Protection Warriors?

[Raysere]

It seem silly to have two limiting factors on how often we can use shield block. So we are limited by our RPS and the actual cooldown on shield block?

I would think a more entertaining system would be to allow us to generate slightly more rage in order to reward a good rotation with the ability to possibly throw in either a few extra heroic strikes or a shield barrier.

If he limiting factor overall for shield block is our RPS what's the point of even having a cooldown on it? Or do we generate enough rage when hit/exp capped in order to keep shieldblock on cooldown?

There isn't a cooldown on it per-say, but you are limited to using it twice in the span of 15 seconds. I think that limitation simply exists to try and discourage doing silly/crazy things to try and get more uptime than intended while trying not to impose upon 'intellegent' SB usage to better mitigate specific factors in encounters. I don't really find that limitation to be a problem during my beta shenanigans thus far, I don't often find myself in a situation where I've enough rage to use SB often enough to be limited by it. It should be mentioned that Shield Barrier has no such limitation.

[Tengenstein]

do people even bother reading my posts?

Side note: Are you sure Reck still increases damage taken? I could have sworn it no longer stated it did in the tooltip in the current build.

Last line of my last post reads;

the loss of the increased damage taken is kinda a two edged sword in MoP

Or do we generate enough rage when hit/exp capped in order to keep shieldblock on cooldown?

The most rage productive cycles for Prot are SS>Rev>Rev>Rev which produces 45 rage per 6 seconds (7.5rps), or (SNB)SS>Dev>(SNB)SS>Dev which produces 40 rage ever six seconds, (6.666RPS). Enrage will increase the RPS by 50%. So yes, as long as we have the perfect procs and are enraged 100% of the time we would be able to have SB up 100% of the time bar its CD. The chances of having the perfect proc rate and 100% enrage uptime aswell are somewhat slim, so in reality, outside of Avatar it's not really possible to use SB even on CD.

Though my thoughts are that does not have to be neccesarily bad for protection warriors to have some RNG on their rage income....

If we then look at the odds of the situation you described: Nót having zerg rage available, nót having battle/commanding shout available, nó parry's, no dodges and no critical blocks and then having your shield slam miss/parry/dodge. Well, sure it will happen at some point troughout a fight, but it is unlikely that it would be very common.

Some RNG is fine, however the difference between how much rage we produce based on rotational procs is 400%, you have no control over whether you get SnB procs and extremely limited control over Rev and enrage procs. and without hit and expertise you have 22.5% chance that even if you could force all your procs 100% of the time you would still produce 0 rage. 22.5% of your shield slams and your Revs produce no rage? 22.5% of the time your Enrage does nothing. not having the hit/expertise caps feel like not having the def cap in wrath. Yes they should be viable threat stats. No, they should not feel like an entry barrier to tanking

And íf it happens, we are not dead right away, you can see your shield slam miss/parried/dodged, you can take a look at your current rage, and then you have still have some viable options left. For example, demoralizing banner, demoralizing shout, shield wall and even shield barrier when you do have some rage. (just not enough for shield block, which is where we talk about)

In a pinch i would use Demo banner, its a raid CD so It's usually going to be saved for some specific point in an encounter, Demo shout is fine but you're gonna find yourself defenceless alot more often than its available, same for shield wall and even shield barrier. You are running on fumes, even with the hit/exp cap, and doing your rotation perfectly you cannot use Shield block on CD you just do not produce the rage.and the problem with using shield barrier is that it has a hidden rage cost. with out shield block up you don;t block as often, which means you don't crit block as often which means you don't enrage as often, and with my current avoidance and mastery I'm 3 times as likely to enrage with SB up as I am without it. If you have to use rage on Shield Barrier you'll find you really have to leave you defences down for a long time if you want to afford to use shield block. which kinda forces you to either cycle shield blocks which leaves you open a lot of the time. or you end up praying you can afford a cheap Shield barrier every 5 seconds or so.

[Tengenstein]

Ponderings. ANd i've hard 3 hours sleep so corrections will be necassary

I'm slowly building a spreadsheet to give me some guesstimates of how our rage is going to play out. Assuming we aren't weaving shouts or TC or dragon roars and are just using Shield Slam (SS), Revenge (R) and Devastate (D), we have could model our as a set of cylcle, that always end in shield slam. which would usually mean we have 6 second cycles but occaisionally would have 4.5 seconds or 3 second cycles. If we treat ones ending with shield slam as seperate from cycles ending in an SnB boosted Shield Slam (SNB) we have 15 possible cycles;

R R R SS
R R D SS
R R D SNB
R D R SS
D R R SS
D D R SS
D R D SS
D R D SNB
R D D SS
R D D SNB
D D D SS
D D D SNB
D D SNB
D R SNB
D SNB

someone make sure i Havne't missed any.

We can easily calculate the Rage per Second (RPS) of each cycle, each R being worth 10, SS being 15 and SnB as 20 divided by the cycle length of usaully 6, sometimes 4.5 and rarely 3 seconds. what i need to calculate the given chance that any cycle will occur and for that i need to know the chance that revengewill be available on any given GCD. that's where i'm coming undone is it to much of a stretch to assume that

1.5 / boss swing speed * (parry% + Dodge%) = Revenge proc chance

[Tengenstein]

So, with a little thievery i have the beginnings a of a rage calculator, needs rather a lot of smoothing out but meh. works well enough for a beta spreadsheet :P

[Airowird]

For the SB uptime cells: You can enable Iteration through Tools > Options > (depends on version, but something mathy) > Iterations
Enabling it will allow circular references as those you are trying to do in B41 & B43.

Oh, and you're welcome ;-)

[Tengenstein]

I'm kinda disapointed that that's the only comment it's gotten. There's gotta be mistakes in there :P


EDIT: It does kinda show just how well we scale with boss haste though, gonna enjoy PVP against dual wield specs.

[Airowird]

Not just boss haste but also multi-tanking!
But that also means that we'll be shitfaced bad vs caster mobs ... oh the joy...

[Tengenstein]

20% enrage uptime against caster mobs is gonna hurt, perhaps they should add a enrage proc off spell reflects or interupts.

[Gregasaurous]

Well, since we've never really had many reliable tools for multiple caster mobs, just EHP, i don't see our decreased enrage uptime against those being that big of a deal. Enrage proc off an interrupt would be really nice though.

[Tengenstein]

On live at least we get some extra rage from casters becuase they ignore our defences, and spell reflect gives us a bucket load. in beta my 450ilvl against a 2s swing timer boss i get just shy of 5.4RPS. if i increase it towards infinity we end up just shy of 4.8RPS, thats a 10% resource loss and that will drop our potential SB(ar) up time by about the same amount, whereras if we get a second target to tank(or if the boss dual wields) we jump to jsut above 5.9RPS and increase the up time on Sb(ar) to by about the same. a 10% increase on damage blocked or absorbed is a pretty large amount.



EDIT: updated the calculator, done a fair amount of clean upand stared at option screens long enough to remember some of the less basic bits of excel......and how the hell do you delete attachments in previous posts?

rage numbers 15799.3.xls

[Airowird]

EDIT: updated the calculator, done a fair amount of clean upand stared at option screens long enough to remember some of the less basic bits of excel......and how the hell do you delete attachments in previous posts?

Edit the post, remove the [ ATTACH ] tags part.

[Tengenstein]

Don't actually see those anywhere. anyone on the US official forums care to point out to Blizz just how meh we are and how we scale really poorely with stats but really well with mobs so that what the boss is doing still actuall makes a hug difference to us as tanks?

[Tengenstein]

Enrage proccing when Sbar is fully consumed sound good to anyone else? Kinda like how rapture procs work?

[Travelsize]

As long as our rage gen doesn't get nerfed to compensate (see: Disc Priests and Rapture), it would make Sbar a bit more interesting. There's probably a few tactics to get Sbar to consume the minimum amount of rage and guarantee an enrage after the first or second boss swing. Charge->SS->Sbar->shout->rev/dev/ss to Sblock etc or even glyphed charge->Sbar->boss swing->ss etc come to mind immediately.

[Tengenstein]

I think that's a pretty convincing argument against Rapture type enrage mechanics. Not so much small Sbar at the start of a fight since we can guarantee we have both Zerker Rage and Avatar available and our first SS is going to be 45 rage so enrage for first 6 seconds are going to be wasted and small Sbar before vengenace stack is just gonna make us squishier which is kind acounter intuitive, but later in the fight we might pop a small sbar to burn some extra rage before and up enraged just becuase.

I'm starting to think its just going to have to be "when Sbar absorbs damage you have a "Mastery" chance to enrage.

Which is kind awhat we really want, something that will work to enrage us when critically blocking isn't an option, but isn't going to have a negative effect if can block, the last thing we really want is to have SB and SBar up at the same time, and Sbar fully absorb a hit that could otherwise be a critical block.

[Travelsize]

I do know that only one mob beating on me, no matter the size, is pretty boring at the moment. High-density quest areas with moderate respawn rates are fun, but areas with low mob density and single bosses in the limited amount of instance tanking I've done so far have been pretty boring.

I mean when you think about it, we're basically tanking in the live incarnation of Fury- keep your enrage active at all costs!

I suppose it would be too simple to just have protection generate rage from taking magical damage. Mastery chance to enrage on Sbar absorb is really... boring, unintuitive, and complex?

It will be interesting to see if they do any fights with one tank on boss and one tank handling adds. If they don't include an arbitrary "keep the boss and adds apart" mechanic and make sure the add damage is very significant, you could end up in a situation where you can game the phase with a warrior offtank who picks up mobs, sits next to the boss, and dumps executes and revenges into it with a full vengeance stack. Between charge and our other mobility options we've got several good ways to pluck an errant mob out of the raid and get back to the boss quickly.

...Hang on, are Sbar absorbs slowing down the Vengeance stack? That's counterproductive.

[Tengenstein]

I don't know.

I would assume that absorbed damage still gives vengeance as it still gives rage on live, However i recall parry streaks not giving vengeance and i know you still get rage for the damage a parry would have done, will have to test this at some point today. I don't think they'll let just generate rage from magic damage taken as it doesn't really fit with the whole "active mitigation" gimmick tanks are getting. mastery chance on Sbar may be boring and unintuitive it may be, but it works and least allows some sort of scaling with Sbar and stats. We need something to make up for the fact complete absorbs prevent parries/dodged/critical block without revenge or enrage procs we lose a good 30% of resource gain.

Also noticed the calculator has an error in calculating the final RPS; B44 reads =(B38*(1+(0.5*(B37/100)))..... it shouldn't have the /100.

rage numbers 15799.4.xls

[Airowird]

It's simple, SBar should not be checked before avoidance/block. Absorbing damage that would never actually occur is stupid and I recall a similar discussion about disc priests in tBC where shields were absorbing 'too much' damage, causing them to be useless and if they can fix that, SBar should work the same way, right?

The Vengeance thing is a bit more complicated. Because it gives prot wars (and DKs) more Vengeance than Druids/Paladins, but then what about their self-heals? It would need to be tested to be sure, maybe give us a rough idea about how much Vengeance each tank actually gets when they got the "expected" active tanking damage reduction running.

[Travelsize]

Sbar does not appear to affect the vengeance stack, limited testing done by letting mobs beat on me with and without using sbar. This is how it should be of course. We still need something to get enrage from magic heavy bosses though.

If you're low on health, have sblock going, and have rage, you should probably put up an Sbar. Aside from rage consumption and overhealing there doesn't seem to be any downside to having Sbar and Sblock running simultaneously.

[Tengenstein]

That's good to know.

I keep looking back at this entry in Theck's blog and thinking it would it would probably be a simpler way of working out enrage uptimes. particularly for arms/fury,

I was doing some testing to work out rage gains from zerker stance are (2.5 x base weapons speed from white swings and 1 rage for every percent of our total health lost) and it turns out we have a new spell school; Divine, that doesn't cause any rage gains, anyone care to post that on the US official forums?