A 5 second weapon proc isn't going to last long enough to be pushed off by anything. Best case that it is re-applied on a somewhat consistant basis.

My quick back of the envelope calcs suggest that a 2H fury warrior should be keeping that up 25% of the time give or take.

You obviously treat your warlocks too well.

I like to piss warlocks off!

Rend has limited uses, it is effective damage/rage when you are offtanking Golemagg's hounds and trying to kill it on your own :)

Bit of a thread ressurection, but it seemed like the right place to ask.


Does +to hit affect sucess rate of Taunt?

I thought no, because it taunt is 'resisted' not dodged, parried, or missed. But I'm curious.


edit: Just read the post directly above mine... don't do that, when Core Ragers get far enough away from Golemagg, the entire encounter resets... =)


But, if you cast SW:P on Golemagg from the bridge, he comes up w/o any adds besides his ragers! (Or, he used to).

Sorry it took so long. That hammer thing took me off for 3days, and by then I was on a 3wk vaction in Hawaii. I apologize for my tone which got me kicked.

Tehax- good point on shield wall. I have been removing 30min timered abilities from this kind of key sequence precisely for the reason you state...it is sometimes better to take a death with the 30min timer still up for another fight. My intial reasoning for putting it in the sequence was that if I was mashing a routine sequence and spike damage got me or my healers decided to go AFK mid fight, having a shield wall come up as part of the macro earlier in the priority list would prevent me from being locked up in global cooldown on say a shield block/revenge sequence, and it would go off that 1.5s faster. I omit shield bash from the macro because it is not something you do routinely. I manually press that as the situation requires it, such as in the case you cite. I use both manual keystrokes on the individual keys and this macro, and do not just press the macro like a drinking bird for all fights. If it is routine, I hit the macro. If the situation changes, I use what the situation requires. My goal was to macro as much of the routine stuff as possible, not try to cover each eventuality in a single macro. So for instance take hamstring. I intially had it in there with a 'target fleeing' condition on its use, but if I am in global cooldown when it runs (or low on rage) and I am counting on a macro to stop it from running, it gets away. You can get clever and condition hamstring with a health total of 25% or less so it goes off just before it runs, but then it will mindlessly apply hamstring to things that dont flee at 25% and waste your rage (eg zerking creatures). So I yanked hamstring out of all macros except the PvP one (since seldom do I want to not hamstring a foe) and I manually apply it as needed. Where I really gain on something like this is conditionals such as revenge, execute, overpower...the macro gets these off faster than I can, and in most situations I want to do those things when they are up. It is foolish to think you can macro your way through all situations, and I do not attempt to do so; but I think there are routine keypunch sequences used over and over which should be macroed.

Savos- my reasoning behind the target health condition on shield wall (I have since taken that out of the macro) was if it was on the verge of dying anyway (<10%) I did not want to blow my 30min timer, and I should just eat dirt and the party could probably down it. But if it was going to be around a while (>10%) then it might be worth blowing my 30 min timer. In my response to Tehax you can see why I junked it in the macro. I did have it actually save my bacon once in an AQ20 where one healer went AFK and nobody knew they had to pick me up on a healing assignment. Spike damage took me low and this kicked in fast, and I told the raid group I had shield wall up and needed healing, and we lived (this was in AQ20 on the series of encounters leading up to the 2nd boss, and we were not activating the NPCs to help us, so wiping equalled losing about 1hr). In retrospect perhaps it would have been better had I died, and the raid wiped, because then they would have yelled more at the guy who took the unnannounced AFK. We have since abandoned the strategy of saving the NPCs and moved on to using them (it works much better).

Whiteknight-you make a good point of it being no fun to macro all play. In SWG it was possible to macro camp a spawn and idle your character overnight, and return in the morning and empty your inventory, train up and start it up again. It was boring. People did it to grind out professions and unlock Jedi. The point I would like to make to you is that if the game is so predictable as to be macroable in its entirety, then odds are the game is not worth playing. SWG was like that for combat...you get 2 missions, run out, kill 2 waves then finish the nest, collect your credits and repeat. This was horrible game design (although SOE did have nice eye candy in the game). In DAOC crafting was utter tedium. They had long timers and you just got a stack of mats and punched the button every bar completion. Many players would get 3rd party macro recorders to automate that aspect. The proper response of a game company is to either alleviate the tedium (say like adding create all for crafting as Blizzard did) or up the monster AI such that it can not be trivialized via macro. So those guys with pathing macros for fishing or resource gathering in WoW should be a sign for Blizzard to do stuff like have variable spawn locations (they had resources shift in SWG, which was cool for this reason) to introduce a changing survey element into the gathering game. We are fortunate that WoW is the kind of game where combat is not entirely macro-able, and it is worth sticking around. But I do think any routine sequence that will be repeated many many times can and should be macroed, and for each such macro a gaming company learns about, they should seriously consider just how lacking that aspect of gameplay is and try to make it less routine. My basic desire here is not to automate play but to overcome what I see as a flawed interface design- you have timered abilities or reactionaries which require you to look down out of the combat and at a bar or combat scroll to monitor when they are available, and that is annoying. Some things like the Warrior addon I use have alerts that pop up with a punchable button when an ability is ready right next to the combat, but I think this junks up the graphics of the game making it harder to see your opponent with that big blinking execute button over his head. What we need are visual clues on your opponents animation such that you can see when he is ready to be executed, or clearly see him dodge, or easily see your character block. The animations we have are subtle and easily missed so most rely upon watching greyed out timers or simply mashing the desired key blindly over and over til the timer comes off and it works. My impression is Blizzard tolerates macros and addons such as warrior because they realize that gameplay is indeed not automated, and they do alleviate tedious mashing, and this is their stopgap solution til they can come up with better UI. In fact they seem to view the mod community as a bunch of idea hamsters, coming up with new great features they can implement.

When armor is decreased, tanks will do more physical dps.

When they do more dps, they generate more threat.

Non-tank threat has a much smaller multiplier than tank threat per damage.

Sunder has threat for the tank, and allows him to build up threat faster.

If the tank does not sunder, he lowers his own dps and threat.

Maybe.

With 5/5 1 Handed Weapon Spec, the 10% damage reduction in defensive stance is negated and the protection warrior pulls further ahead in threat generation.

How does SS play into the mix of HS/Revenge/Sunder etc?

Is SS primarily an OTing aggro generator?

AFAIK Obviously not everyone has it, but if they have it they use it as much as possible.

It's a great all-around rage dump, but it's particularly useful as a snap aggro mechanism.

Another note to add, and re-reading back through all these posts I never once saw it mentioned is: Heroic Strike's damage (and consequently threat) is increased by Sunder Armor, whereas Sunder's threat is static. One more thing to take into account, one which I find to be quite important, but correct me if I'm wrong on this one is that Parry is almost like having Sword spec when it comes to tanking with a fast 1-hander (Thunderfury and Widow's Remorse come to mind). With Widow's Remorse as an example, you can HS every 1.6 seconds and use all your other abilities (Revenge, SS, Shield Block) at the same time, but each time you parry and attack you essentially get a instant Heroic strike if you're keeping it lit up because it resets your swing timer.

You might not think 1.6 seconds would even need a reset but if you land one and immediatly parry then you land another right there you've gained yourself 2 HS's for the time it would take to land a single Sunder and use it again after the global CD came up again. I like Sunder Armor and all but for most situations I find that HS, combined with using your Global CD skills other than Sunder helps keep aggro far better than Sunder spamming and occasionally using HS to soak up additional rage.

Just hoping to add to the discussion a little.

This thread should be weighed with the fact that shield slam was changed during it's lifetime.

I used to be the biggest "sunder" proponent out there until these changes.

However, things have changed significantly.

AFAIK in low rage situations...

Its:
Revenge > Shield bash > Sunder > Shield slam >> HS (cause you lose on-hit rage gen).

For high rage situations:
HS always + Revenge > SS > sunder > shield bash.

Obviously all circumstances are weighed in the "moment"... and the art of maximizing aggro and survivability is being efficient with your use of rage gen - that mostly means "when to dump" "when to conserve". And some of that is also versus your raids dps, and how long the fight has been going. Early on, its more important to "snap up"... later on, just hold it with whatever and shield block a ton if you have the lead.

For instance, you'd snap open a Noth grab with HS-SS, and it should work every time... you'd sustain it with revenge/sunder and hs/ss dumps.

However...
For horde, and on low rage situations, I think shield slam should probably be moved above sunder... why? I think shield slam can proc a windfury swing right? And thats a lot of rage generation and should put you over the cusp.

Have the offtanks demo and sunder, and you can play w/the "dmg" abilities.

Get a good weapon, add in 1h spec, and go to town. My aggros never been the same...

On thaddius, obviously the rotation pushes sunder to the end... but you can easily have HS/SBlock/Sbash/SSlam/Revenge all on cooldowns and still have nothing else to use, so sunder still comes into play I guess.

I know that post was stream of conscious, but its my take on tanking as of late.

I guess it depends on the gear. I found out on my tests (and experience) that SS generates a lot more total threat for me if I use it whenever it's up and as long as I have sufficient rage to use for SB/Revenge/HS.

I'm working on a spreadsheet that calculates the total amount of threat per weapon per time. I started working on it because I wanted to know which weapons are really upgrades for me. I was surprised that the Silithid Claw and Eskhandar's Claw are excellent tanking weapons for pure threat generation based on my gear and my spec (and based on a lvl 63 mob that can pound me with 1000 incoming damage per second on average). I also ran into an interesting number proof that Sunder and HS are really almost equal and interchangeable hate generating skills. Some weapons generate more hate when HS is spammed (i.e. Widow's Remorse), yet some weapons generate more hate when Sunder is spammed (i.e. Gressil). The less HS is used, the more rage is available for Sunder, and depending on that number HS may be better than Sunder for total hate generation.

It’s a pretty nice spreadsheet since it automatically adjusts the number of HSes that can be applied if the number of Sunders is changed. It computes total rage gained and total rage dumped for a lot of variables, and I made it so that the total rage dumped should not be above, but should be very close to total rage gained.

The only thing missing from it are weapon proc rates. I don’t know where I can get accurate numbers for them. :o{. Any help to help me locate that information will be much appreciated.

I usually blow Berzerker rage, switch to def. bloodrage, Shield block, then start the sunder spam while waiting for the 1st revenge to light up and use it. Once the 5 sunders are up i start the Herioc strike spam and just keep block up and keep revenge and shield bash on cooldown, i dont bother with sunder after 5/5 it unless everything else is on cooldown and I have the rage.


A question I have is how much threat is Demoralising shout worth, and does imp. Demo shout cause more threat then the usual one.

Cheers.