Prot warrior: Expertise cap question

[Deleted]

Heya all,

I got question regarding expertise:

I'm having a bit of problems sustaining enough rage lately. (besides the fact that I seem to take way more damage then our other tank (pal), while using shield block/barrier to the best of my abilities).

On fights with slow(er) attacking bosses especially, particulary elegon. He seems to have a slower attack speed and thus the chanche of resetting revenge (and generating rage) is quite low resulting in me taking alot of spike damage, even when rotating cd's. On top of that I'm not hard capped in expertise (everyone tells me not to) so my Shield Slam & Revenge get parried from time to time resulting in even less rage generation.

So I'm wondering if I'm doing something completely wrong (I even race changed to human for the % exp) as I got a feeling our healers don't like to heal me all that much cause of the diff with the other tank :s .

Currently I'm running with the following prio (Character: Aetava, EU Ravencrest):

Mastery > Hit (2550) > Exp (2550) > parry > dodge
(with Dim. Ret. in mind)

However, should I pull mastery down the list? As I agree there is more magic damage atm then there is attack damage Except maybe on WotE.
I can understand people say mastery is a bit useless now, but it's still nice to get the extra rage from crit blocks imo but then again.. you gotta get Shield Block off first. Should I reforge out of mitigation into expertise? I got the feeling I'll be even more squishy then

Any criticism / help would be appreciated. I tried several reforge calculaters such as AskMrRobot & the Reforgelite addon but.. ye

Cheers!

Sorry for the wall of text.
Aet (read: 'Aight?')

[Deleted]

I forgot about mastery build after I could barely hold aggro on the bosses because of the misses, and because of the high damage in me. Now I'm running Hit=Expertise(trying to reach the hardcap, over 13 % atm)> Mastery>Parry>dodge - and I feel fine on all bosses, especially Elegon. Never do I have aggro problems, and never I feel I don't have enough rage. On Elegon you need be careful with your saves. Use them correctly, and you'll have enough SBarriers, and damage reduction saves to survive the total annihilation moment, or the breath thingy. If I don't screw up the rotation when I'm holding Elegon, almost every time I come out with over 70 % hp, not making the healers sweat.
So in my case, Mastery did prove to be useless if you compare to hit=expertise.
Btw, I also first tried the AskMrRobot suggestions, I quickly and painfully found out they are useless and do not work.

[Deleted]

Contrary to popular belief, Elegon does more melee damage than magic damage (Not including the aura).

I run high mastery with 6% hit and expertise and I have enough rage to do the following;

Breath - Barrier
Shield Block x2
Breath - Barrier.
Repeat

Its enough for what I need it for, every time you are tanking you have the shout also I believe unless my memory is failing me right now. Either way my rage is not an issue at all, and I get a truck load from critical blocks.
Random tip though, use your barrier at the half way point of the breath, not at the start. It splits the breath in half and gives your healers time to top before the next half hits again (Instead of 60% of the breath hitting in 1 go) it also gives you a tiny bit more vengeance for a bigger shield when you do use it.

Bottom line, I don't have any rage problems on Elegon.

[T18Z]

Heya all,

I got question regarding expertise:

I'm having a bit of problems sustaining enough rage lately. (besides the fact that I seem to take way more damage then our other tank (pal), while using shield block/barrier to the best of my abilities).

On fights with slow(er) attacking bosses especially, particulary elegon. He seems to have a slower attack speed and thus the chanche of resetting revenge (and generating rage) is quite low resulting in me taking alot of spike damage, even when rotating cd's. On top of that I'm not hard capped in expertise (everyone tells me not to) so my Shield Slam & Revenge get parried from time to time resulting in even less rage generation.

So I'm wondering if I'm doing something completely wrong (I even race changed to human for the % exp) as I got a feeling our healers don't like to heal me all that much cause of the diff with the other tank :s .

Currently I'm running with the following prio (Character: Aetava, EU Ravencrest):

Mastery > Hit (2550) > Exp (2550) > parry > dodge
(with Dim. Ret. in mind)

However, should I pull mastery down the list? As I agree there is more magic damage atm then there is attack damage Except maybe on WotE.
I can understand people say mastery is a bit useless now, but it's still nice to get the extra rage from crit blocks imo but then again.. you gotta get Shield Block off first. Should I reforge out of mitigation into expertise? I got the feeling I'll be even more squishy then

Any criticism / help would be appreciated. I tried several reforge calculaters such as AskMrRobot & the Reforgelite addon but.. ye

Cheers!

Sorry for the wall of text.
Aet (read: 'Aight?')

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...s-Warrior-Tank

Read the whole thread. Hard-capping won't help your shield block up-time improve much, however it will help give you a small amount of excess rage that can be used in shield barriers. If you are attempting heroic bosses, you will be using SB on 3 bosses (Gara'jal - shadowy attacks is blockable, Spirit kings - all melee and Meng hits very hard, and of course Emperors). There isn't more magic damage in heroic atleast than there is melee, however the bosses that do deal magic or unblockable damage are pretty much the easiest on heroic. (Stone Guards, Feng and Elegon)

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…).

I'm at 7.5% expertise, and my rotation feels fine regarding rage. Strings of bad RNG do come, but not often or frequent enough for me to personally warrant hard-capping. If you honestly feel it effects you that much then go for it, however you will struggle to reach hard-cap at current gear levels.

Mastery isn't useless, it only becomes useless if you spam shield barrier 24/7, which is a stupid thing to do.

[Raxxed]

I'm sitting at 3/6H - with a 2.7% wipe stopping me from being 4/6H (In a 10man guild)

I'm currently focusing for Hit=Expertise>Mastery>Parry

Sitting ever so slightly above the hit and expertise cap, but it's the closest I can get.

Having the two caps is amazing for a boss like H Gara'jal, I can have shield block up for 99.99% of his shadowy attacks if I time it correctly, which is absolutely awesome.

Threat is never an issue, my dps is high (I would've had the #1 parse on H Elegon if the log wasn't private >_<) and it means my active mitigation is used a lot more frequently and effectively.

(WoW-heroes in signature for character link)

[tohm]

I'm sitting at 3/6H - with a 2.7% wipe stopping me from being 4/6H (In a 10man guild)

I'm currently focusing for Hit=Expertise>Mastery>Parry

Sitting ever so slightly above the hit and expertise cap, but it's the closest I can get.

Having the two caps is amazing for a boss like H Gara'jal, I can have shield block up for 99.99% of his shadowy attacks if I time it correctly, which is absolutely awesome.

Threat is never an issue, my dps is high (I would've had the #1 parse on H Elegon if the log wasn't private >_<) and it means my active mitigation is used a lot more frequently and effectively.

(WoW-heroes in signature for character link)

what was the dmg on elegon if you dont mind me asking.

[Deleted]

Elegon's Breath is not that big compared with his melee damage. One full breath does as much damage as two melee swings, and don't reset his swing timer (it's 1.5 btw, he's not slow). The spike comes from both the 2 melee swings he will do and the breath, so it's a 50/50 damage on those 3 seconds. You should do your best to mitigate both parts, and what comes after that. Personally, I'm going from 45k vengeance to 60k on that fight (on hc). That's a 90k to 120k shield at 60 rage. Another thing to remember... a shield before the breath won't be high enough to outdo a SB.

And if someone is telling you to not go for expertise he better have a good reason. At the very least it's a perfect valid choice, on a personal level, it's the best gearing decision. With a bit of gear you can hard cap both and start spilling the rest on mastery. Raid buffed you can easily be around 60% crit block at this stage of gear, and any boss out there you can do a 24s SB (either with avatar or having it pooled), Demo or Wall for 10s/12s while you pool rage, 24 sec of SB again. That should make you fairly smooth in your damage intake, as long as you have the exp/hit to support it, ofc. And there should be rage to spare for small SBars too (not 60 ones). If you need to do a 60 Sbar go ahead, of course, but remember that you will take some hits to the face before getting rage to do a SB again.

[Raxxed]

what was the dmg on elegon if you dont mind me asking.

120k on heroic.

[DeathbyFrostBomb73]

I am personally running with 7.5% hit, 15% expertise and the rest goes into mastery and then parry. Thus far I have been doing pretty well and rage never really becomes too much of an issue for me. In Reforge Lite I do Exp (hard cap), Hit (melee hit cap), Mastery, Parry.

[Deleted]

Hit+Expertise convert into active mitigation + additional dps/tps. Thus they trump mastery. If your stamina can hold up you are fine.

[T18Z]

Hit+Expertise convert into active mitigation + additional dps/tps. Thus they trump mastery. If your stamina can hold up you are fine.

It's obviously not as simple as that considering mastery = dps from enrage via critical block too.

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

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…).

If your intent is spamming shield barrier alone, then yeah expertise is great... however when using shield block you will barley see an increase in up-time, not to mention 1-2 barriers over a 6 minute fight hardly seems amazing. On certain fights you will mostly be using shield block, and in those fights mastery > expertise. (at least hard-cap expertise)

[Deleted]

To resume the thread, I would point out that that quote was before he significantly improved his analysis. The mitigation is higher with the actual numbers, and smoother when using 20 rage shields instead of only 60 ones (which is fairly easier to do without the randomness of failing some attacks due to not hit/exp caps and don't building enough rage to keep sustaining your SB). To continue with this and quote Theck again from his blog,

I think that whether you use hit and expertise comes down to a damage smoothing argument. Hit and expertise might not give you the highest TDR, but they give you more Shield Barriers to use in the gaps between SB casts, which smooths your damage intake. It’s much the same rationale as the “Bleed” vs “Shield Barrier Only” comparison in the blog post.

I’m in the “damage smoothing” camp myself, so I see no problem with aiming for hit and expertise caps (soft or hard, depending on preference) before stacking more mastery.

I don't think stacking one or other first is an "invalid" strategy (they are both perfectly good). But I'm of the boat of stacking hit/exp, both for normalization of damage (which I value over TDR) and DPS, which yes, have become a part of our obligation as tanks (replacing threat).

[nowish]

I got 6/6 hc and I find that Exp (soft cap) = hit (soft cap) > mastery > exp > parry > dodge works fine on pretty mcuh all of the bosses. Feels like shield block mitigate so much dmg when popped, me like.

[Nekked]

seems like an appropriate thread to ask for tanking advice.

Assuming no damage from non-physical source (ie: shield block > shield barrier all the time). Is it possible for warriors to chain SBlock without any downtime?

[edit] a bit unsure on how the cooldown / charges work on shieldblock and shield barrier

[Ampere]

Contrary to popular belief, Elegon does more melee damage than magic damage (Not including the aura).

I run high mastery with 6% hit and expertise and I have enough rage to do the following;

Breath - Barrier
Shield Block x2
Breath - Barrier.
Repeat

Its enough for what I need it for, every time you are tanking you have the shout also I believe unless my memory is failing me right now. Either way my rage is not an issue at all, and I get a truck load from critical blocks.
Random tip though, use your barrier at the half way point of the breath, not at the start. It splits the breath in half and gives your healers time to top before the next half hits again (Instead of 60% of the breath hitting in 1 go) it also gives you a tiny bit more vengeance for a bigger shield when you do use it.

Bottom line, I don't have any rage problems on Elegon.

Just a nitpick, currently the vengeance model looks at the damage as if it were unmitigated when calculating the AP you get. So whether you absorb the entire breath or none of it, you'll get the same amount of vengeance.

[nine3cubed]

Mastery as your main focus is pretty futile with the current gear that is available. You're not going to be hitting avoidance numbers like you would want to, so your next best bet is to constantly be able to throw up a block or barrier. Thus, hit and expertise soft cap should be your focus for now.

[Rhokzor]

Just a nitpick, currently the vengeance model looks at the damage as if it were unmitigated when calculating the AP you get. So whether you absorb the entire breath or none of it, you'll get the same amount of vengeance.

He means that you'll already have taken a tick of the breath, causing your vengeance to be higher than it would have been if you had popped Sbar before the breath.