[Prot Warrior] WTF!!?!!

Okay so .. I have read almost every thread from here to the (shudder) Wowforums. and Still I have about 300 unanswered questions..

1.) My "Stat" Priority on gear for tanking used to be...
Armor > Stam > Block > Dodge > Parry > random Avoidance stuff > Defense. Str and Agi are in there somewhere as well...

--1.a) What is my "New" stat priority looking at a piece of gear. (Ignoring Reforge)?

--1.b) What would the stat priority be for DPS'ing as Prot.. (I know lol. But I wanna see some of these insanely huge Shield Slams.

2.) What are my new stat caps.

Hit -
Expertise -
Mastery -
Armor -
Dodge -
Parry -
Block -
Anything else I might be missing -

3.) Reforging.. WTF should I be looking at here. I have hear so many mixed feelings about this.. Most say right now Mastery isn't worth much .. so people are reforging the highest stat into Parry.. Some are reforging Dodge into Hit.. My brain hurts!! .. would like to see a little "reforging" chart made..

like ... Dodge sucks so try to do this!!

Dodge --> Parry
Dodge --> Mastery
Dodge --> Str
Parry --> Stam

**Those are completely contrived and I do NOT take any responsibility for anyone who reforges based on that sorry excuse for a chart.**

4.) Am I still gemming for Stam? .. The old rule of thumb was once you capped all your other Def/Avoidance stats you gemmed Stam regardless of the set bonus. Now what should I be looking at?

5.) Is it just me or are fail hunters that are doing barely 3k DPS pulling threat of a fully Sunder/Thunderclapped/Tripple Shield Slammed mob? .. cause I feel like I suck hardcore..

6.) Is it just me .. or do you feel like Protection Warriors have the survivability of a piece of paper in a hurricane?

7.) I love you guys.

8.) Can someone get someone else to write a kick ass "how to Prot 4.0.1 - Cata" Guide? .. Thacø really like that idea!


***Armory, for those who like to look and make suggestions**
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-s...8&gn=Schematic

we're still trying to figure it out ourselves, but you still want to stack armor where you can get it in efficient amounts, that means some old bis pieces may not be anymore because of how little actual bonus armor they give (trinkets are still awesome).

Armor > stamina > mastery > dodge > parry

hit is still 8%
expertise is still 26 softcap
mastery, get this as high as you can

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kazeyonoma

we're still trying to figure it out ourselves, but you still want to stack armor where you can get it in efficient amounts, that means some old bis pieces may not be anymore because of how little actual bonus armor they give (trinkets are still awesome).

Armor > stamina > mastery > dodge > parry

hit is still 8%
expertise is still 26 softcap
mastery, get this as high as you can

---

What should I be sacking for Mastery? .. Dodge/Parry/Stam ? .. anything thats over cap? .. like say 26 is capped mastery but I have 50 .. kinda thing?

you can't really sack stamina since only things that have "ratings" can be reforged.

i reforged excess hit/expertise if i had any, and then just reforged parry for mastery.

I have read in a bunch of posts that Parry > Dodge at the moment? ..

Nope there the same

parry > dodge if you actually have inflated dodge versus parry..aka if u had 25% dodge and 20% parry...same amount of parry rating will STILL give u more avoidance. You just gotta know when the DR on Parry is getting higher than dodge..since dodge caps at 88% vs parry at 44%.

AND since we have hold the line talent..its nice to have parry to boost crit block.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Tinytankz

Nope there the same

---

Parry and Dodge have the same DRs yes, but Parry is actually more valuable now due to Hold the Line talent.

I've been running dungeons since the patch came online and not much changed stat wise. The only major change was convert my dodge/stamina gem into expertise/stamina since it is now a yellow gem and need it for my meta gem. Expertise/stamina made sense cause after the patch my expertise was pretty low. The only other big change for me was I basically reforged every item, converting mostly dodge into mastery. Now, I am sitting around 40% block and 20% critical block and seem to be doing fine, based on our last night's raid. Even after the reforging, I have 40% total avoidance, not counting block.

Otherwise, I have treated my stats pretty much the same.

I'd say as others have the parry > dodge with hold the line as a talent. The main question is when does DR start to kick in? Most people in ICC 25M HM gear will unbuffed be at ≈20% parry and ≈24% dodge, do we even notice DR here? I guess reforging dodge to mastery still is the way to go.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Roarc

I'd say as others have the parry > dodge with hold the line as a talent. The main question is when does DR start to kick in? Most people in ICC 25M HM gear will unbuffed be at ≈20% parry and ≈24% dodge, do we even notice DR here? I guess reforging dodge to mastery still is the way to go.

---

Not necessarily reforging dodge to mastery, but reforging the highest stat into mastery, so that you get the highest mastery out of the deal. For example, my Helm has 128 dodge and 88 parry, so I reforged the 128 dodge into 51 mastery / 77 dodge. But my chest had 88 parry and 64 dodge, so I changed the 88 parry into 35 mastery /53 parry, rather than going 25 mastery / 39 dodge. I get more mastery out of it, the avoidance is going to be roughly the same, and there shouldn't be an appreciable difference in Hold the Line uptime. Besides, of the 14 pieces I reforged, only 2 of them had more Parry than Dodge, so the majority of the time I was reforging Dodge to Mastery.

That said, I have a little over 11 mastery points from gear (plus 8 from somewhere, so 19 showing on my character sheet). Raid buffed and going in ICC last night I was at around 22 dodge, 21 parry, and 44 block. Assuming that the 5% miss is still in there somewhere, that is around 92% "unhittable". I've actually considered taking my reforged Ony trinket and reforged heroic Gunship Coin and trying to get to 100% unhittable.

Parry and Dodge having matching diminishing returns mean that you will get more % avoidance from whichever you have less rating of.

That doesn't speak to your class mechanics though. Hold the Line is pretty sexy for a proc off of parries.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Porcell

That said, I have a little over 11 mastery points from gear (plus 8 from somewhere, so 19 showing on my character sheet).

---

8 Mastery is the base value. Rating adds Mastery skill on top of that.

I think the reason people are giving for Parry > Dodge is, ATM even though they are even.. you also get the added benefit of parry giving you more rage than dodge, as well as causing more threat than dodge.

Effectively the cap on mastery will be 36, counting the 8 you start with. At that point you have a 90% chance to critical block plus 10% from hold the line. Your actual block chance will be 65%. So you will need in the neighborhood of 1285 mastery rating.

This doesn't become true until they put in the fix to mastery on live that gives up 2.5% crit block per a point though.

I think adding more Parry for increasing Hold the Line procs is being overplayed. It's not going to get you significantly more uptime.

I just pulled a random public WoL log from this week (just happens to be one of Vodka's runs).
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/x...4/?s=398&e=493

Their Warrior tank had a 79.5% uptime on Hold the Line. His character sheet reads 23.24% Parry.

Someone did the math, and I forgot exactly, but with a 20% Parry rate, you have about a ~75% chance to refresh HtL before it fades. I don't think adding another 1-2% of Parry is going to make a noticable difference in uptime.

Although, if in Cataclysm our Avoidance rates are much lower (10-15% range), adding more Parry would make a significant difference in HtL uptime.


--Regarding "caps". First, they haven't really changed the mechanics regarding the combat table, or how it affects us, so any "caps" have not changed with the 4.0 patch.

That being said, you may start to try to move away from having a line of thinking of trying to "cap" stats. There is essentially no Dodge or Parry cap (at least in relation to what we have available in the game) - the only "caps" are theorized with insane amount of stats we could never hope to attain. For all intents and purposes, there is no avoidance "cap".

There is a hard cap on the effectiveness of armor, but we're quite unlikely to ever reach it - thus is moot.

The amount of Hit and expertise we will need to remove Misses (what players refer to as "hit cap") and Dodges (what players refer to as Expertise soft-cap) is likely to change from tier to tier, and possibly boss to boss. I suppose you could say you are "capped" for one boss or tier of content, but it would not necessarily apply to all bosses or tiers.

Players often use the term "block cap" when their combat table is filled with Misses, Dodges, Parries, and Blocked hits - regular hits have been removed. In this scenario adding additional block does nothing for you, as the combat table is all ready filled. This should be evident if to tanks that are familiar with the combat table (all good tanks should be).

One thing to note for Warriors though is that adding additional Mastery (even after block capping) will continue to increase your chance to crittically block an attack. This caps out at 100%.

It essentially comes down to knowing the combat tables (both incoming and outgoing) and adjusting your gear accordingly if needed.

Daddylow has already pointed out this thread in the offical forum. I live in Europe and therefore can't post in the NA forums but I would like to discuss it here:

Basically he found out the ideal balance between Dodge/Parry and Mastery with a sim(http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...sid=1&pageNo=5).

the spreadsheet can be found here:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?...BA&hl=en#gid=0

This is very important for reforging.

At the moment you want to have as much mastery as possible and at the same time you want to have an ideal balance between dodge/parry/mastery so that you lose as less as possible to Diminishing Returns.

However, I'm uncertain how the total rating is calculated and therefore I don't know how to use this information for reforging.

I would like to have an addon that calculates my reforge possibilities and then calculates the best option for this case I described above: "As much mastery as possible while maintaining optimal balance between the stats".

But how can I do this manually?

I would agree after playing around we are very close to pally's numbers that theck has worked dodge 21% dodge 21% parry everything else to mastery till you get 102.4% coverage seems to be the go.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Thacø

I think the reason people are giving for Parry > Dodge is, ATM even though they are even.. you also get the added benefit of parry giving you more rage than dodge, as well as causing more threat than dodge.

---

Maybe I'm missing something, but Parry should not give you more Rage. There is no more Parry haste, and the +Crit%/+CritBlock% proc, while being sufficient reason to make Parry more valuable than Dodge for Warrior threat, is not going to get you more rage either.

i know a lot of people are all about parry since the patch... how much parry are we getting from STR now? if it's decent, i'd rather gem STR over parry for more AP, both for threat and generally making fights go faster. i'm probably not going to actually experiment with doing so, but tell me if that sounds completely insane.
'

i'm not reforging crap, it seems retarded to me. i'm not spending a bunch of gold to switch stats that make a negligible difference, especially when it's still up in the air which stats are better. i reforged some of my dps gear, but that was just to get rid of haste for hit/crit/exp.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Lautoa

i know a lot of people are all about parry since the patch... how much parry are we getting from STR now? if it's decent, i'd rather gem STR over parry for more AP, both for threat and generally making fights go faster. i'm probably not going to actually experiment with doing so, but tell me if that sounds completely insane.

---

From what I saw, 25% of your strength is converted to parry rating. So a 20 strength gem would be 5 parry rating (as opposed to 20 parry rating you could get from a raw gem).
'

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Lautoa

i'm not reforging crap, it seems retarded to me. i'm not spending a bunch of gold to switch stats that make a negligible difference, especially when it's still up in the air which stats are better. i reforged some of my dps gear, but that was just to get rid of haste for hit/crit/exp.

---

So you would rather start changing gems around at 100+g a pop rather than reforging items for 10+g a pop. Sounds smart. Let me know how that goes for you.