The notion of being immune to crushing blows as a warrior both for survivability and threat generation is one that I've been reading about recently on a variety of forums and while the theory seems sound, I've yet to fully understand how one goes about creating such a set.

From my perspective, stacking shield block rating seems obvious because it's the cheapest defensive stat in terms of item budgeting, but while trying to put together my own set I've run into some very curious numbers that I was hoping someone could elucidate for me.

As I understand it, being crushing immune involves reaching somewhere between 102% and 103% avoidance including block, dodge, parry and miss percentages. What I'm wondering is how people claiming crushing immunity are reaching this calculation? Is it through the in-game character information? Crunching the numbers themselves?

I created a set using a variety of items that I currently have available and although my character profile indicated numbers that added up to a bit less than the desired goal, upon calculating the expected values myself I came across different ones.

- Onslaught Greathelm
- The Darkener's Grasp
- Onslaught Shoulderguards
- Devilshark Cape
- Onslaught Chestguard
- Vambraces of Courage
- The Brutalizer
- Kaz'rogal's Hardened Heart
- Gyro-Balanced Khorium Destroyer
- Onslaught Handguards
- Crimson Girdle of the Indomitable
- Destroyer Legguards
- Myrmidon's Treads
- Seventh Ring of the Tirisfalen
- Band of Eternity
- Styleen's Impeding Scarab
- Scarab of Displacement

Looking at the items I selected and accounting for enchants, this amounts to:

464 Defense Rating, 211 Shield Block Rating, 109 Dodge Rating, 59 Parry Rating and 118 Agility.

According to WoWWiki, at level 70 the 464 Defense Rating equates to a little over 195 Defense Skill, but this is rounded down to the nearest integer. Taking into account the Anticipation talent and 350 base defense skill, this set would yield 565 Defense skill in total.

Also according to WoWWiki, every 25 points of defense skill grants a 1% dodge chance, 1% parry chance, 1% block chance, and 1% increased chance to be missed. I've read this elsewhere, but is this incorrect? If we assume that this is correct, then 565 Defense would equate to:

22.6% Block
22.6% Dodge
22.6% Parry
22.6% Miss

This seems very high and possibly the first place I went wrong in my calculations. If so, what's the correct method? I understand that this is versus level 70 mobs so perhaps that comes into play here in a manner that I don't fully understand.

Throw in Deflection and Shield Discipline and we wind up with

27.6% Block
22.6% Dodge
27.6% Parry
22.6% Miss

Next I looked at the gains from the other ratings and agility:

Dodge Rating: 18.923 rating grants 1% dodge.

109 DR = 5.76 Dodge

Parry Rating: 22.4 rating grants 1% parry.

59 PR = 2.634 Parry

Block Rating: 7.88 rating grants 1% block chance.

211 SBR = 26.78 Shield Block

At 70, warriors need 30 agility to get 1% dodge.

118 = 3.934 Dodge from Agility

Including these I saw the totals jump to:

54.38% Block
32.29% Dodge
30.23% Parry
22.6% Miss

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139.5% 'avoidance' and I haven't even accounted for base agility when naked. This obviously seems wrong, but I can't tell where my mistake is. If anyone could shed light on the matter, it'd be much appreciated. I feel a bit silly asking this, but I've been unable to make any headway on this otherwise. Thanks for your time.

Every point of defense above the attacker's weapon skill grants the 0.04% to each avoidance stat.

Therefore 565 defense vs. a level 73 attacker (365 weapon skill) would grant you 200 * 0.04 = 8% to all of the above stats.

Yes, your assumption would lead to a naked warrior with 350 defense having 14% chance to block, dodge, be missed and parry. All of those (except dodge) should be at 5% vs an equal level mob.

Excellent, I knew I was making a simple mistake.

So the values against a level 73 mob would be:

39.78% Block
17.69% Dodge
15.63% Parry
8% Miss.

Thanks for the quick correction! In total 81.1%, which is much more reasonable. Or do the other ratings (dodge, parry, block) behave differently versus higher level mobs as well? Do all non-dual-wielding bosses have a typical, base miss chance? 5% or so? I assume we'd then add this base chance to the miss granted by our defense.

It is high. That's because you're looking at your defense skill against a level 0 attacker. And, as you'd expect, such an attacker would indeed have troubles hitting you. However, a level 70 NPC attacker has a 350 weapon skill, and the amount of mitigation you get is based on the difference between your defense skill and the attacker's weapon skill. Thus, 565 defense would equate to:

8.6% Block
8.6% Dodge
8.6% Parry
8.6% Miss

This is much more reasonable, yes?

Now, a level 73 attacker would have a 365 weapon skill. And this is where the 102.4% value comes from. If you have 100% mitigation against a level 70 attacker (with 350), the addition 15 weapon skill a level 73 has lowers your mitigation chances in total by exactly 2.4%. Thus, the 102.4% is what you need as compared to a level 70 attacker, when you're actually looking at taking on a level 73 attacker. It's used because the defense tooltips are given for an attacker of your level (70), and thus are slightly off when you're interested in combat against a level 73 attacker.

Generally speaking, when people talk of crushing immunity, they're not talking about reach 102.4% through passive effects, and that's (probably) unreachable. They're assuming that there will be an active effect as well as passive mitigation - shield block for a warrior, holy shield for a paladin (druids get to suck down the crushing blows, but they have other advantages).

Now, your final numbers are also missing a little something. There is a base 5% each of block, parry and miss chance (assuming one can block and parry). Including this, along with the weapon skill of a level 73 attacker, gives us final values of

44.78% Block
17.69% Dodge
20.63% Parry
13.00% Miss

For a total of 96.10%. Pretty impressive! However, you might find yourself a bit lacking in another important stat, namely health (generally improved by stacking stamina).

If I recall correctly I'm actually somewhere around 16k health unbuffed with the above gear and there are some other items that I'd like to incorporate in the future which would add a bit on top of that. Tauren have an advantage here of course.

As for shield block, one of the goals of putting this set together is to see threat in a gear setup that doesn't require shield block to push crushing blows off. I doubt I'd use this full-time, but there's been quite a bit of buzz, particularly on these forums, and I've been anxious to see the effects myself.

At any rate, thanks everyone for your input. You've cleared this up for me.

You are overplaying the effects of using a crush immune set quite a bit. At tier 6 gear level, it is not hard to reach crush immunity. You don't drop several thousand hitpoints, unless you have been using max hp gear and trinkets before, in which case you would drop around 2k hitpoints.

Exigent, you need 102,4% avoidance on your character sheet, which is the same as 100% vs level 73 mobs. You should actually aim just a bit higher (maybe 102.5%) because the game might round down somewhere, still leaving a tiny chance for crushes. Also remember that you gain some more avoidance from buffs like MotW, BoK as well as elixirs or a flask. I recommend getting the Tankpoints mod, it has a quite useful calculator for this kind of stuff.

When you get bursted by Morogim from 21k health to dead because shield block charges were consumed by Earthquake and the cooldown was still up, you may amend your position on "passive crush immunity" slightly.

The avoidance listed there is not extreme either, only the block is very high. You'd still be taking incoming damage in good amounts to generate rage for threat output. I'd guess that rage income in that gear would actually be quite smooth and allow for excellent threat generation cycles.

Passive crush immunity would be situationally very nice.

There's a decent amount of discussion about this already in this other thread.

I've never had any problems with morogrim. All our deaths on him are because AoEers die due to pulling aggro too soon on the adds, or healers die somehow, and then things gradually fall apart.

Perhaps you don't realize this, but around 24% dodge and 20% parry is not significantly different from what I'm getting in my typical tanking or threat gear setup. I imagine most T6 warriors are around the same. The goal is to get crushing immune particularly through a high shield block % such that a good portion of the 'avoidance' still rewards us rage. We're not stacking crazy amounts of dodge or parry here, which is what you'd need to do in order to see the scenario you warn of above.

My block value would drop around 150. The question remains whether threat gained from not spending rage on Shield Block would make up for that, which neither you nor I can answer since we haven't tested this ourselves.

Passive crush immunity is good for Gurtogg and Teron, too. It can also be used for some of the low hitting early BT/Hyjal bosses, but that pretty much requires you to have WF totem because of threat issues. Without a shaman, I'd rather wear threat gear and take some crushing blows for more rage here.

Dodge doesn't get a base 5% plus an amount from agility. The base amount of dodge one gets is less than 5% (for most classes), and that takes in to account the base amount of agility you have. As a 70 human paladin, I have 3.73% dodge with 77 agility. It's agility over that that increases dodge amount. (I don't know what the base dodge is for tauren warriors.)

So, Exigent is probably a bit shy of passive crush immunity, although he's close, and he's certainly reduced his crush chances from the base 15%.

According to the TankPoints mod that was suggested above, that gear alone would reduce the chance of crushing blows to 0.25%. With raid buffs active, the chance was reduced to 0%. Whether this is accurate or not, I'm not certain. But it seems possible and I'll be checking WWS logs whenever the set is utilized.

At any rate, thanks again folks for your input. My understanding of the subject has been improved significantly.

The mod is pretty accurate as far as I can tell. Make sure you have the calculator set to lvl 73 boss though. I think this is the default value anyways, but I'm not 100% certain.

I wonder what direction this is going to take. Blizzard has already removed crushing blows from some hard-hitting bosses, will they stop that, continue like this or drop the mechanic completely? Parry haste is much more of an issue than crushing blows, the latter is the one that should stay.

If there will still be crushing blows I can see some nerf coming for block rating and maybe some other defensive stats. Passive immunity is really not far-fetched with T6 gear, and I think that's not entirely intended. Also avoidance is getting fairly high, I'm actually close to "physical immune" with mongoose + pocket watch + scarab in my tank gear. (I chose to gear for avoidance as I don't MT. )

Does Suffering, the Voidwalker spell, work on raid bosses? If so, does it stack with scorpid sting? In the unlikely event it does, physical immunity should be be approaching attainability with the proper buffs. Fun stuff!

Hmm, i had forgotten all about that little buff to voids...

Exactly how long does it last? i remember it has a 2 min cooldown, so it might just be really situational. :/

There is a fairly ideal set of gear you can acquire that gives you crushing immune vs bosses, and also a fair share of weapon skill and +hit chance.

The reason I included weapon skill and +hit is because I'm not one to favor excessively stacking stamina to begin with, so having an alternative gem to put in besides Solid Empyreans wasn't a big change at all.

Setup also has 4 piece T6 not utilizing gloves, for maximizing potential avoidance stats to reach the crush cap, while maintaining the amazing 4 piece bonus and the godly gauntlets of enforcement!

Back: Phoenix-Wing Cloak (Agility +12)

Chest: Onslaught Chestguard (Health +150, x3 +15 sta)

Feet: Myrmidon's Treads (Minor Speed Increase, Stamina +9)

Left Finger: Seventh Ring of the Tirisfalen

Right Finger: Band of the Abyssal Lord

Hands: Gauntlets of Enforcement (Increases the threat generated by 2%.)

Head: Onslaught Greathelm (Increases defense rating by 10. (4.23%), Stamina +10, Increases the block value of your shield by 15.)

Legs: Onslaught Legguards (Stamina +40, Agility +12)

Neck: The Darkener's Grasp

Shoulder: Onslaught Shoulderguards (Stamina +16, Armor +100, x2 15 sta)

Left Trinket: Shadowmoon Insignia

Right Trinket: Styleen's Impeding Scarab

Waist: Girdle of Stability (+8 hit / 5 agi 7 sta gem)

Wrist: Wristgaurds of Determination (Stamina +12) - these are the ones from VR.

Mainhand: The Unbreakable Will

Offhand: Bulwark of Azzinoth (Stamina +18)

Ranged: Barrel-Blade Longrifle (x2 Thick Lionseye)

That puts you a little under the cap, so my ideal setup has you getting like an extra myrmidon's treads and girdle of stability and putting a thick lionseye in each, then matching the other socket, for the bonus. Or just one extra and putting two lionseyes in and ignoring the socket bonus.

I just noticed I have a 'mistake' in there so to speak, I believe you can switch out styleens for a scarab of displacement and get more overall avoidance, and a useful clicky bonus. At the loss of a bit of tps from the 24 block value.

I greatly favor the crushing immune build, and my Template would put the tank at I think 16700 unbuffed hp, and not tauren.

I've been thinking about this a bit over the last week or two, parsing some combatlogs from my guild, and running some simulations, and I'm starting to believe that there really is value in passive crush resistance. The underlying reason for this is as follows:

Observation 1: What kills tanks? Well, simply stated, burst damage. And where does burst damage come from? Getting hit a couple of times in quick succession. In particular, where it starts to get dangerous is when one gets hit 3 or more times in a row without any dodges, parries, or misses, as it's fairly common for tanks to have sufficient HP/Armor to survive 2 hits without a heal (assuming one starts out topped off).

Observation 2: Most tanks that are not passively crush immune tend to get crushed at least once during fights. Looking over last weeks raids in WWS, it appears that our MT tends to get hit with a crushing blow on about 1% of incoming attacks. The immediate question is: how does this happen? And the answer is: he gets hit at least 3 times in a 5 second period (i.e., when the duration of a Shield Block) and thereby has a reasonably chance of getting crushed on the third.

Observation 3: The criteria for getting "crushed" looks a whole lot like the criteria for getting bursted. In particular, if you get hit 3 times in a row after a shield block, there's a very real chance that this is going to consist of 2 regular (blocked) hits and a crushing blow. Now, before one attempts to argue that this is a fairly unlikely occurrence: consider, for the moment, a tank with 25% dodge, 20% parry, 10% mob miss rate, and 25% block (not unreasonable for a sta/armor heavy build). Well, there's thus a 45% chance that each attack hits, and hence about a 20% chance that the first two hits after a shield block both land and eat the two shield block charges. Since total dodge/parry/block/miss rate is only 80%, there is thus a 15% chance that the ensuing hit is a crushing blow. Thus, there is, overall, roughly a 3% chance that during any particular shield block, one eats 2 melee attacks followed by a crushing blow - meaning once every 30-40 shield blocks, or about once per 3 minutes of having a boss beat on you. So this is expect to happen at least some.

Observation 4: These are clearly the most dangerous times for the tank; they're eating 2 regular strength attacks followed by a crushing, most like in a time period little longer than 3 seconds. If a tank is going to die, this is the circumstance that is most likely to cause it.

Observation 5: Passive crushing immunity eliminates this problem.

Observation 6: Two regular hits and a crushing do 3.5x the monster's damage (minus some small amount from the 2 blocks). 3 regular hits do 3x the monster's damage (minus some slightly larger but still small amount from the 3 blocks). Hence, the amount of damage taken in the biggest spikes is roughly 86% as large if one manages to become passively crush-immune; hence, as long as ones effective HP (that is, amount of damage one can absorb purely based on HP and armor mitigation) is at least 86% the size of the non crush immune warriors, you will actually be somewhat less susceptible to burst damage of this sort.

So, lets put these observations into practice for a moment. I put together some sample endgame gear sets for warriors, one that focused on sta/armor, the other that focused on becoming passively crush-immune. I then wrote a simulator of a 10 minute combat wherein the tank was attacked by a hard-hitting boss once every 1.5 seconds. The warrior was assumed to use Shield Block every 5 seconds. I then measured the largest amount of damage taken in 3 consecutive hits at any point during the fight, and compared this to the amount of damage the warrior could absorb without dying (basically, mitigate the damage dealt by the warrior's armor, and then compare to his total HP).

The first set of gear had the following (raid buffed) stats:

22924 HP
21726 Armor
24.24% dodge
20.47% parry
24.99% block
11.16% boss miss rate
Block Value: 289

The second had the following (raid buffed) stats:
21154 HP
20078 Armor
31.83% dodge
23.02% parry
34.60% block
12.48% miss
Block Value: 229

Basically: the first setup has an extra 2k HP and 1500 Armor, while the second has an extra 11% avoidance and 10% block, thereby becoming crit immune. Note that these are real numbers, based on real, attainable gear sets. Averaged across 100,000 trials, I found that the largest 3-hit burst taken by the first tank was roughly 10% larger, as a function of his HP, than the largest 3-hit burst taken by the second tank.

It might also be noted that the first set of gear was put together rather carefully via several conversations with tanks, whereas the second I through together in 5 minutes and is probably not optimal for a crush-immune build - hence it might actually be possible to do better on the HP/Armor front while preserving crush immunity.

Now, admittedly, this doesn't address all the problems with going with a more avoidance-heavy build, regarding increased clumpiness of damage making life awkward for the healers and possibly interrupting the rage (and hence aggro) generation of the tank. On the other hand, it doesn't address the overall smaller quantity of damage that the tank will be taking over time. What it does say, however, is that a passively-crush immune tank is actually less subject to really big spikes of damage than a non-crush immune tank; hence, their may be real merit in attaining crush-immunity against hard-hitting bosses as a means of survival.

Neither of those stat values looks like a stam/armor stacker. The first one looks like a warrior in balanced gear of T6 level, and the second in avoidance/block rating gear of T6 level. (And both have such low block values that it might be hard for them to hold aggro over a great Black Temple geared dpser).

I'm in T4 and have 21.5k hp / 22k armor / Over 500 BV raid buffed. 17% dodge 15% parry 11% miss.

Try a T6 level warrior with around 20% dodge 15% parry not 25/20. And like 800 BV. How would they stack up? Two hits out of every 5 seconds are going to have their damage reduced by that block value.

Hmm, I picked more or less the highest Sta/Armor setup I could find - I must have missed some. Also, I make no guarantee that I calculated the block values correctly - i was working quickly, and off of wowwiki's numbers to a large extent. If someone would like to piece together alternate numbers for their favorite AP/Armor set (and/or their favorite crush-immune set) I'd be happy to run them through my model and see what turns up.

That said, specific implementation details aside, I think the point remains that preventing block/block/crush triplets is potentially desirable.