[5.4] Protection Warrior

[Deleted]

I started reading that reply and actually did a double take Klaus ^^

Damage intake wise even in Stamina gear you can still be very competitive if not easily topping the reduction and I would argue that Warrior has some of the highest delta reduction ingame, a lot of the other tanks are subject to spikes which is really what the problem is when it comes to tank healing

As for damage output, I can see you are passionate about it Espada and I do agree, for the most part it is pretty low when compared to other tanks, I don't think anyone can deny that
I would however argue that it isn't to the level where it is going to make THAT much of a difference, obviously for various cheeses like killing balls on Lei-Shen or pumping a bit more into Ra-Den... or if your tank can't play properly and you have to cheese it with shuffle :P

For most fights though, a Warrior / DK tanking combo is really easily manageable and not an issue at all provided they are both decent players. Even for ~ World 10 I would argue that tanking classes isn't going to make that much of a difference, its only when you are quite literally going for the first kill in the world that having that extra DPS from a brewmaster is really going to matter
For a Semi-hardcore guild, I would honestly say it as long as the tanks are decent the class won't make that much of a difference if you are talking about Ra-den DPS or Lei-shen balls or anything like that


But, as said... Warrior DPS is lower than the other tanks, even when played flawlessly

Averaging 90k less is like having a melee DPS that averages 90k less. Exactly the same. It's someone here on raid group that carry a couple of unenchanted/ungemmed/unreforged DPS while saying "hey, it doesn't make a difference, we are happy to clear the raid on heroic with them aboard"?

Really? We are getting the shit we deserve.

[Nillo]

1) Mind you i "tank" (better: collect) bats on Tortos and they die some globals later in a chi burst+keg smash+shockwave combo.

2) For Ji-Kun... it varies a lot, this week i ate 53% Infected Talons damage, last week it was 37% (same fight length). To my knowledge blocked melee hits still apply the dot, only avoided once obviously won't. Just to give you an example (and i think we can safely assume that i didn't turn my back to the boss):

3) my orginal point still remains.

1) Bats make melee damage reduction even more important - just because it comes in burst with low overall damage doesn't mean their damage isn't dangerous (what isn't dangerous is the raid damage from rocks and slam)
2) Completely absorbed and avoided hits don't apply a stack - this means a crit block combined with a priest shield or shield barrier can possibly negate a stack. That's also what makes dks fairly decent on this fight (enough downtime to apply Blood Shield between hits)

[22:46:42.688] Ji-Kun hits Irlida Parry
[22:46:44.191] Ji-Kun hits Irlida Parry
[22:46:45.704] Ji-Kun hits Irlida Absorb (44890)
[22:46:47.198] Ji-Kun hits Irlida Absorb (107746)
[22:46:48.738] Ji-Kun hits Irlida Parry
[22:46:50.208] Ji-Kun hits Irlida Absorb (49940)
[22:46:52.361] Ji-Kun casts Talon Rake on Irlida
[22:46:52.477] Irlida afflicted by Talon Rake (2) from Ji-Kun
[22:46:52.482] Ji-Kun Talon Rake Irlida Absorb (141263)
[22:46:53.870] Ji-Kun hits Irlida Absorb (111077)
[22:47:01.293] Ji-Kun hits Irlida 54585 (B: 81879)
[22:47:02.135] Irlida afflicted by Infected Talons from Ji-Kun

3) Well I agree that physical damage is often not a concern but on some bosses it does make a noticable difference if you have high avoidance/mastery.

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Actually, he'd be right... Tortos if on bat duty; http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/h...?s=5258&e=5604 melee accounts for 39.9% there... Rockfall AOE which is just stuff hitting within 20yds of you.... accounted for 21% and the quake for 30%... so blockable there would be 40%, granted though shieldblock is really nice that fight while on bat duty. Would be alot lower normally but we're carrying some rerollers so our DPS was bad

Well then look at some numbers from the same fight:
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/h...?s=5376&e=5448 => bats lived longer and you're at 50% from bats.
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/h...?s=5376&e=5422 => the largest damage spike on you with over 60% from bats.
It's all nice and dandy if bats die instantly but once you have to tank them for a while they do make up a significant amount of overall damage taken.
And well you'll also have to account for already inflated block percentages since you can easily have 120 and 2/2 before tanking bats.

[Deleted]

Hmm, isn't it quite the opposite? The higher your world rank the better your players (in general), thus having a stronger tank (ie decreasing the burden on all your dps by 5-10% each) should have a greater impact for the majority of guilds progressing in heroic modes with weaker players (on average).

Well, there is that factor to it. However I would say most fights are more dependant on tactics than actual DPS as there aren't really any DPS checks this tier that are in any way hard to beat. Obviously the faster you can kill a boss the better but I would have said tactics outweigh this by a significant margin, if you do the tactic correctly the boss will die for any raid with 520+ average ilevel

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Averaging 90k less is like having a melee DPS that averages 90k less. Exactly the same. It's someone here on raid group that carry a couple of unenchanted/ungemmed/unreforged DPS while saying "hey, it doesn't make a difference, we are happy to clear the raid on heroic with them aboard"?

Really? We are getting the shit we deserve.

Yes you're absolutely right, however my argument is that tactically if you do things correctly 90k shouldn't really be gamebreaking for most fights

[Nillo]

Well, there is that factor to it. However I would say most fights are more dependant on tactics than actual DPS as there aren't really any DPS checks this tier that are in any way hard to beat. Obviously the faster you can kill a boss the better but I would have said tactics outweigh this by a significant margin, if you do the tactic correctly the boss will die for any raid with 520+ average ilevel

Let's see:
Jin'rokh - Thunderstorm is devastating for guilds progressing on him => dps helps a lot
Horridon - once you're able to skip the soft enrage phase that makes it significatly less difficult.
Council - need some basic dps to kill Sul and faster kill means less stacks.
Tortos - well maybe.
Megeara - yaa tank is only dealing damage to the right head about 70% of the time.
Ji-Kun - yaa but that's probably the easiest boss anyway
Dumuru - Life Drain ... nuff said
Primordius - once you consider mutations not going to tanks and the tank debuffs dps probably doesn't matter that much here.
Animus - There's so much that can go wrong over time that I'd rather kill it asap
Qon - preventing second windstorm
Twins - we actually had troubles with the enrage on that fight
Lei Shen - more dps = less charged pillars by the end of p2.
Ra-den - it's kill or be killed in p2.

There's a reason why there were almost no prot warriors on the first few 10H kills. 25H is obviously a different story for warriors since dps doesn't matter that much.

[Deleted]

1) Bats make melee damage reduction even more important - just because it comes in burst with low overall damage doesn't mean their damage isn't dangerous (what isn't dangerous is the raid damage from rocks and slam)

And it's after all almost the only damage we've control of so it comes again down to the question if we either need/want to reduce that at all cost or if we can live through it with an avoidance heavy gear as well while rocking on noticeable higher overall damage dealt throughout the entire fight.

Durumu is probably an excellent example, the longer it takes you to kill the boss the more the life drain comes into play. Every drain you take equals two steps forward and one step back and if you don't bring enough dps to kill him in six minutes or less you'll have to deal not with one but with two additional drains IIRC, greatly prolonging the whole fight.

Or an even better example: Dark Animus. If you have enough dps to kill him in two minutes or less you can safely ignore most of this fight mechanics.

There's a reason why there were almost no prot warriors on the first few 10H kills. 25H is obviously a different story for warriors since dps doesn't matter that much.

I was under the impression that enrage on 25M is far tighter, but given that tanks like Sco play warrior for almost a whole decade it's highly unlikely you'll see them play another class. And Gliff already mentioned it: banners. It affects 2.5 times as many raider on 25M, so it adds quite a bit of hidden rdps.

[Deleted]

Let's see:
Jin'rokh - Thunderstorm is devastating for guilds progressing on him => dps helps a lot If you are struggling with thunderstorm tank DPS is the least of your concern
Horridon - once you're able to skip the soft enrage phase that makes it significantly less difficult. Bit of a cheese tactic but I see your point
Council - need some basic dps to kill Sul and faster kill means less stacks. The DPS requirement to kill sul even while progressing isn't THAT high
Tortos - well maybe.
Megeara - yaa tank is only dealing damage to the right head about 70% of the time.
Ji-Kun - yaa but that's probably the easiest boss anyway
Dumuru - Life Drain ... nuff said Deal with the life drain correctly and don't let it go above 2 ?:P Tank DPS isn't really going to prevent an extra one going out tbh
Primordius - once you consider mutations not going to tanks and the tank debuffs dps probably doesn't matter that much here.
Animus - There's so much that can go wrong over time that I'd rather kill it asap Once you are in p2 the boss becomes a lot easier and just about manging matter swap
Qon - preventing second windstorm Again the check on this really isnt tight and you can even lust it if needed
Twins - we actually had troubles with the enrage on that fight I'll give you this is probably harder on 10 so tank DPS probably matters a bit here
Lei Shen - more dps = less charged pillars by the end of p2. Tank DPS shouldn't be deciding the factor on an entire pillar charge and if it is, something is going wrong
Ra-den - it's kill or be killed in p2. Relatively easily out healed even with only vita orbs going in but yes due to the vengeance here tank damage is pretty obscene

There's a reason why there were almost no prot warriors on the first few 10H kills. 25H is obviously a different story for warriors since dps doesn't matter that much.

I personally love the mobility and raid utility of my Warrior, and its what I play best so the gains going on an alt are fairly minimal, tried it for Lei-Shen as prot pally with pretty decent gear and I honestly don't think it made much difference at all

On 25 you have a lot more vengeance to play with so the scope for DPS ranges is a lot higher than in 10. Proportionally though Tank DPS is going to be less in 25 although I would argue about enrages being easier in 25 :P

[Nillo]

Well we did 25H for a week so I can say:
Jin'Rokh thunderstorm was pretty much a joke with all the raid cds we had - on 10H it's much more of a struggle to keep people alive even if they don't stand in bolts.
Council - it is if you also want to prevent the special abilities of the other bosses.
Durumu - again not that easy on 10H
Qon - lust against the Windstorm sound like a bad idea with how hard the start of the last phase is.
Lei Shen - on our first kill we were pretty much capped on all pillars and that was with us already cheesing vengeance to some extent.

Also I think you seem to underestimate the difference in tank dps.
Going from our dps which got us a fairly shitty ranking both of us having ~ 200k dps that's still 60k higher than a top 10 prot warrior - with 1.3m raid dps that's 5% of raid dps, enough to make the difference between a charged pillar or not.

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I personally love the mobility and raid utility of my Warrior, and its what I play best so the gains going on an alt are fairly minimal, tried it for Lei-Shen as prot pally with pretty decent gear and I honestly don't think it made much difference at all

I also like my warrior alt but I wouldn't bring her to a 10H progression raid without the 5.4 changes ~
Unfortunately warrior vengeance cheesing (intervene + sit) will be nerfed by then /:

[Zaritte]

More on mastery vs avoidance

Those numbers posted before were theoretical numbers for a fight with constant melee damage on the tank. We all know this is not true which changes things dramatically.

I used 60% effective Sblock uptime for my calculations. Obviously those numbers change dramatically based upon how well we can game out Sblock uptime. Effective SBlock uptime is the percent of boss melee time you have Sblock running and not the overall percent of the fight SBlock is running. This figure could well exceed 66% if gamed properly. Suppose we gamed it perfectly and were able to keep SBlock up for every melee attack, we would see a >35% improvement in the mastery build against blockable damage as compared to the avoidance build with almost no unmitigated hits and therefore very few spikes.

However, as I have been researching, we prot warriors are not particularly good at gaming the SBlock uptime. Using some of the best prot warriors logs along with their armory stats, I can determine what their effective SBlock uptime is. It rarely goes much higher than 60%. There are several reasons for our inability to game it effectively. People are using SBarrier along with the fact that most melee intervals do not come in 6 second intervals so we always waste some of the SBlock.

A great example of this is Stylist's parse against H Iron Qon. He had an overall SBlock uptime of 50.3% and an effective uptime of 58.6%. Consequently he took 7.5% less melee damage from capping mastery than he would have had he used no mastery at a cost of 23% dps next tier.

If you want to know how well you are gaming SBlock, look at your percent of unmitigated hits. If this number is >20% of all melee attacks, you will take less overall damage from avoidance. Avoidance damage reduction is equal to mastery damage reduction at 20%-25% unmitigated hits. Fewer unmitigated hits and you benefit from mastery. More unmitigated hits and you actually take a net loss from mastery. (FYI, it is difficult to calculate the number of unmitigated hits since logs handle absorbed blocks incorrectly).

[Deleted]

Avoidance has provided better damage reduction since day zero, and does so regardless of what you do with your Sblock. Just as Sbar vs Sblock; Sbar has always have better TDR even against melee only bosses. People gear mastery not because they eat less damage, fuck TDR, the point is to reduce spikes, not having a lower number of damage taken after 6 minutes by standing afk infront of the boss. That's why people go with stamina and mastery and avoid avoidance, and don't go spamming Sbar ignoring Sblock (HR changes things too), and hate being force feed with avoidance.

* Ignore above if you find yourself with +5 adds on you. Then avoidance "bad streaks" disappear, you have the rage to sustain permanent Sbars so you don't get spiked, and Heaven opens before your eyes.

[Deleted]

[...]As a PhD statistician and official WoW nerd I thought I would lay it out. [...]

This quote might show a bit of your mindset and brings us to this:

Avoidance damage reduction is equal to mastery damage reduction at 20%-25% unmitigated hits.

Unless things got messy there are only a few things that can outright kill us, regulary it's a combination of two - three unmitigated hits on top of one (or more) special ability. And that's what we're gearing for, the worst case.

Especially if you look at the top logs you'll see us just mindlessly spamming shield block for the additional damage via HR glyph, that's not the way we can play on progression. Regulary you'll also see us wearing double dps trinkets, sometimes even gemming for crit so we can pad the meters, we simply don't care for some mechanics any longer because we outgear the content by 20 ilvl (hello Triple Puncture!) or we squeeze everything thinkable out of vengeance like standing in a head swipe and intervene + /sit.

Well anyway, if you got a scenario with

swingA
special
swingB

and you can't block the special you'll have to see if adding 20k to mastery instead of avoidance not only increase the chance to survive that situation without further assitance (either personal or external cooldowns, pooling rage or plain good old heals) but maybe can guarantee it somewhere down the road in combination with a sufficient health pool.

The good thing: we don't have to decide between 1 and 0, even if we don't avoid the attack entirely or critical block we'll still end up getting the 30% damage reduction so it's not as spikey as it was eg in BC with ferals. But if i die in 1 ouf of 10 cases to an "unlucky" combination of not avoided hits when crit block would've guaranteed my survival it comes to the point of consistency. You don't have time to wipe to bad luck.

[...] Consequently he would have taken less damage (and fewer unmitigated hits = smoother damage) with the avoidance build (he caps mastery). [...]

You could not us AM for most of the fights, just spamming heoric strike and still do fine. There are only a few situations when you need to worry and that's when taking less damage on average is not important because you'll end up being healed back up eventually from all those hots and smart heals anyway. The smaller your sample size (= the less hits involved) the less attractive avoidance gets due to it's uncontrolable nature. And control is the key to our consistency, that's why we also tend to cap on both expertise and hit.

edit: wah Espada beats me to it, should refresh more often

[Zaritte]

As one of my professors once said. Well... that may be true in practice. But this is statistics. XD

I see what you are saying. We can avoid far more "bad" streaks by gearing mastery and using SBlock effectively. And parses are probably not the best place to look for tanks mitigating properly. And in 5.4 the 2pc heals make mastery almost twice as effective as avoidance while block is up.

With more avoidance each tier, the mastery+block build has been getting less attractive. Last tier they just nerfed barrier. Fortunately this tier they decided to buff blocks with the 2pc.

[Deleted]

I will look at this from the point of view of short period spike survival instead of overall damage reduction. Perhaps an example logs of someone using block effectively would help.

Well, i'd call it, spike reduction rather then spike survival, as generally these spikes aren't deadly but they scare the SHIT out of your healers and have a high potential to kill you combined with some other factors, not beeing full health or environmental damage or something.

As for logs Although hard to analyse Ra-Den would be a clear example, especially on progression I pooled Rage and ONLY used SB to mitigate the fatal strike...

Or as Klaus mentioned, Horridon when early progression, I'd SB the one melee swing before triple and if able barrier remaining rage due to the;

Melee, Tripple, Demoralizing Roar, Melee combi. Which would be a pretty big bitch if you don't have things like demo shout etc up.

Anyhow, removing all the spikes as mentioned by Espada & Klaus is why generally Healers enjoy healing a good prot warrior, we don't spike (and if we do it's rarely or because we fucked shit up). Now removing our ability to greatly evenout the healing we require takes away a part of our class which is very valuable to us/me, aswell as something I feel somewhat set us appart from other tanks.

Clear case and example would be (although this might have more to do with my offtanks beeing.... not playing optimally) that generally I raid with a Paladin OT or a Druid, the druid always get's whine he's hard to heal (makes sense since he's fully avoidance orientated) but even when comparing to the Paladin generally healers prefer healing me due to the reliable way I take my damage. Yet looking at the logs I take more damage then the Prot paladin, if you take his raid/selfhealing into cosideration (which IMO you should).

Anyhow, don't "math" around surviving a spike, "math" around creating a controlled enviroment which doesn't make your healers go insane....

Nothing worse then take no damage for 10 seconds and then spiking down to 10%, although it does make sure your healers don't fall asleep I gues

[idefiler6]

You don't need to gear mastery for spike reduction, all that's necessary for that is to keep SBlock up, which pre 5.4 means simply capping hit/expertise. High mastery is like chocolate frosting in this case. Delicious.

[Zaritte]

I went through Espada's logs on H Animus Progression kill. I was reading logs wrong. Unfortunately, worldoflogs does not count blocked melee attacks that get fully absorbed as blocks. They go into the missed/absorbed column and the fully hit column (as do all other fully absorbed hits). So I fixed some of my math up top.

As it turns out Espada was very effective at reducing spikes with his current mastery level - only 2 unmitigated hit the entire opening phase from keeping up SBlock. Do you know how much mastery you were running during that fight? It looks like idefiler is right. Smoothness is more about keeping up shield block than it is about gearing mastery.

[idefiler6]

The extra mastery, however, is also what is giving us a little bit of extra rage (3 second icd on rage from enrage, IIRC). The damage reduction from crit blocks is almost a nice little bonus. But now, we have this Riposte business, combined with enrage from SS and Dev crits, which will grant rage as well. Makes it a bit more interesting to say the least. I'm not saying it's the perfect system by a long shot, but I'll be watching closely as I faceroll through LFR.

[Deleted]

I went through Espada's logs on H Animus Progression kill. I was reading logs wrong. Unfortunately, worldoflogs does not count blocked melee attacks that get fully absorbed as blocks. They go into the missed/absorbed column and the fully hit column (as do all other fully absorbed hits). So I fixed some of my math up top.

As it turns out Espada was very effective at reducing spikes with his current mastery level - only 2 unmitigated hit the entire opening phase from keeping up SBlock. Do you know how much mastery you were running during that fight? It looks like idefiler is right. Smoothness is more about keeping up shield block than it is about gearing mastery.

Don't really remember. The highest mastery I ran with was 18.7k raid buffed. Mayhaps 16k at that point. We really could have gone and softcapped crit block this tier, either by going with double secondary stats trinkets, or by ignoring socket bonus.

About smoothness... Well, of course Sblock is the more important part. If you don't keep it up Mastery won't smooth nothing at all, and just by being there you put a -30% on everything that would connect. The whole things sustains on Sblock being up, and the fact that you can keep it going for as long as 24 secs with 100% uptime. If you really needed to, you could plan on going with 24 secs of Sblock, 12 secs of Swall and 24 secs of Sblock again, and your damage intake won't spike for a very long time, unless of course, they start to throw unblockable damage at you, either physical (very funny Blizzard) or magical.

And when it's up... What will smooth better the damage (besides stamina)? For the secondary points you spend on +1% avoided hits, you get ~+4% +30% reduction on hits. For those 21k mastery points you could avoid 25%, and have 75% of 40% hits, or avoid 45% and get 55% of 70% hits. Avoidance have always felt wrong for tanking, truth be told. It is something that would make sense if the hits never went above 5% of your health, and healers had 0% mana regen. Or the encounter was being pelted by 0.2 secs attacks constantly.

[Deleted]

So dps meta disabled in a future build, dps cloak to follow? I'm already at 40% uptime, going to 60% sounds pretty neat. Yes, you can't control it.. but given the major gap between full offense and full defense this still helps making things easier to balance imho.

[Zaritte]

So dps meta disabled in a future build, dps cloak to follow? I'm already at 40% uptime, going to 60% sounds pretty neat. Yes, you can't control it.. but given the major gap between full offense and full defense this still helps making things easier to balance imho.

I read in a post from Lore that was just a bug. They are preventing the dps meta from scaling with haste and they are going to give the tank meta a big buff so it is more useful.

[Nillo]

I read in a post from Lore that was just a bug. They are preventing the dps meta from scaling with haste and they are going to give the tank meta a big buff so it is more useful.

From what the blue post says:
They're removing the haste scaling from the tank meta (which was kind of retarded anyway)
They're increasing the rppm of the tanking meta by 50%.

Bottom line it's still RNG and the dps meta gem will generally be better ~

[Deleted]

For a Semi-hardcore guild, I would honestly say it as long as the tanks are decent the class won't make that much of a difference if you are talking about Ra-den DPS or Lei-shen balls or anything like that

For someone who's raided majority of this tier without a holydin, protpala or brm AND being forced to play my paladin, i dont agree
While it doesn't make things impossible its a huge difference on 10man, for pretty much all fights.