Are they pushing us away from mastery?

[liliciamgp]

So far I have noticed none of the rep rewards for tanking have mastery on them on the vendor inside FL. I also just picked up the boots for entering the daily quest hub and no mastery either. Are we supposed to be moving away from mastery as our main tank stat? Also why do some pieces have Hit isn that a useless stat for us? I am prot pally btw.

[Loganisis]

It's Blizzard's stated goal that they do not want to create perfectly itemized gear for every slot so an obvious BiS list is created. They want players to have to think about their gear as they're choosing it and reforging it.

Blizzard to remove mastery from all gear in T12, but that wouldn't make it any less valuable - the only way Blizzard can push block tanks away from Mastery is either giving us too much (so you're sitting at 102.4% and need to reforge away from mastery) or by changing mastery to make it less valuable.

No, the lack 'well itemized' gear is not an attempt to push away from mastery but to make it more invovled to balance and reforge stats.


Hit is worthless and what's even worse is they seem to double up the amount of the dodge or parry compared to the hit or expertise on the item, making it so you're going to reforge the dodge/parry since the gain in mastery makes it best. It's frustrating, but that is the way it is.

[Gnoo]

I think they're trying to prevent us from too gaining 102.4% avoidance too easily, because they're afraid of class balancing problems between classes that use shields and those that don't.

[Loganisis]

I think they're trying to prevent us from too gaining 102.4% avoidance too easily, because they're afraid of class balancing problems between classes that use shields and those that don't.

Paladins could get very close or reach 102.4 in T11 (I think Klausi posted a devcharacter build - but there was some follow up on if DR actually allowed it to it 102.4 or not - I didn't follow that part).

Paladins will hit 102.4 for sure this tier, warriors may as well. There's enough well itemized gear with mastery that it's not a problem, it's just like it was last tier, there's some very well itemized gear and some gear that isn't.

[Gnoo]

Paladins could get very close or reach 102.4 in T11 (I think Klausi posted a devcharacter build - but there was some follow up on if DR actually allowed it to it 102.4 or not - I didn't follow that part).

Paladins will hit 102.4 for sure this tier, warriors may as well. There's enough well itemized gear with mastery that it's not a problem, it's just like it was last tier, there's some very well itemized gear and some gear that isn't.

Maybe they're more worried about warriors hitting the passive unhittable mark, since they would also have a decent amount of critical block chance by then (I'm not sure if anyone has done the math on that). I doubt blizzard likes the fact that block tanks can achieve such high numbers of avoidance + block, at least when looking at class balancing.
I wouldn't be surprised if the next major raid instance introduces an avoidance reducing debuff like there was in sunwell or icc. If not I could totally imagine tank classes becoming really unbalanced.

[Tengenstein]

Just a quick Fiddle with the trinkets from askmrrobots BiS and its getting total blockvoidance at ~97%. Doesn't look like we're being pushed away, just looks like some of the better itemised gear is going to require you to kill some bosses.

[Dragaan]

They do seem to be making sure we don't go too high with our mastery this tier.

Paladins might be happy with this change, since they have too much mastery already and I believe they just had a class change that makes it even easier to reach unhittable.

Warriors, on the other hand, have it a little harder when first entering Firelands. As a warrior in 100% t11 BiS gear, I'm losing overall % (towards unhittable) very quickly. I haven't REALLY looked into it yet, but from what I remember my stats being on the ptr with full 378 gear, I think I ended up a lil further off from unhittable than I was in my t11 gear. It seems like warriors will be reaching unhittable once decked out in BiS t12 gear. Looks like they're designing the gear so that we only reach unhittable with full BiS heroic gear at the end of each tier (and not while progressing through the heroics).

That said, it also looks like they're making it so block isn't as big of a deal for tank survival on some of these new fights. There's a lot of nasty bleed and dot damage, lots of hefty magic dmg, and even some dmg that's not mitigatable (let alone blockable). I was worried that warriors would skyrocket ahead of other tanks in terms of survivability once we started getting better gear with more and more mastery on it, but it looks like it won't play as large a role in my survival as I thought it might. Even tho other tanks (especially DKs) take more damage while tanking when compared to geared warriors, there's plenty of situations in FL that look to really favor other tanks (especially DKs...). I guess this is a better route than nerfing our mastery, which is what I thought they were going to end up doing.