Warrior tank trouble stat weights

This doesn't invalidate people's requests for citation or supporting arguments. By the current logic we should simply listen to everyone because they could be anyone. This is quite obviously, self defeating.

That being said:
The expertise stacking was by Xav during their Ascendant Council HM progression. Tank damage is largely trivial and the number of sub 1% wipes that under-geared guilds were bouncing through was getting pretty atrocious.

As always: look at your current progression encounter and gem/reforge/flask/spec accordingly. People who are looking for three golden rules to successful tanking need find only one: "Think"

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This doesn't invalidate people's requests for citation or supporting arguments. By the current logic we should simply listen to everyone because they could be anyone. This is quite obviously, self defeating.

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There is a certain amount of truth to this, but at the same time asking someone else to do all the work for you is just not going to happen (especially when they have already done it at least 3 times before).

For most of the theorycrafters or even just regular posters on this site there is a certain amount of assumed knowledge.

Linking a toon in ones profile to "prove" you have done the content doesn't prove anything as you can link any toon you want (as I stated, I could link Xav as my character in my profile and thus I have completed every encounter in the game).

As WarTotem said, the math doesn't lie. If you have a general concensus between users on any topic then it is most likely true. If you are still in doubt, the search function is top right and as I stated, most (if not all) topics have been covered before.

Sure the math doesn't lie. The issue is that there was no math provided in this thread, and no links to relevant topics. People are right to be wary of this kind of discussion.

I think if you want to start any sentence with "Sorry but no serious progression tank..." then you need to have some qualifications. I mean even taking aside the fact that 'serious' and 'progression' are terms open to interpretation, there's huge amounts of history to show that worlds first tanks have often geared and talented in ways quite at odds with each other and with established theorycraft. Theorycrafters in particular get very hung up on minutiae which have a lot less impact that they'd like to portray, and certainly a lot less than things like 'spending an extra night raiding' or 'having a really high level of skill and commitment'.

Only a matter of months ago, this forum was awash with theorycrafters claiming that mastery trumped all. Now there's a growing recognition that you actually need a baseline amount of raw stamina to survive heroic modes and that message is changing. It's not changing because theory got better, it's changing because tanks with first hand experience are discovering that the Blizzard encounter designers planned for tanks to have X hitpoints when they worked out how hard boss Y was going to hit/breathe.

So to the OP: you have to take this kind of stuff with your own pinch of salt. Theory goes so far, and there's no doubting the basics that 'mastery is good', 'parry and dodge are best kept roughly even' and 'if you reach 0 hitpoints you die', but if 3 different tools give you slightly different results, it's because of slightly different base assumptions that the creator has rolled into his maths.

For the sake of argument, I just searched up "parry dodge mastery warrior" in the search function.

http://www.tankspot.com/search.php?searchid=1184783

There are easily 6 applicable threads on the first page of that search. If you want to be wary, be wary, but don't go asking everyone else to redo the math on what has already been done, a lot.

This is basically me saying don't be lazy yourself, and then complain when other people are.

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Originally Posted by MellvarTank

For the sake of argument, I just searched up "parry dodge mastery warrior" in the search function.

http://www.tankspot.com/search.php?searchid=1184783

There are easily 6 applicable threads on the first page of that search. If you want to be wary, be wary, but don't go asking everyone else to redo the math on what has already been done, a lot.

This is basically me saying don't be lazy yourself, and then complain when other people are.

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I guess I should have been more specific, certainly there is enough parry/dodge/mastery discussion to feed the starving tanks of the world. The thread I was following was:

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Originally Posted by Leverage

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Originally Posted by klausi

- reforge for expertise on heroic progression (sacrificing up to 4% avoidance for the important snap aggro, especially on 10m without tricks or md)
- flask (at least after 4.1 with another +150 stamina bump) over two elixir
- saving shieldblock or using it on cooldown (considering the huge 4.1 changes)

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I have not heard of tanks doing any of these things in current raiding. If you have the threads/source for these statements handy please link them. I doubt i could justify saving shield block, or reforging for exp, but i would still like to read about it a bit. The elixir comment really surprised me, i have flasked for stam since cata and would not even think of doing otherwise.

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For which leverage was essentially told that anyone could be any number of great tanks and therefore should be heeded.

Ramble Ramble, and i'm done.

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For which leverage was essentially told that anyone could be any number of great tanks and therefore should be heeded.

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No, this is what he said that got that response:

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Nothing personal, but its hard to trust your views on subjects when you refuse to link a toon in your profile. You could be not even raiding current content for all i know.

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After he had asked for specific citation.

and was fed:

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Then you just didn't follow all the topics on raid progression of those famous tanks like Sco, Xav, Kungen and so on.

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He said that she said that you said that I said that there's not much more to say here.

Then why continue posting? Obvious trolling is obvious. Just saying.

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Originally Posted by Booi

After he had asked for specific citation.

and was fed:


He said that she said that you said that I said that there's not much more to say here.

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If at first you dont succeed... make all attempts possible to confuse the life out of every set of eyes on the thread. most importantly your own, so you can sleep better this evening.

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Originally Posted by klor

Then why continue posting? Obvious trolling is obvious. Just saying.

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Because someone came asking for information and was turned away.

No, the question was answered. The request for linking a toon in a profile to 'prove' something was... met with a certain amount mirth.

Leverage: "Interesting Ideas, can you provide links to supporting threads?"
Tankspot: "Supporting threads contain Kungen. You did not read. Here is my thread"
Leverage: "Oh I see... and who are you?"
Tankspot: "It matters not!" <Insert Mirth>

That's really how you see it?

New poster: I don't believe you, prove it all to me.
Tank Spot Community: Use the search.

It's not that asking for validation is wrong, it's that it's already been validated ad nasuem (I don't think I spelled that correctly). Frankly, if you join a site like Tank Spot, regular posters post information in response, others back it up, there's probably 353 threads with supporting evidence.

This has become very confrontational where it shouldn't have been. And that started with the 'prove yourself to me' post. There is a lot of information on tankspot, but demanding it be validated to your specific liking isn't going to get very far.

I have to say that what I read came across as, "I come for advice. Prove yourself to me or I will not listen."

That tends to remove any motivation I had to help.

P.S. Previous post beat me to it.

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Originally Posted by Loganisis

That's really how you see it?

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Thinking about it more.... you are of, course, correct. We don't need 1000 threads linking to 1000 other threads.

Sorry for the unwarranted adventure.

Regardless i wont be posting anymore on this forum after getting smashed like this for little or no reason. I have been following this forum for years and am content to keep doing so. I agree this is my general mentality "I come for advice. Prove yourself to me or I will not listen.". I would alter it slightly to "I come for advice. Prove yourself to me or I will not take what you are saying as fact, yet i will always listen.". Also for the record...i did search for other threads on the subjects of "reforging expertise" , and "saving shield block" before i responded... said searches gave me nothing. Perhaps i am not all that good with the search function.

I mostly agree with whats been said. Just wanted to expand on klausi's points.

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Originally Posted by klausi

There are several things that aren't set in stone yet for our lovely warriors:
- gem for mastery over stam

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On progression, stamina is a comfort cushion for your healers. It is determined by both fight mechanics and your party's skill. The less your stand in fire, the better you are at using defensive cooldowns, the quicker reaction of your healers, the better the interrupts, etc - the less stamina your tank needs. Mastery is the king.

On a rare fight you gonna notice your tank starts dying in two hits. You gonna have to determine whether this was avoidable or not avoidable. This is where the mastery/stamina debate kicks in. If your tank died cos he stood in fire, or did not get a proper CD in time, etc - its not yet a reason for more stamina, its a reason to prefect your strat. On the other hand, if the tank dies cos the party is severely undergeared or there is some frequent RNG involved - this may be a good time to get more stam.

Bottom line, mastery is the right approach on the majority of fights due to its overall efficiency. Stamina stacking is the last step when you have already done everything you could to eliminate tank death and it is still not enough. And talk to the healers to determine exactly how much more cushion they need, ie a trinket and a flask could solve your problems. And as Booi gave a very good example above, keep thinking and approaching every raid composition and fight individually.

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- trinket choice (avoidance, mastery or stam)

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I think everyone gonna agree on most fights its "what to take with TB", and then imo it comes down to whether the melee burst gonna be predictable (for vial) or not (for the worm).

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- reforge for expertise on heroic progression (sacrificing up to 4% avoidance for the important snap aggro, especially on 10m without tricks or md)

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Really not needed imo for single target. If your really want to go nuts on threat, you can do recklessness + str potion + swap in a threat weapon set, and a good rotation. The only time when it may matter is when your dealing with adds and you don't want to miss your tc/ph. But you can still solve it with elixir of accuracy and hit weapons on swap.

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- flask (at least after 4.1 with another +150 stamina bump) over two elixir

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Again, not really if you remember about the scrolls. 300 stamina is no way better than 220 mastery + 150 stamina.

ps WarTotem, while I greatly respect your work and opinion, it maybe easy for you to say cos you got your "creds" printed in your signature and anyone with half a brain can see them. That said there is a fair bit of inaccurate, outdated and distorted information floating around on the forum and being transmitted from one poster to another. So I can totally understand how someone new can be confused by different things, go "who do I believe here" and ask for evidence that he can touch.

On General Note:
Let us first consider theory crafting as a science. It follows the same methods and has the same goal, namely understand a system better by reverse engineer it.
Therefor, just as in real world sciences, the general assumptions are as followed:
* If you are new to a field, you are the one that has to prove himself/herself first. The other person will have done so in the past, so you need to catch up.
* It is your job to learn about the theories in a field, it is not for the experts to teach you about them.
* Once a theory is generally accepted, any new theory/viewpoint wanting to debunk them needs to either prove the old theory false, or if it is in contradiction with the old theory, prove itself correct (e.g. Earth is round or revolves around the sun)
* While an experts opinion has weight if he/she has contributed to a lot of theories, he/she does not add weight to any of those theories.

To come back to the current topic of the thread:
klausi iterated on Leverage's comment about sta vs mastery being the only choice by giving discussion points and statements that are not clearly defined as the best advice. It was commented on from both sides and he explained the reasons those discussions are worth having. To clarify, he gave an example of a situation where avoidance > expertise was not the correct theory/advice as well as pointing out that there has been plenty of discussion about endgame progress tanks using different tactics (which usually end up being useful in certain situations for all other tanks as well).
Rather then asking for a link/source to those discussions and/or logs kausi was told to be unreliable because he had no character link... which started the whole trolling about the stuff we're talking about right now.

@Leverage:
If you seek advice, why ask if you don't trust the person you're asking?
If you ask a single person, but don't know who he/she is, then asking only results in more questions.
If you ask a community, expect the conclusion of all answers to be either a sound theory you can rely on, or a bunch of different opinions, telling you that there is no clear cut answer to the question you asked.
Also, "prove yourself or I won't listen" is a bit contradictory, as often the answer is the proof! Not to mention that science would be back a 100 years if every great mind had to prove themselves to those questioning them (especially those not willing to listen, as it was in medieval times).
You should rather see life as "I come for advice, I will listen to your opinion, but I will not take it as a fact untill I can find no way to prove you wrong." To use the flask vs elixirs example: I can not force you to take elixirs, therefor, I can not prove to you that elixirs actually offer better stats than a flask (as logs do not show enough data to clearly distinguish the numbers on this, not to mention that I would need to check every log in the world to check for elixirs vs flasks). Rather, I ask of you to prove me wrong by example (a far easier experiment), at which point the burden of proof (or acceptance) is up to me.

@kopcap:
While contradicting evidence is certainly something worth questioning/discussing, the person to believe is the one that can prove his point in all cases, not just the one who has a more progressing guild (as if you are the sole reason your guild progresses). Also, I post my "creds" in my sig, not so people know what I've done, but so that I can always point out towards advice I know is correct, and to offer a thread to new people where they can offer improvements on general ideas without derailing specific threads. That and I can't be bothered to save & paste links every time people ask for my sources :P

The reason you generally gem for Mastery is because Mastery has increasing returns and pushing it over the edge results in large payoffs. Stamina, on the other hand, is primarily a result of item level and has decreasing returns as a percentage of your total health.

The amount on gear is generally considered more than acceptable for all but a few hardmode encounters--and if you are working on those, you can figure out when you need the extra Stamina on your own. If you are not in this position, you likely are not needing to consider situationally gemming Stamina as an important topic. Likewise, you can probably figure out if you need Expertise on your own as well. If you are not in a position where you have a specific understanding of how/why to do this, you most likely do not need it.

If you are interested in easily optimizing the damage reduction of your Mastery/Parry/Dodge balance, I will always recommend Rawr because it is very good at that type of thing. A big reason I maintain it is because it's a great tool for this purpose, in its ability to run through the combinations of gemmings/reforgings and test them to find the best balance.

(As a quick tutorial, load up Rawr, load your character, ensure your character is fully buffed, go to Tools -> Optimize and Optimize for Mitigation Score with a high Thoroughness slider. When it is finished, you should have the best possible damage reduction combination for your character. If you wish to maintain a minimum amount of HP, put it in as a Requirement in the optimizer, e.g. Health > 170000, although this is rarely needed given what was mentioned above.

Due to how this works, however, this is also very handy--as it will attempt to find the best possible way to get you to your HP threshold while still maximizing your Mitigation. As a general rule, this is usually accomplished with Trinkets due to their large Stamina and ease of swapping.)