I have a comment/question on rage generation.

Blizzard has said that rage generation is normalized now, I think I read somewhere that the rage generated by receiving hits has been reduced so we rely more on our white hits to generate rage?

This leads onto haste and whether it will become more important to threat generation now?

EG: (I'm only doing 10m/normal ICC at the moment, so please provide higher tier information if you have it)

On most boss fights, I am currently at 100% rage all the time. Last weeks BQ I topped almost 30k TPS at one stage, averaged 20-25k TPS. This seems a little nuts now, however I assume the DPS will scale come CATA.

However, on Sindragosa, my TPS dropped dramatically (to 10-12k TPS). I can attribute this directly to not having 100% rage all the time, so unable to spam Maul etc.

I suspect this drop in rage generation is due to the Attack Speed Debuff that Sindy gives you with the frost breath.

Boss Rotation used:

Start with:
FFF

Then rotate:
Mangle (at CD and prioritize when berserk procs)
Lacerate x3
Pulverize

When off CD:
Maul (when rage > 70)


I find that when you pulverize at 3 stacks, you still do get decent berserk procs.

Also, due to the berserk procs, the rotation does change (ie, I might do mangle, lacerate, mangle, lacerate, lacerate, pulverize, mangle, lacerate etc). If I have 3 stack of lacerate and mangle has < .5 sec on CD, I wont pulverize until after I hit mangle, as lacerate will tick again and still generate threat, so I don't believe this is a threat loss.

I'll be looking into this more as I go, but like I said, I'm only up to 10m/Normal runs, so having someone doing hardmodes etc would be handy to comment.

Also, on a side, unrelated note, throughout trash pulls, the change they've made to swipe and the vengeance buff we get, I pulled up to 12k DPS .... DPS TANK!! Loving the swipe change!

Regards,

FFF has retained its threat bonus and that bonus is modified by the number of points in Feral Aggression (48 per point).

FFF Threat:
0/2 Feral Aggression: Damage + 774
2/2 Feral Aggression: Damage + 870

Understood, but what i ment, to clarify is, is it viable compared to the date given by Jamu?

How does FFF threat stack up compared to these numbers?

Fairly poorly. You should only FF when you have a GCD and not enough rage to do something else. Most of the time it's a non-issue, but you might do it early on a multimob pull after swiping.

Thank you, I have corrected the error (I did wonder why my calculations seemed to overvalue crit rating). Given this, the mastery : crit : haste rating ratio is now 1 : 8 : 11.4272, resulting in CR > 1.04285*HR.

As for +0.21782% SD procs = +0.2182% damage mitigated (now +0.10891% SD procs = +0.10891% damage mitigated), I realised I was rather vague in simply wording it as 'damage mitigated'. What I really meant to imply is that given X% increase in the frequency of SD procs, the additional damage mitigated by Savage Defense in total over any given encounter would (on average) also equal X%.

Just a tangent to this Savage Defense talk, I wonder how gearing for agility instead of stamina compares. Probably still stamina, but there was tank threat comparison done on the PTR recently:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/38028/CataTankComparison.png

And you can see that the savage defense procs almost acted like avoidance. I wonder if X amount of agility offers more EH than stamina because it fuels dodge, SD proc chance, and SD power. Just food for thought.


About our threat rotation, at what value of threat is it worth it to use pulverize early as opposed to just lacerating again? I'm assuming it's (Pulverize Threat) - (Lacerate Threat) - ~(1.5 ticks of 3 stack lacerate) - (small chance to proc free mangle) > 0

Is there something I'm missing there? It seems at our current gear level at 80, they're pretty close.

Don't forget, because Vengeance is based on increasing your AP up to 10% of your total HP, stamina is now a threat stat and a mitigation (due to savage defense) stat itself. Both are excellent stats for us atm and until a good sim comes out, it will be difficult to assess which one is best.

Stamina's value as a threat stat is highly dependent on whether Vengeance can be stacked and maintained at the cap (10% of current maximum health), which current data suggests is highly unlikely on the vast majority of encounters.

Calculating the average Vengeance AP over an encounter:

SD= (0.65*(BaseAP + V))*1+M

SD = Average Savage Defense absorption
0.65 = Proportion of Attack Power taken into account for SD
Base AP = Fairly self explanatory
V = Vengeance Attack power
M = Mastery's effect on SD absorption

Using Rotface25H as a reference point:

10697.4 = (0.65*(6666 + V))*1+0.57
V = 3816.51 AP average across the encounter

Which indicates that any stamina accumulated past 38,165.1 health is more-or-less a non-contributor to threat for this particular encounter. Given that V is at 40% of its possible maximum (assuming that max. health is 95,000), this is an indication that it is unlikely for Vengeance to accumulate and be maintained consistently at the upper limit. Even assuming that Vengeance can be capped at 10% of MaxHP at a given point in an encounter, it seems as if the frequency of Vengeance-relevant damage and damage levels are far eclipsed by the rate of decay for Vengeance to remain capped.


According to the ratio, 1 : 8 : 11.4272 (mastery : crit : haste), it requires 11.4272 haste rating to match 1 mastery rating in terms of the additional damage absorbed in total by Savage Defense. Insofar as my calculations have indicated, haste is the least valuable stat in terms of its effect on SD.

After skimming through a few forums, there doesn't seem to be any confirmation about whether this is intended. However, considering that Vengeance doesn't accumulate from absorptions, this leads to a rather contrived roundabout effect for Savage Defense whereby if a sufficiently strong SD proc fully absorbs an entire melee strike, Vengeance would begin to decay and therefore any subsequent SD procs would absorb less damage. Further hits causes Vengeance to stack again, with SD procs absorbing more damage until Vengeance has reached a level where it causes SD to absorb a complete melee strike, with the entire cycle repeating itself.

I'm not entirely sure how significant an impact this cyclical effect has upon the value of Savage Defense. I would hazard a guess and assume it is negligent (non-existent in most cases) considering that Savage Defense isn't able to fully absorb an entire melee strike (may be possible with stacked cooldowns and other damage mitigation/absorption effects) in ICC encounters. This might occur more frequently in 5-man dungeons where mobs melee for significantly less. For absorption effects overall such as PW:S and the like, they most likely have a significant impact on Vengeance and Savage Defense which warrants more investigating.

Tried it but got the same amount of dmg from thorns if you're bear or elf when casting. Maybe they fixed it :-/

Got a question about Savage Defense mitigation. In the ability tooltip it says it reduces damage by 65% of your attack power. That is simple. How does the mastery affect add into this though? Base we get 32% so does that mean an attack is reduced by 97%AP or by 86%AP (65% + 65%*32%, basically asking if that 32% is calculated in before or after the hit)

Also is there an addon that shows savage defense absorbs? Recount doesn't seem to be picking these up.

World of Logs tracks them pretty well under healing: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/7093a4pfttfr59f9/details/1/

I have about 18.5 mastery and the shields average almost 10k. I've been getting absorbs of up to 30k on some H-LK attempts (but that may include PWS and other effects).