This math absolutely does not add up as it is in game right now based on in game experience. I take the EXACT example with Bloodlord's Defender and I can tell you that there is no way your Devistate hits that high at all.

You are factoring in WeaponDmg + AttackPower Bonus = DmgNumber and then dividing that by 2, but that is NOT how the power reads at all. It is 50 % of WEAPON DAMAGE plus the static number. Just like MS, just like Slam, it ain't got one damn thing to do with AP.

And unless something in the current game is really broken, Devestate = Fail for holding aggro big time.

The only saving grace for it at all has absolutely nothing to do with "tanking" at all, and that is we Prot warriors get an instant attack now that we can use in a PVP if we happen to have a 2.6/2.9 high damage MH weapon and DW with a fast off hand .. .. which is totally not the point at all.

Devastate Grade: D-

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Q u o t e:
You are factoring in WeaponDmg + AttackPower Bonus = DmgNumber and then dividing that by 2, but that is NOT how the power reads at all. It is 50 % of WEAPON DAMAGE plus the static number. Just like MS, just like Slam, it ain't got one damn thing to do with AP.

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When Blizzard says "Weapon Damage" in these tooltips, they mean "Weapon Damage after Normalized Attack Power has been factored in." This is true for MS, WW, Cleave, Slam, HS, Deep Wounds, and Devastate.

I was out farming a bit earlier today and Devastate with Spineshatter was hitting for 120-ish average, after damage reduction, with no Sunders up*. Spineshatter's weapon damage before AP is 140-sh average, half of that is 70 average.

Devastate does factor in AP.

*The vagaries of solo grinding with Devastate and whether you should spend the rage on a Sunder or two can be debated elsewhere.

You know reading this thread and seeing the ups and downs to the ability, it makes me realize exactly what i hate about devastate. Initially i was annoyed at the ability because as a 41 point talent, you shouldn't need 3 pages of math to figure out that "oh wow, it really is superior to sunder". That in itself is depressing. What you find though in your raid situation as MT (only place i've really tested it), is that you really have a hard time working it into your rotation. The fact that it has no cooldown, is relatively low rage, and adds damage screams that it is meant to be spammed to some extent to empty excess rage. This is where it gets sticky though, and let me briefly show why:

In any fight your initial concern as MT is of course establishing aggro. The ability is obviously worthless for that, so lets move into our threat rotation. My typical rotation pre-2.0 went something like this:
shield slam, revenge, sunder revenge shield slam (with heroics rage permitting).

Now obviously between each ability you have the global of 1.5 seconds. So that essentially turns into one sunder per 6 seconds in the optimal hate generation setup. Its not as if we sat there and ignored revenge/ss when tanking big raid mobs because that was both inferior threat generation and just plain boring.

What you realize when you look at that rotation is ONE SUNDER. Fast forward to this patch: Devastate essentially replaces sunder in that rotation once 5 sunders are up. Thats one devastate for an average of 220 damage or so every 6 seconds. Forgive me if thats not a mind boggling increase to my tanking dps. This is especially frustrating to me when i read about bear tanks having great dps while tanking in the expansion.

I experimented more with the skill last night, and while i could give a more noticeable increase to my dps by eliminating revenges from the rotation after an acceptable amount of time had passed into the fight, i don't WANT to give up ANYTHING in threat in order to make this skill useful. Why should I? I have to stop revenging to notice a difference? Prot warriors needed a buff, not a trade off. You're essentially giving up threat for damage as there's no way devastate keeps up with revenge (less revenges for more devasates). If this is what blizzard wanted, then i guess that's that, it just seems like the whole situation could be improved without overpowering the class and spec. /rant over

PS My idea for improving the skill is to remove it from the GCD completely, and give it its own 2 second cooldown. Still controlled as far as how much you can spam it by both rage and the cooldown, but this way it doesn't interfere with your normal rotation, and instead compliments it.

oh by the way, in comparing my own sad math and personal testing, devastate with widows remorse was doing more damage than it should have...

(don't trust my numbers fully, but..)

calculated average damage from devastate using my gear (widow's remorse), 5 sunders, no shout: 206.75
observed damage in the same situation: 195-240

Calculation, all gear the same, but using EOC: 250.75
observed damage: 230-270

Since WR is higher than the calculation, and EOC is damn close, that implies to me that AP is normalized for Devastate.

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Q u o t e:
oh by the way, in comparing my own sad math and personal testing, devastate with widows remorse was doing more damage than it should have...

(don't trust my numbers fully, but..)

calculated average damage from devastate using my gear (widow's remorse), 5 sunders, no shout: 206.75
observed damage in the same situation: 195-240

Calculation, all gear the same, but using EOC: 250.75
observed damage: 230-270

Since WR is higher than the calculation, and EOC is damn close, that implies to me that AP is normalized for Devastate.

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Post #113 in this thread establishes this. This is a great thing for tanks with faster weapons.

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Q u o t e:


Post #113 in this thread establishes this. This is a great thing for tanks with faster weapons.

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sorry, missed that :P

but yeah, thats really really good news.

I just wanted to mention in here that dps doesnt really come into a protection warriors life, We need stam, defense and armor. Add some aggro hating tools into that mix and thats what were built for.

Giving us a DPS based skill at the top of our tank build is fricking ridiculous if its working as intended.

Perhaps, Denona, but even a tank might want to DPS sometimes, yes? Whether Devastate is good for tanking or not, it is good for soloing or for those times when you really want multiple protection tanks for some fights (Sartura) but only need one or two for other fights (Fankriss). This makes those other warriors valuable when they're not tanking.

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Q u o t e:
Perhaps, Denona, but even a tank might want to DPS sometimes, yes? Whether Devastate is good for tanking or not, it is good for soloing or for those times when you really want multiple protection tanks for some fights (Sartura) but only need one or two for other fights (Fankriss). This makes those other warriors valuable when they're not tanking.

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Devastate sucked at 60
Devastate sucked at 65
Devastate is still sucking at 68, I don't even spec it anymore when I go prot for an instance

The points you waste for a lame-ass sunder refresher are just not worth it. Improving your crit, your crit damage, the cost of your abilities is far more threat efficient than using that retarded ability that every warrior on beta finds completely useless.

It needs a serious buff to be considered a viable tanking tool in a normal tanking rotation. Don't foget that come the xpac, you'll have to time in your spell reflect too, your intervene on agro dropping bosses (yes fear is stil in the game, thank you blizzard), your tab sundering (on trash, granted, devastate is useless on trash while sunder isn't, since it's doesn't even apply the snder (that would go a long way in partially fixing it)).

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Q u o t e:
The points you waste for a lame-ass sunder refresher are just not worth it. Improving your crit, your crit damage, the cost of your abilities is far more threat efficient than using that retarded ability that every warrior on beta finds completely useless.

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Per Devastate, it is a tool for raid tanking, raid DPS, and solo-grinding. I don't touch it in 5-mans unless I'm on a boss, or unless it's a particularly extensive pull like those in Shadow Labyrinths where rage is a non-issue.

What you are saying doesn't make much sense. If you improve your crit, your crit damage, and improve the efficiency of your abilities, these all apply to Devastate as much as any other damage-dealing ability. That's similar to saying "improving your crit is more efficient than speccing Mortal Strike for PVP" when, in fact, the two are not mutually exclusive.

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Q u o t e:

My typical rotation pre-2.0 went something like this: shield slam, revenge, sunder revenge shield slam (with heroics rage permitting).

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Revenge has a 5 second cooldown, so I'm having a hard time seeing how you use it twice in a 6 second cycle.

Cider, in his original post, showed that in a 31.5 second cycle where SS and Revenge take priority over all other skills, there are 15 seconds available to either Sunder or Devastate. If you assume 220 damage per Devastate, that works out to ~70dps provided by Devastate. Considering that at 220 damage, you are dealing slightly more threat than a Sunder, Devastate is a pure buff; you gain DPS and don't lose threat.

Btw... you made my Lionheart Helm back in the day. Thanks! o.o-b

Ok i guess i wasn't clear what i was saying with that rotation, lets look back at it again. Let's assume in a purely lag-free situation.

If you start the rotation with shield slam, that would be your 0s mark. 1.5 seconds later you can revenge. 1.5 seconds after that you can sunder. So we're 3 seconds in and in lag free you can sunder again lets say and bring the total to 4.5 seconds from the time you shield slammed. 1.5 seconds from that you're back at 6 seconds so lets say you can cram one more sunder in there before shield slam is back up as well as revenge. That's definitely not terrible, and if i could actually fit in three devastates in between the revenge/shield slams i'd be a happy camper. The problem comes from our inability to actually pull this off on live servers. The more realistic rotation probably comes out to BARELY squeezing in two sunders into the rotation, sometimes not even that depending on the server (thanks a lot Tich).

I guess maybe what i'm trying to combat is the lag that restrains us from optimizing the ability. In essence i hate the idea of the GCD and think its a stupid way to limit player skill. If anything i'd prefer they give each ability its own cooldown and balance it that way, but i guess thats more complex and time consuming. I'm probably too brain fried tonight to figure out the dps difference between the current version and what i'm proposing, but lets just take a surface look. If you're getting about 2 devastates per rotation, and each rotation is 6 seconds, and the devastates are about 220 damage as you said, thats about 70-73 dps.

Let's assume that with a 2 second cooldown on the ability, but with it OFF the GCD, you can get the max of 3 per 6 second rotation, obviously still at 220 dmg. That bumps the dps increase up to 110. I'm not sure what the numbers are on bear dps while tanking, but i'm willing to bet it still outstrips warriors in tanking gear. I'm not convinced that we're going to see a ton of agility/str/ap on tanking gear at lvl 70, blizzard has shown a reluctance to really buff those numbers (the ap on might/wrath/dread are painfully comparable), but i guess i'll just have to wait and see. I don't think what i'm proposing is really that amazingly overpowered, its just a more accessible way to implement the skill.

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Q u o t e:


Per Devastate, it is a tool for raid tanking, raid DPS, and solo-grinding. I don't touch it in 5-mans unless I'm on a boss, or unless it's a particularly extensive pull like those in Shadow Labyrinths where rage is a non-issue.

What you are saying doesn't make much sense. If you improve your crit, your crit damage, and improve the efficiency of your abilities, these all apply to Devastate as much as any other damage-dealing ability. That's similar to saying "improving your crit is more efficient than speccing Mortal Strike for PVP" when, in fact, the two are not mutually exclusive.

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Dont you think a 41 point talent should have more utility? It needs to be improved some.

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Q u o t e:

Dont you think a 41 point talent should have more utility? It needs to be improved some.

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I think it's good for raiding, but I don't disagree with your assessment at all. In the "Post-Patch Aggro Problems" at the bottom of page 4 I have a semi lengthy response that says just that:

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I want Devastate to build more innate threat per application. My issue with this ability is that it is currently useful only for raiding Warriors (which is fine, as Protection is the tree for this), but also that it is currently only good for certain boss fights where Armor can be reduced substantially.

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bump

Its a worthless skill, only use for it is to refresh sunder while revenge and shield slam are on cooldown.

/bump till sticky'd

I like it. Devastate >1% crit spec whys. Vitality is the gold. Its not some uber I win button but what 41-point is for us?

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Q u o t e:
Its a worthless skill, only use for it is to refresh sunder while revenge and shield slam are on cooldown.

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I guess you don't like bonus damage and bonus threat?


Noted.

If the new KTM is anything to go by, devastate is almost completly useless with 5 sunders on a target as the threat is gives is very minimal compared to heroic strike/recenge/shield slam.

I'll bump this. this is a great thread, and a lot for me to think about.

I take it it has been verified that it's 25 damage per application of sunder and 47 additional threat regardless of the number of sunders?