Wednesday 14 July 2010

Loudmouth vs. 'Ave Another One

I've always been a firm believer in the tactic Loudmouth. It's a nice proc which does decent damage. For those who don't know it's the following at Rank 40.

Loudmouth: War Bellows now also deal 227 damage to your offensive target.

What this means is that there's a 25% chance every thing you hit something (or in the case of Da Greenest when you're hit) to do 227 corporeal damage to your offensive target. Nice little proc which can do a nice chain of damage if you're lucky. Bellows activate (though you dont gain the effect from them) regardless of whether they are on internal cooldown allowing Loudmouth to do damage fairly consistantly. It's actually my choice over Stab You Gooder (crits do 25% extra damage) due to the guaranteed damage rather than assuming you get a crit, plus a decent damage roll which would add over 227 damage to an ability, although SYG has it's place for heavy crit builds for sure.

Now compare Loudmouth with 'Ave Another One (AAO)

'Ave Another One: Follow me Lead will deal an additional 695 damage over 5 seconds

This is basically three Loudmouth procs in one tactic which is spammable every 5 seconds (not that you would since FML is an opening plan). Overall Loudmouth always looked more appealing since it wasn't tied to one ability and you could easily just keep Wot Armour? as your opening plan without jumping between multiple actions.

But the more I've been looking at AAO recently the more I'm starting to get a twitch for it, however to maximise it's efficiency you need to keep it up as often as possible. It's only 5 seconds so it's pretty much impossible to keep at 100% uptime unless you drop plans (although 1.3.6 changes will make this easier). So lets have a look at two abilities side by side. However be warned, there is NO maths, nor any stats since I have no way to really collate and compare reliably.

AAO is obviously linked to FML so you need to keep this in mind. There's a fine line of whether it's better to always use FML if you have AAO slotted, or to use a combo of Wot Armour? and FML since both have 20 second secondary effects. Wot Armour obviously debuffs the targets armour which increases your overall damage from other abilities (though not Loudmouth since it's corporeal damage) as well as increasing melee damage done by allies on the target. FML however does more damage than Wot Armour and gives you or your defensive target a +100(ish) WS buff which in turns increases your own armour penetration and parry rating.

The one test I done against a random rank 40 mob, an auto attack with -1k armour (maxed brawler at rr80) applied to the target was only slightly more damaging than an extra 7.3% armour penetration I received from 102 WS (6 or so points in Boss). I believe it was onlt a difference of around 40-50 damage in favour of using Wot Armour? however keep in mind I have now activated a 695 damage proc.

So lets think about this without any factual based number crunching in the slightest.

A standard rotation I use is the following:
Wot Armour? > Right in Da Jibblies > T'ree Hit Combo

Three Hit is actually 5 hits (not a bug) so in one rotation not including auto attacks you are hitting a target 7 times without blocks or parry, add in a couple of auto attacks and lets round it up to 10 attacks. Now your bellow will go off 25% of the time so that's 2.5 Loudmouth procs, rounded down due to the Black Orc curse to 2 procs. So including the increased damage from the target being armour debuffed and you probably come away with slightly higher numbers than using AAO with FML always used as the first plan.

Ok, so not the most scientific method so if anyone has any better way for me to collate and work it out then please let me know and I'll give it a shot. In the meantime I'm going to hit some scenarios using just FML instead of Wot Armour to see how it 'feels'.

2 comments:

  1. It's funny you mention this, that's the same thing I've been tooling around with. From my limited testing, and not keeping records I feel there's little if any noticeable difference. I'm now trying to use both in my rotation and see what happens

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  2. Ive been starting to think more about this myself but from the reverse side. Ive always used FML + AAO and have recently thought to checkout loudmouth.

    I find that AAO dot is useful for sneaking damage up on people before a burst. Most folks dont seem to notice when they have dots on them but do notice when they get bursted. My usual rotation was Wot armour?-> FML -> Trip em up -> tree hit combo.

    Try to jam as much damage in at once at the end. Im going to give loudmouth a shot though.

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