[MoP Guardian] Thoughts on Mastery

[uzumati]

Ive been thinking about our mastery a little lately seeing as how bland it sounds. Would it be so bad to have a Cata Paladinish mastery?

Add to thick hide - Gives you a 35% chance for your armor to absorb 30% of incoming damage. Chance and Amount increased by Mastery.

Mastery - Increases your chance to absorb by .75% per point of mastery and increases the amount absorbed by 1.5% per point of mastery.

Numbers would need balancing of course as i just pull these numbers out of my A%^, but it would make mastery a little more interesting for us.

[Raugnaut]

Our MoP mastery COULD use some buffing- the way it stands, Mastery is nearly the worse stat on Beta for mitigation, period. Perhaps 5% more armor per point of mastery, and set us at 2 base mastery.

Your suggestion is pretty neat though, if completly uncontrollable. MoP Mastery = more you have, less damage you take (Although the amount per stat point truely makes Mastery an abysmal state). The only thing I do not like about my druid tanking is how RNG dependent it is. While I can count the number of times Ive actually seen RNG wipe us on one hand, I can STILL count the number of times. I shouldnt have to count em, and have it be 0 - RNG shouldnt decide whether or not I live or die, it should decide whether I take 20% more or less damage over an entire fight. Having a sure-fire mitigation is much better then powerful RNGish mitigation.

[exochaft]

Ive been thinking about our mastery a little lately seeing as how bland it sounds.

I believe druid tanking mastery has been the victim of the mentality "You can't please everyone, but let's try anyways." I'm not refuting that the mastery is bland, but I can see the reasoning behind these changes, and there's a few forces at work here.

If we look at our mastery on live for tanking, it's designed to scale as we gear up, however the mechanism to generate an SD shield to utilize mastery is still a matter of RNG. Since the inception of T13 2pc, generating SD absorbs became more predictable, however nothing we can do absolutely guarantees any damage reduction beyond tanking cooldowns. If you look at paladins/warriors, their mastery could be stacked to the point of guaranteeing/controlling melee damage reduction, and blood DKs have much more control over damage reduction via blood shields. While on average SD works fine, I believe Blizz wanted druids to have at least some guarantee of damage reduction which we can increase via gearing. Therefore, our mastery on MoP increases our armor, the only method of guaranteeing melee damage reduction for bears (leaving SD out of this since it's going thru some iterations right now).

However, there's a problem with our mastery increasing our armor. Sure, it's reliable in the fact that increasing armor always generates a survival increase, however it's veeeeeery passive (one of those big tanking changes for MoP was a more active survival model, which this mastery is not). While keeping SD as an absorb mechanism like it is on live, but modifying it to work under the new tanking model seems like the more obvious way to go (allowing mastery to increase the absorb size of SD), I have this super sneaking suspicion why Blizz did away with it: it resembles DKs way too much. Same goes with the first iteration of SD that reduced incoming melee damage by X%: it resembles shield tanks way too much, amongst other issues. While monks have the Stagger mechanism, plus various cooldowns, I don't think our SD/mastery change was affected much, if at all, by their tanking model.

So why have mastery increase armor and change SD to granting X% dodge? Rather simple, really, if you've played this game long enough. What have druids stereotypically been since they became viable tanks? Druid tank = high armor/HP/dodge machines. From BC to Cataclysm, even with the variations of SD absorbs we've seen, our selling points generally have been high armor/HP/dodge. While keeping true to what we've typically been, they've adjust our mastery/SD mechanics to take on a more active tanking model.

Is everything perfect about it right now? No, of course not. The biggest reason why we evolved to having SD absorb shields was because druids have typically been the victim of spike damage when we didn't avoid attacks. Therefore, FR has been changed to alleviate some of the RNG, but I feel it'll come down to our armor values with respect to other tanks that will make-or-break the druid tanking changes in MoP. Personally, I wouldn't have minded much if we kept SD as absorbs that we could control, even if it makes us seem like DKs to some degree.

[Kaeth]

If our previous mastery was indeed too much like DKs', I don't see that as a compelling reason to scrap it. Warriors and paladins both continue to use shields, and both of their masteries are block related. Oh, and they both get to have block-related mitigation skills that don't have a high chance of 100% failure.

[exochaft]

If our previous mastery was indeed too much like DKs', I don't see that as a compelling reason to scrap it. Warriors and paladins both continue to use shields, and both of their masteries are block related. Oh, and they both get to have block-related mitigation skills that don't have a high chance of 100% failure.

Well, think of all the iterations of SD we've had so far, starting from live into beta.

SD currently on live is an absorb mechanic that scales with mastery to make it bigger. To fit a more active mitigation tanking model, Blizz wanted to make SD a button. So if no changes were made other than the activation of SD, bears would have a button they could push to pop up an absorb bubble, which scales off of mastery (almost an exact copy of what DKs do). That, in itself, isn't a problem, because the mechanic works and can easily be tweaked to scale properly. If the problem was SD bubbles being too reliable, they wouldn't have moved onto the next model of straight up guaranteed damage reduction. The only "problem" with the ability is that it mirrors what DKs do exactly, and Blizz has been making an effort to make the tanks all unique in their own way.

The next iteration was to make SD a straight-up guaranteed melee damage reduction for the duration. Fortunately, we have direct blue post responses concerning the change from this version of SD to the new one granting dodge, so it's not really a mystery for the changes (for those that missed the blue post, that version was too reliable). However, if you read the entire post, it's very clear Blizz wants to make all tanks viable, but they want to make each unique in its own way. This theme supports the change from the SD absorbing damage to X% melee damage reduction (too much like DKs), and it also gives more reason to again change SD from X% melee damage reduction to X% dodge (straight up damage reduction is too reliable for our model and it's too similar to warrior/paladin tanks).

As I stated in my previous post, druids have been long known for their high armor and avoidance, which explains why SD/mastery is currently exemplifying this long-defining characteristic of feral tanks.

Now, you did mention warriors and paladins being very similar, which is very true. However, to make them completely different on every level would require a major overhaul of one or each class. Sure, both use shields, but it's better that two classes use shields (otherwise you start having loot table issues). Blizz has done a fairly good job at separating these two tanking classes that both use shields and plate: they have different resource systems, they each have their individual nuances in terms of survival CDs/utility, and the way they block attacks is different. Although it's subject to change, warriors' tanking mastery increases the chance to block and critically block passively, and Shield Block guarantees that they at least block (perhaps critical block) for 6 seconds. Paladins' tanking mastery increases only the chance to block, but using SotR guarantees blocking at least one attack, but anything blocked for the duration guarantees damage reduction more than a warrior (unless the warrior crit blocks). The two methods of mitigating melee attacks for warriors/paladins using shields is actually more dissimilar than SD bubbles (if scaled by mastery and activated by pushing a button) and DK blood shields (push a button to make a bubble, scales with mastery).

In all honesty... Blizz could do worse things with SD!

[tangedyn]

How good our Mastery is depends on how relevant EH will be in MoP.
From a TDR and TTL point of view, Mastery sucks. However, our Mastery is the only secondary stat out of all the 5 tanks that actually improves EH.

[Noviskers]

The one thing that worries me with the current mastery is that we run into the risk of hitting diminishing returns on armor if we hit a certain point. Another point I am worried about is how little armor you get from each point of mastery and since the only other mitigation stat that bears can reforge to is dodge, which will probably be on the majority of our gear, there is not much variation in the stat choice here.

[Themessiah]

The one thing that worries me with the current mastery is that we run into the risk of hitting diminishing returns on armor if we hit a certain point. Another point I am worried about is how little armor you get from each point of mastery and since the only other mitigation stat that bears can reforge to is dodge, which will probably be on the majority of our gear, there is not much variation in the stat choice here.

From what I understood, other stats such as haste were currently out performing dodge in terms of overall damage reduction, do to the increased rage they bring (and therefore, increased up time on our avoidance/recuperation abilities like savage defense and frenzied regeneration).

[exochaft]

The one thing that worries me with the current mastery is that we run into the risk of hitting diminishing returns on armor if we hit a certain point.

Figured I'd answer the first point you made since Themessiah hit on the second one.

Diminishing returns shouldn't really be a problem. As it currently stands, adding 1 point of armor increases your TTL by the same effective percent. While I don't want to bog down this post with math (you can look up the armor calculations for TTL), adding 1 point of armor when you have 100 base armor yields a higher damage reduction percentage than adding 1 point of armor at 10,000 base armor. Mathematically, though, you're increasing your TTL by the same percent regardless of your starting armor. Keeping this in mind, our Mastery would technically be better with the more armor we have, up until armor cap.

Now, why would rage generating secondary stats surpass mastery? Savage Defense, providing 40% dodge, is a huge TTL increase while it's up, and to ensure it's always up when possible, rage generating stats will trump mastery. Don't forget about Frenzied Regeneration, since we could use all of our excess rage to heal ourselves, also increasing our TTL.

Now, tangedyn was mentioning how from a TTL point of view mastery loses its worth and how it increases our EH, and that's essentially correct. When viewing EH and TTL through the lens of "current end-game raiding" content, the size of the hits we take is very large compared to our healthpool. From a TTL perspective (keep in mind, this means no external help), our armor is already so high and the melee hits we're taking are likely so big compared to our healthpool that any increase in mastery will likely not let you live any longer. From an EH perspective, our mastery (armor increase) does reduce the size of melee attack, and mastery would matter more if the armor increase was the difference between taking one extra hit and going splat.

While mastery does seem to pale in comparison to stats that increase our SD/FR uptime, it's still a useful stat, since every bit of armor up to 75%DR helps over length of an entire encounter, and SD doesn't guarantee we'll dodge anything. For druids, I think mastery is the fail-safe secondary stat: it's there when everything else fails.

[Dreyen]

i think the current mastery is interesting, its like a 100% chance to block a certain amount, rather than a 30-40% chance to block a fixed amount. I just think they should get rid of the link with armor though, it should be just "Reduces damage by 20%, and 1% more every 1 mastery", numbers welcome to change ofc.

[Elunedra]

Armor is a verry powerfull tool, the more you get of it the better it gets, think about those high armor items plate tanks had in ICC.
think about armor penetration how it got better the more you had of it.

Our new design will make us take more random higher hits that we got to heal up whit FR or that we got to avoid by keeping up SD but we cant keep that up 100%.
So our damage is more unpredictable, armor on the other hand is the best stat to make damage predicable it will make the randomness a bit less random.

our mastery might not be good atm but i feel i will shine in end game content when we are walking around whit like 65% dmg redction from armor.

the big downside however is how it is getting balanced, we have currently on live like 60% damage reduction from armor, i feel we will keep that when MoP goes live but that we need to "waste" like 15 mastery to get that same 60% dmg reduction and any mastery above that will start giving benefits.
i feel overall bear armor will not be about 10K higher then other tank by default like it is not but instead we need to spend like 15 mastery to get the same armor advantage we got atm on live

[NightZero88]

Armor is a verry powerfull tool, the more you get of it the better it gets, think about those high armor items plate tanks had in ICC.
think about armor penetration how it got better the more you had of it.

Our new design will make us take more random higher hits that we got to heal up whit FR or that we got to avoid by keeping up SD but we cant keep that up 100%.
So our damage is more unpredictable, armor on the other hand is the best stat to make damage predicable it will make the randomness a bit less random.

our mastery might not be good atm but i feel i will shine in end game content when we are walking around whit like 65% dmg redction from armor.

the big downside however is how it is getting balanced, we have currently on live like 60% damage reduction from armor, i feel we will keep that when MoP goes live but that we need to "waste" like 15 mastery to get that same 60% dmg reduction and any mastery above that will start giving benefits.
i feel overall bear armor will not be about 10K higher then other tank by default like it is not but instead we need to spend like 15 mastery to get the same armor advantage we got atm on live

Pity that the majority of things that "hurt" in Cata were magical effects where your armor and dodge does nothing. I don't see them changing this in MoP, honestly.

[Elunedra]

Pity that the majority of things that "hurt" in Cata were magical effects where your armor and dodge does nothing. I don't see them changing this in MoP, honestly.

looking at DS, magical dmg is mostly AOE effects that hit everyone, but the tanks usaly take hard melee hits, such as ultraxion, algemation on spine, tenticle on DW

[NightZero88]

looking at DS, magical dmg is mostly AOE effects that hit everyone, but the tanks usaly take hard melee hits, such as ultraxion, algemation on spine, tenticle on DW

True, but a lot of those big hits can't be dodged. Impale for example.

[Elunedra]

yes, but thats the same for all tanks and it has little todo whit out mastery

[NightZero88]

yes, but thats the same for all tanks and it has little todo whit out mastery

Impale can't be dodged, impale damage can be reduced by block though I think. Could be wrong. But even if I am, we have one CD, barkskin. All other tanks have a lot more after these changes. Assuming changes came and we were doing say, Madness in MoP, we'd be the worst tank on that fight for reducing damage.

[Elunedra]

no,
we still have 50% dmg reduction (Survival Instincts),
we still have +30% Max HP (Might of Ursoc),

+we are getting a lot more self healing effecs, ofcourse it all has tobe fine tuned but i feel we will be a bit like DK's in term of taking high hits but healing a lot of it up again
+we vcan get an extra lesser minor cooldown tru symbiosis

[Jeffyjimbob]

Impale can't be dodged, impale damage can be reduced by block though I think. Could be wrong. But even if I am, we have one CD, barkskin. All other tanks have a lot more after these changes. Assuming changes came and we were doing say, Madness in MoP, we'd be the worst tank on that fight for reducing damage.

I'm pretty sure we still have Survival Instincts on beta, afaik it was just another "bugged" skill that didn't make it to the official talent calculator, which hasn't been updated in ages last I checked.

I really doubt they'd be basing "CD attacks" on the other tanks alone, considering the fact that bears don't have a guaranteed damage reduction (atm) through SD.

[NightZero88]

no,
we still have 50% dmg reduction (Survival Instincts),
we still have +30% Max HP (Might of Ursoc),

+we are getting a lot more self healing effecs, ofcourse it all has tobe fine tuned but i feel we will be a bit like DK's in term of taking high hits but healing a lot of it up again
+we vcan get an extra lesser minor cooldown tru symbiosis

The problem is +health won't save you from impale like a shield wall for example will. It's the same arguement for why Tranq is a worse raid CD than bubble, etc. If a skill is going to kill you, more health won't help, stopping the damage will.

[Elunedra]

The problem is +health won't save you from impale like a shield wall for example will. It's the same arguement for why Tranq is a worse raid CD than bubble, etc. If a skill is going to kill you, more health won't help, stopping the damage will.

depents on hoe much damage it does, lets say you have 250k hp, then you can survive a 324K blow whit +30%, however whit a -50% dmg reduction you can survive up to 499K blow

but i realy dont see what this has todo whit our mastery. i think pally & monk are the only tanks that can cheat death tho.

@On Topic: i do this our armor mastery suffer a lot of sunder armor type bosses, such as morchok / warcheif blacktorn and such kinda fights