Sweeping strikes guide
Hilbert: Meadows at the wow-europe forums has written a handy guide to the warrior talent Sweeping strikes.
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A guide by Meadows @ Hellscream ——————————————————————- Contents: • Introduction • Basic Facts • General Use • Advanced Applications • Summary • Disclaimer ——————————————————————- -Introduction- I see many warriors complaining about Sweeping Strikes, saying it sucks, costs too much rage and what not. So, I decided to type this guide so that those warriors learn a bit more about the skill and why they should use it as often as possible. This is a fairly comprehensive guide with a few calculations and a lot of text, but I promise you that you will learn something new here. Please note that Sweeping Strikes will be referred to as SS from here on. Yes, I’m lazy. Basic Facts Before going into the advanced stuff it would be best to look into the basics of the skill. So here they are: Sweeping Strikes SS is a 21-point Arms talent. It costs 30 rage, has a 30 sec cooldown, lasts 15 seconds and during its duration your next 5 attacks will hit a second target, if there is one. It does not require a melee weapon to use, although naturally you’ll want to use a weapon when SS is up. The skill works so that it tries to predict how much you would have hit the second target for if you had been hitting it directly. In most cases the formula for this procedure works admirably, but in some cases it does not. More about this later, I assure you. Before going too deep into the subject, you could say that the formula used by SS will consider three things when calculating the damage. • The damage of the original attack (includes stat and % damage buffs) This obviously means that the higher the original attack damage is, the higher the SS damage will be. It is worth noting that SS cannot miss, be dodged, parried nor blocked, but as of patch 1.11 can crit. It cannot proc things like Crusader, Sword Specialization, Hand of Justice and similar effects. It does not generate any rage – only white attacks do. Those are the basics of Sweeping Strikes. Now onto more advanced stuff. A “Brief” History But first a look at how Sweeping Strikes has changed since the release of WoW. Here follows a short change log – if you don’t like these, simply skip to the next chapter. At the dawn of time, Sweeping Strike was a simple but limited skill. It would literally act as a third arm hitting an additional target whenever you wanted to. Its biggest drawback was that it was removed when you changed stance which made it impossible to use together with whirlwind, something that was presumed to counter the possibility of SS + whirlwind being too powerful. This did not change until much later. Up until this point, the biggest use of SS was together with Cleave. This is because Cleave can be used in Battle Stance but also because it only burned one SS charge while generating two extra attacks. Thus, Cleave + SS would generate 20 attacks on two targets with a full rage bar.
I’m not entirely sure what the change was, but I assume they changed its damage and hit formula as well as better range checks.
This change made it more reliable in PvE (when fighting a group of mobs) as well as PvP (when fighting two or more players). What is not mentioned in the patch notes is that patch 1.7 also introduced the greatest change to SS, namely allowed it to remain while changing stances (just like the “big 3” which ironically were mentioned in the same patch notes). Indirectly this was a huge buff to SS because it allowed players to use it together with whirlwind, resulting in 8 hits on 2-4 targets. Overpowered, indeed, but was good fun while it lasted.
Up until this point, certain abilities had their damage literally doubled by SS. Patch 1.9 saw the nerf of two skills commonly used together with SS – whirlwind and retaliation. This obviously reduced their potential greatly. Execute + SS was very popular as well but in some patch this combo was blocked until they fixed it. At this point whirlwind + SS only resulted in one additional attack, which for whatever reason only did a fraction (50% or less) of the total hit damage. Cleave only burning one SS charge was fixed somewhere around this time too.
Some interesting changes. What’s even more interesting is that immediately after the patch was released, SS got bugged again and did full execute damage. This bug lived on till the next patch.
The keen reader might notice that the 1.11 notes are basically the same as the 1.10 ones. Only difference is that they actually worked this time. This patch made SS what it is today, basically. In addition to fixing the “issues” with SS, the developers also blessed it with a 5% crit chance. I assume it’s effected by int and spell crit because it is not effected by +crit gear or buffs like recklessness. More about SS crits later. -General Use- Now that we have basics and history covered, we can go deeper into how this skill can be used and how it interacts with all the other Warrior skills. Basically, SS will copy the instant damage of a skill but not the effect. SS + hamstring will do 50ish damage on both targets but only hamstring the primary target, for instance. Here is a list of what skills to use and not to use, in alphabetical order. Assume that every attack burns one charge. • Cleave – two attacks, good damage. Common sense dictates that skills that do low damage should not be used together with SS. In pretty much all cases, the best time of popping SS is directly after a charge. With the imp. charge talent getting 30 rage right off the bat is very easy and fast, without it it’s slightly slower. This way SS becomes much more flexible because the time spent in battle stance is minimal. Charge & hit, pop SS and then switch to berserker stance (and pop berserker rage). Alternatively, you can pop SS before charging assuming you have some leftover rage from the previous combat. I mentioned that SS will act as if your main attack would have hit your secondary target and thus predict how much damage it would have done. In order to do this in an accurate fashion, SS has to take armor into account. This tells us that main attacks on armored targets will do big SS damage on unarmored secondary targets, and vice versa. This will usually work well. An easy test to verify this is finding two identical mobs (same level, armor and type), sunder one, pop SS and then hit them with your base fists. The sundered target will take the same amount of higher damage regardless of which mob you attack first. Your combat log would look something like this (with A having one sunder): You hit A for 91. You hit B for 86. The total damage is the same. What’s ironic is that armor still plays a big role in making SS so good, but we’ll cover this later. For now we can assume that without any buffs, your total damage will always be the same regardless of which mob you hit. |
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Until 1.11, SS was not able to crit. I say this because several of my mods (CritLine, Damage Meters) had not recorded any SS crits up until that point. Some people will no doubt argue that it could crit but in this case I will simply assume that my mods were not lying and those people are wrong. Now, while SS can crit, it’s more of fun bonus than a serious one. SS crits will never do more damage than the original hit would have done if it had crit. This is a bit confusing but I’ll do my best to illustrate this with an example: Say that you fight two targets with the same armor with SS up. Here are the four possible outcomes (using arbitrary numbers): You hit A for 500. You crit A for 1000. You hit A for 500 You crit A for 1000 If you crit A for 1000, SS cannot crit B for more than 1000. In a sense the two attacks work independently of each other in the sense that SS crits will occur regardless of whather your main attack crits or not, but at the same time the SS damage is directly linked to the main attack damage. So SS crits are mainly a fun thing that doesn’t add too much damage in the long run, nor is it predictable at all. SS crits will ignore Impale and will not effected by +crit from gear, nor Recklessness. http://files.upl.silentwhisper.net/upload5/sscrit.jpg (my highest SS crit so far) So What’s the Secret? It’s quite simple. The formula used by SS allows it to take into account +% dmg increases, just like every other warrior ability that does direct damage. This means that Sweeping Strikes, in addition to copying the main attack damage regardless of how much it’s buffed, will also apply +% dmg bonuses a second time. What does this mean? It means that when you’re enraged, you’ll get the 25% bonus three times. First on your main attack, then on your SS and then a second time on your SS. So because of Enrage the main attack gets a 25% damage bonus while the SS attack gets 56%. We can assume that Enrage is applied to SS a second time. To see whether our assumption is correct or not, we can do a simple test: Find two mobs of the same level and kind. Attack them, pop SS and note whether your SS will do exactly as much damage as your main attack does. If it does then the mobs are identical. Next, you can wait for them to enrage you, then pop SS and observe the damage. Your SS should do more damage than your main attack. If you don’t want to do that, you can simply click the link below and check if the calculation we’ll do next is accurate: http://files.upl.silentwhisper.net/upload1/enragedSS1.jpg The test was done against two elite mobs of the same level and armor class. Enrage was up and the damage done was as follows: You crit A for 997. 997 x 1.25 = 1246.25 ~ 1246 Your Mortal Strike hits A for 623. 623 x 1.25 = 778.75 ~ 779 Thus, the calculations are correct and SS does indeed get a second enrage bonus. Our assumption was correct. What this also means is that defensive stance will incur the 10% penalty twice in SS as well, but luckily that’s not a big deal since you won’t combine those two very often. Warriors have several talents that increase damage by a set % but is not considered a buff in the same sense as Enrage is. 5/5 two-handed weapon specialization will make both your primary and SS attack do 5% more damage, but will not apply to SS twice. So, is this Enrage thing a bug? Doubtful. It has worked this way since pretty much forever and even while the formula itself was revised several times since released, the % damage part of it has never been altered. Should it be? I would say no. It has very little effect in raid PvE and most of the time it won’t do much in PvP either. Sweeping Strikes is a skill that ironically depends on Enrage to do great damage. We can thus assume that the skill is working as intended. I believe the rogue talent Blade Flurry works the exactly same way, but since rogues do not have any innate or talented + dmg % increases that work like Enrage, it’s harder to test. It’s interesting to note that rogues get more out of their Blade Flurry in PvP because they are not limited by rage nor the number of attacks they do. (Please note that the Unknown mobs in the screenshot in this case are two Scarlet Paladins. The game crashed and when I logged back on and that’s how the game displayed them) |
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Remember when I said that armor didn’t have any impact on SS because the total unbuffed damage would still be the same? Well, I lied. The key word here was “unbuffed” – when dealing with percentages, you can use the following rule: The bigger the number, the more you will gain from increasing it by X % In practice, this means that we can attack a high armor target, let the SS hit a low armor target and then let Enrage work its magic. Here’s an example based on our attacks doing 500 damage to A and 1000 damage to B due to armor and before Enrage is considered: You hit A for 625 (500 x 1.25) You hit B for 1250 (1000 x 1.25) Difference in damage: 156, or 7.7% You hit A for 313 (250 x 1.25) You hit B for 625 (500 x 1.25) Difference in damage: 78, or 7.7% As you can see, just by changing target and attacking the one with the highest armor you will do more total damage. Just how much more damage you will do depends on the armor difference, but generally the higher the armor of A and the lower the armor of B, the more damage you will do! A very important thing to note is is that players with low armor almost always have low hp as well. A 7.7% damage difference does not sound like a lot but when making sure that your hardest hitting attacks hit the target with the lowest armor and hp, they will die before they know it. Doing this will make winning 2vs1 battles much easier. Some PvE examples: http://files.upl.silentwhisper.net/upload3/hearthglen.jpg (fighting 3 elites) http://files.upl.silentwhisper.net/upload3/SSpve.jpg (fighting two non-elites) Now, what happens if we add a second % dmg buff, such as the BG +30% dmg buff, and then attack a heavily armored main target (A) so that our SS hits a low armor one (B)? Here’s a few screenshots to illustrate just how high damage you can do with that combo: http://files.upl.silentwhisper.net/upload1/funwithSS.jpg (3vs1, Enrage + Berserker buff, Recklessness) http://files.upl.silentwhisper.net/upload0/SS1-jcn.jpg (2vs1, can’t remember which buffs but probably Enrage + AV 30% buff) http://files.upl.silentwhisper.net/upload3/SS2.jpg (2vs1, Enrage + Berserker buff) I’m not sure if the 20 and 30% bonuses are added or multiplicated (150 or 156% damage, probably the latter) but as you can see, you can get some really insane SS hits by knowing how to use it, or rather, by knowing how to get both Enrage and Berserking and finding two players to attack. A fun thing is that this also works when mind-controlled in PvE and getting that +300% damage buff, be it the Prophet Skeram MCing you or the jinxed Hoodoo piles in Zul’Gurub. This has very little impact on normal gameplay, obviously. Personally I try to get myself MCed in ZG and kill as many of my group members before they kill me. http://files.upl.silentwhisper.net/upload3/SSinZG.jpg Burst Damage While SS is fun and all, in some cases you simply don’t have 15 seconds and you need to do as much damage as fast as possible. This is very familiar to most warriors because it’s the way PvP works for most of us. Here follows a quick summary of how to use SS with the different warrior skills for the biggest damage, in no particular order:
Berserker rage will help your rage issues a bit, but eventually you will have to wait for that auto-attack to generate rage. |
So far I have covered much of how Sweeping Strikes works and what skills to use when. Only thing that remains now is explaining how/when to use it against the different player classes in PvP. This is assuming you have Enrage up and happen to be fighting two people at the same time, ie ideal circumstances for SS.
- Druid – low-high armor. Great as main target in bearform, even better as secondary target in cat and caster forms.
- Hunter – medium armor, but usually lower than their pet’s. Hunters who are good at kiting will not give you the opportunity to use SS, but sometimes you catch them off-guard or in a small room where they are forced to melee and use their pets. Crits for 1000 on cat pets will usually translate into 1400 SS hits on the hunter.
- Mage – low armor, so a great secondary target for SS. Hard to get them to stick around, however, so SS only works in small spaces here.
- Paladin – high armor and thus a great target for your main attacks. Problem is that they can stun you and heal the secondary target. Heh, good thing I play Alliance.
- Priest – low-medium armor. Similar to the mage but more prone to stick around in melee. When they see that you’re fighting another target, most priests will forget about their own health and heal the other target instead. Not all do this, unfortunately.
- Rogue – low armor. Note that SS cannot be dodged or parried which makes it great to use against rogues who pop Evasion or rogues with Riposte. Their low armor and need to melee makes them a great secondary target for SS and I have taken down many a rogue and warrior at the same time this way.
- Shaman – med-high armor. Elemental shamans with shields are great primary targets due to their high armor but not very good SS targets. Shamans with two-handed weapons work well as either target.
- Warlock – low armor. SS is great to use against them because they are much weaker without a pet. This is especially true for Soul Link warlocks; without a pet, no SL, which makes them quite easy.
- Warrior – Tank warriors are probably the best target main attack target because of their high armor. I believe, but am not sure, that the 10% Defensive Stance reduction is somehow considered an armor reduction by the same percentage, so that SS does more damage when trying to predict the damage on the secondary attack.
The general idea is that each class is a good SS target when there’s another class with higher armor nearby that you can attack. The more prone a class is to stay in melee, the better they are as a secondary target.
-Summary-
Well, time to wrap this up.
Sweeping Strikes is a 21-point talent in the Arms tree. It costs 30 rage to use, has a 15 second duration and a 30 second cooldown. It tries to copy your direct damage attacks to a secondary target, exactly like the rogue Blade Flurry talent, except SS is limited to only 5 attacks.
Sweeping strikes cannot be dodged, parried or blocked. It cannot miss, but it can crit at a very low (5%) rate. Even though it is a yellow attack, which therefore does not generate any rage, it does not benefit from the Impale talent in the Arms tree like all other yellow melee attacks do.
Sweeping Strikes cannot proc on-hit procs such as Crusader, Sword Specialization, Life-stealing, Hand of Justice and so on.
Sweeping Strikes uses a formula to predict the damage on the secondary target so at to mimic the damage you would have done if you attacked the target directly instead of having it being hit by SS. This formula takes into account armor and essentially all damage buffs your main attack benefits from.
Sweeping Strikes is effected twice by +% damage bonuses. This means that Enrage, PvE Mind Control and similar effects increase the damage whereas Defensive Stance will reduce it. This offers some great burst damage potential in PvP when used correctly (read: insanely buffed).
Sweeping Strikes is simply the best skill you spend 30 rage on when fighting two targets at once that you intend to take down.
That’s pretty much it. I hope you learned something from this guide. 
-Disclaimer-
Keep in mind that although SS sounds easy to use, in practice it’s not. The reason I posted screenshots of high SS hits was to point out how much damage you would gain by attacking certain targets over other targets, and how damage bonuses interacted with the skill. Not to give you the image of SS doing that much damage all the time.
In all honesty, the only reason I took those screenshots was because SS did more damage there than it usually does. I’m so used to seeing 300-1000 hits that I stopped taking screenshots of those a long, long time ago. 2k SS hits are rare and 3k SS hits happen very rarely now that Execute + SS was nerfed. Most of the time SS will hit the second target for 300-400 a couple of times and that’s it.
It’s great when it does what you want it to do, but pretty anti-climatic when it does not. Use it for some time and you’ll see that it’s far from overpowered.
SWORDS, NOT WORDS – http:///ctprofiles.net/796786
