Harsh Words and Steel: A Protection Warrior Guide

[Tengenstein]

My recent addition was in no way a response to your request.

The kind of thing your asking for is personal preference thing. I might as well recommend that everyone transmog to conqueror's siegebreaker plate, use the herald of the titans title and mount rusted ironbound protodrakes. My ability macros are good for me, but they won't be for everyone, and likewise your macros i would never use. In my personal opinion they're awful. but that's my personal opinion; I have no maths to back it up or even a general consensus amongst my peers. If i was to add a macro section to the guide it would pretty much read "macro whatever you find helpful or necessary to improve your game play"

However, what i am getting asked a lot in game is how do i balance my dodge and parry now at 85, and without Theck's macro, my response has either been, "you need to do a lot of maths....", or "don't worry about you get so much parry off gear its probably impossible to reforge enough dodge without neglecting something else" which are fine but people want something nice and simple so they don't have to sit with a calculator at the reforger and redo their maths after changing every single piece.

[Airowird]

Just throw them Mastery > Dodge/Parry, just keep em at equal ratings!! It usually has those two within 5% efficiency of eachother!

[Bodasafa]

5: Spell Priority

Bearing in mind that simcraft is not up to speed on prot warrior priority this is just a gut feeling but I would suggest the following

1. Keep Shield Block up, or Shield Barrier as appropriate
2. Keep the Weakened Blows debuff up Via Thunderclap, this debuff can be applied by any tank
3. Shield Slam
4. Battle/Commanding shout
5. Revenge
6. Devastate
7. Heroic Strike/Cleave on Ultimatum procs
8. Dump excess rage with Shield barrier>Execute>Heroic Strike/Cleave

What are your thoughts about weaving in Demo Shout and Dragon Roar/Shock Wave?

[Bodasafa]

My recent addition was in no way a response to your request.

The kind of thing your asking for is personal preference thing. <snip> If i was to add a macro section to the guide it would pretty much read "macro whatever you find helpful or necessary to improve your game play"

That's what I am after, improving my play. To do this I read as much information as possible, including other peoples ideas. I digest them and then come to my own conclusion about what makes sense and what works for me.

[Tengenstein]

Demo shout is off the GCD i believe so you don't need to weave it in. Anything that takes up GCDs that you would otherwise use on SS/Rev/Dev/BS/CS is an RPS loss and so leads to lesser SB/Sbar uptimes which has a negative impact on survivabilty. the only argument i can see for DR or shockwave would be on stunnable targets where them being stunned prevents them from hitting you.

[Bodasafa]

Thanks.

Have you seen in raid beta testing us needing to save SB for specific times or generally just hitting it on CD/rage allowance?

[Tengenstein]

Depends on the encounter, most of them your good to just try and keep SB up as much as possible, some of the raid encounters you will need to make sure you have SB up for specific attacks such as the Sha of Fear's Thrash.

[Arman]

Just throw them Mastery > Dodge/Parry, just keep em at equal ratings!! It usually has those two within 5% efficiency of eachother!

Dodge has a "cap" almost 4 times less than Parry according to Theck. The last numbers I saw were 60% for Dodge and 236% for Parry. Basically, unless dodge and parry numbers are vastly different you should be reforging dodge off regardless if it is itemized lower on gear.

[Arman]

Teng, I believe you meant Puissant and not Fractured for blue sockets. You have fractured listed as both a yellow and yellow/blue gem.

[Quietsch]

Dodge has a "cap" almost 4 times less than Parry according to Theck. The last numbers I saw were 60% for Dodge and 236% for Parry. Basically, unless dodge and parry numbers are vastly different you should be reforging dodge off regardless if it is itemized lower on gear.

If you need to round it, it would be 66 for dodge. Also you get a extremely high amount of parry from str, so your statement is simply wrong.

[Airowird]

Dodge has a "cap" almost 4 times less than Parry according to Theck. The last numbers I saw were 60% for Dodge and 236% for Parry. Basically, unless dodge and parry numbers are vastly different you should be reforging dodge off regardless if it is itemized lower on gear.

Wrong.

You forget that Strength gives hidden Parry rating (at 92.8% conversion, 97.44% if you take the kings buff into account), so you actually have a lot more parry rating already!
If you REALLY want to make sure they are equal, the point to aim for is
Dodge Rating = 27,75114% * (Parry Rating + 92.8% * buffed Strength)
OR
Parry Rating = 3,603456 * Dodge Rating - 92.8% * buffed Strength

At 7500 Strength (roughly MoP heroic blues) this equals to something like 3500 Dodge rating vs 5650 Parry rating. Assuming you find ratings at equal amounts, that is not even 25% of your dodge rating reforged to parry, not exactly something you should do "regardless of itemization".

Edit: so yeah, Dodge usually has to be a bit lower, but honestly, even at equal ratings you lose very minimal avoidance overall, mostly because Parry has such an easy DR curve.

PS: Caps are 65,63144% for Dodge and ~236,5% for Parry, FYI.

[Arman]

If you need to round it, it would be 66 for dodge. Also you get a extremely high amount of parry from str, so your statement is simply wrong.

The Str-> Parry has nothing to do with it. The asymptotes for dodge and parry are approximately four times different.

[Airowird]

The Str-> Parry has nothing to do with it. The asymptotes for dodge and parry are approximately four times different.

Str -> Parry has everything to do with how much dodge rating vs parry rating are valued, because you reforge RATINGS, not avoidance chances!

[Arman]

Str -> Parry has everything to do with how much dodge rating vs parry rating are valued, because you reforge RATINGS, not avoidance chances!

When you reforge ratings you ARE reforging avoidance chances by extension. It's why we used to try and keep dodge and parry within 1% of each other before 4.3 hit. We reforged the rating to keep a certain percentage difference because of the common dr for both at the time.

[Quietsch]

...
Str is included in the parry-DR. Thus with more str, parry rating grants less parry. Why exactly should the str -> parry conversion have nothing to do with the dodgerating/parryrating-ratio?

[Takethecake]

From what I understand you essentially want to compare the overall % of dodge and parry, not ratings. You can't just say keep the ratings roughly equal or keep parry rating x% higher. From looking at the graph from theck I just saw the cliff notes version as

10% dodge <-> ~20% parry
15% dodge <-> ~40% parry
20% dodge <-> ~60% parry

You can get deeper than that from the formulas to find the exact value that wastes the least amount of avoidance, but personally it won't matter much to me because I'll be focusing on hit/exp/mastery anyways in the first tier of MoP.

[Tengenstein]

ANd this is why i've provided/perloined Theck's Macro.

[Takethecake]

Ah yeah forgot their was a macro version of the formula! Maximizing avoidance doesn't really matter much to me till 90 so I just filed it under "that may be useful someday"

[Airowird]

ANd this is why i've provided/perloined Theck's Macro.

I just tried out this macro and
a) it has a % sign after the actual ratio, makes no sense
b) I have no idea where you get the 'optimal' ratio from, it's dependant on your actual avoidances and imho, not a good idea to put a fixed number in there.
c) I might add an optimal ratio in the spreadsheet, as I cba writing it all out on the forum here

[Tengenstein]

a) Its thecks macro, i've tried with my limitied script knowledge to remove it and as yet am unsuccesful
b)I'm fairly sure its Cp/Cd, It's Thecks macro, it'll probably be gonod enough most of the time. feel free to give me a better one.
c) wants the prescious!