Fellwraith

It's not potion sickness, you just can't drink more than one health potion per combat. The cooldown for your potion timer doesn't start until after combat is over.

 

• Jamor

I am thinking they will be putting the new gear in, as they are changing class mechanics around the new gear.
I think saying things like "if they put in the reitimized gear, it's going to kill raiding" is a little bit much, don't you think?
Does it look on paper that we will be losing some avoidance? Yes. Are there things blizzard can do to off-set that? Yes. Simply changing sunwell radiance from -20% dodge to -10% dodge would more than make up for what we are losing. I understand your concern about Muru not being affected by the radiance buff, it's legit. But I have been slowly dropping avoidance on that fight over the course of farming, and I still never die on P1 (Sent tank). Or it could be that with the new healing talents, and tanking talents, that they feel it's enough to off-set things. They have said many times that if numbers don't work, it's pretty easy to change them. This is one of those cases.

Fellwraith,

To your point on chaining Ironsheilds -- I don't think they are going to put in that mechanic until WoTLK. It's just a hunch obviously.

 

Lithose

I'm actually planning to get the numbers down tonight, MMO-champ was cool enough to do a side by side of all the changed gear and I am expecting an 8-10% loss in over-all avoidance. However, there are substantial gains being made in general survivability, such as, a 2.6% raw avoidance gain from talents and talented survival skills.

According to a first glance estimate, the new gear, assuming mostly t6ish/mid sunwell, should give a warrior arond 700-800 block value. If we take brut as an example, due to his dual wield mechanic, he will hit, during a stomp, for about 12k per 1.8ish seconds? (9k-10k main/2kish off).Activating shield block during that time will take 1500 damage off both the main hand *and* off hand attacks, effectively reducing his round damage by 3k, or nearly a 25% reduction in total damage. (This math is fuzzy right now, I need to look at my WWS, but its not far off from how it will be.)..In other words, the mitigation provided by improved shield block should absolutely trivialize stomps if used at the start of each stomp because of how much will be absorbed and the unlimited charges.

Combine this with a 4 minute shield wall, 5 minute last stand and you can have a "big" damage reduction/Health pool extension ability available for *every* stomp. (Shield wall-->Nightmare/Trinket-->Last Stand--->Shield wall.)..For felmyst its the same thing, and even for Kal, the ability to use shield wall twice in a single fight is a big one, it shouldn't be overlooked.

Lastly, we do lose stone shields..But, we gain a plethora of buffs that, at least in my case, I couldn't get before due to group comp. Devotion aura for example was not something available to me due to how SP/Paladins worked, but now I will have the new and improved devo aura, providing me with 1500 armor and +3% healing, I'll also have 3% damage reduction from grace/sanct,..

Now, granted, we will be missing a few important debuffs that use to stack, like insect/scorpid, ect....and we are leaving out the down-ranking changes, which could greatly affect healing. However, as far as tanks go, there have been many raid changes that definetly have increased our survivability.

 

ioguolo

I would not be surprised if they decided to take out Sunwell Radiance or maybe tone it down in 3.0. With all of the changes, does it not fix, or attempt to fix the issues they put it there in the first place?

 

ryofu

Hi

i have a question regarding devastate that i hope someone on the forum can enlighten me regarding.

After 5 sunders on the boss, if i use devastate does it still generate the +301 threat from the inbuilt sunder armor? or does it only deal it's normal devastate +104 + (14xsunder armor) threat?

Can someone pls explain how the threat mechanics of devastate works

regards

 

Kethas

Hi all; I have some questions regarding optimal warrior threat gearing.

Usually my guild's protadin tanks Teron (sample WWS); today I had the chance to do so (WWS). Based on those logs, he has:
-56.9% avoidance
-Average incoming melee hit of 6330
-280k incoming damage total
-1615 tps
-Devo aura, sanc aura, battleshout
-Fight lasted 3'25"

I had:
-35.7% avoidance
-Average incoming melee hit of 6270
-490k incoming damage total
-1470 tps
-Devo aura, battleshout
-Fight lasted 3'53"

I was almost never rage-starved (note 99 HS to 10 white swings while maintaining a decent 1xSS:1xRev:2xDev ratio) and had no group threat synergy. A single destro lock was able to creep up to ~115% of my threat in the last 20 seconds, presumably after he popped his seconds series of cooldowns; for the rest of the fight I had a clear lead over everyone.

Looking at the above results, is s4/hit/expertise the wrong gear selection for a warrior threat set? (Some of the difference is explainable by the paladin's opting out completely from expertise gear, leading to him dying inside of a GCD every once in a while, but I digress...) What does a warrior tank offer on farm content boss kills over a protadin, if anything? (Last stand, shield wall, etc. etc. are obvious. I'm curious if there's anything in the different tanking mechanics or gearing options.) Does the superior survivability of a warrior tank in mitigation gear support his rule as a survivability tank for harder-hitting bosses (ex. Azgalor, 8k hit + 9k cleave) compared to a protadin, regardless of differences on farm content (ex. Teron, 6.5k hit, no instants)?

Another aspect of my concern: dropping your avoidance % seems to be a key part of a warrior threat set so that you smooth out your rage gen and eliminate the chance of an avoidance string at the start of the fight. While paladins also benefit from dropping their avoidance, it clearly isn't as urgent an issue for them, as the above protadin's WWS shows. Does this mean that a warrior in a threat set will necessarily take more damage than a paladin? Is there an alternate set of threat stats that can be used to avoid this?

I'm concerned because at the moment I'm competing with a protadin recruited around when I was for a new MT slot, a competition I'm losing. The protadin has a clear TPS advantage, and as I prefer to stack expertise to avoid parry haste and make my incoming damage more regular, I "waste" itemization on a stat that won't show up in any meters officers compare. I always assumed that warriors were more survivable than protadins, so seeing the above difference in avoidance was an unwelcome surprise - granted, this was in a threat set, not mitigation.

Thanks for any input.

 

Kethas

From the guide at the start of this thread:
... which is from WoWWiki, which appears to be, in turn, from here. So, that was accurate as of a year ago.

 

ioguolo

Kathas with so much incoming damage, are you not at 100 rage all the time? At first glance, I don't think you are even able to rage dump to the point of the next hit puts you back to 100.

I suppose if it's farmed out content and your healers don't mind healing 210k more it's ok, but I would think you could put on a little more avoidance and still meet your threat goals.

 

Liar

You should have compared the group compositions before you started to panic really. He gets Drums (1), Heroism (1), Unleashed Rage, Battleshout and Commanding Shout which pretty much indicates that he was in a melee DPS group unlike you. Obviously, a tank (him) in a DPS group is going to do more threat than a tank that is not (you) (Also, Teron is a Demon so he can use Exorcism on cooldown for extra threat but that isn't the deal breaker here). Your Teron parse also lasted 30 secs longer which reduces overall TPS on top of it. CoR and FF were also not used in your parse but on the Paladins (you really should slap your Warlocks around; they used CoD and CoA over CoR. Seriously?).
Do I really need to go on?


Some general info:

I tank Teron in a expertise/hit heavy setup (hit food on top to bring me close to the gap) and drop avoidance socketed T6 for Stamina socketed ones. BV like the trinket you used is secondary to capping expertise and hit so I usually don't have much of that personally. And yes, expertise helps quite alot with reducing parry hasted burst so that's a nice bonus on top of threat. I generally do not Shield Block if I need rage (like you, I assume) unless I drop below 10-11k health which is pretty much how much a crush would hit for. Make sure you get CoR and FF. Make sure you get a Shammy for WF and Hero and feel free to pop Recklessness during Heroism for extra threat (it's what I do from time to time) but do not risk getting crushed during it. Maybe other people want to add some more stuff, but that's pretty much it from me.

EDIT: Seems I forgot to mention it but you really dropped way too much avoidance there. You should aim for something around 50% avoidance, 36% is just way too low.

Unexpected TankPoints error Clearly someone doesn't understand how EH works. That, or upgrading from T8 to T9 is optional in beating Arthas. Clearly.

 

zork

I just checked your data and I think you did really well.

Your fight length was 233 seconds. In that time you did 143 specials. 143 special cost you 214.5 seconds to perform. There is a gap of ~18 seconds but over the course of the pull and the length of the fight the delay is lower than 0.1 per second.

You forgot to add your crits.

Specials:
Shield Slam: 27 hits, 9 crits
Revenge: 26 hits, 9 crits
Devastate: 64 hits, 7 crits, 1 misses

Swings:
Heroic Strike: 95 hits, 25 crits, 4 misses
White hits: 10 hits (incl. 5 glancings), 5 crits

Thats 139 swings which net into ~1.67 swings a second.

You did over 1400 tps without having without having Bloodlust and Windfury Totem (1233 tps without healing threat).
You missed 5 hits though, but no hit got parried (which is good), so you probably only had ~7.23% hit in that fight.

The only way to do any better is to get that last tiny bit of % to hit and a shaman for windfury and bloodlust in your group.

Dropping avoidance in favor of expertise/hit/stamina-gear will net into more rage from damage get, thus you will be capable of doing Heroic strikes 24/7.

BLOG [ZIB] _ GUILD [TDMOG] _ INTERFACE [ROTHUI] _ CHAR [ROTHAR]

 

Mode

He was actually missing more than that. SOE, GOA, windfury, and UR add up to about 150 TPS for him. The paladin got an enhance shaman of his own, COR, JOTC, a drummer, and three paladins for buffs, whereas he didn't have a shaman at all, he didn't get COR or JOTC, no drummer, and only had one paladin for buffs, meaning he was missing either BOM or BOK. Finally, the paladin was running an (almost) max threat build while he was running a fairly typical main tank build.

 

Efreet

A few things, though some of it may have been stated in essence. For one: threat and avoidance are inversely related for warriors, in essentially every case, for another you can produce more than enough threat in full avoidance on every boss in the game. Now, if you have no group synergy whatsoever that's a bit more of an issue, but functionally unrelated to your threat production (set a base value for your TPS and add in X% from what variables could have been there). A paladin is by default going to take less damage from Gorefiend since he will only have maybe 1-2 candidates for Crushing Blows in the entire fight, if that, and you'll have 5-10 with shield blocking, maybe 30-40 without (not a serious issue in Sunwell by comparison).

If you want to maximize your TPS with a full group shoot for ~1900 on Gorefiend (or alternatively 1400 on Naj'entus) with one BL, but be aware you're going to take even more damage in that sort of threat suit and may occasionally get double crushed. Gorefiend is easily healable no matter what you do provided you have 4 piece T6 quality of gear and keep maybe 50% tanking gear on in comparison to DPS/hybrid pieces, but it doesn't mean you won't get blamed for the damage intake. Threat above around 1800 is essentially wasted no matter how good your DPS is, and you could kill Gorefiend with maybe 700-800 TPS (though it would be badly executed and take a while) or 1100-1200 with an easy kill maintaining much less damage intake. Could possibly put together an uncrushable set for just Gorefiend and put out 1400-1600 in a decent group depending on your gear and the difference between you and the paladin would be minimal, maybe taking slightly more damage overall.

Edit: Probably not taking much more damage in a maximum threat suit, being that he's relatively close at current, if you have infinite rage and you have that much damage gear on Devastate is going to be much better than revenge in the long run.

 

• Jamor

I am not sure how good or bad your DPS is, but in full Sunwell avoidance gear, it can be very difficult (due to rage starvation), to tank some bosses at times. Najentus is one that comes to mind. Full SW avoidance gear on Teron can lead to a lot of time without rage as well.

 

Efreet

Enough threat meaning enough to kill the boss a la beat the enrage timer, I'd say around 1400-1500 is "enough" in the sense that the majority of your DPS won't have to hold back very much and 2000+ is enough that your hunters don't have to feign death. But eh, even with only 20% of the hits landing you can probably still do say 1100-1200 TPS with all that expertise, presuming you preserve the 4 piece bonus and use 1HWS, which is functionally more than enough, even if it irritates your DPS. If you're physically immune or close a problem could arise where you couldn't put out the necessary 600-1000 depending on the boss (maybe 1100 on Brutallus? Something like that). Not saying more threat isn't good just saying it's possible to function without it (presuming you don't miss reflects on Council or M'uru). If they remove Sunwell Radiance it may be hard to put out 1100 on Brutallus with say 50-55% dodge and 25% parry, but that's a pretty extreme case and doesn't apply yet.

Edit: Might be hard to put out the mandatory threat for Entropius as well, but of course that's what weapon swapping is for.

 

Liar

It's not landing the hits that's the problem, it's getting hit for rage that is. It really is a dumb idea to even try Teron in full avoidance gear unless you really want to make the life of your DPS miserable for no reason at all. I personally don't like that we can't do it, but that's how it is currently. And 1400-1500 TPS sounds really excessive considering that a boss will have less than 15-20% chance to even get past your avoidance so you can sustain your rotation. 1400 TPS is assuming frequent Heroic Strikes (But maybe you are meaning DPS instead of TPS? Since we can't sustain 2000 TPS in full threat gear either; your post is not really clear about it. That would still be around 1000 TPS sustained (assuming BoS and a 10% threat reduction via talents which is just not doable without a good amount of HSes I'd say).

Really, the only fights where you can get away with high avoidance in T6+ content are Kalecgos because DPS is going to split DPS over two different realms, Bloodboil since the bulk of the DPS is being done in a phase where there is no aggro (and even then it's iffy), Mother because everyone is in SR gear, Council because of the loads of environment damage and the unavoidable DoT from one of the Judgements and maybe Illidan depending on how lucky you are during transitions.

Unexpected TankPoints error Clearly someone doesn't understand how EH works. That, or upgrading from T8 to T9 is optional in beating Arthas. Clearly.

 

Efreet

You can sustain 2000 TPS in threat gear just it tends to only work on Teron or technically Naj if you can kill him in 60 seconds, even with only one BL, with 2 BLs you could probably sustain 2000 over the course of 4 or so minutes. When I say "threat" gear I'm talking armor pen DPS pieces: Gurtogg Legs, Stormrage Signet, maybe Choker of Serrated Blades depending, et cetera. More balanced pure tanking pieces and say double SBV trinkets hit capped/expertise capped will land somewhere in between 1500 and 2000 with just the one BL, probably capping out at 1800 with a sublime group and no particularly bad avoidance streaks. Armory the initial poster (Kethas) that started this discussion and my post(s) might make more sense (provided he's still wearing that same gear). I didn't say you could do 1400-1500 with avoidance gear, sorry if it's unclear.

 

Zegai

"In the patch where all your tanking gear changes, Sunwell Radiance is also being turned off.

[ Post edited by Daelo ]
Daelo
Lead Encounter Designer"

Even though it doesn't help with M'uru.. it'll be a net gain in avoidance for the rest of the instance.

 

• Jamor

You don't need a ton of avoidance with M'uru, at least for the Sents. I wear most of my threat set for that fight, and I don't ever die to burst on the Sents. Fully debuffing the sent and using armor pots is far more important than avoidance on them.

I have never tanked the sides, so I can't say for sure, but it seems like the shield block change, will be nice during flurry, and with shockwave stuns to back that up, and a metric fuck-ton more AE threat (so you can focus more on surviving), it shouldn't be that big a deal at all. We will probably take a bit more damage, but it shouldn't be horrible. Druid tanks are probably going to have more to worry about than us, as I am assuming they will be losing avoidance as well (I am pretty sure they are getting a new agi:dodge conversion).

 

Kethas

First off, thanks for all the replies.

I don't understand - yes, the parse was longer, but why would that necessarily lead to a lower TPS? Cooldowns (i.e. cooldowns that I'd pop the same number of times in a 3'20" and 4'00" fight, e.g. Autoblocker) don't play a significant part of my threat, and I'm not standing there looking handsome for that last 30 seconds, I'm doing the same stuff I have been for the previous 3'30".

A related question - one of our mages pointed out that while 1600 sustained TPS may be overkill, it's beneficial to have that kind of high threat at the start of the fight because DPS can burn cooldowns sooner, and thus be more likely to be able to pop them again later before a) the boss dies or b) someone screws up horribly and we wipe. While not justification for a high-threat tank in and of itself, it does seem like a legitimate point. Are there significant threat cooldowns a warrior tank can use to help at the start of fights? (Excluding other classes' abilities, e.g. Heroism) I like using the Autoblocker for partly that reason, and partly to help ensure somebody doesn't shank in the first ten seconds by critting their first few hits.

I certainly wouldn't want to get out of Defensive in the threat set I used for that fight, let alone pop Recklessness, but while in a better tank set it's a viable option I hadn't thought of.

Sigh. And this was after almost forgetting to add my misses and redoing the math. I need to stop posting at 4AM.

Why add GOA and WF threat together? You're never going to get two shamans... or do some guilds actually gift their tanks to that extent? I imagine my ideal threat group would be warrior, warrior, shaman, feral, and then, say, a BM hunter.

Also, where'd you get talent information from, just the armory? I can't find a link to the paladin's spec in the WWS, and mine is actually out of date - I've been using a 8/10/43 build for the last few weeks, as I like being able to put my own demo up even when another warrior has 5/5 up already.

The conversation's drifted towards discussing differences between the two WWS's and how to set up a tank threat set, which is valuable, but I was also curious as to the role of warriors vs. other tanking classes in late T6 tanking (Sunwell, say). Are the classes interchangeable? If not, why? What do warriors bring to the table that other classes can't? As I mentioned before, things like emergency abilities are obvious, I'm wondering if there are any important differences in the classes' tanking mechanics.

 

acx

Due to the way totem buffs are applied with a duration, it is possible for an enhancement shaman to spam cast both gift of air and windfury totem such that both buffs are up at the same time with only 1 shaman in the party.

 

Mode

The windfury totem buff doesn't go away when the totem does. A shaman can drop windfury, then drop GOA, and everyone's weapons will still have windfury. He just needs to do the windfury->GOA combo again before the buff runs out. Only an enhancement shaman will do this. They spend a lot of time out of the GCD, unlike ele and resto shaman who spam until their fingers ache.

Yes, I grabbed it from the armory. It's also pretty obvious from the WWS that he's 40/21; he never uses Avenger's Shield. WWS has a bad time guessing specs that drift outside the mainstream. It's probably programmed to look for the paladin 41 point talent to determine your main tree.

 

◊ Quigon

I'm not sure this directly answered his poorly written question though.

The answer is no, it does not apply sunder threat beyond the 5th application unless this was changed. Sunder armor as a lone ability does apply the application threat beyond the 5th application though, but this doesn't appear to be what you're asking - this was widely discussed in the very early Onyxia age, regarding "pushing off" sunder armor to get a fresh stack (most early guilds ignorantly did this because of some video or guide floating around).
Devastate has been through many versions - and only recently (= last year or so) did it apply sunder threat in addition to weapon threat, but only upon application or increase of the stack. In fact, for a few iterations, devastate was worse than sunder armor for aggro.

 

ioguolo

Has anyone seen or heard what Illidan shear is being changed to? I've been looking everywhere for the answer.

 

annerajb

They haven't said anything else apart from that they are removing it.

WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> Feral Concerns: Release date announced.

 

ioguolo

It makes sense if that is indeed true.