Does that mean you changed 100 of each stat, or did you change 100 "item budget points" worth of each stat (150 stam, 200 AP, etc)? Also, was this before or after buffs/talents?

There's another problem with the sim that's not immediately apparent; the damage coming in is entirely physical and entirely based on melee swings. And it's parry-hasteable. Expertise wins out here because of this, but there aren't many fights where this is all true (the only one that comes to mind right now is Thorim).

100 of each stat. The coefficient here (as in all other coefficient tables) is the derivative of whatever is measured with respect to the stat in question.

Do you have proof of this? I'm not asking to be a jerk, I'm genuinely curious. To my knowledge, in Ulduar, only Ignis, Kologarn, and Mim have parry-haste disabled (and that's because I'm relatively certain Kologarn and Mim don't parry). I do not have any evidence one way or the other on the rest of the bosses, but I would love to see it. Also, there are very few bosses who do not have a melee attack. Expertise will, of course, go down on bosses who have no melee counter on the parry-haste mechanic, but it is still very valuable the majority of the time.

Okay, Thorim is the only boss I know of where the vast majority of the incoming damage is physical attacks on a swing timer and he's parry-hasteable.

Vezax doesn't appear to be parry-hasteable, and his damage doesn't really threaten; tanks aren't likely to be gibbed on him.

Mimiron might be parry-hasted, but his damage is mostly magic. Freya is the same.

Ignis & Kologarn don't parry-haste.

Auriaya does, but her swings are fairly small too, and the damage spikes come from fear + defender + screech + swing more than multiple swings.

I don't know whether Hodir is hasteable, but his damage threat is from frozen blows.

Yogg has nothing, and Guardians/Immortal guardians don't appear to haste. I could be wrong on that. Tentacles don't parry haste at least.

Razorscale may, but again - majority of the threat is from debuff + magic damage.

Iron Council's also mostly magic damage as a threat, though I believe steelbreaker doesn't parry.

I'm not sure about Algalon. My suspicion is no.

My point was that when you have 100% of the incoming damage being parry-hasteable, it's going to skew expertise significantly higher than it will be most of the time. And heck, on something like Thorim chances are you'll have other melee hitting him from the front too (at least other tanks), meaning even more parries. So even that's not accurate enough. I'm mostly just stating that it's not parry-haste that kills tanks, it's burst damage, and parry haste doesn't often matter compared to large magic damage output.

I still haven't actually seen any hard proof Thorim parry hastes. Usually when asked for proof people bring up the log and point out fast hits, but in the end I have seen it turn out that they had forgotten that the charge he stacks also increases his attack speed as well as his damage.

I'm pretty sure that Vezax, Auriaya and Hodir parry haste (looking at logs). For other bosses I don't know. I've seen tank dieing from parry haste on Vezax a lot of times expecially during the extra damage phase, usually healers can't spam no stop on you so they should know that you don't get hit for a given time frame.

Wow Web Stats

60.9% on the Vezax kill (I was intentionally in higher avoidance gear to try save more healer mana)

Can anyone backup the PVP gear results from the PTR as far as BIS for 3.2 pre 25man ulduar gear? I'm currently the MT for my guild in 10 man content and currently have 4 out 5 T7/7.5. Just trying to see if I need to start PVP to help.

Thanks

I've looked through the Log posted by Gruturistic and found 24 parries on Vezax. The mean swing time of the attack following a parry is 1.69sec (min_value=1.4, max_value=2.0, sd=0.174). Due to my poor programming skills I have manually written down the swing times for a larger time intervall (lines #318563 to #327334, containing 86 attacks from Vezax). After filtering attacks delayed by casting Surge, Shadow Crash or Mark one gets a mean swing time of 1.66sec (min_value=1.4, max_value=2.0, sd=0.151). Interestingly there are quite large "blocks" of different swing times: the first 12 attacks are all within 1.7-1.9sec, the next 33 within 1.4-1.6sec (27 of them 1.5sec) followed by a small block of ten 1.7-1.8sec attacks, five 1.6sec attacks and a large block of 24 1.7-1.8sec swings (19 of them 1.8sec). The smaller blocks could be just RNG, which however is unlikely for the large blocks of 24 and 33 attacks. Perhaps this could be explained with influences of Ping, Lag,... but I am not exactly familiar with these mechanics.

Anyways this Data does not support Parry-haste on Vezax.

I think we can rule out ping and lag. I very, very rarely have any network issues and have a steady and spike-free 45-50ms. In the busiest 25man fights I sometimes have slight FPS drops, but in 10mans the PC hardly ever breaks a sweat.

Yup, seems the case. If you want more logs to analyze to be sure, here's some:
Wow Web Stats
Wow Web Stats
Wow Web Stats

We double-log all our fights on WWS and WoL since WWS won't even recognize some bosses and WoL offers different views and I still haven't come to like some of them. You can see the same fights, on WoL, at this url: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

I just use my normal set (agi/sta mix on gems; JC trinket, Ignis-10 trinket). And I just use Barkskin+JC on every power-up.
Avoidance is ~57%. health is 47k. Same gear in 10-hard and 25-normal.

CD rotation for hard-mode:
#1 SI
#2 Furnace Stone
#3 Hand of Sacrifice
#4 Hard mode engaged; use Furnace Stone, save SI to avoid death

I used a max avoidance/armor set while maintaining about 42k HP for the 10man hardmode kill that we just completed.

I used a Industructible potion just before the pull, then after 2mins I used my Furnace Stone and then another Industructible potion after than by the end of that potion my Furnace Stone was back up but I then saved it for the Animus phase.

I also used Elixir of Protection, Elixir of Mighty Agility and Blackened Dragonfin to help push my dodge and armor up even further.

For the surges I just used Barkskin.

My HP was 42k, my dodge was 50% (on char screen before pull) and my armor was about 32k.

I used SI (28sec, 4xT8) for when next surge came once Animus had spawned and also popped frenzied regen during this phase. I also had a pally and priest CD for the Animus phase.

My healers had no troubles keeping me alive and commented that i was taking bugger all damage.

Sorry for the stupid question but how much exactly is your avoidance?

I assume you were referring to me.

I would have to heaps of DR returns maths and calculate average values for procs of my idol and trinket (i used greatness as well as Furnace Stone) to work it out the exact avoidance.

My guess would be in the order of about 60%+ total avoidance for the encounter.

I have done some 25-General normals with 60%+ total avoidance but in those encounters I was pushing my HP and avoidance up and not really concentrating on armor.

Given how low Auriya hits for, I'd love to see the math showing the odds of a parry haste gib from her melee attacks.

Blakhoof, the first page of FeralByNight thread has all the answers you seek.

For the past 2 months, I have been running a 'test' and I am stumped by the results - and needing some guidance to get me out of the darks. I've been tanking just using Swipe and Maul without using Mangle or Lacerate. Just to see. And threat gen has never been easier, and the content is going down faster than before.

Has anyone else seen this or looked into it? Is it possible that swipe and maul are currently benefiting from mechanics gains to the point that lacerate and mangle can be dropped out of shot rotation with no detriment to the overall goal of clearing content safely and quickly?

The plain and simple of it is that dps significantly better geared than I am does not even come close to pulling threat (well, unless a lock pulls one of their "i am going to kill myself if i have to in order to get to the top of the dps meter" stunts) even though I am only using swipe and maul. Lacerate used to be my standby for making sure I stayed ahead of dps but I ran this test completely dropping it out. Same for Mangle.

And since I am using only swipe and mangle, and most of the content is groups of mobs, my collateral threat on surrounding mobs means that by the time dps switches targets to the next in kill order, they could not hope to pull aggro. All rage I would normally have expended on single-target offensive shots like Lacerate and Mangle is being spent on augmenting collateral threat gen through swipe.

I am convinced that having recently returned to druid tanking that I *must* be missing something here - it makes no sense to me that I can tank raids and heroics without ever hitting Lacerate or Mangle.

Help?! Feeling totally like I have got to be doing something wrong here!

Beartooth on Alleria server

What you're missing out on by leaving FFF, Mangle, and Lacerate are three high-threat moves along with a few target debuffs and other beneficial pieces.

1- Mangle debuffs the target for increased bleed damage along with being the a high-threat move (Should be used on cooldown)
2- FFF reduces armor of your target along with being a high-threat move (Should be used on cooldown as well)
3- Fully stacked Lacerate is significant threat with the added bonus to proc clearcasts with 2pc T-8 (The periodic damage dealt by your Rake, Rip, and Lacerate abilities has a chance to cause you to enter a Clearcasting state).

Swipe is generally used as a filler, and in heroics, you really don't have to do much more than that, and it's actually very good to spam when you've got 3 DPS on 3 targets as often happens. In raids, however, you're going to be wanting to maximize your single-target TPS for the most part (Let alone your raid's DPS with debuffs) but it may just be that your raid DPS is lagging behind in gear so much so that you have nothing to worry about as far as threat.

If it works for you on trash sure it makes sense, but on a boss? Or on a single target that need to be burned first in the middle of a trash pack ( ex. tash leading up to hodir ), it is just plain too little threat not using the single target moves when your dps swaps from AoE burn to single target mode.

FF and mangle also increase the dps of your group by lowering armor and buffing bleed damage. As a bear tank it is part of your job to cover that for your raid / group, and the smaller the group the more important it becomes as there are less sources of those de-buffs the smaller the group gets.

Now frankly all heroics are jokes and you can't gauge your performance or test in them other then to a minor degree, they are simply "too easy" in the sense that nothing lives long enough for anything valid to be gained. Even as a tank in a heroic this is true. If you bring "geared" dps ( and I'm talking close to or at BiS Uld normal at least ) if you dont use mangle and others, you will have a serious threat hit to your rotation and a good dps will yank off of you so fast your head will spin.

As to why they buff your threat hope this quick and dirty rundown helps:

Maul is a lot of our threat now, its not a good thing but its something to get used to.

Lacerate has a nice +threat component and more importantly triggers Rend and Tear for us without needing an outside source for a bleed, and with Primal Gore Lacerate crits, a rolling bleed can even out lulls in rage gen and keep you stable on threat when you become rage starved by slowing hitting / caster mobs that tend to not gen rage really fast when you dodge them a lot.

Mange is used since it is nice burst threat and since we are using Lacerate to buff Maul, buffing Lacerate makes sense as well, which mangle does as it is a bleed buffer.

Swipe really is just filler, its really good don't get me wrong, and glyphed Maul + Swipe = AoE pack rotation for the most part, but considering unlike our other abilities it doesn't "help" them out it is for excessive rage situations and AoEing trash only, not as a main source of threat.

FF has been ridiculously buffed compared to what it used to be and it scales now. So not only does it buff all your physical dps in the group, but it gives you a nice bit of threat, and most importantly its FREE!! When you are rage starved or can't be in melee a move that costs you nothing but a 6 second cool-down is beyond useful.

What I think it is affecting your test is you are testing in Naxx ( considering your gear ) and Naxx for the most part is really easy, and dps really don't put up the numbers yet to make you have to include all of your tools in your rotation yet, though I would strongly suggest getting used to it, that way when you need to it won't be such a learning curve how to fit everything in, especially right off the pull.

As the previous posts have explained, your rotation will differ significantly between tanking heroic trash and holding aggro on a raid boss. On a single boss, I use swipe after the following have been satisfied:

1. FFF is on cooldown
2. Mangle is on cooldown
3. Lacerate is stacked to 5 and is not about to fall off
4. Demo roar is up and not about to fall off

At this point I'll use swipe as filler as it does more damage per GCD than the initial hit of lacerate, although I'm not sure which does more threat at that initial point, although my dps isn't making that an issue yet. Lacerate's DoT is great, keeping it up provides a great dps/threat source for that occasional GCD, but on normal heroic trash it's rarely going to run its course.

For heroic trash, yeah I just mark my initial target in a pack, tag with FFF, then spam maul and swipe as I tab around to hold aggro with the 360 swipe and glyphed maul.

Very much appreciate the input and guidance. I had a chance to rumble in Ulduar Siege Quarter and while I managed to stay ahead of the dps in threat, it was certainly a work out! I did use a fair amount of what was recommended here, however I didn't think to rotate FFF when not on CD - this is why we visit these kinds of forums!! I'll be sure to do so next time. Like everyone else, I am currently farming emblems until my eyes bleed to hopefully increase my threat gen.