All Slam fury builds I see around on Icy Veins, wowhead, etc, still pick Bloodthirst. However after some testing with a slow two-hander it seems to me that Slam does more damage than Bloodthirst and it also costs half the fury.
Anyone knows if there’s a reason to use Bloodthirst at all in a Slam fury build? Aside from the small health regen, is there something I’m missing in terms of dps?
Ty for the input!
Yes, Bloodthrist is probably the single best DPS ability when it comes to scaling with available Gear, Buffs & World-Buffs.
Slam had it’s second when you could batch a swing with a Slam-hit but they fixed that real quick and now it’s an absolutely atrocious ability I highly discourage you from using.
Slam resets your swing timer. Like Roxi was saying, earlier in Classic you could use it effectively with a macro, making 2-hand Fury (And even Arms) viable. Unfortunately that was one of the arbitrary things they fixed/changed.
Hey there. I do understand how Slam works. I’m talking specifically of the fury Slam build. You need to use swing timers to cast Slam right after an auto-attack (just like a Hunter’s aimed shot). Slam will then ideally only delay your next swing by 1s (or close to that).
My question is merely about the place of Bloodthirst in the rotation. Because with this two-hander Slam build, Slam itself seems to deal more damage than BT, and also has half the cost in rage.
There is the 1s delay in auto-attacks but even with that considered Slam seems to be more worth in the rotation right now. Unless it scales really poorly with higher gear.
They just told you it was garbage, are you gonna take their advice or keep talking to yourself because you think you know best?
lets say that you do an average of 2000 damage per swing with a 3.9 speed weapon, including crits and armor and such
with flurry permanently up, your attack speed would be exactly 3.0
when you cast slam right after you swing, you delay your next swing by at least 1 second
this costs you, in addition to the 15 rage, 1 second’s worth of rage generation
with an average of 2000 damage dealt per swing, 1 second’s worth of rage generation is equal to 22.222… rage
but this also costs you 1 second’s worth of autoattack damage, which in this case would be 666.6666… damage
so you do the math, OP
It depends on the swing speed of your weapon mainly, slam is just a rage dump because it slows down auto-attacks and BT doesn’t. You should be trying to use BT + WW and only slam dumping if your weapon is slow enough to be worth it over heroic strike dumping
The problem is that slam delays the white/auto swing timer while BT does not.
Most of your damage comes from white swings, not from abilities, and delaying white swings also delays rage generation (so you’re losing whatever you gain in damage/rage efficiency from slamming by delaying rage generation).
With improved slam it can be worthwhile to weave it in with a swing timer right after a white/auto. But you can’t just use it whenever its up, and it’s always better to prioritize using BT/WW on CD (in which case you usually won’t have the rage for slam unless you’re world buffed, and even if you are world buffed you often need to move or the swing timer doesn’t come up at the right time such that you won’t be delaying your next BT).
Also, if your gear is poor slam may do more individually than BT, but when you have good gear and high AP BT will always be better.
So it nearly always ends up being better to just hamstring for flurry/HOJ procs and/or cleave/HS rather than slam. For horde, there’s no reason to slam as you can just hamstring for windfury procs.
It’s a pretty bad ability overall.
That’s the kind of math I was looking for, ty.
So damage to rage is about 1000 to ~11 rage then.
This will help comparing the effect of BT vs Slam depending on the current amount of AP.
It seems, as Januaryy also remarked, that with weaker gear it may be more efficient to just slam, but with high AP the BT gets progressively better.
Also keep in mind any fight where there’s AOE (e.g the fire nova spam on vael or buffets on firemaw), slam cast timer can be delayed, so any time it will be delayed (or if you’re getting hit by a mob), its basically never worth it. That makes it extra hard to use because you should only cast if:
a.) only cast immediately after white/auto
b.) only cast if there’s no mechanics such that you have to move
c.) only cast if nothing will delay the cast (nothing at all is hitting you)
d.) only cast if BT/WW are on CD and you’re not in execute phase
e.) only cast if it won’t delay the next BT/WW (i.e. rage is >50)
f.) only cast on single targets (on multi-target cleave is better rage dump)
g.) only cast if you don’t have windfury
It’s actually frequently the case that one of those isn’t true, most often the swing timer not being at a good time to sync with BT/WW casts and/or rage generation.
Also, the faster your weapon the worse it is. With a really slow weapon (e.g. sulfuras, with 3.8 speed), it’s better than a faster weapon because you’re not penalizing the white swing timer as much (on top of the increased weapon damage).
So it can be used occasionally to increase dps, but its annoying to find those timings and in most people’s hands will end up decreasing dps because they’ll delay the white timer too much (by not hitting it close enough to the auto swing), delay their BT/WW, or get the cast timer delayed by damage, or get hit by mechanics, etc.
They should have left the macro bug in the game because it made the ability (and 2h dps) more viable, though even then DW was better.
Idk which weapon/gear in this game would make Slam even remotely worth it. It’s terrible, straight up - even if you are a Wailing Caverns parser.