I am mostly posting here to verify my math.

I ran two tests this evening, and while a small sample size the tests were consistent enough to lead me to seek verification that my math is correct.

Important Notes:

All values are verified using a hunter and Beast Lore.
Testing done on normal level 80 mob and an elite level 80 instance mob.
Same mob used for all 3 test sets in each case (hunter used freezing trap while I used dual spec to test different values)

Test Case 1:

Mob: Infesting Jormungar
Zone: Storm Peaks
Mob Type: Normal

Base Stats:

Melee Damage 421 - 587 Damage

Demoralizing Roar - Base Value of -411 AP

Melee Damage 362 - 528 Damage

Variance in minimum hit - 14%
Variance in maximum hit - 10%

Demoralizing Roar - Talented Value of -575 AP

Melee Damage 339 - 505 Damage

Variance in minimum hit - 19.5%
Variance in maximum hit - 14%

Test Case 2:

Mob: Azure Mage Slayer
Location: Heroic Violet Hold
Mob Type: Elite

Base Stats:

Melee Damage 569 - 792 Damage

Demoralizing Roar - Base Value of -411 AP

Melee Damage 489- 713 Damage

Variance in minimum hit - 14%
Variance in maximum hit - 10%

Demoralizing Roar - Talented Value of -575 AP

Melee Damage 458 - 681 Damage

Variance in minimum hit - 19.6%
Variance in maximum hit - 14%

Conclusion

I wasn't able to get Beast Lore values on Mexxena, which to my knowledge is the only raid boss capable of having their stats seen via Beast Lore. It stands to reason however that the same code functions on all given NPCs in WoW, and that the AP values are similar across all of Wrath of the Lich King.

Given that the minimum and maximum values scale slightly differently, it still appears to be at least a 12% averaged reduction per hit on the base line ability. This appears to increase to a 16.75% averaged reduction at a fully talented shout / roar.

This leads me to question that by sticking talents into improved shout / feral aggression you end up at a extra 1% damage reduction on incoming melee per talent point, which is what I believe this is suggesting. I'd liken this to mitigation by armor, but it functions differently so I feel the term damage reduction is more viable.

This does lead to the question however of if my math is correct and this is similar to what other people are seeing?

-Fenier

You are correct insofar as:

A. Every point of Improved Demoralizing Shout / Roar is never wasted.
B. Maximizing Improved Demoralizing Shout / Roar is a significant reduction in incoming damage

Now, as far as advantage, I believe a Druid has the upper hand here, as they can spec into 5/5 Imp. Demo Roar without any major sacrifice in their talent build, whereas points tend to be tight for a Prot Warrior to do the same.

Depending on how powerful the remade Vindication is, Paladins may be even better off, as their version won't require babysitting every 30 seconds, interruption of a threat rotation or cost any resources to cast.

That being said, the trade-off would be:

A. Only being able to apply it on one mob at a time (unless it is procced by Consecration / HOTR?)
B. Possibly being like Curse of Weakness, which is only as powerful as an untalented Demo Shout.

Something to take note of Fenier. Those values are all for a mob that does 100% of his melee swing 100% of the time. There are plenty of mobs that gain plenty of temporary percent modifier's based on the encounter you're dealing with (Didn't armory you, not sure if this is a "Duh" statement in terms of what you're used to.) Demo is great.

Anticipating AP reduction attached to Blood Plague with a 3/3 talented version for 575 ap somewhere.

Those values are the raw values, correct? (pre-armour reduction I mean)

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Q u o t e:
Those values are the raw values, correct? (pre-armour reduction I mean)

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Yes.

There is a long post on EJ about this, using Lurker and Maex to verify the results (Lurker can be beast lored to).

In short, mobs tend to have a certain amount of AP....That AP is multiplied greatly in comparison to a players AP (So, for example, even though they have only 500, it might be worth the player equivalent of 50k...Just an example, not accurate numbers.)

The amount of AP mobs have, tends to be just slightly above what a maxed out demo shout/roar can debuff. So every point of AP reduction is valuable.

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Q u o t e:
Those values are the raw values, correct? (pre-armour reduction I mean)

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Yes, Raw values, pre armor.

Given that this is the case, and that the effect is a debuff, it should allow for higher then 75% mitigation due to it not being subject to player softcaps.

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Q u o t e:


Yes.

There is a long post on EJ about this, using Lurker and Maex to verify the results (Lurker can be beast lored to).

In short, mobs tend to have a certain amount of AP....That AP is multiplied greatly in comparison to a players AP (So, for example, even though they have only 500, it might be worth the player equivalent of 50k...Just an example, not accurate numbers.)

The amount of AP mobs have, tends to be just slightly above what a maxed out demo shout/roar can debuff. So every point of AP reduction is valuable.

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I was able to find 2 threads on Tankspot, and the only thread I could fine on EJ wasn't current.

The threads I found on Tankspot are:

http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f14/42342-level-80-boss-ap.html
http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f14/49629-improved-demoralizing-shout.html

Tthe Maexxna tests are inconclusive as they provide no Baseline prior to Demo shout being applied, so your missing the base reduction without talents. the 5 Various levels however seem to add another 4% variance in Maximum hit. with each rank of improved shout lowering the maximum hit by about 0.8% This is fairly consistent with what I figured above, but since we lack a baseline we can't figure out full values.

I didn't use Lurker for two reasons, first, because I have never fought Lurker and didn't know it was a beast. Secondly, because I know the AP values on TBC content are different from WoTLK content and it seemed better to test values against stuff people are currently fighting.

If you could link me to the EJ thread I'd like to read it. So far I've seen am amazing lack of math on this topic and I find it kinda interesting. My girlfriend being a Hunter is the only thing that allowed me to actually begin proving my theories however. Much <3 for her.

-Fenier

in my experience tanking on a warrior i always kinda took demo shout for granted, and didn't really notice much change when i transitioned to a DK, but it's kinda odd having it spelled out so plainly..

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Q u o t e:
in my experience tanking on a warrior i always kinda took demo shout for granted, and didn't really notice much change when i transitioned to a DK, but it's kinda odd having it spelled out so plainly..

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It's likely because you don't really notice 100~ less damage on a trash melee hit by eyeballing it as anything other than standard hit variance. The damage reduction per hit however calculated over a 6 minute fight should equal a fairly large incoming dps drop, subject of course to the Boss's swing timer. Slower hitting bosses won't show as huge of a dps decrease as something which hits often.

-Fenier

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Q u o t e:
You are correct insofar as:

A. Every point of Improved Demoralizing Shout / Roar is never wasted.
B. Maximizing Improved Demoralizing Shout / Roar is a significant reduction in incoming damage

Now, as far as advantage, I believe a Druid has the upper hand here, as they can spec into 5/5 Imp. Demo Roar without any major sacrifice in their talent build, whereas points tend to be tight for a Prot Warrior to do the same.

Depending on how powerful the remade Vindication is, Paladins may be even better off, as their version won't require babysitting every 30 seconds, interruption of a threat rotation or cost any resources to cast.

That being said, the trade-off would be:

A. Only being able to apply it on one mob at a time (unless it is procced by Consecration / HOTR?)
B. Possibly being like Curse of Weakness, which is only as powerful as an untalented Demo Shout.

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Speccing for an improved version from a tank point of view is easiest for a druid because all they give up is rage efficiency for picking up the talents. They can still keep all their primary threat talents and mitigation talents where a warrior would have to drop threat talents to pick up imp demo.

If you take this beyond tanks though a DPS warrior ends up being the best option for running these talents as they don't give up any of their DPS to have them. The downside to this though is that you also want a DPS warrior running Commanding Presence for imp CS which is also 5 points and if he had to run both improved shouts would eat into his DPS talents then.

Hopefully the fully specced Vindication will be as strong as Imp Demo which will be good even if it is only single target because it's not as frequent that you need to have an improved demo on more than one target so that would make life easier for both warriors and druids.

http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t10509-curse_weakness/p2/

Starts off slow, read the whole thread though.

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Q u o t e:
http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t10509-curse_weakness/p2/

Starts off slow, read the whole thread though.

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Many Thanks,

I didn't think to check for Curse of Weakness when searching.

It seems now in Wotlk however, that Curse of Weakness at base is stronger then base Roar/Shout, but after taking the Improved Curse of Weakness Talent in Tier 2, comes out to about the same value give or take 1 AP as fully talented roar / shout.

Hunters have Demoralizing Screech if they are using a level 80 Carrion Bird, which only applied -410 ap which is about equivalent to base shout / roar.

The thread linked however talks a good deal about Curse of Recklessness which to my understanding was previously required in TBC to get full effect from fully talented Shout. This is now a non issue.

This leads the AP debuff to be currently applied via 4 classes Hunters, Druids, Warriors and Warlocks.

While raids are likely to have a Warlock, and it's reasonable that the warlock may even be Affliction, I am still of the mindset the tank debuff may be best provided by the tank itself. I don't see any reason to chance losing a decent amount of mitigation, (or attack speed with Thunderclap, etc) but relying on someone other then you to spend time debuffing a mob which you could weave into your normal cycle.

Obviously if your raid lacks Warriors and Druids (more common in 10 man I would assume) you could press a Warlock or Hunter into service, but the Warlock would be giving up Curse of Agony and the duration on the hunter debuff is only 10 seconds on a 10 second cooldown. The pet could never leave the boss and if it died you'd lose the debuff, which I view as non-optimal.

Of the mobs I have personally tanked I would see the debuff as fairly important on something like Grand Widow when her attack speed and damage increases, the -AP would be saving a sizable chunk of incoming melee damage.

Regardless of who applies it however this is one of the debuffs I seldom see actually used on pickup raids and groups, least on my server. I think this may be likely because of the lack of re-evaluation since wrath was launched in explaining exactly what is going on and what it means to the tank.

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Q u o t e:


Regardless of who applies it however this is one of the debuffs I seldom see actually used on pickup raids and groups, least on my server. I think this may be likely because of the lack of re-evaluation since wrath was launched in explaining exactly what is going on and what it means to the tank.

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Actually I think it has more to do with the fact that nax, OS (w/out drakes up...PuGs afterall), VoA and all the 5 man heroics are so damn easy that it doesn't really matter if Demo roar/etc are up because the bosses don't hit all that hard anyways.

When it comes to doing content where it really matters whether you have it up, you're probably not pugging at that point anymore so it's likely to be up in a guild run.

I put it up as often as I can.

It's a pain in the butt, yet another button I have to remember to hit every 30 seconds or so in a flurry of button mashing. Then you consider that it misses every now and again, so you have to eat another GCD trying to make it stick, etc etc.

All hail the warrior, champion of RSI.

Giving it some thought, I think it's unlikely for the Paladin Vindication chance to equal -575 AP for two talent points.

I think it's much more likely for each point to be somewhere around 205 ap, with a combined total rivaling the base values for Druids and Warriors. The Improved Curse of Weakness talent is only 16.5 AP or so per rank, but it has a higher base.

Given this I consider more then 205 very unlikely.

-Fenier

I've actually been running with imp demo roar for quite some time now. Shortly after 3.0 was released, there was a thread very similar to this and I found my primary spec to be the best option. I think it was Toskk or somebody along those lines that had suggested the spec and it seems to be working for me very well.

I manged to find a 10 man Beast Lore value for Mexxana, but it seems the values in
http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f14/42342-level-80-boss-ap.html are for the 25 man version.

Does anyone happen to have the Base Values for 25 man Mexxana?

I asked my girlfriend to get the stats off of Mexxena 25 prior to pull in order to correctly calculate the data provided in the first post of this thread.

Her Base Values are:

19,547 - 26,828 Damage

With Full Roar I can confirm the values of

16,220 - 23,501 Damage

This shows a minimum hit difference of 17.1%
This also shows a maximum hit difference of 12.5%
This is an averaged decrease in melee damage of 14.8%

An important note here is the Raid Boss follows the same pattern as normal non-raid trash, but you don't see quite the same drop off in terms of Damage Reduced.

Trash showed a 14% variance in maximum hit and a 19.6% difference in minimum compared to the verified values above of 12.5% and 17.1%. Even as this seems to be the case in this test, your looking at a less then 2.5% difference between how -575 AP effects the Raid Boss compared to normal trash.

That said, I doubt any tank here would turn down shaving off an additional nearly 15% incoming damage off a raid boss.

Since the base values are now presented we can also determine the difference in Base Damage compared to non-talented shout.

Base Damage: 19,547-26,828
Base Shout: 17169-24450
Shout 1 / 5: 16978-24259

Simply by applying Shout at base rank you reduce the maximum hit of the Spider by 8.9% and the minimum hit by 12.2% or 10.55% averaged.

By adding a talent point to the Shout this changes the base reduction in maximum hit by a very small percentage, my math gets me .8% and the minimum by 1.2% or roughly 1% averaged. This average reduction continues all the way to 5/5 talented, there is a slight curve to the reduction which makes it just under 1% thus shown above which is why fully talented the reduction is 14.8% instead of 15.55% when speaking in context of this particular NPC.

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Q u o t e:
Giving it some thought, I think it's unlikely for the Paladin Vindication chance to equal -575 AP for two talent points.

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It's currently -574 AP at 2/2 talent points at level 80, in the PTR.