Would you use rend if it was off the GCD?

[Moonschwine]

Hello there,
I've been tanking pretty much anything and everything since 2008 from level 10 in TBC and now running various attempts at Ulu 25.

Though this is one of my first posts here, I'd like to think I'm at least a ranked amateur when commenting on the intricacies of the Warrior class. I'm happy with my current threat rotations, Tanking build and with Dual-Specc; I can happily average about 2.7-3k DPS with my gear in heroics and raids.

Recently however, I found myself in a discussion with another guild member regarding the use of Rend by Fury/Prot builds in a rotation. Quite often I've found myself in a situation where from Misdirects, Tricks of the Trade and general aggro-building I'm well ahead of anyone else on the threat meters and tend to just throw in a rend here and there on bosses, usually out of boredom.

Having trolled through the boards and finding the following threads of interest:

http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f14/43272-rend-warrior-tanks.html (http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f14/43272-rend-warrior-tanks.html)

and

http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f14/41686-rend-fail-we-so-sure.html (http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f14/41686-rend-fail-we-so-sure.html)


As well as being well aware of the in-game jokes about rend.

After reading and trolling, comparing notes and various number crunches over /w with my guild mate I commented that rend would be used almost every time it fell off a target if it did not invoke the GCD by pretty much any warrior talent build. My reasoning for this is that, looking at the above threads, the real difficulty of finding a reason to rend is that its risk vs. reward is too great, in the sense that there is very little room in a typical dps/tanking rotation to fit it in.

I therefore present the question to the tanking community weather or not you yourselves would be using Rend if it was removed from the GCD much like HS/Cleave etc? And weather or not if (hypothetically rend was off GCD) it be worth to take 2 Points in Improved Rend over say that of Improved Charge?

Thanks in advance for advice/opinions/number crunching.

Moonschwine “The Big Bull”

[Squirrels]

Before 3.1, i speced into imp rend over imp charge

Now with the 4piece bonus of t8.5, I feel the crit bonus on devastate combined with sword and board proc chance, out way the use of tossing in a rend when all you have left to do is devasate.

However, with the increase in rend damage (35%) bonus when a mob is > 75% health the threat bonuses are well worth the usage of rend.


Does 35% more damage on mobs above 75% health - includes bosses =)
With mangle or the arms warrior's equivilant, the bonus bleed damage will health threat
Every damage you do will health your threat, even the ticks from rend. And average rend tick for me with a boss > 75% health is ~900. That's a lot of threat and can be usefull if ur kiting a mob.

Overall the use of rend is 100% up to the player.


To answer your question of "Would you use rend if it was off the GCD":

My answer is YES.
a) It is okay threat
b) what else would I use......

[Molohk]

Not sure where this is going, do you have any reason to believe rend might be removed from the GCD? because I thought devs were pretty adamant about all damage dealing abilities being on the GCD.

If we're just pipedreaming about rend being off the GCD, there wouldn't be a reason not to use it on high rage situations. The only other skill off the GCD is HS, which usually adds about 840 damage to your swing plus the 259 threat bonus, that's a 1100 threat gain from HS while Rend ticks five times for 575 per tick for a total of 2875 damage, if it comes to chosing between HS and Rend to dump extra rage (it implies rend is not on the target already, and there's time for the target to take at least 2 ticks of rend), you'd claerly use rend over hs.

To illustrate how OP rend of the GCD would be, imagine pulling a pack of 6 mobs, and using a tabtarget-rend macro to put rend on all 6 mobs in under half a second, it's probably better than TC+DW (considering you don't even use a full GCD). This is why blizzard will NEVER take a damage dealing ability that doesn't have a cooldown off the GCD.

Disclaimer: I got my damage/threat values from the first log I could find (ttp://wowwebstats.com/kcjujtmsdqckc?m)that had a prot warrior using rend, so take them with a grain of salt.