Elitist Jerks - Lacerate threat - Numbers or Method?

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Hi,

I have been looking for some solid numbers on what exactly "high threat" means in Lacerate's case

Does anyone have an analysis?

If not what is the suggested method to detirmine this value by experiment?

The questions I see are...

When is the bonus threat generated - on application like sunder, or as the ticks occur?

If its "on application", does it generate threat on mobs immune to bleeds?

What threat modifier is applied - a static +threat (ala Maul) or a damage multiplier?

How much total threat does a Lacerate generate?

The method that i'd use would be something like:

Generate a rage bar against another mob, then move on to the test target

Clear damage meters

Test 1

Lacerate the mob and turn off auto attack, allow the lacerate to run its full time

Have a DPS type with no threat mod do steady damage till they pull agro

Capture meters, kill mob

Repeat a few times to get a good value

(it may be better to stack to 5 and then divide the damage by 5 to get a number less impacted by "overkill")

Adjust this to take out the actual bleed damage, that should give an idea of the bonus threat per application (BT)

Test 2

Apply a single lacerate

Have the DPS immediately hit for the BT value

If they pull agro the threat is probably applied with the damage

Test 3

Repeat test 1, but mangle the Mob first, adjust the results to take out the mangle threat and check for differences (if there is one of around 30%, threat is probably a multiplier)

Anyone see any holes in the method?

Better to get in right up front as its going to be a pain to do, so i'd like the results to be valid

I think warriors have no threat modifier (as long as they are not in defensive). So thats your best bet for a melee.

Have 'em punch the mob or use some crappy low DPS daggers, that way you won't overshoot the BT too badly and will get far more accurate results.

Alternatively, just use anyone. We KNOW the threat modifiers of the classes now, so it should not be too much trouble to work out the unmodified BT =).

Anyway, good luck on your search =).

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kink

I think warriors have no threat modifier (as long as they are not in defensive). So thats your best bet for a melee.

Warriors have -20% Threat in Zerker and Battle stance unless something changed very recently.

---

I do remember seeing some threat values of Lacerate but I couldn't find them anymore (might have been on the official boards even), but I do remember that one application of Lacerate was less threat than a Sunder.

Testing it as we speak.
I'll have some solid data in 1h.

My way of testing:

test 1:
put mangle on the target apply 1 lacerate while keeping mangle up, and see how much damage the other guy needs to do to get the aggro.

test 2:
apply 1 lacerate, and see how much damage the other guy needs to do to get the aggro.

repeat test 1 and 2 with 2/3 lacerates to see if that changes anything.

[e]Server is goofing up, no testing for me today :(

Turns out this is a lot harder to co-ordinate that i'd have thought...

Will try and 2-box it over the weekend

Sorry; no formal testing...but the DoT appears to have no threat component...or very very litte.

Something which could be interesting:
Bleed immune mobs, get stunned by pounce, even though the icon doesn't appear, no damage is done and the words 'immune' float above there heads (tested on undeath in nagrand).
Inferals in Hellfire who go 'immune' on bleeds to didn't seem to get any agro from lacerate.

(which seems to suggest that all the aggro comes from the bleed part)

It's hard to find a good sparring partner, else I would have been able to give more info.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Maratai

Sorry; no formal testing...but the DoT appears to have no threat component...or very very litte.

Are you positive? If that is true Lacerate is really disappointing because I expected it to be our answer to aggro reseting mobs due to the periodical damage/threat it does.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tangedyn

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.

From the WoW forums:

Lacerate Threat Measured

EDIT: Added Quote in case someone can't view the WoW boards at work or something. :P

Thanks for the quote - no wow forum access at work

So the "base" threat adjust is 106 to get 154 after bear form + feral instinct (not that you can do it without bear form) - or is this kind of threat modifier totally fixed and not subject to bonuses?

Does naturalist actually add to the damage? - i guess its reasonable to assume so even though this is a DoT not a melee attack

The question of "instant threat" followed by normal DoT damage or DoT Damage that does a threat multiple is still not fully resolved.

Working backwards from 154 threat:

Subtract out bear + feral instinct = 154 / 1.45 = 106

Divide into base damage (assuming naturalist bonus) = 106 / 170 = 1.62 (not a convincing multiplier given precident of 1.75 and 2 ...)

The numbers seem to agree with the "feel" i have worked out for post-66 bear threat:

Mangle is our best TPR for any reasonable combination of bear form AP and Mob Mitigation

(according to my spreadsheet - which i will try and host somewhere for checking and input - at 30% mitigation mangle is better down to bear AP as low as 300)

Lacerate is next most effective up to the point of a 5 stack, rolling is good, but more than 1 extra lacerate per 15sec is poor

Note: for "total" threat generated Swipe is better value when hitting 3 mobs (at the 1000 AP mark) - but the actual threat against the main target will be weaker - but can be almost certainly be boosted with maul as you will have the rage with 3 mobs.

Maul generates around 3x the threat of the melee swing it replaces and as yellow damage is not subject to glancing etc. I typically make normal melee swings for rage generation during the first few seconds - but once agro is initially established and rage incoming is steady switching to maul on the DPS target is usually fine.

The next question is which Idol to use when tanking.

The three that come to mind are
Brutality: +50 maul/swipe damage
Wild: +58 mangle damage
Ursoc: Increases periodic damage done by Lacerate by 3 per application

Some meaningless math follows:
Assuming infinite rage.
Brutality adds 50 damage per global cooldown or 33 damage per second.

Wild adds 58 damage per mangle cooldown or ~10 damage per second.

I have a hard time parsing the Ursoc description. Does the per application text mean 3 damage per outstanding application on the mob? Does it mean 3 damage immediately? Does it mean 3 damage per tick? Does it mean 3 damage divided among the ticks? That coupled with not being sure whether threat is built up over time or applied instantly has led me to keep this one in the bank.

All that said, I'm almost certain that Blizzard has designed this thing in such a way that it is useful. I just can't ferret out the method behind the madness.

3 per application...
2 stack - 6 more per tick
3 stack -9 more per tick
4 stack - 12 more per tick
5 stack - 15 more per tick

its just like the rip one.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Liar (Post 279752)

From the WoW forums:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tangedyn

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)

I wanted to share my experience and then ask if anyone else feels the same way.

I use an addon called Chronometer that provides timer bars for HoTs and DoTs. It's what I use to monitor my lacerate stack. What I have found, is that if I try to refresh a lacerate stack when there is less than 3 seconds left, it does not refresh the stack. So this lead me to push out that time to 5 seconds.

So question 1: Can anyone else comfirm my observation that your lacerate stack won't refresh if you reapply with less than 3 seconds left?

The more and more that I use lacerate, the less and less I like it. In addition to refreshing my stack with 5 seconds (1/3) of the time left, I'm also often frustrated by mobs dodging, parrying or blocking and ruining the stack.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Monsanto (Post 289482)

So question 1: Can anyone else comfirm my observation that your lacerate stack won't refresh if you reapply with less than 3 seconds left?

The more and more that I use lacerate, the less and less I like it. In addition to refreshing my stack with 5 seconds (1/3) of the time left, I'm also often frustrated by mobs dodging, parrying or blocking and ruining the stack.

I've been able to refresh stacks at 1 or 2 seconds left, I'm using DOTimer rather than Chronometer in case that's all relevant though doubt it should be. Share the frustration though on losing a stack - leaving it that late if it fails to land for whatever reason you have to start again and spamming it twice to try and improve odds really cuts into it's efficiency in terms of use of rage/global cooldown.

The only problem here is that those calculations assume that the dot component does 1:1 threat (1 damage = 1 threat), which is never confirmed, ether way, it's fairly obvious that lacerate shouldn't be your main move while tanking.