Block and Miss aren't related in any way on the roll chart, if I understand it correctly.

This is something I've wanted to test for some time. I've been told both ways, that yes you can block/parry/dodge attacks while casting, and that the only time you'll see that is if you actually miss the cast time by an instant due to lag and the server returns the result of the interrupt as if there was no cast going on at the time.

I think the whole assumption that things wouldnt be parried/blocked/dodged while casting come from the recent findings regarding the paladin tanking bug. (Acknowledged by Blizzard, promised a fix soon)

We know some mechanics don't apply to monsters the same way they apply to players. We have all sorts of restrictions (can't dodge from behind, can't block without shield being wielded), whereas I'm sure all of us still scratch our heads when a dual wielding mob blocks an attack... It blocked? With What? Still remember level 20 bears partially blocking my attacks as well. WTB: Druid Block, PST.

So don't take that assumption too much to heart regarding what the mob is doing. But sure, it would be best to conduct testing on monsters we are guaranteed a 100% clear test that doesn't involve things we don't completely understand.

Well, if we're really testing things, we should do so on both players and mobs.

Of course, we are hoping that the observed behavior jives with the intended as always, so hopefully that bug fix will indeed come 'soon.'

Actually, due to the way skull mobs work, I believe they're always 3 levels higher than you. You can go find old raid bosses, and they should work correctly. However, the old bosses still do the same damage, they're only level 73 for the purposes of attack tables.

So I'm thinking maybe the snake boss in ZG? In phase 1, he doesn't do much after you kill the adds. He even heals himself to make things easier.

Onyxia. You could have phase 1 last more or less indefinitely with one tank and one healer. Maybe two healers if you were feeling worried. Eventually she'd get to phase 2, but with only a tank doing damage, that'd take a long time.

Tank could swap in sword/axe to check the effect of racials, swap in some weapon with +skill to double check by giving a third data point. Could also swap in 2h/sword-and-board/DW to check any other effects on (e.g.) hit.

It'd be very long and boring to do so, but that's pretty much a given for testing any small effects.

High Priest Venoxis would definitely be the easiest target to try. His adds have only 15k life and would die rather rapidly to three level 70's, and the boss himself hits like a young boar. I observed a max melee hit of around 550, and he frequently stops to cast spells that you have a good chance of resisting. He also casts Renew on himself, making the parse infinitely sustainable.

On Thursday night a friend and I are going to have our way with Venoxis on the PTR with me boxing two identically geared Paladins: one with 350 weapon skill, and one with 365 weapon skill. We're hoping to go around 3-5 hours with him to hit a low margin of error.

Sorry for contributing nothing meaningful to the discussion, but I've been following the thread intently and the mental image of the high priest of a primal god being slowly beaten to death by a walking tree and two men with rusty swords was just hilarious.

On a more relevant note, 40 minutes with a 1.5 weapon on autoattack would yield around... 1600 attacks? Do you have any promising evidence yet or is it too early to be sure?

We're going for over 10 000 swings before saying anything conclusive. Anything less would have a pretty significant margin of error. Runs on Venoxis are lasing about 40-60 minutes depending on how quickly we kill the snakes, so it'll be a while yet.

Well, we got up to 8000-ish swings on both Paladins when we had a weapon break at some point, and we're too f'in tired to find where it was in the combat log tonight. We shall continue tomorrow night after the raid.

From what I could see – and this is very, very preliminary – it's looking like weapon skill from a DPS perspective is at least roughly on par with an equally weighted combination of Hit and Crit Ratings, but it also digs into Dodges that Hit Rating can't touch. Jury's still out on the tanking perspective, since we got some bizarro results with Parry on individual 45-60 minute runs at Venoxis, but we'll see if the combined log helps shed some light on that mystery.

Wow, I also can't wait for the results.

I have my own test, but the numbers show nothing new...

I went and wacked level 60s using auto-attack only with 350 Weapon Skill for a bit. Same result as Punscho, no dodges and no parries. This time I used daggers, so there's no stunning getting in the way either. Targets were various level 60 humanoids in Hellfire Peninsula.

Weapon Skill 350, Daggers
1138 Attacks
1133 Landed
5 Miss
0 Dodge
0 Parry

Then to make sure that the level 62 test wasn't just the mobs that was fighting that one time, I went and attacked some level 62 Orcs outside of SH.

Weapon Skill 360, Maces (with mace spec)
218 Attacks
212 Landed
0? Miss (I don't have any written down when I copied the data by hand out of recap. Doesn't really matter anyway.)
6 Parry
0 Dodge

So it wasn't just the mobs I was fighting last time. 350 Skill on 60s is not the same as 360 Skill on 62s.