[darkpaladinzz]

Hey Guys, I am kind of new to the tanking business.
However, while discussing tanking with a friend of mine, he brought up that dark command has a chance to miss, I originally thought that taunts wont be able to miss and I was wondering if anyone can verify if indeed dark command will have a chance to miss while pulling mobs/bosses?

thanks in advance

[Satorri]

Taunt (warriors), Growl (bears), Dark Command (DK's), and Hand of Reckoning (Paladins) are all essentially the same thing (though pallies get a little damage on theirs).

It makes your threat equal to the highest threat individual (his current target) and forces it to target you instead. They all use the spell hit cap (at 80: 4% vs 80, 5% vs 81, 6% vs 82, 17% against 83/Boss), and get corresponding benefits from 'spell hit' buffs.

As a DK if you are melee hit capped for specials (8%) you'll have about 10% and change + to hit on spells, and Imp FF or Misery from Boomkins or Spriests respectively will knock another 3% off. Virulence will buff this, as will glyph of Dark Command, not that I'd recommend using it. Also, at the melee hit cap you'll never miss if it isn't a raid boss, and the count of times you'll taunt a raid boss are pretty small. Personally, I've never recorded a miss on a taunt either, but it is possible. If it does miss, at least, it will not contribute to diminishing returns if you just taunt again.

[Odok]

Source: Satorri Taunt (warriors), Growl (bears), Dark Command (DK's), and Hand of Reckoning (Paladins) are all essentially the same thing (though pallies get a little damage on theirs). It makes your threat equal to the highest threat individual (his current target) and forces it to target you instead. They all use the spell hit cap (at 80: 4% vs 80, 5% vs 81, 6% vs 82, 17% against 83/Boss), and get corresponding benefits from 'spell hit' buffs. As a DK if you are melee hit capped for specials (8%) you'll have about 10% and change + to hit on spells, and Imp FF or Misery from Boomkins or Spriests respectively will knock another 3% off. Virulence will buff this, as will glyph of Dark Command, not that I'd recommend using it. Also, at the melee hit cap you'll never miss if it isn't a raid boss, and the count of times you'll taunt a raid boss are pretty small. Personally, I've never recorded a miss on a taunt either, but it is possible. If it does miss, at least, it will not contribute to diminishing returns if you just taunt again.

That's not true. In BC they changed Taunts to work off melee hit rather than spell hit. So against a level 83 target, Taunts have a 9% chance to miss.

[Eroth]

Source: Odok That's not true. In BC they changed Taunts to work off melee hit rather than spell hit. So against a level 83 target, Taunts have a 9% chance to miss.

They did change taunts to work of melee hit rather than spell hit, it's 8% not 9%.

[Molohk]

Source: Eroth They did change taunts to work of melee hit rather than spell hit, it's 8% not 9%.

Do you have any evidence for this? AFAIK the change in 2.3 only allowed taunt to benefit from hit rating, but it was never specifically changed to melee hit chance. I'm pretty sure Satorri is right about taunt being subject to spell hit chances, this also explains the existance of glyphs that increase hit chances.

From 2.3 patch notes: "Taunt: The chance for this ability to land successfully on its target is now increased by hit rating."

[Odok]

Source: Eroth They did change taunts to work of melee hit rather than spell hit, it's 8% not 9%.

The single-wielding/yellow damage hit cap against a level 83 is 9%, or 296 hit rating. I'm sitting at 273 hit rating at the moment (8.33%) and still get a few once in a million misses on taunt.

Although the Glyph of Taunt is only 8%, so you could be right. /shrug

@Molohk, I don't have any specific (re: blue posts) evidence or a bunch of math/graphs on hand. Just empirical observation. At above 9% hit I never saw a taunt miss, and I certainly didn't see it miss at an 8% rate.

[jere]

The warriors over at EJ did testing on taunt after the change in 2.3. Still at a 17% hit cap. The change Odok is referring to is the addition of melee hit to improve your taunt hit, not the removal of spell hit altogether. All they did was allow it to benefit from melee hit as well (back when melee hit and spell hit were separate).

It's also very easy to test. In my hit gear, I was missing with taunt at both the 8% and 9% points.

EDIT: as a matter of fact, I just hopped down to ironforge. Check the bottom of my combatlog:


Melee hit was 9.45%

My third taunt missed.

[Feanorr]

Source: Odok The single-wielding/yellow damage hit cap against a level 83 is 9%, or 296 hit rating. I'm sitting at 273 hit rating at the moment (8.33%) and still get a few once in a million misses on taunt.

No, it's not 9, it's 8; it have been tested over and over, there is a complete test about it on EJ if you want.

About the taunt, I dunno; it's definetly not a spell (i.e. you can cast it while you are silenced), but that doesnt mean it cant be on spell hit.

[Nunes]

Source: Satorri Taunt (warriors), Growl (bears), Dark Command (DK's), and Hand of Reckoning (Paladins) are all essentially the same thing (though pallies get a little damage on theirs). It makes your threat equal to the highest threat individual (his current target) and forces it to target you instead. They all use the spell hit cap (at 80: 4% vs 80, 5% vs 81, 6% vs 82, 17% against 83/Boss), and get corresponding benefits from 'spell hit' buffs. As a DK if you are melee hit capped for specials (8%) you'll have about 10% and change + to hit on spells, and Imp FF or Misery from Boomkins or Spriests respectively will knock another 3% off. Virulence will buff this, as will glyph of Dark Command, not that I'd recommend using it. Also, at the melee hit cap you'll never miss if it isn't a raid boss, and the count of times you'll taunt a raid boss are pretty small. Personally, I've never recorded a miss on a taunt either, but it is possible. If it does miss, at least, it will not contribute to diminishing returns if you just taunt again.

Do you ever do Razorscale, Kologarn, Iron Council, Thorim, Freya tree dudes?

[Satorri]

Yes, but I don't know why you ask.

Like I said, 1.5 sec on your GCD until you can taunt again is a small problem IF you miss a taunt, which I rarely do. And, as I said, the total count of taunts is still relatively very small for the %. In one Kologarn fight on 25 we'll have 3 tanks and I will taunt 2-3 times in the entire fight. If I have a miss chance of 3-4% (which in theory I do) the chances of me seeing a miss are tiny, and chances are I can taunt again before his next swing if I did miss.

[jere]

Source: Feanorr it's definetly not a spell (i.e. you can cast it while you are silenced), but that doesnt mean it cant be on spell hit.

Unless things have changed, silence still prevents you from taunting. My druid and warrior both have been silenced out of taunt. Now granted, I haven't tried since like classic wow, so that might have changed, but it was definitely silenceable at one point.

[Nunes]

Source: Satorri Yes, but I don't know why you ask. Like I said, 1.5 sec on your GCD until you can taunt again is a small problem IF you miss a taunt, which I rarely do. And, as I said, the total count of taunts is still relatively very small for the %. In one Kologarn fight on 25 we'll have 3 tanks and I will taunt 2-3 times in the entire fight. If I have a miss chance of 3-4% (which in theory I do) the chances of me seeing a miss are tiny, and chances are I can taunt again before his next swing if I did miss.

Don't know about you, but I have an 8 sec CD on Dark Command even if it misses.

[tuffmuffin]

Source: Nunes Don't know about you, but I have an 8 sec CD on Dark Command even if it misses.

Don't know about you, but clearly he knows how to use Death Grip

[Odok]

Hrm. Seems I was mistaken about Taunt. I just ran my own test and at 8.33% hit the taunts missed at... 8.62%. So, cough, yeah. 17% miss rate.

And I forgot that they lowered the hit cap to 8% after TBC. Used to be 9%.

[Satorri]

Source: tuffmuffin Don't know about you, but clearly he knows how to use Death Grip

Ha ha, well said, and you beat me to it. Though it is a valid concern for Bears who don't have a backup (we get Death Grip, Paladins get Righteous Defense, and Warriors have Mocking Blow which may not be a taunt, but it will buy time for it). I'll highlight something important to me though: all this is personal choice, if you want to glyph taunt, feel free to do so, I choose differently because I feel the glyphing is a lesser value than I can get from several other glyphs.


And, the miss chance is based on spell hit (17% against a raid boss), it is (since a BC content patch) influenced by melee hit, but that is now not significant any more since hit rating was unified.

If you are a warrior, DK, or bear, you've likely never looked at your spell tab before, but you can flip there now and mouse over your hit rating. It will tell you the spell miss reduction that your hit rating is giving you.

For other folks, bear in mind that it is time consuming to generate a high enough number of taunts to gauge its hit chance accurately, since smaller numbers will not give an accurate statistical representation, though it will highlight the fact that it can and does miss, but only on a boss if you have decent hit rating (only 6% *spell hit* to never miss anything else, that's only 157 hit rating).

[jere]

One thing to note is that if you have two taunts, your "effective" chance to miss is reduced a lot.

Say you have 5% hit rating in gear. Each taunt has a 88% chance to land on a boss and a 12% chance to miss.

The odds of both taunts failing is going to be 0.12*0.12=0.0144, or 1.44% chance to miss. With no hit rating, your chance is 0.17*0.17 = 0.0289, or 2.89% chance to miss.

One thing I am curious about, is that now that the stats are merged, does the spell hit % count for taunt or the melee hit % count for taunt. Before you say melee hit because of back in 2.3, remember that was when they were separate stats. Back then both spell hit and melee hit increased our chance to hit with taunt. Now that they are unified, I am pretty sure from my tests that they are not double dipping on a single stat, and since there is no true "melee" hit anymore (just "hit"), I wonder if we get the added bonus of the spell hit number counting instead of the melee hit number (a 25% bonus).

[Satorri]

That's a good question, I'm pretty sure they aren't double dipping either. My best guess would be that it uses spell hit conversion for your hit rating, but I haven't seen or done enough testing to get a solid number value to support that.

Mmmm double dipping would make hit rating a complete non-issue.

[jere]

It would indeed. Unfortunately, in my tests, I had 9.45% melee hit and 11.81% spell hit, so I know they don't double dip anymore (they did in BC from what I could tell when they were separate stats).

[Astemus]

If you're a bear, you have a much harder time getting hit rating on your gear. Hit rating on leather is hard to find. I pretty much have to use the glyph, before I had it, I missed 2 taunts in a row on razorscale, which was a wipe, then missed the first taunt the next attempt and the healers got owned lickety-split.

In fact, if you're unlucky like me with hit rating upgrades, you'll have under 100 hit rating total. I miss taunts regularly which cause major issues, IC, Freya adds, Emelon for example. On these fights if you miss your first taunt, you cannot wait the CD time to try again unless you are very lucky or DPS are VERY disciplined and you get some hits in on the mob.

Actually, when we were starting naxx, I was tanking on my warrior, and hovered around the melee hit cap most of the time. I cannot remember a time ever missing a taunt on him, but the only boss I taunted was gluth. You would think that the taunt glyph would have put my druid on even ground, but it might be the new content also.

[jere]

The content itself will have no effect on your ability to hit with taunt. Miss % is the same in ulduar as it is in naxx since boss mobs all have the same level. DR might, or a bug in taunt itself, but not the content you play. Raid content is always on the same "level" in terms of hit/miss/dodge/parry/etc.