Hi There,
coming from the DK front, I needed info about the importance of parryhaste for MT survivability. (Especially because DW tanking is a hot topic right now) The first part is a bit heavy on DKs, but later on other tanks should find useful (socketing) information.
I wrote a small simulator, that does typical melee combat (tank vs. Boss) including weaponswings and parryhaste and analyses the survivability for given settings.
Global Setting:
- The Boss: Typical melee hard-hitting Boss (~9k Basedmg), 2.0 attack speed with a special attack roughly every ~ 10 secs (1.5*Basedmg). 15% parry
- The MT: 30k HP, 50% avoidance (including 15% playerparry) and different tanking weapons. Every 1.9 second a special melee attack in addition to the auto attack.
- The Raid: I only modeled the healers for this tool. A typical healsetup consists of a priest spamming greater heal (10k), a paladin flashhealing (4k) and some hots from druids/etc (1200 hps). There are other options, but that should be a quite realistic assumption about the overall incoming heal for a lot of fights.
The tool now simulates 20k tries on this boss and measures how many tries end with a wipe, i.e., MT death.
The following graphs now compare different weaponchoices (stats and weaponspeed) at different amounts of bossparry (15/10/5/0):
- DK DW (2x Broken Promise)
- DK DW (Broken Promise / Slayer of the Lifeless)
- DK 2H (Inevitable Defeat)
- WAR 1H + Shield (Slayer of the Lifeless, Hero's Surrender)



It is *no* conclusion that DK tanking is superior to warrior tanking - I did not model block at all. So no comparison possible. I assume the small gap is closed by blocking and they will perform quite similar.
Instead, we clearly can see that Dual Wielding below the expertise cap is a ... not so smart idea.
So. Coming to a wider audience. Does it make sense to lower the expertise cap to increase the survivability?
Same tool. This time comparing socketing options. 15 gem slots filled with:
24 sta / 16 expertise / 16 dodge / 8 exp+ 12 Sta

Although parrygib is a problem for maintanking, we can see that a huge amount of stamina gives higher benefit than reducing the boss's chance to parry.
All these conclusions are only valid for hard-hitting bosses. In the case of fast-hitting bosses, parry haste shouldn't be such a big problem anyways. If the MT can take 6 hits, one or two hasted hits are not such a big problem than if the MT can only take 2 hits.
So my (personal) conclusions?
Deathknights: stay away from DW for tanking.
Maintanks: expertise is nice to have but I would not socket for it. Stamina is, once again, a better socketing option for hard hitters (c.f.
Graphing Tank Damage / Life tables )
Any comments would be greatly appreciated.