Warrior - Calculations of Reforging Mastery

[Taith@kil'jaeden]

I tried some things yesterday and made some mathematical tuning.

I reforged all my gearvalues (preferable the highest rating / dodgerating, because parry gives you chance to critical block and aggro) to mastery.

Before
Dodge: 26% (before DR)
Parry: 20% (before DR)
Chance to block: 30%
Chance to critical block: 10%

After
Dodge: 19%
Parry: 18%
Chance to block: 42%
Chance to critical block: 22%

Calculation
We have an leakage of avoidance by approximatly 8-9% because of dodge and parry reforging.

blockmitigation before:
blockvalue: 0.9*30 + 0.1*60 (critical block) = 33
shieldblockuptime: 33.3% (10 of 30 seconds)
chance to block: 0.333 * 100 + 0.666 * 30 = 53,28%
overall blockmitigation: 0.5328 * 33 = 17.58%


blockmitigation after:
blockvalue: 0.78*30 + 0.22*60 = 36.6
shieldblockuptime: 33.3% (10 of 30 seconds)
chance to block: 0.333 * 100 + 0.666 * 42 = 61.272%
overall blockmitigation: 0.61272 * 36.6 = 22,43%

Results:
The increase of mitigation through blocking is 5% and the loss of avoidance through the deacreased values of dodge and parry is 8-9%. Because there is no more damageshield-talent, blocking won't make aggro anymore. The single positive effect of reforging mastery is that shieldblock talent which provides you 15 rage per block. Although the reforging gives you a flattened damagecurve and you avoid some damagepeaks, the loss of avoidance is too big in WotlK. If mastery on gear increases more and more, reforging to mastery will make sense because you have two variables to increase - blockrating and critical-blockrating - so if you have enough mastery the mitigation through blocking will not increase linear rather in favour of blocking.

I will reforge to avoidance again today.

Edit: Forget to mention the talent "hold the line" which will also be in favour of not-reforging to mastery.

Sry for my bad English, I'm Austrian

[Brage]

While i'm aware that you get more damage reduction pr. point of avoidance than pr. point of block, i think it's important to look at how that damage is reduced.

Blocking alongside crit. blocking is basically an extra level of mitigation. We lost quite a bit of armor, but gained a flat 30% damage reduction when blocking, a tradeoff in our favour especially when factoring in the 100% block chance from Shield Block. Dodging is still a 100% damage avoidance on a single attack whereas parry is a 100% damage avoidance over 2 attacks, effectively lowering the incomming damage of 2 attacks by 50% each.
Having a relatively high parry chance combined with a well buffed mastery will ease out the incomming damage more than the "pure" avoidance will. And that combined with the change to the pace at which healers can throw heals, makes the most sense to me, even if it does come at a higher statpoint cost.

On top of this comes the improved rage flow as you mentioned, if you spec shield specialization. And a stable rage flow is key to tanking successfully at the moment. Avoiding attacks simply cuts down on rage too much.


All in all i'd say that allthough it might be abit more expensive to get mastery up, it's worth it.

Personally, i reforged the dodge stat on all my tank items into mastery and kept the parry rating at 22% (for a nice secure uptime on Hold the Line). That leaves me on aproximately 22% parry, 17% dodge and 41% block and several healers keep telling me that i'm so easy to keep up compared to other tanks. My health used to fluctuate rapidly when tanking, but now it's alot more smooth.
The rage flow is stable enough to allow a near-spam of Heroic Strike/Cleave while maintaining debuffs.

Atleast for me, it works out.

[Kazeyonoma]

didn't they revert that change to parry? parry just does what it's always done still last i checked.

[MellvarTank]

I checked the PTR/shoutbox knowledge and as far as everyone knows the 50/50 parry change was scrapped. It is the same as it ever was now.

[Brage]

Oh, well in that case my argument kinda loses it's umph :S
i stand corrected


But i'm still interested in hearing about your experience when tanking with each stat setup, as i can see the "un-reforged" set would kill your rage generation.

[Kazeyonoma]

yeah, that's what i figured, thanks.

[Bigbad]

I went from 35k armor to 27,9k armor with 4.0 and was a little afraid the bosses would eat me alive. Thats about 30% extra damage from the armor loss. Reforged all my gear to mastery trying to make up for the armor loss with extra block and got near unhittable.
21%dodge 21%parry 45% block 56k hp with 2 stam trinkets
23,81%dodge 23,09 parry 48,16% block with 2 avoidance trinkets and raidbuffed.
Armory isn't updating atm but almost all 277 gear, what do you guys think about reforging mastery? Crit block is kinda meh atm but seems they will buff it. Only thing that bugs me a little is that shieldblock is only an offensive cd now for shieldslam.

[Kazeyonoma]

30% extra damage?

i'm pretty sure it wasn't that drastic, pre patch i was in teh 72% reduction range, and post patch i was at 65%, that's 7%, not 30%.

[ironsides]

i'm pretty sure it wasn't that drastic, pre patch i was in teh 72% reduction range, and post patch i was at 65%, that's 7%, not 30%.

Correct me if I am wrong. Let me use hypothetical numbers. Lets say a boss hits for 100k, if you have 72% damage reduction from armor you take 28k damage. If you only have 65% you take 35k. Now the change in damage between 28k and 35k is a 20% increase in damage.

Unless I am wrong, you have to think of armor in the terms of how much it would decrease the bosses attack in the big picture. Otherwise .5% damage reduction when you are at 74.5% reduction would be so what, meanwhile it is actually quite a decent amount of damage reduction per hit. This is why armor is more helpful the more you have, even though it gives you less damage reduction numerically. According to the math it does on average the same damage reduction % wise right up until you hit the cap... or something like that?

That's why EH has a steady value for armor vs stam and it doesn't become more or less helpful at any point, besides at cap.

[Aggronaught]

Correct me if I am wrong. Let me use hypothetical numbers. Lets say a boss hits for 100k, if you have 72% damage reduction from armor you take 28k damage. If you only have 65% you take 35k. Now the change in damage between 28k and 35k is a 20% increase in damage.

Unless I am wrong, you have to think of armor in the terms of how much it would decrease the bosses attack in the big picture. Otherwise .5% damage reduction when you are at 74.5% reduction would be so what, meanwhile it is actually quite a decent amount of damage reduction per hit. This is why armor is more helpful the more you have, even though it gives you less damage reduction numerically. According to the math it does on average the same damage reduction % wise right up until you hit the cap... or something like that?

That's why EH has a steady value for armor vs stam and it doesn't become more or less helpful at any point, besides at cap.

This is correct; thats EXACTLY how armor reduction works..not as straightforward as kazey put it.

[Bigbad]

Aye i did some napkin math 73% - (2,7 x 3) = 64,9%. 2,7 is 10% from the 27% damage with 73% armor value so got to about 30% loss from armor. Might be slightly less if you do it accurately but its in the 25-30% ballpark.

[Kazeyonoma]

I think it's just more important for people to be specific when talking about things that can be easily misconstrued. I understand where you're getting your #'s from, but simply blurting out that's 30% more damage is misleading. You have time to read/edit your posts before hitting send. Do so.