[Druid] The threat value of arpen

UPDATED: thanks to Ciopo I went and redid a bit of the math here; sunder and FF stack multiplicatively, the armor for a boss was reduced (from 13083 to 10643, per experimentation) and the math was redone. Turns out arpen is even better than I originally calculated. And thanks to Ramenchef at EJ, I've updated again.

In an earlier post I mentioned the value of threat for every 100 points of itemization for a bear...and kind of glossed over one specific value, that of armor penetration. Here's what I said about it back in the day:

Now, this definitely doesn't do a good job of modeling armor pen, and I didn't want to go into the insanity of that; it's quite complex. It does do a decent job of it given that in general, bears aren't going to have a ton of armor pen.

That's all true, but it doesn't really help a lot. The real trick though is that bears are going to be likely swimming in armor pen by the time they're geared out to the gills; every single tier piece has it, all the offtier pieces have it (at least from icecrown directly), and even some of the weapons have it.

So what's the actual value of arpen on threat? How good is it? The TL:DR version: Armor Penetration is the best threat stat for bears after hit and expertise.

First, we have to go back and revise some of our assumptions. We'll start with the boss base armor: that's 10643 (corrected from 13083), from experimental testing. That's kind of the assumed number. It might be off; anecdotally people have indicated that (as an example) the Mimiron tank and Vezax both had higher armor than this, but we'll go with that since its' the accepted value.

We'll assume sunder and faerie fire are both up on the target. Before anything else, these take off 24% of the armor since they multiply. (this doesn't stack the way you'd think with armor pen). So that's 10643 *.8*.95 = 8088.68.

Next we get into an odd thing, which is that armor pen can only affect some of the armor on the target. There's a lengthy explanation over at wowwiki about this from ghostcrawler and an even lengthier conversation from EJ about how he's slightly wrong, but the long and short of it is that the formula for determining the affectable armor by armor pen by a lvl 80 mob (it was thought to be towards a level 83 mob, but it's attacker level that matters) is:

(935/6)*80 + armor/3 - (44335/6)

Which ends up being the magical number of 7773.727 for a boss. That's the maximum armor that armor pen could remove, and the percentage that it goes against. So for example: if you had 700 armor pen, you would have 'removes up to 50% of armor'. The target's armor after sunder and faerie fire is 8088.68. You can remove half of the minimum of (8088,7773.727) which is 7773.727.

(7773.727*.5) = 3886.8635. This is the total armor that can be removed, leaving 4201.8165 left.

Now to figure out what that actually does, we go to the armor formula, which tells you the damage reduction by armor. That is:

(armor / (armor +(467.5*80 - 22167.5))) for a level 80 attacker and a level 83 mob.

For 4201.8165 armor, that ends up giving 21.6% damage reduction. Not bad, given that before this the armor reduction was almost 35%.

Okay, okay - enough about the math. Let's see what the threat values are. Again, this is a mangle/ff/lacerate/swipe rotation, assumes lacerates don't fall off, and doesn't take into account any T10 bonuses.

We'll start with the basic idea that you're expertise soft capped on dodge (132 expertise) and have 100 hit. You have 10k AP and a 40% crit rate. For a 3 mangle/3lacerate/3 swipe/3 FF rotation, your base TPS is 5131.187 with 0 armor pen. And here's how we scale with 100 armor pen:

armor pen	TPS	difference
0	5412
100	5517	105
200	5626	109
300	5741	115
400	5863	122
500	5992	129
600	6128	136
700	6272	144
800	6425	153
900	6588	163
1000	6762	174
1100	6948	186
1200	7146	198
1300	7360	214
1400	7586	226

Yep, that's right - at the highest level of arpen arpen gives 226 total threat per 100 points of it, which is huge! Before you look back at that prior article note that this is relative; at that same level of arpen expertise is worth 220 TPS per 100 rating, and hit is worth 240. All the stats go up in value as arpen improves. And this is with some fairly vanilla stats (no haste for instance); numbers will change some.

Still, even at lower levels it's worth a lot more than I had anticipated. It's certainly worth more than 100 haste or 200 AP, as an example.

Why is that? Well, part of it is simply that bears have big, meaty attacks that do a lot of damage. Maul and Mangle are good, and swipe is up there too. Only FF and the lacerate bleed don't benefit from it. Also, the benefit is fairly high on a per-point basis. I'm a bit more surprised that the static threat values from maul don't overwhelm this, but apparently not.

And part of it is the scaling nature itself.

Now, what level of arpen are we looking at? Just based on my prior list for 264 gear, you have something like this:

Frostbitten Fur Boots - 64 arpen

Sanctified Lasherweave Handgrips - 80 arpen

Sanctified Lasherweave Headguard - 92 arpen

Sanctified Lasherweave Legguards - 108 arpen

Sanctified Lasherweave Shoulderpads - 72 arpen

Ikfirus's Sack of Wonder - 0 arpen

Vengeful Noose - 80 arpen

Toskk's Maximized Wristguards - 60 arpen

For a total of 496 arpen! Yikes. At that level, here are the values of stats per 100 rating (assuming 100 hit and 132 expertise):

hit: 185 TPS

expertise: 168

arpen: 129

haste: 86

AP: 76

crit: 69

In this situation, arpen becomes the next best threat stat after hit and expertise, and it's almost competitive. At higher rates it does become competitive with expertise - but hopefully as a bear you're not quite at the point where you're trying to reach the hard cap of armor pen.

I'll go back and amend the previous values. I may end up changing the weighings for itemization, but I suspect it won't matter that much one way or another.

ETA: you can check my spreadsheet out over at google. It's a bit messy, but it does have the various numbers and formulae.

[Druid] Some sample values of threat per 100 itemization points

UPDATE: I did more math later on, and it looks like armor penetration is much better. I've changed the tables and the conclusions below. The link to that is here.

A lot of folks have been asking about how to have awesome threat, and that their threat is kinda going through the tubes, and what they can do to help it.

Well...here's the bad news. Threat for bears scales very poorly. That early threat bears get is primarily because of frontloaded awesome threat from maul, lacerate and FFF. As we scale with gear...we will not see as high of gains, especially compared to some other classes who don't have these things.

At the same time, there are things you can do. And if you don't read anything else into it, note this: the best threat stats to stack are expertise (until the dodge cap), then hit, then expertise (until the parry cap), then armor pen.

I did a very basic sim to show this. The basic stats starting out are as follows:
10k AP
40% crit
60% armor on the target
0 haste, hit, or expertise to start (other than the 10 expertise skill we get from Primal Precision)

With this value and a rotation of mangle/lacerate/swipe/FFF (a very boring one), we have a threat value of 4473.88 TPS. Yes, this isn't an optimal rotation, and it's assuming no MSS or improved mangle as well.

Here's how adding 100 of any given rating (except AP, since that's 2 AP points for every one rating point) increases that base TPS:
100 expertise (below cap): 296.26
100 hit: +164.32 TPS
100 expertise (after cap): 147.3
100 armor pen: 98.396

100 haste: 68.12
200 AP: 57.5
100 crit: 52.12

Hit and expertise are insanely good here. But what about more realistic numbers? Let's say you're 100 points from the cap on hit and parry-expertise - how do the values fall in then? This means you have 163 hit and 279 expertise rating; in this case, your base TPS is 5418.8.

100 hit: +162.5 TPS
100 expertise (after cap): 147.5
100 armor pen: 98.396

100 haste: 84.5
200 AP: 67.5
100 crit: 63.5

Even here, expertise and hit are far, far better as threat stats. Up until the cap, of course. Then you're hosed.

Now, this definitely doesn't do a good job of modeling armor pen, and I didn't want to go into the insanity of that; it's quite complex. (UPDATED: complexity over here.) And as it turns out, bears are going to likely have a decent amount of armor pen given the leather in T10 - close to 500 with good gear without trying. But really - the most important thing here is that hit and expertise are the only stats that scale with the threat multiplier on bear attacks. That's the key; AP, crit, armor pen, agility - all do not scale.

Haste is an exception, in that it scales with the amount of mauls and thus kind of scales with that threat multiplier. But only barely. Otherwise no dice. And because it doesn't scale with as many attacks as armor pen, you're out of luck.

So if you're having threat problems? Make sure your expertise is above 26 expertise skill. Make sure your hit is reasonable. Then go for more hit and expertise and have fun.

[Druid]The net threat value of faerie fire

In the Bear FAQ, Bludge said this:

FF seems odd because of the fact that it's based off spell hit. I notice mine missing more than any other ability I have. So using it in a rotation seems like a bad idea except to refresh it. I might be able to imagine a bear that is melee hit capped, but a bear that is spell hit capped? Now you're smoking.

You bet I'm smoking! I'm smoking the sweet smell of awesome threat, baby. Let's go to the numbers and figure out whether I'm smoking, or he's listening to anecdotal evidence.

First off, the hit numbers: melee miss rate against a level 83 mob is 8%. Spell miss rate is 17%. So faerie fire misses more than twice as much as melee attacks. Making it even worse, the crit multiplier for spells is only 1.5, spell crit is typically much lower for ferals than melee crit, and for this test we're going to assume that you're totally expertise-capped too.

We'll take a typical AP value: 6000. A crit rate of 50% for melee, and 15% for spells (this is pretty correct when raid buffed). And let's go with 0 hit total. Not really realistic, but who cares - this is bold theorycrafting when smoking time.

So the value for various bear attacks in terms of damage is:
mangle: (base damage * 1.15 + 299)*naturalist * master shapeshifter * savage *armor *(2*crit rate + 1*(1-crit rate))* (1-melee miss rate)
swipe: (AP*.063+108)*naturalist*master*feral instinct*armor*(2*crit rate + 1*(1-crit rate))* (1-melee miss rate)

lacerate: (AP*.01 +88)*naturalist*master*armor*(2*crit rate + 1*(1-crit rate))* (1-melee miss rate)
Faerie fire: (AP*.15+1)*(1.5*spellcrit rate +1*(1-spellcritrate))*(1-spell miss rate)

After using 6k AP, 50% crit rate, 15% spell crit, and no hit - we get this:
mangle: 2239 damage
swipe: 698
lacerate: 163
FFF: 803

Okay, so mangle wins big on the damage - but FFF even with all of that is coming in second. Even with a 17% miss rate and a bad crit rate, it wins. But what about TPS?

Mangle TPS: Mangle damage * 29/14
swipe TPS: swipe damage * 29/14*1.5
lacerate TPS: 29/14*(damage+1031)/2
FFF TPS: 29/14*(damage+632)

So the final TPS is:
mangle: 4638
swipe: 2169
lacerate: 1237
FFF: 2974.

But wait! What about higher AP? Turns out that FFF wins at any level over swipe. Well, okay - at around 240,000AP, swipe beats FFF.

But what about a better armor reduction? After all, 30% armor is pretty high...right? Not really, but let's just take that out entirely. If your target has 0 armor, swipe will do about 120 more threat per application. But at 0 armor, your swipes are hitting for 722 damage each. I don't know about you, but that's not what mine hit for. And while you can get 0 armor as a cat under certain circumstances, chances are you'll never hit that as a bear.

What about higher crit? Even with an 80% crit rate, swipe still loses by a few hundred.

What about more hit? That's funny - because hit actually makes FFF stronger. Why? Because the hit rating to 1% hit conversion is 32.79 hit rating per 1% - but the spell hit rating only costs 26.3 hit rating per 1%. And remember - this assumed expertise capped, which means 14% reduced parry and dodge or 56 total expertise skill. Again, not really realistic; chances are against bosses you're going to have a lot less.

So for pretty much any numbers that you can think, faerie fire beats swipe, and it scales insanely well with AP. Also, if you don't have things like master shapeshifter or even naturalist, faerie fire does even better by comparison.

So yes, every time you can you should be faerie firing for maximum threat and for maximum damage. Mangle beats it, and keeping up a lacerate stack beats it - but lacerate by itself doesn't come close, nor does swipe.

[Druid] This just in: I am occasionally wrong (lacerate doesn't totally suck)

Thanks to Marino, I was shown that I was...wrong. And with math even, so it's not 'internet wrong'. It's just plain wrong.

My wife is laughing her ass off reading that sentence, by the way.

Using his ideas for a rotation and the published numbers I had for threat, he figured out (and I confirmed) that it is always better at any reasonable amount of AP/crit to keep up a lacerate stack for both maximum threat AND maximum damage. The threat gain is on the order of 5%, which is pretty good. It doesn't take into account the lacerate tax of having to do a bunch of lacerates early on in order to get the stack going, but that's not going to be huge in a longer fight.

The ideal rotation for a 36-second cycle (easier math) would be:
8 mangles (assuming imp mangle), 3 lacerates, 13 swipes, 14.4 mauls. You can substitute faerie fire for swipes in there as well if you want truly maximal threat. At 6250 AP, 40% crit and normal boss armor, we get 4344 TPS.

(if you're wondering why 6250 AP, it's because that's the number with normal raid boss armor reduction where swipe spam matches lacerate spam for threat).

For a cycle without lacerates and no lacerate stack, (so 16 swipes), we get 4090 TPS.

This holds true for AP up to 100,000 and above, in case you're wondering. It also holds true for 100% crit, as crazy as it sounds. The lacerate DOT is just that good.

What about a more reasonable, safe rotation that has a lacerate every 6 seconds instead of 12? That's still more - 4285 TPS. Not a huge loss.

Now, where it gets tricky is when you start considering how many lacerates it takes to keep up a stack. As you get better AP and crit, swipe starts overtaking certain numbers of lacerates. If you have to lacerate more than once every 6 seconds to keep the stack up, chances are that at higher levels of AP it won't be worth it. At really high levels of AP (we're talking post-WotLK levels) it takes one lacerate every 9 seconds to make it worth it.

So for optimal rotations, having lacerate in there is best. Fewer is better, but none is not ideal.

I think the next big mathy thing I'm going to do is figure out what the 'lacerate tax' costs you in threat vs swipe spam. The obvious view is that for shorter fights, getting a lacerate stack isn't worth it - but what is the cost of the lacerate stack falling off in longer fights? If you know for whatever reason that a lacerate stack will likely fall off (Malygos is an obvious one, but there are plenty of others), is it worth it to reapply the stack quickly? Slowly? This isn't the easiest answer to model.

Anyway, sorry that I was wrong. Thank you, Marino, for checking the math and asking the question. I always appreciate people doing that and callling me on it when I'm wrong, and I'm not so egotistical that I can't admit it.

[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.

[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:

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.

Ghostcrawler

2008-12-16 10:01:02

Re: Ghostcrawler, swipe is not fun.

The change for Swipe to generate an additional 50% threat is now live. Please let us know how it goes.

Yes, that's right - I kept the awesome avatar in there for no reason.

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.

[Druid] Rumors of my bad threat may have been greatly exaggerated

In an earlier report I commented on how it felt my threat was poor, I was taking more damage than other tanking classes, etc.

I was a whiny git.

The real thing to understand now is that bear threat isn't as static as it was before. In bear tanking gear threat isn't nearly as good as it used to be, especially relative to the other tanks. This is because they largely expect you to be tanking in rogue leather at 80, so have budgeted accordingly. So threat...doesn't feel so hot in your tanking gear.

But when you start stacking AP? Oh, yes. We start going to 11. Or, for instance, you start putting out 1500 DPS while tanking a boss. Note to those who might be unfamiliar with the fight: this isn't a gimmick or anything. The fight has one add that I tank, then the boss himself. There aren't multiple adds coming out that would inflate dps done. There isn't any special thing from odd abilities that inflates it (fire bloom does get counted to you, but it's a minor boost and almost everyone gets it). It's just boss tanking - mangle, maul and lacerate.



Yep. 6th on damage, 1577 DPS. This is tanking in my DPS gear. Which is fine, honestly; the change to SotF means I'm uncrittable, the protector of the pack boost helps a lot with mitigation lost due to armor and on KJ armor doesn't matter anyway. I'm at 18k health, which is more than enough for soul flay tanking - and barkskin every minute helps with random fire blooms and the occasional orb hits.

But boy, is that some good threat. And just in case you're wondering, this wasn't an isolated pull; I was averaging 1400 DPS for the fights. This one was a bit high because we wiped shortly after I popped my second berserk, but it wasn't so insanely high that it was an anomaly.

So if you're wanting to have a good time, put on that Staff of the Forest Lord and go to town.

I still am taking more damage than other tanks are, but threat wise it's damn fun, and damage is through the roof.

[General] Using WWS to calculate TPS

From MainTankadin comes this little gem - a WWS parsing tool that will output threat per second based on the logs.

This isn't useful for e-peenery. I'll say that right now, in case anyone cares. What it is useful for is gauging how actual changes in gear affect your threat from week to week and what the actual source of threat is in fights, especially as your role changes.

For example: this is the WWS of a recent Morogrim fight that I tanked. And from that report, I apparently did 803 TPS. That's not so bad; that means melee can put out 900 or so TPS, and ranged can do 1050 TPS without going over - and of course, they're salved and have other threat reduction caps. From this parse you can see that Maul is a huge part of the threat, more than any other single source. In this fight it is 37% of all threat generated.

What's more interesting is to see the miss numbers. 30% of all mauls were missed! That's a huge chunk of potential threat, right there. I believe for Morogrim I was wearing my max avoidance gear, so that explains that.

This should demonstrate how good the brooch of deftness and other hit/expertise items really can be. For instance, just from maul, if I were using the brooch of deftness I would have reduced that miss percentage from 30% to 25%, roughly. And just from mauls, that would have increased my threat by 2.6%. Just from mauls.

It should also tell you how huge maul is for threat generation. Morogrim is an interesting fight in that you want to max avoidance and you will also often be rage-starved, because he will get big strings of misses or just choose to not swing for a while. Survivability is the big key for Morogrim, not threat. For a threat race you can look at something like Void Reaver. VR also wants as much avoidance as you can muster (so you can avoid the knockbacks) but also as much threat as you can muster (so you can hold onto him after them). In this fight I went for more of a threat-centric build, and it showed - my mauls missed much less (18%) and my threat was at 923 TPS. In that fight, maul actually made up even more of my overall threat - simply because I used fewer normal swings.

Up until recently I hadn't quite realized how large a threat value maul really is. This should show both the value of damage to your threat and the value of hit. It also shows how badly threat scales for bears; Maul only adds 176 damage per hit, no matter what, so as you increase in gear the relative threat that this produces becomes lower and lower.

[General] The effects of expertise on mitigation

As before, here's the summary: Expertise is the single best stat to stack to reduce the chance of spike damage.

Expertise is understood by most warriors to be their best threat stat. Druids get a lot of good use out of it too. Paladins...well, not as much, threat wise. Since only about 35% of a prot paladin's threat is generated from melee attacks (melee + SoR is basically it) and it doesn't affect taunting, it's not quite as useful as it is to druids or warriors. For druids, all of their attacks are affected by expertise, and expertise is twice as effective as hit rating for threat generation until you reach 24 expertise skill (or 96 expertise rating). It's one of the best if not the best stat to stack for threat.

For Paladins though, it is still pretty useful, and on a per-point basis expertise is almost as good as spelldamage for threat. But that's not the important thing.

For tanks the biggest issue is not how much damage they take per hit; tanking gear tends to normalize to the point where all types of tanks tend to take close to the same damage given the same boss and assuming the same or similar gear levels. What kills a tank is burst damage. In some fights that burst damage can be avoided or otherwise anticipated so that no other damage is taken at the same time; an example would be Magtheridon, where he brings the ceiling down. The raid can stop DPS until after a blast nova, then get him to 30%, cause a lot of raid damage and then resume as normal. In other situations certain bosses will be reduced more by certain classes; Morogrim and Gruul do mostly physical damage, so a druid's high armor comes into play more as a reduction (as an example). Or Prince and a Paladin, where holy shield all but guarantees every attack will be blocked and reduced more. That's one way to reduce spiky damage - make sure that the damage you take is as low as possible.

The other is to reduce the chance of having that spiky damage occur at all. This means we need to understand where spikes come from. One big source is from being parried by a mob. When a parry occurs the mob that parried partially resets their swing timer so that the next attack comes in faster. How much the swing timer is reset or reduced depends on when the parry occurred relative to the swing timer, but in general it's a 40% reduction to the next attack's speed. When this happens, especially in succession, you'll start seeing a lot more spikes of damage - and when this is combined with a boss's special attacks it can quickly lead to too much damage for a healer to overcome. For many fights you can get a parried attack which can lead to two normal melee hits + a special in the space of 2 seconds, and depending on the boss that can be quite a large amount of damage, somewhere on the order of 15-18k. And bosses on average have a 15% parry chance, so this can happen with some frequency. These attacks do enough damage that it's not enough to block them - avoiding them in some way is the only way to reduce that spike. For our purposes, we'll define a spike as being hit by a normal attack, being parried, and then being hit by a normal attack again.

Every 1 point of expertise skill (or 4 points of expertise rating) reduces the chance that you will be parried by .25%. So it takes 4 points of skill or 16 expertise rating to reduce parry chances by 1%. It also takes 19 points of dodge rating to give 1% dodge, which is the best avoidance stat you can stack. So, what are the chances that you will be hit by a normal attack, get parried, and then get hit with another normal attack? The normal attack chance is simply (1-avoidance). The parry chance starts at 15%. Therefore, the chance that you will be parry gibbed is:

(1-avoidance)*(parry chance)*(1-avoidance).

The typical avoidance level for T4-T5 bears and paladins is about 40%. With no expertise at all, you have a 5.4% chance of a parry gib occurring. With each 1% avoidance you reduce that chance by .18%. With each 1% of expertise, however, you reduce that chance by .36%. Thus, expertise is nearly double as valuable as avoidance in stopping a spike from occurring. This pattern holds true for all levels of expertise vs. avoidance:



Admittedly, another great way to deal with spike damage or the chance that you'll take it is to stack health and mitigation so that the spike damage can be more easily dealt with. That is the concept that effective health is built around, and it's always better to maximize your effective health instead of sacrificing it for the purposes of something like threat. That all being said - expertise is the best option for reducing the chances of some types of burst damage killing a tank.