Sheild Tanks and Souldrinker: Enchant VS Proc.

The other day i was screwing around with my CTC after getting a new piece of gear and kinda dreading the day when i'd have to adjust for Souldrinker. Then it got me wondering if Windwalk was really the best enchant for it. Now, yes having a proc that boosts avoidance (even with full CTC) is still good, but at current gear levels, 600 dodge rating is greatly depreciated since T11 due to DR. But is it ideal with this weapon? Now unless I'm mistaken, Souldrinker does about 1k HPS overall for a normal mode geared tank. (All depending on the amount of health, chance to miss/parry/dodge and numerous other things.)

My first thought was: what would happen if you put Mending on Souldrinker? The sword is already doing a good chunk of healing, adding to it might make it a viable weapon enchant. But, then, Mending just isn't very good to begin with, so it might just be as useless as ever for tanking a raid boss.

Then i thought I could put Hurricane on it. Haste on proc could mean a good chance to get a healing boost, and increase the overall effectiveness. But then it occurred to me that a tank using haste is about as useful as a furry warrior using haste for rage upkeep. Meaning that reducing the chance of the attack not landing would be a much more efficient means of producing more heals than simply increasing the speed at which you swing.

So i came to increase hit and expertise. Bad. I'd lose avoidance, and maybe gems that could have been stamina, which in turn would decrease the amount of healing done by Souldrinker anyway. Which would be counter productive to what i'm trying to accomplish.

And so this is where I left off and i figured i'd throw it at the bright minds of Tankspot to see if they had any theories as to the best way to use Souldrinker to it's best effectiveness.

How much does mending actually heal for? What about landslide?


My head is about to explode. Leaving computer to go put up my son's shelves.

So you're trying maximise the proc from souldrinker? Follow the same rules as when gearing for maximum threat.

@Dreador: I'm not sure, from my understanding it's fairly minimal though. I'll go hit a dummy with my PVP weapon and see.

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Originally Posted by Tengenstein

So you're trying maximise the proc from souldrinker? Follow the same rules as when gearing for maximum threat.

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Yes and no. I am mostly looking at it from which weapon enchant would be best for it, in theory. As stated above i don't really want to attempt expertise capping. It's more of a: what will give most bang for 1 buck because i'm to cheap to spend 5. Windwalk is currently giving me about 2.3% dodge right now.


Mending is crappy after renewed testing.

Windwalk: I don't see why this weapon should be treated any different except for the proc giving it a bit of extra weighting due to the self heal. mending was pants in comparison back in t11, we're now in t13 where things hit harder and we have more health. Avoiding damage in the first place is always better than healing it back.


Yes Dodge may have deprecated due to DR. But if you're not CTC capped Windwalk can make you CTC capped whie its up Greatly improving its value. And if you're CTC capped as a warrior you will not have huge DR on dodge as you're desperately trying yo get a 1:1.3 Dodge parry rating ratio and realise that you really need alot more parry rating.

From Wowhead comments:

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By Moromillas (698 – 4) on 2010/12/29 (Patch 4.0.3) Report
Just finished running some numbers.

The setup: Paladin tank with 1.49% crit (10 rating from Alchemist stone), 2006 spell power, no haste - 2.8 swing speed.

2783 total hits, and the numbers slowly started to stop fluctuating. 2367 of the hits did not proc it. On 416 of the hits, it did proc, meaning that it proc'ed 17.58% of the time, with a proc rate of 3.77 PPM (procs per minute).

For healing, 401 of the procs were non-criticals that healed for 836 to 961. 15 procs were criticals that healed for 1254 to 1392. The average heal came in at 915.4, and the healing per minute was 3448.92, this is also assuming the tank is not at full hp 100% of the time.

It beats the hell out of nothing and is probably good for enchanting a low quality weapon, a weapon where you don't want to waste lots of gold on only to get an upgrade for it quickly - I got mine for 100g. I suspect that Windwalk might scale better for bosses that hit harder, but on my server no enchanter seems to have that yet, so another reason to have this enchant.

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So it's a 3.7PPM heal for 800, possible crits to 1300. I didn't see any data on scaling.

A crappy enchant isn't made better because I put it on a good weapon. Its like if I put 63 spell power on dragonwrath because dragonwrath gives me passive spell power.

@Tengenstein I was pretty sure mending was a bad option, it was just on the train of thought and I was interested to see if anybody had an opinion on it. The data i just got form my warrior lines up pretty much with what Dreador got off WoWhead for meanding btw. (This means we can leave the Mending bashing, idk how we even managed to focus on that one)
I am CTC capped, with 15.83% dodge with fortune cookie. Windwalk puts me at 18.03. So my question is, can i help healers more by somehow enhancing Souldrinker, or by having and extra 2.3 dodge 40%(?) of the time i'm swinging at things.

the only way to enhance sopuldrinlers damage is either AP so you melee hits harder. Haste so you have more seings, expertise/hit, so it connects more often or by having a buigger healthpool, so the proc's bigger. Expertise is probably you're best bet.

Windwalk is still best :)

Right, so basically the best answer really is: Keep stacking that Stamina!

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I am CTC capped, with 15.83% dodge with fortune cookie. Windwalk puts me at 18.03. So my question is, can i help healers more by somehow enhancing Souldrinker, or by having and extra 2.3 dodge 40%(?) of the time i'm swinging at things.

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Your weapon enchant is then roughly another 1% change to not be hit over all. Haste would be pointless, and if it was worth it you would start reforging your gear to it.

See the point your missing with the weapon enchant is you enchant what is most beneficial to you, if something like haste is better then avoidance then tanks would be gemming and reforging to haste. Mending is just crap, and landslade is meh as you shouldn't have trouble holding aggro.

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Originally Posted by leethaxor

Your weapon enchant is then roughly another 1% change to not be hit over all. Haste would be pointless, and if it was worth it you would start reforging your gear to it.

See the point your missing with the weapon enchant is you enchant what is most beneficial to you, if something like haste is better then avoidance then tanks would be gemming and reforging to haste. Mending is just crap, and landslade is meh as you shouldn't have trouble holding aggro.

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1) 40%(?) = what is the uptime of that enchant anyway?
2) No, i'm not really missing a point, I'm asking if there is a valid counter point.
3) Does AP even effect a proc that is based off your health?

Actually i'd run with mending on my paladin for 3 ids to get some results because i had a similar idea, but i can only use one of the logs (other are from the time with SoT double dip-proccs):
Mending only healed for ~10% of life drain procc and had comparable proccrate (80-100% of the proccs) to drain life.

But after changing it to windwalk the drain life ppm remained basically the same (couldn't see any benefit*) so i don't see a problem with sticking to it or justiying using a weak procc like mending. Windwalk's 600 dodge rating isn't gamebreak but after DR and only account on third of it's (due to uptime) it's still ~ 0.70% dodge even combined with a trinket such as resolve of undying (770-990 permanent dodge rating, spine drop).

Mending is about 150 hps maximum, scales with attackpower and is affected from those talents/abilities increasing your healing taken.

* ran some tests on dummies for you with ilvl 403 with windwalk versus ilvl 390 with mending, both samples 25 minutes long. No specc (thus neither arms mastery, deep wounds nor other proccs from gear interfering), 524 versus 534 attacks conntected:
83 drain soul proccs for windwalk (procced 21 times) versus 75 drain soul proccs for mending (procced 67 times).

The healing done by Mending is extremely low. It is less than the difference of a HoT critting or not. The only reason it was semi-viable in T11 was the price of Maelstrom Crystals for Windwalk.

A healer does not change their spell choice given a 400hp difference. It is hard enough to resolve 4000 hp on a healer interface, let alone a tenth of that. 400 hp is 0.17% of a healthbar (given a 240k hp pool). Not even a fifth of a percent. 4000hp is only 1.7%. As a healer, I judge the tank's health in 10% chunks. If he has 25k life more because a different heal occurred, I might choose to use holy light instead of Divine Light. The best way (and only) way to enhance the healing done by Souldrinker is to increase your maximum life. Or, to take less damage. Windwalk will, in the long run, reduce your damage taken. It also increases your running speed.

Long story short: Use Windwalk. If you are REALLY not concerned about overall damage taken, use Landslide for the attack power procc. A healer isn't going to base his spell choice on whether or not you took a smaller heal than a druid's rejuv tick. If you took a decent self-heal like Death Strike or Word of Glory that can heal for over 80k, then yeah, the healer might rethink. But over a 1% difference? Never.

As for threat stats: Expertise to 26, hit to 8%, then strength (and attack power). Haste and crit are extremely low in comparison.

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Expertise to 26, hit to 8%, then stam

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I wouldn't be surprised if it was expertise to 56 rather than strength or stam.

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Originally Posted by kopcap

Expertise to 26, hit to 8%, then stam

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Not quite. At least not for paladins. These graphs were compiled by Theck over at maintankadin as part of his matlab protection paladin analysis. You can find the source here:

http://maintankadin.failsafedesign.c...593315#p593315


When compared to strength, disregarding the presence of any caps, hit and expertise trump strength, which is stronger than anything else. Stamina is the 5th line from the top, just below the pink AP graph.
https://sites.google.com/site/matlab.../43_CS_str.png

Look what happens when we take a hit cap into consideration:
https://sites.google.com/site/matlab.../43_CS_hit.png
Hit rating loses dps when you hit the hard cap (obviously). Stamina is, once again, just below Attack Power.

This is what happens when you hit an expertise soft/hard cap. Note how the threat per point is still slightly above strength until the hard cap at 56, and stamina is still quite low in comparison with strength.
https://sites.google.com/site/matlab.../43_CS_exp.png

Now Ultraxion, arguably the only boss in DS where it could make sense to gear for dps, cannot parry. Therefore, for this fight, expertise above the dodge cap is worth zero, putting strength back in the top spot for dps after obtaining 26 expertise and 8% hit.

But the souldrinker's proc damage is based on HP, not AP so strength is not actually going to contribute to extra proc damage.

Nvm