Assuming without a mangle bot then, since running with more than one feral sounds rare. And vast majority of warriors are fury. I still don't think I'd want to use mangle glyph over rip / sr / shred in 3.1

I had never considered not taking mangle at all, what if your arms warrior gets himself killed?

If I had a manglebot I would probably still take mangle, but maybe leave out the 3 points in improved mangle, so I can still mangle in an emergency if required.

Of course I mean in the case of no manglebot being present, I tought that was pretty evident.

IT's not so much a question of a more difficult rotation, but the mangletimer really gets in the way due to its similar uptime as rake. Also due to more mangling you lose shreds, which at times really make it hard to even get 3 shreds per Rip in, simply due to having 2 lower timers that need a lot of refreshing, often at the same time (or within a gcd). Especially if you are down on your luck with crits and OoC procs you sometimes foricng a shred in, which makes you lose a rake timer for a tick or 2.

So what I'm trying to get across is that we shouldnt just look at the glyphs on a 1:1 basis, but that we should take mangles troublesome timer into account as well when comparing the 2. RNG aside, I can easily keep 4300 dps each single time I do a 6 minute practicerun at a dummy with Mangle Glyph. Swapping to Ripglyph I can sometimes reach this as well, but a lot of the time I'm stuck at 4200 DPS, and feeling I'm really struggling to not let either rake, mangle or Rip drop.


Of course this is all moot with a manglebot, which sadly I haven't had in any raid in wotlk.

I did some testing on the PTR dummy. These first two splits are with Primal Gore and glyphs of Savage Roar, Rip, and Shred. The third split has no Primal Gore and uses glyph of Mangle in place of Rip. I used no buffs and had 6756 AP, 46.47% crit, 198 haste, 109 armor pen, 194 hit, and expertise capped. Also had 2T7 and 4T7 bonuses.

With Primal Gore and glyph of Rip:
#1 - Wow Web Stats
#2 - Wow Web Stats

Without Primal Gore, glyph of Mangle over glyph of Rip:
#3 - Wow Web Stats

I was pretty disappointed with how dependent I am on mods in order to keep a reasonable debuff uptime. RoguePowerBars is bugged on the PTR so I had to watch my buffs and debuffs spread over my UI. My buff/debuff uptimes for the runs were:

Rip Rake Savage Roar Mangle
87% 88% 97% 94%
89% 93% 97% 98%
74% 87% 95% 96%

I also found, as others have stated before, that getting 3 Shreds in before Rip expires is not trivial, and it will be even tougher when we lose the 2T7 bonus. It also led to some inefficiencies on my part, where I would try to squeeze in another Shred to lengthen my Rip at the expense of other abilities only to discover that I'd already used my 3 Shreds. A mod to track how many Shreds you've used on a particular Rip will be absolutely necessary. Running without glyph of Mangle also requires you to wait until the last possible second on your Mangles and Savage Roars if you want to have a prayer of getting your Shreds in.

Obviously there was a big difference between the first 2 splits and the third one. My dps rose about 26.5% by using Primal Gore and glyph of Rip. My play was particularly sloppy on that third run with a pathetic 74% Rip uptime, but that obviously wouldn't account for such a massive increase in dps.

The damage contribution from Primal Gore is simply staggering. On the third split Shred and auto-attack accounted for 50% of my damage while Rip and Rake made up 41%, which matches pretty much exactly with what I see on Live. On my first two splits Rip and Rake accounted for 57% and 55% of my damage. On those 2 runs Primal Gore alone accounted for 19% and 17% of my dps. By comparison, OOC was about a 4.5% and 5.7% increase in dps (ignoring it's contribution to combo point generation) assuming I used each one on a Shred.

This was with 0 buffs, suboptimal gear, and sloppy play. If my runs are any indication Primal Gore is about 2-3 times stronger for dps than OOC, which itself is quite overbudget. I see it at least getting put back to a 150% crit like it was originally.

After more testing I reached top dps with Mangle -Shred - SR glyph at 4600 dps over a 3 minute span (1 beserk), something I can't repeat by swapping the mangle glyph with Rip glyph.

Yes raidbuffs could very much improve cp generation, but in general I found it very stressful to play without mangle glyph. As the previous poster stated you are constantly trying to squeeze in another shred, or a mangle or rake or SR. It's more a lack of timers than a lack of cp generation. Raidbuffs could improve the issues you run in when trying to FB more. I found FB useage very troublesome because after you are struggling to gain enough energy to keep mangle and rake up.

Once we loose 2pct7 (but likely gain 2 pct8) 3 shreds could be harder, depending on the clearcast procrate on bleeds.

For now my choice goes clearly to Mangle/shred/SR glyphs. Theoretically Rip glyph might be better, but in practice I don't see fluent cycles working without an extended mangle timer.\

In response to Melthu's test, Is it possible to do another test with Primal Gore and with mangle glyph and describe your impressions? Your impressions on the first 2 runs reflect mine and I wodner if you find the same true for the tests I've done with Primal Gore and mangle glyph.

I'm very pleased to hear about 4600 dps on a dummy. Your points regarding mangle vs rip glyph more than likely correlate to t7 vs t8. Tier 7 gear has additional rip duration whereas tier 8 has additional savage roar duration, not to mention significantly more crit and therefore easier CPgen. For those of us without a mangle bot, I'm willing to bet that mangle glyph > rip glyph before we start getting Ulduar upgrades, then the opposite afterward.

Did 2 longish tests with some critbuffs to see how that would affect stuff.
Agi elixer
Crit Food

Well I was a tad surprised.

2 exact same specs (0/55/16 see armory for details).

First attempt over 9 mins (3 beserks) Shred / SR / Rip
Cycles are going a lot better.

DPS: 4800


So I thought I figured out why the Rip glyph was better. For comparison sake I did test under exact same circumstances but with Mangle glyph instead of Rip, to see how much Rip glyph was beter once you get fluent cycles

DPS: 5000 (bit lower due to bleeds ticking after I stopped hitting


So while I had less troubles with cycles and had very good uptime on all timers in both cases, the mangle glyph still seems to win out in my current gear, Difference damage done was about 70.00 in favor of the mangle glyph. setup. Comparing the 2 you see 10% less Ripticks with a mangle glyph, but a LOT (around 20%) more shreds. Next test will be to see if it's better to use shredidol when you use the mangle glyph.

e: no chance. Not even bothering posting the results with shredidol.

Yet a static testdummy favors the Ripcombo of glyphs more than dynamic movement encounters due to more flexible timers on Mangle when using that glyph. No testing or simulation can implement the variables of a moving encounter. Yet what I'm seeing atm is the more buffs you apply, the manglyglyph setup benefits more from them.

Does this tell the whole story? No of course not, when Blizzard puts up a moving testdummy that gives me raidbuffs Ill post those results. Untill then this is the best testing I can provide. Everything in my gut tells me Rip glyph should outperform the mangleglyph on a static encounter but I'm just not seeing it, and it will be all the more noticable on dynamic encounters.

Your ratio of rip:rake ticks is inconsistent. You appear to have let rake drop on the first run.

Every attack except FB had higher average damage in your second cycle than in your first. Which means you did a bad job of keeping SR up in your first attempt, or you had terrible RNG luck, or you accidentally FB'd in your first attempt when you should've SR'd once or twice, and it dropped your DPS.

rip 1st attempt: 3185 avg dmg
rip 2nd attempt: 3243 avg dmg
increase: 1,8%

melee 1st attempt: 923 avg dmg
melee 2nd attempt: 946 avg dmg
increase: 2,5%

shred 1st attempt: 5490 avg dmg
shred 2nd attempt: 5523 avg dmg
increase: 0,6%

rake (dot) 1st attempt: 3041 avg dmg
rake (dot) 2nd attempt: 3429 avg dmg
increase: 12,8%


rough math:
rip 30% of total dmg, melee/shred/rake 20%
The difference in avg dmg alone means 3,3% increase in overall dps.
3,3% of 4800 is 158.



IF you can guarantee, that Savage Roar never dropped, than your whole experiment is just subject to RNG. I definitely would NOT make assumptions about optimal glyph combos, based on an experiment with such RNG influence. And, as nightcrowler said, parses of fights with raidbuffs/debuffs would be more accurate too.

Perhaps someone could create a raid on the PTR to go for the target dummies. Than he oder she could provide us with some WWS logs, that would be more convincing to me.