[Warrior] Critical Block Mechanics

[Eetabeetay]

You can sac your hit/exp for avoidance via reforging but unless you have multiple sets of gears (usually come @farm) you will need to sac "something" for those threat stats.

On live I went from very little in the way of hit and expertise to being capped on both through reforging and I only lost 3% avoidance.

No amount of stam stacking will help if your healer go afk for 6 seconds, 15s if you pop CDs.

Lol will any amount of anything help if your healer goes afk? I really don't see your point here.

The minuscule amounts of avoidance that you're trading out for the stam is not really going to help conserve healer mana. Plus, its never guaranteed to do that. Over the span of a regular fight, 3% avoidance will equate out to about 4 hits IF you're lucky. Most of the time healers will go oom due to people in the raid taking unnecessary damage.


@Katzazi - Go read http://www.tankspot.com/showthread.p...g-mechanics%29 first of all.

True. But EH (or stam alone) is NOT equal to survivability. Avoidance/mitigation can play a big role here, at least if you can reach the unhittable soft cap. (And there are also your CDs and stuff.)

You can't reach unhittable in 359 gear, and probably not in 372 gear, although I haven't done the calculations with 372 yet. Unhittable will definitely provide more survivability than EH, and will actually semi-act like EH itself at that point with the new block mechanics.
And EH is equal to survivability. In the worst case scenario you aren't going to avoid any hits at all, but you will still have your EH.

I'm not even going to respond to the rest of your post katzazi other than GO READ AGGATHON'S POST. I'm getting really tired of having to deal with the same damn arguments for avoidance over and over. Pretty much every one of them is addressed there. Only thing that has changed is healer mana, which is basically out of your control just with trinket and gem choices.

[Bigbad]

You can't reach unhittable in 359 gear, and probably not in 372 gear, although I haven't done the calculations with 372 yet. Unhittable will definitely provide more survivability than EH, and will actually semi-act like EH itself at that point with the new block mechanics.
And EH is equal to survivability. In the worst case scenario you aren't going to avoid any hits at all, but you will still have your EH.

I'm not even going to respond to the rest of your post katzazi other than GO READ AGGATHON'S POST. I'm getting really tired of having to deal with the same damn arguments for avoidance over and over. Pretty much every one of them is addressed there. Only thing that has changed is healer mana, which is basically out of your control just with trinket and gem choices.

Just to point out that its fairly easy to hit the softcap of 77,4% unhittable in 359 gear. Combined with shieldblock on a 30 sec cd, shieldwall that lasts 18 secs with the T11 bonus and trinket that has 9-10% dodge on use for 20 secs its interesting to say at least to reach that.

I don't see why you rage so much against someone arguing for avoidance. With cata the value of EH will definitely change so we'll have to look at those arguments again if you like it or not. Pretty sure it won't be the blindly stacking of EH that wotlk was.

Edit: 77,4% + 25% from shieldblock makes you unhittable, any avoidance/block after that point reduces the value of your shieldblock. It's new but definitely some sort of softcap.

[Eetabeetay]

77.4% is not any sort of cap for a warrior.

Also, I'm not raging at them arguing avoidance so much as the fact that there are people posting who haven't read the theorycrafting from several months ago. I agree that the value of EH will change relative to avoidance and threat, but I really don't see how most of the arguments are going to change.

[Katzazi]

@Eetabeetay

First: I know aggathon's post. I stated multiple times that I dont want to argue against EH. One thing that I remember from there is that it's a post about a situation where mana does not matter. And that he is explicitly speaking about ICC.

Btw: As far as I remember, survivability is also about using CDs - everything that is not connected with the rdm of avoidance.

Anyway: Even if a huge chunk of healer mana is used to heal the raid. Healers know that the mana that goes to tankheal while progression is not neglectable. There are many encounters where you cannot do much about the mana that goes to the raid. But you can try to do something about the mana that goes to the tank. The difference between the most efficient and the most effective heals are huge in Cata. Not healing helps even more.

The biggest problem of avoidance/mitigation is if the tank may die between two casts. That will not be the case in Cata. At least not for the normal dmg pattern - everything else will be anounced. So the discussion should be about the normal patterns. If each tank can survive about 4 hits. The healer can probably switch to reactive healing if the tank is lucky. And the tank WILL be lucky. There may be the worst case, but there will be good cases, too. This was not the case in most of WotLK progression. Becaus dmg was so high, that many tanks could be two-hited. That leads to chain-casting if you have enough mana.

A big part of the EH-AV discussion is about beeing able to survive one more hit. But the relevance of beeing able to survive 3 instead of 2 hits is bigger than if you can survive 4 or 5 hits. The relative time you are garantied to not needing a heal between the 4th and 5th hit is smaler than the one between the 3rd and 2nd hit.

So most of the asumptions of the post do not apply to Cata. It may be that EH stacking (as far as you can do it) wins. There is a post from GC who says that they are not sure if this will be the case but that it is a good probability. But we have to redo some parts of the math to know if we can affort to have more EH or if we have to have more avoidance/mitigation. Btw: if you read Aggathon latest post (#367) he explecitely speaks about the need to redo the math.



And to your latest post:
77.4% IS a very important sort of soft cap for a warrior. 77.4+25=102.4 The point of unhittable. You agreed that unhittable is something like EH (ok, I don't completely agree to your wording, but anyway). You will not be able to be there all the time. 25% is exactly what you add with using Shild Block. It's avaiable often and long enough to be concidered. If one will use it for survivability or for threat I don't know. But we can chose to use it to get unhittable if needed. (It's not about situations where you cannot use anythign, like when you are paralyzed, but you will never avoid or block anything anyway in such a situation.)

What makes me angry is how forcefull you argument against my posts with the only math you show is about wrath and obviously not knowing about the changes for cata.

[Unix]

On live I went from very little in the way of hit and expertise to being capped on both through reforging and I only lost 3% avoidance.

On beta to get full hit+expertise you pretty much need to reforge a lot of tank gears or simply wear dps gears.
3% avoidance is worth ~+4.5% hit/expertise. Assume you are no longer wearing end-content gear where your default gear already provided you with a good sum of hit+exp, you will need to find room for them somewhere.

One of the greatest reason for EH is because EH helps you live. You have the health pool to allow a certain degree of mistakes to happen + having the health pool to survive the burst damage which a lot of raid bosses deal out (sarth3d/gormok/LK, etc).

The minuscule amounts of avoidance that you're trading out for the stam is not really going to help conserve healer mana. Plus, its never guaranteed to do that. Over the span of a regular fight, 3% avoidance will equate out to about 4 hits IF you're lucky. Most of the time healers will go oom due to people in the raid taking unnecessary damage.

Just because something seem miniscule does not imply it does not exist. A 3% avoidance over a 5 minute fight ith 5mil damag taken is 150k.

If having that extra 10% health is of such importance, then tanking with a full set of PvP gear will be very attractive: because they are a few ilvl higher than regular tank gear, you will end up with more armor and a LOT more stamina. On theory you would never die but you will make your healers cry.



My limited (by limited = I use whatever blizzard give us via newest premades, real progression happens at lower gear levels) experiences with "progression" is that we already come with enough of a health buffer that I look back and ask myself: do I really want to just ignore those +mastery/+parry socket bonus? Should I really be using two stam trinkets? My healers were struggling with mana when we learn fights (note that healer balance is still all over the place): I thought to myself... a lot of these fights I am not really dying, maybe I should reevaluate the trinkets I use.

One thing still holds true: Armor is a very attractive stat since its mitigation vs physical always works. Whether or not armor mitigates as much as mastery/avoidance is another problem to solve (because it is "reliable" I suspect it wouldnt be as effective - will do math later).

Not one "theory" will be suiting for all situations. A good tank wears the right set of gear for every fight!

Over time, through word of mouth, misunderstanding of information, a "need of something to show off with" stamina has became more or less the gospel among tanks. You can pug a random ICC geared tank to naxx10 and he will most likely go with his full stam-gemmed set of gear, ignoring factors such as threat generation and avoidance. Thus I believe debates like this one would hopefully promote more tactical gear choices.

[Airowird]

A big part of the EH-AV discussion is about beeing able to survive one more hit. But the relevance of beeing able to survive 3 instead of 2 hits is bigger than if you can survive 4 or 5 hits. The relative time you are garantied to not needing a heal between the 4th and 5th hit is smaler than the one between the 3rd and 2nd hit.

Unless you have a situation where you will be losing 60% of your HP pool due to a special, followed by a hits doing 20% of your HP. Blizz already stated they want giant hits such as dragon breaths to exist and do atleast half your HP, but that normal hits are smaller (closer to 20-25% of your HP). This means that the moment that breath hits, you ARE in danger of dying because of one more melee hit!

So most of the asumptions of the post do not apply to Cata. It may be that EH stacking (as far as you can do it) wins. There is a post from GC who says that they are not sure if this will be the case but that it is a good probability. But we have to redo some parts of the math to know if we can affort to have more EH or if we have to have more avoidance/mitigation. Btw: if you read Aggathon latest post (#367) he explecitely speaks about the need to redo the math.

How do you bring up the need for new math as argument for avoidance? Have you done the math? Is it actually going far more towards Avoidance?

And to your latest post:
77.4% IS a very important sort of soft cap for a warrior. 77.4+25=102.4 The point of unhittable. You agreed that unhittable is something like EH (ok, I don't completely agree to your wording, but anyway). You will not be able to be there all the time. 25% is exactly what you add with using Shild Block. It's avaiable often and long enough to be concidered. If one will use it for survivability or for threat I don't know. But we can chose to use it to get unhittable if needed. (It's not about situations where you cannot use anythign, like when you are paralyzed, but you will never avoid or block anything anyway in such a situation.)

Actually, this is the Mastery softcap (and it's slightly higher, dependin on the amount of Mastery you have), not an avoidance cap. GC stated once that small CDs (such as Shield Block) are meant to be used as overall damage reduction, not to be used on big hits. That means you use them pretty much on their cooldown. (Because that provides the best damage reduction in a fight, thus reduce healer mana, right?) At that point, you can not rely on Shield Block to be there during a worst-case scenario. Either you use SB on the cooldown, which means you can not guarantee unhittability when you need it, or you are saving it for big hits, at which point you are already forsaking healer mana in order to survive large spikes (read: exactly what EH does)

What makes me angry is how forcefull you argument against my posts with the only math you show is about wrath and obviously not knowing about the changes for cata.

What makes me angry is how forcefull you argument for avoidance with only assumptions and non-existant caps and obviously not know about how those changes will effect tank gearing in cata in the long run (because NOBODY does, not even Blizz, or they wouldn't be doing beta raids atm!)

Using a rough estimate on T11 gear(140k HP, 30k armor, 1500 rating for dodge/parry/mastery each), a Prot Warrior's best stats are as followed in the current existing tank models:

TankPoints: Stamina > Mastery(with SB) > Armor > Avoidance > Mastery (no SB)
Burst Time: Armor > Stamina > Avoidance

The difference certainly is close enough in Cataclysm to warrant gemming socket bonuses (even avoidance), but it still shows that Stamina is better. That is, unless you found a well-detailed, thouroughly researched and mathematicly solid theory model in which gemming for stamina is at the bottom of the ladder, but by all means, do share, because I'ld LOVE to see that one!

[Katzazi]

@WarTotem:
I don't advocate against EH and for avoidance. I advocate for not blindly saying that geming only for stam and neglecting every soket bonus will be best in Cata because it was best in WotLK.

I've repetedly said that I know that EH is a good tank stat (and maybe the best) but that we cannot tell how good it will be compared to everything else in Cata. The same that you say. Eetaybeetay is the one who claims to know how it will be in Cata with a reference to an ICC related post and an author who seems to think that it would be a good idea to revisit the relevance between EH and avoidance again for cata.

Aagathons work is great work. I appreciate it and I've recomended it to other tanks more than once. One part of the post is about how EH and avoidance can be compared. EH clearly wins for WotLK. But the final result depens on multiple variables. Aagathon does not say, that EH has to win all the time, that there is no set of variables so that avoidance cannot be better for that situation. Even while most of the variables have changed to favore avoidance/block I doubt that they will be completely better than EH in Cata. But we cannot tell at the moment.

So saying that neglecting every socket bonus (and never considering any other trinket than flat stamina ones) in Cata is na statment that cann be questioned. (And you do, too.)




About Shild Block: (Btw: I did say that my example did not cover magic and that it would not be accurate.)
GC said that they think about SB as a button used on CD. But he also said that he does not know if the community will use it like this. He also said that the community findes other usages than what Blizz had in mind, all the time.

If I would tank that dragon with the breath that brings me in dangeour of death by the next melee hit, I would save my SB for that (the delay would be relatively minimal anyway, so the overall reduction would not be hurt so much). Even if I'm not directly at the soft cap for block, I would reduce the chances that I would get a full melee hit.

Maybe it would be nice to know that I would have high enough health to survive the hit easily after every breath. But: Even a higher health pool does not assure you that. Because you simply may not have been healed to full before the breath. Either because of bad luck or because healers were busy doing something else or whatever. So even if gearing and geming for EH/stam is the best thing to do, saving SB for around the breath is much more usefull than using it on CD. (At least if you do not cover the breathes with some bigger CDs.)

If you don't save SB for when you drop low or special attacs and use it on CD chances are high, that most streaks of non healed hits will be at least partly affected by SB. So it's resonable to calculate with it somehow. The situations where all your avoidance and block does fail for 4 or 5 hits and you get no heals at all and you don't have SB ready and you (or anybody else) has no CD available to cover this should be very seldom. Most times this happens at least someone has probably screwed up, so it's fair that you wipe.

[Stengel]

For all we know they could decide to give bosses an attack that hits everyone in the raid for massive damage when it connects on the tank. Suddenly avoidance is good. I think they'll actually have to do stuff like that if they want avoidance to be useful, because in today's WoW most healing isn't on the tank but on the raid. So a few % of avoidance here and there barely have any impact.

Stamina was good in WotlK because bosses were designed to burst tanks down.

[swelt]

The difference certainly is close enough in Cataclysm to warrant gemming socket bonuses (even avoidance), but it still shows that Stamina is better. That is, unless you found a well-detailed, thouroughly researched and mathematicly solid theory model in which gemming for stamina is at the bottom of the ladder, but by all means, do share, because I'ld LOVE to see that one!

I think the gemming strategy shift here is quite significant (and it's not just tanks, as the reworked gem colours mean that dps classes are also likely to be finding matches). I guess time will tell whether we gem blue/purple/green (i.e. stam or stam+something) or whether we even break out into the red/orange/yellow end of the spectrum (i.e. gems with no stam at all). Seems unlikely. I'm guessing:
blue socket: stam (Solid)
red socket: stam+parry (Defender's) or stam+expertise (although this one isn't showing up on wowhead)
yellow socket: stam+mastery (Puissant) or stam+dodge (Regal)

While the theory is good to a point, I think that perception is almost important. Healers often say they find different tanks as 'easy to heal' or 'hard to heal'. In wrath, I often found healers preferring tanks to have the largest possible hitpoint pool because it gave them a big green buffer. What will be interesting to see is how they adapt to the new model that Blizzard are trying to push. While GC and co are intent on making us value our healers' mana again, there's often a gap between design intent and the raiding community reaction. If the results match the intent, then healers may well end up saying they prefer tanks with slightly higher avoidance over those with slightly higher hitpoint pools. Personally, I suspect that even though we will value avoidance more than we do now, healers will always feel more comfortable with that bigger buffer.

[Kojiyama]

As much as I love having my thread turn into yet another avoidance vs. EH debate, would it be possible for people to stick to discussing actualy mechanical issues or theory about Critical Block specifically instead?

[Airowird]

As much as I love having my thread turn into yet another avoidance vs. EH debate, would it be possible for people to stick to discussing actualy mechanical issues or theory about Critical Block specifically instead?

* Warrior Mastery is great with Shield Block up (better than Avoidance), but sucks without. The equal level is about 25% SB uptime or so, depending on your avoidance & mastery ratings.
* It has an exponential increase up to SB unhittable, after which the gain from SB sharply decreases. Complete unhittability gimps it even further.
* In order for Mastery to be of equal value as the Paladin one, you need 100% critical block chance (at which point you gain no value from mastery). With the +1% metagem, you need atleast 97,66% crit block chance.
* As long as Critical Block is not a fixed chance, Mastery for Prot Warriors will always remain a scaling issue.

Did I miss anything?

[Kojiyama]

Yeah, that sounds about right.

[Bigbad]

Many people seem to think that mastery is a lot worse then avoidance. Did some calculations and it starts of worse then dodge/parry but since it only gets better and dodge/parry have diminishing returns it quickly catches up and gets better.

Damage reduction for 1 mastery: 1,5% crit block*old blockchance + 1,5% block*average block
average block= 30% * (1+crit block) and you must make the "1,5 crit block" at the start also into an increase of average block so the formula ends up as
1,5%*0,3*old blockchance+1,5%*0,3*(1+critblock)=0,45%+0,45%*(ol d blockchance+crit block)
now if you include 5% crit block from 50% uptime on Hold the line and 8,33% block from using shieldblock on cooldown you end up with
0,45%+0,45%*(old blockchance+crit block+ 0,05+ 0,0833)
Mastery starts out at 0,7146% damage reduction per point and ends up at 0,9811% damage reduction at 20 mastery didn't calculate any further.
Avoidance starts at 1,01% damage reduction (from 179,28 rating) and gets worse then 0,7146% damage reduction at around 14% before DR (2474 rating)

Thing that you have to keep in mind when comparing dodge/parry with mastery is that gear will have mastery if you like it or not, for some slots all pieces have mastery, its on some tier pieces and 2 enchants have only a mastery version.
So since the first few points in mastery, which are the worst, cant be helped it catches up with avoidance earlier then at 4948 (2474*2) total rating. For reference full 359 has around 6k ratings including battleshout/kings converted to parry/dodge ratings.

[Airowird]

Is that with or without Shield Block used?

[Kojiyama]

Even if you get a piece of gear with or without Mastery, reforging allows some flexibility in bias. That's why factoring it is worthwhile. You always have some choice with your items, even if you don't have a choice of which items you have.

[Maèl]

Satorri gave a few numbers for warrors in T11. Looks like we'll have parry/dodge around 10-15%. I can't see how we will hit passive unhittable anytime soon.
Has Blizz' plan to convert excessive block from shield block to crit block already made it into the beta builds? This could make the charts even more confusing.
Could be a healing nightmare, though. 25% of the time we are super tough and the rest of the time we get weird spikes. Our life bar may be more up and down than rabbits during the mating season. I'm pretty sure no chart will actually tell how it will "feel".
I'm not entirely a fan of the "new" shield block and still prefer the vanilla version. It would help with damage being much more consistent and predictable.

avoided damage -> critically blocked damage -> blocked damage -> armor mitigated damage.
We have 4 different damage figures for any given boss attack. That's already pretty random. Now add in SB which nobody but the tank will monitor and we will get complaints about spiky damage.

[Bigbad]

Is that with or without Shield Block used?

With, since you cant really swap gear while using shieldblock average value seems the best.
0,45%+0,45%*(old blockchance+crit block+ 0,05+ 0,0833) the 0,833 in the formula stands for 25% block from shieldblock divided by 3.

Even if you get a piece of gear with or without Mastery, reforging allows some flexibility in bias. That's why factoring it is worthwhile. You always have some choice with your items, even if you don't have a choice of which items you have.

While its true that you can reforge 40% of your mastery away that still leaves 60% of the mastery. So if you want to make an accurate comparison you cant compare a set with mastery to a set completely without mastery.
It's hard to estimate a bare minimum since it depends on multiple factors but a minimum of 300-400 mastery looks like a decent guess.

@Mael: We won't hit 102,4% unhittable any time soon but with 15% parry 13% dodge 5% miss 44%block and 25% from shieldblock we'll be unhittable during shieldblock in 359 epic gear.
I thought about being spiky, if you rotate SB>shieldwall 18 secs with T11>SB>trinkets>SB>pain supression/pw:barrier>SB>last stand etc
Its not perfect but with shieldblock only having a 30 sec cd you can rotate some stuff to have almost a 30% reduction most of the time. We might be a little more spiky without shieldblock but dont think it will be that bad, we can control most of it if we want.

[Airowird]

You could also have assumed no Shield Block at all :P

At 0 ratings, Mastery during SB is already about the same as Avoidance
Using the stats from the premades, Mastery without SB comes close (>95%) to avoidance ratings
That means that the turning point will somewhere be in your blue gearing, after which you're pretty much better off reforging to Mastery (or un-forging)

[Bigbad]

At 0 ratings mastery is worth 0,789% damage reduction with shieldblock up for 179.28 ratings and dodge/parry is 1,01% not about the same. Turning point will be somewhere around 4500 total ratings i think, haven't really calculated it yet. If you include 690 expertise rating and 360 hit, just a random amount of threatstats you get 23 expertise and 3% hit. And you end up with 5550 ratings, somewhere around the point at which you just start to get your first epics depending a bit on trinkets and gemming choices etc...

[Katzazi]

We have 4 different damage figures for any given boss attack. That's already pretty random. Now add in SB which nobody but the tank will monitor and we will get complaints about spiky damage.

I don't get your point here. I agree that if you have "high" chances to avoid, crit block or block dmg, the full hits would look like unexpected spikes for the healers. This will even be more the case when you use SB often. Since it will reduce the full hits even more. But I don't see it as something for healers to complain about. If you are at nearly full health single full hits should not scare the healers. If you avoid / mitigate most of the time this should be quite often the case. (If it's around a breath or something CDs would be used and healers would not see the difference if the breath was the problem or a melee hit.) Most of the dmg a warrior get's should be easy to heal.

It will only be a problem, if paladins will be unhittable at this point and never see the full hits and if it would be something comparable for bears (healers will always see the big spikes for dks, even if they would feel less hard to heal against).