Loading ...The Deal with Devastate
*This post is outdated as of Patch 2.3*
*As of Patch 2.3 Devastate applies a Sunder Armor affect as well as benefiting from the Improved Sunder Armor talent. This means that you should remove Sunder Armor from your action bar and used Devastate instead.*
Cristyen asks - “How do you feel about devastate? Maybe it’s just my playstyle, but I’ve never seen much purpose in it. I talked with a few tanking friends, and they rarely use it as well. Your opinion?”
There’s always a little bit of disagreement among Warriors when it comes to our new 41 Point Talent - Devastate. In fact, if you search through the more progressive guilds across the world you’ll find the occasional Protection Warrior who isn’t specced into Devastate.
Why tanks DON’T choose Devastate
Summary: It’s rare to get to 5 Sunders on Trash Mobs and Devastate is not worth using until you have 5 Sunders.
The reality is that both Shield Slam and Revenge generate significantly more threat than Sunder Armor making them both higher priority when generating threat on a mob. Now while Devastate does pass Sunder in threat before 5 Sunders, you really shouldn’t ever be using Devastate until 5 Sunder are up. As a result on the majority of trash mobs, you won’t use Devastate even once because you’ll rarely ever get the mob up to 5 Sunders.
Why tanks DO choose Devastate
Summary: On Bosses, you will have 5 Sunders at which point Devastate > Sunder. Devastate procs Mongoose essentially making it a Mitigation talent as well.
Trash mobs are one thing, but when it all comes down to it as tanks we are in a party to tank a boss. On a boss, you are going to get to 5 Sunders almost always and you are going to want those 5 Sunders to stay on that boss for a long time. Devastate renews the Sunder timer while generating more threat than Sunder. The more threat you generate. The harder the DPS can push. (and the additional DPS you are doing adds up too) That alone should be reason enough for a talent that requires only a single point to be worth it especially when there are so few ways for Warriors to improve their threat generation though itemization. The final point in Devastate’s favour though is the fact that unlike Sunder Armor, it will proc the Mongoose enchant on your weapon. As a result, Devastate is not only a Threat generation talent, but also a Mitigation talent making it invaluable for a Main Tank.
Wrap Up and My Advice
Summary: Devastate is worth one point especially if you are the Main Tank.
It is somewhat justifiable not taking Devastate when still improving your gear and doing mostly regular 5 man content. However, once you start progressing through Karazhan and the more challenging Heroics you’ll want that little extra edge of additional damage and threat. Eventually every tank should get their primary weapon enchanted with the Mongoose enchant, at which point, Devastate becomes extremely valuable as another way to keep Mongoose active during an encounter. When it all comes down to it, since you’ll undoubtedly be maxing out your Vitality talent anyway that means Devastate is only going to cost you a single point. You could do a lot worse for a single point.
June 14th, 2007 at 4:08 am
I’m not the main tank, but the off tank/main tank when the MT is absent. I’ve tanked every boss fight in Kara, I’ve done Gruul, Mag, and we’re in doing SSC at the moment. I have a Sun Eater with a mongoose enchant on my weapon. Since BC, I’ve had the devastate talent, and I’ve just never had any use for it other than renewing sunders, nor do I have difficulties holding aggro without it. Because of that, I recently respecc’d (two days ago) and took devastate out. I was told from others that devastate is only useful for tanks using slow weapons, so my Sun Eater won’t really make the talent worth it. I’ve discussed it with my tanking friend (who’s the MT), and he agrees on my view of devastate, which only pushes me more towards staying without the talent. I’m sure once I’ve experienced some of the harder fights without it, I’ll come to the decision on my own, but I’d rather not make a mistake if it can be avoided.
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June 14th, 2007 at 9:34 am
See I won’t dispute that it doesn’t offer a lot, but honestly what else are you getting instead for a single point? You get to keep Mongoose active more often and do more threat than sunder. (even if its not a lot more)
Regardless, I think I’ll take the time to test this cause it would be interesting to see from real data how much Devastate helps.
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June 15th, 2007 at 12:34 am
I’ll give you my spec if you want, and you can tell me if you think devastate is a better use of talent points.
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June 15th, 2007 at 10:05 am
Sure, sounds good. You can use the Ask a Question form or just post it as a comment to the link for it.
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June 15th, 2007 at 9:51 pm
http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/#character-sheet.xml?r=Gurubashi&n=Saraiyu
Actually, I respec’d today. I wanted to test devastate out myself as well.
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November 20th, 2007 at 1:22 pm
With the latest patch, Devastate now _applies_ the Sunder Armor effect, rather than just renewing it. This seems to make Sunder Armor somewhat pointless, and I am contemplating removing it from my toolbar.
I suppose a case could be made that Sunder Armor is more efficient for the first couple of applications (if you have the Improved Sunder Armor talent), but I am not sure it’s worth it. This last week, I used Devastate exclusively, and saw no significant change in my rhythm. I like having one less button to press.
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November 20th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
Improved Sunder Armor applies to Devastate as well now. There is no reason to have Sunder on your toolbar anymore if you have speced into Devastate.
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November 20th, 2007 at 2:29 pm
The devastate change is awesome. Just remove sunder armor from your actionbars. It’s one less thing to worry about, and from my somewhat limited experience at tanking, this is a very good thing…
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November 22nd, 2007 at 1:27 am
Once spec’d into Devastate, Sunder Armor is absolutely worthless unless for some reason you are using a two-hander and feel the need to sunder… hehe. At no time will you ever want to choose SA over Devastate, the first 5 devastates apply SA and give threat for both, after that the base threat for Dev is 176-196 (depending on who’s test you go with) + Dmg which should almost always far out do the threat generated by SA (301). One important thing to point out with this change is that an OT should NEVER Dev or SA until 5 SAs are put up by the MT so that the raid can enjoy the benefits of the extra threat generated by this modified ability. If anyone wants to know where I got my info from just go to www.tankspot.com; it’s a very awesome site.
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November 22nd, 2007 at 1:30 am
Crap. I put a semicolon after the website above and it was wrongly recognized as part of the link. If you click on the above link you’ll have to delete the excess punctuation or follow the link here: www.tankspot.com
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November 22nd, 2007 at 7:53 am
There’s also always been a link to tankspot on the homepage for the last 3 months
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June 7th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
So…I am just now working on my tank, (only level 62). One simple thing I’ve noticed is the tooltip for sunder armour says “causes a high amount of threat” where as devestate does not.
Reading this, I’m lead to believe it is best to stack sunders for threat, until you have 5 sunders up, at which point the damage from devestate would be causing more threat.
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June 8th, 2008 at 9:26 am
Actually the first 5 devastates you apply also apply the sunder debuff, and the sunder threat. So you’re getting a ton of threat out of the first 5 devastates.
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