Warrior tanking - spiky damage? Assistance needed.

[Deleted]

Damage Difference: 92.5k per minute (1.5k DPS)

Unless I'm blind, you neglected to include the damage of whatever abilities (presumably devastate) gets used in the HR build in place of the SD procs. So when you factor that in, the increase from SD is less than what you have indicated. Also I think you failed to include rage generated when the extra devaste itself crits.

Lastly, a player can get higher than 50% of their shield slams to be during shield block if they are timing their blocks to maximise their HR dps. However this is generally a bad idea since they should be timing it for survivability, so I just mentioned it in case someone wants to compare the maximum dps of HR (when playing very badly from a survivability point of view..) to SD's maximum.

Please do note, that while I have mentioned some errors with the given mathematical analysis, I am in no way disputing the end result of SD being a larger dps gain than HR and the rage gains of HR being rather minimal. I just wanted it to be clear that the above is only a partial analysis and not complete, and that other readers take it with a grain of salt rather than parading it about as absolute proof.

[Aminah]

I think Emacptr and everyone else covered this pretty well, but you should be tracking your Externals more, on some attempts you overlapped strong Externals like PS with your own Shield Wall. Also, your Berserker Rage usages seems to be a bit random, I would suggest grabbing a WA for that as well.

That is a very good pointer, thank you. I will create some WA's to track them. Certainly that will help a great deal.

Yes, regarding Berserker Rage; in the first logs I posted I had Berserker Rage included in my starter/combo macro. I have since removed it and made a WA to alert me when I am not Enraged AND have Berserker Rage available. The logs from Tectus shows this in use.

Except, Sudden Death isn't a minimal DPS gain and you're not getting nearly as much rage from the Devastates as you think. Sudden Death is 1-1.5k dps above Heavy Repercussions, and you lose minimal rage.

Sudden Death dps increase math:

Note: All numbers taken from these logs.

Procs: 2.5 per minute
SD Damage: 58k per execute
Total Damage: 145k per minute (58*2.5) [SD DMG * Procs]

Heavy Repercussions:

Shield Slams per minute: ~10
Shield Block %: ~50% (this is playing very defensively)
Shield Slams buffed by Shield Block: 5 (would take very in-depth sims to faithfully recreate this, but it should correspond to Shield Block uptime*Shield Slams)
Shield Slam Damage: 35k
Total Damage: 52.5k per minute (35*5*.3) [SS DMG * #SSbuffed * Heavy Repercussions buff]

Damage Difference: 92.5k per minute (1.5k DPS)

More in-depth Sudden Death Math:

The above math is overly simplistic and doesn't account for some of the points that you mentioned earlier. So, this math will try and touch on the rage gain/Heroic Strike usage.

Each Devastate you do is worth 12.25 rage (Note: My crit levels not yours. You would get less value). Math below:

[Base Rage of Shield Slam + (% Chance of Sword and Board Proc)(Rage value of Sword and Board proc) + (% Crit)(Rage Value of Enraged)][% Chance of Sword and Board Proc] -> [20 + (.5 * 5) + (.2 * 10)][.5] -> 30.6 rage

So, you lose 30.6 rage per minute using Sudden Death. It's important to note that you only see this rage benefit by using Shield Slam when Sword and Board procs. Thus you end up spending two GCDs to generate this rage, instead of the one GCD used on Sudden Death. One of your arguments against SD is that it requires GCDs, but when played optimally it doesn't interfere with Shield Slam timing.

If you used the rage generated on a Heroic Strike: 9k damage
If you used the rage generated on a Shield Barrier: 50k absorb

On a typical boss fight Sudden Death is worth 750k damage. The rage you generated by not using Shield Barrier is worth 350k healing or ~100k damage if you used it on Heroic Strike. That is an abysmally poor tradeoff.



Spreading "opinions" that lead other players to play sup-optimally/poorly is not a good thing. If you're not a main tank, and you're not sure that your "opinion" is correct don't suggest it to other players.

Sudden Death, when played properly, is universally better than a Heavy Repercussions build. I would only suggest using Heavy Repercussions if you're struggling to manage Sudden Death procs. As mentioned in my earlier posts, this is not the case for Amby.

That was an incredible insightful post about the differences between those two talents. Thank you!

[Emancptr]

Unless I'm blind, you neglected to include the damage of whatever abilities (presumably devastate) gets used in the HR build in place of the SD procs. So when you factor that in, the increase from SD is less than what you have indicated. Also I think you failed to include rage generated when the extra devaste itself crits.

I viewed it as a 2 GCD window when comparing Sudden Death and Heavy Repercussions. While running Sudden Death you would Execute + Devastate, and using Heavy Repercussions you would Devastate + Shield Slam or Devastate + Devastate depending on Sword and Board procs. I know that technically oversimplifies the problem, but it is still close to reality. I ran Simcraft to double check the numbers and using my character stats/priority SD is still a 900-1k dps increase. So, the napkin math wasn't that far off.

You are completely right that I forgot to include the rage generated from Devastate crits. That would give Devastate 14.25 rage per cast, which still isn't significant when comparing it to Sudden Death.

[Deleted]

I viewed it as a 2 GCD window when comparing Sudden Death and Heavy Repercussions. While running Sudden Death you would Execute + Devastate, and using Heavy Repercussions you would Devastate + Shield Slam or Devastate + Devastate depending on Sword and Board procs. I know that technically oversimplifies the problem, but it is still close to reality. I ran Simcraft to double check the numbers and using my character stats/priority SD is still a 900-1k dps increase. So, the napkin math wasn't that far off.

You are completely right that I forgot to include the rage generated from Devastate crits. That would give Devastate 14.25 rage per cast, which still isn't significant when comparing it to Sudden Death.

If that is so, then you neglected the base damage of the shield slam rather than a devastate: you only added up the bonus of the shield slam from HR, not the base yet counted the full SD damage that occupies the same GCD. However, I think that way of comparing is possibly flawed to begin with. Since you should be using (I believe..) the SD proc only right before shield slam will naturally come off CD, to prevent loss of shield slam casts. This way the cost of the SD is never a full shield slam, only a devastate and the bonus rage that devastate generates.
Therefore you have two scenarios:

1) With SD, you SD, then you shield slam.
2) With HR, you devastate, then you shield slam.

Then, the damage difference between the two is simply: average execute vs. (avg devastate + average shield slam HR bonus damage)

The rage increase of HR is: (number of procs of SD)*[(devastate enrages rage)+(S&B rage)]
Which could be calculated as: 2.5*[(10*crit chance of devastate) + (0.3*5)] rage per minute. Which depends on your crit rate, but is clearly quite small.

This method of approximating the difference does however slightly exaggerate the benefit of SD over HR though, since you will get cases where you proc enough S&B that you do not get to use the SD proc at the expected time (since its going to run out) and ahve to use it at a sub-optimal time.. But this should not happen often and it wouldn't shift the balance in HR's favour or anything..

[ablock87]

6/10 mythic Prot Warrior

Sudden Death is better than Heavy Repercussions.

There are times when you are not tanking anything, thus you are either wasting shield block (and rage) to increase your Shield Slam damage, or you are flat out not benefiting from the talent choice. There are also several important parts of fights that the burst damage from Sudden Death are important (e.g., killing a mob asap, crates on Oregorger, Pillars on Kromog).

As for the spikeyness issue with prot warriors, it's really just a matter of timing your shield block and proper use of small cooldowns. Kromog is a good example because half of the time he is casting an ability (making shield block worthless). The other half is him going to town on you. You need to know to anticipate when he's about to cast a spell and cast shield block right when he spends the next 6-8 seconds melee attacking. The same goes for other bosses; Gruul can be a spikey pain, especially when overwhelming blows stacks up, but shield blocking his inferno slice is insanely good and making sure it's up for the 2-3 autos he does before slicing is imperative.