I have an issue with most proposed warrior stat priorities.

[Krennick]

The original poster may have an issue with most proposed warrior stat priorities. I have an issue with the assumption that shield block is a go-to ability that we should use a lot.

Tengenstein is correct in the stat value posted in #39, but though it has been voiced a couple of times in this thread it seems most commenters are happy to completely ignore the question: Should you be using shield block?

Consider it please - what does shield block do? What does it not do?

Consider this also - feel free to go back to http://sacredduty.net/2012/09/18/l90...tion-followup/ and read through the entire thing. One thing I'm pretty sure you will not find is any consideration that the damage scenarios that are being theorycrafted are anything other than 100% blockable. In other words, the conclusions are pretty good in the scenario where 100% of dmg coming at you is possible to reduce with blocks and crit blocks.

This is not really how raid fights work out these days. I don't have an issue with Theck deciding to take a limited view of things - because the assumptions and restrictions you make is what makes the modelling possible - and it's such a valuable thing to have that I'm happy to read it. But when you want to use these kinds of theorycrafting results to make decisions about how to gear your tank it's necessary to understand the limitations of the model.

So the first thing I do when facing an encounter is ask myself this: Is this one fight where the damage is overwhelmingly (near 100%) physical and blockable? Because if it is - this would be a fight where I should consider being fully mastery speccing and using shield block on cooldown. I'm not saying it's a given - in that fight I might STILL choose to use shield barrier over shield block - but a 100% blockable fight I should at least consider using shield block on cooldown.

If the fight is not 100% blockable - why should I even consider using shield block?

Ok, that's being a bit too direct. Shield block is a tool, and there are times and places where the tool is the right tool for the job. But the point is - due to the relatively large amount of non-blockable damage we have to at least question whether a DEFAULT choice to use shield block is correct.

The most interesting point made in this thread so far was made in post #21 by Tengenstein. The specifics of his point aside it partially addresses the "Why you should ignore magic dmg and consider only the physical damage" argument in SOME situations (the why to use shield block argument). There may be times when there is raid wide magic damage which healers are assigned to top up - where the tanks part of the raid wide magic damage is ignored in the healing/survivability stakes - because it's being automatically alleviated.

This is why I'm skeptical when I see suggestions to run simulations with "some" magic damage to see if it skews the value of certain tanking stats. The situations are never quite as simple as that.

To the specific point raised by Teng - I unfortunately do not have the logs from when I tanked Stone Guard 10m, but when I tanked it 25m I took 40k per rend flesh tick as he said and 20k per melee hit. Yes, 20k. Not 200k (or 180k). I'm not sure this is actually a good example of a place to use shield block, but as said - I completely accept that there may be fights where the survivability challenge is predominantly blockable and for those situations it's worth considering if shield block should be used (and reforged for).

It is possible to have a fight with 90% blockable and 10% magic dmg where the challenge to the tanks survival is predominantly from the blockable damage and shield block is in play. It is possible to have the same fight with 9 times the magical damage - where the challenge to the tanks survival from blockable damage is the same - the blockable and magic split is 50/50 and the increased vengeance makes shield barrier so powerful that shield block is again no longer really valuable enough to use.

[Aggathon]

I agree with a lot of what you say, and I will even go one further: I believe "going for maximum shield block uptime" is a pipedream. That is that even at maximum shield block uptime and trying to cover gaps with shield barrier, trying to "always have it covered" and going for TDR rules is a bad idea. Honestly I think that giving current tanking mechanics... YOU'RE GONNA TAKE A FULL HIT. Why not gear towards assuming that is going to happen and using sblock and sbar manually instead of automatically as situations required, and having a big huge stock of HPs so that small regular hits don't matter, and big boss hits aren't as relevant.

I said it as a joke in another thread, but I'm starting to convince myself of it:

Stat Priority should be as such:
Hit/Expertise to cap
Gem stam, go for hybrid socket bonuses that give exp/mastery/stam
reforge to mastery after hit/expertise.

Seems like a sound strategy to me. What are your thoughts Krennick?

[Ion]

I think you need to change your title back to Stam Czar. You know it's what you want to do.

[Aggathon]

it might happen...

[Tengenstein]

What about healer mana? with Krennicks numbers (which i assume are more correct than mine) your eating 80kdps with no CTC events/active mitigations. That doesn't exactly seem particularly spiky. with 2 dogs on me i could push 6 seconds sans healing before i fell over, I just don't feel the need to pad my health bar. I feel like i have enough stam from gear and hybrids in blue sockets. Maybe this a case where Blizzard have actually done a decent job and made gearing interesting and we need to tailor our gearing to whats actually killing us. I don't think i've died whilst the healers have mana

[Ion]

What about healer mana? with Krennicks numbers (which i assume are more correct than mine) your eating 80kdps with no CTC events/active mitigations. That doesn't exactly seem particularly spiky. with 2 dogs on me i could push 6 seconds sans healing before i fell over, I just don't feel the need to pad my health bar. I feel like i have enough stam from gear and hybrids in blue sockets. Maybe this a case where Blizzard have actually done a decent job and made gearing interesting and we need to tailor our gearing to whats actually killing us. I don't think i've died whilst the healers have mana

Having healed (reluctantly, and with almost no gear) that fight...I agree that the tanks don't really die while healers have mana. But if you're going to gear for what's killing you you'll need to gear for other people taking no unnecessary damage. It's not really tank damage that drains healer mana, from what I've seen.

[Krennick]

Btw, about my number from 25m Stone Guard - that dot was something like 75% of all the dmg done to me. 40k per tick - not sure how often it ticks but Teng seems to think he knows it ticks twice per second. I was off-tanking one statue.

Problem with going for max shield uptime being a pipe dream - if you use shield block and shield barrier situationally you easily end up greatly reducing the value of mastery. The models that aim for maximum shield block uptime creates a value for mastery that is ONLY true with maximum shield block uptime. Since even the model that favours shield block the most had 10% more total damage reduction from barrier over block I tend to favour barrier - and respec out of mastery as much as I can.

I think stamina is still a very good stat - but as long as you can get arguably enough stamina with something less than two stamina trinkets I think it's better to use sockets (and enchants where that is an option) for secondary stats. You can change between avoidance and stamina trinkets on the fly, but you can't regem on the fly.

So I think the most sensible GENERIC way to set up a warrior tank is to use one or two stamina trinkets according to personal/healer preference and additionally gem for parry/expertise/dodge/hit (either stat being good, this being an approximate priority choice to allow the gem+reforge to give good results) and then reforge for hit and expertise caps (soft or hard on expertise I'm still not sure about) and get the right combination of dodge and parry with the absolutely minimum mastery - and then when tanking just use shield barrier. Yeah, you can use shield block for a big dmg spike. You can also use shield barrier for it. And where shield block may reduce a 200k hit to 140k or 80k shield barrier may reduce it to 50k or 90k or 120k or something else depending on your vengeance - not necessarily less, possibly more. Each damage spike needs to be assessed for which mitigation will be most effective - on the fly, looking at your vengeance.

You could compile a list saying that for dmg spike abc on boss 123 if I have less than 120k AP including vengeance I should shield block and if I have more I should shield barrier. In most cases however (where shield block does something) just using either will work and the difference between them will not be huge. But because barrier will always be available and PROBABLY always viable- I'd just reforge/gem etc for barrier and not for block.

Edit: Additionally - stamina gives you more health and that. Dodge/parry/expertise/hit gives you more rage - gives you more shield barrier - gives you more damage mitigation. As long as you don't die to dmg spikes that the healers cannot react to quickly enough - you have enough stamina and don't benefit from more of it - but you DO benefit from more dodge/parry/hit/expertise.

[Tengenstein]

I actually oucked up on the dog melee swing, its 40k bleed per second and then 2x 20k melee ever 2 seconds, so 60k DPS.

[Ion]

So I think the most sensible GENERIC way to set up a warrior tank is to use one or two stamina trinkets according to personal/healer preference and additionally gem for parry/expertise/dodge/hit (either stat being good, this being an approximate priority choice to allow the gem+reforge to give good results) and then reforge for hit and expertise caps (soft or hard on expertise I'm still not sure about)

Ignoring the rest, if expertise is good, expertise is good to the hard cap. It doesn't lose any value from 0->hard cap.

[Krennick]

Broken record here - different perspective.

Worst case scenario - shield block. You use shield block, not knowing or thinking that a lot of the dmg incoming is not blockable. End result is that you use rage and get no mitigation for it.
Worst case scenario - shield barrier. You might mitigate slightly less than you would have if you had used shield block. You still get some decent mitigation out of your rage.

Therefore the DEFAULT recommendation should be to use shield barrier. It would allow even unthinking idiots not to ruin things for themselves. It might not always be best, but it will always be good.

[Selendis]

hmm... continuing Krennicks train of thought, wouldn't it be relatively simple to calculate the best way to go for each individual boss?
given the boss' blockable/unblockable dps (this can't be that difficult to find, Stone guards were discussed earlier in this thread)
and the characters stats.
Use boss dps and stam to calculate vengeance... vengeance to calculate Sbar values. (is this linear with rage btw?)
use blockable dps and char stats to calculate dps reduction of shield block...

At the very least worth an attempt I reckon... are boss stats tabulated somewhere?
all of the above would be for one particular way of stat priorities of course, and possibly somewhat offtopic here...

[Tengenstein]

IF you're using Total Damage Reduction as your metric for "best" then yes, it is fairly simple. The problem is that TDR is not at the end of the day synonomous with what prevents tank death or what makes tanks easiest to heal.

[Airowird]

Worst case scenario - shield barrier. You might reduce slightly less damage than you would have if you had used shield block. You still get some decent damage reduction out of your rage.

Fixed. Absorbs are not mitigation, because they don't guarantee an overall damage reduction.

Therefore the DEFAULT recommendation should be to use shield barrier. It would allow even unthinking idiots not to ruin things for themselves. It might not always be best, but it will always be good.

But the point is to aim for the best! ... Well atleast the best shortened set of rules. Un this case the rules are simple: Get 2 gear sets, one Mastery-heavy set for fights where Shield Block focus is the best option, one Stamina/hit/exp-heavy set for unavoidable damage.

[Lightmgl]

Fixed. Absorbs are not mitigation, because they don't guarantee an overall damage reduction.

But the point is to aim for the best! ... Well atleast the best shortened set of rules. Un this case the rules are simple: Get 2 gear sets, one Mastery-heavy set for fights where Shield Block focus is the best option, one Stamina/hit/exp-heavy set for unavoidable damage.

This is what really bugs me about Warrior tanking at the moment. It feels like our stat weights are so incredibly situational compared to the other tanks. I am yet to see any similar discussions or confusion over stat weights to the degree that warriors seem to have currently and it feels like the general consensus for a warrior is either:

A. Reforge every single fight based on blocking mechanics
B. Go the barrier route (lesser of two evils) which gives you the better low end (block light fights) for a slight tradeoff on the high end (block heavy fights).
C. Go heavy mastery giving yourself a really good high end and a much lower low end

I'm not raiding hardcore this expansion so I just took option B but it really feels like Shield Barrier is a very sloppy design and our Mastery needs some benefit to something besides blocking. It should probably affect Shield Barrier in some way, which would put us on the same page as the other tanks.

Then again I suppose you could say we're lucky because we're seemingly the only tanks with any alternative to pure mastery stacking. Its just that we have the option for the wrong reason (awkward mastery and one of our primary mitigation mechanics not being affected by mastery) as opposed to the right reason (stat equilibrium).

[Airowird]

On top of that, Warriors are the only ones who have to chose between the Block and Armor/Spell reduction meta (hint: Block wins, even with the Dodge on it rather than Stamina like on the other 2)

[Dreador]

I'm a JC with a load of gems in the bag and I will be buying the reforge yak shortly. Not like it's a real fix but I have the options at least.

[Exiledknight]

This is what really bugs me about Warrior tanking at the moment. It feels like our stat weights are so incredibly situational compared to the other tanks. I am yet to see any similar discussions or confusion over stat weights to the degree that warriors seem to have currently and it feels like the general consensus for a warrior is either:

A. Reforge every single fight based on blocking mechanics
B. Go the barrier route (lesser of two evils) which gives you the better low end (block light fights) for a slight tradeoff on the high end (block heavy fights).
C. Go heavy mastery giving yourself a really good high end and a much lower low end

I'm not raiding hardcore this expansion so I just took option B but it really feels like Shield Barrier is a very sloppy design and our Mastery needs some benefit to something besides blocking. It should probably affect Shield Barrier in some way, which would put us on the same page as the other tanks.

Then again I suppose you could say we're lucky because we're seemingly the only tanks with any alternative to pure mastery stacking. Its just that we have the option for the wrong reason (awkward mastery and one of our primary mitigation mechanics not being affected by mastery) as opposed to the right reason (stat equilibrium).

See thats just the thing however, if you look at the current tier, there really arent many low block fights, even on fights like Heroic Feng where there is a lot of non blackable dmg going around he still hits like a mack truck when you are tanking him and you want to have the high SB uptime, barrier is awesome when you arent tanking to help eat some of the DoT dmg and the raid aoes. Looking at heart of Fear, other than Garalon it seems to be the case as well. Will of the emporer has a lot of downtime where SB is useless unless its titan gas there is no damage going out. While some fights it may be annoying and clunky overall looking at heroic encounters bosses are hitting like trucks, so the SB is amazing.

I may be missing a boss here but I dont think I am, my warrior is my alt however is also acting as our 3rd tank in the main raid as the player that was in that role had to stop raiding.

[Tengenstein]

Will of the emporer has a lot of downtime where SB is useless unless its titan gas there is no damage going out.

Down time is good for SB, lets it recharge, so that in between devastating Combos you can easily get back to back SBs giving it a much higher effective uptime than its CD will normally allow.

[Mornak]

Finally, a warrior tank thread that has a bit of agreement. I finally find something to read where I'm nodding my head instead of putting head in my palms, frustrated. My main has always been a warrior, and a tank at that. I've done it since pre-vanilla beta. This expansion has/had been the first time where I was always discouraged when I'd tank. Things just never seemed to feel right and click. After reading several comments here, I'm anxious to get home tonight, change a few things, and try it again. Thanks for the posts all!

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...ornak/advanced