Ok, so I was talking with this tank of my guild who claimed that he was going to get 'more defense so he can't be crushed'. I told him the actual defense didnt lower the crushing chance, but the avoidance he got from it, thus it would be better in most cases to focus more on avoidance once he was crit immune. He then told me he had 539 defense under his skill tab, yet is being crit often anyway, and even told me that warriors never could be crit immune.

Am I (as a non warrior) completely mistaken about tanking mechanics? Or did something massivly change over the last few months or so?

I tried searching here abit for the topics with big combat log purges in, but failed to find them with the forum change. Since he's asking for test evidence aswell, would it be possible to direct me to such a topic?

Two things :

A tank is effectively crit-immune at 490 defense against a "??" boss and everything lower level.
If he wants to be crushing blow-immune, he has to higher his avoidance to a score equal or superior to 100% (that's dodge, parry and block added together). Usually, that's done with Shield Block (for warriors) and Holy Shield (for paladins).

I know, thats what I told him, but he made it come down to a 'my opinion against yours' thing, and the argrument pretty much ended with 'I'm a warrior, I know better then you'.

So all I can do right now is forward him to this topic (so please keep it nice ) and find some topic with combat log parses or so I suppose.

edit: you forgot 'miss' (in the dodge, parry, block list)

Your tank is too stubborn to realize that he has switched crushing and crits in his mind.

Imo.. Dont ever engage a debate with a tank. IF he insist his case, let him be. The only thing I will ever want from a tank is (Tank in the right position, hold aggro, Know when to use trinket to assist, know when to use Last stand & shield wall @ the right time, never ever let ur teammate die earlier than you)

Any decent tanks who realised his own flaws while tanking (i.e stam too low, die too easily ETC.) will try to improve & tune up his own gear. So dont worry, but bring him down if he ever fail his duty as tank

The easiest thing to do is point him or her in the direction of one of the comprehensive guides, like Kenco's, or the that was on evilempire.com.

Of course now that I look, I cant find one myself.

Edit: Giddy up WoWikki http://www.wowwiki.com/Formulasefense

If you want to get a closer look into defense mechanics you can take a look at this thread (from page 2) too:
Beat the 85

you cannot be crushed if "enemy miss", parry, dodge and block rise over 100.

the base crit chance is 5.6, the base chance to get crushings is 15 (from lvl 73mob against lvl 70 player)

melee crit = damage * 2, spell crit = damage * 1.5, crushing = damage * 1.5

to deny crits you must reach 490 defense skill, thats +140 defense skill which is 336 defense rating or with anticipation talent you need +120 defense skill which is 288 defense rating.

crushing blows can not be lowered that way but they can get pushed out of the attack table. to do that "enemy miss", parry, dodge and block must be > 85. which is easily done by activating shield block.

at the moment lvl 70 tanks can get some very sick dodge values while still obtaining a high block and some base parry.

its possible to get 35% block, 30% dodge, 16% parry and 11% enemy miss which lead to a very sick avoidance of 92 leaving only 8% of unchanged hits that will be always crushing blows.

Actually defense does help a bit against crushing blows, as it increases your chance to parry and dodge an attack by 0.04% and increases your chance to get missed by an additional 0.04%, therefore you are looking at 0.12% per point of defense that brings nearer to the 85 mark.

Of course until you reach that mark crushing blows won't be negated but normal hits will.

His response (on guild forum):

mine:
(I'd like to state that he indeed is a very good tank and I have the feeling he just confused crushings for crits, but he turned it into an agrument, and what if he's right...)

Anyway, I asked for a screenshot of him being crit by an npc.

He is right concerning crushing blows, hit, parry, dodge.

My experience tells me that these stats are varying and depending on the mob type. Some are linked to special events. Take e.g. Crushing chance on Stalagg's enrage before Thaddius, Gluth, .... And to this day I swear to god, that Thaddius got some serious dodge+parry skills (could be bad luck though ^^).

But I've yet to see a mob with an increased crit chance.
Just insist on your screenshot request of an incoming crit (when he is +490def), and you've basically won your quarrel.

Make sure the screenshot includes his gear and him still in combat with the mob =)

People try to find patterns in everything. The crushing chance is set, the same for their dodge, miss, parry and crit chance. If he's at 490 def he probably didn't get crit by Prince, he most likely saw a crushing show up as a big number (SCT or the likes) and thought it was a crit. We've all had streaks of parries, misses and dodges, it doesn't mean that the boss has extra chance for it, unless they got some skill such as evasion. I've had 10 attacks in a row be avoided, it can happen. What is true though is that mobs get increased miss rate when dw'ing. Which can be devastating aswell, just ask Prince
No specific numbers but I'm guessing the regular penalty DW apply since mobs are in general naked without stat modifiers.

Is this confirmed or just anecdotal? It could be the fact he's swinging more often therefore missing more often.

I pop my trinket from Moroes at 60% when he starts DWing so he misses a whole shitload anyway, so I can neither confirm nor deny.

Yea nightbane hit me for 10032 yesterday, so its always going to be possible, and they definately messed around with the innate mob values for weapon skill and defense given that I get glancing blows a lot more now on mobs besides bosses.

I find people that deny the math of something worked out or verified by so many people very amusing at this point since I run into them almost on a daily basis. Given one of the responses I read from Blizzard about certain blues being better than purple reading something along the lines of "yea but people will pick the purple, since its purple".

As to the full minute of avoidance, assuming this was normal arca, it stands to reason if a normal boss hits for 1200-1500 on a tank, so with 4 weapons thats 300-375. My block in kara gear which has lost me block in sidegrades for more stamina etc, is 402. So in a quite normal string spamming shield block you could be in effect taking no damage. But that has nothing to do with boss hit values. They couldnt very well make every attack hit for 1500 could they? toughest normal boss ever that way.

Honestly it sounds like your tank needs to get the non Blizzard SCT + a real combat log.

Actually i have to agree with your maintank
Last monday I was tank for our first kill on the prince, with the gear setup at that time i had 499 defence. Second atempt i dropped Extremely quickly(during the 60-30 phase) so i looked at my combat log.

The result was something like this

small hit for 2k'ish and crit for ~5900 at time mark 54 and 55
small hit for 2k'ish and crit for ~6100 at time mark 57 and 57

What I didn't do is take a screenshot, next time it happens i'll look out for it and capture it.

That evidence seems to imply that your warrior is correct in assuming that certain mobs have a different crit rate.

/edit Mistakely wrote down the wrong value for the crits, instead i wrote the total dmg of those rounds into the crits, Fixed it now, so total of those 2(4) attacks was 16k

What gearset would be used to get those kinds of mitigation figures?

I kinda feel that if it is too easy to do this, Blizzard will probably change the way the combat table mechanics work somewhat. It was controlled enough that Warriors pushed the combat table aside only with shield block (2 attacks per 5s) however I would have a hunch that if it ever became "the norm" that Blizz would put its foot down about it.

Personally, I have always viewed Block% as a more or less wasted stat in terms of item budget, as if you're not getting up to the magical 85-90% mitigation (non-Shield Block, of course) range it is somewhat less effective than other stuff you could put on an item (Dodge, Parry, Def, Stam, etc.) in its place.

However, one could hypothesize that due to its relative cheapness...if you stacked enough items, you could in theory push your side of the table to be regularly quite huge.

The question, I guess, is that is it worth it?

The main reason shield block%, IMO, is so underwhelming is the fact that with Shield Block active (which is a large percentage of the time) one's base Shield Block% is totally useless. While Dodge/Parry/Miss buffs are available and prolong the duration of Shield Block as a skill, Block% itself is totally meaningless with that buff active.

With Imp. Shield Block, one has Shield Block up quite a large percentage of the time. For an exmaple, let's go with "worst case" figures of a mob attacking every 1 second. This is 5 attacks per 5 seconds, meaning Shield Block will cover at least 2 of them no matter what. Let's also assume "average" tanking avoidance of, say, 22% dodge and 17% parry--which was pretty standard pre-BC numbers. (I am not playing my Warrior in BC, so I don't have 100% accurate figures atm for 70...)

So, of the 5 attacks, on average 2.25-2.5 (counting potential miss rate, depending on def skill) would be mitigated first. We will calculate this first, as a Dodge/Parry/Miss with Shield Block active does not consume a Shield Block charge (that's the kicker) meaning that, on average, only .75-.5 hits per 5 hits will actually get through one's avoidance+Shield Block. This, of course, means that even if one were to have 0% base Block%, that Block% is really only "used" 10% of the time and is, as such, fairly marginal in impact.

Avoidance is synergistic with the Shield Block skill, whereas Block% is redundant.

This leads to my original question, being: is it worth stacking so much block% to get to some magical number where crushes are pushed off the table entirely (or partially) when, in reality, the mechanics of avoidance and Shield Block cause one's base Block% to rarely ever be used and, even at that, crushes are already so rare?

To me, I'm not sure it would be a viable tradeoff compared to the other stats one could potentially get.

Well, Block Value is and probably always will be useful. You are going to be blocking at least 2 hits every 5s (unless you pull a Neo and dodge everything, in which case cheers to you!) meaning that you are mitgating Block Value * .4 per second of damage (at a minimum.) Given that there is up to 40 Block Value on some of the higher-end pieces, that's ~21 DPS w/ Shield Mastery mitigated from one piece of armor--in addition to it scaling aggro with Shield Slam.

Then again, the main issue is that it wouldn't make a -huge- difference if you were running around with 0% block on your equipment IMO.

Sadly, there are very few armor pieces with Block Value which also don't have Block Rating. (full list here)

~21DPS mitigated is sort of deceptive. On hard hitting mobs that's a drop in the bucket compared to how much is mitigated from armor and avoidance. Block value mitigation doesn't scale at all with mob DPS - it's 21DPS mitigated if the mob does 21DPS, and 21DPS mitigated if the mob does 40000DPS - assuming the same attack speed. Your armor and avoidance will be scaling up proportionally.

I can't really argue with shield slam agro scaling. That's a very valuable aspect of block value.

I suppose you're right that the real problem is with block% and Shield Block. Chances are improvements to that functionality would help BV as well.

Oh, I'm not saying that it scales like normal avoidance--which is why I prefer normal avoidance--but 21 DPS mitigated in addition to a decent other piece is not a bad addition to one's stat lineup. It still saves the healers mana, and still adds to your surviability pool in a fairly predictable manner.

After all, incoming DPS on a boss is relatively consistant--as it is balanced for outgoing healing potential compared to typical raiding gear. So, in that sense, block value is a fairly worthy investment when combined with the aggro increase.

The good thing about avoidance compared to block value, however, is that once you hit max level that 2% dodge trinket isn't ever going to get any worse. That +30 block value trinket, on the other hand, is just gonna get worse as you move up the ranks. This is, of course, why the Vigilance Charm from DM was a viable trinket even in Naxx, while a similar +block value trinket (if it had exisited) probably would have been obsolete before you were out of MC.

On armor sets you have to upgrade to progress anyhow, though, block value itself isn't too bad of a stat.

I'm fairly certain that Blizzard has incorporated more player class mechanics into mob design. DWing mobs, like the assassins in Shattered Halls seem to have fairly high miss rates. It's not unusual for them to miss me 3-4 times in a row. In our Karazhan group, I don't tank Romulo or Prince so I don't have an extended combat log to parse and compare. Given that they already operate on the full damage mh/half damage oh design, I don't think having the DW miss penalty is out of the question. I also believe that some mobs have increased chance to crit. I've been working with 488+ defense for a few weeks. During that time, I probably have done 10 shadow labs. The DWing demons you get after the ambassador but before the warlock boss get at least one crit on me almost all the time. It's easy for me to tell because I'm fury with enrage. They attack fairly light but swing a lot. I don't see enrage popping up from other mobs in the instance. These are not +3 mobs so even at 488 defense, I should of been near crit immune. I would doubt Blizz would give a boss a higher chance to crit as it would make MT deaths much more common, but it's certainly not impossible.

Mobs having player like combat mechanics is nothing new. The avengers in silthus are a perfect example of mobs with dual weild miss rates. I'll go test and get concrete rather than anecdotal evidence when my computer isn't busy copying 30g of music from an ipod.

As for the immune to crit argument, after being annoyed by the endless speculation I took my lvl 45 priest outside of SW and got 3 defias mobs to beat on her. Recap recorded zero crits in 1300 hits. I couldn't find the screenshot though >_<

Edit: Found the screenshot and it was 1502 hits without a crit.

http://elitistjerks.com/showthread.p...717#post247717

Has any serious theorycrafting been done on the debuff side of damage mitigation, as far as what stacks, -AP caps, ideal debuffs etc. With all the new and/or upgraded debuffs I have, I'd be interested to know how much of the ridiculous damage some of these melee mobs do can be reduced.

Some speculation follows:

There's been alot of talk about Blizz's "Internal Raid Testing Group" expecting encounters to go down faster/easier. For a good portion of TBC encounters (gruul being a notable exception) the raid wipe becomes inevitable after the tanking/healing rythm gets out of synch due to spike damage and not due to the other 75% of the raid who are busy trying not to pull aggro or get cleaved. Maybe we should be looking at Mob-side mitigation for these encounters? While we're talking about getting Boss Misses + Tank Dodge + Parry + Block to a certain percent, lets not overlook TBC debuffs like the new Suffering (link). 15 seconds out of 2 minutes may not be much, but on phase transitions like 60% Malchezzar or on Bosses with low-HP burn-me-down enrages, it gives healers that extra bit of breathing room. How about pushing the Crush chance to 0% on the first 15 seconds of an un-cubed Magtheridon?

It would be nice to see if the new -350 atk power CoW is really making a dent in boss DPS output, or if the -AP cap makes it redundant to apply CoW + Demo Shout. When does the spammable Soothing Kiss (Rank 5) (link) out-wiegh +70 Stamina from an imp (for non-tank grps)? Is Shadow Embrace completely useless? TBC changed alot of these kinds of spells (not just for warlocks) for the better, perhaps its worth looking into.