Prot Warrior - is mastery worth reforging?

[Rickdick]

Just to be more clear healing mana is a problem its not a no brainer to manage it anymore, with the right communication the guys can manage it just fine.

How have you approached prioritizing avoidance stacking then?

[Aurless]

Just to be more clear healing mana is a problem its not a no brainer to manage it anymore, with the right communication the guys can manage it just fine.

How have you approached prioritizing avoidance stacking then?

I'm wearing avoidance trinkets (just fyi I roll mastery as "avoidance" for the sake of this discussion, even though it is kinda mitigation)

I'm gemming avoidance.

My thought so far is in WotLK stamina was the only stat I looked at on an item. I would never consider an avoidance trinket and I got plenty of avoidance through just normal gear progression. In Cata it's the opposite. I don't even consider stam trinkets and I gem avoidance because I get enough stam to survive anything.

This is mostly speaking to heroics as that's what most people are doing and we aren't stepping into raiding until Monday. However, my experience with the brutallus like boss in tol barad says that avoidance is king. His normal melee took 7-10 hits to kill me, the meteor slash does the same damage to everyone in your group and certainly wasn't a threat to killing the tank, and our healers ran OOM. With it taking 7-10 hits from the boss to kill me anything I can do to lower damage taken is good.

I haven't decided on mastery vs parry vs dodge. A small amount of parry > dodge is certainly true, but whether master or parry is better I don't know. A lot of the posts on the subject argue that mastery "smooths out damage intake" which is true. However, if it's going to take 10 hits to kill you, your damage intake is already smooth.

[Jammer Six]

Yea,

As i have not played for a while and had no real opinion yet on the cata changes...

Can't read your post, sorry.

[Relem]

in my honest opinion, not till 5400 dodge+parry+mastery.

Yesterday i reforged my equipment and, according to skada, overall was an damange reduction improvement, but not so much.

The other thing is: shall we cap hit\expertise to increase ou'r EH? is parring haste something still here? Or is just a "take hir coz you can make more aggro" (coz i feel hold the line just fill this problem).

As a warrior tank, i feel myself quite ok, afterall, i just found reforging mastery during AoE time was pretty helpfull (due the two roll system, if i recall this "thing" correctly).
Also, i feel like there is no quite difference to have full stama gems and full avoidance gems nor mastery gems (or taleast untill 5400).

Sry for my bad english, someone will not be able to read my post....

[Petninja]

I believe they've removed Parry Hasting as a mechanic. Expertise won't do anything to increase survival anymore, unless perhaps you're a DK and landing hits gives you health back.

[Danienn]

I'm wearing avoidance trinkets (just fyi I roll mastery as "avoidance" for the sake of this discussion, even though it is kinda mitigation)

I'm gemming avoidance.

My thought so far is in WotLK stamina was the only stat I looked at on an item. I would never consider an avoidance trinket and I got plenty of avoidance through just normal gear progression. In Cata it's the opposite. I don't even consider stam trinkets and I gem avoidance because I get enough stam to survive anything.

This is mostly speaking to heroics as that's what most people are doing and we aren't stepping into raiding until Monday. However, my experience with the brutallus like boss in tol barad says that avoidance is king. His normal melee took 7-10 hits to kill me, the meteor slash does the same damage to everyone in your group and certainly wasn't a threat to killing the tank, and our healers ran OOM. With it taking 7-10 hits from the boss to kill me anything I can do to lower damage taken is good.

I haven't decided on mastery vs parry vs dodge. A small amount of parry > dodge is certainly true, but whether master or parry is better I don't know. A lot of the posts on the subject argue that mastery "smooths out damage intake" which is true. However, if it's going to take 10 hits to kill you, your damage intake is already smooth.

You misunderstand what smoothing out damage is. Smoothing out damage doesn't meant preventing you from being one shot; instead it means making you take a consistent amount of damage over time rather than burst damage. When you parry 4 times in a row and then take 3 hits to the face you take significant spike damage which the healer has to recover from. This in turn means the healer has to use his low efficiency heal and burn a lot of mana healing that spike damage. When you focus on mastery (for the sake of discussion we'll talk warriors), you end up getting hit more but taking 30% reduced damage on most hits. This means the healer knows your health is dropping at this rate and can begin pre-healing you and using more efficient spells to keep you up (I.E. He can cast before you take the damage and heal you up as you take the damage because he has a pretty good idea just how much damage you are about to take).

As far as the topic of the post, I'm gemming stam primarily and reforging dodge->mastery and leaving parry alone because of hold the line. Once ratings climb higher I'll have to start hanging on to more dodge to prevent too much DRs on parry but in heroic blues that isnt happening.

[olivete]

Hi guys!
I am not an experienced tank and this topic already helped me alot.
I got confused with some points. We have got nice tables and graphics and all kindda math stuff, cool, but i still getting gear and i think most of ppl here are too, so i am not sure, but i dont have even 3000 rating yet.
The reality is that i saw alot of "make sure you get hit cap and expertise 26", ok, but do i really need those caps already? Should not prioritize my dodge, parry and mastery?
First i am having no problem with threat, specially when comes up to one target.

I just would like to confirm this, so what should i do with the reforging thing?

hit? parry? dodge? mastery? expertise?
I dont have even 3000 (parry + dodge + mastery).

Thanks alot !!!!

[Petninja]

You don't really need to cap hit or expertise. Add that stuff IF you have threat trouble, or maybe if you are super worried about taunt missing and wiping the raid (but it's probably not the case).

[Tankz]

I am with a lot of other tanks in this thread, but Avoidance is king at the current gear level we have imo. I have been stacking dodge/parry (making sure they are about the same to minimize DR on the rating) which has helped healing on me dramatically.

I have the 2 healers I am running HCs with actively commending on how much easier it is to heal me on runs than say from Wednesday (obviously) with them finishing boss fights with 50-60% mana rather than going OOM with 20% of the boss still to kill. This of course is down to their gear, and the DPS getting upgrades, but its the way forward i believe. I'm still not sure how good mastery is, but at the moment i'm reforging it to pure avoidance which seems to be helping.

[Hypatia]

You misunderstand what smoothing out damage is. Smoothing out damage doesn't meant preventing you from being one shot; instead it means making you take a consistent amount of damage over time rather than burst damage. When you parry 4 times in a row and then take 3 hits to the face you take significant spike damage which the healer has to recover from.

What Aurless was pointing out is that if you can survive seven to ten full-on hits, the damage intake is already plenty smooth. The three-full-hit spike is no more dangerous than six-half-hit smooth, because in neither case do you get very low on health.

The difference between spike and overall damage only becomes important when two or three hits in a row can kill you. If it takes seven hits to kill you, that's plenty of time for a healer to respond and heal you up a bit (but optimally, not quite top you off.) If for some reason the healer has another emergency going on and can't take care of you, there's even plenty of time to notice "Oh, I'm not getting any heals" and leisurely amble over to press an oh-shit button.

[Danienn]

What Aurless was pointing out is that if you can survive seven to ten full-on hits, the damage intake is already plenty smooth. The three-full-hit spike is no more dangerous than six-half-hit smooth, because in neither case do you get very low on health.

The difference between spike and overall damage only becomes important when two or three hits in a row can kill you. If it takes seven hits to kill you, that's plenty of time for a healer to respond and heal you up a bit (but optimally, not quite top you off.) If for some reason the healer has another emergency going on and can't take care of you, there's even plenty of time to notice "Oh, I'm not getting any heals" and leisurely amble over to press an oh-shit button.

Yes but when the healer has to re-actively heal you because you take burst damage instead of steady damage he ends up using flash of light instead of holy light or heal. This causes him to spend a significant amount more mana healing you. When the healer knows you are about to take damage he can queue up an efficient heal and not have to worry about overhealing as much when you get a parry chain.

[Hypatia]

You're not getting it... If it takes long enough to kill you, the healer doesn't have to do that. That's true whether the damage comes in chunks of x damage or chunks of 2x damage. As long as there's plenty of time to actually do the healing, the "burst" isn't really a burst.

You're right that if there's actually a danger of the tank dying then the healer has to use something less efficient and faster. But if the biggest "bursts" that the enemy can actually produce aren't big enough to produce that kind of threat, then you can't even really call it burst damage any more. Is the pattern different? Sure. But it's not meaningfully different, because it doesn't actually require different healing behavior. If somebody heals differently in this scenario, it's because they're anxious, not because it was necessary.

Short form: There's an argument that can be made that it's bad to make the healers bored because there's no incoming damage for a while, because they might decide to watch some TV and not notice when the damage actually arrives. But, in the scenario that Aurless hypothesized there is no reasonable argument that can be made that less efficient healing will be necessary to keep the tank alive.

More formally: A less efficient heal is required if: a) HPS with slower more efficient heals is insufficient to keep up with the incoming DPS dealt, b) a more efficient heal will take so long to cast that there is a chance that the tank will die before it lands, but the less efficient heal will arrive in time. If it will take 7-10 full hits from a mob swinging at a rate of 2.0 seconds per attack, that means it will take between 14 and 20 seconds for the tank to die, even if the tank *never* dodges, parries, or blocks a single attack. The argument is that there will always be plenty of time for the more efficient heal to land, and that therefore it's more optimal to aim for stats that produce less damage taken over time rather than more consistent damage taken from moment to moment—because the "spikes" of damage simply aren't large enough to matter.

[Kazeyonoma]

the combat table doesn't work like that gigglepants. at least not for mobs hitting us.

if you have 13% dodge and 13% parry you have 74% chance of getting hit. if it was 16% and 10% you'd still have a 74% chance of getting hit.

[gigglepants]

Are you sure its additive? Does anyone have a source on this?

[Kazeyonoma]

uhh, yes. satrina has done extensive testing, as has whitetooth.

13% dodge additive means it is 13% dodge, the way you're explaining it is actually where 13% parry is not 13% parry, it's a single roll.

say you have 5% miss, 13% dodge, and 13% parry and 35% block

/roll 10000
if x <= 500 then miss
else if x <= 18000 and x > 500 then dodge
else if x <= 31000 and x > 18000 then parry
else if x <= 76000 and x > 31000 then block
else hit

this effectively makes it so, each time you take a swing, it has exactly a 5% chance to be a miss, 13% chance to be a dodge, 13% chance to be a parry, and 35% chance to be a block. the way you're calculating it would actually make it so that you'd have to check if it's not a miss, check if it's a dodge if not a dodge, check if it's a parry, if it's not a parry, check if it's a block, which doesn't yield exact 5% 13% 13% 35% respectively.

[gigglepants]

cheers.

[Danienn]

You're not getting it... If it takes long enough to kill you, the healer doesn't have to do that. That's true whether the damage comes in chunks of x damage or chunks of 2x damage. As long as there's plenty of time to actually do the healing, the "burst" isn't really a burst.

You're right that if there's actually a danger of the tank dying then the healer has to use something less efficient and faster. But if the biggest "bursts" that the enemy can actually produce aren't big enough to produce that kind of threat, then you can't even really call it burst damage any more. Is the pattern different? Sure. But it's not meaningfully different, because it doesn't actually require different healing behavior. If somebody heals differently in this scenario, it's because they're anxious, not because it was necessary.

Short form: There's an argument that can be made that it's bad to make the healers bored because there's no incoming damage for a while, because they might decide to watch some TV and not notice when the damage actually arrives. But, in the scenario that Aurless hypothesized there is no reasonable argument that can be made that less efficient healing will be necessary to keep the tank alive.

More formally: A less efficient heal is required if: a) HPS with slower more efficient heals is insufficient to keep up with the incoming DPS dealt, b) a more efficient heal will take so long to cast that there is a chance that the tank will die before it lands, but the less efficient heal will arrive in time. If it will take 7-10 full hits from a mob swinging at a rate of 2.0 seconds per attack, that means it will take between 14 and 20 seconds for the tank to die, even if the tank *never* dodges, parries, or blocks a single attack. The argument is that there will always be plenty of time for the more efficient heal to land, and that therefore it's more optimal to aim for stats that produce less damage taken over time rather than more consistent damage taken from moment to moment—because the "spikes" of damage simply aren't large enough to matter.

True, in the original statment with 7-10 hits to die you are correct; however, I still disagree that avoidance is going to help that much more. When you get that rng chain of not parrying or dodging in a raid situation you might die in 4-5 hits rather than 7-10. Right now reforging my dodge to mastery I have a 42% chance to block (plus shield block on a 30s cooldown), a 16% chance to parry and 11% chance to dodge. I still see a good amount of parries as hold the line is up almost constantly and critical blocks happen frequently. Personally I'm having much better results with that than I was going for more avoidance. I think we're just going to have to see who is right on this topic down the road though. There are merits to both sides of the discussion.

Edit: Xav reports there are bosses on 25man normal that can still 3 shot the tank so trying to get a near constant 30-60% damage reduction is important. His post on EJ:

The idea behind having a very high amount of mastery (and thus block %) is to have full coverage, and guarantee you have a permanent 30% damage reduction, at minimum, vs melee swings (the bulk of all damage nearly all bosses do). The easiest tanks to heal are those that take steady damage, not those that take spiky damage. Even if the spiky damage tank is taking say less than half of the overall damage (compared to a 'steady' tank), it can be more difficult to heal because of the wide variance in swing damage.

[adamd]

Hi guys. I'm new to playing a warrior tank although i've been tanking with my pally since vanilla. I've been running 5mans and H5mans for the past week and have been playing around with reforging most dodge and any parry over 1200 rating towards mastery. Hit 50% block today with parry and dodge sitting at around 12% each and have to say the damage the difference is incredible, especially with the new eternal shadow spirt gem (Godly) Imo. Where before healers would almost ooommmm on wost trash pulls (no CC), now mobs just don't even really seem to hurt, + healers never run outta mana and most trash can just be chain pulled.

When it comes to bosses the effect seems even better, i get so many crit blocks for +10-15k it ain't funny. For the most part it feels like I'm just tanking a normal mob, except for the spell damage. Haven't started raiding yet but i imagine the effects in raids would be even better, (+25k blocks) with a lot less full hits getting through .

Anyway just thought I'd add my two cents. Oh and with all the peeps lvl'in alch ya can get elixir of the master for like 1g each, bout 2.4% block (kicks ass)

[Airowird]

There are 2 arguments here:

1) Overall damage reduction. The more you have of this, the faster a healer can bring you up from 30% to >90%
2) Chance on damage streaks. The more avoidance/block you have, the lower the chance that there will be a streak that can create a teimframe wherein the DPS taken is higher than the HPS received.

The thing with #2 is: Tanks die slower. Even with lower avoidance, the streak needs to be longer to kill a tank. This was the entire issue in WotLK, where the streak could happen so fast you either spammed your biggest heals all the time, assuming that streak was coming up, or the tank would at some point just fall over and die because you didn't even see what happened. This issue is far smaller in Cataclysm.
Xav's example of taking half the damage is slightly exagerated, but his point is still partially valid: If you can guarantee that you will atleast block an attack, you effecitvely are running around with a 30% perma-Shield Wall rather than a block mechanic. But unless you are actually at that point, those 100% damage hits can still happen and your incoming hits vary just as wildly as the other guy's.
The point of Mastery (for Warriors & PAladins) is to a) reduce incoming damage and b) try to minimize the chance of larger streaks by taking away some of the damage they do (up to a point where this chance on a streak is 0%).

Unhittable will (in realistic environments) be better than pure damage reduction focus.
The fact that Unhittable is achieved through Block/Mastery, does not necessarily make Mastery a far better tanking stat than Dodge/Parry (DR does that for you!)

[Kanzer]

Mastery is the most important stat prot warriors can be focusing on right now. That quote of Xav above explains it perfectly. Spiky damage has always been more difficult to heal than consistent, even if the overall damage is less.