There's some misinformation about auto-attack threat generation out there. I've spent days parsing and spent untold hours trying to convince my cocky, all-knowing guild-mates that they're wrong. So far I'm 100% on conversion, but they have to see it to believe it.
There are two myths I've encountered. They're kind of related. I'm going to explain my testing process and the outcome. Please keep in mind I play on Aradune and this is geared towards TLPs. I haven't ever played past LDoN so...
Myth 1: Hate is generated from "white damage" DPS
tl;dr fake news, you can hold aggro without doing a single point of damage on seru/emp
Myth 2: Hate is based on max swing damage
tl;dr hate is a tiny fraction of your "max hit" and a not tiny fraction of of dmg+dmgBonus. Weapon procs are a HUGE amount of your hate generation.
Testing:
On Miragul I created a level 85 SK. SKs get hate spells with a flat amount of hate. I then /testcopy that character to the Test server. I also have a lvl 65 warrior from a TLP that I test copied. You could use a lvl 85 war from Miragul for the test too.
Before starting I took all gear off the SK (and Warrior if you make a lvl 85 warrior on Miragul too). Some of the gear had hate modifiers on it. I also picked up a couple healer mercs. If you want to follow along at home you can sell some of your loyalty points for plat to make the merc payments. Then I did a /resetaa because there are threat modifier AAs that needed to go.
Then I went to PoFire and got up onto the castle wall with both characters. The mobs there are all the same level and mostly unremarkable trash so it was a good baseline.
My parsing went like this: Pull mob into camp. Cast Terror of Vergalid with SK. Taunt with warrior. Taunt with SK and then cast Terror of Vergalid again. Then I'd select a 1hander weapon and put on my shield (no /autoskill) and beat away until I got 100% aggro. Then I'd kill the mob with my SK and log the data.
According to EQ Resource, Terror of Vergalid is a flat 3360 hate spell. I had to do some testing to verify that number. It takes 4 full-duration incites and one incite more and I get immediate aggro (no dot ticks). It's hard to find exact numbers on Incite. I believe it's close to 375 initially and 38 per tick for 1 minute (10 ticks). So the warriors 4 full duration incites plus 5th instant hate is around 3395 hate which makes sense and somewhat verifies the set 3360 hate. This 4 + 1 incites is consistent. It doesn't need to be "parsed". It's all just set hate numbers.
Results:
I parsed results for 10 different weapons. Grouping by the weapon, the amount of damage it took to get aggro each time was all over the place. The time it took to get aggro each time was all over the place. However, the number of swing attempts it took to get aggro was always almost exactly the same. Regardless of whether I hit or missed or landed a crit the number of swings didn't change. For example, using the Braided Strands the damage it took to pull aggro was between 6420 and 7364. However, the number of swing attempts it took each time was between 179 and 181.
Using a Fine Steel Warhammer I was able to pull aggro with 145 attempts. The reason this is remarkable is because I was able to do it by doing zero damage. Fine steel is not magical and therefore cannot damage the mobs I was testing on.
So realizing that threat generation was based on a Threat Per Swing model I was able to generate the following table by averaging the number of swing attempts and dividing 3360 by that number.
Threat per minute
Findings:
So, busting myth 1 we can see that it's fairly obvious that the amount of white damage you do has nothing to do with your weapon's hate generation. Even on weapons without a magic modifier (doing zero damage per swing) they still produce hate. This will be apparent to anyone that's tanked Seru/Emp without a bane weapon.
Furthermore, we can see that the hate generated per swing is nowhere close to max hit. My max hits with the plankton 2hs are around 600. It took around 33 swings to chew through 3360 hate. Using the "max hit" theory it should have only taken 6 swings to get aggro. Even if you interpret max hit to mean dmg + bonus damage, the calculation doesn't work out. The plankton's damage is 142 which is 42% higher than the actual parsed threat.
I had a guildy that swore that items like Orb of the Sky were basically worthless because hate from swings was so high. That's what got me going on this whole thing and that's what myth 2 is about. It's well known (and I've personally parsed it, but that's for a different post) that you'll get around 2 procs per minute on most procs. One proc of Orb of the Sky is around 437 (400 from stun and 37 from proc). So if you're getting 2 per minute then that's 874 hate per minute. As you can see, that's a VERY significant amount of hate. Luckily, we can significantly increase the amount of swings we generate per minute with haste. Fully raid buffed (in PoP) you'll be at 225% haste so the calculations will look more like this:
https://preview.redd.it/hxy35qu05f771.png?width=467&format=png&auto=webp&s=debfe2c444012f9ae87305b4f8a72ad608394fe8
Using Bloodfrenzy with the Orb of Sky proc you're generating something like 60% of your hate purely from weapon procs.
Future Research / HELP!
For the life of me I can't figure out the universal equation for weapon threat. No matter how I spin the numbers I can't figure out how dmg/delay is translating to threat per swing. Without parsing every single weapon out there how can I come up with the threat per swing or threat per minute number?
Any notes would be appreciated.
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