Currently there is a debate on the general forums about how avoidance weakens a dk's mastery. I personally do not understand how this is, unless it's something like "since i use item a more, item b is of less worth to me". I see it as "I use item a more than item b so I have more of item b to back me up". Am I flat out wrong? If so can someone explain the discussion a bit better?
a link to the current thread: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/to...6479535?page=1
If you avoided enough consecutive hits to lose the shield due to the time expiring, then maybe I could see that arguement. I don't see that happening because there's not enough avoidance, even stacking the heck put of it, to make that happen. You would also have to not be refreshing the blood shield with a new DS.
I'm not a theory crafter, but I can't see the value of their arguement.
"he doens't need healing, he doesn't need healing, he doesn't nee-WHAOSHIT!wtf was that man!". Please stop leaning on TDR. -Teng
It's in the Official Forums which the equivilent of it appearing in the National Enquirer.
The theory behind the argument is fairly simple, but flawed. The idea is that since Death Strike's healing scales upward with the amount of damage you've taken in the last 20 seconds, every hit you avoid weakens the healing. Our mastery is based off that healing, ergo, decreasing the healing decreases the value of the mastery. So, technically, yes, high levels of avoidance would begin to reduce teh value of mastery for a DK, but jsut at a cursory glance, I doubt anyone could reach the avoidance numbers to have a significant impact over the course of a 5 minute boss fight with current gearing.
OK that's what i thought. If do do get to a point of having enough avoidance to avoid enough consecutive attacks that a single BS would fall off, and this were to happen on a regular basis, if we were still gemming mastery it would probably be time to start gemming for avoidance. Yet I don't see us getting there any time soon or even ever, seeing as how Blizz would just put in place another chill of the throne style debuff.
And yes theotherone, I can't help myself when it comes to the official forums, it's like crack
Here's the deal with avoidance and DK mastery.
If you were to gain an increase of say, 5% dodge. You would expect to see a certain decrease in the amount of damage you took over the course of a fight. You would see a decrease but it would be less than you expected. The reason is that if you looked at the healing you did you would see a decrease in healing output (because you took less damage). Therefore, you only get a partial gain from avoidance than other tanks do because it caused your mastery to suffer.
At the same time, if you were to gain a percentage to Mastery, you would also get a decrease in damage taken. But again, it would not be as high as you would expect. Why? Because again you took less damage.
Both stats suffer from the same flaw. Anything that causes you to take less damage adversely affects your mastery and the gain from it will be smaller than you would have expected.
Conclusion: The idea is right but it does not mean anything in the slightest and should not be used to make an argument for stacking one thing over another.
-My DK is a Healer
I think this debate will go along until Blizzard will make their mind and bring some changes to DS / BS / Mastery because currently it's not quite in state I would love to
If at first you don't succeed, you are running about average
Doubtful that will ever happen; Warrior tanks have for years been screwed over by avoidance streaks, and with the patches to SR we're even more screwed by Bosses that refuse to melee and just cast at ramdon targets.
Honestly though whats wrong with Blood tank's mastery? you either Take a crap ton of damage, and so get a lovely big shield to absorb a crapton of damage later, or you avoid a crapton of damage so don't have a shield to avoid a crap ton later. Take a crap ton then absorb a crap ton; or avoid a crap ton and tthenake a crap ton. Net result is the same; one crap ton to the face, one crap ton negated.
The augument only stands when you use DS mindlessly on CD, which every veteran DK tank won't do. Remember, avoidance only means you can avoid an attack, and the damage will still be the same once it lands. The DK rune refresh time is not something super: 16 seconds for a full set of runes. In an actual boss fight, when a big hit lands, we DK tanks can throw 2 consecutive DS, and wait for another hit and another DS cast. The fact is, usually the hits lands much earlier than the time your runes refresh. It's true there is a low chance that even in a 16 seconds window you didn't get a hit at all, but it's very rare. And even without income damage, we can still use DS to stack the blood shield, and higher avoidance means that the shield is more likely to stack to a higher amount, which will better mitigate the income damage.
I don't know why I'm bothering to post here. The DK community on this site has never been supportive of math; which is why I stopped trying so long ago. However, to answer your question OP, avoidance does fight with our mastery.
Think of it this way, a block tank has 25% avoidance and has 75% block. The block and avoidance lie on the combat table. That block tank will avoid 75% of all possible hits. The avoidance doesn't stop 25% of the blocks. The avoidance never removes a hit that would have been blocked (unless they cap out). Now, our Death Strike uses all attacks that land from the past 5 seconds. When the DK avoids a hit in the previous 5 seconds, we've lost coverage. That hit would have gone to our mastery. Avoidance stopped it. That is the phenomenon being described. It is like a block capped tank; where the avoidance is removing block from the table. That drops the mitigation that mastery should have provided.
As for the responses, I invite you to look at the math, there is a link to the math behind it in that thread. You all seem to think that this is referring to the situation where all hits are avoided. It isn't. It deals with the fact that one or two hits will be avoided per DS frequently. That does impact the value of mastery and how it scales in the future. You guys really should look at the math instead of making claims that it is incorrect without any logical backing as to why.
Don't you want a certain amount of hits to be avoided to be less spiky? I rather heal a bit less and take a little less damage and be a bit more stable as tank but maybe that's just cause my main is a warrior.
Also dk mastery seems to have a little diminishing returns to me, each point will still give a static 6,25% increase but going from 100% to 110% bloodshield is a bigger relative increase then going from 140% to 150%.
Seems to me you want at least some sort of balance between avoidance and mastery. no idea where the breakpoint would be but stacking mastery to take more damage to heal more seems a bit flawed.
Unless you are absolutely positive that you can keep your blood shield up AT ALL TIMES, it is not worth it to skip out on avoidance to go completely for mastery. Even with blood tap, you still need to use death runes sometimes for other abilities... Blood Boil reduces damage taken, diseases reduce damage taken, etc... Avoidance will help mitigate damage in general so that you can use your death runes for abilities other than Death Strike when needed. A good rule of thumb is this... Reforge for mastery first, dodge/parry second. Enchant for for mastery first, dodge/parry second, and stamina third. Gem for mastery first, and if the slot isn't yellow, gem mastery/dodge or master/parry.
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