That is false. I have definitely been crit with shield block up when my innate shield block was at 24.5% or so with my dodge/parry skills easily over 10-15% each at the same time. This is why I am suspicious of the combat table idea because I have never seen one theory satisfactorily account for both observations. 25% innate chance to block is the magic number. It seems to be completely independent of dodge and parry.

Gid, is it possible Shield Block had faded at that point and the message just hadn't appeared in the combat log? I've never seen documentation for the case you're talking about where Shield Block was definitely up, only for borderline cases. Remember, combat log messages are not guaranteed to be in correct order.

I guess it is impossible for me to say for certain but if you assume something like:

Miss > dodge/parry > block > glance/crush > crit > hit

Is the combat table then:

Makes no sense. Yes it is a crush rather than a crit but it comes a mere 3 seconds after I activate shield block (which has a full duration of 5.5 seconds with talents). In that case I had 24.74% block chance innately. Given that I am tanking the Twin Emps I think it is safe to say that my parry + dodge > 20%. That means parry + dodge + innate block + shield block is way over 100% which should be enough to push all other results off the combat table. Yet I still took a crushing blow.

Interestingly shield block fades early as though I had "blocked" the crush.

Wild guess - i see that some of damage was absorbed (PWS i suppose). Maybe its interfering with crush/block calculation ?

Block should be nullifying crushes too, is the problem. I can only imagine it might have been the PWS interfering.

Alternately - were you under Unbalancing at the time? -100 defense is going to chop ~12% off your mitigation (4% each from block/dodge/parry), which might be enough to throw you into crushable territory.

Erm, please just delete this post if I'm being moronic - but Crushing blows are a flat 15% rate. It's not affected by defense score at all, nor can shield block "push it off" the table. It's a seperate mechanic to crits etc., and you can happily block crushing blows all day long, even with shield block up.

Level 60 players hopefully have a far higher than 5% crit rate. 5% -> 1% is a lot more noticable than 35% -> 31%.

Perhaps you need 25% chance to block to never get crit or crushed.

Yep, it seems having damage absorption negates block chances ... Have anyone a log with "(XX absorbed) (YY blocked)" ?

That would be odd, because you can see (XX absorbed)(YY resisted). Although only on the hit that wipes out your Protection buff and spills over.

So absorbing prevents block mitigation on physical attacks, but still allows avoidance. Very strange.

There goes that theory ...

The problem is that most of those theories are *very* well tested.

Though, really, the simplest possibility is just that crushing sits above block on priority.

I always suspected that Block > Crushing/Crit > Dodge/Parry in the priority order as well. Why is everyone so resistant to the idea?

Because it's pretty well proven, I thought, that blocks prevent crits, yeah? Just seems silly that it would be above the one and below the other.

So, in theory: miss > d/p > crush > block > crit > hit?

Note to self: "it just seems silly" is a godawful argument against Blizzard doing something, given their track record.

I was under the impression that as far as mitigation is concered, there is a percentage based chance for each possibility that 'goes down the line.' To put that in more easily managable terms, consider this situation: A mob attacks you - ONE of the following can happen. (Not necesarily in this particular order)

Block
Crit
Crush
Dodge
Parry
Hit
Miss

The mechanics don't lump it into 'hit' or 'mitigate' (i.e. dividing those sections into two.. one for dodge/parry/miss/block and one for hit/crush/crit) they calculate the chance of each individually. Whilest the exact order is unknown, as long as Block is calculated before Crit and or crushing, then 25% block + Shield Block would mean that you could never get crit. The game essentially rolls a die for each possible outcome... If the value comes up true (i.e. 1-25 if you have 25% block) then that is the outcome, and the procedure has no need to continue. If the result is false (i.e. 26-100 if you have 25% block) then it determines that the attack was NOT blocked, and moves on to the next possibility.

Am I way off base here?

Why would you need 25% chance to block when parry/dodge/miss are higher on the priority list? It doesn't make sense. The results in your combat log are strange, I'd suggest you try to replicate this to prove it wasn't a fluke and then you can challenge the theory that shield block prevents crushing blows.

Because dodge/parry/miss aren't higher on the priority list. I've seen tanks take damage on Sarutra while facing her with the 8/8 wrath bonus active, so there's obviously stuff above parry. Gurg's idea (Block > Crushing/Crit > Dodge/Parry) fits pretty well with my experiences.

That should be testable with a pure agility rogue doing evasion tanking right? How much dodge can you stack onto a rogue, can you eat into the crushing/crit you should be taking? Obviously testing it will take a fair amount of time due to cooldowns, but should be doable.

You can't get anything useful out of evasion because you just get crit a lot. :(

Btw going back to flurry formula a bit, inspired somewhat by the 1-(1-(crit/100))^3 formula I did the following to take into account specials:

I determine how many total attack per sec I have with all my normal and special attacks. Number is between 0.5 and 0.65 with a 2-handers depending on alot of things.

I find how long a flurry cycle is. That mean using the hasted value of my weapons * 3. Say that cycle is 8.5 sec. In 8.5 sec * 0.5 attack per sec I get 4.25 attacks. With a crit rate of 25%, my chances that any of those 4.25 attacks are crits is 1-(1-0.25)^4.25 or around 70% which is my uptime.

I still have some details to work but my main problem I have is how should I get around the circular reference this create in excel? Obviously the more attack you have, the higher your flurry uptime is which increase the number of attacks you have, etc. I will try to apply the haste only once or something.

This seem to accuratly predict flurry uptime after 1 cycle is over, in this case after 8.5 sec.