Z O M G! I got crit at 5xx defense! They sky is falling! You all suck!
Yep it happens. The great debate between "once in a blue moon" and increased crit chance is covered initially
here. However, the most common causes of this have nothing to do with that little holy war.
You sat down
Probably the leading cause. You miskeyed, sat down, and took a crit. Best part, the exchange happened in under a second, so your computer didn't even have time to render the sit animation, in all likelihood. Oops. Unbind sit from a hotkey, or at the very least, bind it to something inconvenient to hit.
Mind control
Feral Druid. Leader of the Pack. Mind Control. Boom.
Some debuff
Twin Emperors in AQ40 were the first place we saw this. Debuff the tank's defense by 100, and the crits begin. It's happened before, it'll happen again.
But Enrage/Blood Craze triggered!
As the saying goes, what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
We've seen many players report a bug when abilities that activate upon landing a critical strike activate inconsistently when used against a target with resilience. For instance, if a warrior has both Enrage and Blood Craze talents, only one may activate when a critical strike is prevented by resilience. This isn't a bug.
This is due to the underlying implementation for this feature. The game doesn't actually know that hit would have been a critical hit if not for resilience. Instead we've added a small chance to activate off non-crits based on resilience gear. Each ability rolls this chance separately, so they will only occur together if a player is very lucky.
I've asked for clarification to see if this is true for crits prevented by defense as well. Never got an answer.
None of the Above
99% of the time, you can trace the crit back to one of the above. Sometimes, the person who got crit swears up and down that it wasn't any of those. Maybe we're missing something. Or maybe this is the biggest piece of supporting evidence for Once in a Blue Moon. Who knows?
And now back to our regularly scheduled holy war:
Increased crit chance vs. once in a blue moon
Our old friend the Malicious Instructor from Shadow Labyrinth is the keystone for this. We've seen dozens of screenshots of people with 490, 500, 510, 525 defense taking crits from them. That's enough people that you can say
okay, you all can't be retards who miskeyed and sat. I've been crit by them, and I don't even have sit bound to a hotkey. They don't mind control, so that's out, too.
One: they have a higher crit chance than the average mob of their level.
Two: There's always a [0.1%, 0.01%, 0.001%, 0.0000001%] chance.
One: We've got a precedent for this sort of thing - The Hellfire Warders in Magtheridon's Lair are level 72, yet they land crushing blows on raid tanks. If they can up a mob's chance to crush, they can up a mob's chance to crit.
Two: Hard to prove, harder to disprove. We see screenshots, but can't always know if there was a mind control, a debuff, you just sat down, or if there is indeed some tiny little chance anyway.
In any case, none of us have any right to be talking in absolutes. For either argument. At least until someone from Blizzard comes along and tells us one way or the other. I wouldn't hold my breath.
I am definitely biased towards increased crit chance, based on: my knowledge of programming practices; the fact that there are a far more mobs that do not crit 490+ defense tanks than mobs that do; the ones that do seem to always be the same ones; the precedent mentioned above; and the simple fact that in over 40,000 attacks (recorded in CombatMonitor) from Karazhan to Tempest Keep, I have taken zero critical hits from a world boss since I hit level 70 and specced protection for raiding (and a handful of crits from Malicious Instrictors.) Also, look at the chance: It's always small, and rarely do people give the same value. Where did you get it from, and why are you so sure of it? And finally, do you really, honestly think that Blizzard would leave this hardcoded chance in, that basically says "sorry for your luck, but random chance says it's time for a repair bill!"? For me, that's enough to sell. But, I could be wrong.
I took a crush with shield block up!
Yep, this happens, too. You look and see that crush and 1 or 2 charges left on shield the block icon. Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot, over?
Uncrushable doesn't mean "always uncrushable" There are exceptions Fast hitters
Mobs that dual wield (Moroes, Prince Malchezzar, Leotheras the Blind, etc.) will chew your shield block charges fast, and you'll often take crushing blows from them.
What can I do about it?
One thing working in your favour is that since the mob is dual wielding, it is subject to the increased miss chance that all dual wielders get. This helps a lot. There are a few things that you can do to help in this scenario:
- Swap out some stamina for avoidance, so that you increase the chance of avoiding attacks while shield block is up. This makes it more likely that your shield block will last the full duration. Dual wielding bosses tend to not hit as hard as bosses that don't, so a little stamina hit shouldn't make any difference. Since the boss is hitting fast, that helps to offset the rage starvation if it was going to be an issue because of the increased avoidance.
- Put together a gear set that gives you about 80% combined dodge/parry/block. With the dual wield 24% miss chance, you won't need to use shield block at all to drop crushes from the combat table.
- Let a paladin tank. If you have a protection paladin geared to prevent crushing blows, they may be better choice
- Let a druid tank. A feral druid will take the crushes, but their huge armour and high avoidance balance it out, and they may well be easier to heal
Many hitters
Mobs with a special abilities that can be blocked (High King Maulgar, Morogrim Tidewalker, etc.) Sometimes they'll drop their Arcing Smash or whatever right between two autoattacks within the duration of Shield Block. You get
Autoattack - Special Attack - Autoattack. If you block the first two, you can eat a crush on the third.
What can I do about it?
- As with fast hitters, you could swap in a bit more avoidance and hope to extend shield block more often. The drawback here is that these mobs tend to be the heavy hitters. Trading off too much health and/or armour could get you killed pretty fast. It may well be that you (and your healers) have to just suck it up and accept that crushes will sometimes get through. Bring armour potions.
- Let a druid tank. A feral druid will take the crushes, but their huge armour and high avoidance balance it out, and they may well be easier to heal
There's something about parry
Melee DPS types attacking from the front = wrong. When you parry, your swing timer for next attack is reduced by up to 40%, to a minimum of 20% of your normal swing time. We have pretty good parsing indicating that this happens for mobs as well. So, what that means is that retarded rogue standing beside you is causing the boss to eat your Shield Block charges faster and getting you crushed. Note that the parry range is about 180 degrees frontal. People can think they aren't in parry range and still get parried. Yell at your DPS to wake the hell up and pay attention. More than that, your attack followed by Sunder/Devastate/Shield Slam/Revenge can trigger parries as well. In the worst case, you can get yourself killed if the boss gets lucky on your own attacks!
What can I do about it?
- Tell your melee DPS to not be retards and get behind the mob. Even if they don't know that bosses get the attack speed benefit from parry, they should know that they're hurting their own damage output by being in front anyway. If they don't know this, replace them.
- Be ready to reposition to accommodate pets/shadowfiends/etc. Saves you the parry pain while increasing DPS, mana regen, etc, since you kindly put them behind the mob. Everyone wins.
- Expertise. Bosses have about 5.6% dodge and 12-14% parry, so you won't reduce any boss' parry chance to zero unless you stack more expertise than is wise. However, enough expertise to eliminate their dodges will reduce parries by about half, in addition to increasing your threat output. Expertise is an important tank stat.
Daze syndrome
See, the whole premise of WoW is a massive client/server system. Your computer is the client, and the WoW servers are, well, the server. Unless you're playing on the network local to your server, there is some amount of latency inherent in how long data from you gets to the server, and vice-versa. This could be anywhere from 50-300 milliseconds, depending on where you live in the world. More if something is broken between you and the server, or the server is under heavy load (shout out to old school BWL!)
So what does this have to do with daze? Well, we've all been facing a mob, or the mob's been in our frontal arc, and have taken a daze. After yelling at the screen "WTF! It was in front of me!", we get on with our gaming experience. We don't stop to consider why this happened, usually. So, what happened, you ask? Well, two things. The first is that latency. The last time you moved, the update of your position took some small but measurable amount of time to get to the server. The last time the mob moved, the update of its position took some small but measurable amount of time to get to your computer. There is also some interval that passes between position updates. It could be 10 milliseconds, it could be 1 second, it may not happen until one or the other of you actually move. It, too, is some small but measurable amount of time.
The problem now arises that your computer thinks you are here, and it thinks the mob is there. The server thinks that you are actually over here, and that the mob is actually over there. In the ideal case, both ends think that you and the mob are in the same spots, and all goes as you'd expect. Sometimes, you will get out of sync before a position update is generated and matched up at both ends. If the server thinks you're in a different spot than your computer does, and it knows the mob is here but your computer thinks it's in a different spot, then you can have a problem. That problem is, the end that determines if you are susceptible to a daze thinks your back is to the mob. Even though your computer shows you facing it. And so you take a daze, and yell "WTF! It was in front of me!", and then you get on with your gaming experience.
The sinister case of this is when you have shield block up. If, during an out of sync period where the server thinks that the mob is behind you, the combat table is recalculated without shield block and parry. Naturally, this means crushing blows are back on the table. Now we yell "WTF! Shield block was up!", and the continuance of our gaming experience now probably includes a run back from the graveyard. Oops.
What can I do about it?
Not much. Being out of sync is a simple fact of life with a client/server system with any latency. There are methods and tricks to minimise the impact of this, but it is going to bite you occasionally. As mentioned earlier, if you could play on the same local network that the server is on, you'd have something like 1 millisecond latency, and you'd never see the problem. I think Blizzard may have a problem with a LAN party in their data centres, though. Practically, the best you can do is to:
- Make sure you tank with your back to a wall to minimise the amount of forward/backward position changing that goes on while you fight.
- Make small strafing movements from time to time, to force a position sync. Doesn't have to be big, just one step to one side, then one step back to where you started.
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