Mister Joshua

One could also use Glyph of Barbaric Insults for a 2nd taunt, couldn't they? I personally doubt it's worth using up a Major Glyph slot for it, but that's just me. I'm crossing my fingers for some tank-oriented throwing weapons in Northrend - I use my S3 throwing axe when I tank now.

 

• Jamor

I am pretty sure it's because you don't see them enough, and possibly because of your gear level, cause I am not really sure how you could say this.

Druids fully decked in Sunwell gear can produce massive amounts of threat, really good DPS while tanking, and have very similar mitigation as warriors. Their DPS while AE tanking is really high as well. Paladins are still incredible AE tanks, and now can easily produce enough single target threat and DPS to tank bosses as well as any class. Also remebmer they are still missing their Shield Slam, which they don't get until lvl 75. So they are going to only get better. Plus, when you have one in the raid with BoSanc -- hi infinite rage.

Well, we do get heroic throw at 80 -- so that will help.

 

Kannojo

Very well then!

I was under the assumption that no class/person/spec will be able to attain the armor cap at level 80. I should have clarified. I was thinking (But not really typing) about defensive statistics. This would seemingly make them not nearly as advantageous as they were early on in BC due to them getting 35880 (nearly) in clefthoof/kara armor/items alone. Obviously now is a different story. The TBC is over however in 16 days (essentially ended october 14th 2008)

I personally don't think threat will really ever be as big of an issue anymore for any of the tank classes. Whether it be AoE or single target encounters. They all seem to perform marvelously at this moment in time.

 

• Jamor

I think Blizz will have to do some balancing still.

I haven't been on beta much lately, but for awhile Druids had the most threat, highest HP and best mitigation. So even though the lost armor (and they were getting back close to the cap from what I understand), they were still doing very well.

Paladin and warrior are going to be very close either way, because the mechanics are so similar.

I think the big balance will be getting DK correct. For a while (not sure if it's still the case), they were doing DPS type numbers while tanking, and I think their scaling will get really good a higher gear levels.

I really think Blizz needs to focus on keeping tank DPS close -- I have heard GC say things like "threat is fine, so it shouldn't matter" -- but the fact is, if one tank can do 1.5K more DPS than another, there is clear advantage there -- theat and mitigation being the same of course. But at this point, I am going to reserve judgment until problems come up.

 

Bakabon

Is strength better than dodge rating for tank survivability?

I’m not the best at math, so these calculations may be way off, but here goes…

I am assuming that % avoidance is equal to % mitigation for the sake of comparison. I know this is only true in the long run.

First, let’s calculate how much block value 1 point of strength gives. I will assume all of the appropriate talents, but will not count Kings. Therefore, there is a 6% increase in strength, and a 30% increase in block value. Critical block means that 30% of the time, block value will be doubled. Finally I will assume that Shield Block is always being used, which means it will be up 2/5 of the time. So,

1 strength = 1.06/2*1.3*(1+2*0.3)*(1+2/5) = 1.54 BV

Now, let’s calculate how much mitigation 1 strength will give. I will assume that the mob will hit for 4000 damage. This is arbitrary, but it is twice the average damage of the last Sunwell boss on a tank, according to Wowwiki.

Since not every hit will be blocked, we must calculate the % of time block value will reduce incoming damage. I will assume that the chance of blocking compared to the mob hitting is 1:1 (say 30% each). This seems like a conservative estimate. The ratio would of course go up if someone is purposely stacking block rating. With a 1:1 ratio, damage on what would be a hit will be reduced 3/5*.5 + 2/5 (due to shield block) or 70% of the time,

With these assumptions,

% Mitigation per point of strength = ((4000-1.54*.7)-4000)/4000 = .027% mitigation

At level 80, each point of dodge rating provides 1/39.35 = .025% avoidance

So each point of strength provides more mitigation than dodge rating provides avoidance.

Obviously, the result will depend on how hard the tank is getting hit, how much BV you already have, etc. But this seems to show that dodge rating and BV are at least on the same order of magnitude.

Other factors include the fact that the BV mitigation improves with greater armor. Strength also greatly increases SS damage, and AP, thus increasing threat and DPS. Dodge rating has diminishing returns, whereas Block rating doesn’t.

All things considered, it seems like stacking strength might be better than stacking dodge rating for tanking overall. Where am I wrong? If someone could provide a more thorough calculation, that would be great!

 

Harne

I haven't had a chance to check the rest of your math, but the average damage you are assuming is way too low because of the mechanics of the Kiljaeden fight. A more realistic average hit from Sunwell is around 5000 from a boss like Brutallus or Kalecgos. If you do the same arbitrary doubling of that damage to 10,000, your calculation of mitigation per strength drops considerably. Assuming the rest of your calculations are correct, it ends up being more like 0.01% per strength.

 

Bakabon

Good point. I've never been to Sunwell so thanks for those more appropriate numbers. Even so, given diminishing returns on avoidance, there may be a gearing point where strength surpasses dodge rating on survival considerations alone. The idea that the numbers even with the 10,000 hit assumption are so close is shocking to me though, considering the threat/DPS advantage strength gives.

 

Warrok

I've also thought about the implications the new block value (BLV) scaling of strength has. There are some additional points to consider:
a) How worthy is Block Rating? Before 3.0 it was largely ignored due to the fact that you could spam Shield Block and only had real use for passive uncrushable sets. Now it should be considered a nice mitigation stat, that scales with STR, BLV and Critical Block.
b) STR vs AP vs direct BLV for threat purposes, where are the crossover points? It seems obvious, that AP is a pure threat stat but is somewhat easier to get on some slots and via buffs and that BLV should be better for mitigation than STR but lacks the AP for some abilities.

 

Rathil

ok guys so do Ap have anything to do with tank surv? is it worth including armored to the teeth in u`r spec for this sake?

 

Qwik

I'll answer your question with a previous post... and expand on it

Since most of the tanking skills now scale with AP, the more AP you have, the more threat you will generate. I wouldn't include it for its survivability, but I would include it in a tanking spec, just because it's more tps at the cost of no additional rage or item stats (since your tanking gear is going to be loaded with armor, anyway).

 

Alhoe

Hello I thought about possible Level 80 specs and in particular about impale and its effect on threat. I have seen many builds from people including impale. My problem is I made some calculations and don't think impale is as good for a Prot Warrior as many people think but in other forums I asked no one really answered. There are now more or less two possibilities:
- My ideas are so wrong and so stupid that they ignore them (I hope not)
- They just don't wnat to hear it.

Well I try it again Here are first my assumptions for the calculation. I used impale friendly assumptions because I don't want to argue about 1% crit more or less ore 1% yellow damage more or less:

- 100% yellow damage
- 40% crit
- no not damage threat (threat = 2.07*damage)

So let's calculate:

Damage without any crit is 100 for me. That means damage with 40% crit and without impale is 140. This is the base value of my calculation of which I want to calculate the improve through impale.

The crit part of your damage is 80/140 = 57.14% (rounded) which leaves 42.86% noncrit part. Impale increases the crit part of your damage by 10% (yes this is the same as increasing only the bonuspart of the crit by 20%: 0.5x + 0.5*1.2x = 1.1x). That means:

threatFactor = 0.5714*1.1 + 0.4286 = 1.05714

So that means with the stats above you increase your damage and in this calculation your threat with impale by 5.714%. Sounds good for a 2pt talent? Not really because you must take talents that are useless from my point of view. In fact taking impale would lead me to use 5 points I don't want and 2 points impale itself.

So what do you mean? Are this thoughts so wrong? Did I made a misstake in my calculation which makes impale better?

 

Zegai

Of the 5 points, 3 are hardly useless (Imp HS is still useful, even if less so than AtT for example).

And you can also get Deep Wounds, which could be good. When I did some simulations, it would be up to 10% of a prot warrior's damage.

Cruelty synergizes well with both as well - haven't done any simulations, but a 15/5/51 with Impale, Deep Wounds and Cruelty 5/5 (as opposed to AtT, but I'm not sure there, might have to calc a bit) could be the max threat spec. If you aren't taking Deep Wounds, however, I wouldn't take Impale either.

And I sincerely doubt threat will not be a concern forever. Remember, ungeared 2.X tanks could generate a very fair amount of threat, that scaled at a far smaller pace than DPS. They even introduced expertise to help out there, but it certainly didn't solve everything. And from what I see, the same will happen again.

edit: fixed some typos.

 

Alhoe

Yes perhaps with 80 my weighting of some talents especially concerning threat talents will change but at the moment it is difficult for me to imagine that we will be rage starved again. Even without a prot pally in group it is very difficult to blow out rage at the moment. Sure my gear is not High End but not as bad it could be.

Perhaps there are some beta warriors who could tell us that this will change.

Well 15/5/51 as threat focused build looks nice but because of the reasons above at the beginning of level 80 raiding I would never take this. First I am going to take a Avoidance/Mitigation focused build and if I get problems with threat I change some points. 15/5/51 is then my last possibility if it is again like 2.4

Edit: Oh and thank you for confirm that impale alone is not as good as it looks like^^

 

JamesVZ

Why wouldn't you take Impale if you're giving up Deep Wounds in favor of Armored to the teeth? Impale is a solid talent all the way around, what else would you take for a damage increase over Impale? As far as Deep Wounds vs Armored to the Teeth, my personal hunch is Armored to the Teeth will pull far, far ahead. I'm running 20k armor right now, that's 300-400 attack power depending on buffs. I don't think 30-35k is too far fetched for a raid buffed armor range later in the raid game, which comes out to 500-600 attack power depending. That's a LOT of extra threat that applies to everything, whereas Deep Wounds will only be good versus single targets, if it's that good at all.

I dunno, 12/8/51 seems like the way to go for me, with my gut telling me Impale will pull ahead of Improved Revenge for damage/threat (and if not, it will be close enough that the universal application of Impale will still make it the clear choice).

EDIT: I also think you guys are downplaying the effect of Improved Charge, which is absolutely massive in application, and at least appreciable on the math side of things.

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In regards to Icecrown Radiance:

 

Zegai

As I said, I haven't done the simulation again in a while - when I did, even though the talents weren't much different from today, I simply guesstimated the stats from gear.

Stats:
I also considered all the +15% crit talents as base, and Focused Rage as well. Stats guessed were:
* Crit ~25% raid buffed (might be 3-5% off, however, that would change some things a bit, especially Cruelty vs Impale/Deep Wounds)
* Hit and expertise ~5%
* BV 550 (just from gear)
* STR 650 (base+gear, no talents/kings)
* Swing: 210 dmg, 1.6 speed
* Armor: 27000
(Considered all the common melee buffs, even though this doesn't show that)

When I did it, my results were (% is +TPS% per talent point spent on the talent alone):
Teron Gorefiend-like fight, reasonable inc. rage:
1,34% Gag Order
1,41% Imp Revenge
0,32% Puncture
0,45% Imp HS
2,81% Impale
2,27% Deep Wounds
0,91% Cruelty
1,66% Armored

No external inc. rage:
1,25% Gag Order
1,70% Imp Revenge
2,36% Puncture
0% Imp HS
3,01% Impale
3,34% Deep Wounds
0,69% Cruelty
2,81% Armored

I do intend to redo this with "real" stats, when I have the time. Also, I want to find out if the same bug that affects Bloodthirst crits' deep wounds also affects Revenge/Shield Slam (I assume they don't affect Devastate/HS since they are weapon damage based), since if that happens, yeah, Deep Wounds gets hit hard.

So, taking what I say here with suspicion is fine, really.

Also, Imp. Revenge only increases the base damage component (which is a shame). I THINK I considered it affecting all the damage when I did the simulation, and it would bring the %increase down a bit.

 

JamesVZ

Revenge says it requires a melee weapon, so that would be something to test re: Deep Wounds, for sure. One thing I think you're overlooking is the difference in AE threat between Impale and Improved Revenge (and Deep Wounds for that matter). Deep Wounds basically only affects Cleave, whereas Impale affects Thunderclap, Shockwave, and Cleave. Even if you fall slightly behind in single target threat, it'd be worth it to pick up Impale for that reason alone, imo.

I'd say your crit numbers are off a smidge, too. I'm running around 18-20% raid buffed right now, tack on another 15% for almost all of my abilities and that's a pretty significant difference, and I don't even have Cruelty right now. Crit rate may go down in Wrath, but I'd suspect not.

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In regards to Icecrown Radiance:

 

Zegai

Ah, yes, my analysis was quite simply single-target threat.

AoE threat is a bit more difficult, since you'd have to assume a few values. If I end up making my simulator again, I might do something for AoE threat. But, yeah, all the values are for single target threat.

@Crit: When I did the estimation, my char screen crit @ beta was something like 12%, then I added in the buffs. I might have overlooked talent specs, even though I don't think I had Cruelty specced.
They might have changed a bit the formulas since then as well - I run with 9% unbuffed crit on live, which goes to ~20% buffed as well.

 

• Jamor

I am in agreement with James here in a couple of respects --

1) I really like that spec -- I view it as a standard warrior spec at 80 with the two points in Imp Spell Reflect being "float" points which can be moved easily. I really like Impale as a talent choice. Mostly because it's better for OT and DPS than Revenge.

2) I also agree that Imp Charge is huge. Def. going to be in pretty much any spec I come up with. Very underatted. The only points that I wouldn't normally spend is Imp HS -- and even those aren't "wasted".

 

JamesVZ

Definitely on the Spell Reflect. If you find you're lacking the threat output, you may move those two over to Improved Revenge or something. I like the talent a lot for 5 mans, though, since it covers your whole party fully talented, which is extremely nice if a caster is in the back going nuts on your healer. Definitely one of the more interesting talents in our arsenal.

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In regards to Icecrown Radiance:

 

Zegai

Well, doing some testing.

Findings:
- Currently, Shield Slam procs your Deep Wounds damage as if you had no weapon equipped.
- Revenge, Devastate and Heroic Strike proc your normal Deep Wounds damage.

 

• Jamor

Yeah, that's not good. I figured that for some reason, prot and deep wounds would be a bad combo. Mostly because such a small main hand -- but the sheild slam issue makes it a definite no.

 

Alhoe

Some questions:

Why is impale a higher threat increase with less rage? In fact the yellow part of damage should be smaller which leads to a lower effect of impale. In fact most of the numbers don't really fit my combat log (gag order e.g. looks more like 2% in my logs)

In which situation you missed imp. charge (or if you specced it you thought that it was important)?

I specced imp. HS before 3.0.1, too. But at the moment it simply is wasted points.

My crystal orb doesn't tell me how it looks at 80 but if it doesn't change completly: Less incomming damage > more threat. And don't undervalue the block chance of Shield Specialization. Block Chance is far more important without a allways up shield block.

Well I guess we will see some different speccs at 80

 

Zegai

Alhoe: you can basically maintain your rotation. As I said, these were simulated using somewhat rough estimations of stats and I may have not iterated enough on it.
I think, however, it has something to do with Heroic Strike - it is a huge part of our threat, and not using it (eg rage starvation) lowers our total threat considerably. The difference is pretty small though, so it may be (probably is) related to not enough iterations.

Every calculation there is basically a base spec that gives a base number and a spec with 1 talent point on talent X. You could probably do that in a spreadsheet as well, but spreadsheets aren't that good to simulate rage.

I'm thinking of doing a more elaborate one to run these, but I have a very serious issue with gathering data (equip data, etc).

@Jamor: I think it is a bug, but, yes, if it stays like this it cuts a lot of its effectiveness. However, of the two main Naxx-25-level tank weapons, one of them is a 2.50 speed sword. Might calculate it with/without deep wounds and see how it all fares, could have interesting results.

 

Kethas

Couple questions concerning the new 3.0 mechanics. (Ninja edit: Okay, several.)

1) I know the new priority list for abilities is SnB SS > Rev > Norm SS > Dev. It's easy enough to say to prioritize SnB SS's over revenge if both are available for a particular GCD, but because Revenge's 5sec cooldown doesn't line up with GCDs, I often find myself, when SnB doesn't proc for several attacks in a row, with the option of either hitting a normal SS (or a Devastate) immediately, or pausing for 0.5 - 1.0 seconds and then hitting Revenge. Does anyone have any quantitative insight into how long a pause for a Revenge before the next GCD is "worth it"? Put another way, in the theoretical total absence of SnB procs, what is the highest-threat rotation (which is now deterministic), and does it include pauses?

2) On a related note, tanking ability selection is now a lot less rote - we need to watch for SnB procs. I find that sometimes the SnB proc appears very late into the GCD, so I have little time to react and may incorrectly hit Devastate instead of using the SnB proc. Prior to 3.0 I was a big advocate of not tanking via macro so as to relinquish as little control as possible of which abilities I use, but now I'm tempted to change my Devastate button into

... with the appropriate additions to remove the error message when SS is, in fact, on cooldown. Anyone else thought of/tried this?

3) Shockwave is a four-second stun on a 20-second cooldown. My question concerns how diminishing returns affect successive casts of Shockwave. WoWWiki says that, in PvP, DRs reset when a particular debuff type hasn't been on a mob for 15 seconds; this is supported in the 1.4 patch notes. Neither explicitly mention PvE DRs. I seem to remember DRs in PvE resetting as of 20 seconds from the *application* of the first (un-DR'd) debuff. For example, I distinctly remember that on Sartura, NECB would start a 20 second timer when you conc blow'd something, and stuns applied after that timer lasted the full duration again. So, as an aside, could someone explain when PvE DRs reset?

My point, though, is that according to the above DR reset models, consecutive shockwaves should never be subject to DRs, provided that no other stuns are applied to the mob(s). There's 20 seconds + lag + reflexes between casts. However, I've noticed that when I'm spamming Shockwave as fast as possible, the second cast + subsequent casts sometimes only stun for two seconds. Is this just because of lag affecting the time the server thinks I'm applying Shockwave? How long do I need to wait between uses to guarantee no DR's on the stun component?

4) Simpler question: as of 3.0, is DW devastate still the best threat/dps when not actively tanking, or is it devastate spam with a shield + use any SnB procs you get?

 

• Valoran

1)Shield Slam is always better than Revenge for threat, the only exception being in a rage starved situation. If you've got the rage for it and you want to do the highest TPS rather than TPR, use SS.

2)Such a macro will not work at all. It will attempt to cast shield slam regardless and will fail to progress any further down the macro. "/cast Devastate" won't even be evaluated. Personally, I haven't had any problems watching for SnB, the sound has generally provided me enough of a signal. If you're really having issue missing procs, you could setup a SCT/Parrot event to spam you with a text warning (and even add custom sound event), or use a notification mod like TellMeWhen or Power Auras.

4)If you're in tanking gear with decent levels of strength (note: strength, not attack power) and block value, sticking a shield on and using SS when possible will always out threat pure devastate spam.