Loading ...Thunderfury beyond 70
There’s a lot of mystery still surrounding [item]Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker[/item]. I run across some people that are merely awed by its colour and others that simply look at the pre-BC DPS and scoff. The reality is its still very good for tanking, but how good?
The Proc Explained: ~20%
The proc on Thunderfury is the first thing an uninformed viewer passes over and doesn’t consider. It’s a part of the Thunderfury that’s been changed and nerfed countless times. In its current state, the proc rate of Thunderfury is around 20% and it produces two unique debuffs when it procs. One that gives the target being hit a -20% attack speed penalty and another that jumps to multiple targets and gives each target -25 Nature Resistance. The proc also does 300 Nature Damage to the target being hit.
How good is its threat?
Not nearly as good as it used to be, but its still very strong. The “jumping” Nature Resistance debuff no longer creates any additional threat which means that Thunderfury is no longer the holy grail of multi-target tanking. The threat of it is caused exclusively from the damage the weapon and the proc causes.
But its only 54 DPS though!
Consider Shield Slam and Revenge. Neither take DPS into account but Revenge can proc Thunderfury. Devastate scales poorly with DPS especially with the 1.6 speed competitors to Thunderfury and it can proc the extra 300 damage too. That’s your 3 instant threat moves not really caring about the DPS of your weapon, but 2 of them able to produce 300 extra threat 20% of the time thanks to Thunderfury. At this time, Thunderfury still out-threats my [item]Blazeguard[/item].
Should I farm it?
If you have 1 binding maybe, but if you have neither then I wouldn’t. The drop-rate as many have found out the hard way is simply terrible and while Thunderfury still has a lot of life left in it threat-wise that doesn’t change that when you need some solid mitigation stats that items like [item]King's Defender[/item] have way more to offer. I won’t deny that I don’t use Thunderfury all the time. It’s fantastic for a lot of situations, but by no means required nor is it “easy-mode” for your DPSers.
When to Replace it for threat?
[item]Blazefury[/item] should out-threat Thunderfury since Blazeguard comes very close.
Thunderfury Word Count: 14
July 28th, 2007 at 6:41 am
I don’t have TF… I don’t like to use any weapons with the term “blessed” in their name, it just sounds too holy-pally-like. And “windseeker”?? ‘Puh-lease, that makes it sound like some flimsy Druid staff or something… What self-respecting, battle-hardened WARRIOR would use such a sissy-sounding weapon? C’mon!
I use Sun Eater!! I mean, according to the “yellow text” it’s “…feared across the cosmos”… and as it’s name would imply, it eats friggin’ suns! Can’t beat it!!!
Unless, that is, someone wants to help me farm mats for TF…….. uh, yeah.
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August 20th, 2007 at 8:10 am
Everyone listening right now, pay close CLOSE attention
STOP USING A LEVEL 60 WEAPON TO TANK WITH AT LEVEL 70
THE PROC DOES NOT GENERATE EXTRA THREAT (aside from the 300 dmg, BFD) This weapon has HALF of the dps of a level 70 tanking weapon, not to mention the lowest and worst stats I have ever seen. Get it together, get your king’s defender/suneater.
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August 20th, 2007 at 9:21 am
Now first and foremost, in the future I won’t approve comments that are trying to shout all in caps. I have no issue with people disagreeing, but speaking louder rather than speaking smarter by backing your opinion will find your opinion not being shown on this site.
Now keep in mind:
1. 300 Damage = 300 Threat
2. The proc can happen from Revenge while a regular weapon’s attacks cannot.
3. Thunderfury vs King’s Defender in regards to Devastate
Devastate is calculated as the following…
(Weapon Damage / 2) + (35 * Number of Sunders) - Mitigation
For simplicity sake, we’ll assume Average Weapon Damage, 5 sunders, no mitigation and a 15% crit rate for this comparison so the formula becomes…
(Average Weapon Damage*1.15 / 2) + (175)
King’s Defender: (161 / 2) + 175 = 255.5
Thunderfury: (91.425 / 2) + 175 = 220.7125
So a very small lead for KD at this point. Now we factor in the proc of TF assuming it happens 20% of the time.
King’s Defender: 255.5
Thunderfury: 220.7125 + (300 * .20) = 280.7125
And we find that Thunderfury does more threat than King’s Defender when using Devastate. It does more threat when using Revenge and it does equal threat when using Shield Slam. This means that your 3 primary aggro generation moves, Thunderfury is passing King’s Defender which explains why it can keep up with it and ultimately surpass it on threat.
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January 3rd, 2008 at 7:04 pm
still we get threat from auto hits as well. Meaning that every second the fight goes on you get 40 threat anyhow.
Lets view the revenge bonus. In 60 seconds you get ideal about 10 revenges. Meaning 10*0.20*300 = 600 threat = 10 TPS
We are all good tanks so we keep shield slam on cooldown. This means we use 10 shield slams every 60 seconds. This results if we don’t use any other skills in 40 devastate. 280.72 - 255 = 25.22 threat each devastate extra for TF. 25.22 * 10 devastates = 252.2 threat = 4.26 TPS extra for TF
The total now is 14.26 TPS more for TF when using abilities.
Now TF has 32 white hits in 60 seconds. This gives 1920 (=32 * 0.20 * 300) threat or 32 TPS on top of the dps.
So TF final TPS is 53.9 + 46.26 = 100.16 TPS + 9.5 TPS from white crits.
GRAND TOTAL: 110 TPS
Kings defender is easiers
special abilities : nothing better then TF
White hits: 87.5 dps, so 87.5 TPS
white crits: 18TPS
GRAND TOTAL: 105.5 TPS
This calculation is based on:
- 15% crit
- 20% procrate of TF
- TF dmg proc doesn’t crit (could be wrong but won’t make a big difference)
- both weapons never miss so they have same amount of hits.
- the players uses shield slam > revenge > devastate
- no dmg modifiers have been taking in consideration
In a real situation TF keeps thunderclap on the mob so the non TF user will lose some TPS due to spamming thunderclap twice each minute.
TF has a great threat but it doesn’t scale. The basic dmg from weapons is an important part of our threat generation. This damage and thus the treat CAN scale with increased crit for instance.
In the end I think The king’s defender and thunderfury will be very close to each other in TPS. The proc of Thunderfury can close the gap in damage difference but can’t take the lead. So with threat more or less equal but a great difference in mitigation the choice is easy to make.
Use TF to show off in town. Get kings defender the threat may be a bit less but the damage mitigation is important…
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January 4th, 2008 at 9:04 am
Since the TPS is so similar I’ve been using TF in fights where the slow can proc (mostly trash and Tier4 bosses) and King’s Defender all other times.
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February 8th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
I still use TF in the offhand when ever I need to DPS. Proc’s don’t suffer a dual wield penalty. 20% * 300 dmg / 1.7 sec = +35 dps (offhand). When comparing to the normal dps number thats like +70 dps since offhand dmg is halved. This makes it a “120 dps” offhand weapon. You also forgot to mention that nature damage doesn’t suffer the armor penalty, which makes it more effective then melee dmg on most targets.
Whenever I’m tanking something that hits like a girl, I tend to put the shield up and put TF in the offhand. It’s very easy to HS/Revenge spam and keep high threat on a low rage target. If I know ahead of time and max my hit, its very easy to keep up 800-1000 TPS on girly mobs.
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June 14th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
Hi. I’ve been trying to get my Thunderfury for years now, and in downtime I’ve thought about theorycrafting all sorts of stuff with Thunderfury. After looking into it’s threat potentials past 60 (ever since playing with many other tanks who used it in its various states of overpoweredness/after being nerfed), I decided to finally test some stuff.
First off, the previous calculations were all wrong because they counted the proc as doing 300 damage in Defensive stance, which is wrong. It would do 270 damage, because of the penalty. Also, the average damage calculation of Thunderfury was wrong, because it was not counting the innate nature damage portion of it, which I counted.
However, many raids now (25 mans, anyway) will have at least 1 shadow priest and 1 enhancement shaman - infact, you’d be hard pressed to find a raid that didn’t have at least these.
The Thunderfury proc is affected by both Misery and Stormstrike, which I tested thoroughly to be sure of. This brings the proc up to 340.3 damage in defensive stance, which I also tested. (I had a friend use his thunderfury for the testing since I don’t actually own one yet)
I did some scratchpad math based on the stuff that was already done here, and this is what I came up with.
340 dmg proc in defensive stance (stormstrike+misery)
60 seconds =
1.9 second attack speed, 31 hits in a minute, 37 with WF
60 seconds =
20 devastates 10 revenges 37 = 67 attacks/min, 20% procrate, 13 procs/min
13*340 = 4556 extra threat/min or 76 TPS, in a standard rotation.
Dragonscale 113-211 = 324 * 1.15 / 2 = 186.3 avg /2(dev penalty) = 93.15 dmg + 175 (dev) = 268.15
Thunderfury 60-145 = 205 * 1.15 / 235 / 2 117.9 /2 (dev penalty) = 59 dmg + 175 (dev) = 234
With proc, 20% of the time for 340 dmg, 234 + (340 * .2) = 234 + 68 = 302 - significantly more than the best threat weapon in the game currently.
Now, please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong somewhere (very possible), but I believe that Thunderfury is STILL the best threat weapon, assuming Misery and Stormstrike are up all the time, which they should be (nothing consumes Stormstrike, unless you run with an elemental shaman, which we don’t).
The math will be skewed a bit, and could actually be calculated further, if you consider that the Thunderfury proc is not affected by armor at all, and the regular threat weapon’s pure physical advantage is, and so forth - but just as these rough estimations show, I think it’s still actually the best by a fair margin.
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June 14th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
One more thing, since guildmates brought up a good point. If you get multiple TF procs in a 10-12 second window (Stromstrike cooldown/debuff duration), the second (or more), proc will not have the Stormstrike debuff, so I decided to see what the worth of it is if half of the procs have the full bonus and half don’t.
Or.. With proc, 10% of the time for 340 dmg, 10% of the time for 284 dmg (no Stormstrike debuff, due to being already consumed by a previous TF proc), , 234 + (340 * .1) 34, 268 + (284 * .1) 28.4, 268+28.4 = 296.4
So it’s 296.4 vs 268.15 from the dragonscale, still better.
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June 14th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
Also forgot to apply the 50% uptime of stormstrike, for TF procs, to the overall tps gain/min.
6 seconds = 2x devastate 1x revenge 1x shield slam
* 10 =
20 devastates 10 revenges 37 = 67 attacks/min, 20% procrate, 13 procs/min
7*340 = 2380 extra threat
6*284 = 1704 + 2380 = 4084 threat/min or 68 extra TPS
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August 16th, 2008 at 9:18 am
Guys, im not good in calculations, but i just notice that you miss one little factor in your calculations. Everyone of you forget that Dragonscale have 25 haste rating bonus, which makes him to do more hits in a minute, and this increase his TPS.
P.S. I’m playing Tank from more than 3 years, and i have TF long enough to say that its really good tanking weapon even in TBC. I think that there is no better weapon till Sunwell. I can’t be sure, becouse i don’t have Mallet of the Tides, or The Brutalizer, or The Unbreakable Will. But usually i make more TPS with my TF than other warriors make with their weapons.
But to be honest i think that my 1300-1500TPS is REALLY low… and now im waiting to get Dragonscale to can test the difference between TF and Dragonscale. Some people said that with this sword a good warrior can make 1800-2000TPS. Is it true or false? And if someone have time, try to calculate how much TPS will make TF if you useing it in combination with Sunwell tanking items which gives you Haste Rating (more hits per min = more procs of TF)
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