Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Tarskin's case against improved mangle for a main tanking bear

First of all it’s important to notice that I do not run with the cookie cutter 0/60/11 build but with 0/55/16 because I believe the added dps/tps from master shape shifter is worth more then whatever you can throw at me from within the feral tree.

Pre-3.1 I used to go with 3/5 R&T as I wanted improved mangle which meant higher threat in my rotation but with the changes to the threat and damage done by faerie fire it is damn good, good enough to always use it whenever it pops off cool down.

This is where we run into a problem as faerie fire is on a 6 second cool down and mangle is on a 4.5 second cool down (if talented), for those who do not see this yet here below is a representation of 18 seconds worth of fighting.



As you can see on GCD 10 there’s a problem that both mangle and faerie fire come off the global cool down at the same time which means that you are losing threat as one of the moves will be not used while ready.
Therefore the threat offered by improved mangle talent is not as high as it was or as most people think it is, I therefore make the case to not take imp mangle so that mangle and faerie fire have the same cooldown which makes for a better rotation as follows.



Which is a rotation that makes perfect sense and frees up 3 points which can be put in 5/5 R&T and 1/1 primal gore which makes more threat then a 3/5 R&T build where 1 out of 3 improved mangle cool downs are wasted.

This would mean that the perfect build for 3.1 Main Tanking in my opinion would still be a 0/55/16 build and the defense of this build will be a seperate post as it goes beyond the scope of this post...

HOT OF THE PRESS!!!
Monedula from Omen of Clarity makes a case that improved mangle is worth it IF you have the Idol of the Corruptor and threat is not an issue, read his reasoning here.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your first table is a bit misleading as the feral would obviously use mangle at GCD 10 and FF at GCD 11.

Bas Jansen said...

@ Anonymous
That's besides the point, the point here was that both abilities come off cooldown at the same time and that by having to choose which one you use, you lose threat.

Kalon said...

Really nice point, and one I wish I had made. I did some more analysis of this the other day too, and it looks like in a 1-minute interval (compared to imangle) you lose 4 mangles in exchange for 3 normal attacks (swipe/lacerate) and one FF. That actually means that the overall threat gain from having iMangle is less than expected before (I pegged it at around 3% total), since FF is about 75% of a mangle's threat whereas lacerate/swipe is about half.

This should likely be the subject of a significantly larger post; I think I'll try and figure out the relative value of threat of FF given that it goes off of spell hit/spell crit values instead of hit/crit values. It might end up being about the same as lacerate/swipe due to missing so much more. Doubtful, but worth the math. :)

Anonymous said...

You still end up with more mangles, and don't lose many faerie fires.