One of the often overlooked raid support curses in a Warlock’s arsenal is Curse of Recklessness

Before we can look at the benefits of this spell, we need to look at how raid boss attack power and armor work, and how they will be effected by this spell.

Obviously the more you can reduce a target’s armor, the more physical DPS you are going to generate. This is most helpful to melee and hunters. The generally accepted armor values for raid level bosses fall into two categories, 6200 or 7700 armor. See http://elitistjerks.com/496799-post8.html for details.

Bosses with 6200 armor
Base Reduction: 37% (6200 armor)
Sundered 5x: 2543% (3600 armor) – increase for Sunder: 18.36%
Faerie Fire: 22.07% (2990 armor) – increase for FF: 4.5%
CoR: 17.11% (2180 armor) – increase for CoR: 6.36%

Bosses with 7700 armor
Base Reduction: 42.17% (7700 armor)
Sundered 5x: 32.57% (5100 armor) – increase for Sunder: 16.61%
Faerie Fire: 29.84% (4490 armor) – increase for FF: 405%
CoR: 25.85% (3680 armor) – increase for CoR: 5.69%

Source

The heavier your raid is on melee and hunters, the more benefit you will receive from Curse of Recklessness. Let’s not forget that this will also increase your tank’s DPS on the bos as well, thus increasing threat also.

Now, we’re also boosting the bosses Attack Power by 135, and that’s bad, right? Well, yes it is, but this boost can be easily offset as long as you have at least 1 warrior who is spec’d into 5/5 Improved Demoralizing Shout.

It is speculated that most raid bosses have approximate 330 base Attack Power. With an added 135 AP from CoR, we expect to have a raid boss to have somewhere in the neighborhood of 475 AP. A 5/5 Improved Demoralizing Shout will reduce the attack power by 420, thus leaving the boss with a modified 55 AP. (Source: http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t18771-protection_warrior/ )

In the end, in many raid encounters, it can be highly beneficial to use Curse of Recklessness on raid bosses, when you have the proper raid setup (5+ physical DPS and a 5/5 Imp Demo Shout Warrior). There are some bosses that it is advised to not use CoR on. Some raid bosses to consider NOT using CoR would be the following: Azgalor, Gurtogg Bloodboil, Essence of Suffering, and Mother Shahraz.  These encounters are some of which the added attack power that the boss receives would potentially outweigh the benefit of increased physical DPS.

Threat rotations and when to change them:

Hey guys,

Had a pretty good reception from my last post, so I thought I’d write up something a little more rich with paladin detail.

Any tank has two basic jobs.

One is to generate enough threat for the damage-dealers to not have to hold back too much. Eventually, its inevitable that they will be holding back, but, especially on fights with sensitive enrages, its important to put out as much threat as possible.

The other is to survive, obviously. A dead tank generates no threat. Most of the work you have to do to keep yourself alive is done way before the raid, when preparing your gear. Once in the raid, your life is in the hands of the healers. Obviously you have a few things you can do to help them but basically you need to trust your healers.

In this little post, I’ll be talking about our first job, and how it relates to paladins.

Most people in here would know a basic threat rotation for paladin tanks.

Seal Righteousness
Avenger’s Shield (if possible)
Judge Righteousness on the primary target while dropping a Consecrate
Seal Righteousness
Holy Shield

if on a boss, you do Holy Shield before the Judgement.

Thats pretty easy, right? Right.

The hard part is that all of these abilities cost mana. You get your mana back from being healed, but what if you’re not taking enough damage? You’re going to get less mana. This is where you have to start looking at doing something. You can basically either, a) get more mana, or b) spend less mana.

Of course, its preferable to get more mana, because then you can continue your threat production. There’s a couple of ways to do this. Mana pots are the easiest and quickest. I always carry a healthy supply with me. Seal and Judgement of Wisdom are good also, although I prefer to use them to prevent mana shortages, and not to fix a current one, as they work slowly. Judging Wisdom on a boss at the start of a fight will give you a lot of mana back over the fight.

There is also three “unorthodox” methods to get mana. One is a Demonic Rune. Little known to many players who did not play before The Burning Crusade, Demonic Runes drop in many of the high-level instances in Azeroth, Dire Maul, and the like. They restore 900-1500 mana at the cost of 900-1500 health. So, you get mana, and you also take some damage, which then translates into more mana from Spiritual Attunement when you get healed.

If you’re REALLY scraping the barrel for mana, you can use Lay on Hands on yourself. It will give you 900 mana.

Finally, you can mash the X key. This will cause you to “sit” (unless you’ve changed your key bindings from the default for this key) and automatically take a critical hit on the next hit. The next heal you get will give you more mana back, as it will be healing actual damage and not overhealing. Obviously this is not a good idea if you’re tanking a hard-hitting boss, but then again if you’re tanking a hard hitting boss you’re probably not having mana problems to begin with.

The second option when faced with mana starvation is to spend less of it. This is what you move onto once you’ve exhausted all avenues of getting more mana.

Personally I don’t change my threat rotation all that much, as by the time I’ve exhausted all avenues for getting mana back, the fight is over and I can drink. However, here’s a few tips I use, during combat, that make a small difference.
-If you’re AOE tanking a few mobs, but they are not being killed by AOE, you can probably drop Consecrate from the rotation after two-three full Consecrates. It will be plenty to keep ahead of healer aggro, and you can focus your Seals/Judgments on the target being killed first.

-Judge and Seal Wisdom. Energy gains such as mana are AOE threat, and in a huge AOE situation (Hyjal), can actually add up to more overall threat than if you went through and hit mobs with Righteousness up.

-Balance your threat cooldowns. If I look at my actionbar and see that I have 30 seconds left before Avenging Wrath and my Icon of the Silver Crescent are both cooled down, and I look at my mana bar and see that I’m spending mana faster than I’m gaining it, I’ll slow down a little. What this achieves is that when its time to blow those cooldowns, you don’t want to be running low on mana, because it will lessen their effect. What you ACTUALLY want to do is to maximize the effect of those, by spending as much mana as possible on threat abilities while they are up.

The other half of managing mana is when you have so much incoming damage, and thus, incoming heals, that you simply cannot spend your mana fast enough. Everyone loves to be in this situation. In this situation, what you want to be doing is hurling Judgments every cooldown without fail, Consecrating constantly, if the enemy boss is Undead, using Exorcism, and even, if your latency allows for it, weaving Avenger’s Shield and Hammer of Wrath in between the boss swing timer. If you want to go REALLY overboard, you can constantly recast Righteous Fury. It will dump a lot of mana and give you more threat from Spiritual Attunement gains.

-Tyaer