I appologize if this is in the wrong section.
What place do hit and expertise play in Paladin Tanking stats? Is there an acceptable ratio of TPS and avoidance stats?
Or can someone point me in the direction where this has been discussed previously?
Thanks, and I appreciate the effort you theorycrafters put into the posts. Much appreciated.
◦If your raid-buffed BV is < 2500,
STR > BV > Hit > Expertise > AP
◦If your raid-buffed BV is > 2500 but < 2950,
STR > Hit > Expertise > AP, with BV rapidly declining in value
◦If your raid-buffed BV is > 2950,
Hit > STR > Expertise > AP, and BV is worthless for threat
hit rating helps your spells and attacks land. With a really low hit rating,
sometimes your pulls will aggro, but they wont do any damage [therefor, threat], this is shown my a pop up 'missed' or the like, over your target. It's also pretty important for your taunts, with low hit you won't be able to consistently taunt enemies off people.
For expertise, I really am not sure
Honorshammer - I'm not quite sure where you got that information, and what difference does current BV have on the relative merits of threat stats? Are you thinking of 3.2 with diminishing returns/caps on shield of righteousness damage? Since that's the only move whose damage is affected by BV I assume it must be in relation to this, but you don't say how you've arrived at those numbers. It's also worth noting that 3.2 changes many things, including shield of righteousness damage, so BV will be a worse stat there, not better.
I've always used Theck's work at maintankadin as a point of reference:
Maintankadin • View topic - Theck's MATLAB TPS analysis (A Jonesy derivative work)
which suggests priority on stats for threat purposes is:
Str > Hit (below 8% melee cap) > BV > AP > Expertise (unless you have > 1700str, where it starts to edge ahead of AP until dodge cap)
although it's worth nothing that several of these (str, hit and expertise) have purposes which go beyond threat which are 1) block value 2) more stable threat, especially on the pull, and more reliable taunts 3) less boss parries in that order.
As for a balance of threat and avoidance stats, there are obviously different views about this. The most basic tanky attitude is that you need to do enough threat to stop your mage/lock/whatever getting squished, and thereafter additional threat/damage is just stroking your epeen and you should go for survival. While not necessarily true, and many people would (rightly) disagree with this where you're facing tight enrage timers where all dps (even the tank's) helps, it's a fair starting place until you get a feel for how you like to tank and what your priorities are. It's also worth pointing out, however, that minimum required threat will change fight to fight on the basis of environmental factors, buffs, whether you have to do something else while tanking the boss (run, pick up adds as well, etc).
Ok...I'm a pally tank. Pretty decent gear, gemmed for avoidance. I have pretty much stayed away from expertise, but do not know if that is really the right move. In my understanding, expertise is strictly the boss' chance to parry or dodge your melee attack. Since my white damage is such a small portion of my threat, is this really necessary to even worry about, except for what is already incorporated into gear????
Second question: Since my damage is mostly magic damage, what is my hit cap?
PS...I very rarely if ever have problems keeping and holding threat since 3.1
Last edited by Feldez1902; 07-31-2009 at 08:10 AM. Reason: need some additions
The most important part of expertise cap is to stop the boss parrying your attack as it can result in parry haste meaning he can hit you for two blows closer together than normal which could potentially load too much damage too quick for healers to respondOriginally Posted by Feldez1902
@bashef
The information I quoted comes directly from Theck's thread, page 46 which is the latest simulation of various stats and how they affect your threat generation.
I favor hit > expertise > strength. It's not the best for TPS, but expertise is better than strength for *D*PS, and since I don't have any threat trouble I focus on my DPS and let the threat take care of itself.
You are aware that paladin threat is just paladin DPS plus the righteous fury modifiers right? Strength is our best sustained DPS stat, as has been shown fairly comprehensively by Theck on maintankadin. Hit rating is nice for short fights, but don't post misinformation. Hit might get better around the 2000 unbuffed strength mark, but that's a long way off.
According to Theck's 3.2 calcuations, Hit will pass Strength assuming you aren't hit capped, after you have more than 2950 raid buffed Block Value. At that point Strength no longer gives you BV, but only AP.
RF scales holy threat much more than physical threat, so if you look at TPS scaling instead of DPS scaling, your holy damage abilities (like ShoR and consc) are a much larger portion of your threat than your dps.
White damage is ~30% of my DPS, just about tying with SHoR. It's less than 15% of my threat.
Hit rating is alright, although as stated by HHammer it is still only situationally better than strength until you reach a rather large amount of raid buffed BV. Conversely a large amount of our damage can not be dodged/parried. Admiteddly the holy threat modifer of 271% is a factor compared to the white modifier of 143%, but still the major portion of our damage is expertise-less. On my last WWS for example, over 60% of my damage was unaffected by expertise on boss parses. This is changing a bit in 3.2 though with the new SoV, but I haven't checked the math for that yet.
This isn't quite right - come 3.2 strength continues to give you block value past this point, what it ceases to do is increase the shield of righteousness damage via block value, in the same way as block value obtained from other sources will not have an effect on shield of righteousness damage beyond a certain point. This is a dodgy pvp hack as I read it, meant to stop burst damage potential for prot specs with all the survivability they bring. Time will tell whether it makes it live or not (this is not the first solution that's been proposed).
The threat stat priority Honorshammer posted is perfectly accurate for 3.2 according to Theck's latest work, but currently there's no cap/DR on ShoR damage and so strength is always our best threat stat. Hit is not that far behind actually, and as I said has a tendency to provide more smooth threat since everything connects (a big issue at the start of the fight while you wait for a 10k ShoR crit from all that str you've been stacking
Finally I have to say that I agree that posting personal preferences or gut feelings isn't especially useful - this isn't a matter of opinion, there are clear-cut answers to these questions. I don't even believe the assertion that these priorities change when you're looking at dps instead of tps (the last chart of Theck's I looked at showed the same priority for stats to increase dps, but this was again for live not 3.2). If you have contradictory evidence, I'd be interested to see the link just out of curiosity.
As far as I know, none of thecks "these stats scale this way" charts are done for DPS, they're all done for TPS. His charts showing which *abilities* have a higher DPS priority vs TPS priority match what I said.
My own results (Theorycrafting isn't magic, and it's not just Theck that does it) show expertise and hit to the cap to be comparable with AP as DPS stats.
I have little trouble with quantity of threat so I prefer to pick up hit rating when I can to make it more reliable and smoother.
I'll deal with Theck's work for the moment. All the threat charts contain links to DPS charts underneath in the post I linked above. TPS and DPS charts are almost identical. 10 itempoints of STR will get you almost double the increase in DPS that 10 itempoints of expertise will (precisely how much better depends on what your other stats are - higher strength makes expertise relatively more valuable than at low levels of strength). Hit is somewhere in between the two, but strength is still clearly better than hit.As far as I know, none of thecks "these stats scale this way" charts are done for DPS, they're all done for TPS. His charts showing which *abilities* have a higher DPS priority vs TPS priority match what I said.
My own results (Theorycrafting isn't magic, and it's not just Theck that does it) show expertise and hit to the cap to be comparable with AP as DPS stats.
Nobody said anything about AP - strength is considerably better than AP (as are hit and expertise, by the way, they are not equal) because strength has lovely scaling and affects ShoR damage on top of everything else, AP doesn't.
The reason I, and so many others, quote Theck's work is because it took massive amounts of effort, each and every assumption is made plain in the post, and the code that drives the simulations is available to download. No, he's not alone in theorycrafting, but he does have a unique position in the Paladin tanking community in that nobody else has done such extensive and totally transparent work. This is the essence of good science.
You're quite right, theorycrafting isn't magic - it's science. If you have done work which contradicts this, by all means post your methods and results here, or on maintankadin in his analysis thread. The community would love to hear from you, I'm sure, since he may well have made errors in assumption or execution nobody but you has caught which affect the results. If you're not prepared to do this, please stop posting anecdotal evidence/hunches as though it were hard fact when people ask questions.
I'm a bit late to the party here, but this post is the one that Honorshammer and bashef are referring to, which contains the latest TPS per stat point simulation I've done.
The DPS and TPS plots are shown below, you can see that there isn't a huge difference between them. Expertise is relatively better for DPS than it is for TPS, because our white damage doesn't get the RF modifier. However, in neither case does it ever eclipse STR, even when the contribution from block value diminishes to zero. Thus, the algorithm Honorshammer posted is correct for both DPS and TPS.
By the way, you can always find the latest update to any calculation by checking the Table of Contents. I'm being pretty diligent about updating it when I post revised or new calculations.
"Theck, Bringer of Numbers and Pounding Headaches," courtesy of Grehn|Skipjack.
MATLAB TPS 4.0, Talent Spec & Glyph Guide 4.0
I believe some part of Vengeance can be parried, so that's why expertise helps. The vast majority of tanking weapons are fast (anywhere from 1.50as to 2.60as) and if the boss parries, hits you, parries again, then hits you again, your survivability goes down. Expertise lowers the chance of that happening, thus increasing survivability.
Last edited by Miagorme; 08-10-2009 at 05:58 PM. Reason: clarity
The damage portions of SoV cannot be parried (though the application of the DoT can, I believe). But your melee swings and HotR can be, and if they are you don't get a 5-stack SoV proc from that attack. That's the real reason SoV benefits from expertise - more connected melee attacks that can proc it.
"Theck, Bringer of Numbers and Pounding Headaches," courtesy of Grehn|Skipjack.
MATLAB TPS 4.0, Talent Spec & Glyph Guide 4.0
Theck's work very clearly shows that hit and expertise are not as good for overall threat as BV and strength until BV contribution to ShoR hits diminishing returns.
In my own experience, establishing threat at the beginning of the fight (independent of misdirection and tricks) has always been more challenging than maintaining a threat lead over time. My personal preference is to be close to the hit and expertise soft-caps to minimize the effect of luck in my openers.
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