Slightly off topic but quick post on your group makeup.

Okay.

9 Healers is pushing it here, I'd be amazed if you had anywhere close to the required raid DPS to do it with 9 healers. We ran with 7 for the kill. Also Holy priests are pretty useless on this fight, they don't offer anything that another healing class can't do better, their signature moves like PoM and CoH aren't that great here.

Shadow priests are king. I'd take two minimum and even 3 if you could field them. Their healing helps tremendously in Meteor soak groups and their mana return allows mages and locks to forget about mana pots/lifetap and chain chug destruction pots, which more than makes up for any defecit in DPS between taking one of them in a main dps slot.

3 Warlocks is great. If you have an affliction one Maeldiction and Shadow Embrace are both incredible boons on this fight.

Feral group is good, exactly what we had on kill (me, 3 hunters, resto shaman for GoA/Bloodlust).

Melee group is a little messed up, as I said I'd shift the MT into a pally group and move the Fury Warrior if hes there into the MT spot. If none there just fill the spot with a random (paladin ain't bad for fire res aura, shaman should be dropping searing totem). On that note have all shaman drop searing totems as they do contribute a suprising amoutn from 3-4 shamans over the fight.

You roll with a lot of spell casters. 3 warlocks, 3 mages, 1 shadow priest. Ditch the two holy priest, bring in a second resto and second shadow priest. Then you can change group 3 and 4 to look like:
Warlock, Warlock, Warlock, SP, Resto Shaman
Mage, Mage, Mage, SP, Resto Shaman

We found mages pulling some incredible damage by chaining Bloodlust with their <20% ability that increases their damage.

I'd also ditch a resto druid and bring in another DPS, either another Shadow priest for a healer group or another melee to take the now vacant spot the MT was occupying in the Group 1.

Your MT if a Warrior should really have Devotion Aura. Warriors get pulverised during Stomp, Devotion and chain chugging Stoneshield pots can really help.



So I'd change to look like:

1: Rogue, Rogue, Rogue, DPS Warrior, Enh Shaman
2: Feral Tank, Hunt, Hunt, Hunt, Resto Shaman
3: Mage, Mage, Mage, SP, Resto Shaman
4: Warlock, Warlock, Warlock, SP, Resto Shaman
5: Resto Druid, Holy Pally, Holy Pally, Holy Pally, Warrior Tank

[Shard of Contempt] + x? vs. [Tsunami Talisman] + [Dragonspine Trophy]. What can you recommend guys? Thanks!

Without taking it too far OT, I see your point, but do you think myself and the Warrior could honestly keep enough threat going without any group buffs of consequence? Obviously I didn't have many issues last night as we just had a couple of tries to sort out group positioning, but a fully optimized, buffed, pot chugging raid is a different matter when all our gear is biased towards mitigation?

Personally, to have the option of buff stacking (like trinketed heroism), I like at least one on-use-trinket. Letting me end up with [Shard of Contempt] + [Berserker's Call] as my favorite option.

I maintained enough threat easily enough through contiual destruction/haste/drums spam. I was in a group with 3 hunters. Our MT had only randoms in his group, a few healers and a spare mage I believe. Threat shouldn't really be an issue for a T6 geared tank using optimal cycles, you have infinite rage on this fight. We had our DPS blow their aggro drops early too.

These procs will already be up during heroism anyway, 80% of the time. DST really is that good. I can't tell you for sure (use Rawr to tell for sure), but 95% certain that SoC+DST will be the highest DPS pair of trinkets, by a significant margin. TT is good too, but falls behind somewhat, and BC is even farther behind, most likely.

Has anyone done the testing to confirm that the boost is in fact negligible and that the anecdotal reports of higher threat than expected in Omen are in fact erroneous or unrelated to the Lacerate change?

By my numbers the Aldor version is pretty good as well. I put it 3rd best, just a little behind the Kael one and the new JC one in first by quite a bit. I haven't actually modelled the Scryer version yet though.

I realize Omen is still going through a bit of a shock after 2.4, but I feel I should check anyway.

Have any of you other bears found that your apparent threat level in Omen is being vastly overrepresented? I've had people pulling from me at as little as 80-90% over the past couple of days. I know Omen has always been a little off, but never by that much.

Didn't think before posting, ignore this.

Up until... about a week ago or so (?), it seemed to be accurately representing our threat, but with relatively high threat values. Since then, it's been all over the place. Some nights it's seemed perfectly accurate, some night's, it's been completely worthless. They're making breaking changes to it every couple hours it seems, if not more often. I'd say just make do as best you can, for now, and maybe in a week or two, it'll be back to being the awesome solid threat meter that it was pre-2.4 (actually, it'll be better, with all the new features of omen, and per-mob tracking in threat2.0).

He's obviously asking about Shard + either TT or DST VS TT + DST as opposed to Shardx2 VS TT + DST....

He means "Shard + something" not 2xShard.

On hit rating: You probably didn't get an answer because its a pretty blatant "try it in a simulator with your gear" style answer. I'll put a bit more detail into it though:
Hit rating is good, but not as good as agility stacking in theoretical terms. Food choice will always be +20 agility as best, and hit rating is not worth stacking in theoretical terms.
Personally I capped hit rating, but that was partly due to the gear available at the time, and because I was seeing quite a difference in actual DPS terms from WWS between hit capped and not hit capped. Check the theoretical difference with Rawr or Toskk's simulator, but go for what you feel most comfortable with (if you find a missed Rip completely screws up your rotation, hit is probably more valuable as a personal stat than the theoretical value of it).

Expertise will always be of approximately the same value as hit (but obviously works when hit capped), but not worth going for unless the item itself is exceptional (see: [Belt of One-Hundred Deaths]/[Shard of Contempt] as good examples).

I did some napkin math a while ago about user-error in theoretical terms: If you mess up the next move in your cycle 50% of the time when you miss or get dodged, hit/expertise still doesn't make up the difference between it and agility (although it easily becomes the 2nd best stat). OTOH, it DOES make you a somewhat better player, in that you need to pay attention to your cycle less to do your DPS, which means you can, essentially, get out of the fire that much faster.

You really need to cap hit and take a bite out of the expertise cap to get to that point of effectiveness, though.

The boost to Lacerate is in fact negligable, at least in terms of threat. While wearing full tank gear at Brutallus, Lacerate is probably still better TPS than Swipe is. You might want to consider stacking Lacerate up to 5, refreshing at ~5s left and using Swipe in between. This is just to boost your DPS, just spamming Lacerate will generate more pure threat.

Been wearing mine for a couple days now and it's very nice but it definitely has some kind of internal cooldown. Based on what recount's telling me it is about 3% of my dps while soloing and 1-ish on a boss fight which is still quite good.

Also as you may have heard it is affected by melee crit, and crits for around 750-790. Considering I've got about 42% crit unbuffed I'm pretty happy with the item.

The exception to which being if the mob is crowd controlled, which is when it gives you the highest value. Obviously that doesn't apply to Brutallus though. :P

Brutallus down yesterday WWS

Some personnal advice:
Use a good mix between stamina armor and agility, i disagree that stamina and armor are everything. Full buff with commanding shout and the warlock buff i was at 24k6hp.
On the trinkets, after some try, i use on first stomp [Badge of Tenacity] and a [Nightmare Seed], and on the second stomp [Moroes' Lucky Pocket Watch].
Even if it requires some luck, i think it helped a lot, more than to use [Darkmoon Card: Vengeance].
I don't have [Commendation of Kael'thas].

[Ironshield Potion] is totally required.



For the threat generation, i was with 0 expertise, some 50 hit, i used only mangle, swipe, and maul. You can use maul permanantly, there is absolutely no rage issue. Dont used lacerate. Was totally sufficient, was able to keep aggro on warlock@2300dps.
Dps in cat form when you dont have aggro was also required for the down.

It is also =not= worth it to use the debuff slot for virtually the same or less threat depending on your AP (the majority of threat from lacerate is still on the initial hit and not the bleed)

Depending on your raid make-up it is very easy to reach the 40-debuff limit

If you're that worried about debuff slots you should have your rogues stop using deadly poison unless they are mutilate. Lacerate does more dps then deadly and they can switch to instant for a minor dps loss. If we look at Tagrat's WWS the average deadly poison tick was 280ish whereas my lacerate averages just over 400 and they both tick every 3 seconds. It's not bad dps if you do a mangle-lacerate-swipe-swipe rotation.

It's a fair dps loss if you have a enhance shaman using stormstrike.

I sit at 26,5k hp full buffed with shout and warlock wearing Darkmoon Card and CoK and find it very comfortable to survive. I do not need to do anything while tanking when a stomp comes, because i simply survive 2 MH/OH-Hits. Of perhaps 30 Tries i died once. If other ways work for you its nice, but i don`t want to get fucked up by RNG.

The problem is that the warrior tanking simply cannot go that route because he can`t reach that levels of stamina/armor to survive 2 hits reliable without trinket/seed. So your healers have to learn to heal so that every second a heal is guaranteed to land. If your healers learn to heal a warrior through stomp you can go whatever route and will tank successfull. But it would be much easier with two ferals who survive 2 MH/OH-Hits .