I was using this: Mitigation = AC / (AC+ ((85 * LEVEL) + 400) ) and was running on the assumption that LEVEL was 63 for the boss mobs. Are we supposed to use 60 for the level when calculating their armor?

Working back through it:

Mitigation% = (AC - Debuffs) / [(AC - Debuffs) + ( (85*63)+400 )]
Mitigation% = X / [X + 5755]
Mitigation% * (X + 5755) = X
Mitigation% * 5755 = X - Mitigation% * X
Mitigation% * 5755 = X * (1 - Mitigation%)
Mitigation% * 5755 / (1 - Mitigation%) = X
[ ( Mitigation% * 5755 ) / (1 - Mitigation%) ] + Debuffs = AC

I'm getting something like 3770 for them, I can't remember why I setup the formula the way I did for them. I think, for some reason I was using the debuffed mitigation as a percent of the whole armor amount. For the life of me I can't remember why, so do as you will. I'll try to figure out exactly what I was thinking when I did that after our raid tonight.

Slug :( no

I did some basic quantitative testing last year on how attack power affects the damage a mob puts out and was quite surprised at the results. We tested on three level 60 mobs in winterspring: non elite bears, elite giants and elite demons. We ate some hits from them with and without demoralizing shout (not talented).

All mobs had roughly the same attack speed (2.0 or so) so if they followed same attack power formula we'd expect to see their attacks go down roughly the same amount. This turned out not to be the case. Whether the mob hit for 60 damage or 360 damage on average it still ended up losing roughly 18% of it's total physical damage.

If ~140 attack power reduction of demoralizing shout turns out to be 18% less physical damage, then we would expect to see roughly 11% damage increase for the 90 attack power increase of curse of recklessness.

Cursory look at Chromaggus' damage physical output gave us similar numbers on both demoralizing shout and curse of recklessness. However, I encourage everyone to test this for themselves. We did not 'control' this particular test but rather just looked at combat log in various situations. Anyway... it definitely seems the formula which links attack power and attack damage is not the same for mobs and players.

I would thus conclude that curse of recklessness should not be used in any situation where a mob poses significant threat to the tank. Also, curse of recklessness is not an economic form of damage in a fight against a single high physical damage output mob. It might be a good pick when tanking 3 mobs while only killing 1 mob or when killing very trivial content. The damage increase of a typical boss mob would, however, often require one more healer than normally just for pure healing amounts (8 MT healers -> 9 MT healers) not to mention burst damage. A more safe (and debuff slot-effective) form of DPS increase would be just to have one less healer and one more DPS.

You must be confusing it with Rend~

In getting back to the original request and post, I will grant what many have already said and add this. If your guild remains blindly unwilling to even so much as try tactics openly suggested by highly experienced people from many of the most hardcore and successful raiding guilds in the game...that's pretty damned sad. If you're rolling with a crew that are only just starting to learn MC, perhaps you should wait to worry about CoR'ing things until they are "farm status". (Trash mobs you never wipe to. Bosses you kill every time without a problem, etc.) If you already largely know what you're doing in MC, they have nothing to fear and a great deal to gain.

Assuming your people don't just tremendously suck at the game, CoR should be highly beneficial on the vast majority of fights. (Read as: "All of MC unless you're still running around in blues and greens and having major difficulties on particular bossfights".) I think I'm addressing someone with the mindset of your guild in the last section of this post, so maybe they should just go read that and be less stubbornly ignorant about trying new things.

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I like how many people are so unwilling to even try it based on simple worries of what it "might" do. When a few of us warlocks started debating the usefulness with Wodin and other rogues way back, I cut the theorycraft and just started throwing it onto everything without asking one night. Non-spell DPS sent me love letters and Gurg piped up in Ventrilo or via tell, I forget which.

"Curse of Recklessness?"

My explanation?

"He's not dying from it and rogues are giving me head."

Moz would never cockblock a brother for something so simple as safety. Hellsoap eats CoR for breakfast and farts deep wounds. You people's tanks need to grow a pair and have some faith in their healers. (Either that, or people need to gear and skill up quite a bit.)

Exactly. Meaning double crushers that hit big to begin with (Broodlord), enraged Chromaggus types (during enrage), and that's pretty much it. As someone with fairly heavy level 60 raiding experience as pretty much every class in the game by now (no paladin...lol), I can safely say around 95% of the fights in this entire game are stable enough that tank death won't occur from a CoR unless one of the following is the case:

1) Your raid heavily sucks.
2) Your raid is badly undergeared.
3) Your raid is somewhat underexperienced with the fight.
4) Your people are lazy. (File under #1.)

Anyway, if any of those are the case, people should hardly be concerned with math efficiency over learning to play and getting an epic or two. ;)

It would still be good for damage, but it is actually dangerous versus heavy spike mobs like Broodlord and should be avoided unless your healers and tanks are very comfortable with the spikes and ranges on an encounter like that. So don't CoR Broodlord unless you really know what you're doing. I'd leave the rest of things up to tanks' discression. We usually ask our tanks how comfortable they are with a new boss before we start using CoR on it.

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This next response is dedicated to Brock's guild and all those like them who seem to blindly fear CoR (and apparently math) out of some manner of odd hatred. No offense meant to Anaram at all, here. I appreciate all people who take the time to actually read a thread and respond intelligently with their input, experience, or opinions. Always welcome here. :) Part of his post handily mirrors the whole "I think, but haven't actually tried..." and "my LBRS experience tells me..." mindset that many people in guilds like Brock's stubbornly exhibit when arguing against stuff like CoR on raids, so...

What? 8+ MT healers on Molten Core bosses? Is the entire raid in blues and greens? Hopefully that was just odd numbers for an example to clarify the point.

One extra healer is hardly difficult to allocate on any fight excepting the ones you wouldn't be using CoR on in the first place. Two decent healers in a raid with even a handful of epics can generally keep a MT up throughout most if not all of MC. By BWL, you've generally got the raidwide gear to keep things the same on many fights. In all of my raids as a priest, anything I've ever had a tank die from with CoR on a mob was unlucky burst damage that would have killed him quite dead whether CoR was there or not. Myself and most of the healers I raid with are capable of singlehandedly keeping a MT up in MC, barring a couple of boss fights in there that an extra healer or two for insurance or mana breaks is handy.

Too many healers required due to CoR? Poor arguement unless massively undergeared, in which case you probably wouldn't be using CoR anyway. (PS. Massively undergeared means a solid raid of blues and greens, in MC. If you can clear to domo regularly, you can probably afford to use CoR in most of the zone already.)

I've seen that one a lot. In the minds of many, it would appear that Deep Wounds, CoA, or another handful of frostbolts is much more DPS than every single hunter, rogue, shaman/paladin, and warrior in your raid hitting for more damage at all times in course of every fight. ;)

As to safe, CoR is generally safe on any fight we haven't specifically called a "NO", which people would actually know if they weren't too much of enormous candy-asses to actually try using it on content. If you are badly undergeared? Not so good an idea. Sucking horribly at the game? It'd be a bad idea in those two cases. On effectiveness, it is a dirt cheap and constant level of DPS that can be applied instantly to virtually every single mob and kept on at 100% efficiency with minimal difficulty for the full duration of any fight.

Even with Paladin stacks on a mob, there is usually room for a CoR, and depending on how many Warlocks or Mages are in your raid, you'd often be better off ditching the ever popular CoE or CoS for it. (3 warlocks and 5 mages in a raid with gobs of melee? Room for only 2 curses due to pally stacks? CoE + CoR = best potential DPS. No contest. Adjust as needed, based on raid composition.)

But don't take our word for it. Try it. If it sucks and you get no benefit, go ahead and stick to your old methods. Not like people have something to lose, here. No sense in heavily theorycrafting something that people on both Alliance and Horde sides have actually been using in practice and to good effect for well over a year.

For reasons of clarity: I was not specificly talking about Molten Core in my post (especially the 8 healers part :]). I was, however, making a point that if there is only a single target mob which hits very hard, then that DPS increase of roughly 250 (depends heavily on raid gearing level and mob armor after 5xsunder 1xFF) at the cost of needing one more healer isn't really any better than just having one less healer and one more DPS.

Assuming a roughly 50% physical 50% magical damage boss such as broodlord (in terms of healing needed, not in terms of tank-threat from each ability) swapping one DPS to healer and starting to use CoR doesn't really give any real benefit in terms of DPS. It's just micromanagement (in this particular scenario burst damage is dangerous so obviously using the curse is not a great idea). Obviously Molten Core bosses don't require so high a number of healers that this statistic alone would make it uneconomic to use the curse.

That said, I agree in principal with what is being said by Slug - if your tank is comfortable with CoR you can most of the time use it. But demanding to use it when the tanks are not comfortable with it isn't really worth the benefit in my books... assuming your tank is unconfortable based on his knowledge of how the curse functions rather than just having some unfounded horror scenarios in his mind.

Interesting to note that a fully debuffed mob (meaning sunder x5, Faerie Fire, and CoR) is close to 0 armor anyway. I think you may find that items like Bonereavers Edge and the trinket from AQ40 are highly situational if the armor values computed above are correct. The BWL mobs tested just don't have enough armor to make them useful because you can't go below 0 armor.

I'd be curious to see what AQ and Nax mobs look like. I bet most of the damage mitigation that occurs is due to glancing blows and the fact that we are 3 levels below them (giving them a greater % mitigation for every point of armor based on the formula).

Wait, demoralizing shout reduces mob dps by a percentage, not a flat amount? Might have to start using it again.

Probably have to think how they did it to make it simple on them in order to understand that. You have a basic template of mob, probably of class X that is a generic mob of lvl X. That mob does say, 100 dps, got 3k hp, etc. Each class got it's template and you probably have different template for some types like the 4 types of elementals where earth got less dmg but ton of AC, etc.

Elites are similar but have alot more HP and do alot more damage. What I would probably do to make scaling power simplier is use multiplier on any values, like HP and Damage.

So if I'm designing a 5 man dungeon I would put lvl 60 with 2times the dmg, 3 time the hp, lvl 60 10 man I would go for 2.5 times the dmg, 5 times the hp, etc.

Since I'm using multiplier that mean that the initial stats on a mob are mostly similar even if it's elite or if it's a molten core giant. It's also logical to make sure that alot of habilities like demo shout scale. Without a system like this, anything that remove X from a mob would be worthless versus a % equivalent (and that would be bad design).

So yeah, I think it's logical that demo shout remove a % of dps and not a fixed value.

True, if your healers are on the ball and toss you dots pre-emptively, I would agree 100% here. But if you have debuff slots open, it seems good to have it =)

MORE DOTS

Yeah man if there is debuff slots open I always throw up siphon life. Its fantastic. But if all the slots are full there is no way I would push something else off for it.

Well thanks anyways guys but I think im going to quit. My guild just wont listen to reason about anything. Curse of recklessness is just one minor detail.

We got a new warlock class leader last night and according to him the following spells are now BANNED:

Curse or Recklessness
Immolate
Curse of Agony
Curse of Tongues
Siphon Life
Everything except banish during banish pulls or on Garr (we have never wiped to Garr once)

If you cast one of those spells you get in trouble and possibly booted from the raid.


Our new class leader is the same guy who tried to argue with me when I said spirit was worthless to warlocks. Before he got felheart he used to use full dreadmist and got mad every time I told him it was dumb and he would be better off with +dmg gear.

He also has 31 points in demonology and will still wait 3 or 4 seconds between every single shadowbolt even on trash mobs. He does this to "avoid drawing aggro".

He has 5/8 felheart and a mageblade and last week a warlock rookie on his first MC ever using no epics at all did 250,000 more damage then him. I usually do about 400,000 more.

Now that this guy is our class leader I think its hopeless and I should just give up.

You could try threat meters. It's been a slow process, but I've finally convinced most of my guild to install it, it really makes a huge difference. For those close with no agro dumps, it REALLY helps to know where exactly to stop. And it lets you know which tanks are slackers.

Have a threat meter you can reccommend?

Kenco's threat meter, as far as I know it's the only threat meter people really use, but I could be wrong...unfortunately, for the time being he's stopped working on it, last I talked to him he's working on a mana conserve mod instead :(

http://curse-gaming.com/en/wow/addon...reatmeter.html

Other than CoR, the rest of those spells suck

I know a few people like that. With their flawed ideas, it certainly can cause issues.

Felheart isn't that great, I am sure there are blues that have more +damage that 5/8 Felheart, so would outdamage it.

How did he become your class leader? I have trouble understanding why someone like this would be bumped up to a leadership position when they obviously are pretty bad.

You mean "petophobic", right? ;-)

I don't see the point of putting up Siphon life. Sure it's a neat-o self-heal, but it's fricking expensive for the amount it steals and it does it over 30 seconds. If you're decked out in uber-'lock gear and SM works (does it work properly now with Siphon Life? Last I checked it didn't), you'll steal 900 health over 30 seconds (and I mean it... you'd need an obscene amount of +dmg gear to get Siphon Life Ticks of 90). There's no way you're going to maintain a DoT on a target for 30 seconds... odds are it'll get bumped off by an Ignite that will do as much damage to the target in 4 seconds as your Siphon Life would do in 30.

Sure!

What? Curse of Agony sucks? It has a better mana->damage conversion rate than Shadowbolt or Corruption. Also, when he says no spells other than Banish, I think he means: no Corruptions, no Curses, no Shadowbolts - nothing at all other than Banish.

I think this thread is slowly becoming a testament to close-minded idiocy in raiding. I can only imagine that there are very few people who have not had at least one experience where, despite mathematical and logical proof, people refused to acknowledge their error (GoA vs. WF RARARHGSAR).

When looking at any statement, you must understand the context.

Sure CoA is a decent skill that is better mana to damage than SB, but with raiding you only have 16 debuffs to chose from, and one curse per lock. So it is a decent spell, but in raiding CoA sucks, because it will likely get pushed off or may push off a better debuff slot.

CoE, CoS, and CoR are all better mana -> damage in a 40 man raid.