The Protection Guide - Cataclysm Edition

[Deleted]

No, full 372 will not render us unhittable. It'll be close (98%+) if we push mastery over anything else, but not quite all the way.

We will not have such huge amounts of critical block, and I doubt mastery will be nerfed. Possibly some, but it shouldn't be anything huge. After all, it's value is significantly reduced once unhittable and makes gearing rather interesting.

98% unbuffed? Cause in a raid envoirment i gain about 2-2.5% avoidance from dodge and parry, and 2 points in mastery which is another 3% getting me at 95ish% avoidance. Somehow i doubt getting decked out in the next ilvl gear would only give you an additional 3% avoidance.

The value of mastery remains the same even after reaching unhittable. Since instead of block it provides you with raw Crit Block.

[Alianthos]

No, full 372 will not render us unhittable. It'll be close (98%+) if we push mastery over anything else, but not quite all the way.

We will not have such huge amounts of critical block, and I doubt mastery will be nerfed. Possibly some, but it shouldn't be anything huge. After all, it's value is significantly reduced once unhittable and makes gearing rather interesting.

Unless i'm mistaken, 98% avoidance would make you unhitable, since 102,3% includes 5% inate miss chance for bosses, so actually you only need 97,3% total avoidance.

Amirite ?

[Deleted]

98% unbuffed? Cause in a raid envoirment i gain about 2-2.5% avoidance from dodge and parry, and 2 points in mastery which is another 3% getting me at 95ish% avoidance. Somehow i doubt getting decked out in the next ilvl gear would only give you an additional 3% avoidance.

The value of mastery remains the same even after reaching unhittable. Since instead of block it provides you with raw Crit Block.

~98% buffed was a rough estimation I made looking over the avoidance values on the 372 gear. It may be more, I'll look into it later if nobody else has better insight.

Mastery won't increase critical block by more after unhittable. Shield Block transforms additional block into critical block, although it's not currently known in "overcapping" block through mastery would further increase the effect. It's possible the maximum increase Shield Block would give is 25%.

[Deleted]

Actually it gives critblock if your total avoidance adds over unhitable.

[Deleted]

I got roughly 90.4% coverage of the attack table when raid buffed in my current gear (ilvl 360, 111 expertise rating and 212 hit rating). This is with mastery food, mastery elixir and Night Elf racial.

If I upgrade all my gear, where heroic versions are available - and even replace some parts to dps plate to maximize coverage and use a second mastery trinket - I'd probably see a gain of roughly 7% block. I'm still ~5% short.

Parry and dodge would be almost unaffected by the upgrades/mastery push; I'd gain ~200 total parry/dodge ratings at most. There's some additional parry from the exra STR on heroic gear. If you proceed to changing to mastery meta, add mastery enchant to feet, gem straight mastery and perhaps throw in another item I didn't consider, I doubt it'd cover for the missing 5%.

If my estimations are right, we'll be able to get really close, but not all the way.

[Alianthos]

Iyona, read what I wrote. I believe you are mistaken : you actually need ONLY 97,2% avoidance (parry + dodge + mastery) to be unhitable because the last 5% are covered by the 5% miss chance every boss has. Torture pointed that to me back in October in Wotlk, when unhitable could be reached with ICC gear, and I achieved it with 97,3% total avoidance.

[Deleted]

Iyone, read what I wrote. I believe you are mistaken : you actually need ONLY 97,2% avoidance (parry + dodge + mastery) to be unhitable because the last 5% are covered by the 5% miss chance every boss has. Torture pointed that to me back in October in Wotlk, when unhitable could be reached with ICC gear.

When I say "I got roughly 90.4% coverage" I include the base miss chance, ye daft cow. :-)

[Alianthos]

its you, daft cow ! omg

[Nesco]

its you, daft cow ! omg

But he said he was a Night Elf! Not a Tauren!

So he just needs 95.4% total mitigation before casting Shield Block would yield him with the full 25% critical shield block.
It would be nice if a GM would be able to say anything about mastery, if excess mastery will add 1.5% into critical shield block or 3% into critical shield block.

[Deleted]

But he said he was a Night Elf! Not a Tauren!

So he just needs 95.4% total mitigation before casting Shield Block would yield him with the full 25% critical shield block.
It would be nice if a GM would be able to say anything about mastery, if excess mastery will add 1.5% into critical shield block or 3% into critical shield block.

I really doubt mastery will give 3% critical block, that's not stated anywhere and shouldn't logically do so. Shield Block may or may not, however, transform the additional block to critical block durings it's duration. Else it may just "cap" at the 25% it produces itself. If the former, mastery will stay relatively strong even after unhittable, as our other defensive stats diminish naturally. We will then find a sweet spot where DR eats too much of our defensive stats, making mastery reduce more damage per point of rating. It could be 20, it could be 25, I got no idea but you get my point. Obviously this would still be true even if Shield Block "caps", but yeah.

[Nesco]

I highly doubt that mastery will give 3% too. But it's not easily proven. Mastery tooltip doesn't say it, so it won't.

The soft spot you're talking about, would mean that the DR should be ~55% on dodge or parry. This number is way too high to reach. A parry rating of 8837 (50% parry from rating) would only give 29.11% parry after DR (41,8%) which is still way under the 55% loss from DR. So there is no soft spot really that mastery will be able to give more damagereduction than avoidance stats per point of rating.

What I do concern myself about is, that after testing the tooltip of Shield Block for Critical Block transference the critical block part looks at the undiminished stats of parry and dodge.
Basically this means that when someone has 77.4% chance to mitigate or avoid damage, that after casting Shield Block that someone won't be unhittable. The chance that you're hittable is the amount of DR from parry and dodge.
The downside is that you'll have to have either less than 77.4% chance or higher than 102.4% chance to mitigate or avoid damage for Shield Block to give every point of damage reduction that you're promised to get.

It could also just be a tooltip error, that just does 95 - parry - dodge - blockchance. And that under water the formula to calculate critical block chance is working correctly. But I have no means to test this.

[Alianthos]

So anyway.

"Shield Mastery now reduces magic damage taken by 7/14/20% for 6 sec"

How awesome is that ? 20% is very, very, very decent. Mirror of Broken Images provides 40% damage reduction from magical sources on a 1 minute CD, so this trinket + SB = awesome survaviability VS magical bursts, ALA Sindragosa. Maybe strong enough to actually save LS (and use RC instead) and just live with SW, SB and trinkets as all-around cooldowns.

Me like.

[Deleted]

So anyway.

"Shield Mastery now reduces magic damage taken by 7/14/20% for 6 sec"

How awesome is that ? 20% is very, very, very decent. Mirror of Broken Images provides 40% damage reduction from magical sources on a 1 minute CD, so this trinket + SB = awesome survaviability VS magical bursts, ALA Sindragosa. Maybe strong enough to actually save LS (and use RC instead) and just live with SW, SB and trinkets as all-around cooldowns.

Me like.

It's almost too strong tbh. Warriors will be the tank suffering the least damage of all. Perhaps that's how they want to design it... Ah well, let's just hope it stays that way. Yarr.

I highly doubt that mastery will give 3% too. But it's not easily proven. Mastery tooltip doesn't say it, so it won't.

The soft spot you're talking about, would mean that the DR should be ~55% on dodge or parry. This number is way too high to reach. A parry rating of 8837 (50% parry from rating) would only give 29.11% parry after DR (41,8%) which is still way under the 55% loss from DR. So there is no soft spot really that mastery will be able to give more damagereduction than avoidance stats per point of rating.

What I do concern myself about is, that after testing the tooltip of Shield Block for Critical Block transference the critical block part looks at the undiminished stats of parry and dodge.
Basically this means that when someone has 77.4% chance to mitigate or avoid damage, that after casting Shield Block that someone won't be unhittable. The chance that you're hittable is the amount of DR from parry and dodge.
The downside is that you'll have to have either less than 77.4% chance or higher than 102.4% chance to mitigate or avoid damage for Shield Block to give every point of damage reduction that you're promised to get.

It could also just be a tooltip error, that just does 95 - parry - dodge - blockchance. And that under water the formula to calculate critical block chance is working correctly. But I have no means to test this.

I understand your confusion, but everything is working as intended. What you must consider is that we cannot have 102,4% avoidance. It's impossible; our chance to do something can't exceed 100%, it's only logical. When you look at tooltips, it assumes your stats versus a level 85 mob, and that's where the difficulties begin.

Basically how the WoW engine works is that if you're lower level than what you're attacking, you got less a chance to hit. The hit cap versus level 85 players and mobs is 5%, while the hit cap versus level 88 bosses is 8%. Similarly, when you're higher level than something, you got an increased chance to hit it. This is also true for NPCs, and a boss at level 88 has an overall 2,4% higher chance to hit you. Technically, the boss decreases your chance to block, parry, dodge and be missed each by 0,6%. If your character sheet says 15% parry, your chance to parry a boss' melee swing is 14,4%.

That's why we overcap 100% with 2,4% additional avoidances, and that's why Shield Block looks funky on the char sheet. Presumably, the differance should be automatically accounted for by the engine.

[shadowkras]

It's almost too strong tbh. Warriors will be the tank suffering the least damage of all. Perhaps that's how they want to design it... Ah well, let's just hope it stays that way. Yarr.

Not quite sure thats correct.
Currently we are the only tanks with 10% less magical damage resistance.
When a boss hits a fireball for 10k damage every 2 seconds, a bear will take 9k damage each hit, and a warrior will take 10k damage each hit.
With shield block up, the warrior will take 5 hits for 8k instead of 10k. The cooldown is 30 seconds, so out of 15 hits we will take less damage on 1/3 of them, the other 10 will hit at full power.

The bear will take a total of 150k damage, the warrior will take 180k damage. So in the end we are still behind other tanks in magical damage taken.

This change MIGHT help against timed attacks such as breathes, but we will have to save shield block so it is cast when the boss casts his big hitting spell, thus we will lose physical mitigation in the long run, taking more physical damage and going against our current goal (the whole block+mastery ideal of taking more constant damage instead of spiked).
The change is nice on fights like nefarian, but on a lot of other fights i wouldnt save my shield block just for that big hitting spell and lose physical mitigation in the process, just not worth it.

EDIT
Correction, the talent seems to last 6 seconds instead of the full 10s from shield block, so you only absorb 3 hits out of 15. Overall we will take more magic damage than other tanks, just less damage than before this change.

[Deleted]

Delaying Shield Block slightly to have it cover up for a magical damage source could likely reduce more damage overall. After all, it's often magical damage causing spikes.

Thinking about it, it might be spot on to apply this to Shield Block.

[shadowkras]

It doesnt fix our problem, it will just apply some bandaid over it. Personally i dont like this change, they will use this as excuse to not balance us again and we will still take 10% more magical damage than other tanks.

Delaying it certainly wont be worth all the physical damage you would have mitigated (30% per block, 60% per critical, thats huge). Unless we are topped off by 2 healers (25man?), we will take overall more damage from melee hits, and a little less damage from the spike magical attack, so our health before the magic attack will be lower than it would have been if we used shield block earlier, resulting in less total health at the end of the spell. Unless, of course, the boss doesnt hit hard enough and we can easily get topped off.

It needed to be at least 30% to make it as strong as antimagic shell for example (against most boss fights).

[Deleted]

It's almost too strong tbh. Warriors will be the tank suffering the least damage of all. Perhaps that's how they want to design it... Ah well, let's just hope it stays that way. Yarr.

Me thinks you never played a DK Iyona

Here's the thing; if the spell shield is OP, then the same should apply to AMS. In fact, AMS is OP and always has been. The amount of utility that it gives is borderline insane and I can only wonder why the world isn't on fire with QQ about it. Lets just look back a bit to ICC, where AMS alone made DKs the kings of tanks; we could run across poison, survive Festergut without inoculation, and survive the most insane magic damage without flinching. Those included Talderam's improved fireball from two feet away, Sindragosa's breath, Lich King's Soul Reaper, etc. Could almost say it completely trivialized all the above and more.

Today, think AMS was changed a little but not in any great significant way. The amount it mitigates was limited, but it is still maximum 50% of the tank's health. Now that essentially means you can trivialize major magic burst such as Fury of Cho'gall and Nefarian's Crackle, along with a bunch of other magic abilities across the board. Examples that come to mind are Nezir's cold damage, flame jets on Maloriak (+the cold and fire debuffs during red and blue phase), Chimaeron's feud phase, etc. I could go on forever. Plus ofc, they can buy the TB trinket so it's like having two AMSs.

Compared to all of that, the changes to our Shield Block really don't seem all that bad to me. If anything, I'd say "about time!"

[Grimtor]

Hello, I'm back for some more questions since I allways get answers over here


Iv'e been progressing quite a lot with my warrior (here's an armory link) http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...imtor/advanced

and me and my guild raid every week, Iv'e been wondering, should I spend my valor points on the tier gloves for protection? or is the gravitation pull from the council a better option? (I didnt get it yet, but hoping every week)
Generally I need advice whether to work on 4 piece tier gear or individual epics.

I wish I could figure this out by my self but Im really new to WoW and only now getting a grip of it

I could also spend my VP on my off spec fury but I barely get to raid as dps. thanks for the tips in advance

[Deleted]

Grimtor, you're in Fury gear on armory.

The 4p bonus is great, close to mandatory for a few encounters. Wearing off-set items isn't really worth it; three of the tier items (legs, gloves, chest) have perfect itemization. While Gravitational Pull may be slightly better than the tier gloves, it's slightly indeed.

If you have the best possible off set items, then wearing them all may reduce overall more damage than the 4p bonus does. May. I went for the full set asap.

[Grimtor]

Grimtor, you're in Fury gear on armory.

The 4p bonus is great, close to mandatory for a few encounters. Wearing off-set items isn't really worth it; three of the tier items (legs, gloves, chest) have perfect itemization. While Gravitational Pull may be slightly better than the tier gloves, it's slightly indeed.

If you have the best possible off set items, then wearing them all may reduce overall more damage than the 4p bonus does. May. I went for the full set asap.

Thank you, my armory may have not refreshed to my protection gear when you were looking at it.
It's on my protection set now.