Impale tanking crit%

[Nambey]

When doing arenas for my Gladiator shield, I was a big fan of the 17/3/41 impale tanking build. Since I'm in an all troll guild, I don't often run with pallies and druids, so getting to the 20% buffed crit that makes this build really shine while tanking was kinda rare. That is why I switched back to a more traditional build with 5/5 cruelty.

My question for the number crunchers is this:

With the change to devastate, I think most people are using it much more often. This means we now have many more attacks landing that can crit. I'm wondering if more attacks with the possibility to crit has lowered the buffed % you need to make the impale build worthwhile. I know that part of that number came from the straight increase to crit damage vs. the higher possibility to get a crit. However, I think that some of that also came from having a high enough crit chance to keep deep wounds up, and I'm thinking this is the part of the formula that could be changed due to using devastate instead of sunder.

Any thoughts? Thanks!

[veneretio]

Impale is now going to offer a little more threat early on than it used to which is nice, but this slight change isn't going to change the requirements that make this spec worthless to any great extent.

Just think of a 10 minute boss fight... does 4 extra Devastates at the start really make a huge difference?

[Nambey]

Impale is now going to offer a little more threat early on than it used to which is nice, but this slight change isn't going to change the requirements that make this spec worthless to any great extent.

Just think of a 10 minute boss fight... does 4 extra Devastates at the start really make a huge difference?


Well, other posts on this site seem to suggest that a buffed crit chance of over 20% actually makes the 17/1/43 or 17/3/41 build pretty good, but I'll leave that to another discussion.

And yes, you will definitely have the extra devastates at the beginning, but I would suggest that you will also have more devastates throughout the fight as well (at least I will). Hasn't the innate threat on devastate been raised such that it is better than before even when it is not being used to apply sunders? My experience prior to 2.3 suggests to me that devastate was only so-so and was something I would use once in awhile after 5 sunders were up, but now I use it as often as possible within the standard revenge/SS rotation.