Yet you’re sitting here pooh-poohing the extra threat from Improved Thorns as if there’s some other talent that provides more.
There isn’t.
In a dungeon run (especially in the amazing gear you apparently have) you want every threat talent you can get. There’s nothing that provides more threat than improved thorns you can choose that you haven’t already chosen in any tree.
That’s the entire point, your incredibly nitpicky arguments about exactly how much extra threat it causes are irrelevant.
Yeah, you totally misunderstood.
Thorns is affected by the quality of your gear because if you have high dodge thorns does less total damage because you dodged the hit and no damage was dealt.
In pre-raid gear i sit at 19% dodge. In full naxx gear it will be 30% dodge.
As I get better geared, thorns will do less damage. It is not the place to be putting your talent points.
That’s quite the goal-post slide.
Okay Mr. Thorns-Beats-Swipe-On-Damage
And if you’re avoiding that silliness to just say “more threat always better”, I’m still going to pick nits over the silliness that is Improved Thorns. The damage component of Thorns is entirely trivial, even at very weak gear levels, and only gets worse relative to all other skills. Additionally, it scales inversely with gear as well as clear time for your group. Finally, thanks to the RP-mechanic of mobs moving at a walk pace when at very low health, your best bet when chain pulling is to move on to the next group while a few mobs trail well out of melee range behind you.
Sinking three talent points into improving an incredibly anemic baseline skill over giving yourself more on-demand Rage when you need it and improving your Armor modifier letting you get away with “flimsier” items that are more threat-centric is simply silly. If those improvements don’t matter, you are just cutting off your nose to spite your face when trying to present THORNS as the shining alternative of significant choice.
And to top all of this off, we’re ultimately talking about THREAT mechanics. You get zero benefit from having additional threat beyond what is necessary to hold aggro for whatever it is you’re doing. That doesn’t even mean holding aggro for 100% of the pull. Improved Thorns doesn’t let you do anything you couldn’t already manage without it, without changing anything in play style.
You misunderstand me, in saying Thorns scales inversely with Dodge, I am saying the more Dodge you have, the worse Thorns performs.
After reading through a lot of these I can see you’re just grabbing at things now and its clear who knows their class better.
Stop trying to compare Thick Hide and Thorns soley based on Threat. Maybe if I say this you’ll see it.
The question is does Thorns which is nature damage get a multiplicative threat generation from the one given in Dire Bear form?
Not entirely, at least from what I gather.
One is saying to take Imp thorns, the other is saying you’ll be giving up more valuable talents elsewhere to accomplish this.
I’m operating under the assumption that EVERYTHING the Druid does while in Dire Bear Form gets the form modifier for threat. So if you have Regrowth or Rejuvenation active and pop into Bear, any healing would get multiplied by the 130% baseline modifier (or 145% with talents).
I assume therefore that Thorns does as well.
The big separation comes from Swipe/Maul vs everything else. These abilities have their own bonus threat modifier. So if you deal 100 damage with Maul, the threat would be:
100 * 145% * 175% = 253.75
This is why Druid threat is so ridiculous and only keeps growing all throughout Vanilla. With incoming damage from raids, you have so much Rage that you can essentially spam Maul/Swipe nonstop and make every bit of your damage have that giant modifier. It is what makes Druids so ideal for Thaddius.
For leveling I always go 14 balance first, because omen of clarity + thorns is very versatile. Natural weapons + omen of clarity + improved thorns is much better dps than any 14 points you’ll put in feral, and you can cast thorns on other players. Omen of clarity gives you free casts, which makes healing 5-mans easy(along with thorns making a tank’s job much easier and helping you not get aggro healing him).
In raids though, your moonglow druids will normally have improved thorns(assuming they keep you buffed).
Huh… I wouldn’t entirely be surprised but I suppose I’ll have to confirm this when I get home since the usual AP to damage formula is (AP/14) * WpnSpeed. But if that doesn’t apply to Swipe then only Crit/Hit matter and improved gear levels make Maul skyrocket past it.
This I cannot agree with whatsoever. Just the first 5 points in Ferocity improve your DPS from Maul by 33.3% and from Swipe by 25%, on account of having that many more go out from whatever Rage you were getting. And while I do enjoy DPS gains more than just TPS gains, the next 5 pts in Feral give you the equivalent of 12% increase in TPS from everything you do, making it stronger for threat than Natural Weapons. Then the next 4 pts would be Feral Charge and 6% baseline Critical Strike against Omen and Improved Thorns.
I’d advocate for Balance talents over Resto talents for sure, but Ferocity is our single strongest increase for either of our DPS skills in Bear.
And AFAIK, OoC has a 2 PPM, so you’re looking at between 30-40 Rage per min (assuming no Ferocity of course). Only in incredibly low Rage income situations would Omen be able to outpace Ferocity, and I mean very low, like incoming damage is less than 2% of your entire EH low.
Against a single target swipe is nothing but a rage dump. Maul adds damage to your white hits, but maul also gets bonus threat like heroic strike.
Baseline Maul adds 183 damage, Swipe is 83. But Maul is 10 rage to Swipe’s 15 rage. Against 3 targets, swipe would do 249 damage, or 16.6 damage per rage, while Maul would do 18.3 damage per rage. But swipe can theoretically crit three times(and become free), while maul can only crit once.
In a 5-man, you should tab maul and use swipe only as a rage dump(Faerie fire also produces threat, so you should cast it every time it is up, even on the same target).
At low levels your autoattack will be 50-60% of your damage and thorns will be 10-15%. If Maul/Swipe is a third of your damage(and most of that is not the bonus damage on maul but the base white damage) then ferocity is about as big a dps increase as natural weapons. Omen of clarity is also huge, and at lower levels, thorns with talent does nearly as much damage as swipe and costs no rage.
From like 10-40 I actually prefer to level in bearform. Hot yourself > moonfire pull 2-4 mobs > go bearform > swipe/maul them down while thorns chunks their health. Catform only begins to eclipse bearform once you have ferocious bite, otherwise it is only good against casters or for the run-speed.
In addition : I find catform incredibly boring. Pull one mob, Claw/Claw/Claw/Claw/Claw till dead, repeat. You can shred, but you have to stealth from 20 yards away, slowly move up behind them. If you’re speed grinding it is better to just go straight at them(or pull with faerie fire) because stealthing “wastes” a few seconds of autoattacks. Also catform’s fast attack speed forces you to just stand in one spot. While bearform’s 2.5 second autoattack allows you to hit > run a few steps > hit > run a few steps. You can kill things while running across zones without slowing down/stopping like you would in cat.
Why? We are talking about dungeons, so anything other than threat/damage is pretty much irrelevant.
The OP asked about dungeon talents and Imp. Thorns is great for dungeons. I wouldn’t take it in raids and I don’t think arguing about what happens when you’re wearing Naxx gear has any relevance to the discussion at all, since nobody will be wearing Naxx gear for another year or so, and you won’t be running dungeons then anyway.
Essentially you take Imp. Thorns for the same reason Warriors run around tanking dungeons as Fury. The mobs in dungeons hit like little girls, and the major challenge is holding threat. Thick Hide for whatever little benefit it offers is overkill, and threat talents like Imp. Thorns are way more important.
Imp Thorns is a decent talent. It’s phenomenal while leveling, since it’s going to be dealing a set amount of damage no matter what based on spell rank.
It loses its value as you continue to scale though since you can’t reasonably scale it. Still a relevant talent, specifically for five-mans. Dropping some points in Thick Hide/Improved Enrage is a reasonable trade-off. Same goes for Natural Shapeshifter, which allows you be more flexible if your not always in Bear Form.
TLDR: It’s a good talent, worth taking. Just don’t give up something like Omen or LotP for it. Bear talents are more flexible than most people think. 30 in Feral to get the fat stam and 5 in furor are the only absolute must haves, though not using Natural Weapons/Omen is will be a big threat loss.
Talents like Imp Thorns, Natural Shapeshifter and improved MotW are certainly viable.
Because of the following.
That got people distracted from your original point of improving Thorns doing more for threat generation than other talents.
It’s literally the same point though. The Damage and Threat increase from Imp. Thorns is worth more than the tiny damage reduction from Thick Hide, it should be obvious to anyone who does dungeons, rather than the guys in here talking about how badly Thorns scales with raid gear lol.
Not quite; one compared Thorns with other talent options; the other compared its damage output with other abilities. It was that part (the 20% damage) that got people distracted from your overall point, and confused when you returned to it.
Thorns does not benefit from +spell power in classic. With about +84 sp there was no change in the tooltip or damage to mobs during testing. 18 dmg @ rank 6 thorns untalented no matter what.
I thought so. Will continue testing when opportunity presents itself, though not optimistic it will change. Not sure if +spell/nature damage was intended NOT to effect thorns, but glad it does give threat.
This was a lvling dungeon grind AOE meta tank build thread. Nobody would take this if raid tanking.
Thanks for all the input guys. Most of you missed the mark on this tho.
Blockquote
You’ll never secure aggro on 25 mobs no matter what. You can Demo/Swipe all you want, won’t be enough.