Hard-cap Expertise as Warrior Tank?

[Deleted]

Unless anyone of you missed it, hit/expertise is now avoidance.

Is hardcapping exertise worth it for warriors? Currently we're progressing on heroics, and it FRUSTRATES me those times where I'm at low HP, and that shield slam would've saved me from death (rage to pop shield-barrier), but it gets parried and I die from insufficient rage.

Thoughts?

[garrotte]

What? Hit/expertise translate directly to avoidance?

So 1% hit = 1% parry, dodge or mastery?

I think you're incorrect on this one (unless, like you said, I missed it.)

If you mean in terms of rage generation, then you are correct (not a direct correlation to avoidance.) I sit at maybe 5% hit / 5% exp or so. It seems useless to cap them both, and I'm probably a bit high. If you look at the top warrior tanks, most ignore it as well.

[Bubblebutt]

Well I even hesitated going hit and expertise capped as a prot paladin as we more than any tank never needed to be. But then I found out that I would have 20% more uptime on my SoTR physical dmg reduction by doing so.

The more hit/exp capped you can be, the more rage you generate, the more shield blocks and absorbs you have. Even though you are at 5/5 I would recommend going to both hit and exp soft cap and you should see a nice reduction in dmg taken if you use your cd's right due to this change in rage regen.

[Deleted]

I would highly recommended it, as it has been outlined in various other posts. Not being able to use SB on some heroic fights is extremely dangerous and the most reliable mitigation you can get is from having the rage to SB or Sbar

[T18Z]

I would highly recommended it, as it has been outlined in various other posts. Not being able to use SB on some heroic fights is extremely dangerous and the most reliable mitigation you can get is from having the rage to SB or Sbar

I wouldn't recommend it. Expertise is great when you are gaining double the benefit via taking %'s of both dodge and parry off the table, but when it just becomes parry the gain isn't worth the loss in avoidance/mastery. Expertise loses value once you are at 7.5% in comparison to other stats.

If you get to a certain point where you do not have enough rage to follow your rotation then make use of your internal and external cooldowns, I have been using 7.5% for a while now and although bad strings of rng do come once in a while, it isn't often enough for me to want to warrant hard-capping.

[Deleted]

I'm assuming you are talking about 10 man then? Because frankly it is very important in 25 to not have that burst on fights like Gara'jal to reduce the voodoo doll damage, and on spirit kings which after the first, Meng in particular which hit extremely hard, on the order of about 600k when at high rage

[Deleted]

Going for hit/exp I find a very good way to lower my incoming damage overall. And as a big plus, increase the damage output.

Ofc there will be pros and cons with going for either hit/exp or master/parry/dodge but I think most players out there are turning themself into hit/exp cappers

[Odina]

I wouldn't recommend it. Expertise is great when you are gaining double the benefit via taking %'s of both dodge and parry off the table, but when it just becomes parry the gain isn't worth the loss in avoidance/mastery..

FYI since MOP it no longer doubles and only takes dodge off for the first 7.5% and then you work parry off the last 7.5%.

So the "it's good while it double dips" argment no longer holds water as it never double dips anymore. The more you have untill 15% the better you just got to take into account what you would be giving up at this point of gear level to get to 15%. I believe pushing dodge compleetly off the table at this point is mandatory to keep up smooth mitigation and I take any extra after with pleasure!


shamelessly stolen from Devloc

This is how Expertise works now.

0% Expertise =
7.5% change to be dodged
7.5% chance to be parried

5% Expertise =
2.5% chance to be dodged
7.5% chance to be parried

7.5% Expertise =
0.0% chance to be dodged
7.5% chance to be parried

10% Expertise =
0.0% chance to be dodged
5.0% chance to be parried

15% Expertise =
0.0% chance to be dodged
0.0% chance to be parried

[T18Z]

I'm talking about 25H, which I raid in too. Gara'jal's shadowy attack has a cooldown, which you can line up with many things and predict. Meng spends some time being kited around, however of course not constantly. You also have berserker rage and your shouts to generate extra rage when times get rough on RNG, just simply don't use them until they are needed.

[Viertel]

I wouldn't recommend it. Expertise is great when you are gaining double the benefit via taking %'s of both dodge and parry off the table, but when it just becomes parry the gain isn't worth the loss in avoidance/mastery. Expertise loses value once you are at 7.5% in comparison to other stats.

If you get to a certain point where you do not have enough rage to follow your rotation then make use of your internal and external cooldowns, I have been using 7.5% for a while now and although bad strings of rng do come once in a while, it isn't often enough for me to want to warrant hard-capping.

If you don't recommend it you're not reducing enough damage.

Like mentioned above the first 7.5% is for dodge, the second 7.5% is for parry. Furthermore, once your vengeance stacks high enough anyway Shield Block becomes shit because the barrier negates more total damage in the long run, thus ruining the Mastery argument. Yes, the rage generation from critical blocks is nice but with the 3 second ICD you generally only get one (if mastery is high enough) during the duration. Plus, you can't even keep up SB full time and with perfect rage and pinpoint accuracy the *most* you can have is a 66.6% uptime throughout a fight.

Shield Block's nice, but right now it's far, far inferior to Shield Barrier once Vengeace starts climbing.

I'm talking about 25H, which I raid in too. Gara'jal's shadowy attack has a cooldown, which you can line up with many things and predict. Meng spends some time being kited around, however of course not constantly. You also have berserker rage and your shouts to generate extra rage when times get rough on RNG, just simply don't use them until they are needed.

You're doing it wrong.

[T18Z]

If you don't recommend it you're not reducing enough damage.

Like mentioned above the first 7.5% is for dodge, the second 7.5% is for parry. Furthermore, once your vengeance stacks high enough anyway Shield Block becomes shit because the barrier negates more total damage in the long run, thus ruining the Mastery argument. Yes, the rage generation from critical blocks is nice but with the 3 second ICD you generally only get one (if mastery is high enough) during the duration. Plus, you can't even keep up SB full time and with perfect rage and pinpoint accuracy the *most* you can have is a 66.6% uptime throughout a fight.

Shield Block's nice, but right now it's far, far inferior to Shield Barrier once Vengeace starts climbing.



You're doing it wrong.

I use my zerk rage and shouts just in my normal rotation to keep things smooth. Don't mistake what I said for something I personally do, just a suggestion if you feel RNG is fucking you over again and again for OP. Also, shield block doesn't have a full up-time, yeah, but neither does Shield barrier? You can say it reduces overall damage by more, but does it reduce spike damage more from physical? I never claimed Sbar was shit by the way, so I'm not sure where this is coming from.

Lastly, pretty much the top 15 warriors I can see are aiming for the 7.5% expertise cap, I assume they are doing it wrong as well?

[Deleted]

Lastly, pretty much the top 15 warriors I can see are aiming for the 7.5% expertise cap, I assume they are doing it wrong as well?

They are wrong, yeah

[silmarilen]

almost every tank i know has hit/exp cap these days because of active mitigation.
this isnt cata anymore

[Odina]

Lastly, pretty much the top 15 warriors I can see are aiming for the 7.5% expertise cap, I assume they are doing it wrong as well?

As mentioned before by many most will aim for the 7.5 to take dodge completly off the table however AT THIS GEAR LEVEL you will be takign up too much of your stat alocation to try and get to the 15% mark but anything past 7.5% is not all of a sudden worst than the last 7.5% as it no longer double dips.

Top 15 wars have top 15 Healers and DPS at there disposal as well thus they may not be "doing it wrong" but it may be the "wrong way" for non top 15 raids that don't have the same calibre at therer disposal.

[silmarilen]

top 15 warriors need to beat insane enrage timers because they are undergeared, which may also be a reason to reforge to exp

[Deleted]

I do it purely for survival, as you wont get any better effective mitigation, even if you are getting more rage than needed to back to back cast shield block, you can just use the remainder into shield barrier. You wont get this level of mitigation from going into mastery or avoidance

This is the way that works for myself and my guild and the majority of others, if you think otherwise you are welcome to try it as everyone has the right to be wrong:P

[Deleted]

Oh these silly warriors. TI8Z you right.

[nowish]

Test it out yourself. If you notice that you are taking too much dmg or have a low uptime on w/e , change something according to your own experience. The only way to know for sure is to test it out yourself!

[Deleted]

Oh these silly warriors. Ck you right.

What on earth lol

[T18Z]

almost every tank i know has hit/exp cap these days because of active mitigation.
this isnt cata anymore

Almost every tank I know has hit/expertise to 7.5% and not above, see how flawed that logic becomes?

By the way, I'm not saying expertise is a crap stat, I'm saying from the information I have read on Thecks blog http://sacredduty.net/2012/09/10/l90...-for-warriors/ and from my own personal experience (much like Eddy is basing off his own experience) that expertise isn't a god-send stat which we should all aim to cap at 15%. I agree the extra rage is well spent on Sbar, but then in relation to SB you gain 10 rage each time you block... this rage can be used for Sbar use too.

Theck explains that you need a certain amount of rage per second to keep up with optimal SB use, and that amount is gained once you reach a combined total of 9% hit + expertise.

The data is a little noisy, but it’s pretty clear that the value of expertise drops off pretty steadily up to around 9%. From the bottom graph, we see that 9% is where we hit the 6.667 rage threshold, and correspondingly we see a “knee” in the Shield Block uptime curve. Shield Block’s uptime is saturating to it’s asymptotic value of 66.67%, and this “knee” is where we start really feeling the effects of that cap. Since warrior skills are equally affected by hit or expertise, we can surmise that hit behaves similarly, and what really matters is that the sum of hit and expertise is 9% (though of course, hit over the 7.5% cap doesn’t count!).

Beyond the 9% threshold, SB uptime only increases slowly and the value of hit or expertise is primarily due to the smoothing of rage droughts that I described earlier. The bulk of the rage generation beyond this point is what we consider “wasted” in this simulation (more on that in a second). So we can reasonably say that any hit or expertise beyond a total of 9% (i.e., hit+expertise=9%) has little to no effect on Shield Block uptime

I understand though that the model doesn't take into account excess rage can be burnt into Sbar, but Theck explains:

However, we can come up with a conceptual estimate based on the assumption that all of the “wasted” rage can be converted to Shield Barrier casts. There would obviously be a little attrition, in that you might push Shield Block back a few seconds if you use a 60-point Shield Barrier at the wrong time, but overall the result shouldn’t be that far off from the approximation. Even in our near-capped case, where we “wasted” 362 thousand rage (which is about 1.8% of all rage generated), that’s still only an extra Shield Barrier every ~5000 seconds, or every ~83 minutes.

We can do the same analysis using our expertise scaling data. At 14% expertise we’re generating 6.983 rage per second. If we assume that everything over the 6.667 RPS we need to maintain Shield Block gets turned into Shield Barriers, that’s 0.316 rage per second, or another Shield Barrier every ~190 seconds (about every 3 minutes). So that extra 6% expertise beyond the 9% threshold buys one Shield Barrier every fight, maybe two on a 6+ minute encounter. That’s doesn’t seem like a lot of survivability for a 2040 rating investment (then again, it only takes one sometimes…).

Now this could be no longer relevant, or there could be more recent studies on it, which I'd personally love to read. However my mindset revolves around this and a few other things, and I'm hoping there is some math which can back up other players arguments of "hard-capping" expertise.

Top 15 wars have top 15 Healers and DPS at there disposal as well thus they may not be "doing it wrong" but it may be the "wrong way" for non top 15 raids that don't have the same calibre at therer disposal.

That makes a good point, top players do have top healers with them, but I doubt that is a reason for them to incorrectly and pointless gear/reforge differently from others for no benefit.

As mentioned before by many most will aim for the 7.5 to take dodge completly off the table however AT THIS GEAR LEVEL you will be takign up too much of your stat alocation to try and get to the 15% mark but anything past 7.5% is not all of a sudden worst than the last 7.5% as it no longer double dips.

I agree, thanks to the previous poster and his/her information on expertise yeah I wouldn't say if you are over 7.5% expertise you are intentionally doing anything wrong, my point was simply aiming for the hard-cap expertise is not something everyone should do without reading more into it. This is going off top warriors and Thecks information, among other guides posted here and on other websites.

Finally, SB is still needed on the fights on MV, straight off the top I can already see Gara'jal (blockable shadow attacks), Spirit kings (all physical + vengance isn't high on that fight until you face Meng, not to mention you don't get OP vengance from annihilation now) and also the final boss, pure physical, very large but slow hits. This whole idea that Sbar is king isn't really true... you do take less damage overall using Sbar as opposed to using SB, however the distribution of damage in regard to timescale is totally different. Sbar provides more TDR (around 4-10%), however it causes frequent periods of 0 damage, and then full on extreme damage. You have to ask yourself what is the reason for tank deaths usually? I wouldn't put it down to a 10% damage increase, but rather unexpected burst within a short period of time.

What I want to address here, though, is the disparity between Shield Block and Shield Barrier. Under certain conditions, a Shield Barrier cast will prevent more overall damage than a Shield Block cast, even against blockable damage.. Some have suggested that this will lead warriors to simply spam Shield Barrier as a finisher.

I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but my gut feeling is that it won’t be optimal even if it is better for TDR. And the reason is simply spike damage and control. To explain, let’s look at the damage intake pattern for the “Bleed” finisher strategy. We’ll use a raw boss damage of 250k per attack, which is around 93k after mitigation (armor, spec, Weakened Blows). That attack size with a 1.5-second swing timer gives about 67k Vengeance AP, or a 150k Shield Barrier absorb per cast.

Sbar:
Instead, we have about 40% of our events doing zero damage (avoids and full absorbs) and another 40% at the high end doing full damage. The binary nature of this will generally mean that damage intake is spikier, even though we’re actually taking less damage overall (note that DTPS drops from about 53% to 49% by switching to this strategy).

SB:
As you can see that this is a very smooth distribution. We have a lot of events in the middle of the plot, in the 50% average DTPS range. Remember that all of the DTPS values in this sim are normalized, so “0.5″ or 50% average DTPS means half of the DTPS you’d get if the boss hit you for 93k on all 5 attacks. Most importantly, you’ll note that there are very few events at the upper end of the spectrum, above 90% DTPS. That’s the advantage of a smoothing strategy – you minimize the number of high-DTPS periods you’ll experience, reducing the chance you’ll die to a spike and making you easier to heal.

If you don't recommend it you're not reducing enough damage.

Like mentioned above the first 7.5% is for dodge, the second 7.5% is for parry. Furthermore, once your vengeance stacks high enough anyway Shield Block becomes shit because the barrier negates more total damage in the long run, thus ruining the Mastery argument. Yes, the rage generation from critical blocks is nice but with the 3 second ICD you generally only get one (if mastery is high enough) during the duration. Plus, you can't even keep up SB full time and with perfect rage and pinpoint accuracy the *most* you can have is a 66.6% uptime throughout a fight.

Shield Block's nice, but right now it's far, far inferior to Shield Barrier once Vengeace starts climbing.

TL;DR: I'd personally say you're doing it wrong, but whatever. Just because the TDR is higher does not make it better, I shouldn't even have to explain why. Spike damage kills tanks, not healers going OOM.

More info in the follow-up: http://sacredduty.net/2012/09/18/l90...tion-followup/