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- Savage Defense now procs on Lacerate crits. It also procs on Rip crits. So if for whatever reason you have a rip up on a target then switch to Bear, SD will proc on those too.
- Savage Defense still only works on bear form.
- Savage Defense still has weird issues with timing. It can proc .5 seconds after an actual crit, and still appears to be overwriting itself now and then. I need to test this more conclusively.
- Swipe's radius has been greatly increased. It feels much more like the old swipe did in terms of radius. And yes, swipefarting still works great. In fact, with a bit of lag you can get really stupid looking chains of people taking damage and following you around.
- The T8 2p and 4p bonus is still the same as was listed before. This is still really awesome for cats and still really crap for bears.
- Swipe (cat) does not have a 360 radius.
- Thorns now uses your spellpower/bonuses instead of your target's. This means having a macro that switches you into your spellpower gear to cast thorns first will help some, though it's very annoying. It also makes a moonkin's thorns (assuming they have brambles) exceptionally potent - 420 damage/hit is pretty decent.
- Rake no longer crits with Primal Gore. Balancing for cat DPS, of course.
- The Glyph of Savage Roar is reduced to 3%. Again, cat DPS balance.
- Glyph of Survival Instincts is ass. Just an opinion, but getting 10% more health from SI is really not what bears need. 40% more health for 28 seconds sounds awesome, but how much does that actually help things when you have one healer on you who can't cast most of their spells? That's the hard modes for you, and that's where it fails. (sorry, just an opinion piece.)
Showing posts with label swipe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label swipe. Show all posts
Monday, March 30, 2009
[Druid, 3.1] the state of druid testing on the PTR, 03/30
While raiding is out, and while substantial play is out, I can at least do some small amount of PTR testing. So, this week's (well, two week's) testing results
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
[Druid]Oh yeah, swipe!
I guess I didn't make any announcement or OMG on how they've changed swipe. Heh. Oops.
So yeah, they're changing swipe to have no target requirement and hit everything in an 8-yard range around the druid. It's neat. It's much like playing my pally in TBC was in terms of feel. You always want to reposition yourself, clearly - but now you don't have to immediately, which makes your threat a lot more consistent and your pulls less prone to random mobs wandering off.
The animation hasn't changed a bit, so it still looks like you're just swiping the thing in front of you. I desperately hope for some kind of bear whirlwind when swipe happens.
Swipefarting is damn, damn fun. Basically, instead of kiting mobs by aggroing them, turning around, swiping, turning back and running again, you just run past, swipe, and swipe as you're running. Swipe swipe swipe every 1.5 seconds, and the mobs never run away from you ever again. You might occasionally have to slow down to hit more, but it's not that hard. And with Savage Defense not having positional requirements, you can actually block attacks while swipefarting.
It's bugged right now, of course, and only effects things in a less than 5 yard range. Even with that limitation, the ability to swipe things without targeting them is a huge boon for me. I have onmouseover macros for my FFF, charge and taunt, but it's still very nice to be able to actually target them so that I can charge them and then hit them, for example.
Doesn't work in cat form as far as I can tell. It still requires a target and still requires a cone. I'll test it more thoroughly though.
I do miss not having more fine-grained control of AoE, but not so much that I'll complain. It makes one headache less headachy. I still don't want to spam things as much, but with the maul toggle macro (more on that later today) it's not nearly as much a headache. It does feel less skillful though, which is amusing given some of my earliest posts on Karthis' blog. I still don't think that it's that crucial that they remove the skill components or not, but I also think that having one big AoE "I win" button is a bit lazy and not particularly fun. It's interesting to know how to use a cone effect vs. a 360 one. It's not that interesting to have only one tool without significant limitations. Better tanks will still be more situationally aware, know how to build threat on multiple mobs better, break CC less, do cleaner pulls, use cooldowns more wisely, gear better and do more damage - but now swipe is an Easy button, and it's slightly poorer for it.
But hey, I can swipefart. So it's all good.
What do y'all think about the new swipe?
So yeah, they're changing swipe to have no target requirement and hit everything in an 8-yard range around the druid. It's neat. It's much like playing my pally in TBC was in terms of feel. You always want to reposition yourself, clearly - but now you don't have to immediately, which makes your threat a lot more consistent and your pulls less prone to random mobs wandering off.
The animation hasn't changed a bit, so it still looks like you're just swiping the thing in front of you. I desperately hope for some kind of bear whirlwind when swipe happens.
Swipefarting is damn, damn fun. Basically, instead of kiting mobs by aggroing them, turning around, swiping, turning back and running again, you just run past, swipe, and swipe as you're running. Swipe swipe swipe every 1.5 seconds, and the mobs never run away from you ever again. You might occasionally have to slow down to hit more, but it's not that hard. And with Savage Defense not having positional requirements, you can actually block attacks while swipefarting.
It's bugged right now, of course, and only effects things in a less than 5 yard range. Even with that limitation, the ability to swipe things without targeting them is a huge boon for me. I have onmouseover macros for my FFF, charge and taunt, but it's still very nice to be able to actually target them so that I can charge them and then hit them, for example.
Doesn't work in cat form as far as I can tell. It still requires a target and still requires a cone. I'll test it more thoroughly though.
I do miss not having more fine-grained control of AoE, but not so much that I'll complain. It makes one headache less headachy. I still don't want to spam things as much, but with the maul toggle macro (more on that later today) it's not nearly as much a headache. It does feel less skillful though, which is amusing given some of my earliest posts on Karthis' blog. I still don't think that it's that crucial that they remove the skill components or not, but I also think that having one big AoE "I win" button is a bit lazy and not particularly fun. It's interesting to know how to use a cone effect vs. a 360 one. It's not that interesting to have only one tool without significant limitations. Better tanks will still be more situationally aware, know how to build threat on multiple mobs better, break CC less, do cleaner pulls, use cooldowns more wisely, gear better and do more damage - but now swipe is an Easy button, and it's slightly poorer for it.
But hey, I can swipefart. So it's all good.
What do y'all think about the new swipe?
Monday, March 16, 2009
[Druid] the state of druid testing on the PTR, 03/16
First off - thanks to everyone who replied on the Pimp my UI post with suggestions. I've spent the last three days playing around with things, and I'm almost done tinkering, I think. And it's a huge improvement; things are far less cluttered, it's easier to find stuff and overall the UI is much improved and organized. I should be able to show people the results tomorrow or so. The last step is to get rid of Xperl...and that might be painful.
I figure that there's enough interest in how Savage Defense is doing each week that I'll make a post on my weekly testing of it and indicate what, if anything, has changed or not. If you do have requests for testing specific things, please post! I can't guarantee that I'll be able to test something - I don't have infinite resources or a raid group always handy. But I'll do my best.
This week's testing results:
I figure that there's enough interest in how Savage Defense is doing each week that I'll make a post on my weekly testing of it and indicate what, if anything, has changed or not. If you do have requests for testing specific things, please post! I can't guarantee that I'll be able to test something - I don't have infinite resources or a raid group always handy. But I'll do my best.
This week's testing results:
- Druids do appear to get full rage on a hit on them when Savage Defense absorbs an attack. This is hard to conclusively test, but in all the cases that I tested it, it worked. My methodology was to face away from a mob and swipe it until I got a proc, then stopped attacking. In each case the next attack that hit me (which was almost always all of them, since I couldn't dodge) gave me rage and was absorbed.
- Savage Defense does proc off of crits on critters. Poor, poor spiders are going to be even more mauled now.
- Savage Defense still procs off of the new untargeting swipe attacks. Just in case you were wondering.
- Savage Defense does not appear to have anything to do with client-side latency. Both a person with high latency and low latency can trigger up to a .5 second delay from a crit and the SD proc. It appears to be entirely on the server side.
- Swipe still triggers 'chance on hit' procs. Mongoose still going off all the time when doing AoE.
- Savage Defense still can absorb multiple attacks with a single proc. Nope, still not fixed. And chances are, won't be.
- Savage Defense still overwrites itself some times and does not produce a shield. This is still the most critical bug I can think of involving SD. And it's still not fixed.
- Swipe has a serious range bug right now. Swipe's range used to be about 10 yards since it could 'chain', similar to the mechanics of avenger's shield. Now, it barely hits anyone in melee range. This is apparently a bug and will be fixed. (ETA: the blue response was this:
The correct range for the new, 360 Swipe should be 8 yards. It appears to only be 5 in your version of the data.
- Swipe is now insanely good for kiting mobs. Before, if you wanted to kite a bunch of mobs you'd have to run, turn around, swipe, spin back and run some more. Now? Just run at mobs, swipe them as you run past them, and keep swiping as you run. You hit most everyone and they stick to you like glue. Stratholme was never more fun.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
[Druid] The threat value of improved mangle
In an earlier post I talked briefly - hinted, really - at whether improved mangle is really all that now that swipe has been so significantly boosted. What I found out was pretty surprising to me.
Yes, I'm using the teaser trailer. Bear with me. :)
Pre swipe getting boosted, the best threat rotation for a bear was mangle, lacerate x 2, with a faerie fire thrown in whenever it was off cooldown or when it was applicable (stupid misery bug...). This meant that in an 18 second window, you would mangle 4 times and lacerate 7 times and faerie fire once (hopefully), along with 7.2 mauls. This would result in the following, assuming AP of around 5k, a crit rating of 40%, and the standard talents you'd find in most tanking builds:
Damage(mangle): 1644.7
Damage(Swipe):508.1
Damage(Lacerate): 91.08
Damage(Maul): 2139
Damage(lacerate DOT): 815.1
Threat (mangle): 3406.9
Threat (swipe): 1578.763 (post 50% boost)
Threat (lacerate): 1162.154
Threat (maul): 5309.797
Threat(FF): 1933.057
Threat (Lacerate DOT): 844.21
4 mangle/7 lacerate rotation: 66991 threat, or 3721 TPS.
If you take out the improved mangle, you instead get a 3 mangle/8 lacerate rotation. Basically every 18 seconds you go to 65746 threat, or 3597 TPS. That's a loss of 124 TPS. That sounds substantial until you look at it as a percentage: it is only 3.35% of your total threat.
But that's not the rotation any more. The rotation for best TPS is now swiping whenever the cooldown is up and throwing in a faerie fire whenever the cooldown is up.
This assumes using the same 5000 AP and 40% crit from above.
Using the same methodology above, we have the following
4 mangle/7 swipe/1FF rotation: 64842 threat per 18 seconds, or 3602 TPS
3 mangle/8swipe/1FF rotation: 63014 threat per 18 seconds, or 3500 TPS
Net loss is 101 TPS, or only 2.8% total threat.
2.8% threat really isn't that big a deal in the long run. It essentially means that improved mangle is worth about 1% threat per talent point, which puts it ahead of master shapeshifter but behind rend & tear. The above is also the best case possible; it assumes you're mangling every time you can, that you're not using berserk (which helps the non-improved mangle case more), and it discounts rage/healing gains for threat.
The first surprise that you might have is that these numbers show that lacerate, not swipe, is the best threat. But...didn't I just say the opposite a couple weeks ago? Yep. The main reason is that that calculation assumed a 30% armor reduction, which is a bit unrealistic. 40% is closer to the mark. With that and a low-ish AP value (5k is pretty low for raiding tanks), lacerate wins out on threat. If you instead have 6k AP, swipe wins out again. So I was still right...it just means that if you're on the lower end of gear, spamming swipe for threat is not as good as lacerating.
Okay, you ask, what about the best damage case? Since a lot of people seem to care how much damage a tank does, we'll go through with that. Using the same 5k AP/40% crit, the cycle for optimal damage is something like:
mangle whenever it's up
swipe
lacerate to keep the stack up (once every 12 seconds)
So in a 36-second cycle (we need it to be 36 seconds to fit in the lacerates), we have the following for max dps:
8 mangles
3 lacerates
13 swipes
14.4 mauls
+36 seconds of lacerate DOTs (12 ticks)
The damage for that is:
60624 damage, or 1684 DPS
For the same cycle without imp mangle, we'll have 6 mangles, 3 lacerates, 15 swipes, 14.4 mauls, and 12 ticks of lacerate. That damage is:
58351 damage, or 1620 DPS
The loss of DPS: 63.1, or 3.74%.
That was really surprising to me. It does mean that improved mangle is a really big bang for your buck in terms of overall damage - it's better than the 1% damage/talent point that the devs have stated is something of their goal, for instance - but it's not so big that you can't live without it. And do note that as AP increases, both the threat and DPS loss from imp mangle also increases. At (for example) 10k AP you're looking at a 3.9% DPS decrease and a 2.9% TPS decrease. Which isn't earthshattering, but it is something to note.
To me, this solidifies what I've been leaning towards for a while: improved mangle is a nice-to-have but hardly an essential talent. And it's one I'm going to drop, in favor of picking up more cat-friendly talents.
Curious about my numbers? The spreadsheet I used is over at google. The numbers were from EJ's feral values here and here.
Yes, I'm using the teaser trailer. Bear with me. :)
Pre swipe getting boosted, the best threat rotation for a bear was mangle, lacerate x 2, with a faerie fire thrown in whenever it was off cooldown or when it was applicable (stupid misery bug...). This meant that in an 18 second window, you would mangle 4 times and lacerate 7 times and faerie fire once (hopefully), along with 7.2 mauls. This would result in the following, assuming AP of around 5k, a crit rating of 40%, and the standard talents you'd find in most tanking builds:
Damage(mangle): 1644.7
Damage(Swipe):508.1
Damage(Lacerate): 91.08
Damage(Maul): 2139
Damage(lacerate DOT): 815.1
Threat (mangle): 3406.9
Threat (swipe): 1578.763 (post 50% boost)
Threat (lacerate): 1162.154
Threat (maul): 5309.797
Threat(FF): 1933.057
Threat (Lacerate DOT): 844.21
4 mangle/7 lacerate rotation: 66991 threat, or 3721 TPS.
If you take out the improved mangle, you instead get a 3 mangle/8 lacerate rotation. Basically every 18 seconds you go to 65746 threat, or 3597 TPS. That's a loss of 124 TPS. That sounds substantial until you look at it as a percentage: it is only 3.35% of your total threat.
But that's not the rotation any more. The rotation for best TPS is now swiping whenever the cooldown is up and throwing in a faerie fire whenever the cooldown is up.
This assumes using the same 5000 AP and 40% crit from above.
Using the same methodology above, we have the following
4 mangle/7 swipe/1FF rotation: 64842 threat per 18 seconds, or 3602 TPS
3 mangle/8swipe/1FF rotation: 63014 threat per 18 seconds, or 3500 TPS
Net loss is 101 TPS, or only 2.8% total threat.
2.8% threat really isn't that big a deal in the long run. It essentially means that improved mangle is worth about 1% threat per talent point, which puts it ahead of master shapeshifter but behind rend & tear. The above is also the best case possible; it assumes you're mangling every time you can, that you're not using berserk (which helps the non-improved mangle case more), and it discounts rage/healing gains for threat.
The first surprise that you might have is that these numbers show that lacerate, not swipe, is the best threat. But...didn't I just say the opposite a couple weeks ago? Yep. The main reason is that that calculation assumed a 30% armor reduction, which is a bit unrealistic. 40% is closer to the mark. With that and a low-ish AP value (5k is pretty low for raiding tanks), lacerate wins out on threat. If you instead have 6k AP, swipe wins out again. So I was still right...it just means that if you're on the lower end of gear, spamming swipe for threat is not as good as lacerating.
Okay, you ask, what about the best damage case? Since a lot of people seem to care how much damage a tank does, we'll go through with that. Using the same 5k AP/40% crit, the cycle for optimal damage is something like:
mangle whenever it's up
swipe
lacerate to keep the stack up (once every 12 seconds)
So in a 36-second cycle (we need it to be 36 seconds to fit in the lacerates), we have the following for max dps:
8 mangles
3 lacerates
13 swipes
14.4 mauls
+36 seconds of lacerate DOTs (12 ticks)
The damage for that is:
60624 damage, or 1684 DPS
For the same cycle without imp mangle, we'll have 6 mangles, 3 lacerates, 15 swipes, 14.4 mauls, and 12 ticks of lacerate. That damage is:
58351 damage, or 1620 DPS
The loss of DPS: 63.1, or 3.74%.
That was really surprising to me. It does mean that improved mangle is a really big bang for your buck in terms of overall damage - it's better than the 1% damage/talent point that the devs have stated is something of their goal, for instance - but it's not so big that you can't live without it. And do note that as AP increases, both the threat and DPS loss from imp mangle also increases. At (for example) 10k AP you're looking at a 3.9% DPS decrease and a 2.9% TPS decrease. Which isn't earthshattering, but it is something to note.
To me, this solidifies what I've been leaning towards for a while: improved mangle is a nice-to-have but hardly an essential talent. And it's one I'm going to drop, in favor of picking up more cat-friendly talents.
Curious about my numbers? The spreadsheet I used is over at google. The numbers were from EJ's feral values here and here.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
[Druid] Swipe is 50% more fun (UPDATED: less fun now)
Figured I'd go for the hat trick on a busy news day. According to ghostcrawler, swipe has been given a 50% threat increase from prior values:
And it's not live on the PTR either - it's live, as in right now on the server.
Yes, it should mean that dealing with AoE tanking is better, and you can occasionally miss a swipe without the mob running off. I'm...well, I'm a bit skeptical; I think at best that you'll have enough threat to where most classes can go AoE hog wild but you'll still have to do it basically every GCD.
However - it also means that the best rotation for single target is also 'swipe'. With Naxx-level gear, bears were already at the point where the best threat rotation was to lacerate to 5 stacks, swipe, lacerate as little as possible to keep a stack up - and throw in faerie fire every time you could. Now? That's not true. It's simply mangle when up, swipe otherwise. That's it.
UPDATE: This is not really correct, as better math has shown. Swiping as much as you can is the best threat you can do, but it is about 5% better threat to make sure that you keep up a lacerate stack. I'll keep up the rest of this article for posterity's sake, but use the better math in the post linked above.
Here's the math for me in case you're interested. Feel free to play along at home with your own numbers to check things out.
Swipe damage: (AP * .063 + 108) * Naturalist bonus * feral instinct bonus * armor penalty * (1 + crit chance) * 4pT6 bonus
lacerate damage: (AP*.01+88)*Naturalist bonus * armor penalty * (1 + crit chance) * 2pt7 bonus
lacerate DOT damage: (AP*.01+64)*stack size * naturalist * mangle * 2pt7 bonus
Swipe DPS: swipe damage /1.5
lacerate DPS: lacerate damage / 1.5
lacerate DOT DPS: lacerate dot damage / 3.0
swipe TPS: swipe DPS * 29/14 * 1.5
lacerate TPS: 29/14*(lacerage damage+1031)/ (2* 1.5)
lacerate DOT TPS: lacerate DOT DPS * 29/14 / 2
Based on a 70% armor reduction from bosses, here are the results:
For AP 4735, crit 30%, no T6 and 2pT7 I get the following:
swipe TPS: 1095.2
lacerate TPS: 786.1
lacerate DOT TPS: 282.5
total lacerate TPS: 1076.045
The important thing to note here is that the swipe TPS - lacerate TPS is greater than the lacerate DOT (with 5 stacks) TPS, meaning that it's always better to let the stack fall off and swipe again. And that's for my own paltry numbers; as you get better gear, this will only increase in value. Add to this that swipe does a lot more DPS than lacerate, and it may be time to retire lacerate completely.
I honestly don't expect this to be the case for long; I think that they'll change it fairly soon once they see lacerate taken out entirely. And keep in mind that while my gear isn't optimal, it is Naxx-25 geared with a good staff, decent other pieces and fairly high level stuff; if you've got a worse staff (or really, worse than about 4500 AP and 30% crit) you're going to want to use some lacerate.
ETA: so there are some good points to be made here.
For starters, you should always have a bleed on your target to maximize maul damage via Rend & Tear. This doesn't mean it has to be your bleed - a warrior can put up deep wounds, for instance. It just needs to be some bleed. If you have that, you shouldn't lacerate. If you don't, you should. It's that simple. No matter how good swipe vs. lacerate is, at WotLK levels there will never be a point where losing 20% maul damage/threat beats never having a bleed.
So...make sure your warriors are doing that and go to town. :)
This also means that in 5-mans and most 10-mans you'll have to keep lacerating. Just do it as little as possible. :)
ETA2: it turns out that the lacerate bleed is actually pretty good DPS, and losing one swipe every 6 seconds to a lacerate is worth it if you can keep the 5-stack going for raw damage. And it's not paltry either - it's on the order of 10% more damage, even at high levels of gear. So strangely, you're left with this oddity: for max TPS, swipe. For max DPS, keep a lacerate stack up and swipe whenever you can.
Yes, that's right - I kept the awesome avatar in there for no reason.We think we might try increasing threat by 50% because that is something easy to hotfix. That should buy you enough globals to do other things, and provide enough wiggle room if you get a target out of the area for one Swipe. We'll consider additional changes after we've had a chance to see how that plays out.Ghostcrawler2008-12-16 10:01:02The change for Swipe to generate an additional 50% threat is now live. Please let us know how it goes.
And it's not live on the PTR either - it's live, as in right now on the server.
Yes, it should mean that dealing with AoE tanking is better, and you can occasionally miss a swipe without the mob running off. I'm...well, I'm a bit skeptical; I think at best that you'll have enough threat to where most classes can go AoE hog wild but you'll still have to do it basically every GCD.
UPDATE: This is not really correct, as better math has shown. Swiping as much as you can is the best threat you can do, but it is about 5% better threat to make sure that you keep up a lacerate stack. I'll keep up the rest of this article for posterity's sake, but use the better math in the post linked above.
Here's the math for me in case you're interested. Feel free to play along at home with your own numbers to check things out.
Swipe damage: (AP * .063 + 108) * Naturalist bonus * feral instinct bonus * armor penalty * (1 + crit chance) * 4pT6 bonus
lacerate damage: (AP*.01+88)*Naturalist bonus * armor penalty * (1 + crit chance) * 2pt7 bonus
lacerate DOT damage: (AP*.01+64)*stack size * naturalist * mangle * 2pt7 bonus
Swipe DPS: swipe damage /1.5
lacerate DPS: lacerate damage / 1.5
lacerate DOT DPS: lacerate dot damage / 3.0
swipe TPS: swipe DPS * 29/14 * 1.5
lacerate TPS: 29/14*(lacerage damage+1031)/ (2* 1.5)
lacerate DOT TPS: lacerate DOT DPS * 29/14 / 2
Based on a 70% armor reduction from bosses, here are the results:
For AP 4735, crit 30%, no T6 and 2pT7 I get the following:
swipe TPS: 1095.2
lacerate TPS: 786.1
lacerate DOT TPS: 282.5
total lacerate TPS: 1076.045
The important thing to note here is that the swipe TPS - lacerate TPS is greater than the lacerate DOT (with 5 stacks) TPS, meaning that it's always better to let the stack fall off and swipe again. And that's for my own paltry numbers; as you get better gear, this will only increase in value. Add to this that swipe does a lot more DPS than lacerate, and it may be time to retire lacerate completely.
I honestly don't expect this to be the case for long; I think that they'll change it fairly soon once they see lacerate taken out entirely. And keep in mind that while my gear isn't optimal, it is Naxx-25 geared with a good staff, decent other pieces and fairly high level stuff; if you've got a worse staff (or really, worse than about 4500 AP and 30% crit) you're going to want to use some lacerate.
ETA: so there are some good points to be made here.
For starters, you should always have a bleed on your target to maximize maul damage via Rend & Tear. This doesn't mean it has to be your bleed - a warrior can put up deep wounds, for instance. It just needs to be some bleed. If you have that, you shouldn't lacerate. If you don't, you should. It's that simple. No matter how good swipe vs. lacerate is, at WotLK levels there will never be a point where losing 20% maul damage/threat beats never having a bleed.
So...make sure your warriors are doing that and go to town. :)
This also means that in 5-mans and most 10-mans you'll have to keep lacerating. Just do it as little as possible. :)
ETA2: it turns out that the lacerate bleed is actually pretty good DPS, and losing one swipe every 6 seconds to a lacerate is worth it if you can keep the 5-stack going for raw damage. And it's not paltry either - it's on the order of 10% more damage, even at high levels of gear. So strangely, you're left with this oddity: for max TPS, swipe. For max DPS, keep a lacerate stack up and swipe whenever you can.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
[Druid] Stupid bear tricks with swipe
I confess: my favorite change so far is swipe having infinite targets. This isn't thrilling for raid tanking; it doesn't come up that often. It's not close to being as good as other tank's AoE abilities, as it basically requires good positioning and every GCD to be used on swipe. But having it means AoE farming time, and that's something I've desperately missed.
Swipe (like I alluded to in my previous post) is kind of different than the other AoE abilities that tanks have, in that it's an actual physical attack. This can be bad; it is mitigated by armor, can be blocked/parried/dodged, and requires a lot more use of it to work well for AoE threat.
But the advantage is that it's an attack, and that each separate hit can trigger 'on hit' procs. That's pretty neat, and unlike anything any other class can do against infinite mobs. There's got to be a way to shamelessly exploit this, right?
Turns out no. Or at least, none that I could find. I was hoping to find a 'chance on hit: do 10-20 damage to all mobs in 5 yards' type of thing, but that doesn't appear to exist. Still, there are ways to make your AoE nuking more fun, entertaining, or at least a bit more sustainable.
Some of the nice ones that aren't totally broken but are really, really good:
The original that started it all was Mongoose and noticing that it was up all the time. This already was better for bears than +35 agi, but when you throw in multiple mobs it becomes really fun.
For even easier farming and zero downtime, you can try using Battlemaster, which should proc multiple times a swipe with sufficient mobs.
Darkmoon card: Heroism is a bit cheaper than battlemaster on an item, especially now that inscription can make these cards. Should be a similar effect and a similar behavior to the enchant. A cheaper piece yet is the Mark of Conquest from zangamarsh.
Romulo's Poison Vial looks like just a bit more damage, but it could be fun. And the +hit helps do it even more. I'd like to either try this out or darkmoon card: maelstrom and see whether I can cause my current target to melt.
Some of the things that aren't so hot:
Shard is great normally, but the proc can only happen once every 45 seconds. The expertise is awesome but the proc? Not to be exploited. Same for hourglass or its bigger brother, Tsunami Talisman
Dragonspine Trophy has a 20 second internal cooldown. That doesn't make it bad, but it does mean you're basically getting 110 haste or so, which isn't the hottest thing ever.
Any other ideas of stupid bear tricks with swipe?
Swipe (like I alluded to in my previous post) is kind of different than the other AoE abilities that tanks have, in that it's an actual physical attack. This can be bad; it is mitigated by armor, can be blocked/parried/dodged, and requires a lot more use of it to work well for AoE threat.
But the advantage is that it's an attack, and that each separate hit can trigger 'on hit' procs. That's pretty neat, and unlike anything any other class can do against infinite mobs. There's got to be a way to shamelessly exploit this, right?
Turns out no. Or at least, none that I could find. I was hoping to find a 'chance on hit: do 10-20 damage to all mobs in 5 yards' type of thing, but that doesn't appear to exist. Still, there are ways to make your AoE nuking more fun, entertaining, or at least a bit more sustainable.
Some of the nice ones that aren't totally broken but are really, really good:
The original that started it all was Mongoose and noticing that it was up all the time. This already was better for bears than +35 agi, but when you throw in multiple mobs it becomes really fun.
For even easier farming and zero downtime, you can try using Battlemaster, which should proc multiple times a swipe with sufficient mobs.
Darkmoon card: Heroism is a bit cheaper than battlemaster on an item, especially now that inscription can make these cards. Should be a similar effect and a similar behavior to the enchant. A cheaper piece yet is the Mark of Conquest from zangamarsh.
Romulo's Poison Vial looks like just a bit more damage, but it could be fun. And the +hit helps do it even more. I'd like to either try this out or darkmoon card: maelstrom and see whether I can cause my current target to melt.
Some of the things that aren't so hot:
Shard is great normally, but the proc can only happen once every 45 seconds. The expertise is awesome but the proc? Not to be exploited. Same for hourglass or its bigger brother, Tsunami Talisman
Dragonspine Trophy has a 20 second internal cooldown. That doesn't make it bad, but it does mean you're basically getting 110 haste or so, which isn't the hottest thing ever.
Any other ideas of stupid bear tricks with swipe?
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