Friday, March 27, 2009

In Defense of the Devastate Glyph

I've seen some disparaging remarks made about the devastate glyph, and I'll be the first to admit, if I'm MT on a raid, realistically, the glyph of blocking is a lot better, but if you're OT, or your main focus is clearing trash effortlessly or PvPing, I've decided that the glyph of devastate isn't that bad, really.  

Minuses - it doesn't generate threat on the second sunder armor debuff, so it does as much threat as the first, third and fifth devastate attempts in that order, instead of the first, second, and third, which is still a little more, but not as much more as you'd have from applying a sunder armor on top of the devastate (which might be a little rediculous).  It eats up one of your precious glyph slots.  For long drawn out fights (like those against bosses), after the first 10-20 secs having a glyphed devastate is exactly as good as having a non glyphed devastate, so it doesn't really do you any good in this situation.

Plusses - When you're working with trash or mobs or foes that will typically drop in 30 secs or less (after they're "really" engaged) you need all the time you can get and blowing the 5 gcd's (about 8-10 secs depending on reaction time) to get up a full stack of sunders doesn't leave you much time to build aggro.  So every spare gcd you can free up is one more big aggro move you can throw (Shield Slam, Shockwave, Revenge, whatever).  And there's not much chance your pet mob will live to much beyond the time it takes you to get your 5 sunders up anyway, so by the time you get to the point that it doesn't matter whether you have the glyph or not, your mob is already dead.

Another thing to note about the MT situation, if you're MT for single bosses anyway, glyph of Sunder Armor (usually a staple) isn't any good right from the get go, since there shouldn't be any "nearby" mobs to receive the extra sunder stack.  If you're really in that situation, you may as well consider yourself free to pick two extra glyphs.  At the moment, maybe Blocking, Heroic Strike, and Revenge, although after the patch, HS glyph won't be as useful, so you can maybe pick up the shockwave, shield wall or last stand glyphs.

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