Prot Warrior - is mastery worth reforging?

[Arthalion]

Well, if one is reforging just for that purpose then it is something a bit subjective. That's a fair enough point of view, but from a pure 'over time' perspective, it does indeed take a long time for Mastery to beat Dodge/Parry per point.

In fact, if they adjust the ratings targets in the future (e.g. you need more Dodge/Parry/Mastery for each tier of 'leveled' bosses) it's quite possible that Mastery will never really reach the clear-cut winning stage due to Dodge and Parry being kept out of the heavy DR curve zones.

Time will tell. I do think Mastery is pretty useful for smoothing out damage, as you say, but I'm not sure I would go out of my way to reforge Dodge or Parry to Mastery anytime too soon.

What you say is true, but then again there are many encounters/mechanics that can play on subjective decisions.

Whether its time-to-live, overall damage mitigation or healer mana savings you're trying to improve, i think for all those concerns it will take decent gear setups for mastery to catch up. Mastery, really only shines when you're really close or at softcap.

Healer mana for example, you reduce the amount of health to heal by mitigating entire hits. Also reducing the hit frequency as well.
With block however, you allow the healer to heal you up with low costing spells.

An encounter specific example: Chimaeron, that nasty double attack is a dream come true for a prot warrior mastery fan. Suddenly, if you're at or near block softcap, you can feel alot safer about that ability, compared to fully avoidance geared. (then again, cooldowns can be involved, and both ways work)

The way i see reforging, it's seriously there to suit your needs, not a set and forget utility like extra gemslots. If you have a better item budget and available pieces for a mastery setup, it's probably worth getting at or close to the mastery softcap. Simply, the mastery softcap unavoidably works with avoidance in the first place, at least when looking at the combat table. If it were available to reach softcap in heroic blues, we'd work on that, then start pumping up the avoidance.


I hope i didn't make this sound confusing, i just really think there isn't a hard carved path to take when it comes to reforging, as long as you know what your needs are.

An interesting debate though, would be the trade-off of stam gems for mastery gems hehe.

[Naka]

Koji, thanks for the explanation. And once again, much kudos to you for your work on the ProtWarr model, I'm looking forward to your next commit. And hoping for more regular updates of the live application.
I wish I could be of more help, but my coding skills are pretty much limited to some basic Java and C++. I will keep the issue and request tickets coming though.
And if you need any assistance besides coding (ingame testing or whatever), just drop me a line.

[Kojiyama]

Koji, thanks for the explanation. And once again, much kudos to you for your work on the ProtWarr model, I'm looking forward to your next commit. And hoping for more regular updates of the live application.
I wish I could be of more help, but my coding skills are pretty much limited to some basic Java and C++. I will keep the issue and request tickets coming though.
And if you need any assistance besides coding (ingame testing or whatever), just drop me a line.

Well, your tickets are very helpful. Always nice to get good reports, makes fixing stuff easier.

Anyway, Arthalion--there is certainly room in tanking gear for subjectivity. Always has been. Tanking isn't quite the science of DPS classes, although I personally believe it's a lot closer to a science than many tanks believe. (I think it's possible to take the feeling thing a bit too far if the math is screaming at you that something is more effective.)

Mastery is strong enough that it's a pretty large judgement call on the part of Warriors to simply decide what is best for them. At the end of the day, reforging is dirt cheap... so experiment and reforge/gear for the encounter. Reforging makes things easier than ever--and it's certainly less annoying that re-gemming or enchanting IMO.

I think it's great for Warriors to at least have the option to reforge. I've been playing a lot of Druid recently, and their Mastery is so weak that reforging everything to Dodge is pretty much the only viable option.

[olivete]

After this whole discussion i have got a little lost, hope you can help me out

This is my char: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...lazar/advanced

As you gonna see i have got some reforge done there... but did i do it right?

What is the freaking "softcap" that you guys say all the time? I found no info about it.

Please, check my char and let me know what would be better to do.
For sure it can be a little better with this ilvl.
Ahhhhh btw, i am not having threading issues! (The reforge for hit was for a test reason)
Thanks alot!!!

[Airowird]

Softcap = 77.4% total miss, dodge, parry & block chance on your armory
Because miss is always 5% base, it's 72.4% for dodge+parry+block (or 70.4% for nelfs)

At that point, you can cap block with Shield Block, turning it into a mini-CD

[Shyrian]

Careful. That's not a cap to block with shield block because of the rollover to critical block.

With the numbers we're seeing right now, warriors are capable of sitting at 100% avoidance/mitigation and a staggering 70% critical block with shield block up simply by stacking mastery gear and then forging dodge into mastery where you can.

With trinket procs that add large amounts of mastery, we've seen crit block exceed 100% for short periods of time.

Stack your mastery.

[Shyrian]

I no more than make a post like that and Bliz fixes the shield block mechanic... ignore my previous comment - but keep stacking mastery anyway.

[Kojiyama]

Well, the current roll-over mechanic was obviously somewhat bugged compared to what they said the intent was.

[Ozymandius]

ok so here is me,

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...mandius/simple

Yes, I do go for hit cap because I never want an interrupt to fail but I think that is a different discussion.

Is the conclusion that it would be better to reforge all extra Dodge and Parry into Mastery?

[Natalia]

So I've now read through all 8 tabs of this post and I really hope I've done my char's stats right.

I was capped for hit and expertise (I've already replaced the hit gems with stam, left the expertise ones for now), figuring I want max threat and rage, but had to reforge dodge to get there. You'll also notice I deliberately went for gear with either expertise or hit, where I had a choice. After my healers started complaining about me taking massive hits I found this forum and reforged my char like so:

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...natalia/simple

I get a bit confused with the 2% Nelfs get. Can I take it off the total or do I have to take it off a certain stat?

If i add my dodge, parry and block i come to 70.89%. Being a Nelf and all, does this mean I've reached the desired avoidance/mitigation(saw that discussion ) point?

Also should I now look into getting my hit/expertise capped with any more stats I might get with gear in the future, while keeping at or above 70.4%, or should I just gem str for bigger blocks? (Str still affects block sizes right?)

[klausi]

Is the conclusion that it would be better to reforge all extra Dodge and Parry into Mastery?

It's that going for stamina isn't the best route especially on normal mode while your healers are still learning to manage their mana.

Stamina comes handy for some heroic bosses, but there's where you can easily swap in a second stamina trinket.

figuring I want max threat and rage

After tanking some bosses you should have figured out that threat doesn't matter at all thanks to vengeance. Especially for a blocktank that won't avoid a lot of damage, only migitate it.

You want at least 77.4% combined avoidance+migitation, that's dodge/parry/block/miss. This way you reach unhittable (102.4%) with shieldblock up (+30% block). Regular miss chance is 5%, nelf +2% = 7%. You're fine for now.

To consider: i'm sitting at overwhelming 2.5% hit and 3 expertise and easily rank on almost every fight with my warrior. It's really not about missing 1 out 5 of styles, it's only about getting the initial aggro and smashing the enlighten' buttons as hard and fast as you can afterwards. With that you shouldn't have any problems versus raiddecked dps, might change with next tier but not for now.

Strength gives you parry rating, block amount is fixed (30% warrior, 40% paladin with holy shield up). But if you want more parry, strength only gives a quarter of straight gemming/reforging for it.

[Katzazi]

What klausi said. My hit and expertise is even lower. I don't understand all those tanks going for expertise. I know that official formus say you should get it or something. But it just gives you some threat and dmg, that you don't need. Vengeance is so good that for really high incoming dmg encounters tanks can even fight for the first places in dmg meter. That's especially true for multi-mob situation.

We have some paladin tanks in our guild who all tell me that they just need to be expertise capped because it's in that guide on the official forums. Well good players at maintankadin don't advise to take expertise like they do at tankspot. Most or the paladin tanks don't trust me when I tell them that they should get rid of those stats - even as I'm there MT and they like to run with me on their dps-mains because they say that mobs always seem to stick to me (their words). I even offer them a bet: When they reforge their expertise and hit to avoidance and mastery and are not happy with it after some runs I will cover double their costs. One of them eventually accepted the bet. He got a total of 10% more avoidance and block out of it (yes, there was quite much to reforge). After his first run he was overwhelmed by the differences. Ok, he had little initial threat problems now and again, but he had to admit that he had no problems to cover them with the tools he had. On the other hand he could survive that much better. It's at least the same for warriors (even more drastic when you can cross the 72.4% line doing so).

Pre-Cata expertise was important as a defensive stat, too. Because of parry-haste. It's gone for players and there is no boss at the moment that has it. (Chances are high, that it's completely gone, but there is no blue post about this.)

Additionally: Since Cata you now have a taunt that will always land (beside of maybe deminishing returns). It cannot miss anymore. So if you have threat problems because you could not connect an important opening attack, you can use taunt then.

If I would have to chose between hit and expertise, I would take hit as a tank. And only to be able to interrupt in 10mans, where one may have to be short on people who can do this.

[Phantomix]

I´m kind of confused now, could someone please tell me which is the better way to go?

- All Dodge to Parry and Mastery?
- Leaving Dodge just 1% behind Parry?

[Pek]

Personally, my rule of thumb for tanking stats (provided I don't need the hit for interrupts) is to try to make sure every item has Mastery on it.
- If it has Mastery + Dodge/Parry: leave that item alone
- If it has Dodge/Parry + hit/exp: reforge hit/exp into Mastery
- If it has Dodge + Parry: reforge Dodge to Mastery

Chances are if you are gearing in accordance with current thinking, you won't have to reforge much. Just get as much Mastery and Dodge and Parry as you can.

[Katzazi]

Pek that does not answer the above question.

I think it depends on what you already have on your gear and what you are aiming for. If you are near the 72.4% cap, it should be much more effective to have both values more or less equal, because doing so you get the best combat table coverage.

If you have high amounts of dodge and parry, it may be also better to have them not too far away from each other, too. Because if you have big differences parry would gain only slowly by more ratings. The same is probably true for HtL uptime. If you have already a good uptime, one percent more parry will not give you so much more uptime. On the other hand the same rating for dodge would give you more avoidance.

However most of us are somewhere between this two extremes. It's probably better to have parry somewhat higher than dodge. But you have to consider, that we also will get even more parry than dodge via kings.

[Kojiyama]

I'm still seeing that you can reforge quite a lot of Dodge into Parry before Dodge becomes better due to HtL--however it is still minimal in terms of gains from doing this.

It's still probably best to aim for Mastery to get into the territory where Mastery is better than both Dodge and Parry, as this takes some time and effort.

You can see my post about this and some follow-ups here:
http://www.tankspot.com/showthread.p...336#post486336

[Brage]

I'm abit curious about the roll-over mechanic on shield block.


Are we absolutely sure that you reach 102.4% avoidance/block when using it provided you got the necessary passive ratings?

Admittedly by using the "unhittable" macro i'm told to be at ~111% unhittable, but i imagine scripting the roll-over mechanic is quite hard, so the macro could be faulty.

And by looking over my raid logs for the past several raids i can't really determine what's right since i ofcourse am not passively unhittable, so a few full hits are shown aswell.


My gut tells me that if Shield Block is designed to cap us at 100%, then that might be without including the base 5% miss chance, meaning we are "unhittable". but i honestly wouldn't be surprised if we're capped at 100% including the miss chance, effectively leaving us at 2.4% chance of taking a full hit.


Any solid proof as to which is correct?

[Katzazi]

That would be weird. Blizz does not use a 102.4% table, it uses a 100% table and reduced ratings. It works like this:

The values shown on your character sheet are those you have against lvl85 mobs/players. Everybody above your level has a better chance to hit you, so your ratings dont do as much against them. For a 3 lvl higher opponent like a raid boss, this sums up to 2.4% in difference. The hit table will always be the size of 100%. But you will not dodge for the value on your character sheet but for a little bit lower value. So all that Shiled Blook "sees" are those reduced values. It fills up your table with more block, until either it's used up (probably also with the reduced factor) or the hit table is completely covered. Then it spills over everything remaining.

The 102.4% virtual table is only used by us, to make it much easier to calculate where we are. Because with this virtual blown up table we don't have to multiply everything we want to add up with this adjustment factor. We just can add up the stats we see and compare it with the 102.4%.

[Brage]

I know that the charactersheet shows values against an 85 pve opponent, but it still doesn't answer my question.
If anything it only makes me a tad more sure that we're not capped when using Shield Block against an 88 pve opponent, since i could imagine those 100% the Shield Block tooltip mentions, are against an even levelled pve mob aswell, meaning the excess block (if any) rolls over to crit block instead of pushing us further up the charts.

And if indeed that is how the Shield Block roll-over works, going past 75% passive combined avoidance/block won't do you any good from an "unhittable PoV", unless you can get there passively.

Counter to this, you could stat that there's a base 5% miss chance from PVE mobs, meaning you effectively only need to reach 97.4% combined ratings. But if 97.4% is actually the cap then why any mentioning of 100% on the Shield Block tooltip? (I personally hope this argument is the correct one).

I'm confused or rather, in doubt :S

[Bigbad]

You need 77,4% unhittable to reach 102,4% during shieldblock. Just add 25

Shieldblock will always add 25% block regardless if we're at 50%, 78% or 90% unhittable. It just starts to give additional critical block once you pass 75% unhittable. It wont magicly cap at 100% and leave us with 2,4% chance to be hit.