I have an issue with most proposed warrior stat priorities.

This is a hit/expertise theory thread. Now... this thread will have almost no theorycrafting, this is more of a thought experiment. Feel free to discuss and call me wrong but... I have an issue with people saying mastery > hit/expertise. Now while I haven't done any raids so I don't know if damage is just meaningless or something, but if the assumption is you want to keep 100% shield block uptime, then I think the arguments for mastery over hit/expertise have the same flaws in arguments of people who in WotLK said, "go with avoidance because it's better to not get hit than EHP." Those people were wrong because over time, which is what all of the simulations so far are based on, the statistics break down and you eventually have a bad streak where you just flat out get hit. This is where healers get stressed and mana starts to become an issue.

So what happens when your theoretical over time RPS is high enough to average to always having SBlock up, but you aren't going for hit/expertise. You might have enough mastery (and avoidance) to theoretically hit that maximum, but what happens when you just flat out MISS with shield block or revenge? You take a full hit to the face, maybe even two.

Am I just talking out my ass here? But it seems like hit/expertise > mastery > everything else (with stamina still trying to decide if it's before or after mastery). Lots of people are saying go Mastery > Hit/Expertise or even putting Hit/Expertise on the bottom. I just have to strongly disagree with this.

I also disagree because I feel like excess RPS isn't a problem, here's how I see warrior playstyle:
Keep Sblock up, if for some reason you know you don't need rage use HS, otherwise bank want rage you can and use shield barrier as an "Oh Shit" button. As your current health value decreases, blocking becomes of lesser value, and absorbing can be better (obviously depending health amount and how hard you are getting hit), but at low values your healer is going to want you to absorb the damage to give them more time than block part of it because sometimes even if it's blocked it means a death and you'd rather absorb once and let Sblock fall than take even a blocked hit. Secondary OH shit button being Last Stand.

I feel like this is the best of both worlds between what Theckk calls the "bleed" strategy and the "high-TDR" strategy. It's damage smoothing + high TDR to an extent, and I feel like his "taunt switching" calculations aren't really what we care about. Okay, you're a tank, you're going to tank something for 30 seconds, if you can't survive that, especially starting with full rage, just freakin' reroll your character. The more LIKELY scenario to kill a tank is low health, low rage, and you HAVE to instantaneously generate rage, we'll call it "burst rage", and I feel like you don't need to do any math to say "well obviously hit/expertise is the best."

So the way I see stat priority is Hit/Expertise > Mastery (>= Stam??) > Avoidance. I feel like the math and general simulation philosophy in the discussion so far isn't representative of real tanking scenarios.

Anyways, that's my "tanking philosophy" thus far. Maybe I've just had too much caffeine and it's too late, but this seems reasonable to me. Please feel free to prove me wrong, especially if you're someone having great success in raids presently and know better what incoming damage looks like.

I completely agree with you mate, we killed Elegon and I was switching between Hit/Exp (Hard Cap) > Mastery and Mastery > Hit/Exp and you're exactly right. Sure the RPS is OK and works either way but if you got Mas>H/E you're essentially turning your RPS into RNG which I for one am not comfortable with.

Tanking Elegon felt far more safe as H/E>Mas than Mas>H/E and even the healers agree. You're simply taking bad luck out of the equation and like you said I was having a rage bank for breaths and Total Annihilation.

Huzzah! Vindication. Any opinions on stam vs. mastery weight? I feel like at a certain point where SBlock is at 100% uptime, and you have enough mastery for crit block and innate avoidance that you have enough average RPS and hit/exp eliminate those "RNG" situations, mastery looses it's value at some point and you should start gearing for stamina. I have no idea where that inflection point is though and I feel like it's heavily dependent on boss mechanics (both how much bosses are hitting for and how much magic damage there is).

Agreed. Hit/Exp are almost certainly more important as a stat currently. Missing a Shield Slam or Revenge feels so clunky right now and you just immediately feel on the back foot. I've swapped between the two for the last couple of dungeons and raids and I am leaning more too Hit/Exp caps.

Another question I have is Enraged Regen vs Second Wind. Both seem fine but which do you guys value higher?

Well, on Elegon I had close to full up-time 100% or 66% depending on how you view it and the extra rage was going straight into barriers the difference was huge for the healers compared to going Master > All especially when avatar was active. I'm not sure any models properly account for Active Mitigation yet.

In terms of what I'm gearing after that, it was Stamina but it's really not needed at least for warriors at the moment. I have zero stamina gems and only stamina chants where there is no alternative yet nothing in MSV came anywhere near killing me this will probably change in Heroic but I'd have a lot more secondary stats and stamina from gear by then. Instead of Stamina blue sockets are going for hit reds are expertise reforge everything else to near caps and once past that I went for parry to the point where parry is less effective than dodge for RPS and TDR which is around 2.6:1 P : D I think if the macro from EJ is correct, I'm not entirely sure though.

Unfortunately I've had absolutely horrible luck and got no MSV drops so I'm still rocking full 463 with some BoE Epics I'll let you know how I go after tomorrow night with first three bosses of LFR and MSV down just how I reforge and gem my gear then.

Bragoon in terms of ER vs SW I'm not decided yet. SW Might win out as we try harder and harder content but ER is great for when you need to give healers some breathing room to catch up on raid heals.

For me in terms of ER vs. SW, I much prefer ER, the 10% burst health gain + on demand response time of it means it's better in my opinion, at least for PvE raid tanking. I feel like PvP is where SW really shines.

I find this interesting as it's a similar situation to what DK's were faced with up until a little while ago. You simply NEEDED expertise/hit for Deathstrike. Our whole tanking build centered around that. Sure, this is a little different, but there are a fair number of parallels. Having at least SOME runes available is similar to now needing to have SOME rage available.

I think you're on the mark with this........

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I feel like this is the best of both worlds between what Theckk calls the "bleed" strategy and the "high-TDR" strategy. It's damage smoothing + high TDR to an extent, and I feel like his "taunt switching" calculations aren't really what we care about. Okay, you're a tank, you're going to tank something for 30 seconds, if you can't survive that, especially starting with full rage, just freakin' reroll your character. The more LIKELY scenario to kill a tank is low health, low rage, and you HAVE to instantaneously generate rage, we'll call it "burst rage", and I feel like you don't need to do any math to say "well obviously hit/expertise is the best."

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It's been much more about damage smoothing for a while now, but with what you're describing here, it's pushed warriors into a state that sounds about where DK's were in t11/t12.....low health and no/little resources available when you NEED to land a deathstrike NOW was responsible for death 9 times out of 10 (at least for me).

Interesting side thought...... wouldn't this place a higher premium on stam then? If you're more likely TO take a full-on crack to the head at some point, due to finding yourself in the point of "the more LIKELY scenario to kill a tank is low health, low rage, and you HAVE to instantaneously generate rage"..... wouldn't stam be the insurance you're going to really want to back it?

Depends on the value of stam vs. the value of active mitigation. All that really depends on how hard the boss hits and how much item level you have to lend credence to that. Remember, at the point in time where active mitigation is 100% uptime you have a certain amount of "guaranteed" damage reduction (which is Effective Health just like how Armor is Effective Health). Now you can supplement EHP with "burst EHP" in the form of absorbs, like a priest shield, or in this case Shield Barrier. So the question becomes is gearing more towards stamina beneficial in terms of effective health, or is getting more mastery for more crit blocks (more mitigation) and more rage (more shield barriers) more beneficial.

I'm tempted right now to say mastery is more beneficial and will be the better secondary stat, especially based on the encounter mechanics thus far, but I also feel like there will be a saturation point, maybe it's not until you get "mastery soft capped" meaning you have enough mastery that every block is a crit block, but I honestly don't know where the inflection point is in changing from mastery to stamina.

Right now my gut instinct is to say: hit/expertise to cap > mastery to soft cap > stamina > parry/dodge.

I just want to say this thread is like porn to me. /tankgasm

You're aware that it's impossible to have SB up more than 24 Seconds, due to the CD?
The problem with your low health & rage scenario is simply, that even with hit/expt it's not sure if you'll have Rev/SS off CD. Which is basically the point, where your whole hit/expt > all argumentation gets somewhat... 'wrong'.
You'll want some hit/expt, to somewhat minimize RNG, but it's simply not effective in terms of TDR to prioritize it over mastery.

Without going into math (which I think I'm physically incapable of at the moment) I have a feeling that a lot of this is moot...almost certainly for this tier and probably at least through the next one too. There's just so much wiggle room on gear...and it's not enough to really do much with the theories here.

Additionally, if there's one thing I've discovered lately it's that what is intuitive and "feels" right isn't necessarily mathematically sound. Unfortunately I don't have the time or mental bandwidth to really look into the math of the problem before us.

I'd note something that Teng (I think it was Teng...it might have been Airo) mentioned previously: mastery is basically a wasted stat once you stop shield blocking. So if the intent is to drop SB for SBar then mastery is almost completely valueless and stam becomes far-and-obviously the better stat (especially since, if you're doing that, you're presumably taking assloads of magic damage and not physical).

The question of rage income I believe Theck had some theories on...I can't seem to dig them up, but I recall some math on how much potential rage gain you can actually expect from hit/exp and it wasn't impressive.

You should probably read more of theck's blog then. He re did his sims in the name of damage smoothing via keeping block up and filling the CD gaps with sbar. The results favored hit/exp by a large margin. I think I linked the article in the last page of Harsh Words.

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The corrections to the sim have put us above the "rage cap" (at which Shield Block uptime nears its theoretical maximum) even at zero hit and expertise.

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Coupled with:

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Extra rage generation doesn’t have a large effect on Shield Block uptime; in fact, in the short simulations I ran using a "Shield Block only" finisher queue, hit and expertise were nearly worthless. But it does help generate more Shield Barrier uses with rage bleed

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Even on his short, highly-skewed sim expertise and hit fell below mastery on the "bleed" strategy. They DO hold their value up to the hard caps, and there's still the question of what happens at the mastery soft cap (if that's even attainable), but it's clear WHY people are choosing mastery over hit and expertise.

The theory that hit and expertise will smooth your rage gen to smooth your smoothing (yo dawg...) seems intuitively interesting, but I'd suggest that Theck's article DOES fairly definitively show that mastery is still better, even for a smoothing scenario. Certainly on Mastery/Avoidance pieces you'd want to reforge the Avoidance to hit/exp, but I don't see any reason to suggest that you'd ever favor them over mastery in enchants, gemming, or reforging. Especially since his sim WAS skewed to a small window where a miss/dodge/parry would be significant against your rage gen.

Except that with the current fights pure Melee TDR is more or less useless and having maximum RPS through exp/hit outweighs this as you can't block a non-melee attack or DoT.

I'd much rather Hit/Exp cap and spam Barrier, I've tanked all of MSV this way so far after Mastery > All just failed, both my feeling safety and the healers mana.

The models and math and all that jazz is only good for a melee patchwerk style fight, in all honesty read below and if you still think max RPS through hit/exp is useless and you should stack master for blocks/rage on block then power to you.

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- The stone guard : I successively off-tanked the bosses which get -90% damage received. ~70% of the damage income is a physical dot that cannot be parried/dodged/blocked.
-> Shield Block is completely useless, and so mastery too.

- Feng The Accursed : ~25% of the damage taken is melee based (~35% in 25), the other sources being arcane/lightning/fire damage only.
-> same thing, shield block is a waste of 60 rage, ruining the mana of your healers for a little more dps

- Gara'jal the Spiritbinder : a little more than 50% melee damage (60% in 25)
-> shield block is still far from shield barrier

- The Spirit Kings : ~90% of the incoming damage is melee based, and so blockable. This is the first fight where shield block can be usefull.
-> except that popping shield barrier as soon as the previous one has faded will still be less overall damage taken. The only real benefit here is that it will let you do more dps.

- Elegon : less than 50% melee damage (less than 60% in 25), also, there is 2 magic burst damage where you have to pop shield barrier with 60 rage : Celestial Breath and Total Annihilation.
-> again, I do not see any reason to use shield block instead of shield barrier

- Will of the emperor : probably the one and only encounter of this tier where shield block is better than shield barrier. Not because there is nearly 95% melee incoming damage, but because while you avoid their devastating arcs and stomps, you can stack rage and your shield block charges are coming back. So you can achieve a lot more than a 66% uptime with it when the boss starts melee you again.

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As long as barrier remains better which it will on any fights that aren't overwhelmingly melee HIT based encounters there's no reason to max master for crit blocks this tier. Thecks articles like stated above and on that page assume a steady income of hit based Melee damage which simply isn't the case in this current content.

At the end of the day you can theorycraft all you want, but logs and recount don't lie. On all attempts and kills I've taken far less damage as Hit/Exp and spamming 60 Rage barriers than I ever did as Mastery stacked with Shield Block it's just the nature of these fights.

I must have been high when I read it. Oh well. At any rate the post above this one is relevant.

Theck's post was pretty clear on the topic of TDR vs smoothing as well...

This is shaping up almost to be a reverse-avoidance question. Instead of "how often will you get a consecutive hit streak when stacking avoidance" it is "how often will your rage generation get screwed up by a parry/miss streak, resulting in a loss of sblock uptime."

For me personally, the answer is very simple. When actually playing the game, I am pressing buttons. The end result of missing the boss and getting dodged and parried, is that 1: the time I used pressing those buttons is wasted and 2: the rage I would have generated from pressing those buttons is lost.

I've decided that I really hate missing, and would rather eliminate that variable from the rage intake equation entirely, unless some very significant theorycrafting presents itself.

If there are two reasonably equivalent gearing strategies, and one reduces and eventually eliminates the amount of button pressing the boss negates, smooths and increases my rage intake, and reduces the spikyness of my damage intake, guess which one I'm going to go with?

Additionally, considering how close I've been able to come to hitting hit/exp caps with a number of subpar gear slots that the loot system just doesn't seem to want to give to me, and seeing the dramatic increase in available itemization just a few purples provides (thanks to the engineering helm and Sha of Anger for tank pants and boots)- why not do it?

We have 4 sources of rage:
1: normal use of ss, rev, (also Avatar)
2: snb procs and revenge procs
3: critical blocks
4: Passive rage gen, shout, zerker rage

Of those, we can't do anything about 4, and 2 and 3 are subject to various sources of rng. We do have the ability to completely eliminate the sources of rng affecting 1, doing so increases the probability of gaining more uses of 2 and 3.

Incidentally, the maximum single target rage generation you can get from a 2s swing timer boss is 40 rage (4 critical blocks) over the 6 seconds of shield block. This requires perfect timing, and due to server lag I'm not sure is actually possible. Your more reasonable best-case scenario is 30 rage, over the six seconds plus half the cooldown gap of 3 seconds. Your avoidance technically eats into these however.

ss/rev, before procs and avatar, account for 5 rage per second.
3 crit blocks for every shield block + half coverage gap accounts for 4 rage per second.
passive rage works out to 2.16bar rage every 3 seconds.

So personally I'll be maximizing my ability to hit with ss/rev and increase the frequency of snb procs from dev by capping hit/exp. Then I'll be increasing the percent of critical blocks I get from sb with mastery. Then I'll be increasing the likelihood of rev procs by strongly favoring parry over dodge for reforging.

There may be some other optimized distribution strategy you can get from a solver based on your exact itemization budget, but this napkin-math demonstrates that guaranteeing rage from ss/rev gets you more guaranteed rage and more potential rage per second than guaranteeing 3 crit blocks every 7.5s. If you could guarantee 4 crit blocks every 7.5 s, your rage generation from critical blocks would pull ahead of the rage generation from ss and rev on their normal cds. However it's difficult to guarantee crit blocks since your avoidance is always working against you.

Now, if there's a way for a mastery-focused tank to generate extra rage by bringing a couple light, fast-hitting mobs with him to the boss, you might get some ridiculous rage numbers out of that. But once your vengeance stack is built up, revenge will kill them pretty quick. However, there's a theoretical case where if you bring enough light-hitting mobs with you, you could keep up a persistent shield barrier and basically be immune to damage.

Travelsize that was an excellent post especially,

We have 4 sources of rage:

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1: normal use of ss, rev, (also Avatar)
2: snb procs and revenge procs
3: critical blocks
4: Passive rage gen, shout, zerker rage

Of those, we can't do anything about 4, and 2 and 3 are subject to various sources of rng. We do have the ability to completely eliminate the sources of rng affecting 1, doing so increases the probability of gaining more uses of 2 and 3.

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We're more or less coming to the same conclusion in the EJ forums regardless of what excel/simcraft any math says as they don't account for the variables of the fights or as you mentioned avoidance eating into rage gen from blocks with the 2 roll system.

Probably by the end of tier 15 they'll be enoguh hit/exp on gear that these debates won't matter but right now like you and a growing number of other end game tanks out there I'l' be going for Hit/Exp to avoid wasted buttons ;)

The 3 second ICD on enrage is key, thanks for again pointing that out Travelsize.

Where to begin....

Let's start with this

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Incidentally, the maximum single target rage generation you can get from a 2s swing timer boss is 40 rage (4 critical blocks) over the 6 seconds of shield block. This requires perfect timing, and due to server lag I'm not sure is actually possible.

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It isn't. It wouldn't even be possible if you're playing ON the server, as it would require Shield Block to last atleast 6 seconds plus an 1 extra CPU cycle and even then literally requires nano-precision timing.

With 40-55% Mastery you are looking at roughly 10 Rage income per Shield Block at a 2s swing timer, up to 15 Rage at a higher rate. Depending on circumstances you'll be looking at about 0.1 Rage for every % Mastery. These are rough estimates, depending on a LOT of variables, including your own avoidance, but they should be somewhat accurate for a raid-starting Warrior. Note that this means about one in every ~6-7 Shield Block uses are basicly paid for by the rest.

For Rage generation hit/expertise still beats Mastery, but has no inherent damage reduction, so it comes out about equal overall (and it even ends up being equal with dodge/parry on Total Damage Reduction). With sufficient incoming swings, Shield Block uptime should easily meet atleast 65% over time, with the rest bled off into Shield Barrier. The issue is that it is extremely difficult to bleed off just enough Rage into Shield Barrier, without hindering SB uptime, so there is a point in Rage generation where you generate more Rage than you can use on Shield Block, yet you can't bleed off into Shield Barrier without gimping your SB uptime. This becomes even more complicated when you can not rely on Shield Slam and Revenge generating Rage. For this reason alone, hit/expertise are (in a simple model, such as I used in my spreadsheet) undervalued, as guaranteed Rage generation not only provides insurance on better Shield Block uptime, it also increases the amount of Rage "allowed" to be used by Shield Barrier, making it easier to bleed off Rage without overusing it. So in other words, there is a bracket of hit/expertise ratings (dependant on boss swing timer, avoidance and a bunch of other factors, but the average out somwhere around a guaranteed swing every 2s) where there is a 'slump' in gain but after that, it becomes a sort of controlable avoidance, which is pretty powerful in the right hands.


If you don't keep Shield Block up, Mastery is worth far less than Dodge/Parry, even considering the smoothing effect, because the entire MAstery system is based on the assumption that you block enough through Shield Block. At the point you are only blocking 15-20% of the incoming attacks, hit/exp become far more valuable than Mastery for Rage generation and provide more controlable damage reduction than dodge/parry, so it becomes more preferable. Stamina (imho) comes just after those, in the understanding that preventing damage is better than soaking up damage that still needs to be healed later on.

There, 386'd this thread, now I can finally go get my beer!