SBV vs Stamina - Theorycrafting

[Shagh]

I would also suggest that lesser geared tanks like myself would use it as an defensive measure and not on every cool down.

Perhaps two spreadsheets are required?

[Tenraiel]

I disagree, I think it is still very pertinent. Though the best benefit of using it on cd is the threat mechanic imo, you will still see a greater reduction in incoming damage over time with Shield Block on cd. Assuming a "normal" fight that is, not one where the boss doesn't attack you sometimes, ala bloodboil, reliquary and vr.

<edit> but yea, I think I'll incorporate a function into it where sb isn't accounted for. Though, I'm not good enough with spreadsheets to just make it a drop down tab

[Tenraiel]

From the appearance of the way that SBV and Mitigation work togeather it seem that stacking one in the absence of the other is detrimental and there is likely a medium that needs to be met except in extreams. Having extremes in mitigation lowers the effectivness of SBV as does having extreme SBV such as being able to fully mitigate boss attacks(unlikly past kara).

From observations it appears that mitigation is taken into account first when figuring out how much an attack is going to land on you for making this the primary form of damage mitigation increasing the value of shield block value's effectiveness. SO by having 65% mitigation your decreasing the amount the attack would hit for by 65% and then if your also able to block the attack your taking an additional amount away from the unmitigated portion of the attack. Therefore the higher the combined SBV/Mitigation/Block% would be the information from the player that would be needed to figure out how much value SBV and stam are related in terms of effective health. Somewhere there is also a need to know how much the boss maximum hit or combination is for and the attack rate of the boss to determine the balance. In the end the safest way to deal with a boss is stacking mitigation/stam for maximum effective health however as a side effect this will also put the greatest strain on healers ablity to heal you as in the end you will be mitigating less overall damage then you would had you properly balanced mitigation/sbv/block%/stam so to minimize the damage however this comes with an increased risk that you will get that unlucky streak where you are taking higher then normal damage and your healers will be cought off guard as they tend to get lazy when the tank is taking far less damage then you would in a Max Effective health set.

This is actually what I've been thinking and is the reason I went through the trouble to make any kind of sheet in the first place.

[Shadevarr]

The balance I am using for my block set has been to stack enough sbv so that shield block + shield wall can negate melee damage from a normal raid boss or as close as I can while maintaining required EH for the boss. I like to be able to hit 2 buttons and get the same effect as a pally bubble, albeit for 12 seconds. It was quite awesome doing this on najentus last week.

[Galushi]

I'm with Kazey on this one. Using it on CD as a mitigation ability could mean using it entirely when you didnt need it. Also if your doing this, you might as well let your healers know when its up so they can expect to heal a little less.

I like it like an ohcrap button for periods of time i know theres gonna be a lot of incoming damage or when i need to buy my healer sometime. On the opening of a pull to limit burst healing need so the healer can get in position and also have less initial heal agro, or when healers are silenced to limit incoming damage. Anything that will cause predictable burst dmg to you or periods of time your healer is busy/silenced/out of mana, are much uses for the ability imo.