There's been so many arguments based on subjective anecdotal evidence of how good or bad Lacerate is going around the forums, it has become a necessity to have an objective measure, which can only come from a measurement of Lacerate's threat amount.
Special thanks to Indoe of Dragonblight for helping me out with the test. We did not have much time to test, otherwise we would have done more test runs to check the results, but I believe there's enough testing done to have a good rough idea of how good Lacerate really is.
The test was done by having Indoe lacerate the mob once while in bear form. Inevitably, Indoe will also get a melee in, but this is not a problem since we know the threat from melee dmaage and can subtract that out. However we will cancel test if the melee crits. After the lacerate has finished bleeding, I will come in and start punching the mob while in caster form (usually I will hit it a couple of times with the new fishing rod first to speed up the process of gaining threat) until I pull aggro. I record down how much damage I did before pulling and after pulling.
The first test is to check on the effects of Lacerate against bleed-immune mobs. Only one run was done, because it was enough.
Indoe Melees for 441, Lacerate fails (Mob is immune)
Tangedyn did not pull at 698
Tangedyn pulls aggro at 705
698 / 1.45 / 1.1 = 437.6
705 / 1.45 / 1.1 = 442.0
Conclusion
1. Lacerate against bleed immune mobs does 0 threat
2. This confirms the observation by Antiphaze
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...picId=64036507 that bear form with 3/3 Feral Instinct gives a threat multiplier of 1.45 instead of 1.495 that warriors get in defensive stance with 3/3 Defiance. Otherwise it would have taken 725.2 damage to pull aggro.
When Lacerate works, I assume that it does innate threat + normal damage threat. So a Lacerate for 155 damage will do some amount of innate threat and 155 normal damage worth of threat. With 5/5 Naturalist, of course, this does 170-171 damage.
Indoe Melee + Lacerate / Tangedyn did not pull - Tangedyn pulls aggro
230+170 / 875-890
234+171 / 891-902
212+171 / 847-857
Innate threat is calculated using Tang_damage / 1.45 / 1.1 - Indoe_damage
Giving the following windows:
148.6 - 158.0
153.6 - 160.5
148.0 - 154.3
So there we go, it looks like Lacerate does an innate 154 threat.
What we did not test in the limited amount of time we had, was the effects of further lacerates when lacerate is already at 5 stacks, although i think it is safe to assume that it works the same way as Sunder Armor.
So together with the bleed damage, Lacerate does 324-325 threat for 13 rage (with talents). At least half of the threat is Over Time though, so Lacerate might not be a good idea if you need threat fast. If you use Lacerate immediately again when Lacerate hits 5 stacks, you only get 154 threat. HOWEVER, if you wait until Lacerate is about to go off before you Lacerate again to keep the debuff on the mob stacked at 5, you will get 154 + 4 * 170.5 = 836 worth of threat off a single Lacerate.
Therefore, my single-target threat generation strategy will go like this
1. Mangle is highest priority - always do it every 6 seconds when the cooldown is up
2. Lacerate when it is stacked to less than 5
3. Lacerate only when it is stacked at 5 AND there is less than 3 seconds left on the debuff
4. Maul/Swipe whenever there is excess rage (have not calculated yet which is better)
P.S. A lot of people are making a simple mistake when doing threat per rage comparisons when it comes to Maul. Maul costs more than the 10 rage it costs to activate it - there is also an additional opportunity cost (your average rage gained per melee attack) because when you activate Maul, you do not gain rage from the attack.
01/25/07, 3:19 AM
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