This log exerpt from an actual Gruul raid shows how terrible things get when attacks from raid bosses are parried. When a mob parries your attack, its next attack is sped up via a haste modifier. I'm not sure how well-known this is to your average WoW player. It's why it's crucial that melee DPS always remains behind a raid boss (where attacks cannot be parried), because being in front can literally kill your main tank. In the above log, a cave-in causes all the melee to run around to the front of Gruul...and parries result.

Looking at the combat log, you can see the time differential of attacks.

Attack 1: 40.031
Attack 2: 41.609 (1.578 seconds later)
Attack 3: 42.390 (0.781 seconds later)

Total: 13,688 damage in 2.359 seconds, shorter than the casting time of a Priest's greater heal.

Gruul's attack was sped up from around 1.5 seconds to about half that due to multiple parries from both the tank, some rogues, and a fury warrior. The melee DPS literally killed the tank. Don't think that extra 0.8 seconds doesn't matter; ask any healer how often a target dies with "milliseconds left on my heal."

Healers need to watch out for those dodge/parry/miss Strings of Doom. It's why tanks can go for seemingly ages without getting hit and then suddenly get *destroyed*. When you see that happening, it's time to get even more aggressive, rather than the tendency to do the opposite. "Oh, he's not getting hit, lol, this is easy."

Melee DPS needs to recognize that if they are hitting a raid boss and it is parrying them, they are contributing to a potential wipe. This falls into the "it's not always the healers' fault, you know" thing.

Hunters must realize that if they use pets against a boss, this also contributes to the problem! A parry from a pet attack is the same as from a character. It's not that pets are "illegal" for use, it's that the Hunter must be very aware of their pet's location relative to a raid boss' position.

Food for thought.

-Bolty

Very interesting. Thanks, Bolty.

That's scary.

Of course, assuming he has a 5% parry chance (most mobs have base 5%, right?) the chance of that happening is really small. 1.953e-12 small

Thanks for the heads up, though. I've never thought of that.

It's actually a very large chance. Each and every attack will have a 1/20 chance of triggering a parry. The attack roll is just one roll on a chart to get the outcome, the game doesn't roll them seperately for miss, dodge, block, parry, etc. Having a 20% miss chance for example doesn't overwrite also still having a 5% chance to be parried.

Now consider most melee with dual wields and instant attacks can pound out around 40-60 attacks a minute. (A feral cat due to 1.0 speed auto without the dual wield miss rate can put out around 80 attacks a minute ). Thats basically 1/20 chance every second per melee person to trigger a parry. If you have 5 people in there doing it... pray for the tank.

Bosses also have instant attacks that they can put out on top of their auto attacks just like players on cooldowns. So if you're triggering parries as above and it has instants.. you can see a situation where the tank drops dead instantly no matter what the healers are doing. Regular attack, instant, regular attack again .5s later due to parry, Dead.

The biggest time this happens is when people are attacking large bosses from the side. They don't realize that even though it looks like they are behind the are actually not. Rogues and feral druids can tell easily because you go to hit a backstab or shred and receive the 'You are not behind your target' error. Warriors... well.. pick a smart rogue who backstabs to follow.

Hence why it was an important maxim for dps warriors to line up with Quark.

In many fights this isn't as hard as it might seem either. If the pet ends up not on the side or behind you can just tell it to stay. Shift your position tell it follow send it back in. It does not need to get all the way back to you either since it will beeline to you and beeline back so you can change position pretty fast. The issue is that while you can move and not delay an autoshot if you stop in time you can't fire steady on the move. But when a beast hunter pet can push over 200 DPS you learn how to deal with it. You also want the pet behind the boss anyway to up it's damage to avoid the blocks and parries anyway.

And with a lot of bosses tanked with the warrior having his back to the wall and the boss facing away from the raid anyway it's not too big a deal.

But yes hunters should pay attention to it. Hunters are very micro intensive this is another aspect, though I do wish Blizzard would make the pet a bit smarter on this issue to cut down on some of the micro.

I counted 9 attacks parried in a row. The chance of that happening is 0.05^9. Assuming he has 5% Parry.

I think you misunderstand the situation. It is not solely the tank's attacks. In this case a bunch of people were all melee dpsing from the same side as the tank and Gruul parried 9 out of dozens of attacks.

Depends on whether the combat log was edited or not. We know that were 9 parries in a short period of time, but the actual number of successful attacks in the that same 4 second period is unknown.

Next question: Is this behaviour universal or limited to just Gruul? One combat log from a single encounter isn't conclusive evidence. (Unless this feature had been added recently I would have thought it would have been noticed much much earlier).

The first sentence of Bolty's post should also be edited to clarify that the issue is parries by the boss on player attacks, and not parries by players on the boss's attacks. (I'm sure he meant the former but it read like the latter).

Chris

It applies to all parries by all entities, and has been known for at least a year (the behaviour was first documented in the early Naxx days). Players parrying get their attack speed increased, bosses parrying get their attack speed increased. It's why Parry rating has always cost more than Dodge rating (even in the earliest WoW 1.00, 1% parry clearly cost more than 1% dodge - see Hyzenthlei's original formulas).

Why is the Fury Warrior using Sunder Armor?

Back in the original BWL days, Horde guilds trying Broodlord were having issues with the deaggro and had to maximize their threat generated. One way they did this was by handing off the Sunder Armor duties to a DPS warrior, which allowed the tanks to focus on attacks that had higher threat per rage.

Oh, it's definitely edited. Peoples' names are removed and the log was trimmed to show the number of parries that came in. Yes, there were other successful attacks on Gruul during the log timeframe.

-Bolty

Might be trying to trigger an overpower if he's two handed fury.

Hamstring would be better for this, though, less rage, and does damage.

It would.

Yeah, Sunder isn't a high priority for the main tank to get up quickly, so sometimes people will help finish the 5-stack for maximum melee DPS. The main tank is more concerned with high-threat moves, and keeping shield block up. The tank can hold aggro better if another warrior finishes the sunder stack, and they can do even more TPS if someone keeps imp thunderclap and imp demo shout up, too.

As far as the threat issue of sundering by someone other than the maintank, it shouldn't be a problem, as revenge/shield slam > sunder by a large margin, especially with the threat modifiers on def stance vs battle/zerk.

Besides, if someone else does Sunders, the MT can start Devastating much faster.

And you'd want to Devastate why?

I'll take mine dry, waiter.
~Frag

Fixed.

The only person in that situation who would want sunders up to use Devastate might be a 2nd prot war who is DPSing, for whatever reason, whether they just came off an add, or they were just an extra. I mainly only use Devastate for DPS/some solo situations, not much for tanking. Heroic Strike isn't on the GCD, Devastate is, so if I have the rage to use Devastate, I'm usually using it to stack Heroic Strike on top of everything else, instead. One use I do have for it when tanking is to hit it often enough to keep the sunder stack up.

A full stack of sunders does help melee DPS and hunter DPS, so it's a good thing to have up, but if the tank doesn't need to worry about it, that's more threat they can build.

Devestate is not the rage dump advertised in my experience. Heroic strike still remains my rage dump of choice.

I use Devastate after a full stack, in between Shield Slam and Revenge cooldowns. So, it gets used once or twice every six to eight seconds

Once you have Sunders built up, not Devastating on every GCD you're not Revenging or Shield Slamming sounds like quite a waste to me.

Heroic Strike and Shield Block operate on their own cooldowns, and if you're not Sundering, you'll have plenty of GCDs to spare for Devastate. It's more threat.

And after all, Devastate doesn't consume a white hit.

Hey folks, forum etiquette question here - may I copy the original post over to the Keepers forums? This is good info I think they should all know.

Thanks!

-Ben

Two things make me pause and wonder.

First, there are mechanisms in the game that most players will probably never perceive as such important like a simple parry in that boss encounter. Yes, any melee class will probably see parries very early in the game (You attack. Wolf parries your attack. With what?) But never know that it actually does more than just discard your time, rage, mana, or combo points.

Second, I've been always terribly annoyed at these rogues that jump constantly around you in PVP or duels. Now I see that this does make absolutely sense from their point of view. Although I still wonder how they manage to squeeze in a gouge while hopping around you like a madman...

I think that would be fine, just include where you found the info, and a link to the original post here. Anyone have objections?

Of course, this is true, but, it's as you say: When tanking, I only use Devastate when I don't have anything else to use the GCD for, other than making sure I use it enough to keep the sunder stack up.

Sounds good.

Mathematically the optimum threat cycle once the sunders are on is:

Global cooldown skills (one every 1.5 seconds)
Shield Slam
Revenge
Devastate
Devastate

Cycle takes 6 seconds which conveniently is the cooldown of shield slam and close enough to the cooldown of Revenge. (No lag and perfect reflexes are assumed)

On Next Swing (once every X seconds where X is your modified attack speed)
Heroic Strike

In addition you may need to activate Shield Block every 5 seconds. (Fortunately it operates without global cooldown)

The GCD attacks and the On Next Swing attacks are not contrained by the same factor so there is no need to use a heroic strike instead of a GCD move you can use both simultaneously

Of course that is one heck of a lot of key presses in a very short span of time so I'm also in the process of optimising how I do it and I certainly don't achieve it except in the briefest of bursts with my current set-up. I am looking at making macros to help me maintain this before I begin raiding

All this assumes you have plenty of rage, rage starved fights are different

Source:
http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?t...=94319875&sid=1

Interestingly the On Next Swing mechanic favours fast weapons while the Devastate mechanic favours slow weapons (bigger hits). I don't know whether fast or slow weapons number crunch out to higher threat. If no one enlightens us in the next day or so I'll see if I can sit down with the numbers and produce some calculations

Circle-strafing around your target is to negate Dodge, Block, and Parry as well as to reset their swing timer. Obviously, this works much better against people using slower, two-handed weapons (Warriors and Retrinoobs, primarily) than people using quick, one-handed weapons (Rogues.) Of course, many Rogue and kitty abilities rely on positioning, and this can also help.

I'd go with faster weapons for their stats if nothing else. The Sun Eater and King's Defender are both 1.60 speed and are clearly superior to something like The Decapitator in regards to tanking. I also tend to start using Heroic Strike before Devastate (especially since I'll be spamming it while building up the sunder stack on "infinite rage" fights), and faster weapons make very efficient use of it.

Easier said than done with a shadowfiend - they don't hang around long enough to order around.

Shadow fiends won't cause this enough to be significant as long as everyone else is doing their part to avoid it.

After taking 21,774 dmg from Maulgar in ~2.3s due to one parry , I'd like to put forth that giving a bossmob any unnecessary opportunities to parry are ill-advised.

Then again, maybe your tank needs the rage...
~Frag

This was Magtheridon parrying the *tank* at a bad time. I don't think we need anyone else helping out....

04:15'55.378 Magtheridon's Cleave hits <tank> for 9376 (393 blocked)
04:15'55.378 <Tank>'s Heroic Strike parried by Magtheridon
04:15'56.300 Magtheridon's Melee hits <Tank> for 10627 (crushing)

20003 damage in .922 seconds. Ouch. (cleave ate 2nd shield block charge)