Taunt Mechanics Guide/Discussion

[jere]

Overview:
Taunt is an ability shared by all Tank classes in some form. Taunt has 3 main functions:

1. Forces the mob to attack you for a set duration of time (3 seconds base).
2. Sets your threat equal to the current aggro holder (I.E. at 100%)
3. Makes you the current aggro holder.

There is a small difference between #1 and #3 in that #1 is called a Fixate. It just makes you the current aggro holder for the duration of the debuff. A few of the tank classes have other abilities that do #1, but do not do #2 or #3. Mocking Blow, Challenging Shout, and Challenging Roar are among these Fixate only abilities. Those abilities that only have the Fixate property usually Fixate for longer (6 seconds rather than 3). The difference for #3 is that it makes you the current aggro holder until someone pulls aggro or you lose aggro through some other fight mechanic (or death). It doesn't have a time limit or debuff associated with it.

NOTE: There are various combinations of these 3 things that can occur on special mobs. Some mobs are totally immune to taunt and none of the 3 occur (this also can happen through diminishing returns). Some mobs will take the fixate but not affect your threat or aggro status at all. The Instructor Razuveous adds are among these. In general, though, taunts will either fully work, or fully fail.



Class Taunts:
Warrior:
Taunt - Spell - World of Warcraft -- Single Target 30 yard Taunt

Druid:
Growl - Spell - World of Warcraft -- Single Target 30 yard Taunt

Paladin:
Righteous Defense - Spell - World of Warcraft -- 3 Random Targets 40 yard Taunt (all targets must be targetting the same player)
Hand of Reckoning - Spell - World of Warcraft -- Single Target 30 yard Taunt with Large Damage Amount

Death Knight:
Dark Command - Spell - World of Warcraft -- Single Target 30 yard Taunt
Death Grip - Spell - World of Warcraft -- Single Target 30 yard Taunt with Pull Mechanic



Class Fixates:
Warrior:
Mocking Blow - Spell - World of Warcraft -- Single Target Melee Range Fixate with damage/threat added
Challenging Shout - Spell - World of Warcraft -- AoE 10 yard Fixate

Druid:
Challenging Roar - Spell - World of Warcraft -- AoE 10 yard Fixate



Diminshing Returns:
UPDATE: In patch 3.3, Blizzard turned off Diminishing returns for most mobs.

# Taunt Diminishing Returns: We've revised the system for diminishing returns on Taunt so that creatures do not become immune to Taunt until after 5 Taunts have landed. The duration of the Taunt effect will be reduced by 35% instead of 50% for each taunt landed. In addition, most creatures in the world will not be affected by Taunt diminishing returns at all. Creatures will only have Taunt diminishing returns if they have been specifically flagged for that behavior based on the design of a given encounter.


For enemies that have taunt diminishing returns enabled, this is how DR works: if you taunt every time on cooldown, then the first taunt works as normal, the second taunt will work as normal, but only fixate for 65% the duration (1.95 seconds), the third taunt will work as normal, but only fixate for 65% of the second taunt's duration (1.2675 seconds), and so on. The sixth taunt will go immune and none of the effects of taunt will apply.

Diminishing returns will reset if you do not taunt for a set period of time. As of this time the duration of the diminishing returns seems to be around 18 seconds. I tested this by taunting on cooldown over and over again and noting the times (UPDATE: I tested this during the 3-taunt era, but the results should be the same, just after 5 taunts instead). The first three taunts landed, the next two were immune, and the next one landed. Testing also shows that immune attempts don't start the diminishing returns timer as the sixth attempt landed. As a note, Fixate only abilities like Challenging Roar also apply diminishing returns to targets and will count against your taunts in that respect.

Hit Mechanics:
This is a topic of heated debate, but here are what I believe to be the facts:

1. The taunt hit cap against bosses is the spell hit cap of 17%. The hit cap for taunt is not the melee cap. This can easily be tested by putting on 9% melee hit gear and taunting over and over again. I put on enough to have 9.45% melee hit. Doing so I missed on my target.

Remember that the hit cap that applies to you is determined by the level of the mob you are attacking. If you are level 80, then the following applies to you (I need to verify levels 80-82):
Level 80 target => 4% miss
Level 81 target => 5% miss
Level 82 target => 6% miss
Level 83 target => 17% miss (Boss)

Here are the testing results if anyone wants to see them:


2. Taunt chance to hit is increased on the scale of spell hit. I put on 448 hit rating, which is 17.08% spell hit and 13.66% melee hit and then proceeded to taunt a target 283 times. Out of all of those times, there was not a single actual miss. The odds of that happening are about 6.681 in 100000 if taunt increased with melee hit and not spell hit.

I know in 2.3, that melee hit was allowed to increase taunt. However, in WotLK, the two stats are now merged, and only one can increase taunt hit. From my testing it looks like it increases with the scale of spell hit and not melee hit.

To quote Satorri:

For all tank classes 'Taunt/Growl/Dark Command/Hand of Reckoning' is a spell and takes its caps and rating conversions accordingly, from spell hit chances.

Here are the testing results if anyone wants to see them. I had 242 hits, 41 crits, and 150 immunes (notice they are listed as "other" and not "miss").


3. Taunt does not double dip. I.E. it is not affected by both spell hit and melee hit at the same time. If you look at my testing in #1, I had 9.45% melee hit. At the same time I had 11.81% spell hit. Combined I would have had 21.26% hit. If taunt double dipped, I wouldn't have missed, but I did. So even though hit rating gives you both stats, only one affects it, and that is spell hit.

[jere]

I posted this in Theory and Mechanics initially in case I made a mistake or someone wanted to submit some counter Data (parses, screenshots, etc.). Suggestions/Corrections/Discussion is welcome.

EDIT: Adding this for reference purposes:
EDIT: Based on testing, I think the DR on taunt is 18 seconds. Waiting 17 seconds after taunting, the next taunt was immune. Waiting 19 seconds after taunting, the taunt landed successfully. The last successful taunt was the 3rd taunt, so DR had the debuff duration at 0.75 seconds. I think 18 seconds is a safe bet, despite GC's post on it being 15 seconds.

[NecroNetics]

I posted this in Theory and Mechanics initially in case I made a mistake or someone wanted to submit some counter Data (parses, screenshots, etc.). Suggestions/Corrections/Discussion is welcome.

Paladins taunt is on spell hit and warriors/druids is on melee, isnt it?

[Shortypop]

Personally I find the comment "does not increase with melee hit" confusing, since apart from the odd skill/enchant they are the same thing. I guess what you mean is the number of your melee hit doesn't effect your taunt chance, but your hit rating does affect it (through the conversion to spell hit)?

[Roarc]

Taunt increase from spell hit and your hit rating will be translated into both physical hit chance and spell hit chance (i.e. taunt). Stacking hit should remove chances of taunt resists or have I missed something fundamental?

Questions:
- Does a mob suffer diminishing returns even if just using taunt every 8 seconds (i.e. the CD of taunt)?
- Is the diminishing returns stacking and then resetting, i.e after 3 taunts you will have to wait X seconds (say 16 seconds) for the DR to wear off and then you can taunt 3 times again, or would be have it getting "more and more" and later "less and less" stacks of a DR?
- Does fixate and taunt have different or shared diminishing return charts?

Awesome you bring this up btw. Would be interesting to have similar topics about DR surrounding stuns as well.

Regards
Roarc

[Hengist]

Paladins taunt is on spell hit and warriors/druids is on melee, isnt it?

Nope. All taunts have spell miss chance. Easy to test, taunts still can miss with 8% hit.

[Belak]

Personally I find the comment "does not increase with melee hit" confusing, since apart from the odd skill/enchant they are the same thing. I guess what you mean is the number of your melee hit doesn't effect your taunt chance, but your hit rating does affect it (through the conversion to spell hit)?

What he's trying to say is that "hit rating" converts to "hit chance" at a different scale for melee vs spells. More specifically:

32.79 hit rating = 1% chance to hit for melee attacks at level 80
26.23 hit rating = 1% chance to hit for spell attacks at level 80

So if you need 17% hit to prevent taunt from hitting, that would be 559.3 hit rating if it were physical. But since it's a spell, you only need 445.91 hit rating to cap it.

I can't imagine anyone actually doing this, but there it is.

Does that help?

[Astemus]

So with the glyph, you would only need 349 hit rating to never miss a taunt, because the glyph gives 8% to hit with taunts, which means it's worth 209.84 hit rating for taunting.

Does that add up? If you ever get bored and want to verify the glyph is working as intended. God knows you must have the patience of a monk, Jere.

[jere]

Personally I find the comment "does not increase with melee hit" confusing, since apart from the odd skill/enchant they are the same thing. I guess what you mean is the number of your melee hit doesn't effect your taunt chance, but your hit rating does affect it (through the conversion to spell hit)?

Belak pretty much hit the nose on the head with his statement. They do share the same rating stat, "hit", but they scale differently. You get 25% more spell hit per hit rating than you do melee hit per hit rating. So the 448 rating that gave me about 13.66% melee hi (check your melee tab on the character sheet), will also, at the same time, give you 13.66*1.25 = 17.08% spell hit. The same hit rating increases both, but does so at different rates. The important thing to find out is if it's the melee hit % or the spell hit % that gets you capped at 17%. It appears from my testing that it is the spell hit %, which is good, because, as Belak stated, that means you need less hit to cap your taunt than you might think (assuming you knew you were aiming for 17%).

I think you might be getting stuck on the idea that hit rating means melee hit rating by default, which is understandable. I have a hard time forgetting not to think of hit rating as spell hit only. In either case, I am definitely open to suggestions on how to make it clearer. Maybe I will put up a blurb about it if I can think of something clearer to say.

Taunt increase from spell hit and your hit rating will be translated into both physical hit chance and spell hit chance (i.e. taunt). Stacking hit should remove chances of taunt resists or have I missed something fundamental?

Questions:
- Does a mob suffer diminishing returns even if just using taunt every 8 seconds (i.e. the CD of taunt)?
- Is the diminishing returns stacking and then resetting, i.e after 3 taunts you will have to wait X seconds (say 16 seconds) for the DR to wear off and then you can taunt 3 times again, or would be have it getting "more and more" and later "less and less" stacks of a DR?
- Does fixate and taunt have different or shared diminishing return charts?

Awesome you bring this up btw. Would be interesting to have similar topics about DR surrounding stuns as well.

Regards
Roarc

- It looks like DR on taunt lasts around 20 seconds, so doing it every cooldown (which is what I did most of the time during my testing), will put it on DR at the 4th taunt.

- Yes, after the 3rd taunt, you have to wait some time period for it to reset, and that time period starts from the last successful taunt. I don't know the timer period, but it is some time between 16 and 24 seconds. I am guessing it is 20 seconds, but that is only a guess. Taunts that are immune or resisted don't appear to affect DR (I.E. they don't count against you).

- I don't know if the fixate skills like Mocking blow share DR with taunt. I will try to check that next time I hope on my warrior.

So with the glyph, you would only need 349 hit rating to never miss a taunt, because the glyph gives 8% to hit with taunts, which means it's worth 209.84 hit rating for taunting.

Does that add up? If you ever get bored and want to verify the glyph is working as intended. God knows you must have the patience of a monk, Jere.

LoL, well we had a lot of afk's last night, so I had a lot of time to burn while waiting for the raid to fill up and Darnassus is nice and quiet this time of year.

As for the ratings:
17% - 8% = 9%

I think my testing shows that's 9% spell hit, so then, it should take:
9*26.23199272 = 236.09 or 237 rating (if my math is right).

The glyph would be worth 8%*26.23199272 = 209.86 rating, yes.

[Molohk]

Good post, very useful.

Regarding the DR: GC did say it was on 15 second timer, perhaps the timer starts after the 3 second buff fades, so it would bring it to a total of 18 seconds after the last taunt. Here's the quote from GC post (emphasis added): "It shouldn't affect the Razuvious fight. The diminishing returns only lasts 15 seconds (not the whole fight) and that encounter is timed more for 30 second taunts. Secondly, we can just make the Understudy taunts not diminish."

[Satorri]

Do the diminishing returns last that long? I've never been readily able to watch the reducing effect.

Other moves (particularly in pvp) will have a 10 sec fall off, so first does 10 sec, second does 8, then 4, then 2, then immune. 20 sec is pretty severe since it seems the 3rd or 4th taunt will make it immune.


The simple statement is as follows:
For all tank classes 'Taunt/Growl/Dark Command/Hand of Reckoning' is a spell and takes its caps and rating conversions accordingly, from spell hit chances.

It always bears reminding the spell miss chances for a level 80 are:
80 target = 4% miss
81 target = 5% miss
82 target = 6% miss
83(Boss) target = 17% miss

You only have an appreciable chance to miss on a boss (which as someone pointed out elsewhere is more common in Ulduar and very uncommon in Naxx/OS/EoE, or at least not required).

I'm sure Jere is right about the glyph effect, 8% off the miss chance as a spell. That means the glyph makes any non-boss require 0 hit rating to taunt, and for the boss Jere has the number above.

[jere]

Well it definitely could have been some sort of latency, but this was a repeatable test for me (yall should check it yourselves and report back as well incase it is on my end).

Target a boss target dummy, hit taunt on every cooldown (8 seconds). When I did, this happened:

00.0 Taunt 1 hit
08.0 Taunt 2 hit
16.0 Taunt 3 hit
24.0 Taunt 4 immune
32.0 Taunt 5 immune
40.0 Taunt 6 hit

It's possible I lost two seconds in latency in the first 3 pushes. See if yall get the same thing. It could also be that 15 seconds was the intended value and it got bumped up. I did that test about 70-75 times while testing out the hit cap for taunt, and every time had the same results.

[jere]

Here's a screen shot of a recent try:


36:46 - Taunt hits
36:54 - Taunt hits
37:02 - Taunt hits
37:10 - Immune
37:19 - Immune
37:27 - Taunt hits

Notice here, taunt is immune for at least 17 seconds (37:02-37:19)

The only thing I can think of is that the DR starts when the Fixate debuff wears off?, which would put it at 37:02+3secs = 37:05 start time, and that would be 14 seconds at 37:19.

Though that is a technical gotcha if that is the case. For taunts, we typically more care about from the time it was last cast. So that would make the DR from my perspective 18 seconds, when it is "technically" 15 seconds, you just have to add the fixate buff duration in there.

EDIT: Actually, scratch that thought. The third taunt would have had a fixate duration of 3/4 = 0.75 seconds (shows that roughly in the combat log), so 37:03 to 37:19 would have been like 16 seconds at least, which doesn't add up with the 15 seconds GC posted.

[Tarigar]

So I am thinking that the change was implemented to prevent tanks from just spam taunting a boss like widow back and forth to avoid getting hit at all.

This messed with us at first in my guild and did our first week on Ignis with the Moltens. Too many people were trying to tank and not trust the other.

[Satorri]

It is Tari, with the number of bosses in Uld that require multiple tanks as well they didn't want people pingponging them for a free pass.


Oh, and Jere, I think I have some insight. It makes it a little hard to figure out the actual duration, but the window probably gets refreshed with each taunt. In other words, taunt has a 3 sec visible effect where it changes targets to you, and it then has an invisible window during which time additional taunts will fall under the raising immunity. If GC said 15 sec then it's still longer than I expected.

So first tank taunts and sets a 15 sec window, when the second tank taunts, even 8 sec later, he restarts the 15 sec window but now with 2 taunts on the list. Thanks to your tests I think we can safely assume it's 4th taunt will be immune (3 taunts will work). I'm a little surprised its so long a window, but GC's words seem pretty clear from reading the post and the context. This should be easily testable and I'll edit this in a little bit when I go online. (yay for lazy fridays!)

[jere]

Yeah, but it would need to be longer than 15 seconds if two taunts in a row go immune. It's not just the 4th taunt, but the 5th taunt as well. That's at least 16 seconds of DR in effect.

I was actually already assuming the window gets refreshed with each successful taunt, but it seems longer if two taunts in a row are immune before taunt DR falls off.

I guess what I am saying is:

T_______T_______T_______I_______I_______T
D_______D_______D_______________X_______D

In that example, DR resets 3 times at first, each with each new taunt every 8 seconds. The 4th taunt goes immune and doesn't reset DR. I put an X under the 5th Taunt, because if DR lasted 15 seconds, I would expect the taunt to succeed and DR to reset here. But instead, the 5th taunt is also immune (16 seconds after the 3rd taunt), and DR isn't reset there because the 6th taunt is successful.

I can't figure out where the 15 seconds would go if it were still true.

[jere]

Here is another parse I did tonight. In this scenario, the following happened:



41:55 Taunt 1 Hit
42:04 Taunt 2 misses
42:12 Taunt 3 hits
42:21 Taunt 4 hits
42:38 Taunt 5 is immune

So here we see that misses don't refresh DR (which is good), but also notice that Taunt #5 happens 17 seconds after Taunt 4 (I did this on purpose) and is still immune. So nothing happens for at least 16-17 seconds, but the taunt is still immune. I don't think it is 15 seconds on the DR.


I did some more testing, this time using a stop watch. When I waited 17 seconds from the last taunt, the next taunt was immune. When I taunted 19 seconds after the last taunt, the taunt passed. So it seems like the DR is 18 seconds.

[Satorri]

Hmmmmmm

Very helpful stuff. When faced with the functional versus a dev's report of what is 'supposed' to be scripted (bearing in mind GC is not always directly privvy to the state of things and is one step removed from the actual coding), I'll trust how things actually work in practice.

Take-home message:
Be careful when and how you taunt. Communicate! That goes doubly for impromptu tanks, dps DKs and Feral kittehs who try to save the day.

(I have a couple feral kittehs who are skilled tanks and have a tendency to quick bear shift and try to snag a boss if things look like they're going wrong. If they're right it can buy us another 30 sec or time for a quick save of a dead tank, but when they're wrong they can actually just kill themselves and possibly others if they create a taunt blackout.)

[Ghladum]

Ah, the perfect thread... thanks for this work you guys, especially Jere. /hat tip

[chefjeff]

Most raids will have a shadow priest or boomkin so actual spell hit rate to not miss taunt would be 14 %