It just changes the abilities you use.
You’re prioritizing Revenge, Shield Slam, then Devastate, then Heroic Strike. IEA just cuts Devastate out of the equation. Threat doesn’t suffer that much, honestly, because Devastate is a filler.
It’s no different than now in Classic where Warriors simply swap to using Demoralizing Shout/Battle Shout as a filler instead of Sunder Armor when there’s IEA up.
The best tank is actually a hunter. If it can’t hit me, I have the most effective HP! Lol.
Add in the AP contribution from your baseline gear too. On the beta with the starter gear, I’m getting about 150 added damage, about 290 average damage afterward. 35% of that is 101.5. So Devastate’s damage in this scenario comes to 101.5 / 351.5 = 28.9% from the weapon damage part, before any buffs.
Edit: the above calculation is tainted by the fact that I have 1H spec talented. Taking that into account, Devastate’s additive damage adds 275 damage instead of 250, which comes out to about 27% damage from the weapon damage part pre-buffs.
Devastate’s damage scaling is far worse than Maul’s damage scaling.
TBC Prot Warrior threat is bad, you’re deliberately spreading misinformation here and it kinda sucks. Stop doing it.
And neither Devastate nor Maul make up the majority of either tank’s threat in TBC.
Thank goodness too… as much as I like Maul, it being 90% of our threat is lame. I cannot wait for Mangle.
gonna miss that dynamic rotation though: maul, swipe if too much rage. Now you’re telling me in TBC I have to mangle now and then? Not sure how I’m going to manage.
and lacerate and demo and FF if you don’t have a boomie… so much buttons
I believe that swipe eventually replaces lacerate even on a single target once you reach a certain AP threshold lol. Man, imagine if I had to both swipe and lacerate…what am I, some sort of supercomputer.
Maul is going to make up a huge part of Bears threat in tbc, Mangle on CD, but after lacerate is stacked up it’s just making sure it doesnt fall off. Maul is still the normal rage usage for bears on single target. That’s why the classic Idol is prebis still.
You will need about 6000 AP before swipe will be more threat than stacked lacerate and even at that point for max dps you will still want to get it stacked and maintained.
Maul will be used just like how a fury prot uses HS today, only when you are above a certain rage threshold so you always have enough rage for mangle. You rotation priority will be on a sliding scale and the ability to put out high damage becomes a real asset just like fury prot was in classic. It’s nice sitting middle of the pack or higher on damage while tanking and every little bit makes the encounters easier.
The only reason that swipe gets better is because it can crit and at that level of AP you will also likely be at the crit cap which makes it really good but you can slowly build a lacerate stack in there as well.
Pri 1 - secure the pull
pri 2 - build initial threat so DPS do not have to be scared of good rng on crits
pri 3 - build your dps
pri 4 - collect lootz
It’s too soon to say with certainty, but the theorycrafting I’ve seen shows swipe spam out threating lacerate at fairly early gear levels (after T4). Lacerate still seems better if you have limited rage and don’t have 100% maul uptime, but if you’re tanking a boss that gives you enough rage it seems like swipe spam is the way to go for max threat. We’ll see how it actually works out in practice.
I agree with you that it appears that maintaining lacerate will still be the higher DPS option. It just appears that it’s not the highest TPS option after T4.
Yup. The Lacerate threat is all front-loaded, the DoT might as well not even exist, so Swipe doesn’t take long to beat it TPS. DPS-wise it takes longer because the DoT, if maintained, is pretty good, but even that falls behind too when you consider how much a pain it can be to keep rolling.
This appears abnormally high.
Swipe non-crits never overtake lacerate. Swipe crits overtake lacerate at 4k AP but since not every swipe hit is a crit you need 6k to reach a delta were it is better on average.
You’ll have to post your math on that one because that’s a big no.
…assuming what kind of crit rate?
zidnae. gitlab. io/tbc-armor-penetration-calc/tbc_bear_tc.html
It would be near crit cap at that point since at 6k AP swipe is only worth 200tps more than a fully stacked lacerate.
From Zidnae’s link:
There seemed to have been some debate[16] regarding wheather swipe or lacerate was better ability for single target tanking. Lacerate scales poorly due to its 20% damage to threat modifier and relies primarily on its static threat component to generate threat. Swipe on the other hand has the standard 100% threat modifier and therefore scales better.
Based on the below plots, at lower gear levels mange + lacerate spam is the optimal threat generating roation for single target tanking. With better gear swipe eventually scales up to the point where it becomes worthwhile to start weaving in swipes and letting lacerate tick two or three times before refreshing.
This point is the intersection between Swipe and Lacerate Hit in the plots below. Calculating this point, when swipe hits start doing more than 294.0 damage Mangle + Lacerate + Swipe is better threat generation than just Mangle + Lacerate spam. This point should occur around 1080 attack power for critical hits and 3640 attack power for non-crits. The exact break even point is dependent on a player’s critical hit rate and other factors like the exact enemy boss armor.
Nerdegghead referencing Zidnae on druid discord:
The interesting finding from adding the Swipe model is that we’ll switch from Lacerate spam to Swipe spam a lot earlier than we anticipated. The breakpoint is T4 quality gear - the reason is that even though the AP on gear is only 1533, the stacking of so many raid buffs leads to a fully buffed AP of 2738. This falls in the range calculated by @Zidnae between hits and crits for Swipe falling ahead. Also interesting to note is that there is a regime where Swipe spam is more TPS than Lacerate spam, but the Lacerate spam rotation is still optimal because it results in more Maul uptime.
This seems to support my conclusion that swipe spam, after a certain breakpoint, is superior TPS provided we have enough rage to keep mauling. From Nerdegghead again:
But DPS mattering is why maintaining 5 stack Lacerate is good even very late game, very very slight reduction in TPS compared to pure Swipe spam, but much higher DPS
I’m not a TC guy or even particularly good at math. But it seems like it would be very easy to reach bad conclusions based on Zidnae’s graphs only since a lot of it depends on how many lacerate ticks you get, etc. I certainly can’t decipher those graphs well enough to come to a solid conclusion. That’s why I rely on the big brains in the discord. It appears that they conclude that pure swipe spam is superior TPS fairly early, but it’s still not a bad idea to weave in lacerates if you care about DPS. At the end of the day I am but a simple man who pretends to be a cow, who turns into a bear.
None of this follows.
You can look at his own break-points at the bottom, Swipe overtakes Lacerate at 3,640 AP at zero Armor for non-crits, and 1,080 AP at zero Armor for crits. The threat from the Lacerate bleed is spread across the totality of the bleed, so only 20% of damage dealt per tic is counted as threat (modified by other things like Dire Bear and talents obviously). Further, you have other modifiers for Swipe that aren’t accounted for in this calculation like the T6 4pc bonus that gives Swipe another 15% scaling.
Even if we assume bosses still have 3k Armor left over, which is way too much but for argument’s sake we’ll leave it, the AP breakpoints would only increase 4,122 for non-crits, 1,223 for crits. At a meager 30% crit chance, that’s 3,251 AP for Swipe to just straight up match the massive static threat of Lacerate applications. Adding the bleed becomes increasingly less appealing once beyond that point because a missed Swipe is just a missed Swipe, but a missed Lacerate means you have to shove off a potential Swipe to keep the bleed going, with the real danger being losing the entire bleed stack, at which point you were better off never Lacerating at all.
Even for DPS only, maintaining stacks of Lacerate are a non-trivial consideration, and late game we’ll have another 15% damage on Swipe and oodles of ArPen. We can’t yet socket for Expertise so only by taking specific key items can we even manage to guarantee Lacerate applications, and often at great cost to other slots like rings/trinkets. Shard of Contempt is amazing sure, but most of the Expertise items tend to get paired with more Warrior/Paladin fixated gear items.
Finally, Lacerate is a bleed, so there are a few but notable fights we can’t even use the ability. Lacerate just… well… it sucks. It works great while we’re leveling on single-target situations but by the time we’re ready for T5 content, we won’t be using it much at all.
That is all true which is why I posted the AP numbers you need to reach. Each person will gear a bit differently between mit and threat and will have different numbers. If you are an OT you can hit that point MUCH sooner than if you are a MT always tanking the lvl 73 bosses. Trash will require MUCH less defensive gear for the most part outside of certain packs(maggy trash in p4).
Yeah, I’ll be real with you guys. I just don’t want to track lacerate stacks lol