Source: Ciderhelm
Scenario
You have 5+ Devastate, 2x Shield Slam and 2x Revenge. Organize these to provide maximum Threat output, keeping in mind that:- Each of the first 5 Devastates will provide a Sunder Armor debuff and increase the damage of Shield Slam and Revenge;
- Normal attacks will see a damage increase withthe Sunder Armor debuff if Devastates are applied sooner;
- Devastate is assumed to be 9 rage, Shield Slam is assumed to be 17 rage, and Revenge is assumed to be 2 rage;
- Devastate has significantly increased Threat for the first five applications.
Is initial threat increased by prioritizing Devastate over other abilities?
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Ok I re-ran things given the information above. My own assumtions are below.
- You always have enough rage to perform an ability.
- All abilities are assumed to be hits. No misses, parries, dodges, or crits.
- Damage for abilites is increased as the number of sunders increase.
- A single white attack [i]follows[i] each ability. As most tanks have a 1.6 weapon this is close enough to the GCD to warrant 1 per. If the special ability applies a sunder the white attack will use the new sunder amount. The first devestate will have its white attack at one sunder.
- Innate threat values are taken from Evil Empire's Guide here
- No sunder and max sunder damage values have been done from my own observations while playing. These are highly subjective as I was unable to find any notes about the armor values of mobs to perform a more detailed calculation. The damage between 0 and 5 sunders is increased linearly.
- There must be at least three moves between Shield Slam and 2 moves between Revenges to accommodate cool downs. I know that you would lose a half a second with only three cool downs between revenge. A half second allowed some other rotations to be checked.
The spread sheet detail can be found
here.
The first sheet is my assumptions. Things in blue are to be changed.
The second sheet is my calculations.
I will summarize the results here:
The best full rotation is Dev, Dev, Dev, SS, Rev, Dev, Dev, SS, Rev. This generates 8582 threat before stance and talent modifiers at approx 715 TPS. This is 12443 threat and 1036 TPS after modifiers.
The worst stating rotation is SS, Rev, Dev, Dev, SS, Rev, Dev, Dev, Dev. This generates 7884 threat at 657 before mods. After mods it is 11432 threat at 952 TPS.
The best 5 ability rotation for a quick burst of threat is SS, Dev, Dev, Dev, SS. This produces 4453 threat in 6 seconds or about 742 TPS before mods. Or 6457 threat and 1075 TPS after mods.
The best 2 ability rotation for quick burst of threat is Dev, SS. This generates 1717 unadjusted threat compared to SS, Rev which produces 1607 unadjusted threat.
Conclusions:
It appears that if you are doing SS and Rev as a pair it does not matter which goes first. This is because their side effects have no effect on the threat generated by other abilities and white damage.
From looking at the data (and common sense) the sunders from devastate directly increase the threat generated by the other abilities to such an extent that it would be wise to use devastates first where snap aggro isn't needed.
A SS only generates 162 more base threat than a Devastate. This small difference may actually make it worthwhile to open with the devestate cycle instead of a SS. This is because in most cases when you are going to get something pulled off you at the opener it is due to a lucky crit and at that point even SS won't help much. However this difference will widen as your shield slam increases.
As I am only in Heroic and Kara gear I recommend that folks grab the spreadsheet and plug their own numbers into the blue area and see how the rotations compare with their gear in there. I suspect that, as the only major value that would change would be white damage and shield slam, that the rotations would maintain the same relative positions. In fact the values would be better as the difference between a SS with no sunders and more sunders would be greater. However the benefits of using SS for snap aggro would be too great to start with a devastate for a single hit.
