Originally Posted by
YouGotTheTouch
I'd like to ask a question about Versatility.
I've been thinking of getting into tanking on my DK, and have been looking into the stat weights. I'm very much a casual player, so having the absolute best gear is not nearly as important for my enjoyment of the game, but I do like to understand why the gear I choose is good for me.
So what I've done is set up a spreadsheet to act as a model for my dps, healing, and damage taken. For the most part it has gone well, but one thing I'm consistently running into is that Versatility keeps coming out as substantially better than Mastery for survivability, despite its high cost.
Point-for-point, the numbers I'm getting suggest that Mastery and Versatility provide very similar Death Strike healing, and that Versatility's damage reduction is stronger than Mastery's extra absorption. I'm getting Versatility as over 20% more valuable than Mastery per point, and it gets stronger when you're taking more damage. The tipping point seems to be at about the point where you start taking 15,000 dps, after damage reduction from armor has been applied (ie somewhere in the region of 35k base boss damage).
Now, it's incredibly unlikely that I have magically stumbled across something that dedicated raiders and theorycrafters haven't already thought of. When this guide, Icy Veins, and SimCraft all tell me I'm wrong, I assume that I'm wrong. I must be missing something about the way that things work, but I can't for the life of me figure out what that is.
So my question really is, what is it about the way that Mastery and Versatility work that makes every guide rate Mastery so much more highly than Versatility? Is it really more powerful for pure survivability? Am I overestimating base boss dps? Have people just decided that the survivability difference is sufficiently small that the extra dps from Mastery makes it more worthwhile?