The Importance of Cruelty
…and no I’m not talking about killing puppies.
For the past couple months I’ve been happy with the a spec of 8/0/53, but little did I know what I was missing. I recently switched to a build of 8/5/48 losing Improved Revenge and Improved Shield Bash (two rather mediocre utility-ish abilities) for 5 points in Cruelty.
The reality of generating threat for a warrior is that the important part really only is the first few seconds of the fight which makes crit offer a lot more for a tank than attack power, strength, etc. As a result, it simply cannot be downplayed how much of a difference Cruelty makes towards threat generation. For me in particular, I went from just over 5% to crit to over 10% to crit effectively doubling my chance of a very strong opening to a mob.
August 7th, 2007 at 5:04 pm
I agree with the 8/5/48 spec, only switch Imp def stance to imp revenge. The revenge works wonders on trash & pvp, and it still generates aggro even when immune. The 6% less dmg from spells I could onlyu see useful when you are entering the SSC game and going against spells that hit for 8-12k
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October 1st, 2007 at 5:19 am
I am currently using the 8/5/48 and it is a huge difference in DPS from my previous of a shit ton of points in arms and 5 points in cruelty. But I have no idea how it works as far as tanking goes since I have yet to use it in an instance.
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August 16th, 2008 at 9:21 am
I recently switched to 10/5/46 losing improved taunt for 2 points in imp heroic strike helped me alot on tps managament I out tps the main tank of my guild now.:P
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September 14th, 2008 at 7:41 am
for myself i have 8/0/53 with impr sunder armor and no impr revenge, since i dont need that for Raiding, as for cruelty i dont need it really. my shield slam does the crits :).
as for main tank in my guild, he is my classleader but we have the same stats except for hp, he has 16.2k hp and i have 15.8k hp and sometimes i just go Main tank bosses.
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Talldar reply on September 15, 2008 8:45 am:
Hm as far as the standard rotation goes Shield Slam only makes 1/4 of your attacks, so you’re basically loosing the extra crit for 75% of your abilities + 3-4 white damage attacks inbetween. That might not be an issue if you’re fine in threat generation, but especially when starting to tank, non-full-epic (let’s say up to Kara equip) those 5% really do a great job and make life much easier.
I wouldn’t want to loose those 5 points in cruelty and am doing good threat with sufficient survivability with a 12/5/44 spec.
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