With the removal of the threat of burn consistent and frequent tank switches are all but guaranteed, so odds are dps will never get enough time on one tank to pull aggro unless they're trying really hard to do so. This coupled with the fact that Brutallus is a dual-wielding gib-machine means tanks should be wearing the best gear possible. The only exception to this is if you want to get near the hit cap to prevent taunt resists, which unfortunately means you're forced to choose between the hit-less sunwell gear and your old items.

I don't see what that would have to do with anything, taunt gives you 100% of the previous tank's threat, not 110%, it doesn't matter who's tanking the mob when you're dpsing it and building threat, they'd still pull at the same rate regardless of how many people are taunting it periodically.

But other than that, yes, max avoidance gear is pretty standard.

I always wondered whether it would be possible to set up a rotation with two tanks, using precisely synchronized taunts to get in more tps than any one tank could do. For example:

0.0: taunt 1
0.5: ss 1
2.0: dev 1
3.5: rev 1

4.0: taunt 2
4.5: ss 2
6.0: dev 2
7.5: rev 2

8.0: taunt 1
8.5: ss 1
...

You'll get 18 skills per 24 seconds as opposed to the normal 16 and the percentage of shield slams is higher too. Has anybody ever tried something like that? How does the swing timer play into this? I don't dare to ask my fellow tanks to test that, they already suspect I might be crazy.

It'd work, the problem comes from resists and latency, mostly. It's something that is already present in most tauntable mob situations, more often than not the overall threat gen goes up slightly with a tauntable mob because there's a second pool of "Shield Slam" and "Revenge" abilities to draw from with independent cooldowns.

Xaviera, we tried Brutallus v4 (no grounding, 10M HP etc.) and tank death was no issue, threat was (or rather would have been, if we had a full and capable raid; thanks again for the EU PTR mess-up). What we've noticed was that he does not hit that hard if you do not have a certain debuff. So just taunt after he puts that debuff on another tank, and use a survival CD (trinket, last stand, seed, whatever) before he puts it on you. With stomp removing burn, you do not even have to spare SW for the absolut worst case. Of course Deadly Boss Mods already had nice and accurate timers for everything he did to us, making the encounter feel much less hectic.

Edit: According to my experience there only one thing that kills a tank on Brutallus, and that is taunt resist. So what I was wearing for our best attempts was not really my max agro gear, but rather good pieces with +hit. And funny enough, some really good tank pieces already have +hit, even if they lack some avoidance. There is also an incentive to craft my T2 tank goggles, even though I have the illidan helm.

I'm less worried about resists with such a rotation (as if you get a resist you simply do normal threat for 1 rotation), but more about is your raid doing so much more dps than your tank can generate threat that it'll be worth bringing 1 less dps to the raid just to increase the tank's threat? It just doesn't *seem* to be the case.

It's not about bringing one more healer to cover my threat gear, it's about surviving in threat gear with a normal number of healers. Which I did, strange as it may seem. As I've said, Brutallus does not hit that hard normally, the problems come only if you get too high on the meteor's debuff, or when your armor is reduced. And then the other tank taunts him off you. Of course we'll just have to see him on live and several times for the full 6 minutes duration. I am still somewhat afraid of the healer's mana running out on my threat gear.

Question:

What is an average TPS that should be expected from a warrior in T6 content?

Scenario 1: Warrior, 4/5 or more T6, top end-gear.
Scenario 2: Warrior, T5 gear with T6 weapon/shield.
Scenario 3: Warrior, T5 gear with T5 weapon/shield.

Assume ideal conditions and perfect threat cycle.

Not even remotely enough information given. Group composition, raid makeup, boss debuffs, boss fight, fight duration, etc.

Go look at the TPS thread "WWS: Sustained TPS" or something.

You should be able to achieve over a thousand quite readily now. As for perfect cycles - well, what Xav said^.

Well, I was just looking for a sort of ballpark estimate. I was intentionally light on the particulars so that you guys could be as free with your answers as you wanted to be. Most of the question was because we had a warrior app to our guild who claimed he could meet 1300 DPS regularly, and our main tank balked at that number as unrealistic.

Looking at a random WWS on a Teron kill (I picked this one from the lot), it looked like Abananax's MT was putting out 1190 or 1119 TPS, depending on whose math you believe, and it looked like he had a feral druid, enhancement shaman, AND a ret paladin in his group, which would seem rather stacked from my perspective. And that warrior has better gear than our warrior applicant.

It is likely that he was looking at Omen and saw 1300 from a crit spike or something and went "oh, I think I'm doing 1300 TPS", and that there is no attempted trickery going on. What do you guys think?

Also, as a dumb question:
If the tank is only putting out 1200 TPS, how on earth is a DPS warrior putting out 2300 DPS and not pulling aggro? He didnt die and soulstone, and he doesn't have a threat dump. Colour me confused.

1300+ tps sustained is easy, that's how much I sustain on Gorefiend on a bad night with very few group buffs. 1500+ is possible with a stacked group and such.

The likely scenario is your main tank is bad, and Abananax's main tank is bad. (To support this correct statement of mine: Hellas is basically not even using revenge. Grats. Also is doing far under the maximum number of shield slams.)
Although I looked into it more and the threat calculator isn't counting any threat from Execute, which Hellas used. It would be a minor gain, 8000 threat * .8 [battle stance passive] = 6400 more threat over 146 seconds, or 43 tps higher than the calculator displays for that log). Regardless, using Execute over maximizing your shield slams/revenges is hilariously bad, as a crit shield slam alone can do 2000 damage. It's the most efficient and damaging ability a warrior has, next to Revenge.

The dps warrior can also dump a lot of extra threat at the end and actually overcome and out-threat the main tank, as long as he stays under the 10% threshhold.

The best way to handle applicant warriors and figuring out if they know how to generate threat is to ask them to link several WWS reports, not just from Teron, and compare them to someone who reliably puts out very good numbers. People claiming they generate good TPS when the highest DPS in their guild is 1600 isn't going to fit in very well with a guild with people all consistently pushing 2000+, most likely.

Edit..

I went back and tested it out with two arrays of swing speeds (one normal and one with a parry at each interval of 1%) and came up with an average difference of 23.96039604. When I increased the interval frequency from 1% to .1%, I got 23.9960039960064, so it appears to be approaching 24%.

I'm old and it's been a really long time since I've had hard math classes, but I am having trouble accounting for the difference. It seems to be approaching 24%. Check out the two tabs in this spreadsheet for 1% and .1% intervals.

Google Docs - parry hastened2

Am I off here?

Hey guys, is it possible to get below 490 defense so that you're no longer crit immune so long as you have shield block up?

I've just been assuming critical hits take priority over block, but if that's not the case maybe I could stack even more stamina at the cost of even more avoidance for some situations..

The question is, does the table go like this: (like it says in the guide here)

Miss > Dodge > Parry > Block > Crushing > Crit

or more like this:

Miss > Crit > Dodge > Parry > Block > Crushing

Has anyone tested it out?

The combat table is

Miss > Dodge > Parry > Block > Crit > Crush > Hit

Satrina has done extensive testing to make sure that's the case, and indeed, you cannot simultaneously be crit by a mob whilst blocking it as well.

I'd add that it's (probably) a bad idea to rely on Shield Block to push off crits however. It'll work, sure, but a setup that doesn't have at least 490 defense is going to have it happen a lot more that your Shield Block charges are used up before you can use Shield Block again. And if you don't have at least 490 defense that doesn't just leave you open to a Crushing Blow for 1.5 times the damage, but also mean you have a chance to be hit for twice as much damage.

Getting 490 defense isn't particularly hard and does help a good amount on reducing the spikiness of the damage you take.

As you said though, it could be used in some specific situations, but I can't really imagine many situations where getting stamina higher is so important which doesn't involve a situation where your Shield Block charges can potentially run out at the same time.

Heroic strike changes that TPS value a bit.

Fun fact: on ZA speed runs with an enhancement shaman and feral druid in my group, 1500+ sustained TPS was really easy to do and I could actually reach 2000+ TPS while heroism was up.

Quite funny, I run with exactly 2 of the 3 sets you mentioned here.

I usually get stuck in with a feral druid (5% more crit) and a shaman (either windfury or agi/flametongue, dependant on group composition/boss fight)

Scenario 1 : 1K - 1.1K TPS, having (really) low expertise, 90ish hit rating thanks to the lack of terron gloves/brutaliser
Scenario 2 : 1.3K - 1.4K TPS, especially good on trash, 4/5 setbonus T5 pwning and expertise bracers/neck making up for any unlucky start
Scenario 3 : 1K - 1.1K TPS, this was back in the days of SSC/TKE

I kinda like flametongue btw, a fixed amount of extra threat and with devastate/heroic strike rage spam macro it is a certain extra 50 (resistable) extra damage per melee sequence, where shield block isn't up often (a.k.a. trash)

A further nitpick: Since you'll have to be in battle/zerker to execute it'll be 1.25 * 0.8 = 1 threat per damage.

I have read through almost all of this thread and others regarding spec. I have never been a fan of improved taunt in a raid environment. 5 mans its great. So I am wondering what the logic is behind almost all specs I see having improved taunt.

It's been discussed a few times in this thread already -- I would suggest you take the time to review those discussions, but generally speaking a lot of people who have it now, do so for raids that really push hard on trash. It's a good talent for 5man content as well.

Going into Sunwell, a couple of the bosses are tauntable, so many people will take it for that.