirical tests. This behaviour may have since changed, since we did most of these tests in 1.6, I think. Certainly plausible that it's been changed -- they've changed aggro rules a number of times since then in other ways.

Chromaggus and the vulnerable drakonids in the lab don't calculate aggro the same way as normal mobs do (same with Burning Adrenaline). It's something along the longs of damage multiplied by 3, but actual threat generated remains the same (or lower).

What.

Feint has no relation to daggers or swords. Feint IV removes 600 damage worth of threat, V removes 800. That's all it is. Dagger rogues generate greater initial burst damage because they crit more (and abilities like Ambush which add 300% of weapon damage), so it just seems like they generate more damage. Dagger builds are nice for trash because they frontload so much of their damage whereas sword builds maintain a relatively constant rate of damage.

Sorry, I was implying that dagger rogues are less intelligent by nature and don't feint enough to not get aggro.

Zellyn I wish I frontloaded a lot of damage. But when you say "Dagger builds" you mean "Seal Fate 30/8/13 builds" I think.

Also, haha feint.

It seems like a lot of EJ threads are getting derailed by rogue talk lately.

We're the ones with math.

And Grayson, the dagger rogues are the intelligent ones. We know that 20 is greater than 6. :P

Well, yes, 30/8/13 is probably the biggest lol crits build in the whole game, but even 16/25/10 and it's derivatives still are opening with bigger, shiny numbers. The best opener a sword rogue will have in most raids is Cheap Shot. That's not damage, just a quicker SnD. Of course, "burst damage" is largely subjective with rogues, because two crits with a dagger is not that far away from 3 crits with swords.

Frankly, front-loading lots of damage doesn't even seem like a very good idea most of the time.

PS: I'm a literature student. Math makes my head hurt. I let people like Wodin and Kalman do all the number-crunching, I just reap the benefit. :laugh:

A guildie of mine just did a bit of research, and his conclusion is that 2 frostbolt hits of N damage each cause exactly the same amount of threat as 1 frostbolt crit of 2N damage.

His post:

http://forums-en.wow-europe.com/thread.asp...en&T=157107&P=3

Obviously, the answer given in this thread and the statement by my guildie cannot both be correct. One must be wrong. But who is wrong, and why?

Your guildmate is probably right and a 2k crit does just generate 2k threat.

Yeah, what Gurgthock said. We did our tests just after BWL came out, and it's more than plausible that they've changed the way it functions since then (and we know for a fact that they have changed a number of things). The "+10% of current max threat needed to switch to a new target," for example, is something they've added since then.

Glad they changed the extra aggro component of crits, that helps a bit.