Raiding 101: Do Not Fail at Misdirection
Thursday night, I took my Paladin through Gruul’s and Mag’s. The other Paladin had slightly better gear than me (although not by much now, since I got my Justicar Shoulderguards off Maulgar), so I was designated as an off-tank.
We only had one Hunter in the group, so we couldn’t rely on a bunch of misdirects to send the giant Ogres to their designated tanks. When we got to the three pull in Gruul’s Lair, we had the Hunter misdirect to the MT (a druid), while the two Paladins were supposed to pick up their targets.
The Hunter threw up Misdirect. He pulled. The Ogres started running at the Druid. I thought, “Gee, he should had some nice threat, let me use Avenger’s Shield to pull the two priests off for us Paladins.”
All three Ogres promptly turned around, and the raid leader made some comment about using the Avenger’s Shield. To which I replied, “The Hunter should have created plenty of threat with the misdirect.” Should he have?
My Threat - Avenger’s Shield
In this scenario, I pulled the mobs with Avenger’s Shield. A regular hit does approximately 650 Holy Damage. A critical hit would do approximately 1100 Holy Damage.
As a Protection Paladin, I’ve got Improved Righteous Fury. With that, my Holy damage generates an extra 90% threat. Therefore a regular hit would generate about 1250 threat, and a crit would generate just about 2000 threat.
Pretty clear-cut. Now can a Hunter, with three shots, consistently generate more threat than this?
The Hunter’s Threat
I have no idea what the Hunter pulled with. The Raid Leader contended that the Hunter was a Beastmastery Hunter, so he couldn’t generate a lot of threat with a Misdirect. To which I now say, “Bull.”
Granted, if the Hunter is not Marksman specced, he doesn’t have the luxury of Aimed Shot. This leaves him with a likely pulling rotation of Distracting Shot, Auto-Shot, and Arcane Shot.
How much threat is that? I hopped on my own BM Hunter - poorly geared and recently turned 70. He has a few PVP epics and an epic crafted gun. I would estimate that his gear is pretty below what would be expected of a Hunter in a Gruul’s/Mag’s raid, so it’s safe to assume that the Hunter with us could at least do the same amount of threat - and likely more.
Distracting Shot generates 900 threat. That’s simple, and unfortunately it doesn’t scale with AP.
With absolutely no buffs, my Auto-Shot does roughly 5-600 damage. My Arcane Shot also deals roughly 450 damage. Taken together, that’s roughly 2k threat.
The Hunter had Salvation on him, which would reduce his threat by 30%, leaving him with approximately 1400 threat generated with these three shots. That’s well above the average 1250 that I would generate with a hit of the Avenger’s Shield.
This is calculated with my gimp Hunter that has approximately 1100 RAP. Your average Kara-ready BM Hunter should have 1500+ AP, plus about 250 from self buffs (Aspect of the Hawk and Hunter’s Mark), and a decent amount more from raid buffs (Kings, Might, Paws, Flask, Food, etc). I’d estimate that he should have generated 1600 threat (minimum) with those three shots. This also assumes there are no crits.
Should I Have Pulled?
So the question is, should my Avenger’s Shield have pulled the mob off of the tank that it was misdirected to?
There is a possibility, yes. If my shield critted (not an altogether likely event, since my melee crit is fairly low), I’d generate about 2k threat. The Hunter would need to have generated ~1800 threat to prevent me from pulling, which may not be possible if he did not crit on either of his shots.
If I did not crit, though, there is no reason the Hunter should not have maintained aggro on the MT. Nor is there any reason that the Raid Leader should assume that the Hunter can’t generate sufficient threat to keep a target on the MT over my Avenger’s Shield.
My guess is the Hunter hit Misdirect, threw up an auto-shot or two, and called it a day. If you’re going to Misdirect, use it properly. Use a maximum threat shot rotation, and make sure that you give the tank a decent amount of threat to start with.
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