So the MT of my guild and I are pretty much in agreement over a certain skill not being great that everyone else seems to think is absolutely required. That skill being Sunder Armor. I tried the whole spam sunder while revenging type style and lost aggro all the time. Now I pretty much hardly ever use Sunder and pretty much never lose aggro. Shield block revenge to start, keep HS lit up, make sure to hit revenge every time its up, if I have the rage, SS, if I still have leftover rage, Sunder is what I do. I'm curious what your tanks feel about it.

That's what our best aggro tanks do.

Sunder is what offtanks/backup tanks do.

Pretty much, I learned some very interesting things when BWL first came out. Watching your incoming rage and using the appropriate skills vs. just sitting there going through the motions yields vastly differing results. As for everyone thinking it's required -- I am pretty sure it's common knowledge for tanks in the heavy raiding guilds at this point, but you are completely on the ball with the observation.

Heh, I must be a shitty tank then.


*takes note*

This is a thread about warrior aggro generation, not a druid bearform circle-jerk. Carry on.

How does HS scale with damage? After poking around WoWWiki, I couldn't find any solid numbers, but the threat-per-rage on HS vs. Sunder and the fact that HS isn't limited by global cooldown is something I guess I didn't pay much attention to.

According to WoWWiki's chart:
Skill - Threat - Rage
Revenge - 1370 - 5
Sunder Armor - 1050 - 12-15
Shield Bash - 910 - 10
Heroic Strike - 890 - 12-15

(Threat = 1 pt. of healing from a Priest with Subtlety)

And threat-per-Rage:
Revenge 274 TPR
Shield Bash 91 TPR
Sunder Armor 70-88 TPR
Heroic Strike 59-74 TPR


Hm. I guess I never knew HS's TPR was so close to Sunder Armor's.


Edit- I assume you guys both have full ranks in Imp. HS?

HS doesn't scale with damage.

Right. Rage-not-gained due to HS isn't factored in (easily done on a case-by-case basis I'd assume).



And I didn't know HS didn't scale. Hm.

I thought HS was part threat, and part threat from Damage.

HS scales... but it scales linearly, as your regular hit dmg increases... so does your HS value, though the BONUS on HS stays constant

Which means that HS doesn't scale, as you would have still gotten the regular hit damage if you hadn't used HS.

I'm not in EJ but I've found that as your dps classes gear up, it becomes harder and harder to hold aggro using just Sunder, because a) its threat generation doesn't ever increase unless talented or you have the glove enchant, and b) Sundering right off the start means [physical] dps will be doing that much more right off the start.

I've found Heroic Strike becoming more and more important as people gear up. With the new book, I find that if I drop 2-3 HS's before Sundering the mob to full, and then go back to HS/revenge, I won't lose aggro. Nonstop Sunder from the start is a surefire way for me to lose a mob to the DPS warriors in my guild.

Long gone are the days of being able to hold aggro Sundering start to finish.

I, on the other hand, have been known to use rend.

Hm.. Ok, so during my boring trek home from work, I pondered this situation.

Assuming you always want to Revenge every 5 seconds (either forced through Shield Block or through a natural proc), given a 5 second window you have 3 opportunities to trigger the global cooldown before it would interfere with Revenge (1.5s x 3 = 4.5s < 5s). Also, assuming you want to "keep" your Shield Block to avoid a crit/crush after a particular burst sequence or to proc Revenge, you effectively have 2 points where you can safely trigger global cooldown without interfering with Revenge. If there was no need to Demo Shout or TClap, then I can't see why a tank wouldn't Sunder Armor on those two occasions while HSing throughout. Obviously this is Rage intensive and Revenge / S. Block would have higher priority compared to Sunder, but when Rage is plentiful, I can't imagine why a tank wouldn't use Sunder.

Of course, in any multi-tank scenario, you'd want your OTs spamming Sunder (low Rage = no HS, not being hit = no Revenge).

Is this line of thinking wrong?

Yeah, I know the practical results, but I'm also trying to piece together the math behind it.

Sunder appears to have a slightly better threat:rage ratio than HS, so why isn't it optimal to bash/revenge/sunder/slam and use HS as a rage dump when you have excess, instead of HS being a mainstay and sunder being the dump?

One of the reasons our former main tank --now damagemeter king-- used primarily HS was due to it decreasing your base miss rate per swing from 8% to 5%, making it far easier to hit cap. I'm not well versed enough in tank mechanics to judge the importance of that, but it should at least factor into the higher threat.

I'm not saying Sunder is worthless. But we're a fairly high DPS guild. Vael in 2 minutes, Rag down at 2 minutes 30 seconds 4 months ago. The #1 thing I have to worry about is holding aggro, sunders can come later. It pretty much cracks me up that I pseudo started a fight in the warrior forums about the efficacy of Sunder, got told by several people what I did was wrong, come here to arguably the best guild in the game and get told what I'm doing is what your best tanks do, and people still think I'm a noob. Purely mind-boggling.

Guys like Moz and Tehax are the ones who can give the most authoritative answers among the EJ warrior contingent, but I know that we experimented very extensively with aggro generation back in the early BWL days, when doing 100%-aggro-wipe-on-Knock-Away Broodlord and untauntable Firemaw as a Horde guild meant that every single point of aggro. At the time we did things like using Finkle's Skinner to tank, over Quel, because of the increased threat from more HS spam.

MS? Hm..


Elerion- I'm not quite sure what you mean by decreasing the base miss chance. Do skills have a higher-than-normal miss%?

But I don't understand what the comparison is at this point- You can HS and Sunder without them affecting each other in any way (unlike, say, Revenge, which would trigger global cooldown) other than Rage usage.

So in a fight where Rage isn't a limiting factor, why wouldn't you be tossing out Sunders at every opportunity? Like I posted earlier, even if you kept strictly to your S. Block and Revenge timers, you could still throw 2 Sunders without any effect on your timers or HS. I don't understand why the OP says he "never uses Sunder."

But in fights where you have to choose between 15 Rage vs. 15 Rage + Rage lost on next hit, then I think the numbers simply speak for themselves (in terms of threat / rage). It seems to me that at any point you want to effeciently use Rage, a Revenge, Sunder, Sunder, HS->S. Block (if needed) would be optimal. If at any point you need to ramp hate up significantly and in a short amount of time, HSes would be thrown on top of those Sunders. But if you're Rage starved, you may have to simply wait for Revenge in order to really maximize efficiency.

Maybe I'm totally off the mark here, but I still see HS as a high threat / second tool when Rage is a secondary factor compared to threat generation.

My understanding is that skills like HS have a 3% lower base miss rate against 63 mobs than white attacks. I'm not a melee though, so I'm acting off second hand information.

I'm pretty sure the miss rate on specials, and white attacks with a 1h/shield are the same.

I hadn't heard of anything about a lower miss rate. Heroic strike can't land as glancing though, so that helps with threat generation a bit.


Also the numbers that are always thrown around are (to my knowledge) before the new AQ20 rank of heroic strike. I don't know if the new numbers have been found