Can anyone dispute this...

[Bodasafa]

You've described the timing of mob special abilities.

This was my initial thought after reading the OP. Right at the start of most boss fights you will not encounter special abilities which do great deals of damage. A short time in you will, which ramps up the damage intake. Then your damage intake will fall after the special.

[Satrina]

In many cases, we get numbers by collecting a few thousand data points and applying analysis to them. The aforementioned law of large numbers plays a part in it. Sometimes trends emerge easily from the data, sometimes you need to apply a curve fitting algorithm or other analysis technique.

A simple example of this is found in my analysis of warrior threat values (http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f200/...s-warrior.html). In this case, I wrote an addon specifically to help me pull out the numbers. Since I was able to query the game client directly for total accumulated threat values there was no need need to collect thousands of data points, merely dozens.

In some cases you can pick apart the game data files and find numbers that are hardcoded into them (this is an example of data mining.)

The formula for mitigation from armour is taken directly from the game's user interface files. The 75% hard cutoff for mitigation is also explicitly shown in that. (See http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f63/4...itigation.html for specifics.)

And sometimes it's simple observation. In the specific case of defense, for example, you can go buy a crappy grey bracer from an armour vendor and get it enchanted with deflection, +5 defense rating, which should gain you +1 defense skill at level 80 (4.91850 defense rating = 1 defense skill at level 80.) With no gear on, note your miss, dodge, parry, block values. Equip the crappy bracer that increases your defense skill by one point to 401, note that each of miss, dodge, parry, block chances have gone up by 0.04. (This is also one of those very rare cases where Blizzard has confirmed the numbers by the simple expedient of discussing mechanics in terms of them with us)

[Tengaaris]

One thing to consider as well for your light/heavy/light damage pattern (for prot warriors in heroics at least) is the frontloading of Shockwave and then Shield Block on just about every pull. So light damage up front, heavier damage when those wear off and then light damage again as mobs start to die. Paladin Holy Shield may have a similar effect. Can't say much for the other tanknig classes.

[SquishemHard]

Science depends on people who continue to question everything we think we know.

Nothing wrong with questioning what we think we know. But before you do it you should probably know what we think we know THEN go on to question it once you have a firm grasp.

All this post is, is an attempt to explain game mechanics as if none of the info Satrina linked existed. It is a very well disguised example of posting a question without searching the forums to see if it has already been answered.

No harm done as we were all new at one point, just don't spend too much time trying to understand whats being "explained" by the OP.

[Proletaria]

I don't think he was explaining anything, more like feeling out a problem that he didn't fully understand. My point was that, given his knowledge of the situation he probably wouldn't have known what to look for. Perhaps I was wrong.