BfA prot paladin secondary stats

[Meiffert]

I want to bring this up as I think the community opinion hasn't adjusted properly to the changes in BfA.

There are two main components of comparing stats that need to be taken into account:

1. The quality of damage reduction provided.
What this means is that we would prefer 1 % DR from versatility over 1 % DR from crit. Why? Because versatility is reliable and crit isn't. Crit gives parry which you cannot count on as it's random.
Similarly, we would prefer 1 % DR from haste over 1 % DR from versatility. The DR haste provides comes mostly from higher SotR up-time which is not only reliable, it allows you to choose when you want to use it, providing superior control (all the DR granted by haste can be concentrated into a few seconds when you need it the most).
Finally, mastery works partially as versatility when standing in consecration and partially RNG giving block chance. That puts it just below versatility in usefulness.

That gives us the following priority: Haste > Versatility >= Mastery > Crit.

I have seen a lot of people stop right here and pronounce that as our stat priority.
Unfortunatelly, this isn't all there is to consider and we have to look at the other part as well:


2. The amount of damage reduction provided by 1 rating.
The simplest way to present this idea is this: Even though we can all agree haste is the "best" stat, getting 10 % DR from haste is not as good as getting 50 % DR from versatility (these numbers are just for illustration, the difference isn't that high).
In the past the stats were much more balanced, so this played lesser role. We knew that haste used to be weak numbers wise in Legion, but the difference was smaller so the quality of haste was more important than its "lack of numbers".

I have done some calculations about the raw strength of stats (not taking the quality into consideration) in this spreadsheet.

Coincidentally (not really because I'm convinced the developers aren't that stupid and did it on purpose), the raw strength of stats is the exact opposite than their usefulness: Crit >= Mastery > Versatility > Haste.

Another thing to consider is that the spredsheet assumes all damage is blockable, parryable and reduced by armor. Against magic damage mastery and versatility keep their full value while haste and crit are close to worthless.


So how do we come to a conclusion when we have two competing components?
It's not simple, not only is it partly a matter of opinion, the answer also varries depending on the encounter and its damage paterns.

Comparing to established Legion values.
(I will be comparing to versatility because it is a stat that hasn't been changed and was considered a solid 2nd defensive option in Legion.)
In Legion, the accepted recommendation was to prefer haste as our best stat, but still prioritize item level when the difference was more than 5 item levels.
For jewelry, rings and necks (since they don't have primary stat and armor), the recommendation used to be 15-20 item levels.
This was quoted multiple times a day on the Discord prot paladin channel, including by moderators and templars so I think it's a good place to start as a general gearing strategy good for most situations.
15-20 item levels translated to 10 - 13 % more secondary stats. Assuming roughly 50/50 split between two stats (say, haste/crit vs. vers/crit ring), we get 20 - 25 % more vers than haste if we keep equal crit. There is also a little bit of stamina, which isn't too important, but not completely worthless either, so let's bump it up to roughly 30 % difference.

So since we know that haste was valued about 30 % higher than versatility in Legion, what does it mean today?
The value of haste dropped significantly because of the nerfs to SotR:
1. The DR provided by SotR is much smaller now, likely not exceeding 40 % (depends on your strength vs. armor). In Legion it used to be much more powerful (also buffed by mastery).
2. SotR only provides armor now, which means it doesn't work agains magic damage or bleeds. You might have noticed being a lot more vulnerable against Ymiron in MoS.
3. Base up-time is lower because the cooldown of SotR has been increased to 18 seconds. That also means that increasing the up-time by the same percentage gives smaller absolute up-time increase.

Despite the value of haste dropping significantly compared to Legion, I still consider it very useful and believe it's probably slightly better, especially in raids with a lot of moderate tanking up-time encounters (typical tank-swap fights) and m+ with some downtime as well (finishing off 1-2 mobs, running between packs etc.)
That being said, the lead haste has on versatility is much smaller nowadays and rather than 30 %, I'd say it's better by a very small margin of maybe 10 %. If you tank something with 100 % tanking up-time, I wouldn't even object to considering haste worse than versatility, but such encounters are practically nonexistent.

That brings us to the second part of the comparison and that is the new mastery. Old mastery was quite bad, but the new one is amazing.
Consecration portion is reliable and is worth about 85 % of versatility by itself. Add in the block chance part and we have an extremely powerful stat. Sure, blocking isn't reliable, but it isn't as bad as pure dodge/parry in terms of smoothing. If block was reliable, the value of mastery would be almost 70 % higher than versatility.
Even discounting block by 30 - 40 %, mastery still beats versatility by about 40 %, which is arguably competitive with Legion haste, definitelly more than BfA haste.


There are some other more ways to compare the stats more dirrectly, but they aren't quite as proper.
Still, I'll include some for illustration (talking mastery vs. haste since I believe mastery to be the strongest stat and the community mostly agres on the rest of the stat priority).

1. One counterargument I have received a few times in relation to the spreadsheet was this: "with 150 extra stats, the difference in damage taken between mastery and haste is only about 1 %. That is quite low and I'd rather have the control provided by haste over 'measly' 1 % DR."
The problem is that 150 stats is a reasonably small amount. I used to have much bigger numbers in the spreadsheet for this purpose, but it was pointed to me that they were unrealistic. It's not like you can decide to reenchant a couple rings and gain thousands of stats.
What the people making this argument don't realize is how many extra SotRs you get for that 1 % DR. On a typical fight of 5-7 minutes, the answer is less than 1. You don't even get a single full SotR with only 150 haste. So the idea that there is some tangible increase in control that you can actually feel during the fight for this much stats is incorrect.

2. Comparison to Bastion of Light talent (3 SotRs per 2 minutes) = 1575 rating is equivalent to 14.69 % DR from mastery. Would you rather have BoL (7 seconds of on demand 40 % reduction per minute) or a new talent that gave permanent 15 % damage reduction at all times?
While there are a few fights (think 3tanking Argus p3) where the BoL is the difference between having and not having SotR up for every big hit you take, on the vast majority of encounters the "new" talent would the clear winner.

3. Extreme option of incredibly high amount (5k) of stats:
At 5k stats, haste gives roughly 40 % of SotR Up-time (which is 38-39 % DR), while 5k mastery gives 38.4 % at all times (effectively providing the equivalent of permanent SotR).


With all this taken into account (and a couple of things that were beyond the scope of this, such as the small increase in SotR up-time from crit), my personal recommendation for defensive stat priority is Mastery > Haste >= Versatility = Crit.


I am more than happy to discuss this on Discord, I am also perfectly happy to be proven wrong (I'm not perfect and it's quite possible that there are mistakes in the spreadsheet that I used for the raw data as well as in my reasoning).
I only ask that if you disagree, you provide your reasoning and arguments that aren't just "The quality of DR provided" mentioned at the beginning because as you can see, I have already taken it into account and used the generally accepted Legion conversion for this value.

[Paultimate]

This is the agreed on standard right now:

Haste > Mastery > Versatility >> Crit

You do not have enough actual math up there to prove in any situation this isnt true. Infact the top worldclass prot paladins agree with this. (As well as the top healers). Tanking is about first: 1. reducing damage to levels below being 1-shot 2. Normalizing incoming damage as much as possible 3. reducing the normalized damage as much as possible.
Thinking parry in any way is = to versatility (damage normalization) just shows a very broken theory when approaching tanking in the first place even if the overall incoming damage numbers is less with parry (not saying it is or not). Its about how easy are you to heal

I dont even know what to tell you if you think haste and versatility are even close to equal. I feel like you're looking at the stats like a robot, instead of a player that can use tools given at time needed. Thats not how humans play the game. If you're just pressing buttons as they come off cooldown, youre a standard paladin/game player and shouldn't care about any of this anyway.

In no way do you need to be 'proven wrong', you need to prove yourself correct first. Thats how it works.

[blueprint21]

For high end prog you'll have two gear sets defensively, for physical encounters it will be haste>Mastery=Vers>Crit, For magic heavy encounters it will be Mastery>Vers>Haste>Crit.

New players and those who are unfamiliar with what proper progression is tend to have the same mentality towards tanking - whatever makes me take the least total damage is the best choice. If this rang true in any regard we would have been the best tank for the entire expansion, monks would have been bottom of the pile forever, it just fundamentally does not work like this.

Theres only one thing that will ever be relevant for a tank survival wise when it comes to raid and that is, how easy are you to keep alive. Smoothing is the everything, thats why monks have been and still are so absurdly broken in raiding scenarios, anything that eliminates spikes is by default going to be your go to tank with VERY few exceptions.

Haste would have to be gutted by such an absurd amount for it to no longer be our go to stat for any physical based progression, there's absolutely no chance that haste is not on top as our primary defensive stat.

For the significantly worse players going Mastery/Vers only may be of a greater benefit as i will limit the negative impact of their own play, but for people who are actively trying to play the game and min max, aswell as improve, there is no alternative to haste as your primary stat on any physical based progression which will always be 80-90% of prog.

[Meiffert]

This is the agreed on standard right now:
Haste > Mastery > Versatility >> Crit

That is indeed the agreed upon standard. Do you know what the problem is with it?
It was agreed upon before we knew the formulas for calculating pretty much anything.
We didn't know the constants in armor calculations, we didn't know the parry diminishing returns, we didn't know how much strength/armor/secondaries items were going to have for their budget after the stat squish. I'm not even sure we knew the stat conversions (how much rating you need for 1 % of a given stat) with any kind of certainty when we "came up" with that priority.

In other words, it was a guess.
An educated guess, mind you, taking the mechanics (and the resulting "quality" as described in my original post) into account, as well as some historical perspective. (Crit was always bad for smoothing, no reason to thing it's going to be any better.)

Unfortunately, many players took it as law and it became something that "everybody knows so it must be true," rather than an early estimate that should be improved as we get more information.

You do not have enough actual math up there to prove in any situation this isnt true. Infact the top worldclass prot paladins agree with this. (As well as the top healers). Tanking is about first: 1. reducing damage to levels below being 1-shot 2. Normalizing incoming damage as much as possible 3. reducing the normalized damage as much as possible.

If this was true in such absolute terms, why aren't versatility and mastery considered stronger than haste?
After all, even with pushing haste to unreasonable levels, you can get nowhere near 100 % mitigation coverage, meaning you are still getting hit by attacks only affected by mastery and versatility and otherwise unmitigated (and those should be priority, shouldn't they?)

Thinking parry in any way is = to versatility

I don't actually think that. I had crit as clear last when I only took parry into account, until some people on discord convinced me that I'm underestimating the value of SotR up-time, especially on tank-swap (~ 50% tanking) fights.
Crit doesn't only give parry, it also gives you more SotR (through Judgment crits), which is similar to haste (about 20-25 % of the effect of haste per point). This part is what made me consider crit a lot more valuable and roughly equal to versatility. (Crit is better on AoE physical fights, versatility on hard hitting single target or magic fights.)

[StrutAmari]

For high end prog you'll have two gear sets defensively, for physical encounters it will be haste>Mastery=Vers>Crit, For magic heavy encounters it will be Mastery>Vers>Haste>Crit.

To quote bp, there shouldn't be a standard ever for players actually trying to min-max to the best potential that can be achieved. As well as you saying earlier in your post that if a 1% DR is achievable, it would be meaningless to achieve. That is an incorrect thought process. If you can get it without sacrifcing anything, you are putting yourself and your team in harms way for...what reason?

Your stats should adapt to what the encounter requires -- this is strictly speaking on terms of survival.

Haste overall is your best secondary stat for all Physical encounters as it is a direct physical damage reduction tool in the form on SotR. Consecration should have a 100% or near 100% uptime on all encounters.

Mastery is arguably better than Versatility as well for majority of encounters for 2 reasons.
Mastery gives you a flat DR (yes, slightly weaker than Vers) in the form of standing in you Consecration, which we already went over should have a near 100% uptime, and also the variable of blocking incoming damage.

Block Dodging and Parrying are factors in reducing and smoothing incoming damage regardless of there being an RNG factor in it.

[Meiffert]

I wrote to you guys on Discord, but not getting any answers as of yet, so some quick thoughts:

@StrutAmari
I'm not sure if you are addressing me in your post since you only quoted BP.
If you are, everything you are saying is already covered by me in the original post or the linked spreadsheet, so there isn't any disagreement (also you mentioning the 1 % DR being insignificant isn't in any way my opinion in this context, I am in fact arguing against that if you reread that part carefully).

@BP
I can generally agree with most of your post, maybe even haste being best on physical hard hitting bosses with very favorable tanking uptime (just over SotR uptime, or ~50 %). Though I wouldn't consider that a general gearing strategy, it can has its place.

There's absolutely no chance that haste is not on top as our primary defensive stat.
[...]
there is no alternative to haste as your primary stat on any physical based progression

But this is the absolutist attitude that is just killing any discussion.
You are saying (even though I know that's not what you mean) that 1 point of haste is better than 10000 points of any other stat.

Which is obviously ridiculous. There has to be some value of its effect, it isn't actually infinite. So why not just say what the value is in your opinion?
In fact, many people did during Legion. They said: haste is best (despite being weak numbers wise even back then) and it is worth 15-20 item levels on a ring. Since then the value of haste went down and mastery went up a lot. If those numbers (which were generally accepted during Legion) were anywhere close, mastery has overtaken haste.

[blueprint21]

don't missquote to try and prove your point.

Haste would have to be gutted by such an absurd amount for it to no longer be our go to stat for any physical based progression, there's absolutely no chance that haste is not on top as our primary defensive stat.

I said it would have to be gutted to not be our best stat, never did i state that haste is so far beyond anything else that you should sacrifice 5x more of another stat for it.

My attitude is 100% the attitude that kills any discussion, because this isn't a dps sim or theorycraft, it doesn't function the same, you haven't prog'd even at a middle level as a tank, let alone at a high level.

Your opinion of tanking is, the numbers say this is going to make me take the least damage so its the correct decision.

That is wrong, flat out incorrect, it also showcases you have no real knowledge of what tanking progression entails and kinda directly correlates to the fact that you shouldn't be giving your two cents in this fashion, if all you're going to do is give input that is going to be a detriment to the playerbase.

A post like this does nothing but hinder because all you're giving is inaccurate information relative to progression.

I'm not going to sit here and say haste is worth x ilvls on a ring or x ilvls on a chest, because for one thats entirely wrong in every way as everything has two stats, and secondly its not a stagnant value.

As you said hastes value isn't infinite, but this entire expansion you did not reach the point where you no longer wanted it. I.E 100% haste permanently, that wasn't where defensive benefits stopped thats where your gcd capped.

[Paultimate]

Your opinion of tanking is, the numbers say this is going to make me take the least damage so its the correct decision.

That is wrong, flat out incorrect, it also showcases you have no real knowledge of what tanking progression entails and kinda directly correlates to the fact that you shouldn't be giving your two cents in this fashion, if all you're going to do is give input that is going to be a detriment to the playerbase.

Agreed, I thought i made that pretty clear to op in my post. Its a bit harder for most semi-new/inexperienced tanks to understand that any tanks main goal is very simply this: make it as easy as possible for your healers to heal you Thats it. Thats all there is to it. Lowering spike damage is far more valuable that slightly lowering overall incoming damage. Haste allows Prot Paladins to control this.

However haste is pointless if you're not actively playing your character and watching whats going on around you. It requires active use of abilities to show its true value, where other stats are more passive.

Also, op, you can be as stubborn as you like about it, but fast is there is a discord filled with ~20,000 paladins that would disagree with you as well. When you get over it or start to get to progression and experience it yourself (and have experienced healers thank you), you can thank experienced players for showing you the light.

https://discord.gg/S4pHqe

And some reading for you by one of the world class paladins:
https://www.icy-veins.com/wow/protec...-stat-priority

[Meiffert]

Your opinion of tanking is, the numbers say this is going to make me take the least damage so its the correct decision.

Agreed, I thought i made that pretty clear to op in my post.

How can you agree with this when it is clearly not even close to what I said?
Have you read the original post at all or are you just trolling? Honest question. Do you actually think that was my point?

The value of stats in terms of damage taken was only one of many parts I took into account and the final ranking I recommended weren't even close to those generated by the total damage taken.
So I just don't get it. Did you stop reading right there, about 30 % into the post? And even if you did, did you also skip over the first part?

Also, op, you can be as stubborn as you like about it, but fast is there is a discord filled with ~20,000 paladins that would disagree with you as well.

Yeah.
And if you read the original post (which you didn't as I'm just realizing, since you didn't even make it to the first sentence), you'd understand that the accepted stat rankings that "everybody knows" were made in Legion before we knew how the mechanics would work in BfA.
And the fact that we, as community, have not adjusted to the changes, is the very reason for this thread.

any tanks main goal is very simply this: make it as easy as possible for your healers to heal you Thats it. Thats all there is to it. Lowering spike damage is far more valuable that slightly lowering overall incoming damage. Haste allows Prot Paladins to control this.

You are almost right.
Lowering spike damage is indeed important. And haste used to do that. You know, back when the up-time on SotR was kinda high and enough haste pushed you over the threshold where you could have it more reliably for most dangerous situation.

What you seem to not understand (maybe because you haven't tested BfA yet, I don't know), is that after the nerfs it is impossible to have SotR up with high enough frequency.

So let me give you an example that I gave BP last night when we discussed it on Discord:
Let's say you are tanking a "Patchwerk" type boss for 5 minutes. You get hit 150 times. You SotR some of the attacks, use AD, GoaK, externals, you even get hit with unmitigated attack every now and then on purpose when you have LotP or LoH available.
But even with all that, you still get hit maybe 30 times by unmitigated attacks because paladins just don't have enough cooldowns and SotR up-time to cover everything.
Some of those 30 hits might even be back-to-back making them way more dangerous.

Your solution is to get more haste, so you can cover those 30 hits (or at least most of them, so you eliminate the back-to-backs at the very least) with SotR. That makes sense and it used to be the best solution for the past 3 expansions. I get that.

But unfortunately, it doesn't work any more. Why? Because you can't get the up-time high enough any more. Even if you stack haste on every item, you will only eliminate 2-3 of those 30 hits.
So if you can't survive those reliably (and your healers hate it when you take the spike damage), how will you handle the 27 remaining instances?

Isn't it better at that point to go a different route and reduce all 30 by some small-moderate amount (by getting 5-10 % DR from mastery) rather than trying to eliminate 3 of those dangerous situations "completely", but keeping 27 more dangerous?
As long as there are unmitigated spikes left after stacking haste, those spikes are actually worse than if you had more mastery.

Is it possible that there are fights where you will be missing just a little bit of extra SotR to cover all/most dangerous points? Yes, absolutely, such fights can exist. And you are completely right that haste will be the best stat on those encounters.
But it is incorrect to assume that those encounters are the majority. Falling into the little window just slightly above what you can mitigate reliably isn't the norm, it's an exception.

Its a bit harder for most semi-new/inexperienced tanks to understand
[...]
However haste is pointless if you're not actively playing your character and watching whats going on around you. It requires active use of abilities to show its true value, where other stats are more passive.
[...]
When you get over it or start to get to progression and experience it yourself (and have experienced healers thank you), you can thank experienced players for showing you the light.

https://discord.gg/S4pHqe

And some reading for you by one of the world class paladins:
https://www.icy-veins.com/wow/protec...-stat-priority

Yeah, personal jabs, how clever of you.
Because why make an actual argument when you can just call me a noob and that makes me wrong, right?

[Deleted]

@Meiffert: About your example: Several things come to mind,

First: I have a hard time remembering a boss that just straight auto hit one tank for 5 minutes. Closest thing this expansion would probably have been.... Dragons of Nightmare? And even then there was the breath, the spawn of the copies and switching them to deal with. Some of these things are periods of increased damage intake, thus a stat that gives you controllable damage reduction (AM uptime) is more useful. Tank swap fights on which you half the time just stand there are even worse.

Second: Why do you think that the amount of stats giving you 5-10% DR, which is pretty gigantic, is equivalent to something like 3% more SotR uptime? These numbers don't seem overly realistic.

Now to your main argument: You take into account 2 factors: damage reduction per stat percent and conversion ratio from rating to stat percentages. If you combine the two what you get is damage reduction per stat rating. This stat is something you can actually model in simcraft and still isn't used in theorycrafting for tanks in any meaningful way. Why? Because overall damage taken isn't the only relevant factor because not all bosses are patchwerk.

Almost all bosses have nukes that you need to deal with and mitigating those is as well as the auto hits is what matters. Smoothing is what makes you healable not overall damage reduction. Therefore there usually are no "best" tank talents or trinkets, but ones that fit a certain fight and ones that don't. Therefore flexible stats that allow you to adapt to the conditions are more sought after than versatility unless they are massively numerically inferior.

Also relying on parries and blocks for your damage mitigation sucks as you have no control over it. So stats like crit can even be bad if they seem strong numerically just because you really can't play around them in much of a meaningful way.

/ramble

[Meiffert]

First: I have a hard time remembering a boss that just straight auto hit one tank for 5 minutes. Closest thing this expansion would probably have been.... Dragons of Nightmare? And even then there was the breath, the spawn of the copies and switching them to deal with. Some of these things are periods of increased damage intake, thus a stat that gives you controllable damage reduction (AM uptime) is more useful. Tank swap fights on which you half the time just stand there are even worse.

Hello, thanks for your thoughts.

Every fight has a different damage profile, there is no reason for it to be Patchwerk to consider this model.

For example, maybe you only need mitigation when an add spawns, or after breath that makes you take extra damage for 10 seconds. Are you in a situation where you don't have your mitigation tools available often enough? And would a few extra percent from haste be enough to make the difference and cover them all? If so, haste is best, you will get no argument from me. But the window for that is pretty narrow, so it's more likely that it's not the case.

An example of a boss with too low "requirements" on up-time is Argus (with the common 3-tank strategy). You don't need haste on Argus. Why? Because with 3 tanks rotating, you can have SotR up all the time when tanking, even with 0 haste (you need BoL in phase 3, but you'd use it anyway on such a fight).

An example of a boss with too high requirements on up-time is Aggramar. You are tanking a lot. When not tanking, you are actually taking even more damage from Taeshalach's Reach because you have the debuff. When the boss is not attacking, it's because he is casting his Technique where you actually take even larger hit and need to save something for it.
You can't cover all of that with SotR, no matter how much haste you get, so you will take some unmitigated hits. As that is inevitably the case, why not focus on those hits (which are arguably most dangerous)?

Second: Why do you think that the amount of stats giving you 5-10% DR, which is pretty gigantic, is equivalent to something like 3% more SotR uptime? These numbers don't seem overly realistic.

You can review the math in the spreadsheet.
If you want, you can make a copy and tinker with the numbers. You need about 500 mastery to get 5 % damage reduction (it will give roughly 2.6 % from standing in consecration and 2.4 % from blocks).
500 extra haste, on the other hand, increases your SotR up-time from 41 % to 44.4 %.

Now to your main argument: You take into account 2 factors: damage reduction per stat percent and conversion ratio from rating to stat percentages.

That is only a very small part of what I took into account. If that was all I did, crit would be the strongest stat and haste weakest by far.
But I agree with you (and others) that large part of crits value comes from parry and parry being unreliable makes it much less valuable in practice.
I also agree that haste is better than what the "pure numbers" suggest. That's why instead of being "worst by far" I argue that it is second best. The only disagreement is on how much is the better control provided by haste worth.
I agreed with the community throughout Legion where (even though haste was already weak numbers wise back then), it was considered ~ 30 % more valuable than other stats.
Since then haste was nerfed and mastery buffed drastically, which put it ahead.

Somehow most people seem to think that haste used to be 30 % better. Then it got nerfed. But it was still 30 % better. Then other stats were buffed (mastery is clearly ahead of versatility which used to be the 2nd best defensive stat) and somehow haste is still 30 % ahead of it? How is it possible?

Smoothing is what makes you healable not overall damage reduction.

That's all good.
But why is taking 9 large hits (because you eliminated one of them with SotR granted by more haste) considered smoother than 10 slightly smaller hits (smaller because extra mastery)?
Isn't that the exact opposite of what smooth means?

[ulmer9]

I think people undervalue crit too much especially with crusaders judgement giving grand crusader procs with parry resetting judgement thus more sotr uptime. Obviously would have a soft cap. Is be willing to say even better than vers on physical fights until 15% to 20% parry then greatly falling off. That's just my opinion, but I mainly heal. I'll prob be tanking this time around though.

[Meiffert]

I think people undervalue crit too much especially with crusaders judgement giving grand crusader procs with parry resetting judgement thus more sotr uptime.

CJ isn't really viable defensively with current numbers (BoL gives around 3x more SotR up-time and it's on demand).
But yeah, the crits giving extra 2s of SotR cooldown is part of the reason why Crit isn't as terrible as its reputation from the past.

Somehow most people seem to think that haste used to be 30 % better. Then it got nerfed. But it was still 30 % better. Then other stats were buffed (mastery is clearly ahead of versatility which used to be the 2nd best defensive stat) and somehow haste is still 30 % ahead of it? How is it possible?

What bothers me the most other than the quoted hypocrisy is that since I'm active on Discord, I actually know that the current community opinion doesn't have a real source. Nobody ever sat down and figured that mastery is not the best in BfA. When new mastery was introduced, some people did the math to compare the Consecration part to versatility (I remember Panthea discussing it with someone) and since it was so close and mastery also provides block chance, it was accepted that mastery beats versatility now.
But nobody even asked the question whether or not it beats haste. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, nobody cared. Yet somehow the old haste > vers/matery > crit idea spread around (just updated to the haste > mastery > vers > crit version) and accepted as unshakable God's word.

I actually asked Treckie what method he used to figure out the stat priority in his guide when he published it on Icy-Veins (he asked us on Discord to look it over) and he said that he didn't do any research, just used the community opinion and he is prepared to change it if the popular opinion changes.

It saddens me that people throw the guide at me as a "proof" when it comes from the same Legion dated source as everything else on this matter.

[blueprint21]

Because devensive stat priorities aren't as black and white as X beats Y beats Z like dps stats are.

Mastery does not give you greater control over your survivability until you are able to stack it to a ridiculous level, whereas haste does.

The reason it was Haste>Vers in legion is because our other defensive options were crit, which whilst technically giving you more Sotr uptime, gave you such a small amount for the investment, and block, which is a chance to reduce damage that you don't dictate, Vers was the easy choice.

The reason mastery beat vers out now is because its what, 85% as good as vers ignoring the block aspect of the stat. Progression tanking is always about being able to limit threatening situations as much as possible - there is two extremes for these situations. Have complete control over your serious mitigation value and then have downtime inbetween so it relies entirely on play(Paladin in a nutshell.) Or the other extreme, have so much passive DR that you no longer need to actively play or react to incoming damage as every threatening situation has been eliminated(Monk.)

We don't have the luxury of reaching that level of raw mitigation from Mastery/Vers early on in the expansion, towards 3rd tier there is a very good chance it will be the go to.

But i don't know a single high end protection paladin who is currently willing to sacrifice greater control over his own survivability in order a passive 8-10% DR first tier.

Progression tanking is all about death prevention, not damage mitigation, stacking mastery is going to have less of an impact on death prevention in nearly every case for hardcore prog, you can try and argue that point with the numbers of how much damage mastery will mitigate opposed to haste and re-use your scenario if the 28-30 unmitigated hits, which is in every way irrelevant as every stat is pointless in the scenario where you live without them.

But bottom line, haste gives you as the player the greatest control over whether or not you will die in an encounter.

Your definition of "Proof" is entirely incorrect aswell, because as you've stated to me "You want me who "doesn't even tank' to build a model for tanking and healing by myself when the entire community considers it too large a project to do it? there is nothing that accurately sims survival, and you're using the same useless simming that everyone else was and then trying to spout it as what is correct for survival.

You need to stop looking at things in the same mindset as a dps, its not a one size fits all scenario, its not an optimal rotation = highest survival rate situation, which is where you seem to have the disconnect and why you believe mastery is so strong.

[Felkor]

@Meiffert : Actually, the model you present is a little flawed, by taking each attacks as a similar mitigation priority. It's always never the case.

There is my breakdown on a fight encounter from a mitigation perspective :

On a typical "wow boss fight", the boss will be using special attacks. Those special attacks are in most case predictable, and allowed the tanks to use mitigation to be able to survive those hits.
In a lot of fights, there will be this "other big attacks", not as dangerous as the previous one, but if not mitigated properly can cause your health to "spike" more often than necessary. And there is where healer will be challenged.
And, the rest of the attacks of the boss. Which shouldn't be an issue unmitigated, but still hurting you enough to create the need of the attention of the healer (or being DK).

In my mind, I always try to classify each of those attacks on those 3 categories. Depending on your gear level, type of mitigation available, one attack could change of category from one player/class to another.
-> "Special One shot attack" : MUST 100% mitigate
-> "BIG attacks" : SHOULD mitigate if cooldown is not mandatory for an incoming special attack
-> "Normal attacks" : COULD mitigate if cooldown is not mandatory for an incoming special/big attack

And then comes in place the fight knowledge. The more you know the fight, the more you know when to use (or not) a cooldown, and which is best fitting for a specific situation.

Now to the topic. I don't think that "SOTR usage" should be as high as possible. We need to know when to save all charges during the fight. So calculation being done to determine an average mitigation level over a 5 minutes fight based on a 100% usage of SOTR charges is missing the point.

If the haste allow the Paladin to have 2 or 3 more SOTR usage during the encounter, thats not 2 or 3 "generic incominc damage" that's being mitigated here, but 2 or 3 potential One Shot Mechanic, if used cleverly during the fight. Which, in progression fights, could be the difference between a kill and a visit to the repair guy.

A skilled tank for me (from mitigation perspective) is the guy always able to mitigate OS mechanics, and know when he could or not use mitigation to prevent big hits without being "naked" if things go south. And know how and when call externals, etc.

So, the "Fight Knowledge" is far more superior to any stats. We can all agree on that.
And in this context a better Fight Knowledge is favorising more "Haste" than any other secondary. The problem is that there is no way to put a value on this.

And when the fight is so tight in damage mitigation than there are no way to be able to mitigate all those "Special One Shot attack" (looking at you, Argus), then come the 3 tanks strategy, which alleviate the need for such haste levels.

In conclusion, for the top raiders for which a SOTR well placed in a fight could be the root of the victory, yes, Haste is better.
In all other cases, the slightly better availabilty gains on SOTR will not have an impact on the figh. In this kind of content (Mythic farm content, heroic raiding, etc : while not undergearing content) Mastery will be the way to go as you present it.


This was talking about raiding. Now there's M+, and this is another discussion.

[Meiffert]

If the haste allow the Paladin to have 2 or 3 more SOTR usage during the encounter, thats not 2 or 3 "generic incominc damage" that's being mitigated here, but 2 or 3 potential One Shot Mechanic, if used cleverly during the fight.
[...]
In conclusion, for the top raiders for which a SOTR well placed in a fight could be the root of the victory, yes, Haste is better.

Hello, I don't see anything that contradicts my point of view in your post, I agree with most of it.

As for the quoted part - why not just use your "regular" (rather than the extra 2-3) SotRs (and other available mitigation) to mitigate the One Shot Mechanics?
Are there too many of them on the fight, or unfavorably spaced that you don't have any available? And are those 2-3 SotRs just enough to make the difference? In that case haste is the best stat indeed. I have mentioned such a situation myself.

Such a situation is rare, and if the boss is challenging enough that you'd like to gear specifically for it, that's fine.
Just like it's fine to gear completely ignoring crit and haste on a fully magic fight (such as Star Augur for example).

But those special "1 per expansion" bosses shouldn't dictate how we recommend gearing in general.

[Felkor]

For your question regarding the quote, it's because if the build was not haste oriented, those extra SOTR could not being available, and having to use another cooldown/call for external instead of using SOTR !

But as you say, it's a fight to fight basis.

The thing I'm saying, it's the value of 2-3 extra SOTR during a fight is more valuable, not in terms of total damage prevented (where mastery/vers will pull ahead) but in terms of mechanics mitigation. I don't think that a small variation in the total damage prevented will change anything, but the ability to mitigate a little longer the damage of a mechanic at a specific time could have more impactfull results. And the haste increase in a fully predictable way the number of occurence where you can pull off those situations.

However I agree with you in the general terms.
I understand why the haste is more impactfull when correctly used, but in reallity this is only concerning a very few minority of players, in a very short period of time (progression undergeared). And I think that if you're this kind of player, you don't need to read guides to understand that swapping gear for being able to have the most optimal setup for each fight is important, and then adapting your strategy.

But for the rest of the players, all of this is more, like we say in french, "enculer des mouches". (I let you google translate it )
(Not that discussing about it is not interesting)

[Meiffert]

The thing I'm saying, it's the value of 2-3 extra SOTR during a fight is more valuable, not in terms of total damage prevented (where mastery/vers will pull ahead) but in terms of mechanics mitigation. I don't think that a small variation in the total damage prevented will change anything, but the ability to mitigate a little longer the damage of a mechanic at a specific time could have more impactfull results. And the haste increase in a fully predictable way the number of occurence where you can pull off those situations.

Of course, I have taken that into account.

Why do so many people I discuss this with tell me that total damage taken isn't everything as if that was the basis of my opinion?
I never suggested any such thing. (Just for reference: If damage taken was the only thing that mattered, haste would be by far the worst stat. But since I know that having control over when you want to use the extra mitigation, I value haste much higher, higher than versatility or crit.)
I have mentioned all of this multiple times, including the original post of this thread.

The only disagreement is how valuable this is. I think it's very valuable, but not enough to beat out mastery (which is way stronger numbers wise than other secondary stats, including some other tanks that I have looked into). What you call a small difference in damage prevented is actually more than 200 % difference. For every 1 damage prevented by haste, you could have more than 3 damage prevented by mastery, which is quite a huge difference imo. Big enough to outweigh the control aspect of haste.

[Paultimate]

For every 1 damage prevented by haste, you could have more than 3 damage prevented by mastery, which is quite a huge difference imo. Big enough to outweigh the control aspect of haste.

P R O V E I T and stop flapping. Just saying it doesn't make it magically true. Stop arguing and start showing, because unless you show it this is worthless.

What would you rather have:
10% passive damage reduction
20% active damage reduction

The answer tells people what sort of tank you are, especially to healers.

[blueprint21]

"Why do so many people I discuss this with tell me that total damage taken isn't everything as if that was the basis of my opinion?"

"What you call a small difference in damage prevented is actually more than 200 % difference. For every 1 damage prevented by haste, you could have more than 3 damage prevented by mastery, which is quite a huge difference imo. Big enough to outweigh the control aspect of haste."

You contradicted yourself in the same exact post.

Again, it is not about damage prevention it is about death prevention, how have you not understood this yet when every single person disagrees with your mentality towards it because you're ignoring practicality to side with theory.

So i'l try and make it as simple as i can for you in the hopes that its going to finally sink in.

Haste gives us more sotr casts throughout an encounter, there is no guarantee that you are going to need the extra sotr's in order to survive, theres a chance you could live the encounter without ever pressing sotr other than for the big tank mechanic once every 30 seconds. The reason you stack haste is, when you get an unlucky hit string from the boss and theres a mechanic thats making healers move or some other situation that is taking attention away from putting any direct healing on you, haste is going to give you more leeway to have an extra sotr charge for those situations which is where the death prevention aspect comes in.

We don't give a shit about the constant irrelevant damage that doesn't ever threaten us, as i said you could do some encounters without ever pressing sotr and you'd live just fine, but at that point you don't need mastery/crit/haste/versatility at all, because its not a relevant factor.

Mastery is a very good stat, hands down the best defensively for magic heavy encounters, and i'd prioritise it over Vers as our secondary in nearly every situation. Now the problem with mastery is, its passive DR and its not at the point where it eliminates threatening situations yet. You overvalue its EFFECTIVE gain so much. because the fact that it on average will mitigate 3x more damage than sotr(Complete bullshit btw) holds absolutely no value. If you're taking damage without sotr up and you never drop below 40% without being healed to full, it has effectively done nothing for you, you can't argue that, it is a factually true statement. Healers don't OOM so you're never talking about mana saving.

Your entire argument is the haste vs mastery argument of Legion just with a different basis.

Mastery and Haste went back and forth with which provided more raw mitigation value, it ended up being heavily skewed in Mastery's favour as we stacked haste to a ridiculous degree. But the reason haste was still better to stack outside of situations where you needed more mitigation on sotr to live a specific mechanic, was because of the Effective gain of the mitigation increase.

Theres only two types of damage, relevant damage and irrelevant damage. Irrelevant damage poses no threat, relevant damage poses a threat and has to be dealt with via AM or a CD - with VERY few exceptions through this entire expansion i.e argus scythes in mythic past 3, any and all relevant damage could be made irrelevant with sotr WITHOUT stacking mastery, despite the fact that mastery would have mitigated them further and had more raw mitigation value on paper. In practicality thats entirely redundant and serves no purpose.

This is a game of numbers like you've said multiple times, but i'l say this again because everyone else is trying to put this toward you aswell and you cannot seem to grasp it.

Become a progression tank first, see how your theory stacks up versus practicality and how it impacts your opinion, because mastery/vers have more dead time than haste ever could and you don't want to accept that when its a fact.

- - - Updated - - -

Also your statement of "As for the quoted part - why not just use your "regular" (rather than the extra 2-3) SotRs (and other available mitigation) to mitigate the One Shot Mechanics? this shows you've never tanked progression, if you're under the impression that when you're learning a boss you're going to play perfectly and never need to use either sotr or a cooldown outside of the specific time you originally wanted them, then you're deluded beyond belief.