Stats, reforging and caps

[Scarro]

Hi everybody,

I've run into a problem that's gonna spell doom for my teammates and myself if I dont find out. Like I've mentioned before I am worse then Goofy when it comes to googling stuff and although I feel I've given it a fair try so far I've come up empty handed :(

I'm looking for small bits of information to complete the Cataclysm puzzle, and going over a 5000 word guide to find a specific statcap seems very daunting...
So I thought that maybe the members here on Tankspot could enlighten me :confused:

The Cataclysm version of paladins brought about a rather big change in playstyle aswell as spells and skills. Most important though is the stat changes, reforging etc. which also means new caps... There are a few things I would love for someone to explain to me so that I may complete the puzzle.

1) What/where is the Mastery cap (numbers and %)?
2) 102.4% avoidance - does that include any active spells?
3) 102.4% avoidance means bosses can't critical hit you?
4) What's the softcap/hardcap on Expertise?

For anyone interested I'd love for them to give my armory a look and tell me what needs to be changed if any: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/nagrand/rhemedy/simple

Thanks for your time :)

Regards
Scarro / Rhemedy

[klausi]

1. The "cap" is reached when you're unhitable. Everything after that is worthless.
2. It's an goal and only theoretically possible to achieve passivly in the current tier, while wearing BiS and gemming and enchanting pure mastery. It's something like ~69% block and ~33% avoidance with dps enchants and whooping 138k hitpoints ;)
3. Critical hit? What? They removed defense and added a talent to every tank tree giving you the needed crit-reduction to become uncrittable. 102.4% avoidance is about being unhitable, thus boss attacks can never miss, only being dodged, parried, missed or blocked.
4. Soft and Hardcap haven't changed since Wrath, 26 to remove dodge and 54 (56? 5-something whatsoever) to remove parry from the attacktable. But in the current raidtier you don't have to worry about neither, having something like 0 expertise and 0 hit in favor of avoidance/migitation is the way to go.

For your char:
50 mastery gloves and boots or armor tinker for gloves
55 stamina chest
50 dodge bracer
250 armor cloak
boots hit to mastery
waist parry to mastery, exp/stam to parry/stam gem
bracer hit to dodge
helmet parry instead of expertise gem
your 60 stam gems to mastery or mastery/stam to fit socket bonus
buy different legs (http://www.wowhead.com/item=62355)

A proper specc & glyphs for raiding. (http://www.wowhead.com/talent#sZhrhcRdkRRucbG:zVcqbwMzc)

[Katzazi]

102.4% avoidance is about being unhitable, thus boss attacks can never miss, only being dodged, parried, missed or blocked.

I think you wanted to write two sentences at the same time, because I know that you wanted to write it right. The sentence above does not make sence so I try to rewrite it.

102.4% avoidance and block is about getting unhitable, thus boss (and all other) attacks can never hit you fully, but will always been dodged, parried, missed or at least blocked. So every the dmg done to you from every hit is reduced by at least 60% through your block.


@OP: You will find so few cap values, because there are less actual caps for paladin tanks at the moment. The only theoretical cap (102.4%) has to be approached with a balanced combination of 3 values. (Well actually 4 if you count miss, but since we cannot change it with the defense stat anymore it's a fixed 5%.)

What you want to do is to get as much mastery as you can get. When you cannot convert anything to mastery, try to get your dodge and parry as close together as possible. Do this while having kings up, since parry scales a little bit with strength while dodge scales a little bit with agility.

Try to get items with strength on them in the following order:
- items with mastery + dodge/parry
- items with mastery + hit/expertise or dodge + parry
- items with dodge/parry + hit/expertise
- items with mastery + something else
- all other items

Reforge:
- reforge all items with no mastery to mastery. If it has hit/expertise (or crit/haste) reforge that to mastery. If it has dodge and parry select the value that is bigger.
- after that reforge the items with mastery and hit/expertise/crit/haste to either dodge or parry. Reforge to the value that is smaller on your character sheet.
- if you have items left with mastery + dodge/parry look if you can balance dodge and parry a little bit better by reforging them.

Gem:
As klausi said:
blue: stam+mastery, yellow: mastery, red: parry+mastery

If you don't trust to have enough HP you can focus more on stamina with your gems, some people are doing this, but in most cases focussing on mastery should be better.