Is there consensus yet on an ideal spec for situations with no predictable damage spike? Seems Lichborne requires enough frontloaded RP to make it useless in situations where the damage is either consistent or less predictable spikes.

Or, is it just recomended to bank ~60 RP at all times?

I am wondering if the DRW glyph should be reconsidered? I don't have a wealth of experience theory crafting, but in the dozens of heroics ran and the few hours I spent in a raid with a warrior and paladin tanks, I far outstripped their TPS, and that's without any misdirects, tricks or the DRW glyph. Once I place my first Runestrike on the boss, no DPS get close to pulling aggro, at worst I am 50% ahead of them. I suspect Runestrike is just overpowered at the moment as a result of Vengeance.

On the topic of > 7% deathstrikes and larger blood shields.

I am curious if there are currently any mods that will tally the damage taken (while purging all instances from >4-5 sec) and notify the user when a set percentage of total health is reached (say 35%), the threshold at which more powerful deathstrikes are available.

I ask this as I have not come across any and between negotiating fight mechanics and being healed it can be difficult on lower damage fights (not so much for large burst) to determine when you can get those larger shields (if even only slightly better).

Even if no such mod exists, thank you for your time.

What exactly are you looking for comparing avoidance to self shielding? Yes, the DS shield serves a similar function to block, but it works differently, AFTER the hit occurs; it doesn't replace the hit with a block. Yes, you can come up with some arbitrary conversion value, but DK's don't shoot for unhittable like the other plates. It wouldn't be any more meaningful than the old standard throughput/mana debate healers often return to.

A lovely mod named “blood shield tracker” on curse at the moment, been using it since its release and its extremely stable and accurate. (Sorry at work atm so can not access the site to link it directly, will do some when at home) I strongly recommend it if you want a mod that shows the relative heal of you Death Strike, as well as showing the shield it produces and also how long that shield is active. Doc (a member of the EJ forums, who's mod can been seen in the DPS threads as a rune monitoring mod) also has incorporated it into his rune watch mod, however its implementation is crude at the moment and he is refining it. (Maths wise its spot on, appearance wise it’s not as pretty as the 1st I mentioned is what I mean by the crude comment.)

Thank you Roop, I think I'll be giving that first mod a test run tonight when I get home.

I have noticed this as well, seemingly as soon as I look at a target, I tend to stay at roughly 4-5x the threat level of the next highest DPSer. I've only done one raid though thus far (being the Tol Barad boss), but I did notice that I tended to pull out ahead of the paladin tank, and nearly wiped the raid when I decided it was a good idea to pop DRW on the pull (never doing that again, at least on the Brut-clone).

My one problem with replacing it though is that there is not a real wealth of decent major glyphs to choose from, that and our threat might start to become less effective relative to the dps as they start to gear up again.

If this is truly supposed to be a long term solution to Threat then what's wrong with just buffing up the Threat Modifier to say 500%? I watched Ensidia's Kill Videos for Halfus and Theralion/Valiona 25, their Tanks spent the majority of the time on Top 1-4th place on Recount, over 50% of the fight on Top 14.

Threat is even less of an issue than it was in WotLK. With Icy Slam it took some time to get a Threat lead this large. Now we just whack 2 Rune Strikes and we can sit there mashing DS/HS for Blood Shield and Blade Barrier until the opportune moment to use Rune Tap or if we need a Defensive Cooldown for whatever reason.

The current Vengeance needs a re-design so it won't work just for 1-2 Tiers, but for the whole Expansion. Until they figure that out, Threat Decay would be an excellent alternative....

Regarding the dimishing returns on Parry / Dodge....

If I understand it correctly, the theory is to make the values of each as close to each other as possible. Thus if Im sitting at 12% dodge, and 20% parry, I should reforge my parry values to dodge when possible. This would effectively increase my total avoidance? IE. I should attempt to reforge until I get to 16%/16%.

And then.... Where does mastery fit into all of this? If Im at 12% dodge/20% parry, if I was reduce my parry to 12% and use those values for mastery (which is currently 12.5%) would I gain more in absorbsion vs avoidance?

I thought the point of simplifying the stats for Cataclysm was to ummm... Simplify the game. Seems like theres far more fuzzy theorycrafting that needs to be done now... Or am I wrong?

If you want even fuzzier theorycrafting, try looking at haste as a survival stat for more DS/minute.

To answer your question, yes, DR is equal, so on avoidance, try to bring the ratings to equality. Not the actual percentage, but the rating value for each stat.

I did some napkin math trying to work out that exact haste question a while back, but right around the time I realized that the value of mastery differs based on the specific ratio of physical/magic damage on a per-encounter basis, I gave up.

Since you can't work out an actual EH value for mastery without going fight-by-fight for it, then trying to compare it to dodge/parry is essentially impossible unless you plan to reforge between fights.

If anyone wants to mess around with the stuff I have from those attempts, I have a spreadsheet and some formulas I can send you.

one, if you can send them over to me that'd be great.

I wonder how long blizz is planning to keep using this model for Blood shield that is on a sliding scale (i.e. mitigation is based on damage you take). Compare it to Blocking (30% reduction), and Savage Defense (-35% AP).

It'd be so much easier to model and predict.

Heres a google docs link to the sheet, for now I have it set to not be modifiable online, but you should be able to save it locally and work on your own copy.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?...thkey=CIKiu_0H

The working formula I started with is h=[(.3625x)+z]/n.

h= EH gain for physical incoming damage
x=dmg/5s
n= % not mitigated.
z is your DS shield, which = .3625y

All values labeled "Don't Touch" are interval steps, the label was to remind me of that more than anything.

Sorry its so poorly documented, if something doesn't make much sense, feel free to pm asking for help with it.

Some of the values may not be updated to the most recent patch, I haven't messed with this much in a month or so.

Obviously, the whole thing assumes a greater than minimum heal. Values for avoidance, mitigation, and haste are all variable, as are the raw damage in and % damage physical values.

On my to-do list as soon as my servers online.

Also: any chance you could put something rough together to model the value of Haste as a survival stat? I'd be more than happy to actually run it myself if your cycles are claimed, I have a decently high-end gaming PC.

Or, barring this, is there a thread somewhere with the magic/physical ratios and raw damage throughput from the various bosses? That info would make it possible to get rough averages out of my spreadsheet.

Edit for: Those values hold true for myself as well for dodge/parry base at 85.

There is no thread for this at the moment, but looking on the likes of the various websites that list dps etc, would this give the same information and build it up from there?

If so then its just a case of collating the information per website per boss to build up a better % split of damage between magic and physical. Something that would take time but that would be worth it.

Well, at World of Logs, I couldn't find anything related to boss damage throughput, seems like most people consider it a lower priority compared to raid numbers, and since raid numbers/execution turn into a pass/fail scenario, specific boss throughput just gets pushed to the wayside.

Seems it would require a specialized addon to actually track the data, or a specialized log parser. Otherwise, you would have to sit down with a calculator and mess around with the percentages and procs to determine raw damage for almost every ability used.

That was why I was hoping there was already a project under way for this. I don't have the coding knowledge to put something like this together, but would happily donate cycles to testing if it was made.

Edit: the data IS available, I just failed. Going to work on this some when I have the time.

It takes some delving, but the information is there on worldoflogs.com

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

For example, is a report of the damage taken by paragon on the 01-12-2010 and heroic LK.

You need a log per run, then you can split it down into per boss from there, its all in the website already. Just takes looking for... (And I certainly dont have the time to do such a task unfortunatly, but thought I would point out that the information is there, just slowly being captured at the moment)

Edit..

For shits and giggles, I am going to e-mail the authors of worldoflogs.com and ask them if they could introduce a section for each boss to show physical/magic % damage taken, so the split is plainly obvious and can be made up VERY accurately with more and more logs being added. Need to have a more in depths explanation/request that "cud you plz do itz" from what I have at the moment, but the information is THERE it’s just a case of amending how its shown will show the % without hassle.

To clarify the value: It allows for a per-boss analysis of average values of mastery and avoidance, and in our case, haste. Once values are determined for certain ratios, we will be able to extrapolate those values with a reasonable certainty for new content based on 1-2 logs analyzed, and finding the most similar ratio from cleared content.

Is that the sort of specific reasoning you needed?

Edit: To clarify, I'm sure you saw the reasoning, rather, the question should be is that a good wording for it?

A little off topic: we did our first testing of Conclave of Wind. You can find my spec in the link to my armory. The spec used was 33/8/0 taking Lichbourne and Glyph of Death's Embrace. Considering there is nothing to interrupt, I will respect the two points from Endless Winter to something more useful (see the end of this post). Threat is a non issue, as there are multiple target switches between bosses, giving you 20-30 seconds alone on the boss (using our strategy).

Just to clarify, we did not kill the three bosses of the encounter. This was strictly for testing and learning purposes. A paladin healer and I were placed on Nazir's (frost boss) platform. After Sleet Storm, you can AMS the following Wind Chill to drops your stacks (which have 30 second duration). We also had our paladin bubble off his stacks when he felt overwhelmed. We found the self heal from Lichbourne to be beneficial for mana conservation and an "oh shit" button (yes, I saved enough RP to heal myself to full while using VB or IF to mitigate incoming Permafrost – I also was not glyphed for Dark Death because I’m an idiot).

If I remember correctly from the previous end game tanking thread, Blood Worms were considered a smart heal but not exactly reliable as a consistent source of healing. For those who've seen the encounter: do I stand correct in my thinking that Blood Worms would be the best potential replacement for Endless Winter (all things considered, of course). I will also replace Glyph of Rune Strike to Dark Death for the increased self healing. What should be done with Glyph of Pestilence? Considering there are no adds to manage on Nazir’s platform and we are not tank swapping, would Glyph of Rune Tap be the viable choice for increased healing during Sleet Storm?

Edit: This spec would be specifically for Conclave of Wind.

I actually dropped blood worms from my spec because of the shields on Omnitron seemed to be triggered with them last week.

Tweaking the amount of Haste is an option that's already in BloodSim. The only thing that I would say could stand to be changed is to have the input be Rating instead of Percentage, for easier comparison to other stats on a 1->1 rating basis. I'll save you the time, though: Haste as a survival stat is terrible and grossly inferior to Mastery.

What I'd really, really love to do if I can find the bandwidth is model all (or as many as reasonable) of the current bosses and have this be an option when running a simulation. Unfortunately because of my schedule I have literally zero time to Raid so I have only a rudimentary (at best) understanding of their mechanics. Is there somewhere that has extreme detail on each boss's abilities that I can use for this? I've checked TankSpot and I've A) Only found guides for Magmaw, Halfus, ODS and Argaloth and B) The only one of those that has the detail I need is the ODS guide, but even that doesn't have melee swing information. Wowhead appears to have all the abilities and damage values, but not cooldowns or usage intervals.

Excellent.

I find crimson scourge still valuable for the 40% damage on bloodboil. Although with threat how it is, I might be able to do without.

Question:
How do most diseaseless tanks find themselves pulling? AoE is normally pretty easy with Bloodboil / DnD, but on bosses I mostly just find myself opening with outbreak. Should I open with IT as the F should be back up by the time I need? Pulling with only the outbreak dot doesn't make me very comfortable.

I understand your view about pulling with something that you don’t normally use other than once a minute, and especially at "range". However, I like the fact of pulling with outbreak as it instantly applies the attack speed de-buff before another can apply it. Those 1st few seconds before the de-buff's on the boss, buffs on you or healers start to land heals depending on the encounter can be at times troublesome. Especialy if there is some sort of "start of encounter lag" which some claim can occur. So lowering the incoming damage by slowing the swing speed before them even land a hit is in my eyes beneficial. I also, depending on the encounter like to use Death grip, the vast majority of encounters now a days use boss's that are not taunt immune, (or let me say not encountered one that is yet) so having those seconds fixate to know you can position at your pleasure without the worry of trigger happy DPS can be useful. Let’s face it, if the DPS are going to take the boss from you, it’s going to be within the 1st 10 seconds of a fight with our current threat levels, after which time you will have a solid lead misdirects or tricks aside. So having the ability to cut that "chance" down to a very small window of 2-3 GCD's without the requirement to chastise your DPS is quite priceless.

My personal preference is Outbreak, Taunt. Gives me attack speed before reaching the target, and guaranteed time to establish aggro. Mind you, my guild hasn't got enough 85 healers yet, so thats all based on 5mans, and may not continue to be true into raids.