Warrior reforging in 4.2

[Outbackjack]

With the changes to agility affecting dodge in 4.2 I had heard that we didn't want quite as big of a spread between Parry and Dodge any longer. I plugged my character into Mr Robot and was quite surprised when it started telling me to reforge everything into Dodge that couldn't be put into Mastery. Ultimately it placed my Dodge and Parry within <1% of each other and claimed to be optimal for 4.2 with my gear.

For the life of me I could not find the post(s) on Tankspot that described what is considered "optimal" for Firelands content and I could have swore there was a spread a little greater than 1% between Parry and Dodge. I did take the suggestions from Mr Robot and reforged accordingly, as you can see here on my armory. Is this the way to go now? Keep Parry and Dodge a little more balanced compared to the bigger difference we had in 4.1?

[Bigbad]

There hasn't changed that much its still the extra Hold of the Line uptime from parry Vs the difference in diminishing returns between parry & dodge. Now that agi doesn't give dodge any more its even easier to eyeball from the character sheet, just do a battleshout and add a little parry to account for kings/motw.
Looking at your armory your dodge seems a little high compared to parry, I would go for about 800 ratings difference with battleshout & kings up. But maybe someone who knows the HtL math better can throw a number around?

[Tengenstein]

Well the number varies substantially based on your current mastery and your total avoidance ratings,more mastery increases the desired disparity in dodge/parry raitings, but as total avoidance rating increase you want closer balance as DRs kick in throwing out a flat number is not really gonna be accurate unless by sheer fluke your Parry, dodge and mastery rating are just the right numbers. at the numbers the OP has he wants about 15% more parry rating than dodge rating, fully buffed.

[Outbackjack]

Well the number varies substantially based on your current mastery and your total avoidance ratings,more mastery increases the desired disparity in dodge/parry raitings, but as total avoidance rating increase you want closer balance as DRs kick in throwing out a flat number is not really gonna be accurate unless by sheer fluke your Parry, dodge and mastery rating are just the right numbers. at the numbers the OP has he wants about 15% more parry rating than dodge rating, fully buffed.

This makes more sense, like I said I was surprised that Mr Robot was pushing me so hard towards evening out Dodge and Parry. I guess I'll put less faith in that site than I did, which wasn't much to begin with anyway.


Tengenstein when you say "15% more" do you mean Dodge = 11% , Parry is 15 higher? ie: 26%?

[Bigbad]

throwing out a flat number is not really gonna be accurate

Lets look at his armory then and make it a bit more accurate? One thing I am wondering with these calculations does it account for windwalk? With about 1/3 uptime and 600 dodge rating it will have some impact...

@ outbackjack: 15% more ratings so with your total 4000 avoidance ratings (inc BS and motw) it would be 1860 dodge and 2140 parry (4000/2,15=1860) but personally i would make the difference bigger then the 280 ratings difference.

[swelt]

I did almost exactly the same thing with Mr Robot the other day and was rather annoyed when I realised that it wasn't factoring in HTL in it's calculations and just trying to balance the DRs. However, I think this might reflect the current dilema of prot warrior gearing:
Option 1: aim for full combat table coverage
Option 2: balance for least damage taken

In this tier, 'unhittable' seems to be entirely feasible and the benefits are clear: block becomes physical mitigation not avoidance. If you leave even a few percentage points of coverage open, you need to plan to survive unblocked hits. The cost of reaching unhittable may mean that overall your damage taken is higher. Reforging out of dodge and parry into mastery means you take more blocked hits. Getting full coverage probably means having dodge and parry at very similar levels, which undermines the value of HTL. Higher HTL uptime means more critical block which means less total damage taken.

So that's your choice, and the factors unique to you are things like "what my healers prefer" and "what loot drops for me" and "what level of progression am I aiming for" and "which boss am I pulling".

That said, I don't know whether Mr Robot is really doing more than stat weighting around caps, and I don't know how well it's going to cope with unhittable... it certainly doesn't seem to factor HTL in it's calculations.

[Loganisis]

Swelt - part of it is the ratings difference was much closer pre-4.2 than I think any of us realized. Koji did state at one point that at 2400 mastery, you wanted about 800 rating difference to balance out the HtL uptime with the Parry DR.

However, probably 600 of that gap was actually hidden in agility being converted straight to dodge % rather than dodge rating. At least I think that is the case. When you factored in the leg enchants, any BiS agility gear, agility raid buffs and kings/mark, even a warrior was looking at 400-600 'effective' dodge rating.

At least this is the only thing I can make sense. Mr Robot is still promoting a gap between them for me, about 200 rating difference... which actually would hold with what was going on pre 4.2. All I can think of is HtL isn't as awesome as we thought, it just looked that way because parry was = parry rating + str-centered parried rating. Dodge was just shown as dodge rating with the dodge from agility 'hidden' by being converted directly to dodge %, if I'm recalling the mechanics correctly (Dodge was converted straight into dodge % and str was converted into parry rating).

[Bigbad]

What i did before 4.2 was ignore battleshout/kings since they both gave around the same dodge/parry (slightly more dodge) but now i'm always putting up a battleshout when balancing them. So the unbuffed ratings difference has gotten a bit smaller but should still be around 800ish when you're buffed i think. Unbuffed the only agi came from the leg enchant and maybe a random piece of loot.

If anything HtL is becoming more awesome since we have more block. Only reason there is for keeping dodge and parry closer is if you're pushing for a ctc cap like 96,4 or 102,4 like swelt said

[Airowird]

What i did before 4.2 was ignore battleshout/kings since they both gave around the same dodge/parry (slightly more dodge) but now i'm always putting up a battleshout when balancing them. So the unbuffed ratings difference has gotten a bit smaller but should still be around 800ish when you're buffed i think. Unbuffed the only agi came from the leg enchant and maybe a random piece of loot.

Agility gave ~41% to dodge rating, strength 25% to parry. How is that about the same?
But they should've just made Agility give Dodge Rating, it would've solved a lot of the clarity issues they had with it.

If anything HtL is becoming more awesome since we have more block. Only reason there is for keeping dodge and parry closer is if you're pushing for a ctc cap like 96,4 or 102,4 like swelt said

HtL is still not a great factor for keeping Parry Rating 800 above Dodge (as I've always said). The uptime change from rating gain is actually fairly minimal, and on top of ratings having DR, the mechanic itself has a DR on the per rating value. At 12% Parry & 50% block chance, you get 1-2% more damage reduction out of parry than the DR formula tells you. That's worth about 100-200 rating, or as I've suggested in the past: "Keep them close together, but Parry always higher than Dodge".

[Bigbad]

Agility gave ~41% to dodge rating, strength 25% to parry. How is that about the same?

Since kings gives more strength then agility.... Combined with bs they give about the same parry/dodge, slightly more dodge as I said.

1% parry will give around 2% uptime in HtL, more like 2,5% at lower gearlevels and slowly going down the more parry you have. Currently with 60% block HtL is a 1,8% damage reduction (10% critblock * 30% * 60%=1,8%), 2% uptime would then be 0,036% damage reduction. Takes about 400ish rating for DR to equal 0,036% if you then add windwalk you easily come to 600+ ratings difference. But this is all napkin math so feel free to point out any errors

[Tschus]

Agility gave ~41% to dodge rating, strength 25% to parry. How is that about the same?
But they should've just made Agility give Dodge Rating, it would've solved a lot of the clarity issues they had with it.

HtL is still not a great factor for keeping Parry Rating 800 above Dodge (as I've always said). The uptime change from rating gain is actually fairly minimal, and on top of ratings having DR, the mechanic itself has a DR on the per rating value. At 12% Parry & 50% block chance, you get 1-2% more damage reduction out of parry than the DR formula tells you. That's worth about 100-200 rating, or as I've suggested in the past: "Keep them close together, but Parry always higher than Dodge".

I've been trying this on your spreadsheet recently. If the damage reduction result is accurate, I'll have to keep my parry rating a little bit lower than dodge rating (but I still have more parry % than dodge %) to get the maximum damage reduction.

Seems like a little bit odd, any thoughts?