Recent guild arguments over the new Kazzak have lead me to inquire here as to the specific mechanics of Cleave from mobs. It always seems like a shady ability that few truly understand. Some of our rogues insist that some mobs have 360 degree cleaves, or that cleaves can hit twice, or something in the middle. In an effort to promote understanding (and also because I can't seem to replicate their stated mechanics), I come here to ask.

Here's my understanding:

1. Cleave is a frontal cone/180* attack that generally does weapon damage plus a bonus.
2. It can hit unlimited targets.
3. It operates by hitting everyone in range then it runs a check to see if anyone is within 5 yards. If someone is, that hasn't been hit by the cleave, it then 'chains' to that person and then runs its check again.

My propositions:
1. Those that report 360* cleaves are wrong and it is a side effect of the mechanics of cleave, and largely results from a chaining effect caused by melee targets spread out all around a mob.
2. Blizzard would never design a fight that was completely impossible for melee to interact with in a significant way without a way to either play/gear around the attack.

Conclusion:
1. Cleave is entirely avoidable by dps melee with proper positioning.

Please, tell me where I misunderstand the mechanics.

I believe that your proposition based on the chain is correct.

When we were working on Kazzak last week we had some serious chaining issues with his cleave. We eventually moved all of our melee to max melee range and we stopped having the cleaving issue. We had melee behind him, along with the rest of the raid, and the tank opposite everyone. We had issues elsewhere, but, we weren't getting cleaved.

Not all of our dps was listenning, mind, so we did have some people closer, inside his hitbox and they were not chaining either. We were able to repeat that 4-5 times. (We didn't kill him.. but.. well... the cleave stopped killing us, which is nice.)

From my own experience, your conclusions seem to be correct. Chain cleaves usually have a max number of targets tho, so you don't end up with the whole raid cleaved if everyone is forming a chain, however it can chain pretty far from the original target. In almost 100% of the cases, you can avoid cleaves totally by having the tank at max range and the rogue/whatever at max range in the back, unless the boss has a small model and the tank himself has a small model(bigger model have higher max melee range against npcs).
BC saw the introduction of "Back cleaves", or at least I wasn't aware of them before, some mobs in shadowlabs will exclusively cleave people in their back, but it doesn't display anything so it's hard to tell unless you read combat logs.

Having everyone stand at the direct back of the model, on top of one another, will also keep cleaves from being chained. At least, it did on the "Tri-talon Death Pulls of Fun" (Copyright: Disrupted) in BWL.

This has been beaten to death since the Vael days... Cleave works exactly like chain lightning, C'Thun's beam, Zeliek's Holy Wrath and anything else of the sort. It always hits the MT first, then it checks to see if anyone's in a set range (5-10yds usually), hits them and repeats the check until it either can't find anyone or it's reached the maximum number of targets.

The times someone might get cleaved when they're directly behind the mob is when the mob's hit box is not big enough to out range the MT chain... a few mobs have a special attack that works like a reverse cleave, ie: Romulo, but that's a separate attack.

Do you have any examples of this? I've never found a mob where cleave is not avoidable with proper positioning. I'm not convinced that it scales with mob hitboxes either. If that was the case, Onyxia's cleave would have a massive range, and from practice, it's really no bigger than most other mobs with smaller hitboxes. Instead, there's probably a range variable that Blizzard set along with the maximum number of targets when they add cleave to a mob.

From my experience, these are only accurate for certain mobs (or certain "types" of cleaves if such a thing exists). There's definitely some exceptions that I've witnessed.

Examples:

Lord Kri in AQ - all melee standing at max range behind him, still get cleaved.

Big Wyrmguards in BWL - same thing.

Ballsacks in Arcatraz - tentacle thing hits melee at max range behind.

Of course the common response is that someone was too close to the tank - the only reason I quote these three occasions is because they are ones where we very specifically worked on cleave positioning and found it ineffective.

Now I'm not sure whether this stems from such attacks being something other than a cleave (despite always being referred to as such), category-wise, or just the designers feeling sadistic again. In terms of the latter, you look at Nethercurse's enrage, and you wonder.

Fixed, but you are pretty much correct.

Doing Kazzak this one time and one idiot warrior stood almost in the middle of his model.

Then we see the yell "Rogue 1-2-3-4 your strength feeds me."

Some cleaves operate the way you describe, however, I very clearly remember fights like the family in AQ40 where Vem would destroy all the rogues if one person was so much as a milimeter out of position.

I suspect that the ability to avoid that cleave was a function of us abusing a hitbox mechanic rather than an intended effect (similar to how Taurens could avoid mortal wounds on Fankriss). Onyxia was very finicky with her cleave, she would only cleave you if you got too close. Vael was definitely a frontal 120 degree arc, you wanted to be behind his front paws. Vael's cleave could chain all the way through the melee if one person was out of position, however I never saw that with Onyxia.

I very clearly remember some cleaves as being a full 360 on my rogue, others were not. In general if everyone is located directly behind a mob, at max melee range, it's harder to get hit by these things, but in many cases they are not as easy to avoid as you might think (particularly if it's a mobile fight).

Are you sure that isn't the bronze debuff? Even then, it just made the "safe melee area" much smaller. There was no unavoidable damage from wyrmguards that I recall, but it's been a while.

Granted that its difficult to ensure perfect positioning on a mobile target, etc etc... I'm merely looking to be able to state very strongly that such a "safe zone" ALWAYS exists when it is a cleave, no matter the difficulty of attaining it. Most kills I've seen of Kazzak involve maybe 1 rogue, if at all. I'm trying to refute the point that rogues/war/kitty are worthless on cleaving mobs because this safe zone exists concretely, and its solely a learn to play argument from there on.

I'm curious to hear about the 360 cleaves and explore if they do/don't exist, to see if we can build some knowledge as to the exceptions, if they exist.

It's not that the cleave scales, it's that you can't always out range the cleave and still be able to hit the mob, like for instance if the cleaving mob is humanoid sized, 5yds away from the tank is too far to hit the mob. I suppose I can't come up with any specific examples, however, so take that how you will. :P

I could be wrong or not thinking straight, but i'm pretty sure the old Kazzak in Blasted lands has a 360 degree cleave. Someone wanna go try it? There might be other examples eluding me as well. I really do think that some mobs have cleaves that can hit ANYONE in melee range, while some are just "chaining" cleaves.

I have been in fights where Cleave was successfully avoided on Kri, but the margin of error is so small that it usually involved me telling people to back up over and over and over. Unless your melee is all stacked pretty much exactly on top of each other at absolute max melee range, the guy with the big nose is going to get everybody else cleaved.

Some of the cleaves I've experienced (and tried to avoid):

Vael: Definitely a chaining cleave. Rogues would never get hit with it unless someone moved up to about his front paw. Then we'd all eat it, even if you were clearly behind him.

BWL Drakonid guys: A 359.9* cleave. Their cleaves were possible to avoid if you were absolutely perfectly positioned at max range and exactly behind them. This was complicated by their sort of asymetrical stance.

Lord Kri: Chaining cleave like Vael's. Rogues would never eat it unless an idiot Fury warrior was attacking from the side, or even if a shaman plunked totems on the side. Then all of the sudden we'd get hit with it.

Patchwork Golems: This one is hard to classify because they only cleaved after doing an undodgeable warstomp. I'm pretty sure that this was completely unavoidable though because the only ones I EVER avoided were by running out before the stomp, and then Evasioning off the cleave. It never fired while I was in melee range and did not hit me.

Nagas in Steamvaults: Pretty sure this is a full 360* range limited cleave. As some have noted, it is extremely hard to tell since these mobs come in two packs, and your tank is moving around, so that even if there was a 1* deadzone at their "6," you would still be eating cleaves from the other. I don't think this is a chaining cleave because we never bring more than 1 melee DPS to SV.

Bottom line is that any time a ranged class tells us that we can avoid cleaves, we tell them to DIAF. We've been dealing with this crap for long enough that we figure out the parameters of cleaves in new encounters right away. If a cleave chains, its likely due to some idiot caster standing in the mid-zone. The types of cleaves that are theoretically avoidable almost always are practically unavoidable. Playing the "1* Shuffle" is not fun or viable. Blizzard needs to either limit non-chaining cleaves to a 120-180* frontal cone, or implement an equal number of equally damaging manaburn effects. Fair is fair.

Edit: Another possibility would be for cleave damage to be distributed among those on its hit list, rather than cloning itself (ala Meteor).

I agree completely, the opportunity costs of melee + cleave are borderline stupid. Something needs to bump the class's equation in favor of melee, either with more damage, a damage bonus after getting aoed, or more effective aoe evasion (Or simply not having cleave/making it easier to dodge).

As a raid leader and a melee class, I wanted to get a sense of whats reasonable to complain about/adjust for.

I think this is really what I'm trying to get out of this thread. These little subtle understandings and mechanics that change a splattered rogue within 30 seconds to a rogue on top of the dps meters.

I seem to remember the Prince in Dire Maul West having cleave and being humanoid sized? Could easily be wrong, but ze might be useful for testing.

With proper positioning, it's entirely possible to get Onyxia's cleave to chain 30-40 yards away from her body. Make a line of people connecting the healer pack to the main tank and you'll start losing healers. Ony's cleave is 10 targets iirc, so you can get it to go a long way - it's just that with normal positioning this is rarely an issue.

I've yet to be convinced that there are multiple manners of cleave out there. Kri and Wyrmguards definitely have extremely difficult but still possible to avoid cleave just due to the relatively small size of their hitbox compared to other mobs.

There are definitely other types of cleave OR at least variable ranges on them. The golems with the animated cast time cleave in Naxx you can be pretty dang far off and be hit.
Tentacle guys in Arcatraz if I'm not mistaken do a 'Tentacle Cleave' rather than a cleave, definitely hits me max range behind.
Everything else mentioned is just poor melee positioning or small hitbox, take your pick, but there are mobs out there with some other types (Surely different spells in the database just using the same name).

He definitely has 2 AoEish attacks... the reverse cleave is called something else, I believe, and does a small knock back.