Prot warr - Stamina or mastery?

[Deleted]

There are three main factors for the whole discussion which can/will led to different results.

a) raid size
As we all probably already know 25M bosses hits WAY harder, so having a 10% buffer there can be much more worthwhile than a 10% buffer in 10M. I for myself can only state from 10M experience in the last ~ three years, just wanted to make that clear before hand.

b) healers
I could argue about their healing styles (proactive vs. reactive) etc pp but let's just assume they know what they're doing and the can anticipate what you're about to eat and use their heals accordingly. What will greatly differs (even on a 25M vs 25M or 10M vs 10M comparison) is the class combination.

I raid with a disc priest & a holy paladin (fairly common combination for 10M), me healing taken regulary looks something like that:

0. (shield barrier)
1. Beacon of Light
2. Atonement
3. Illuminated Healing (paladin mastery)
4. Powerword Shield (to procc rapture)

5. Chi Wave (from my co-tank)
6. AoE heals (prayer of healing, spirit shell, divine aegis)
7. Eternal Flame (fire and forget 30s hot from holy paladin) + Holy Shock

8. other selfheals (enraged regen, victory rush, impending victory, healthstone)

As you can see in this particular setup there's not much attention on me (and in fact my co tank needs just as much if not more selfheal to stay alive, spamming purify, expel harm, etc) or directed heals. While we regulary eat the most damage there's just enough raid damage going on to keep us alive with some additional love from instants/hots. You could argue that having more total damage reduction lowers the amount of smart heals we'd need (via Atonement) but i think you got the general idea. There's just no room for a scenario when a healer has to decide between using a heal vs greater heal on me unless things goes downhill (somebody screwed up on a mechanic, we timed our personals bad for predictable bursts, etc).

c) bosses & approach ('tactic')
There are several ways to beat an encounter from solo tanking it over kiting things to the Vaelestraz room to ...

So let's see: Last tier there were two bosses in particular who could give me a headache on 10M, Mel'jarak and Shek'zeer (heroic mode). Both could literally "instagib" me between two heal casts when my shield barriers dropped. Having considerable more health allowed me to survive one more unmitigated hit.

On Meljarak we liked to CC the puddle throwers so i still had to deal with lots of +%haste from the heal casters. Other raids cc'ed some of them because they had the healers (ie: druid, monk) to handle movement better.
On Shek'zeer i tanked ALL of the smaller adds manmode, so they empowered each other and gave me a very good beating (600k+ vengeance), but i had 4 healers to back me up including resto shaman for +10% health. Other raids tanked 3 smaller + 1 big add together or kited some of the smaller ones or used hunter/warlock pets to reduce the damage considerably.

For both cases: i just did what guaranteed my survivability in x out of y cases instead of hoping for the best, the mantra was (and should be for all tanks) gear for worst cases. That's why Theck even started those whole modeling thing, he was afraid to die to a series of hits without much attention of the healers. But this tier is considerable different to the last one: there's just no "instagib" scenario to be afraid of (in 10M).

Possible exceptions
1) Horridon after his buddy dies but that's more to all the other stuff going on and less due his heavy damage on it's own. Our healers have to spend every third global on those dire beasts, if that lines up badly with a direcall/triple puncture/2x melee swing combo... ouch. But he hits that hard that adding 10% or 20% stamina alone won't allow you to survive, in such a scenario you have to rely on personals or just kite him (thanks to Double Swipe you have a decent amount of time to run away).
2) Tortos if you solo tank him, those Bats will heal after you drop below a certain amount of hitpoints (550k, not % based) but if you can bring a third healer instead of a second tank keeping up the crystal buff isn't all that hard with the extra vengeance. As said before, there are some differenct approaches that work just as well (if not better) like kiting the bats or killing them with two tanks which adds a noticeable amount of control (stuns), cooldowns (personal + external) - so just saying x is king there can be plain wrong.

tldr; at least for 10M it depends on how you handle things, with high enough itemlevel (52-something) and the option to change to stam trinkets for nonblockable burst-heavy fights like Megaera, Council, etc i just don't see a clear reason to stick to a stamina overload when i'm not in the danger of dying and mastery on the other hand would add both on damage dealt and less damage intake side. Sadly our options aren't just as good as stacking haste or crit and getting both a resource control boost over gemming stam and a noticeable damage increase and we can only hope for some adjustments in the near future but that's still no justificating to dumping *everything* into a stamina when the normal reason for a wipe is failure of a raidmember to a certain mechanic and no tank death. It's not LK all over again when you needed 45k to survive an ability.

I like hit cap+expertise hard cap. Then stamina. the 5% more change to get critical block is not that because it doesn't even help at many deadly things bosses do.

The difference is roughly ~ 10.000 mastery from gems & enchants & trinkets which adds up to ~ 6,6% block and ~ 37% (!!!) critblock at the exchange of 9600 stamina or ~ 180.000 hitpoints (before resto shaman buff). And you could still argue about the exchange rates of gems (0.75:1 stam:mastery) versus trinkets (1.5:1 stam:mastery for lei shen vs council pieces) if you want to get the most out of both.

[Deleted]

I would say that 10k is a bit over the top, unless the decision is 20 gems x 240 stam or 20 gems x 320 mastery, ignoring every single bonus. At this ilvl we are at a point where gemming hit/exp doesn't translate directly into mastery gains (especially hit, which ends as dodge/parry), because we already have a lot of hit/exp on gear.

Trinket are another 3500 sec stats, ofc, but until I get them to drop, well.. I can't choose.

At least I end up deciding between green/purple/blue or green/orange/yellow gems, so I end up deciding between ~3000 mastery or ~2250 sta. Enchants are only ~350 mastery vs 300 stam.

[jason1975]

Well, Theck made a recent post stating gems should be the last place you go for stamina.
http://www.sacredduty.net/2013/04/12...ocket-stuffer/

So, not only do I disagree with the "significantly better than any other stat" but I'll go on to say that we gain twice as much value from mastery than a prot paladin that if we were doing fights with high sources of damage, then mastery would be the go to over stam. We also gain 10% less benefit from stam.
Note, never have I said for low hits would I drop stam. I strictly stated if the hits were 350k+ that I'd gem mastery instead of stamina for a Protection Warrior.[COLOR="red"]

Those comparisons between Haste/Stam ratios for gems (essentially looking at DPS vs. Survivability tradeoffs) aren't really valid for warriors. For us it's a survivability vs. survivability game. All Theck is saying is that the Haste:Stam ratios are most favorable to Stamina on the trinkets, and least favorable to them on the Gems/Enchants.

Unless you're trying to add crit or something to get your DPS up, there really isn't a comparable situation for warriors. Stam >> Mastery for smoothing spike damage.

[Recke]

Those comparisons between Haste/Stam ratios for gems (essentially looking at DPS vs. Survivability tradeoffs) aren't really valid for warriors. For us it's a survivability vs. survivability game. All Theck is saying is that the Haste:Stam ratios are most favorable to Stamina on the trinkets, and least favorable to them on the Gems/Enchants.

Unless you're trying to add crit or something to get your DPS up, there really isn't a comparable situation for warriors. Stam >> Mastery for smoothing spike damage.

Once again, it depends on the amount of damage taken. my entire argument since my first post in this thread is that for high bursts (350k per melee swing) and if the boss has attack speed/damage buff, then mastery will provide, more often than not, more survivability. For spike damage that won't kill you? Sure, Stamina. And no, that isn't all Theck was saying because he also included tables for Mastery/Control, Avoidance, Mastery/Avoidance, etc. He played around with most viable prot paladin gearing ideas and showed that Stam was better for a prot paladin, even stating that Haste was sacrificing survivability for damage gain. Warriors, gaining more from mastery, and having a way to maximize it's usage during burst periods (of melee), and gaining less stamina than most other tanks, don't follow his chart. The entire Stam vs Mastery is for gems (which favors Mastery in terms of value) and for my posts, during high burst damage that would kill either tank regardless (aka 350k per melee swing) that Mastery has a better survivability rate. And I don't understand the "unless you're trying to add crit" part, because Mastery is more valuable for warriors than both mastery and haste for prot paladins.

[Deleted]

What Espada wrote is the same side I'm on.

Personally I would never favor a mastery trinket over a stamina trinket. It is pointless this tier because of the stat conversion ratio.

The only real difference is from gems/reforges. No-one argues that you should go for hit/exp caps first which is still a lot of secondary stats (7650).
Additionally no-one argues that you reforge for mastery thereafter.

So all it comes down is how you lay out your gems which in the end isn't a huge change.

Stamina:
blue - 240sta
yellow - 160mastery/120sta
red - 160exp/120sta

Mastery:
blue - 160mastery/120sta
yellow - 320 mastery
red - 160exp/160mastery

If we look at 12 gems that is probably a difference of 1080sta vs 1440mastery. Of course it depends heavily on your gem colors.