An Expert Guide to Expertise
Even before Patch 2.3 came out, it was clear that the Expertise Skill they described was going to be amazing for tanks.
Just how Amazing is it?
- 3.9423 Expertise Rating = 1 Expertise Skill = -0.25% Parry & -0.25% Dodge
- 7.8846 Expertise Rating = 2 Expertise Skill = -0.50% Parry & -0.50% Dodge
Basically, 2 Expertise Skill is like 1% to Hit for a Tank. So we can say 7.8846 Expertise Rating = 15.78 Hit Rating. Which makes Expertise almost exactly Twice as effective as Hit Rating for threat generation.
Is there an Expertise Cap?
Theoretically, yes. There has to be, but realistically, you cannot reach this cap. The reason is because while a boss always has 5.75% Dodge the amount of Parry can range from between 10% to 15%. It’s still important to understand the following though:
- 23 Expertise Skill = -5.75% Parry & -5.75% Dodge
The reason is that after that point you’ve removed the potential for a boss to Dodge your attacks. The result is that after 23 Expertise Skill, Expertise Rating because roughly equivalent to that of Hit Rating for Threat generation.
So, stop after 23 Skill?
No.
While Threat wise Expertise might equal Hit Rating after 23 Expertise Skill, it’s other major benefit is still working as good as ever. Reducing a bosses chance to Parry is very powerful because when a boss Parries one of your attacks, just like you, his next attack is going to come up to 40% faster. For this reason, no amount of Expertise Skill really is ever enough and this is also why you should not let any dpsers attack the boss in the front. (There parried attacks will speed up the boss’ attacks too!)
Where do I get Expertise?
Patch 2.3 was kind enough to gift wrap us 6 free Expertise Skill just by specing into Defiance. (a talent that every tank absolutely must have no questions asked) Other than that unfortunately, we can only acquire more from gear. The following list represents the Expertise items that a Tank could potentially wear.
Weapons
Special Note: Patch 2.3 changed the Human and Orc Racial so that Maces and Swords give Humans 5 Expertise Skill and Axes give Orcs 5 Expertise Skill. Which means that a Human’s weapon list is going to include all the Maces and Swords in the game as would an Orc’s for axes. It also means that the Mallet of the Tides for Humans and The Brutalizer for Orcs are going to be especially powerful.
Armor
- Ring: Shapeshifter’s Signet
- Neck: Brooch of Deftness
- Wrist: Bracers of the Ancient Phalanx
- Hands: Gauntlets of Enforcement
It’s definitely not as long a list as one would like given how powerful Expertise is, but at least the few options we do have to pick from will, for the most part, last you until the end of the game.
January 24th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Thanks for the heads up on the Shapeshifter’s Signet, I hadn’t realized it had been changed and it is indeed powerful, I’ll likely be picking it up as soon as I hit Exalted with Lower City (which is a Heroic Sethekk Halls run or two away).
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January 24th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Once I got the Badge Brooch and Bracers, it felt like i was getting dodged and parried MORE. Why? Because I didn’t start paying attention to when I got dodged and parried until after expertise was implemented hehe. When you start stacking expertise you’re not gonna be like “Wow, my threat generation is off the F’ing map!!!” Your long term threat generation is going to see a significant increase, which you probably wont notice immediately.
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January 24th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
One thing I’ve pondered is the defensive value of Expertise. For example, if a boss attacks 120 times over a 5 minute period (thats twice every 5 seconds) you can reasonably expect the boss to have a parried hasted swing about 10% of the time. 12 hasted swings may result in a 4 or 5 additional attacks over the same period. Its more damage in general and a bad streak is always painful. Expertise will obviously reduce these extra attacks.
The downside of the warrior tank in this regard is the frequency with which a warrior attacks. A warrior will land 6-8 physical attacks every 5 seconds and each one may give your opponent a chance to parry. Druids will do less since their auto attack is slower with no parry and Paladin’s only have an auto-attack and no physical threat generating skills.
Right now I’m wondering if I should skip the Darkener’s Grasp. Its an excellent defensive item but the Brooch of Deftness is hawt sauce and still has some defensive value.
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January 24th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
I don’t doubt the awesomeness (it’s a word) of expertise, I’ve got the brooch and planning on getting at least the bracers if not the ring as well, but it still might be worth mentioning that while the maths says expertise is twice as effective as hit rating for threat, it only applies to situations where an attack can be both dodged and parried.
They changed +hit to affect the chance for taunt to be resisted, is that the same with Demo Shout and TC?
Can Shield Slam be dodged or parried?
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January 24th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
@Ivanstone:
As fantastic as Darkener’s Grasp is I’d still wear Brooch of Deftness over it. There really is just too few spots where you can get Expertise in the first place that I feel it’s worth wearing all of them.
@Talisman:
1. Demo Shout and TC are still unaffected by +hit.
2. Shield Slam can definitely be dodge or parried.
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January 24th, 2008 at 9:49 pm
You have answered my doubts in expertise. Thank you, nicely written.
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January 24th, 2008 at 11:39 pm
I love the site.
Some items that also have expertise:
Fang of Vashj
Demonblood eviscerator
Firebrand Battleaxe
Timeslicer
Twinblade of mastery
Whispering Blade of slaying
Pilfered ethereal blade ( a green with expertise)
Twin-bladed ripper ( hit and expertise)
Axe of the legion
Blood-guided knife
vibro shanker
Resonating axe
Claw of the netherwing Flight
There are also a number of leather items, which would not be good for prot warriors, but druids might be interested even though they are in competition with rogues
belt of one-hundred deaths
gloves of the searing grip
grips of deftness
and of course
Earthwarden
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January 25th, 2008 at 5:09 am
I’m still using http://www.wowhead.com/?item=14551 Edgemaster’s Handguards - for both Fury and Prot, I never take them off!
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January 25th, 2008 at 6:47 am
Personally I think expertise is a great stat for a tank, in almost every situation, since its both offensive (threat generation) and defensive (avoide being parried and consequent increse of the enemy haste).
Just remember that there are many different situations a Tank have to manage and sometimes covering with topped avoidance is better than to have high expertise (I would never trash the Darkener
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January 25th, 2008 at 6:48 am
hopefully WotLK will bring us more tanking stuff with expertise on it… i got the bracers last week and the effect is quite noticeable…
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January 25th, 2008 at 9:01 am
I did some Kara the other day with 6 expertise, rather than my usual 32. It was painful. Expertise is a flat out broken stat, it’s just that powerful.
It’s crazy that I’m wearing an ilvl 100 epic ring over my ilvl 130+ alternatives in almost every situation.
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January 25th, 2008 at 11:06 am
My results have been just the opposite. I have 42 expertise rating from my gloves and axe and 6 expertise skill from defiance but I have been pretty unimpressed. Looking back through WWS reports, I am not seeing a significant reduction in dodge and parry even though I should be getting a 4% reduction. I was just as excited as everybody else when I saw that Blizzard was finally fixing weapon skill but I have been pretty disappointed.
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January 25th, 2008 at 11:40 am
4% should drop it a fair bit. You’ll be seeing some dodge, but not a lot.
http://wowwebstats.com/6is2kmvojwvlq?s=14894-15170&a=14
I’m at about 30 expertise here
0% dodge
4% miss
8% parry
Pick up the bracers / neck / ring, and you’ll really see a difference. Especially once you drop dodge completely off the table.
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January 25th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
I guess I should specify - I have nearly eliminated dodge and the WWS bears that out and that is great, but unless I can eliminate parry, then I really just can’t get excited about it. http://wowwebstats.com/ht3jdjuaz5bdo?s=136-404&a=7
Those results are pretty consistent across all my reports - my specials don’t miss thanks to hit rating and I very rarely get dodged but I always see roughly 10% parry.
Now that my guild one-shots Illidan week in and week out, we have to find a new motivation to keep performance high. My suggestion was to pick a few fights a week and go all out with consumable and really try to push the dps to see how we stack up against other guilds who put up their WWS. So I did some homework to find out what the tanks of the guilds who consistently have top dps reports are doing. I found a couple things I could be doing better. I looked at 7 different high dps reports from Gorefiend (I figured it
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January 25th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
The only problem with your conclusions is that you have 7 unique people. 6 of which support your argument that Expertise is not powerful and 1 that does not. However, you don’t have any data showing what those 6 did with Expertise and given that factors such as spec, skill and most importantly raid dps make up/skill are not easily measured it kinda defeats your entire claim.
Basically, you make the assumption that Higher raid DPS = Higher tank TPS which simply is not a fair assumption to make. Certainly TPS matters a lot, but the reality is that the tank that stacked Expertise could have had the highest TPS and simply did not have the highest DPS raid.
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January 25th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
I should also point out one thing about those parses: Dalvian from Juggernaut did not have Windfury or little in the way of additional tank support. Many of the other tanks did have it.
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January 25th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
By no means is my little bit of research meant to be an all inclusive statement on whether or not expertise is worthwhile. I looked at 7 different reports and that is far from a statistically sound sample. And even amongst the small sample I took the result was not unanimous.
You are right, there could be a tank with all the expertise out there and he could be putting out higher tps numbers than anyone else but there is no way to find him. The raid with a high tps tank doesn’t necessarily have high dps but a raid with high dps DOES necessarily have a tank with high tps.
While spec and skill could be a factor, I doubt that there is much variation when you are looking at tanks who have been farming tier 6 for months and who are capable of putting out enough threat to stay ahead of some wicked dps. The skill is going to be the same for all of them - very very good - and I would bet 10 American dollars that all of them were specced 12/5/44.
Like I said, I am not trying to present definitive evidence. But, in my experience, expertise has not been particularly impressive and after looking at what a couple other tanks did while putting out massive amounts of threat, it appears that they weren’t impressed by expertise either.
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January 25th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
@Ivanstone
He had no improved leader of the pack either so I assume he didn’t have regular leader of the pack either. And he only used shield slam 9 times but had a pretty high crit rate on it. His HS:auto-attack ratio is almost twice as high as the other tanks I looked at though which I guess is where all his threat came from.
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January 25th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
Hehe, no worries Rochelle. I know you are intelligent, but it’s important to balance your very convincing argument. The fact that 2 of the tanks alone didn’t even have Windfury proves that maximum TPS really is not a huge factor for the encounter even with very high dps.
I wouldn’t be so quick to claim that just b/c tanks with high dps raids didn’t use a lot of Expertise that Expertise doesn’t impress them. What it more likely says is that they didn’t even try it. If there’s one thing that many tanks have in common it’s an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach.
In the end, if your goal is the highest tps then simply test both approaches. As you said, you’re farming Illidan so it’s not like you can’t try it one way one week and then try it another way the next.
And btw, I’ll take the spec bet
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January 25th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
Assuming the changes to the WWS site haven’t broken his parser you can use http://www.coolyo.org/index.php?area=threat to get the TPS of the tank during the particular fight. Only other issue I see with checking someone’s WWS and then using the armory to check what gear they wore is you really can’t tell if that was the gear they wore for that particular fight.
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January 27th, 2008 at 7:45 am
Comparing to WWS I find myself having a great improvement in Threat and dps. Also the boss parry and dodge on my attack has significantly reduced over previous encounter without expertise. Compared to other tank in my guild, the percentage of boss miss/dodge/parry on with my attack is almost half.
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January 29th, 2008 at 7:40 am
I did make one big assumption looking at that data and you picked up on it. I assumed that those other tanks tested expertise a little on their own and reached the conclusion that a little bit was good but stacking it really isn’t effective. I figured that after doing the same bosses for months they would have tried a few different gear setups and that when expertise was introduced they would have given it a test drive. It is also entirely possible that they did no such thing.
I could test it out myself but… I have like 14 badges and I would rather get the pvp cloak. And since I don’t really do Karazhan anymore and I don’t like ZA and I promised myself I would never do a heroic again after I finished my Trials of the Naaru, I don’t really have easy access to badges.
Maybe that is why I don’t like expertise - it is my subconscious rationalization for being too lazy to go get some Badges of Justice.
@Danarch - that’s a really cool website, thanks for the link.
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February 8th, 2008 at 8:56 am
I was wondering, given how godly expertise seems to be, I’m currently running the Mallet of the Tides with mongoose on it and I’m trying to gather together Nether Vortexes together for Blazefury (which I will promptly enchant with executioner). I was looking at using the sword as a higher threat weapon for fights like Hydross where there’s a lot of tank switching and you need to be able to grab things quick, and the mallet for fights like Morogrim where I have him the whole time (plus it gives me a better DPS weapon for when my group fights Leo). Am I wasting my DKP in your opinion, or is this a solid plan?
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February 8th, 2008 at 10:18 am
My most recent revelation (not really, I just never had a good weapon to do it with) is that a slow 1h weapon will give you a bigger bonus for threat than just about anything else. The rage you get during a boss fight is almost entirely from incoming damage so switching from a 1.6 weapon to 2.6 really didn’t make me rage starved at all in front of a raid boss. Actually, I ended up with more rage than usual because the slow speed meant fewer HS. And the damage from HS and devastate went WAY up which provided a huge threat boost and a slower weapon means more procs for whichever enchant you are running with.
I posted a WWS of a Teron Gorefiend kill from a couple weeks ago in an earlier reply on this thread and that was using a 1.6 weapon (Brutalizer iirc) and here is a WWS from last weeks kill when I used the Season 1 sword (unenchanted because I am a noob). You can see a big jump in my damage:
http://wowwebstats.com/rrmoyvyd36k5m?s=2377-2655
So if you are looking for a high threat weapon, I would strongly recommend getting something nice and slow - the Season 1 sword does very nicely if you don’t have something in your bank already.
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February 8th, 2008 at 11:39 am
Going to have to disagree on this one.
It’s important to realize that our threat is a combination of Static Threat from abilities and DPS, not just DPS. So while a slow weapon will result in higher dps, it’s going to result in lower overall threat in a high rage situation due to, just as you said, less Heroic Strikes. The static threat offered by Heroic Strike far exceeds the bigger numbers of a slow weapon. You’ll actually be able to get in 3 Heroics Strikes with a fast weapon for every 2 Heroic Strikes with a slow weapon which is a massive threat difference.
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February 8th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
But devastate has a much smaller static threat component so an increase in damage from that gives a significant increase in threat.
I have seen every boss in the game and there are only 2 (not counting Vael) where I had the perfect ‘unlimited’ rage situation. For every other fight I have had to manage my rage and that usually means cutting HS from the rotation. In a perfect situation I would be able to get 3 HS with a fast weapon vs 2 from slow weapon, but that perfect unlimited rage situation almost never happens. And that is the hidden beauty of a slow weapon, Its not possible to HS as much which leaves me with enough rage to execute perfect threat cycles for the entire duration of the fight without having to worry about rage conservation.
Slow weapon means a better HS:Auto-attack ratio, higher devastate damage and more rage to execute SS->Rev->Dev->Dev. And of course you get more procs from your enchant.
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February 8th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
(sorry about the length of this, I may end up revisiting my Slow vs Fast article and just re-post a lot of this so it’s not lost in the comments)
You are right, the unlimited rage situation presents itself rarely if ever which is why I said High rage situation, but that’s semantics so not worth worrying over.
Let’s breakdown your claims a bit: (I’m going to jump around a bit b/c it’ll make more sense that way)
1. Slow Weapons offer more Rage (False)
While Threat does not equal Rage, DPS does. You’ll get roughly the exact same amount of rage over a 60 second time frame from a fast or a slow weapon with the same dps. Better yet the Fast weapon’s rage will be more consistent.
2. Slow weapons mean a better HS:Auto-attack ratio. (False)
The reason I call this false is because you’ve made the claim that a 1 to 1 relationship between auto-attack and Heroic Strike is good. It’s actually not. All we really care about is the quantity. Let’s do a little quick math:
- 1.6 speed weapon in 60 seconds will hit roughly 37 times.
- 2.6 speed weapon in 60 seconds will hit roughly 23 times.
Now the reality is that even if we say that we both land 20 Heroic Strikes (which actually won’t be true we’ll find out), the Fast weapon generates the Exact Same additional static threat from using Heroic strike even if the numbers may not look as big. (slow or fast they both get the same static threat and the same added damage) Even more to the point since the Slow Weapon’s Heroic Strikes consume the auto-attacks, we are left with an ugly looking situation for slow weapon users:
- 1.6 speed weapon does 20 HS and is left with 17 auto-attacks
- 2.6 speed weapon does 20 HS and is left with 3 auto-attacks
So using a fast weapon, we’ll get auto-attack rage from 17 attacks where as the slow weapon user will only get rage from 3 attacks. Now stretch that rage gain across an entire fight and the fast weapon user will get far, far more rage and be able to Heroic Strike more often.
3. Higher Devastate damage (True)
You win this one, that’s definitely the benefit to a Slow Weapon and is the whole reason why when you are in a low rage situation where Heroic Strike is used rarely, if ever, that the Slow Weapon is the speed of choice.
I think what you’ve really fallen pray to is appearances. The Slow Weapon definitely ends up with Higher DPS due to increased Devastate damage and your rage bar is certainly going to look like it’s less starved since you can’t consume it as fast, but as I’ve proved above those don’t actually tell the whole story.
The truth is a Faster Weapon in High Rage fights equals more Rage than Slow Weapons, not vice-versa and as a result more Heroic Strikes equating to more Threat than the higher Devastate damage of a Slow weapon nets you.
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February 8th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
You are right, two weapons of different speeds but with all else equal will produce the same amount of rage over time. But it is not very much. The rage you generate from white damage is insignificant to the point that I pretty much ignore it for the sake of this argument. The 5 rage you get when you hit the boss for 200 is completely meaningless when you get 50 rage on the next boss swing. So the consistency of rage from white damage coming from a slow vs a fast weapon is moot. Especially considering that in an ideal situation, you will never have any white damage to generate rage.
I am definitely not trying to say that you want a 1:1 HS:auto-attack break down. Just the opposite in fact. In an ideal situation you will never have an auto-attack, every single swing will be an HS. So with a fast weapon you have more opportunities to squeeze in an HS but because you are swinging so fast, you aren’t likely to have enough rage to use an HS as often.
So if you are using a fast weapon your ratio of HS:Auto-attack is likely to be closer to or less than 1:1 than if you are using a slow weapon because except for a very few circumstances, you are not going to have enough rage to HS as often. It has been my experience that with a 2.6 weapon I can have the vast majority of my swings be HS and not have any rage issues because I am not dumping rage into HS as often. The problem with a fast weapon is that you get whacked by the boss and think ‘yay a bunch of rage’ and you launch into your threat cycle and now you have a decision - do you use HS liberally and hope that you get hit again so that you can continue to use the real workhorses of threat gen (SS, Rev and Dev) or do you play it safe and keep up your SS Rev Dev Dev cycle and only HS if you have more than 60-70 rage? Going with the first option will produce the most threat if you have steady damage intake but that is far from guaranteed and the second option will produce pretty good threat but not max threat. Now if you have a slow weapon, it has been my experience that you can HS almost every swing and since your swing is slow enough you still have enough rage to execute the SS Rev Dev Dev cycle.
Either way, fast or slow, you are going to get roughly the same number HS squeezed out and you will do roughly the same amount of damage over time from autoattack + HS damage, but because you can’t physically HS as fast with the slow weapon, your rage usage will be more consistent which allows you to maintain the SS Rev Dev Dev cycle better and it gives you more time to decide whether or not you want to hold off on using an HS on the next swing.
And you skipped the bit about improving your chance to proc weapon enchants and windfury.
I think 2.6 might be a little too slow though. If there was a new 2.3 weapon somewhere I would take it out for a nice candle-lit dinner and then we would go for a walk on the beach and then I would take it home and play a little game of Just the Tip.
r.i.p Crul’shorukh, Edge of Chaos
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February 8th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=19363
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February 8th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
I’m not going to lie Rochelle, you are contradicting yourself a lot in that comment and you’ve pretty much chose to ignore my math which already addresses a number of your comments and proves them incorrect. That being said I realize I have an unfair advantage being able to edit my comments to craft the most convincing argument possible. Part of the perks of owning the site
We’ll have to setup a vent conversation some time to hash it out. Passionate, opinionated people like you and I can have fantastic discussions talking, but typing it’s just one massive wall of text after another (as we’ve already seen) which ends up being pretty boring for everyone else other than us two.
Anyway drop me a line via the contact form on the left side if you are interested. For those of you still capable of reading, you can see my thoughts on the Fast vs Slow debate in a nut shell here:
http://www.tankingtips.com/2007/07/20/weapon-speed-fast-vs-slow/
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February 9th, 2008 at 11:42 am
Rofl! I can’t speak for everyone else, but when you are doing shift work and need to do some thing to kill the down time, walls of text are great!
I am still amassing my badges for the brooch of deftness and phalanx bracers. I am like 400 rep from getting the ring too >_
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February 12th, 2008 at 9:40 am
One additional thing regarding the slow vs fast argument is the availability of beneficial stats on weapons ie Expertise. There are no slow epic weapons with expertise. Overpowered Humans (filth) or Orcs (scum), get a little more choice since there are enough quality slow weapons with hit rating on them to experiment with.
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February 13th, 2008 at 10:41 am
Ok, let me try and simplify.
My whole argument is based on the premise that the rage you generate from your own white damage is completely irrelevant since it is completely overshadowed by the rage you get from incoming damage.
So, assuming you have the same amount of rage regardless of weapon choice, it becomes a matter of how you use it. With a fast weapon you will have more swings that can potentially be HS than you would have with a slow weapon. Whe you try to HS every single swing, the fast weapon will burn through your rage more quickly than a slow weapon will.
The majority of threat comes from maintaining a SS Rev Dev Dev cycle. So your goal should be to keep that cycle up and use HS as often as rage allows. With a fast weapon, you have to make the decision of whether or not you have enough rage to HS and maintain your cycle every 1.6 seconds. If you chose to HS but then dodge the next 4 boss swings, then you are not going to be able to maintain your cycle. With a slower weapon you have more time to consider your situation and fewer decisions to make which could potentially go wrong. If a slow weapon doesn’t make your rage management better, at the very least it makes it easier.
My experience has been that a slower weapon led to increased threat. If may be for technical reason, but it could also be because easier rage management means I don’t have to be staring at my rage bar and doing calculations in my head every 1.6 seconds. Instead I can be deliberate in hitting every single GCD without spamming my buttons. I can also be a better raider overall because I am better able to watch everything that is going on around me instead of being concerned that I will have enough rage to keep threat cycles going.
I skipped your math because as I said in the first paragraph, rage from white damage is inconsequential. You skipped my part about procs from enchants and WF totem. And of course, slow weapons tend to be tailored for melee dps so while they might both say 100dps, the slow weapon is going to have stats that further increase the dps.
If you want to jump on vent sometime I would be up for it. Maybe we can make a whole thing of it. Collect questions from readers and then talk it out and make a podcast or something.
jeez, first blogging and now talking about a podcast? How 21st century am I?
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February 13th, 2008 at 11:31 am
Ya, I’ve been looking into Podcasting the last while. Basically, just trying to decide how much time it’s going to take to do a good job of it.
First, you are right I did glaze over the Windfury and Proc stuff, but that’s because the difference in procs is minimal and with Windfury the benefit you get from greater threat on Windfury procs is lost on the fact that you waste rage because you can’t dump it fast enough with a slow weapon.
The Faster is Greater math is going beyond just the rage of auto-attacks, (which is meaningful especially for the multiple dodge situations you are worried about) it’s true power is that there is the opportunity to generate more threat. You are right that you won’t accidentally “Over” Heroic Strike so to speak with a Slow weapon, but you also lose the opportunity to generate the maximum potential threat.
In my opinion, you can’t say Slower is Better because this way you won’t be able to make bad decisions. Idiot-Proofing the Threat process certainly has the upside of increasing your situational awareness, but it has the downside of losing the potential to do maximum threat and that’s the goal here.
Basically, Slow Weapons lead to Rage Waste due to being unable to dump rage fast enough coupled with Threat loss because of lost opportunities to use Heroic Strike in the Rage Waste situation. Certainly, multiple dodge situations can happen, but this is why we have Bloodrage and Auto-attack rage.
Grr… I don’t know how you dragged me into this again Rochelle
We’ll definitely have to try to swing the podcast idea. If you are cool with it I’ll start up a post to start gathering questions with the main topic being the Fast vs Slow debate.
Food for Thought:
Why spec into Improved Sunder or Improved Heroic Strike? After all, if 5 rage from an auto-attack is meaningless then 3 less rage on a Devastate or Heroic Strike must be too. Should be not use Focused Rage either?
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February 13th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
With a slow weapon there is certainly the possibility of wasting rage because you can’t unload it fast enough, but honestly, there have only been two bosses where I have had enough rage to do whatever the hell I want. Not being able to spend enough rage is VERY rarely a bigger problem than not having enough rage.
I don’t think you are giving enough credit to idiot proofing your rage. HS is not the workhorse of threat, SS Rev Dev Dev is. And ensuring that you have enough rage to keep that cycle up will generate more threat in the long run than getting a few more HS in there if those HS followed by an a dodge or two leaves you rage starved.
And the procs from enchants is hardly minimal. If that were the case then fury warriors and enhancement shaman - and rogues to a lesser extent - would use fast mainhand weapons. I will point out that I screwed up including WF since it only procs on auto-attack or on-next-attack abilities.
I understand the concern that a slow weapon can leave you with a rage surplus but it just doesnt happen that way. Maybe I am just unusually good at spending rage, but I doubt it.
I can’t post a WWS to show how much rage I have, but I can tell you that with a slow weapon I have usually have between 50 and 70 rage for the duration of any boss fight. I rarely hit 100 which would infer wasted rage and I almost never hit 0. WWS doesn’t track rage so I can’t offer anything but anecdotal evidence. But give it a try and I think that you will find that after a little adjustment period, you won’t ever have too much rage.
And you are comparing rage management talents with rage generation which is a pretty big stretch. Sure I am only saving a little bit of rage but it makes a big difference because the amount of rage I have to work with is finite. But rage generation from white damage is inconsequential because your potential for rage generation is infinite. It is especially irrelevant when you consider that to generate the most threat possible you will never have any white attacks anyway. Hell, if you are fast enough you can even HS a WF proc.
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February 13th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Melee DPS uses Slow Weapons b/c yellow attacks use your top end damage, it has very little to do with Proc Rates.
You can’t really devalue my argument on one hand by saying the infinite rage situation never happens then follow it by saying auto-attacks are meaningless b/c in the infinite rage situation they’ll never occur. Either Infinite rage happens and HS spam with a fast weapon is amazing or it doesn’t and I get the same HS as a slow weapon + free rage which in turn becomes even more HS.
You do the same 50 rage balancing act with a fast weapon as a slow weapon. Better in fact when you consider that when you suddenly see a spike in a rage you can dump that rage even faster by doing a couple HS to ensure no Rage Waste occurs.
This is the real beauty of faster weapons. You have greater rage control coupled with better threat in high rage situations and higher rage generation in high to mid rage situations which encases 90% of encounters.
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February 13th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
Melee attacks haven’t used top end damage since Nefarian was end game and just unsheathing an Arcanite Reaper would cause people to run in terror. The vast majority of attacks for fury warriors and enhance shaman only care about AP. And almost everything else is normalized based on a certain speed depending on the weapon type so only the average damage and weapon type matter. PPM on the other hand is heavily influenced by weapon speed which is why any good enhancement shaman uses a 2.6 weapon in their offhand.
There is no limit to the amount of rage you will have over the course of an encounter. That does not mean that you will have a full rage bar for the duration of any given encounter, just that there is a potential for it.
With the same dps, a 2.6 weapon will generate almost twice as much rage on the average hit than a 1.6 weapon with a swing speed that is only 40% slower. But thats not the point, this is the point - you are trying to argue that you are getting more rage from white attacks which allows for more HS. But if you have more HS, then you have fewer white attacks to generate that extra rage. The logic is flawed. And as I said in a previous post, the slower weapon is going to have melee dps stats which further increase the dps so the white attacks that go through are even better for rage generation. If you look at the two WWS reports I put up, all of my gear was the same except for the weapon. The fight with the slow weapon took about 10 seconds longer. With the fast weapon I had 41 white attacks and did 9.9k damage and I had 14 with the slow weapon yet the slow weapon did only 100 less damage. So the rage generation for the 1.6 is 273 over the course of the fight and 272 for the slow weapon. Which is roughly 11% of the rage from incoming damage. So, since the two weapons will generate the same amount of rage and because it is such a small portion of the rage over the duration of the fight, I think it ought to simply be ignored.
If you are balancing 50 rage with a fast weapon then you are already skipping a lot of opportunities to HS. If you are doing so, then you aren’t maxing your threat by using the one advantage the fast weapon has. So if you aren’t pushing out extra HS with the fast weapon because you are balancing at 50, then all you are doing is gimping your devastates.
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February 13th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
See balancing at 50 is to ensure that you’ll maintain your SS > Rev > Dev > Dev rotation with Shield block. Regardless of speed you have to balance at a certain rage number to maintain this. It sounds like your play style is to use HS (along with a part of the cycle) every time you have rage available, this would definitely lead to frequent rage starvation and may be why you are seeing lesser results with a faster weapon. If you aren’t balancing then you are basically “over heroic striking”.
There is nothing wrong with the logic of more white attacks leads to more rage leads to more HS. It’s this very concept that is the reason balancing at 50 is the way to play. It’s not about using every single possible opportunity to HS (although certainly this is the money situation where faster is way, way better), it’s about getting the maximum number of Heroic Strikes over a period of time while maintaining the rotation.
This is what my initial math was attempting to illustrate.
- 1.6 speed weapon in 60 seconds will hit roughly 37 times.
- 2.6 speed weapon in 60 seconds will hit roughly 23 times.
I’ll take the example farther assuming you maintain your SS > Rev > Dev > Dev / SB rotation and doing this you land 23 HS. (something you say you can do with your slow weapon)
- 1.6 speed weapon does 23 HS and is left with 14 auto-attacks
- 2.6 speed weapon does 23 HS and is left with 0 auto-attacks
Those 14 extra auto-attacks of the fast weapon = roughly 70 rage (14*5 rage) where as the slow weapon has 0 opportunities to generate auto-attack rage. Now even if we waste a bit of the fast weapon rage, we’ll still get to turn some into additional HS. We’ll say we only lose 20 rage which is more than fair so that extra 50 rage turns into 4 more HS (assuming worst-case of non-imp HS). Now we get:
- 1.6 speed weapon does 27 HS and is left with 10 auto-attacks
- 2.6 speed weapon does 23 HS and is left with 0 auto-attacks
This illustrates that over the course of a 1 minute time frame, the Faster weapon with the exact same incoming rage is going to consistently land 4 more HS than the Slow weapon thanks to extra auto-attacks of the fast weapon maintaining it’s additional Heroic Strikes.
Now certainly if you don’t balance your rage and instead use HS all the time along with your standard rotation then you are essentially shooting yourself in the foot. The slow weapon as I said before is idiot-proof in this regard since you aren’t able to “over HS”, but you also will miss out on the opportunity to HS 4 more times/minute.
4 HS = 196 static threat * 4 = 784 threat / 60 is an extra 13 TPS.
Now that’s nothing huge, but when you consider that this is simply a moderate rage situation and its not factoring in the threat provided by the bonus damage nor threat multipliers, it doesn’t even close to do justice for the actual threat superiority of a fast weapon.
A high rage fight (not even infinite) will lend itself to even more HS potential beyond the 23 that a slow weapon can land in a minute. In this case, we have a Rage Waste situation on the slow weapon’s part with no waste on the fast weapon’s part. This leads to an even greater threat difference between the two. Improved Heroic Strike will only further exaggerate the advantage of a Fast Weapon.
I can see why you like a 2.3 speed weapon because it lends itself to the “I get to HS all the time” while doing your standard rotation in a moderate-high rage situation. I hate to say, but not being willing to balance your rage usage to accommodate a fast weapon is why you aren’t getting the superior play out of it.
Anyway I’d really like to thank you Rochelle, you’ve challenged my fundamentals and forced me to back them up in a way I’ve never had to before. Ultimately, I think my readership is going to benefit from our debate greatly.
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February 13th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
/popcorn
What, it’s over already? It’s nice to see all the math and reasoning behind both styles of play, though. Thanks for it, guys.
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February 14th, 2008 at 12:08 am
More white damage leading to more rage leading to more HS which leads to less white damage is what’s kown as a “negative feedback loop”. The goal there is to spend the rage as you get it. The only thing that changes with more white damage rage is the frequency of heroic striking. Thought experiment: what happens to a tank’s rage generation if you give the tank an extra 2000AP? Every time he lands a white hit, he has to spend a few heroic strikes to burn off the extra rage. The extreme example would be an Arms warrior white hitting Curator during Evocate, which fills his rage bar 100%.
Veneretio is just saying that any extra rage he ends up with is going into heroic strike anyway, which does fixed bonus damage per use. So he’ll have more opportunities(sooner too) to spend any extra rage he might have with a faster weapon.
On Rochelle’s side, heroic striking with a big weapon fewer times produces a greater proportion of yellow damage to white damage; Yellow damage can’t glance. This might have an impact on threat, but I haven’t done the mathcraft on that. Using a slow weapon also reduces the boss’ opportunities to parry you which could make your healers happy
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February 14th, 2008 at 7:39 am
If I am putting out a perfect SS Rev Dev Dev cycle then I am getting 30 devastates a minute. With a 100 dps fast weapon the average damage will be 160 so devastate damage will have a base of 80. With a slow weapon the average damage is 260 so devastate will hit for 130. So, if all your other gear stays exactly the same and the weapons don’t have any stats except for damage, the slow weapon is getting 50 more damage out of each devastate and at 30 a minute, will be doing 25 more dps. Then you add in the threat modifiers and get 36.25 tps from the extra damage. In order to close that gap with HS you need to get 11 more HS with the fast weapon than with the slow one. And in order to have the rage to HS 11 more times you need 20 more auto attacks (26 without imp HS). So that fast weapon has to find at least 31 more swings somewhere.
And that is before you consider the increased dps from weapon enchants and before you consider that your slow weapon will surely have other stats to increase dps.
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February 14th, 2008 at 7:56 am
In a minute time frame, you’ll get 40 Global Cooldowns (assuming perfect play which is unrealistic even due to latency) so with a SS, Rev, Dev, Dev rotation you’ll only get 20 Devastate opportunities. (and this is assuming you’ll have someone else getting to refresh Thunderclap, Demo Shout and Commanding/Battle Shout which is unlikely and those abilities will lower the number of devastates/minute) So giving you the 20, which is generous, that’s 16.67 more dps with threat modifiers that’s only 24.17 tps.
Keep in mind in my above example I didn’t throw in the 176 base damage of a Heroic Strike. In the example with 4 more HS that’s 176*4 + 196*4 = (704) + (784) = 1488 threat / 60 = 24.8 threat and when the multiplier is applied that’s 35.96 tps. That’s with only 4 HS. That scenerio above was the best case scenerio for Slow Weapons. As soon as we move from moderate to high rage situation, a Fast Weapon is going to get a lot more than 4 additional HS and this is only going to increase the gap even greater.
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February 14th, 2008 at 9:44 am
I am not winning with math here but I have anecdotal evidence. Since I got a Blade of Infamy a few weeks ago I have tested it on everything and for every single fight there has been a significant increase in threat and I very rarely find myself rage starved - far less often than with a fast weapon. So I don’t know where in the math it comes from, maybe there is something I am not thinking of, maybe there is an intangible somewhere in there.
Pick a stand and tank fight and test it out.
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February 14th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
awesome. huge walls of text are nice for boring work days with very few work to do. thanx guys.
i
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February 14th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Here is last nights Teron Gorefiend where I used Blade of Infamy - http://www.wowhead.com/?item=30881
http://wowwebstats.com/gi3posrovrvny?s=476-714&a=25#abilities
Danarch’s spiffy link says I sustained 989 tps
I will try wearing the exact same gear next week but use The Brutalizer instead http://www.wowhead.com/?item=32254
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February 20th, 2008 at 8:37 am
Interesting topic here. I’m fairly new to tanking, but nice to see some discussion challenging the de facto standard of fast weapon for tanks. Come to think of it I’d like to try a 2.6 if I can find one that has good tanking stats (if I were to replace my Sun Eater @ 491 defense, gonna be hard). But if you count increased dmg in all devastate + revenge + heroic strike, that’s some serious tps gain. Beside if you consider 5% parry rate from a boss, that’s 1 less parry per minute.
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February 20th, 2008 at 8:46 am
I remembered revenge is independent of weapon dmg >.
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February 20th, 2008 at 11:27 am
Heroic Strike is independent of weapon damage as well since it offers a static damage increase unlike Devastate which offers a percentage of your weapon damage. I should also note that a bosses parry rate is between 12-15%.
Basically, it all comes down to if you are in a high rage situation where you are able to HS a lot then faster is definitely better, but if you are in a low rage situation where you don’t use HS then slower will be slightly better. (and this is only if it’s the same dps, it’s not worth using a slow 85 dps weapon over a fast 96 dps weapon)
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February 20th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Right…need to get my concepts correct. In that case then I would stick with a 1.6 if the only thing benefiting is devastate.
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February 22nd, 2008 at 10:14 am
*looks up the list of posts in complete awe*
Wow, talk about a grand detour. Since my previous post a lot of theorycraft seems to have happened, in addition to me getting the last of my nether vorticies. Seeing as I’m going to be crafting my T3 sword anyway, I am still curious about your thoughts on Mallet/Mongoose vs Blazefury/Executioner for threat gen. Is it worth while, in your opinion, or do you think the sword is going to find a happy home in my DPS set and stay there.
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April 9th, 2008 at 11:18 am
Back to the original topic, what is an effective amount of expertise to have?
The SSO armory is opening on my server in a few days and there will be a lot of gear available with large amounts of exp on it. With just 21 Expertise (43 expertise rating) i do not see any dodges / parries from trash but do have some on bosses.
How high have people taken their exp? Normally when i get new gear i make it into a set, pop on recount and see what comes out but I really want to avoid spending badges on something only to find i am stacking it pointlessly.
Thanks in advance
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April 9th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
Depends on the encounter. If you want TPS, there’s no reason not to have 6.5%. If you’re worried about parry gibs, you can go right up to cap. (something over 11.5%)
If you’re not worried about threat, or hasted parries, expertise doesn’t matter much at all.
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April 16th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
btw there is a (blue) sword for SSO-Revered if im not mistaken that offers expertise and defense.
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