Deadly Boss Mods has a portal add on that shows who is in your realm. I am usually the tank who takes the 1st portal. I make sure at least two healers are in the Demon realm, wait for a CS on Human Kalec, and then announce my taunt.

I want to revisit the Swipe vs. Lacerate question. I recently did some math based on my WWS report here: WWS Loading...

It's anecdotal, and not a terribly large sample size, but since I'm trying to figure out my personal best TPS choice, it's good enough.

Here's what I came up with as the optimal "keep lacerate rolling" vs "just use swipe" cycle math:

My boss tanking set has 38% crit, so...

With a cycle of (after 5 lacerate stacks): Mangle -> Lacerate -> Swipe x2 -> Mangle -> Swipe x2 -> Lacerate -> Mangle -> Swipe x3, repeat
cycle time 18 seconds. Lacerate hits every 9 seconds, consistently across cycles

Lacerate:
avg dd = 58 normal 139 crit. 58*.63 + 139*.37 = 88 avg dd every 9 seconds = 88/9 = ~10 TPS
dot ticks for 420 avg every 3 seconds = 420*.2 / 3 = ~28 TPS
7 swipes in 18 seconds = 7 * 280 norm 630 crit = 7 * (280*.62 + 630*.37) / 18 = ~158 TPS

total TPS: 10 + 28 + 158 = 196 TPS
total DPS: 420/3 + 88/9 + 158 = 307 DPS

Swipe:
9 swipes every 18 seconds = 9 * 280 norm 630 crit = 9 * (280*.62 + 630*.37) / 18 = 203 TPS

total TPS: 203
total DPS: 203


Getting 5 stacks of Lacerate going:
Cycle: Mangle -> Lacerate x3 -> Mangle -> Lacerate x2 -> Swipe, then start the normal 18 sec cycle
this is 12 seconds
5 lacerates at 88 avg dd over 12 seconds = 5*88 / 12 = ~37 TPS
dot will tick for 2 stacks the first time, 3 stacks second, and 5 stacks third: (2/5*420 + 3/5*420 + 420)*.2 / 12 = 14 TPS
1 swipe in 12 seconds = (280*.62 + 630*.37) / 12 = ~34 TPS

total TPS for the first 12 seconds: 37 + 14 + 34 = 85 TPS
total lost threat for doing stacking cycle instead of just swiping = ~120*12 = 1440


The TPS difference between 280 dmg non-crit swipes and lacerate is very small. Small enough that the bonus DPS of weaving Lacerate into my cycle offsets the minor TPS loss. Unfortunately, I'm terrible at turning anecdotal evidence into useful rules like the one we've got posted on the main page (but later today I'll try figuring it out). However, my evidence tends to make me think that the 30% crit, 225 dmg swipe rule is rather undervaluing lacerate threat, so I wanted to post to see if the people who are actually good at math could come up with a more accurate rule.

I'm pretty sure the 230 30% crit rule was before the buff to lacerate. It's harder to calculate now since ap will increase both swipe and lacerate damage.
What I go by now is putting lacerate up if I know it will stay up. On fights like Kalecgos and Brutallus I don't use it since it will only be up about a minute on each. On twins I would use it if it wasnt for the tick giving me aggro back right after a confounding blow, when i really just want to run away 10 yards and reset fire debuff.
On M'uru I don't use it for the obvious reason of there being 3 mobs to tank.

So even though this might be borderline useless post, I think my conclusion is that when you have gear good enough for swipe to out-threat lacerate, you will be doing fights where swipe is more beneficial anyway.

Many of your numbers are wrong here. You forgot to include the static 285 threat to Lacerate. The crit percentages are changing throughout your calculations as well. Your crit chance also seems quite low.. is that with no buffs or are you using your WWS number for Lacerate? Note your Swipe crits were 50%. Crit chance can greatly affect the numbers since it favors Swipe. I'm also not sure why you chose to Lacerate every 9 seconds. If it's in case of misses you'll need to models those as well since a missed Lacerate is one less Swipe, not one less Lacerate.

Regardless, I'm not quite sure what you're discussion is here. There definitely is a point where spamming Swipe starts to beat spamming Lacerate (generally around 4t6). However, after you reach that point it is best to still Lacerate enough to only keep the DoT up and Swipe in between. Are you contesting either of these points?

The arguments of when to Swipe only mainly fall into the last category when you were trying to calculate the difference when building the initial stack. The more often you need to re-start the stack the worse it becomes. The other issue is if your raid is filling up all the debuff slots. So, in practice, it depends on the fight mechanics and raid composition.

One thing missing in that analysis is the effect of hit and expertise. Due to the general lack of hit and expertise on tanking gear that isn't threat focused and how specials are based on the 2-roll system, your crit rates are going to be significantly lower. Due to the DoT nature of lacerate, so long as you can react to it after a miss/dodge/parry and not let it fall, lack of hit/expertise doesn't hurt as badly as it does swipe. I suppose that's a little confusing to say unless you look at it in terms of threat per global cooldown. It's relatively common knowledge that spacing lacerates as much as possible without losing the stacks is optimal, so what I mean is that while a swipe miss is all threat lost for that gcd, a lacerate miss, but refreshed within time limits, actually slightly increases the threat per gcd of the prior lacerate.

Assuming lacerates have already been stacked:
Threat/gcd lacerate @ 9 sec refresh = 285 + 0.2(88 + 3*420) = 554.6
Threat/gcd lacerate @ 12 sec refresh = 285 + 0.2(88 + 4*420) = 638.6
Threat/gcd swipe = 280*.62 + 630*.37 = 406.7

This actually undervalues lacerate by assuming 0 crits and overvalues swipe by assuming hit/expertise cap. If you actually only land 80% of attempted abilities, swipe threat drops to about 325.6. There's also the factor of not being hit/expertise capped affecting mangle uptime, which in turn affects lacerate threat somewhat, but I haven't thought about mangle uptime in relation to hit/expertise in all that much depth and simply make the assumption that uptime is roughly equal to the percentage of landed mangles as given by my WWS.

My personal TPS rotation when I'm not using a lot of hit/expertise on single targets would be mangle, lacerate, 2x swipe, and only going to using mangle, 2x swipe, lacerate when lacerate didn't land the first time. i.e. mangle, lacerate (miss), swipe, [use 2nd cycle] lacerate, mangle, swipe, swipe, lacerate, mangle, swipe, swipe, lacerate (miss), mangle, [first cycle] lacerate, swipe, swipe, etc. That uses a mixture of threat per global cooldown of lacerate refreshed at 6 and 9 sec opposed to at 9 and 12 sec, but I find it generally keeps lacerate stacks up better when I'm not using a lot of hit/expertise since missing twice is still recoverable from.

All in all though, this just reinforces the swipe when mangle is on cooldown and you don't need to lacerate to refresh concept.

I have a friend who's a druid who 2 times this week now has been 1 shot by bosses (Mag and Jan'Alai). I'm thinking he has undercapped defense now and is critable. He has 400 defense and 54 resil. Is that enough to be uncritable or not?

Yea, I tried to do some math and confused myself on it. I can see that he's a bit behind in defense, and I'm not sur eif the 54 resil is enough to make up for that 15 defense. Roughly how much resil is 1 defense?

Lazy.....

From the first post

I'm sorry but I don't see a "1 defense=X resil" on that....

no

but there is

1 def = x anti-crit

and

1 res = x anti-crit

The maths from there you should be able to work out.

There, I only quoted the relevant parts now do the maths.

Alright sorry, I'm upped on caffeine and somewhat slow. Thanks for the help.

Make sure he's specced 3/3 into Survival of the Fittest, as without that talent 400 Defense and 54 Resilience rating won't be enough to get him uncrittable. Magtheridon and Jan'alai can both crush, so go through your recap/wws and find out whether he's getting crushed or crit and whether there is any parry/thresh happening when he dies. Finally, Mag is a hard hitter, and Jan'alai enrages, so it could just be an extremely unlucky no-dodge streak .. I seriously doubt it was 1 hit that actually killed him.

Jan was not enraged, and both him and mag just got 22k (what the recount graph showed) hits on him, not sure if they were crits or crushes. Recount does not report this, and I just got us our WWS today. He is 3/3 in SotF. I'll check out a WWS our next raid (mag again tomorrow/tonight). Thanks for the help guys I appreciate it.

It would help if you'd give an armory link of him so we can see his gear. If he is getting 22k hits (/crits?), there is a big chance it has to do with either wrong spending of talent points or wrong choice of gear.

Caster form or healing gear would be the only explanations, hits wouldn't get that big even in dps gear if that includes a few T4 pieces. Ask him if he tried to pot around that time, he may have had a GCD running and got stuck in caster form.
Other than that, if it wasn't a single but a combo of hits for 22k in less than a second it's either dps gear or simply parries.

The World of Warcraft Armory
His gear's fine really, he's tanked VR before with no real problems, just suddenly this kind of thing is popping up.

He claims that he doesn't have an power shifting macros or anything. We're all leaning in the direction that he sat down and let himself get crit so he could make the joke "I'm not getting any rage so I sat down to get crit!" since he's one of those guys and wants to be showing off his e-peen.

I believe optimal dps setup is:
Duplicitous Guise
Bladed Chaos Tunic
Leggings of Immortal Night
Gloves of Immortal Dusk
T6 shoulders/boots/belt/bracers

But seeing as how its very unlikely you will be able to get those pieces (as your primary role in sw is tanking, you should be getting sw tanking items first) 2t4 will probably still be used by many people

Sorry for the late post but Vanish is currently bugged on the KJ fight. It doesn't do anything so even if he did vanish it wouldn't reset his agro

Does Vanish not working on KJ actually matter? From what I've read, KJ doesn't melee... he just casts spells. His Soul Flay ability hits the person highest on aggro, but that's the only thing I can think of that'd be meaningful.

He could really use badge of tenacity and a stam trinket. He has somewhat low armor and not a ton of stam, and both of those things could be fixed. (on a side note, it makes me cry a little that he is tanking with a DST).

But no, there's nothing there that suggests that he's crittable, and he should be able to take a crush or two. I'm guessing parrygib.

Alright, not sure if this has been covered in the past ~160 posts, but it however isn't on the main post.

I've yet to get a full armor pen set for feral dps, however, I don't believe it will be as helpful as I had first thought due to my calculations on the affect of armor on effective damage by melee swing speed. Which concluded in armor effecting slower swing speed damage more then quick swing speeds by a small amount. Either way, I plan on testing it once I manage to get the gear required for the testing.

On a side note, I've been using this thread for quite a while for basic figures. However, I happen to disagree with the use of the [Everbloom Idol].
According to multiple tests, I would lose ~ 200 dps per boss fight using the [Everbloom Idol] with an ability rotation of Mangle, Shred (till 5 CP), Rip. In most of the fights, ~ 46% of all damage done by me was from physical damage (white melee hits). During the time I had used [Idol of Ferocity], I recorded an average 58% uptime with the ability rotation I used. The 65 agility proc from [Idol of Ferocity] adds 74 AP unbuffed, 79 AP with kings (80.8 AP according to Rating Buster). The AP would slightly increase rip damage, but I'm too lazy to come up with figures for that at the moment. Along with the AP, the idol also adds temporarily to crit chance of all attacks and abilities, stacking up to 2.81% (According to Rating Buster, again, lack of worked out figures due to laziness).
I have not looked at the figures attributed to [Everbloom Idol] due to the fact that my overall performance with it decreased on multiple occasions.

Just seeing if there are others with the similar opinion.