Cruelty and impale

[Sanelora]

One thing that I am seeing a lot of is Cruelty versus Impale.

I would like to make the point that if you pick up impale:

• Cruelty moves from a lower rung of the threat tallents to actually being quite high up in priority
• It scales with incite making it even stronger

Personally, if I was building for impale, I would have (at least) the points I was using for AttT in Cruelty instead. Without doing the maths on it, I think that cruelty is almost a must with impale.

That being said, with dual specs, it is my belief (also, not knowing how the raids are going to turn out on live and what is going to be needed during the fights) i personally think that impale should only be featured in a leveling/threat build and with dual specs, personally I am making a pure threat build (which doubles as my leveling build) and a survival/mitigation build at 80 for boss tanking.

[agonis]

actually i specced for impale and 3 points in cruelty.

I have 4/5 shield specialization, 0 points in puncture and 0 points in demo shout.

at 80 i will be:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

I believe it's not a low mitigation spec. In case i have some problems with the -1% block chance i will turn down cruelty to 2% instead of 3%, or just drop vigilance, or 1 point in focused rage.

for the dual spec.. i will get my hands on some sexy 1h and build an equip with good hit\ap\crit and get a fury 1h spec. Or maybe turning to my old love, 2h fury, no titan's lol though.

[agonis]

same post, sorry

[Fenicks]

12/8/51. I can't post an exact spec right now, but the only survivability I'd be forfeitting is 3 points in Shield Spec.

[Hogshank]

Agonis,

It seems to me that for MT tanking for 25 man raids if you want to go for the 5 pts in dodge that you should instead take 2 pts from improved revenge than take 2 pts fro cruelty. That 2% less crit will apply to all your attacks. Where as the 2 pts taken from imp revenge only applies to one ability. The threat you will lose from less revenge dmg wont be as bad and can be made up for by misdirects from the hunters.

Personally, I would only take 3 points in dodge then you can have your cake and eat it too. You'll have the full 5 points in cruelty and the 2 pts in imp revenge. Block is the #1 defensive stat for warrior tanks not dodge. Focus on that and let dodge and parry take a backseat.

[Ghreystar]

Agonis,

Block is the #1 defensive stat for warrior tanks not dodge. Focus on that and let dodge and parry take a backseat.

what? this isnt making sense. dodge and parry are 100% avoidance, which is certainly better that absorbing 1000dmg or so. not to mention parry benefits swing speed.

can somebody clarify this?

[Hogshank]

All I'm saying is that of these 4 things to consider when building your tank, I would rank them in this order:

1. Block
2. TPS
3. Dodge
4. Parry

What that means is when building your spec if it comes down to a choice between 2% more dodge or 2% more crit (as agonis seemed to indicated from his post), then TPS for me ranks higher than dodge so I would take the points in cruelty AND impale rather than shorting myself in either of those and taking the full 5 points in 5% dodge. IMHO

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

[loquatious]

If a block stops all incoming damage then 1% block is better than 1% dodge because you get 2 free rage, but not as good as 1% parry because you get increased swing speed which has to be worth more than 2 rage.

Assuming the boss hits for more than your shield block value 1% avoidance is always better than 1% block.

[mero12513]

Even if bosses hit for less than your SBV (which they won't), Avoidance is better than block for survival because you can't block every attack (unless you're a paladin).

Also Hogshank, I think your priority might be improved if you consider your entire job as a tank from a top-level view first. My priority would be something like this:

1. Staying Alive (If your survive and heals are not OoM, proceed to #2)
---- 1a. Dodge
---- 1b. Parry
---- 1c. Block
2. TPS/DPS
---- 2a. Crit

Those are the stats from the talents in question. Those obviously aren't the overall priority. You can never make a hard rule or even a generalization about what is going to be more important to you. As a tank, you shouldn't really have a personal preference, unless it's just silly epeen waving about having more health or never being hit. Your primary goal is always to stay alive. If your healer(s) is/are consistently and without panic keeping you alive, your secondary duty is to do as much damage and threat as possible. So, if your gear/progression/group setup is such that you can afford to drop block % for more crit %, then great. If you need that block %, keep it. Also, 1% dodge is better than 1% block. It just is.

[Morgo]

Well, even considering that dps MIGHT some day be threat capped again, they will just have to hold back a very little, while a dead tank is worth 0 dps to the raid. I know that 1% dodge won't save you, having it might just save your butt when things go in the Sh*tter, so I doubt anybody will NOT spec it for progression fights. For everything else, I agree that crit>dodge, especially because 1. its fun to crit, and 2. because there might be encounters where the tank's dps does matter.

One last thing to consider:

Avoidance has dimishing returns, crit doesn't. But they both cost the same in the way of item budget points, so you get more overall if you increase your crit with gear and your dodge via talents than vice versa.

[Tyriall]

You also have to factor in Damage Shield as well.

[mero12513]

One last thing to consider:

Avoidance has dimishing returns, crit doesn't. But they both cost the same in the way of item budget points, so you get more overall if you increase your crit with gear and your dodge via talents than vice versa.

This is misleading. First, if we're talking about talents, avoidance doesn't have DR. DR doesn't apply to those talents, only to the avoidance you get from gear. Also, more Crit does have diminishing returns in a very real sense. Each extra percent in crit does *less* to increase dps than the last percent. I'll use some elementary examples to illustrate.

Let's say that you do 1000 damage per average hit, with a 1 second swing timer and 10% crit chance. What is your average dps? Well, your dps is your average hit damage (Da) divided by time (1 second, so easy math), which is calculated as follows:

Da = (1-crit chance) * (normal damage) + (crit chance) * (crit damage)
Da = .9 * 1000 + .1 * 2000
Da = 1100

If we increase crit chance to 20%, we get the following:

Da = .8 * 1000 + .2 * 2000
Da = 1200

We've gained 100 dps, or 1200/1100 - 100% = 9.09% increase. If we increase our crit chance again by 10% (up to 30), we have the following:

Da = .7 * 1000 + .3 * 2000
Da = 1300

Again, we gain 100dps, but only 1300/1200 - 100% = 8.3% increase.

So dps, and thus threat gain from cruelty has the same kind of diminishing returns that avoidance would.

[Morgo]

I meant exactly the fact that talent dodge is NOT affected by DR, and thus it's better to use talents for dodge.

[Shortypop]

I'm not getting involved in the actual spec discussion, but its worth noting that personal preference/common sense comes into play as far as I'm concerned. Our guilds MT is a warrior, and so me as second warrior tank will be going with an impale spec (of some sort) missing out on some mitigation in order to fulfill a slightly different role. If in the future I need more points in prot I'll respec, but that's the aim atm for me.

[agonis]

the trade off is just full cruelty\full avoidance, keeping however 2/2 impale.

I tend to prefer atm (ie: when i'll be a raiding tank) 2 or 3 points in cruelty and 4/5 shield spec and 5/5 anticipation.
When i'll be close to the avoidance DR (6 months time?) I will put 5/5 in cruelty, since at that time my healers will have easy time keeping me alive and i will /yawn at patchwerk.

In the end, just for answering to the thread Op, i believe using both specs for tanking is wasting a new possibility for my gameplay.

[Rannsaka]

Why not just spec like this:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
Full avoidance, full cruelty, full impale. You can move the last stand/damage shield points around to improved revenge/vigilance/puncture.

[agonis]

Beware, not getting imp.revenge with his +10% damage on all revenge is a significant loss in dps\tps, i think it should always be chosen.

maybe damage shield is not the best aggro talent in single mob tanking, but it should (never really tested it) be good in aoe tanking.

edit: imp. revenge 2/2 is 20% damage increase, sorry

[Shortypop]

I think, if I remember correctly that imp revenge is only giving 10% to base revenge damage, or something like that, am sure someone will be able to give details, but I'm pretty sure its not actually 10% of total revenge damage - would be nice to have this confirmed

[holmedog]

I've said this other places, but I'll restate it here:

Screw Focused Rage. Take the 3 points out of it, put them in cruelty.


There, problem fixed.

[Kazeyonoma]

I wouldn't take out of focused rage if you seduced me with 10 women. I personally wouldn't do it, I like 2 rage revenges, 12 rage devastate, 17 rage shield slams, 9 rage heroic strikes, etc etc