Yes, he would be crushing the tank everytime an attack 'went through' the tank's avoidance checks, as crushing blows take precedence over crits and hits, which in this case are an impossible outcome.

Tanking Malc while dual wielding is definitely the spikiest damage I've ever seen, it is probably just me but it seems like he crushes WAY more often then other mobs.... I almost wonder if the Thrash mechanic calcs crushes improperly as they seem to come in chains. Anyways, the first thing to make your life easier if this is an issue is to make sure you burn him from 60 > 30 as fast as possible.

Aside from that, the fight became infinitely easier once we nagged the hunters to use scorpid sting and I would pop a Moroes trinket followed by my armor trinket. Demo and Thunderclap reduce his damage immensely. IMP Thunderclap is amazing during this phase because it reduces the total number of his attacks in a 5 second period significantly so it is much less likely your shield block will get used up. If you're really having spike issues, use stoneshields just for 60 > 30.

For my stats the white hits have like a 20% miss rate to begin with (Hes still 3 levels over you remember) combined with another -6%ish from defense, another 5% from scorpid, and 21% dodge 17% parry you end up with nearly 70% attacks avoided, the time I have the dodge trinket on its damn near 100%. With that and thunderclap, he very very rarely gets a crush in the entire phase. Dabiri's Enigma is also a very nice trinket for this fight (THIS IS THE ONLY TIME I WILL EVER SAY BLOCK RATING IS GOOD). With that 70% avoidance all it takes is 30% block chance to knock crushes off the table even without shield block with those stats. Using an Enigma will push crushes completely off the table for the time it's up. Between that and Moroes, you gain a solid 30 seconds of 0% chance of being crushed.

Correct the miss to 25-26%ish and and you get

Miss: 25%
Dodge: 16.73%
Parry: 18.74%
Block 28.04%

That only leaves 11.5% of hits going through with a potential to crush. A bit more dodge and a scorpid sting and even insect swarm and you can push his crushes off the table, especially using the Enigma or a Pocket Watch as mentioned above.

Also keep in mind that part of tanking is learning when you're gonna die and stopping it before it happens. If you're decently geared with commanding, imp, fort, mark, and possibly kings; then you should be able to take 15-16k spike damage and still live with decent gear. At that point its up to your tank to save his own skin with last stand, or shield wall, or a healthstone, or whatever the hell he has up his sleeve.

Aside from the Prince, I'm yet to see a boss attack anywhere near fast enough to push shield block off the table with imp thunderclap on.


PS: Be very careful with his high miss rate though. Many tanks get trapped in the "Not enough rage for shield block" deficit if they don't manage their rage well, you could not get hit for as long as 15 or 20 seconds and you need to make sure shield block is up the whole time with your autoattack rage as your only source.

As others have said, the real problem is probably that itemization choices could have been better, especially valuing block rating over defense and dodge rating or stamina. Briefly, while block rating can be nice for 5-mans, against a level 73 boss it is counterproductive (it is already impossible for a warrior with 490 defense, Deflection and Shield Specialization to not be crushing-immune with Shield Block up). Stacking block rating means that either you skimped on dodge and defense rating elsewhere, and thus your Shield Block charges are getting eaten up more quickly; alternatively, your stamina is lower than it could be. Also, socket bonuses are rarely worth it: you want to choose the gem with whatever stat you need most, which nine out of ten times is stamina (and the remaining times, dodge or defense).

Lately with Hydross there's been a lot of talking about how bursty damage can get, and how your tank being parried will significantly reduce the time in-between swings by the boss.

Anyways, I decided to go look up "Thrash" on thottbot to try and figure out if thrash was a proc, or an ability, and it seems like it is a proc on melee that the mob can have (10% or 15% or 35%!)

Now, since 60 -- 30 is all about getting through as fast as you can and your tank will be at great danger, and the trend on this thread seems to be going towards living through prince stage2, I ask the people that have been following this thread this:

If thrash is indeed a chance on proc per swing, would it be unrealistic to have the tank switch to a much slower tanking weapon, or perhaps stop auto-attacking at all to miminze the chance of parries and therefore spike damage?

Has it been proven that bosses get the .5 second swing speed after they parry a player or creature? I always used to wonder cause I would nag the hunters to make sure their pets weren't being parried just to be safe, but never actually tested or saw real proof that it happened. I'd love to get a piece of that discussion!

I can't recall exactly where the parsing for it has been done, but if you look around the first page of the forum 'public discussion' you'll see that it's accepted that monsters also benefit from parry the same way as players.

I found a reply from a warrior in the thread "Combat Mechanics 3.0" (last page) where he said he's done extensive testing on this, and got to the point where he would make sure even hunter pets were positioned behind Patchwerk to ensure the MT wasn't taking any additional damage.

Every hit should be either crushing or blocked, yea.

Very, very bad juju. Do not ever do this.

What turning off autoattack will do is to stop parry and shield blocking mechanics from working at all, resulting in happy fun splattertank.

Just one of those 'fun' mechanics that absolutely baffle me in existing.

I would say yes, I have a parse hidden in another thread (parse here) that shows Gruul parrying attacks does indeed speed up his next attack. I don't see any pattern in the speed of the next parry-affected swing.

Lol, i forgot completly about scorpid sting. thats another 5% enemy miss bringing machezaar to about 35% miss rating . (24+5+6 through defense)

gathering 65% avoidance to avoid crushings shouldn't be that hard.

btw one warlock with the affliction talent (-5% melee damage) is very nice too, remember patchwerk after armor value nerf? only possible with warlock talent before they nerfed patchwerk hateful.

it is possible to reach very high avoidance, thats cause there are so many good items with defense+dodge rating out there.

i'm asking myself how much crushings the prince will do with a tank with 70% parry/block/dodge and a hunter with scorpid sting...hmmm

Boots of Elusion are one of the major avoidance items out for now and maybe you give it a try and stack avoidance. Maybe you will not get any crushing then.

I am a casual gamer so i can only guess what may happen but i tested the dual wield with avoidance against this mobs to check out how dual wield miss chance works...to bad i cannot reach 70 avoidance yet :/. But its kinda of funny. 20 of this guys at once do little to no damage to me. (block >2xx).



the parry thing is kinda tricky for warriors.
if the enemy parries a white hit from me i will get the rage for it like beeing a normal hit.
if i parry a mob attack my swing timer will be lowered.
if the mob parries a attack from me his swing timer will be lowered.

http://www.wowwiki.com/Formulas:Parry

for mobs hitting like trucks this i a very bad thing and this may force us to use slower weapons. what you may want to try is if you use ktm is to stop attacking (i know ><) but maybe you see a difference in damage income. thunderclap+demoshout+block are a must though .

I used to turn off autoattack all the time on 4hm and still parried/blocked...?

Its cool to see some parses now, I guess I fell outta the loop on that discussion between Patchwerk and now. I always figured it did, solid proof is just resolution :-D. Means I get to REALLY chew out bad melees and bad pets now as getting chain hit at .5 seconds by mobs that can hit for 8k is really not cool.....

Just gives me more reason to wanna get a +weaponskill weap eventually to circumvent parries in addition to increasing my threat!

Back on topic, avoidance is good; get healers that aren't thrown off by it. Abuse the fact that Prince is dual wielding and crank up his miss rate and your avoidance/block so you're at or close to 100% total miss/block/dodge/parry even without shield block up and his damage becomes pathetically easy as you push crushes off the table or you avoid like 70% and of the remaining 30% at least 20-25% of them are blocked to non crush (33% to 17% crush rate of the hits that actually land). With that, shield block will minimize it even further. All skimping out on the avoidance does it ensures you will use up your shield block charges and get hit a ton once they are gone.

No, no. Last I checked on this bug it didnt involve auto-attack at all, it was actually related to whether your character had his weapon/shield sheathed or not (them being sheathed would not allow you to parry/block, them being wielded -- would).

If you look around these very boards you'll see a possible paladin bug that is related to this, where supposedly paladins become unable to block/parry for a fraction of second when they are casting instant spells like cleanse and being beat on.



What I think is really cool is that despite the game being out for what? 2 and a half years now? We're still learning new things about it everyday.

Insect Swarm anyone?

Xelopheris, I've got some MT friends from other guilds that have gotten far enough in endgame TBC to know whether or not they want to stack stamina or avoidance. (I stack stamina, they mostly stack avoidance) the trend I've been seeing is that once they get through magtheridon they realize they haven't paid enough attention to hitting a high enough minimum HP, because even though they're avoiding a lot more hits than me and saving the healers some grief by not taking over 1/2 of the hits, they're getting instagibbed when they get hit for 17 or 18k in 1.5 seconds. (happens easily on maulgar and gruul past 14 growths) now, I may not dodge or parry as much as they do, but I can take those 18k hits and still have 3k left over no problem.

looking at your MT's armory, he's got to figure out what he's giving up to get that avoidance. like on the wyrnn dynasty greaves. http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/#c...n=Braincracker
stacking those 2 yellow gems to get 6 stamina is not worth it. he can change them out for two 12 stamina gems, have 10 more stamina and 6 less defense rating. that's 112 HP for about .16% avoidance and .08% block. also, his shield. if he gets hit around 8 times before he needs a heal (assuming he has 30% increased SB value from talents, armory isn't loading talents for me) then 18 block value is better than 18 stamina. but with your problems he's saving himself around 66 dmg (if he blocks all 3 hits) and dying, when 18 stamina stacked with changing out a little bit of def for stamina can save him. it's better to save him from dying than to save your healers from having to heal that 66 dmg.

completely opinion, but I aim for at least 13k unbuffed HP to make sure I can't get 2 shot. once I've hit that almost 'immune to 2 shot' point, it's dodge/parry/block as long as I can keep the HP up there.

put on a shield

I wonder actually with all these discussions, on which of the end-game bosses can a warrior really guarantee having shield block up all the time, if he's good? (If any). Prince obviously isn't one of them and I'd guess not maulgar either with all those specials, but what about gruul or mag? Nightbane?

Well don't I feel an idiot. I could -swear- that that shut off parry/block because of some testing I did (quite some time ago) having to do iwth reflective damage and shield spikes and all, and the warrior even with SB up wasn't blocking my attacks for snot and we could not figure out why.

Yeah, the animation bug w/ casts looks unpretty for pally tanks, esp on something like Prince where if he's not blocked he does a happy-fun crush chain.

And on another fun little potential issue- reckoning will possibly trip more parries and speed up the swing timer as well...hmm.

Anyway, sorry for being silly- I was pretty sure I was right, but apparently i was very mistaken.

The bug is getting looked into, it's probably a side effect from turning a caster class into a tanking class. As for the reckoning thing what do you mean "trip more parries" ?

I was actually thinking (for some, unknown reason) that 2 parries in a row would be worse than one, but since the only time they'd happen on two different swing timers would potentially be when one of them completes immedately following your swing it's mostly moot. So unless there's an (unknown) additive bonus to parrying twice in a row before your swing goes off, that's more or less irrelivant.

My tired brain looked and saw 2> 1, discounting that it's likely more of a binary equation.

And I'm very happy they're looking into the weapon sheath thing, I'm still feeling silly for thinking turning off autoattack would put me into happy fun crush zone.