Parappa

after three flawless twin emp kills it seems like one of our MTs specced totally out of prot in favor of pvp. he didnt really tell us about it and we didnt really think about it either. only on our last attempt things kind of fell apart. he rather kept getting one (8k health, 1k health with UBS, dead) shotted, and after 4 or so attempts we basically gave up for the night.
at first we blamed it on the healers (of course) but while looking at the healing meters (effective healing on swstats) it turned out that during the 60% of the fight that we stayed up the top 3 healers on the tank that died had healed for 70k more than the ones on the prot tank that survived. of course there were more than 3 people on each side healing the tank so its not too accurate, we wanted to track damage taken on the next attempt but never made it that far.
so.. im sure we couldve kept him up if we wouldve gone full out with pots and nightdragons and whatnot (horde btw), but seems like overkill when our other kills were basically totally smooth with regen breaks and without pots.

my question is, would a such difference in talent spec (namely 10% more AC and 10 more def, guess improved shield block as well) have such a rather huge impact on the fight overall? im mostly trying to find out if it WAS healers fault after all or if basically the tank is to 'blame', since attempting a fight like twin emps without a basic prot build is just useless.

 

Umph

Doesn't improved shieldblock mitigate/prevent crits and the like, and thus wouldn't at least an extra point it be worthwhile?

 

Thooloo

You wouldn't think it at first glance, but in my experience Improved Shield (and shield block in general) does a surprisingly good job of keeping you alive. I've had a lot of situations where I'd get killed faster than I could be healed for whatever reason, and when I re-approached the fight throwing up shield block whenever possible, I'm suddenly surviving with only a little fuss, and it's the other tanks that are getting one-shotted and combat rezzed.

 

Chimera2402

A blocked attack cant be a crit or a crushing blow, t'is not to be underestimated.

 

Calantus

Twin Emps is like the posterchild fight for Imp Shield Block since it's the only one where a tank is certain to get critted at some point if they don't have it up. So yeah, it would likely make a difference.

 

Rachel

Imp Shield Block is certainly very nice, and I do wish I had it, but I've tanked Vek'nilash just fine without it, and my damage taken still ends up being fairly similar to the other tank's. And I don't think any of our tanks have Anticipation, because getting a sufficient amount of +defense is not hard.

Not that I'm denying the usefulness of some of these prot talents, but I just can't imagine a talent change as being that drastic. Are you sure it wasn't something to do with gear or healing?

 

Parappa

actually the tank that kept dying was the better geared one. and that side (at least the top 3 people on the meters) effectively healed loads more (around 23%) than the people on the prot tank. of course mabye the rest of the healers on that side were just slacking, but i usually trust all these guys with knowing their stuff and doing their job.

hopefully we will get another attempt in soon, and then we will be able to track damage taken to figure out what the hell is going on.

 

aertifact

if ur tank is dps specced its a large chance that something random will kill ur tank. Like crushing and crit in a row

 

Rane

Kaubel alert in 4,3,2....

Anyway, as has been said, the Twin Emps fight is currently the hardest fight in the game at the moment and it's really taxing on both healers and tanks. Whatever helps to overcome that (the so-called "pve-specs") should be welcomed.

Personally I am under the impression that protection spec is a sacrifice that only a really dedicated tank should be making. If you really notice his DPS spec is making it harder for everyone, have chat with him about it. Is it healers that need to adjust their playstyle, should be take a more hybrid DPS/protection spec to at least get 1 pt. in Imp. Shieldblock, Defiance and Last Stand, etc. If he wants to convert to the role of DPS warrior, then I'm sure your guild will handle that in your own way. Is he the sole protection spec, can you swap him out for some one else?

What I understand from our tanks is that they find Last Stand especially a life-saver in this fight, along with Life-Giving Gem and more consumables than you can swing a stick at. Maybe now that your healers know to account for less mitigation they can adjust to it, if it all still fails I'd ask him to spec back if he wants to stay MT. Nothing more selfish than forcing your healers to the max so you can have more fun in a dps spec, healing is already a thankless job most of the times as it is :)

 

◊ Praetorian

Are you kidding me? No.

 

Mippo

It would depend on the equipment of the tank. If the tank had borderline equipment for the job beforehand, and then removed the talents, it would likely be enough to do that. I don't know if I am misreading your post, but does that 8k reference to health mean your tank has 8,000 hitpoints while fighting the Emperors?

If that is true then yeah, the talent switch would do it as 8k is rather low for a tank on Emperors to begin with. The loss of 10% AC is going to mean he will take considerably more damage on the Unbalanced Strike.

 

Xizorz

From the context of the post it seems like its 8k buffed which is very poor: Most tanks should have ~6500 hp base or so.

Did the OP use a flask?

http://ctprofiles.net/298322

 

◊ Praetorian

Our best-geared prot tank who has lots of experience tanking the Emps and has some experienced healers backing him up can do just fine with 9200hp, and has done so in the past (non-tauren, no lung juice/zanza and no imp, but definitely with a flask) and never died. 10k hp is a more reasonable "safe" target, however.

 

Parappa

our better geared tank has around 9.2k with imp and flask (no zanza/food/lung). we killed them tonight with 2 warriors with 0 points in prot.
kill itself (after again some attempts where tanks dropped from 9k to dead in a second) was rather smooth though it sure felt a lot more demanding in terms of mana and risky in terms of burst than our previous kills. still our tanks are kind of hush-hush (or in denial/clueless) on their specs before and how useful 16 points in prot would be for the fight, etc.etc. cant comment on that myself unfortunately since ive never played a warrior.

for the record one tank took 661k damage(better geared one), the other 703k.
guess have to wait for next reset to get numbers to compare.

 

Uthalin

Parappa, how long did the kill take? Should probably use that to compare too in case for some reason your next kill is faster/slower.

 

Parappa

kill was around 13.5 minutes. mostly using those numbers also to compare for next time if we should get lucky and have our prot tank back to tank one, since on our first kill there was a difference of nearly 20% as opposed to 2% in the damage taken by the two different specs.

still mostly just wondering whats up, where we can improve, etc. do we have to force our tanks to spec 16 points prot, do some of our healers need to l2p, etc.

 

Zalera

10k is definitely where I'd feel comfortable, as a healer. It's still possible to die stupidly quick to Vek'nilash with that much, but it definitely makes a big difference for healers. If you're up to Twin Emps, you should have the gear to make 10k possible with consumables, so don't be lazy and go farm =p I'm curious though, you had 3 flawless Emp kills with a tank with only 8k health?

 

Parappa

nah, on our first three kills we sure went out loads more, had tanks fully buffed with chops/zanza/flasks, etc. but after a couple of kills people of course start slacking, and as you can tell we also like to pvp so not everyones fully focused on pve.
thing is just the kill felt totally different. i was before mostly hovering on around 85% mana throughout nearly the whole fight, while this time around i *gasp* even had to use a pot, and not to NS+HEAL some sudden burst but just to keep up with "regular" healing.

 

Savos

In my limited tanking experience, I'd have to say that Improved Shield Block is *MAGIC* in terms of how good it is.

Never been past Sartura or such yet, but for things like Broodlord, its amazing. Reduces incoming damage significantly.

I used to spec the "generic" 31/5/15, but after seeing how good both Last Stand and Improved Shield Block is, I spec for 5 Blocking, 2 Imp. Bloodrage, 3 Toughness, 1 Last Stand, 1 Imp. Shield Block, 3 Defiance. Just feels to me like the best balanced spec you could design for a warrior in the game.

If I really were to get fancy I'd take points from cruelty and put them between Defiance and Toughness, but haven't yet reached a point where they are needed.

Edit: Some fancy numbers:

Assume you have crazy absurd gear (ie: 9/9 Dreadnaught or something) with 20% Block/Dodge/Parry and so on.

15% of the time you are going to get a crushing blow while tanking a 63 (boss) mob (do lvl 64/65 mobs exist?). That accounts for 75% of the bosses attacks right there. Another 4%ish for misses, leaving ~20% regular attacks.

So you have about 20% chance of a regular hit, and 15% chance of a crushing blow (assuming you have the magic number of defense) and 20% blocked (usually more but easier to back of the envelope calculate for).

Say the mob does enough damage that 150-200 block is negligible in its attacks and call a block = regular attack for damage done.

40% regular damage, 15% crushing, 45% no damage.

So for the attacks that *do* hit, you are getting about a 25% "crit" chance on your tank. They are only 150% crits but they do hurt significantly in one big hit. What shield block does is "remove" a good number of those attacks that would have crushed had shield block not been active. Say you get 1/2 of the total of the crushing blows over a fight, adds up to about 5.5% damage reduction *of the attacks that make it through*. Thats almost 3 free points in Toughness (better even as you smooth the spikes considerably!).

Numbers I came up with for the attacks that do damage: 100% (regular attacks incl. base crush) + .5 * 25% = 112.5% damage of mobs normal damage range. Subtract approximatly 1/2 of the crushing blow with proper usage of shield block (totally made up how many you can remove using imp. shield block) gives 106.25% normal melee damage range, saving 5.88% damage taken.

 

Torel

Gear and coordination seem to matter much more here than spec, overall. Several of our kills on the emps were using a superbly geared fury warrior with minimal points in protection. As another example, we had only one well-geared (over +100 def, over 10k health buffed) warrior on one night, so the guild tossed me in as a feral druid to be the punching bag for the port position. It was absolutely fine from a damage spike standpoint... I rarely went below 3000 health due to normal damage. The healers had normal-ish mana useage. The biggest issue was from me being a noob with proximity judging on the warlock pets which caused one wipe. Not recommended by any stretch, but perfectly viable if you would rather have the DPS warriors doing DPS due to gear considerations.

Any DPS warrior in full wrath with the right rings/trinkets/etc can easily tank this if the healers are on the ball and they have the positioning down. A prot warrior "feels" a bit safer though from a healing standpoint.

Good idea on comparing damage taken during that fight for dfferent specs. I have always wondered how big of a difference occurs due to spec, but have never thought to measure it during the emps fight like that.