Xav

The thead has come to address more than just a "rotation", because obviously, there isn't a set rotation.

With the amount of viable abilities we have now, and how ingrained (most) of us are in the classic SS, Rev, Devx2 cycle, it's taking time to get used to using other abilities.

With the addition of S&B procs and Conc Blow and Shockwave, the space between Devastates is larger and larger. Regularly adding in Heroic Throw when it's off cooldown will further that gap. Thunderclap could easily be worth more than the devastate too, but I'd have to do the math to see if it outweighs the possible S&B proc from Devastate.

The point is, even if the abilities aren't able to be used constantly (heck, Conc Blow has a decent cooldown but I'm still using it every time its up), you should strive to not forget to use them when they ARE available.

The limiting factors would be if the encounter calls for a potential better use of the ability rather than for single target threat (adds spawning, picking up runners, period where you can't hit the boss in melee at all, etc)

The value of the thread though will be in determining which abilities are suitable to use in place of others without wondering, "Is this actually increasing my damage/threat?"

 

Yomon

I use a slow weapon and Thunderclap does more threat than Devastate as well. Hard to tell if a S&B proc can outweight this case, but as mentioned before a Thunderclap right before Shield Slam comes up again is better than a Devastate; a S&B procc would save 17-18 rage but would not add threat by itself.
Other than that I use the ability with expires sooner, because the extra threat is quite neglectable.

A thing that interest me is the choice of a threat weapon and enchant other tanks use. More threat is often not needed, but the more threat you have the less painful are farm raids. As a defensive weapon I have Broken Promise that with a speed of 2.5 is bad at threat - so for me a second weapon for threat is important.

The main question is the enchant. In TBC Executioner was the best enchant for threat, but is it still like that? At the moment I use the cheap and simple attack power enchant. But with Impale and Deep Wounds Mongoose seems to be good as well.

EDIT: With Devastate's lessened importance a Dagger like Webbed Death might be good or am I mistaken?

 

cylene

I don't suppose you have any WWS logs from fights with the use of improved rend? I can't say having 2 points in improved charge is of much use on raid bosses - but I'm not convinced the additional damage from improved rend would justify having it in your rotation from a dps perspective.

 

• Jamor

Your gear has a lot of hit on it because you are not geared in end-game gear. When you reach full 25 man raid gear, that hit becomes expertise. I would venture to guess that not many people are going out of their way to gem hit, but I have a yellow slot that I currently have gemmed for hit / stam. I am swapping to jewelcrafting this weekend, so that will be gone soon, but at defense cap, I don't see a huge reason to use defense/stam gems for yellow. Also, there are no raid buffs that increase melee hit at this point. The space goat hit aura is party only.

 

Fellwraith

I think it's also worth having people think about which abilities are getting a multiplicative benefit on the damage dealt and which fights have various types of damage multipliers.

If you think about a fight like Malygos, every minute you get vortexed. Right before the vortex you have a few seconds to intervene someone (reducing their total threat by 10%) and stand in a spark multiplier. That's a great time to heroic throw because you'll get a damage multiplier (and heroic throw is 1.5x damage in threat) and the cooldown for both abilities lines up perfectly. Similarly, stuff like thunderclap should be used on every CD in a fight like Thaddius because of the high damage multipliers and the 1.85x threat modifier (not that Thaddius is really that threat sensitive right now, but you get the idea).

 

Rustyboy

I don't use it in my rotation for 5 mans and trash, however if I'm on a boss and trying to push out every nth bit of threat then I use it whenever off cd and the same goes for shockwave and conc blow even though they have alternate uses.

 

teiglin

In general I agree with Rusty; in a fight like Patchwerk you want to push out as much dps/tps as possible and if heroic throw increases that, it's worth using on cd. Of course if you're talking about Gothik phase 1, then saving heroic throw for loose adds, or Malygos, using heroic throw during vortex makes more sense.

With Executioner's change to rating next patch, I don't see it being particularly useful as a threat enchant any more. I would go with Accuracy if I were enchant purely for threat. In addition to having higher total item budget than, say, Superior Potency, hit and crit will affect all attacks (assuming you're not over hit cap), while AP will not affect shield slam, and of course crit scales very well with deep wounds build.

Re: weapon speed, I haven't seen any reliable math on how higher deep wounds damage with a slow weapon compares to higher heroic strike damage with a fast weapon. In lieu of good math, here's some napkin math. I have 8.5% paper doll crit. Add ~8% from raid buffs and subtract ~4% for boss (haven't paid close attention to boss crit depression rates, but that should be close enough), so white attacks/revenge crit at 12.5% while shield slam/heroic strike/devastate/thunder clap crit at 27.5%. I'll go with 4000 AP, which is pretty close to what I have raid buffed. I'm going to simplify a bit and assume every one out of four GCDs is a non-crit-bonus ability and the rest are at +15%, and that every regular swing is a heroic, just for simplicity (numbers obviously change a bit with rage starvation), and just to make the math easier in my head I'll use five minutes, or 200 GCDs, and assume all the deep wounds tick out.

With Last Laugh, average damage per swing would be 731.7, and you would swing 231.75 times in 5 minutes for a total of 381.75 crit-bonus-attacks and 50 non-crit-bonus-attacks, or an average of 111.2 crits, meaning a total of 81382 deep wounds damage. The 231.75 HS net you an "additional" 114716 damage, making 196098 deep wounds+HS damage. With Calamity's Grasp, average damage per swing is 1188, and you'd swing 142.62 times in 5 minutes for a total of 292.6 crit-bonus-attacks and 50 non-crit-bonus-attacks, or an average of 86.7 crits, meaning a total of 103053 deep wounds damage. The 142.62 swings net you 70595 bonus HS damage, making deep wounds+HS 173648 damage.

So in this situation, fast weapon has a clear edge thanks to more swings/HS outweighing loss of deep wounds. And because HS has bonus threat inherently as well, it will be much better threat than the deep wounds damage. However, 2.6 weapon does about 20% more deep wounds damage than 1.6 weapon, and if we assume zero HS, Last Laugh does ~53000 deep wounds damage and Calamity's Grasp does ~78000 (lazy rounding), or a much larger edge of around 40%, give or take. However, to what extent this advantage can be realized depends heavily on the amount of HS able to be performed and how much/little rage is being generated, since more HS will favor fast weapon quickly (in addition to higher potential HS damage, slow weapon has higher HS rage cost). If there are any fights like bloodboil in the future, it might be worth using a slow weapon while offtanking and switching to a fast weapon when you get aggro.

 

Xav

Yep, pretty much nothing has changed in regards to slow/fast weapon usage. However, when AoE tanking, or doing trash (often, both), you should use a slow weapon - the Deep Wounds procs with your slow weapon equipped will simply be more TPS than your fast one. (Due to AoE procs off of damage shield, thunderclap, shockwave, cleave)

But even with more deep wounds proccing frequency from auto swings/heroics, I would likely still use a slow weapon on anything that I'm rage starved on, due to devastate. (Also, math of this comparison was done on tankspot, in this thread Warrior Slow Weapon & Deep Wounds -- Math Challenge - TankSpot )

 

Toots Hepcat

Mechanics around slow/fast weapons haven't changed, but what has changed is threat in general and the existence of more slow weapons with tanking stats.

If you don't need to race your DPS for threat, even without deep wounds it seems to me slow weapon might be nice to have around for fights against DW mobs. Slower weapon speed should also means more time in between potential parries, right?

Fast weapon (1.6 / 1.24 raid haste = 1.29s) + standard rotation (40 swings/min) = 86.5 parryable swings per minute
Slow weapon (2.6 / 1.24 raid haste = 2.1s) + standard rotation (40 swings/min) = 68.6 parryable swings per minute (about 20% fewer)

Parries aren't as big a deal as they were with crushes around and no Expertise gear, but they're not exactly healer pleasers either way.

I'm not in a deep wounds spec, nor am I often rage starved. I'm still in "survival first" mode until more of my DPS gets geared, and I'm using a slow sword only because it had better defensive stats than what I had. I haven't felt a problem with threat generation (still in the high 3000s), though I obviously can't burn all my rage on some fights. Only rage issues I see are at the beginning of fights or occasionally on trash.

 

Rustyboy

Deep Wounds

After using an AP focused gear set (AP trinkets) during a naxx 25 clear on most bosses and trash, deep wounds was doing between 6-11% of the damage. On Thaddius it did %18 of the damage and Loatheb it topped the damage at %25 with an average of 1.3k per tick due to it constantly stacking.

Yes the last 2 are very situational due to the damage/crit buffs you receive however I think you would agree that an extra %3 crit from 5/5 cruelty would struggle to make up for the %9 damage deep wounds was doing over the whole clear especially due to rng.

 

Xav

A dual wielding boss would be less threatening when they parry you versus a slow hard-hitter, so I'm not sure why you wrote that? (Generally, faster hitting mobs have weaker individual hits, so an extra one slipping through does less compared to something that hits for a huge amount but less frequently)

 

teiglin

I certainly agree on trash/heroics/aoe situations, I always use slow weapons for these for the reasons you mentioned. I am merely curious for the single target boss situation because deep wounds really is a lot of damage. While we've had a lot of anecdotes of deep wounds damage, as I mentioned I haven't seen any good math in this thread about it.

I skimmed through that thread you linked and didn't find any convincing math one way or the other. One guy had an interested spreadsheet I'm not 100% sure I understand, but it looks like he's assuming deep wounds is constantly ticking as if he crit exactly once every six seconds, which is far from an accurate model of real world crits and suggests maybe he doesn't understand current "rolling" of deep wounds. The thread did make me realize i didn't account for devastate (easy to add into my estimate with the same type of hand-waving, which I will do shortly), nor did I include any estimate of damage shield deep wounds procs, which I'll try a couple of different numbers for.

For devastate, I'll completely arbitrarily assume 1.5 devastates per six seconds, or 75 devastates over the five minute period. My slow weapon did 171 more damage per hit than fast, so 85.5 more pre-mitigation damage per devastate, so with 30% armor mitigation, that's almost 60 more damage per devastate or 4500 more damage over the five minute period, which is about a fifth of the 22500 edge fast held.

For damage shield, if you assume about one attack per second and 60% avoidance, you'll proc damage shield 120 times, of which 15 will crit, for another 8000 damage with slow weapon and 5200 damage with fast weapon, making up another 2800 of the difference.

So with those, my estimation of the gap closes to about 15000, or less than 10% more damage with fast weapon. Still a solid advantage (and even larger threat advantage) and I remain convinced that in high-rage situation, extra HS with fast weapon will easily edge out bigger deep wounds from slow weapon, but I'm also convinced that the gap is pretty small and will fairly quickly tip towards slow weapon as you move into rage-starvation-land. Of course, as was mentioned there are other concerns beside dps/tps to fast/slow, slow does seem pretty nice for scary, big-swinging progression bosses like dragons assuming they make any that can parry thrash.

Edit: the discussion of rend over there is also interesting. I don't normally use rend/spec imp rend (I love my imp charge) but I might try it out to see if it gives a good bump in dps while tanking. Would also give another bonus to slow weapon.

 

thecraig00

Hi there

I have noticed while being offank I would have to say that the biggest problem I tank with offtanking with Patchwerk is we use a prot paladin as MT and I'm usually the tank taking virtually all of the hateful strikes, but he is putting out a decent amount of threat and I can't normally stay under him.

I would say my threat seems too good, I currently use Broken Promise with the Deep Wound spec, I am wondering is it actually worth it to just not use HS every cd?

I am nearly always full rage except if i get a avoidance streak which isn't normal. I think threat is really not a problem for warriors right now. We normally have alot of rogues (at least 2 sometimes 4) depending who can be online at the time.

I would have to say even in my tanking cycle i normally always forget to use concussion blow and shockwave when its of CD, and now I'm working more on my rotation. I can sometimes put out up to 7-8k TPS constantly if its a easy enough fight,

First post here and hopefully one of many, thanks alot guys and hope to hear more soon. =)

 

Darkmgl

All testing was with a 1.6 speed weapon.

I've been doing alot of testing with rend in combination with improved rend, trauma, and with/without the glyph. What I've found is that even with the 5% AP to threat bonus from devastate rend is completely superior in a raid environment easily doing more threat than even a crit devastate with impale as long as you have improved rend and trauma/mangle up.

Rend also gains a tremendous advantage in the "above health" rule though that is currently bugged. For some reason when you spec improved rend it reverts to the old above 90% health version instead of the more recent above 75% health version.

This puts rend permanantly above devastate in my threat rotation assuming that trauma/mangle is availalbe and I just conveniently refresh it in lieu of the next devastate whenever it falls off the mob.

Also Rend scales significantly better than Devastate too since Devastate gains .5 dps per 14 AP plus a fixed threat bonus of .7 compared to rend which gains something like 1.56 dps per 14 AP with trauma + improved. Devastate is further hindered by the fact that mobs do not have 0 armor.

With Rend over Devastate I was looking at a gain of somewhere in the realm of 150TPS (Would be better if the improved rend bug was fixed) and a very very slight DPS increase of around 70ish. With a 2.5 speed weapon you gain about another 60 or 70 TPS over the 1.6 speed weapon which does not seem like enough to warrant the loss of HS threat but it is definitely a step in the right direction.

 

◊ Birdemani

What were your results without trauma/mangle? Where are you stealing the points for improved rend from?

Relwin: Besides, the BB is not some ivory tower of WoW knowledge, it's just less stupid here than elsewhere.
DeeNogger: Not less stupid, better stupid. The BB takes stupid very seriously. Now if you will excuse me, I have to go misspell the word fire.

 

Darkmgl

For the time being I just took the 2 points from improved heroic strike since the difference was pretty minimal. I run a 15/5/51 build so I already have lots of points in the arms tree.

The improved rend and mangle are all about coefficients. My rend averaged around just under 400 point ticks with both at a 1.56 coefficient. Without improved mangle you just have a 1.2 coefficient which landed at about 307 a tick and without either I was doing about 256 a tick. This was in a raid environ and not vs a combat dummy. I did the tests over the course of two raids. I also confirmed results on a dummy but I had to manually remove the health bonus since the combat dummy is always at 100% health. Once again this is all with my 1.6 speed weapons.

Rend is theoretically better then devastate even without the talents though. You end up looking at around 1300 dmg which is going to be higher than the average devastate damage when crit chance is taken into account. I found it to be a bit too much micromanagement for the tiny gains like this though. The talents really seal the TPS increase to make it worthwhile to me.

If they fix improved rend it will be an absolute beast over the health number. That 1.56 coefficient becomes a 2.03 coeffient or something silly. That would put my 400 point rend ticks up to something around 520ish which would be 2600 dmg over the duration.

I will have to do some testing with the glyph next patch. Looking at the potential of replacing a 700/1550 dmg attack with what could be a 2800/3640 dmg attack with the two extra ticks seems like it could have potential over the HS glyph I have on currently if rage is not a major issue. Obviously this becomes more and more tempting once we move into future tiers of raiding where mobs may have higher armor %s and we gain better weapons which scale rend's advantage up further.

Edit: Corrected numbers to non combat dummy values

 

Toots Hepcat

Yeah, this makes sense. I was probably still thinking in terms of parry->crush, where a big danger was a dual-wielder knocking down your shield block.

Doesn't change the fact that a slow weapon, by virtue of swinging less often, will result in fewer parries. And that this effect is sizable -- 20% fewer parriable swings (1.6s vs 2.6s) at 26 expertise is roughly the equivalent of adding 5 expertise. If you're in the camp that considers Expertise a survivability stat, weapon speed belongs in that category, too.

I can't believe there hasn't been a deep wounds vs. deep prot thread yet -- or has this already been decided at TankSpot?

 

sveno

You can be deep prot and deep wounds at the same time, you don't really lose any special talents.

 

Rustyboy

You can definitely go deep wounds without losing anything major in the protection tree. Cruelty is probably the first area where you will be pulling points from, in the protection tree Puncture is your first place to save some points and then Shield Specialization / Focused Rage. Punctures worth has devalued considerably as Devastates priority has move down a couple of places.

 

dest

It has become rather apparent to me that the, "Use conc blow, tclap, shockwave, or heroic throw whenever up" method is not the ideal route. I've been working with a rather malleable cycle that seems to be going quite well. I've been using the following cycle :

Shield Slam
Devastate
Devastate
X
Shield Slam
Devastate
Devastate
X

Any time revenge is up, replace one of the Devastates with it. Any time Sword & Board procs, the cycle resets. X qualifies as Heroic Throw, Concussion Blow, Shockwave, Thunder Clap (in that order of priority). Be certain to use your shield block only at the beginning of a cycle, so as to get the max number of Shield Slams in while you have the increased damage from imp shield block (as well as ensuring that your first "Devastate" slot will be utilized by a Revenge).

Obviously the rotation is quite flexible due to Sword & Board and Revenge procs, but this appears to be doing a vastly greater amount of threat than just using the "X" abilities whenever they are up. This preserves your ability to actually "utilize" Sword & Board procs, as you are only using the abilities that cause it to proc whenever it will turn out to be useful (as opposed to causing it to proc the GCD prior to Shield Slam coming off cooldown, which wastes the proc on it).

 

jozga

Are you saying not to replace X with Revenge ever? I see your point about utilizing S'n'B procs, yet it feels counterintuitive to not try and blow Heroic Throw, Conc. Blow and Shockwave as soon as you can because surely the highest threat possible on a boss would be using these abilities the maximum possible number of times - doesn't this cycle leave these abilities lit up and waiting for a while?

 

dest

You can replace X with anything with a high threat modifier if you feel so inclined. This would apply to Revenge or HT. The entire purpose of this "rotation" is to maximize the number of usable S&B procs, so replacing one of the devastate/revenge slots with something that doesn't proc it would be counterintuitive and lead to using a devastate/revenge on the third GCD in the cycle...meaning that a S&B proc on it would be useless.

 

Rustyboy

Dest,

For me..

If SS is at the start of its CD period and REV is not up I will Devastate to try and see if I can get a S&B proc. If SS is at the end of its CD period and REV is not up I will go with another ability like Conc Blow, Shockwave as I know that SS is going to be coming up anyway and I'm going to get more threat from using them than devastate.

In essence that's what your rotation is trying to do, however due to S&B procs SS's CD will be reset every time you use it so again there really is no set rotation as its constantly changing or reseting based upon SS's.

Spamming only REV/DEV during a shield block period for S&B procs to maximise SS output is something most people would do naturally, however its definitely something that any guide should include for completeness.

 

Yomon

I tested Rend at Dummies after reading about it. It is like Thunderclap - better than Devastate, even if you have unimproved Rend, and as mentioned above it scales better than Devastate.

I use Broken Promise with 2.50 speed and my Devastate hits for about 870 avage damage with critical strikes factored in, plus ~210 threat for ~4250 attack power; that is 1080 in total. Unimproved Rend, with Battle Shout (3458ap) ticks for 412 above 75% and 306 under 75% at Dummies; that is 2060 or 1530 total for one global cooldown, and it ticks for even more in a raid environment.

With a 1.5 weapon Devastate is about 950 threat in total. Unimproved Rend ticks for 289 above 75% and 214 under 75%; that is 1445 or 1070 threat in total.

So with a slow weapon Rend is always worth it. With a fast weapon Rend is above 75% health worth it, below 75% you have to see if you have Trauma, Mangle or the improved Rend talent, otherwise I would prioritize Devastate before Rend due too the possibility of Sword and Board proccs.

 

Xav

That's a rather amateur way of trying to tank nowadays though, with all the abilities at our disposal. Our tanking abilities simply have an order of most threat to least threat. The more frequently you use the abilities that cause the most threat, the higher your TPS will be. You are only substituting lesser-threat abilities for them, ideally.

This is made "easier" to accomodate because they have different cooldowns - so everything comes off cooldown in a staggered manner, so you aren't "forced" to use them back to back and actually lose threat because of it.

Although due to the cooldowns, you can naturally fall into a "cycle" that you listed simply because there's nothing else to use. There just isn't much of a set "cycle" you should be listing off because of how free-form tanking is, a very basic guideline of the mechanics is all it should take, with understanding of most-threat to least-threat on abilities usage, and people can manage themselves.

The easiest way you can prove it actually causes more threat to always wait and stick to an order as you mentioned, VS using stuff when it comes up within reason, is to simulate a boss pull using both methods. I may do it if bored enough but I'm almost certain what you said is definitely a downgrade.