I never understood the fixation of stacking avoidance for Bone Shield. Sure, avoidance increases Bone Shield uptime but this is only important in specific scenarions; namely when there is raid damage (or sometimes even damage directed on the tank) which is reduced by Bone Shield without expending a charge itself. If there is no such thing, then avoidance just doesn't matter. You will take 20% less damage from the next 3 abilities that can remove a charge (obviously excepting things within the ICD of Bone Shield).
Right now I have a hard time thinking of encounters where such mechanics exist or are important. There just aren't that many bosses around with a raid wide damage aura where a high BS uptime would have helped.
Roop: I have 2 screenshots and both were melee hits, with only physical damage.
Insolence: I'm aware of the bug, but changing presences didn't fix it, as I stated, and neither did respeccing.
My question, however, was not "omg imp blood presence isn't working," I just wanted to make sure I understood the percentages correctly, because the official response I got seemed wrong to me. I just wanted to verify that Improved Blood Presence should, in fact, make me crit immune.
bluedragon: that's interesting but I don't believe I have ever seen "x crits y" in a combat log. Critical hits have always appeared as larger numbers in the floating combat text (or on my portrait) and that's what I saw. Critical hits that I deal are always logged in the same way--You hit for X damage (critical)
Edit: just did a couple fights on my mage, I'm seeing "hit for X damage (critical)", not "crit for X damage." Can anyone else confirm/deny this? I'm working with the standard in-game combat log.
Critical hits have always appeared as larger numbers in the floating combat text (or on my portrait) and that's what I saw.
This is rather vague.
In any case, I can't remember the last time I got crit in Blood Presence at all. While Improved Blood Presence seems to bug often for me lately (resetting to 10 second Rune CDs after getting resurrected) I just came into the habit of switching presences after every wipe - if I am not running back in Unholy Presence to begin with.
A few explanations that can explain getting crit/looking like you got crit:
- You accidentally sat down/switched out of Blood Presence.
- An addon might show you get crit when you didn't (i.e. I wouldn't trust anything but the real combat log for this).
- The mob has an increased chance to crit (generally Rogue mob types).
- You got crit indirectly by another player's debuff, i.e. Living Bomb back in Molten Core would take your character's chance to crit to determine if said debuff would crit you and anyone around you when it went off and since spells and special abilities cannot crit otherwise, this is the only explanation for them to crit at all.
For what it's worth, this is how getting crit should look like in your combat log:
In any case, I can't remember the last time I got crit in Blood Presence at all. While Improved Blood Presence seems to bug often for me lately (resetting to 10 second Rune CDs after getting resurrected) I just came into the habit of switching presences after every wipe - if I am not running back in Unholy Presence to begin with.
A few explanations that can explain getting crit/looking like you got crit:
- You accidentally sat down/switched out of Blood Presence.
- An addon might show you get crit when you didn't (i.e. I wouldn't trust anything but the real combat log for this).
- The mob has an increased chance to crit (generally Rogue mob types).
- You got crit indirectly by another player's debuff, i.e. Living Bomb back in Molten Core would take your character's chance to crit to determine if said debuff would crit you and anyone around you when it went off and since spells and special abilities cannot crit otherwise, this is the only explanation for them to crit at all.
For what it's worth, this is how getting crit should look like in your combat log:
[Cutpurse] Melee hit [You] 7 Physical. (Critical)
Okay, the "larger numbers" thing was not what I was going by...I was simply saying, if I see in floating combat text larger numbers, I assume that was a crit and when I check the combat log, "X hit you for Y damage (critical)" is what I see at that point.
- I did not sit down, and I checked that I was in blood presence
- I tried switching presences and it didn't fix it
- I tried respeccing and it didn't fix it
- I was using the in-game combat log and that's what told me I was crit both times
- It was a normal melee attack that crit me, not a special ability
I understand now that I was correct about how Improved Blood Presence functions, and I should not have gotten crit, so I will be putting in another ticket about this.
And yes, that is what I saw in my combat log when I got crit. I'm happy to post screenshots.
Insolence: I'm aware of the bug, but changing presences didn't fix it, as I stated, and neither did respeccing.
My question, however, was not "omg imp blood presence isn't working," I just wanted to make sure I understood the percentages correctly, because the official response I got seemed wrong to me. I just wanted to verify that Improved Blood Presence should, in fact, make me crit immune.
Ah sorry.
I'm assuming you played pre-Cataclysm, where Tank's first Gearing move was always to reach 540 Defense. Improved Blood Presence is our replacement for that 540 Defense. A Level 83 Mob had a 5.6% chance to Critically Hit a Tank. 540 Defense reduced that 5.6% chance to 0. Now instead of Gearing for that 5.6% reduced chance to get Critically Hit we (in theory) should get it "free" by speccing into Improved Blood Presence.
The idea is that we should just Talent into it and forget about ever being Critically Hit again (minus Crushing Blows etc). When the Talent works right.
I never understood the fixation of stacking avoidance for Bone Shield. Sure, avoidance increases Bone Shield uptime but this is only important in specific scenarions; namely when there is raid damage (or sometimes even damage directed on the tank) which is reduced by Bone Shield without expending a charge itself. If there is no such thing, then avoidance just doesn't matter. You will take 20% less damage from the next 3 abilities that can remove a charge (obviously excepting things within the ICD of Bone Shield).
It is not about uptime in the sense of seconds it is up, it is about reduced attacks per time period. For example, if you have 0 avoidance and get hit once every 2 seconds, in 1 minute time (BS cooldown) you have reduced 3 of the 60/2 = 30 attacks, which is 10%. If you get 33% avoidance, you take on average only 20 hits, meaning you BS reduces 15% of all incoming attacks. In this sense BS increases in value as avoidance goes up.
Bone Shield also increases the Blood Shield per Damage taken ratio. Eg. if you have a Blood Shield for 25k, and you get hit for 50k, you absorbed 50%. If you use Bone Shield, you get a shield for 25k on a damage taken of (50k - 20% =) 40k = 62.5% absorbed. Also note that after the absorbs, in the first scenario you get hit for 25k, while in the second you get hit for (40k - 25k) 15k, which is 40% less, while Bone Shield by itself only provides 20% reduction. With the new Bloodshield stacking, you can also increase the average value of the Blood Shield by increasing your avoidance.
As you can see there is quite some synergy between Avoidance and Bone/Blood shield value.
Also be aware that if you completely absorb an attack with blood shield (or any shield really) you do not lose a bone shield charge. I like how it all nicely flows in that way.
It is not about uptime in the sense of seconds it is up, it is about reduced attacks per time period. For example, if you have 0 avoidance and get hit once every 2 seconds, in 1 minute time (BS cooldown) you have reduced 3 of the 60/2 = 30 attacks, which is 10%. If you get 33% avoidance, you take on average only 20 hits, meaning you BS reduces 15% of all incoming attacks. In this sense BS increases in value as avoidance goes up.
But BS still only reduces 3 attacks per minute regardless of your avoidance (unless you get hit less than 3 times outside the ICD of course, but that isn't going to happen). Why does it matter what percentage of attacks it reduces when the absolute number of reduced attacks stays 3?
Originally Posted by Murdoque
Bone Shield also increases the Blood Shield per Damage taken ratio.
Yes, it does. But you have to time it properly and use Bone Shield in the Blood Shield window and not before so your potential Blood Shield size does not get 20% smaller. This is somewhat true of any damage reduction CD like IBF, DRW and even AMS; use them in the Blood Shield period if you can, not before.
I still don't get how this behaviour would make avoidance stacking for Bone Shield any more valuable though. :/
Honestly, the only situation I could see Bone Shield/avoidance to be useful for is when you are fighting a boss with magic damage in short intervals, like every 10-15 seconds. Avoidance might help you keep Bone Shield for 2 magic bursts there but that's pretty much all it does. Mastery might still eclipse avoidance stacking because magical damage contributes to bigger Blood Shields etc.
Don't get me wrong, I am not saying DKs won't be stacking avoidance. As a matter of fact with the Death Strike nerfs (Scarlet Fever requiring a U rune) and the 5% heal nerf avoidance might become better than mastery for most encounters anyway. DRW and Swordshattering would also synergize pretty well in such a setup because they add undiminished avoidance (I have to admit that I use DRW as a glorified threat CD right now; if I had more avoidance it would be more powerful as a survival CD). Nothing of this has to do with Bone Shield though.
Well, Bone Shield does kind of sync well with DRW too. A great example is Cho'Gall. His Shadow Orders do those three aoe pulses. With Bone Shield up and high avoidance, I can keep BS up longer and reduce more damage. This also lets me save AMS for Flame Orders since I'm (pretty sure) that those are direct damage that takes off BS charges and the flame attacks cannot be avoided or blood shielded.
But BS still only reduces 3 attacks per minute regardless of your avoidance (unless you get hit less than 3 times outside the ICD of course, but that isn't going to happen). Why does it matter what percentage of attacks it reduces when the absolute number of reduced attacks stays 3?
I think you're forgetting that while Bone Shield is active you take 20% less damage from all sources. Therefore, while you are correct that is will only help with three (or whatever the charges are) direct hits, the longer it is up you are also taking less damage from non-direct attacks. There is some value in it lasting longer.
But BS still only reduces 3 attacks per minute regardless of your avoidance (unless you get hit less than 3 times outside the ICD of course, but that isn't going to happen). Why does it matter what percentage of attacks it reduces when the absolute number of reduced attacks stays 3?
It matters because you have a relative amount of damage taken vs. an absolute amount of damage reduced.
The damage that BS reduces is indeed only dependant on the amount of damage from the boss's hit (ie. in one minute, you take 20% reduced damage on 3 hits regardless of avoidance), but that doesn't mean the _value_ of the BS is always the same:
If you take 100 hits in 1 minute (not likely but easy to make a point), BS reduces 20% of the damage on 3% of the hits, which is a laughably small number making it a useless CD. On the other hand, if you take 3 hits in 1 minute (also not very likely), BS reduces 20% of the damage on 100% of the hits. Ie. the larger the amount of hits you take, the weaker BS becomes, and vice versa, the fewer hits you take, the stronger BS becomes.
The effectiveness of BS therefor scales with avoidance, meaning that the question that sparked this entire discussion ("is it worth stacking avoidance to improve BS, since BS value will increase by 33% next patch") is a valid question.
From my personal napkin math it seems the value of BS (which I calculated as "damage reduced by BS divided over total damage taken") scales (roughly) inversely proportional to percentage of unavoided hits. It has a base value at 0 avoidance depending on number of incoming attacks, and the value from then on is very close to base_value / (1 - avoidance), with less than 2% deviation, which might easily be attributed to rounding errors in the program. This correctly predicts that at 50% avoidance, BS reduces relatively twice as much damage compared to 0 avoidance (as it still reduced 3 hits, but the total amount of hits is halved).
Note that damage taken per boss hit has no influence on the value, as you would expect, since both the damage reduced due to BS _and_ total damage taken scale identically with damage per boss hit and cancel eachother out in the value calculation. Of course in absolute terms, the amount of damage reduced depends entirely on boss damage per hit, and indeed does not take avoidance into account (at least for any obtainable amount of avoidance).
Also note that this calculation does not take Blood Shield into consideration, which I think would only improve the scaling from BS with avoidance even more. However Blood Shield value is very hard if not impossible to calculate, especially with stacking shields, so I will leave it at this for now.
Originally Posted by Liar
[on Bone Shield affects Blood Shield value]
Yes, it does. But you have to time it properly and use Bone Shield in the Blood Shield window and not before so your potential Blood Shield size does not get 20% smaller. This is somewhat true of any damage reduction CD like IBF, DRW and even AMS; use them in the Blood Shield period if you can, not before.
I still don't get how this behaviour would make avoidance stacking for Bone Shield any more valuable though. :/
Avoidance also increases the uptime of Blood Shield, making it easier to time Bone Shield in that window and subsequently, increases the chance to stack a Blood Shield during the Bone Shield window. Though the Bone Shield reduces the Blood Shield value by the same amount it increases the value if it was up while the hit landed, with Blood Shields now stacking you can get 2 Blood Shields up from 1 damage source, meaning Bone Shield reduces Blood Shield value by 0.2x but increases the value by 2* 0.2x if you stack it twice, or 3* if you stack it 3 times, etc. All of this scales with avoidance, since the more you have, the more often you can get multiple stacks during that window.
In the end, I do not know wether stacking avoidance is the best way to go, neither do I know if the BS changes will tip the scales in favour of one or the other, but I can at least say that yes, BS does increase in value depending on your avoidance.
I still don't quite get how the value of Bone Shield is increased by avoidance. We can use Bone Shield for 2 things: Mitigate a non-avoidable ability (for example Electrocute on Nef) or to reduce overall damage taken. The former is burst mitigation and the latter is "just" saving healer mana.
Since your avoidance doesn't matter in the former case in terms of how valuable BS is, I think we can focus on the latter aspect. And here is what doesn't make sense: You still only reduce 3 melee swings by 20% with Bone Shield regardless of your avoidance because only the absolute reduced damage matters for this. What am I missing?
Originally Posted by Kuren
I think you're forgetting that while Bone Shield is active you take 20% less damage from all sources. Therefore, while you are correct that is will only help with three (or whatever the charges are) direct hits, the longer it is up you are also taking less damage from non-direct attacks. There is some value in it lasting longer.
Actually I addressed that in another post on this page. The gist of it was that there are just no encounters where this seems to matter because most of the non-tank damage abilities either still take a charge from your Bone Shield or don't matter as much in the overall picture. Now maybe this changes in heroic modes, but for normal modes I can't think of any boss where it would have been useful. As I said before, the only time I could see it being useful is if you can carry over your Bone Shield to cover 2 magic burst abilities (i.e. Ignacious breath possibly since he casts it pretty regularily and likes to charge off so you would only need to avoid a few swings inbetween them).
Does anyone have a different experience in Bone Shield usage (the Chogall example from Mild Confusion was a pretty good one actually)?
EDIT:
Originally Posted by Murdoque
Avoidance also increases the uptime of Blood Shield, making it easier to time Bone Shield in that window and subsequently, increases the chance to stack a Blood Shield during the Bone Shield window. Though the Bone Shield reduces the Blood Shield value by the same amount it increases the value if it was up while the hit landed, with Blood Shields now stacking you can get 2 Blood Shields up from 1 damage source, meaning Bone Shield reduces Blood Shield value by 0.2x but increases the value by 2* 0.2x if you stack it twice, or 3* if you stack it 3 times, etc. All of this scales with avoidance, since the more you have, the more often you can get multiple stacks during that window.
Just so I am clear, are you refering to these 2 scenarios here?
1) 2 Death Strikes in a row after eating a huge burst then popping Bone Shield (presumably with Blood Tap)
and/or
2) Death Striking as usual but getting a stacked shield just due to avoidance and lower damage taken from Bone Shield?
If it is 1), then I could see scenarios where this would be useful but it would probably end up more valuable for a mastery stacker for bigger shields. If you are refering to 2) then doesn't this mean the boss didn't get through your first bubble to begin with and you are now stacking up min heal Blood Shields? That doesn't sound particularily effective.
But now that I think of it, stacking Blood Shields plus heavy avoidance gemming could probably be useful for some niche fights where you can build up a big Blood Shield just through min heal DSes (off tanking and waiting til your assigned mob spawns or something) and then popping Bone Shield and relying on that plus avoidance to keep up the shield for quite a while since fully absorbed damage does not expend a Bone Shield charge. Sounds interesting but it's probably not anything that will come up in more normal scenarios.
I still don't quite get how the value of Bone Shield is increased by avoidance. We can use Bone Shield for 2 things: Mitigate a non-avoidable ability (for example Electrocute on Nef) or to reduce overall damage taken. The former is burst mitigation and the latter is "just" saving healer mana.
Since your avoidance doesn't matter in the former case in terms of how valuable BS is, I think we can focus on the latter aspect. And here is what doesn't make sense: You still only reduce 3 melee swings by 20% with Bone Shield regardless of your avoidance because only the absolute reduced damage matters for this. What am I missing?
I will concede in this point. You are correct when evaluating Bone Shield by itself. But with Blood Shield in the mix this does get more interesting:
Just so I am clear, are you refering to these 2 scenarios here?
1) 2 Death Strikes in a row after eating a huge burst then popping Bone Shield (presumably with Blood Tap)
and/or
2) Death Striking as usual but getting a stacked shield just due to avoidance and lower damage taken from Bone Shield?
If it is 1), then I could see scenarios where this would be useful but it would probably end up more valuable for a mastery stacker for bigger shields. If you are refering to 2) then doesn't this mean the boss didn't get through your first bubble to begin with and you are now stacking up min heal Blood Shields? That doesn't sound particularily effective.
I was talking about scenario 1.
In this case, the percentage of Bone Shielded hits taken compared to Non-BS hits does play a part in determining the value of avoidance, the reason being that Bone Shield uptime in % of hits taken doubly affects the Blood Shield, ie. you take 20% less damage and your Blood Shield is 20% larger. When taken on its own, it is true that avoidance does not improve the absolute reduced damage from Bone Shield, but when adding in Blood Shield this is not the case.
Let's assume that you always have enough time to get a Blood Shield in between Bone Shield charges. Bone Shield affects the stack of Blood Shields multiplicatively. At 0 avoidance, you get 3 times a +20% size on a single stack every time. The more avoidance you have, the larger the chance to stack a Blood Shield multiple times. When you get 2 DS's stacked without expending a charge, you get a shield that is 2.4 times the value of a single stacked shield, meaning (if you subtract a "non-BS hit Blood Shield) you get an additional 0,2 times a single Blood Shield size compared to the non-avoidance scenario. Every time you stack another without consuming a charge, the amount of Blood Shield you get "for free" from Bone Shield/Blood Shield synergy increases. Also avoidance helps with making sure you have a Blood Shield up for each Bone Shield charge to make use of.
But even at scenario 2, with Bone Shield up and some avoidance streaks, you can get a fairly respectable Blood Shield. For example Chimaeron melees fairly slow, where if you avoid/miss 3 in a row you can already have a couple of DS's on him. This is also a fight where you will be able to stack Blood Shield while offtanking (potentially with Glyph of Dark Succor?).
Has it been determined yet where the DR is on Parry/Dodge? ... at what point does Parry/Dodge not help and MAstery should be the direction.
for those that are reforging away hit, when levels of hit/expertise are you keeping and how has that impacted your DS hits in raid?
Formulas are known: Combat rating system - Wowpedia - Your wiki guide to the World of Warcraft
This web makes the math for you: Dodge calculator
Each 1% more of avoidance is worth more than the 1% before, even after diminishing returns. Extreme example: At 98%, +1% cuts the damage taken in half (50%). This old thread elaborates: Diminishing Returns on Avoidance? Not really.
DR doesn't decrease the value of avoidance, it prevents it from becoming too powerful. So there isn't a point where you stop adding avoidance because DR is killing it.
Reforging hit/expertise is an increased chance of losing 1.5 seconds of the GCD repeating DS. Tanking with increased avoidance/mastery is worth more than 1.5 seconds wasted now and then. Exceptions to this would be countering a powerful hit like Soul Reaper, or causing a wipe in 10 man heroic mode because you missed an interrupt (in 25man, there is always someone else).
Formulas are known: Combat rating system - Wowpedia - Your wiki guide to the World of Warcraft
This web makes the math for you: Dodge calculator
Each 1% more of avoidance is worth more than the 1% before, even after diminishing returns. Extreme example: At 98%, +1% cuts the damage taken in half (50%). This old thread elaborates: Diminishing Returns on Avoidance? Not really.
DR doesn't decrease the value of avoidance, it prevents it from becoming too powerful. So there isn't a point where you stop adding avoidance because DR is killing it.
Reforging hit/expertise is an increased chance of losing 1.5 seconds of the GCD repeating DS. Tanking with increased avoidance/mastery is worth more than 1.5 seconds wasted now and then. Exceptions to this would be countering a powerful hit like Soul Reaper, or causing a wipe in 10 man heroic mode because you missed an interrupt (in 25man, there is always someone else).
Yes, considering avoidance to reduce in value when inflated is a side-effect of viewing the issue backwards. You shouldn't be thinking "how much avoidance do I have" you should be thinking "how much less damage am I gaining". As pointed out, going from 0% to 1% avoidance is a 1% damage intake reduction. Going from 99% to 100% is an infinite one. DR was implemented to counter this exact phenomenon, it's mostly there to counter tanks getting exponentially better with avoidance. When first implemented, DR wasn't entirely enough to keep avo-stacking from being the superior choice. During late LK it was mostly fixed, and if you recall we saw a spike in Armor and Stamina stacking back then.
Also maintain in mind, interrupt duty is dependent on Hit, not expertise. Capping hit and avoiding expertise is a lot more feasible as an intermediate stage compared to (1) having as little as possible of either or (2) capping both. It is also a neater solution; Expertise soft-caps, it never caps per se. Unless your avo is gimped you'll always have to deal with ~4% parry. This is my main beef with the Plague-strike issue; IT always hits when hitcapped, PS doesn't. That's a compromise that, to my knowledge, other tanks don't have to deal with.
Actually I addressed that in another post on this page. The gist of it was that there are just no encounters where this seems to matter because most of the non-tank damage abilities either still take a charge from your Bone Shield or don't matter as much in the overall picture. Now maybe this changes in heroic modes, but for normal modes I can't think of any boss where it would have been useful. As I said before, the only time I could see it being useful is if you can carry over your Bone Shield to cover 2 magic burst abilities (i.e. Ignacious breath possibly since he casts it pretty regularily and likes to charge off so you would only need to avoid a few swings inbetween them).
Does anyone have a different experience in Bone Shield usage (the Chogall example from Mild Confusion was a pretty good one actually)?
When setting up/learning my CD rotation for Nefarian (P1+P3) I noticed that if I use BS when he is about the cast a breath and then pop DRW, Bone shield will sometimes last until the next breath. Considering that his shadowflame does around 100k damage and is the main reason a DK Tank will die (since you have hard CDs for the Lightning Machine), this is a good example of where avoidance and boneshield work together to greatly increase your survivability.
The Downside is, I have to interrupt alone on my platform (10m) and therefore have to be hit capped which basically cripples any attempt at stacking too much avoidance. In 25m however it could look different.
EDIT: My Bad, the mobs are only level 85. Thanks a lot for pointing that out Draginclaw!
Unless your avo is gimped you'll always have to deal with ~4% parry. This is my main beef with the Plague-strike issue; IT always hits when hitcapped, PS doesn't. That's a compromise that, to my knowledge, other tanks don't have to deal with.
The only one I can think of is Vindication, the difference here being that Pala tanks will be spamming CS and HotR anyway, making the uptime basically 100%. When a parry occurs, it does not matter much. All other debuffs are not parryable (well not counting Infected Wounds, because you will have to be one unlucky Feral if it drops off due to boss parrying every maul and mangle attack for 30 seconds).
With PS competing with the same resources as Death Strike, DKs will be putting off applying Blood Plague untill the last possible moment, meaning if you get parried then, your debuff drops off.
The Downside is, I have to interrupt alone on my platform (10m) and therefore have to be hit capped which basically cripples any attempt at stacking too much avoidance. In 25m however it could look different.
The mobs are level 85 and it's on the spell hit table (4%). You are way over the cap to interrupt.
I get that double Death Striking and then putting up Bone Shield after a huge burst sounds like a good idea because you can pretty much count on Bone Shield to increase that huge shield by another 20% without losing charges until the boss actually breaks through the shield. Let's say that double dipped shield is worth 2x50k absorbs and the boss melees for 30k. Bone Shield alone would increase the shield to 120k before it's charges are being consumed which is pretty nice since that means you can take 4 non-avoided swings from the boss before your bubble breaks. In the worst case of 0% avoidance that would take 4x2.4 = 9.6 seconds which is a lot of time for your healers to stabilize you. By then atleast 1 pair of FU runes will have cooled down so you could keep stacking on the shield - except I am not convinced that doing so is such a good idea to begin with. At this point in time you have not taken any melee damage at all so the next Death Strike would be a min heal one. Adding normal avoidance (around 30% is easy to get without gearing for it) here would ensure you could even go longer without taking damage at all, true. But again, is it really such a good idea to use t on min heal Death Strikes? If the answer to that is "yes" then stacking avoidance would be good in that scenario. If the answer to that is "no" then stacking avoidance does not matter because you want to wait until you can get bigger-than-minimum shield anyway without sitting on unused Runes anyway.
Originally Posted by Murdoque
But even at scenario 2, with Bone Shield up and some avoidance streaks, you can get a fairly respectable Blood Shield. For example Chimaeron melees fairly slow, where if you avoid/miss 3 in a row you can already have a couple of DS's on him. This is also a fight where you will be able to stack Blood Shield while offtanking (potentially with Glyph of Dark Succor?).
Again, stacking up min heal Blood Shields until you can take fully absorbed boss swings even while OTing would take a while. Such a strategy is niche enough that someone, somewhere at some point will probably try to pull of something like this (imagine a boss like Maloriak where you need 2 tanks but instead of releasing adds continually you only need to tank in P2) but in reality I just don't see how using min Blood Shields is going to give you more damage mitigation in the long run than if you used them for bigger Blood Shields when it's actually your time to tank unless you absolutely know that you have more than enough time to stack up a huge Blood Shield in the beginning (i.e. it's not a good idea to use your 2 Death Strikes on Halfus because it takes 5 seconds for the other dragons to be freed and then counting on avoidance to keep that shield up but if you know you got 60+ seconds to stack it up then by all means go for it).
Unlike scenario 2 I can see scenario 1 play out more often in actual gameplay. That said, it still needs to be proven that double dipping on the Blood Shield isn't actually more beneficial for the mastery stacker than the avoidance stacker (or vice versa). Personally my money is on the mastery stacker because it doesn't take much avoidance to keep up the shield until your FU Runes are available to be used on a non-min Blood Shield.
Originally Posted by Wakez
Ammount actually absorbed: 42950 = 33% of my HP, thus this seems to be the cap.
Wow, that is low. That means you can't even double dip on huge bursts. :/ I was expecting a cap for sure but I would have hoped for something around 75% of max health.
I am very confused if the cap is going to be 33% of your health. Even now without stacking you can get shields higher than this, so if it is going to be capped at 33% then am confused why allow them to stack in the 1st place. This therefore puts a cap as to where mastery would be attractive. What I mean by that is if you get to the levels where mastery is giving you a shield of 33% of your health from the DS, then there is no point in going higher with mastery. Granted we are talking about extreme levels of mastery for that to occur, (in the region of 475% of the amount healed if using the basic 7% heal from a death strike) but if this is true, then mastery now has a cap of its usefulness where it did not before.
Assuming 200% Mastery, you would need to take 110% of your total health as damage within 5 seconds in order to hit the Blood Shield cap.
We still don't know how the next tier will look like in terms of gear, boss damage or what our avoidance levels will be at with the possibility of "boss expertise". It is a valid concern though.
How do you mean? The damage taken made the shield wear off prematurely. Total damage absorbed this way was never above 33% of total health, even if Blood Shield was supposedly stacked to absorb 200% of total health.
Perhaps there is more to it, such as it working differently if above the minimum heal stacked several times.
01/17/11, 3:37 PM
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