Because the ability of bosses to do that is a granular ability that can be individually toggled by Blizzard. As such, the discussion about whether or not an individual boss has a particular flag, i.e. "whether a particular boss has their attacks hasted by parry mechanics", which is entirely unrelated to the ability of any other boss to do the same.

I'll hopefully get to do it tonight when I get back from the University, but I don't mind if somebody else beats me to it. But even if players will benefit from parry haste, there's nothing to indicate that bosses will as well. It certainly wouldn't be the first time there are differences in the way attacks work.

Looking at that WWS linked in the top post it seems like at least some bosses are still parry-hasting.

I took the raw combat logs through WWS a boss fight at at time, and filtered them using

This gives you a nice list of the boss swings and lets you scan easily for parry thrashes. Like THIS. You then have to check the raw log for actual parries, but more often than not there's one in there somewhere. For example:

I may have filtered it wrong or something, and I know very little about the boss mechanics so there may be something going on there, but those are some pretty quick swings. From this I would conclude that at least SOME bosses still parry-haste, if not all.

P.S. I'm sure someone smarter than me can figure out how to filter it down to a simple list of boss swings and player parries, but I just couldn't get it to work.

Is this a side effect of the heart-strike debuff stroke, or is parry-haste based on a different mechanic than generic haste?

ed. Disregard, my own dumb fault for not looking at your WWS.

Looks like the perception that parryhasting was gone, at least on my part, was because the easy-to-evaluate-in-a-WWS bosses (Maexxna, Patchwerk) simply have it turned off.

Oh well.

So... I guess we need to eventually compile a list of which bosses do/don't parry haste, so you know when to equip your expertise gear?

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:

1. 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
2. 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.
3. 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):

1. DK DW (2x Broken Promise)
2. DK DW (Broken Promise / Slayer of the Lifeless)
3. DK 2H (Inevitable Defeat)
4. 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.

Using my own experience from warrior and DK tanking, as well as data from wws logs, 1.9 s (little bit higher than GCD) seems like a good estimation for non auto attacks that can cause parryhaste. I also tested with somewhat higher and smaller values, but it did not make any significant difference.

Concerning the class comparison, you are absolutely right that paladins will have no hard time dealing with parry haste, because they do not attack (physically) that often.

In terms of a frost DK:
- Icy Touch which is a spell;
- Howling Blast which is also a spell;
- Frost Strike which is unparryable;
- Rune Strike which converts mainhand hits to be unparryable;
- Pestilence which is a spell (although not used on single targets, obviously).

You're saying that warrior / DK tanks have a comparable number of attacks that are parryable? I'm not quite sure where you get that from, especially considering the difference in weapons (one using a slow 2h, one using a fast 1h) and the fact that Heroic Strike can still be parried while Rune Strike cannot.

Could you provide rates of parryable attacks that you have used for Warriors / DK's as I would be interested in seeing what your assumptions were in producing those graphs.

Although I did not intend to compare the difference in classes, you (dukes) are absolutely right, that there are differences in the amount of special attacks for different classes.

Ok.. let's get some numbers.

Frost DK (20 seconds); (3.6 mace)
IT,PS,BS,BS,OB,IT,PS,OB,OB, (and some irrelevant FS) and let's say four (2.0 boss swing timer, 40% combined doge/parry of the tank) additional Rune Strikes (reducing the number of parryable attacks). -> 7 special attacks, 2 white attacks.

Warrior (20 seconds) (1.5 mace);
I am not sure about sunder armor, but every other attack should be parryable. Lets assume it is. This results in:
13 parryable special attacks, 13 auto attack / heroic strike.

Ok. kinda different :-)
Especially because DW Frost Tanking uses HB instead of OB, the DW tank should produce 3 less parryable special attacks, but a lot more white attacks. Even with two Broken Promises we have 16-4 = 12 parryable attacks.

So we have
Warrior 26 parryable attacks
DK 2h 9 parryable attacks
DK DW 16 parryable attacks.
I am still sure that DW will be worse than 2H tanking (including the benefits of two tanking weapons), but I will change the simulator as soon as I got spare time.
On the warrior / class comparison side, I assume that Blizzard did a good job and blocking outweighs the higher parrygib chance. Maybe I will research on that detail a bit more some time. But for really meaningful data, I would have to include Shield Block/Wall, Ice-Bound Fortitude, etc. So this is not very likely.


Thanks again for pointing that out dukes.

For anyone (=C programmer) interested in playing around with the simulator, here ya go.

http://www.iseurope.de/theheap/wow/T...ParryHaste.zip

its wrapped in an Objective-C Project, but the code itself is pure C - it should compile with any gcc.

hf