Mastery rating = spikey (tank)

[Deleted]

Your first mistake is that you reforged all parry.
The second one is not getting hit and expertise

Wrong. If you don't have Threat issues you can Tank with 0 Expertise + Hit (theoretically), Hit capping and Expertise soft-capping is not Mandatory, the latter is recommended while the first is entirely optional.

Reforging parry provides about a 2% net loss of Avoidance while gaining quite a fair amount of absorb. If you Reforge all available Avoidance you will lose about 5-10% Avoidance which right now I don't recommend since you really want those Rune Strikes to make sure Dps don't over-aggro even more.

Gemming Dodge + Parry in ICC is just... Stupid. There's a zone-wide 30% Stamina Buff. Not to mention Stamina = Vengeance = Threat.

[wizdro]

It's really not that hard to get to. I have ~81% blood shield with like ~40% avoidance iirc. (hit and expertise cap)

I wasn't talking about it being 'hard'. I was talking about why you would trade superior stats like avoidance or threat for a shitty bubble unless you had an excess of threat stats.

And I have 55% avoidance with a 50% Blood Shield. Who takes more damage I wonder?

If you Reforge all available Avoidance you will lose about 5-10% Avoidance which right now I don't recommend

Thank you, Alcotraz.

[Deleted]

How the hell do you have 55% Avoidance? I had 51% pre-4.0.1 and I got nuked down to like 42% due to diminishing return changes, loss of Anticipation talents and gear changes....

I don't recommend reforging all Avoidance, however if you Reforge parry you'll note a loss of about 2% for a large gain in Absorb, which will most definitely make a difference.

While we're on this, I'll just throw in a link to pwnwear where there's a hot threat on "Avoidance vs. Blood Shield" right now. http://pwnwear.com/forum/avoidance-b...ield-t733.html

[Duckybank]

I wasn't talking about it being 'hard'. I was talking about why you would trade superior stats like avoidance or threat for a shitty bubble unless you had an excess of threat stats.

And I have 55% avoidance with a 50% Blood Shield. Who takes more damage I wonder?

Long time lurker, first time poster.

Who would take more damage? Depends. What happens when your avoidance fails and you take 5 hits in a row? Would you rather a 100% blood shield then? Consistent damage is easier to heal than spiky avoidance.

[wizdro]

How the hell do you have 55% Avoidance? I had 51% pre-4.0.1 and I got nuked down to like 42% due to diminishing return changes, loss of Anticipation talents and gear changes....

25% Dodge. 25% Parry. Base miss of almost 5%. I had over 70% raid-buffed before 4.0.

I don't recommend reforging all Avoidance, however if you Reforge parry you'll note a loss of about 2% for a large gain in Absorb, which will most definitely make a difference.

I prefer parry.

While we're on this, I'll just throw in a link to pwnwear where there's a hot threat on "Avoidance vs. Blood Shield" right now. http://pwnwear.com/forum/avoidance-b...ield-t733.html

The calculations there pretty much confirm my beliefs. If you have really low avoidance, the shield could theoretically outperform what little avoidance you have. If your avoidance is already pretty good, you are trading a Corvette for a Pinto.

[Deleted]

Parry's stacking and diminishing return are now the same as Dodge's. If you want to maximize Avoidance loss + Mastery you'll want to Reforge whatever you have the least of, in most cases Parry.

If you want to maximize the amount of Avoidance you'll gain from your next upgrade you'll want to keep Parry and Dodge at the same levels.

Satorri is simply doing napkin math. RNG may, and it may not save your life. Absorb will absorb a certain % of incoming damage as long as Blood Shield is present on you. If you just took heavy damage/know you're about to you can use Blood Shield at just the right moment to avoid dying, you cannot do that with RNG.

A Tank's goal should always be to minimize the amount of RNG he uses, not increase it.

[wizdro]

A Tank's goal should always be to minimize the amount of RNG he uses, not increase it.

Funny, I thought a tanks goal was to keep threat and minimize the amount of damage he takes. RNG is always present and I don't deny the usefulness of Blood Shield, but I'm not going down fast nor do I appreciate a bubble as opposed to avoidance. My chance of getting 4 hits in a row is less than 7%, and my healers a good enough to Spirit-protect and bubble me themselves, not to mention Blood Tap and CDs.

Mastery just doesn't play a part yet until Cata when we have the spare points.

[Ciah]

Funny, I thought a tanks goal was to keep threat and minimize the amount of damage he takes. RNG is always present and I don't deny the usefulness of Blood Shield, but I'm not going down fast nor do I appreciate a bubble as opposed to avoidance. My chance of getting 4 hits in a row is less than 7%, and my healers a good enough to Spirit-protect and bubble me themselves, not to mention Blood Tap and CDs.

Mastery just doesn't play a part yet until Cata when we have the spare points.

In ICC this is not the case. I know as a healer I (even after the patch) much prefer healing a tank that takes slightly more, but also predictable damage, to the tank that takes fewer hits but might get a bad RNG string and die before my cast is even over.
Rather than minimize damage taken, a tank's job is to minimize the chance they will die which in ICC means consistency more than anything else.

Maybe in Cata avoidance will be worth more, but now is not Cata.

[Deleted]

BS Crafted Legs has more parry, some pieces (264 Sigil) have the same amount of dodge + parry.

A Tank's job is to do two things: 1. Hold Threat, and 2. Stay alive. Healers don't like spiky damage however, and Avoidance does exactly that. Just used a big heal on a Tank expecting him to take damage? Oops wasted, he just got an avoidance stream. RNG isn't as favorable as straight out damage reduction because you cannot control it.

Spare what? What are you talking about? You don't need to talent Mastery......

[Deleted]

So you are saying Dodge and Parry are bad because you take no damage then get hit really hard? Its the same thing...

[Deleted]

Lol no. I'm saying RNG is un-controllable. It might help, then again it might proc at a horribly bad time instead of when you need it. With Blood Shield you can time your Death Strikes so you have Blood Shield up when you need it instead of when it wants to be there.

[Foibles]

Plus it works on things like Impale that are unavoidable.

[Nyanmaru]

As said before, I traded 4% avoidance and 2% hit for 8 mastery, sitting at 16 mastery, ~19% parry/dodge each, using SSG over parry and 2x stamina trinkets over onyxia trinket, 21 expertise, 8%+ hit, lost a bit more avoidance than orginally planned trading 277 dps wrists for 251 tank wrists gaining 1:1 in stamina what i lost in avoidance and adding a bit of armor.

The only time I had a survivability issue in ICC10 (as stated before, mostly hc) was when I fought in Unholy Presence and got critted for 98k on Festergut 3rd inhale... (x.x)
And that was with 2 druid healers that had few experience overall and no experience in tank-healing since 4.0 hit

Compared to Midknight what I lose in avoidance is what I win in HP and I still got the superior blood shield.

Gotta check at home if I still have the numbers from my late knight LK10 fun with 2 tanks + 1 hunter + 3 healers vs. LK10, us tanks were 2 DKs, one being me with above stats, the other with dodge trinket + parry trinket and no extra mastery. And otherwise almost exactly the same gear and gems (he had a few dodge/stam gems and a different neck) after each of us had done about 30 minutes of LK tanking solely in P1 we compared numbers of damage taken/absorb/selfheal, basic rotation of both was the same, no FF, just diseaseless DS + HS + BB, surprisingly we were almost even on LK numbers (less than 2% difference) but I got a lead of 20% less damage taken on add duty... 30 minutes ain't a great sample size but it's a nice snapshot about the usefulnes. There's still some unavoidable damage that adds to a blood shield but can't be reduced by avoidance (yeah, I know while channeling aotd avoidance reduces damage, but I'm not gonna consider a 4s channel on a 10m CD).

Just take it with a grain of salt, it's just a small snapshot after all.

Though, I really gotta say, I love my Blood Shield when soloing hard hitting stuff with some HP (e.g. 80 heroics or ZA solo) not that it has anything to do with current raiding, just saying

[Zao]

BS gets better the better you use DS. If you just spam the hell out of DS without thinking about when you might get a burst in, it's considerably it won't have too much effect.

If however you time it right and can hold it for a few seconds to use it after a Frostbreath, it gets very powerful.

Avoidance on the other hand always was tricky since the value you get from spreadsheets is always measured over a vertain time period and the shorter the time period is, the more RNG plays into its worth.

Parry's stacking and diminishing return are now the same as Dodge's. If you want to maximize Avoidance loss + Mastery you'll want to Reforge whatever you have the least of, in most cases Parry.

Actually you'll want to convert whatever you have the most of, since the more you have of a certain rating, the less percent you gain from one point and in turn you loose less percent if you reforge it.

[deneweth]

As numerous others have posted this will be fine at 85. What I don't get is how the OP links an on demand heal/shield to spikes compared to RNG blocks. If you think about it the blocks are random and thus will tend to have strings of good/bad luck from times to time. DS on the other hand is on demand and reactive so you can use it after the big spike to greater effect, thus reducing the spike. It also shields you after the spike, thus lessening the chance/impact of other sources of incoming damage chaining into a greater/ongoing spike.

The perceived spikiness comes from the tank noticing just how much damage you actually take. As other people have pointed out the damage calculation may have been off and armor changes could help account for it. The irony here is that the OP reforged out of avoidance to get mastery. The avoidance is prone to RNG streaks and spikiness, and is probably more spiky (read as: less reliable) than DS+mastery. However having more avoidance lessens the likelihood of such RNG streaks so he inadvertently increased the odds of bad luck with avoidance which may have helped cause the spike damage that DS helped deal with.

On a side note I tanked that fight on my DK last week and right before pungent blight I popped VB->DS to get a shield while he was casting and hit DS again shortly after the cast. I didn't get any numbers, but in a situation like this where you can save up your runes for heavy damage I think DKs really have a lot of tools to work with. I really like the DS mechanic and mastery. I'm probably going to drop my pally tank for DK in cata because of this and because holy power + word of glory just doesn't seem as fun.

[Brince]

I want to ask something related. Some ppl claim death strike is not working as intended.
They say it only heals for 10% of your health, despite the damage taken in the last 5 secs. Can you confirm this?

[Deleted]

I want to ask something related. Some ppl claim death strike is not working as intended.
They say it only heals for 10% of your health, despite the damage taken in the last 5 secs. Can you confirm this?

No, DS works as intended (on live), unless I suddenly got 300k hp. :>

[Deleted]

Actually you'll want to convert whatever you have the most of, since the more you have of a certain rating, the less percent you gain from one point and in turn you loose less percent if you reforge it.

Oops.

@Brince Death Strike will heal for a minimum of 10% of your Health regardless how much damage you took. I think you confused Death Strike with Imp. Death Strike which people claim is bugged because it doesn't increase the base healing of Death Strike, only the actual healing done.

@Deneweth Unless you can eliminate the spikiness completely (65% dodge, 65% parry) then you'll always have spikiness and RNG Avoidance will always be inferior.

[Shieldd]

On The Beta, DKs are taking more damage then any other tank, per hit.

Something needs to be done, whether it be buffing BS, I'm not sure.

[patrins]

I tanked 11/12 heroic (25m) 2 nights ago. I'm currently at 20parry 19dodge hit/exp cap and 60khp with nearly all dodge reforged to mastery (117% shields I believe)

I didn't feel spiky at all. The shields/heals were actually really effective despite still being wotlk lolburst tanking. I would really recommend being hit/exp cap unlike what someone said earlier in the thread. I was getting a TON of runestrikes and since they take a global now I feel nearly global capped unless I fail to get a dodge/parry in a while. I'd also get 2-3 points in scent of blood, you'll need the rp.

Also, since you are runestriking more now (no chill of the throne gained me about 8% avoidance even after 4.0 avoidance nerfs) you random refresh a LOT of runes. Where as hitting a target dummy you have downtime I was often unable to keep up with my runes (priority was on runestrike). This will become even more the case when they remove the dodge/parry req on runestrike. (and the 30rp will make SoB even better)