There was never an argument for going out of your way to stack shields either. The notion in it's self is oxymoron: You can only stack them when the damage is inconsequential, because when you are MTing they'll expire before they stack. Ergo, while taking a constant beating you gained nothing, but while not you gained the potential to do something.

You're trying to construct an argument against something that nobody sugested.

This notion came from comparing a magic heavy fight to a physical heavy fight. For the sake of example, Lets say during both fights the tank takes 5 million damage. Fight 1 is 4 million through melee and 1 million magic while fight 2 is 5 million through just melee. In both fights the total damage taken is the same so the amount Death strike heals for should be fairly close, lets call it 1 million, then another million through Blood Shield absorbs. this value wont change whether you take 0% magic damage or 40% magic damage unless there are extended magic period phases where you aren't always in range to keep your Blood Shield up. Where as avoidance, lets say 30% avoidance, on average, should mitigate a percentage of the physical damage so that you mitigate a different amount depending on how much of the incoming damage is magical. In my example it would be 1.2 million damage in fight 1 and 1.5 million damage in fight 2.

Essentially, its not that mastery becomes better but that avoidance becomes worse while mastery stays the same when you go into a fight with a higher percentage magic damage.

I noticed that yesterday when we were having tries on Nefarian, I would use the free rune tap and sometimes it would proc again and I could use another free rune tap, really weird.

Magical damage has the tendency to come in rather large bursts though, and not just a slowly ticking aura. Think of breaths, or the "big damage" spell from bosses like argaloth's meteor slash, or commands on cho'gall.

Just looking at total damage taken does not really do the system justice.

This is exactly what I was trying to say.


The point is not that mastery helps mitigate magic damage, it's that avoidance has absolutely no effect on magic damage, while with mastery stacking the magic damage actually helps you somewhat by giving you bigger blood shields. And you can't say that "if you aren't in range of the boss you lose the shield and therefore mastery is worse" because in that case avoidance isn't doing anything for you either, so they are pretty much equivalent. In fact, mastery is still better because (assuming you can get in range of the boss within 5 seconds of the 'magic damage' phase ending) the magic damage contributes to your first and maybe second death strike.

I agree with this, completely. Mitigation is generally superior to avoidance. The point I was trying to make is similar in lines to your counterpoint.

"BS is very significant damage mitigation, which in turn translates to healer mana." If no one had any form of damage mitigation, the incoming damage would be spiky. Through block mechanics, Paladins/Warriors are able to streamline a portion of damage. Through absorb mechanics, DKs are not able to streamline damage.

Below are logs for three tanks. Paladin (Halfus), Warrior (Whelps and peeling drakes), DK (Halfus). For reference, we ran 4 tanks for this encounter, rotating between tanking Halfus and Drakes (since the the drakes hit substantially harder that Halfus).

Warrior - World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis
Paladin - World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis
DK - World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

Warrior - Though he was tanking the whelps, he effectively only took 25% of the attacks unmitigated, unavoided (68 hits vs 272 blocks). Damage taken (4,938,703) vs damage mitigated (3,554,937). Melee accounts for approximately 35.6% of the warrior's incoming damage.

Paladin - MTing Halfus while picking up a drake as needed, he only took around 15% of the attacks unmitigated, unavoided (8 hits vs 56 blocks). Damage taken (2,050,433) vs damage mitigated (1,424,372). Melee accounts for approximately 56.5% of the paladin's incoming damage.

DK - MTing Halfus while switching between drakes, took 100% of the attacks (no passive mitigation, 67 hits). Damage taken (4,237,443) vs damage mitigated (including DS heal + BS absorb: 1,087,459). Melee accounts for approximately 56.5% of the DK's incoming damage.

From this you can't really discern any type of information. It appears as though the warrior and paladin are demigods and I should DS more, here are some more factors:

As boss damage increases, the value of having passive mitigation for the sake of streamlining incoming damage increases.
Example:
Mob A (Halfus) hits for 45,000. Block would mitigate 13,500, reducing the hit to 31,500.
Mob B (Storm Rider) hits for 70,000. Block would mitigate 21,000, reducing the hit to 49,000.
While both are a static 30% reduction in damage, when you compare those hits to health pools (between 190-200k raid buffed) you see the following.

Mob A (Halfus) unblocked attack would reduce your HP by around 22%.
Mob B (Storm Rider) unblocked attack would reduce your HP by around 35%.

Mob A (Halfus) blocked attack would reduce your HP by around 15% (31,500/200,000).
Mob B (Storm Rider) blocked attack would reduce your HP by around 24%.

Mob A (Halfus) critical blocked attack would reduce your HP by around 9%.
Mob B (Storm Rider) critical blocked attack would reduce your HP by around 14%.

I included critical block to display that the value continues to reduce your damage compared to your HP pool, which is obvious. Below is how the players HP bar *may* look in a real time environment, assuming similar numbers posted above to include mob damage and percentage of blocked attacks:

Warrior (no critical block)/Paladin - 200k, (swing 1) 155k, (swing 2) 123.5k (blocked), (swing 3) 92k (blocked), (swing 4) 60.5k (blocked). Four swings, 1 unmitigated.

In comparison (Bolded are HPs after DS heal, Underlined are HPs after BS absorb):
DK - 200k, (swing 1) 155k (186k with heal, 31k BS with 100% mastery), (Swing 2) 172k (BS absorbed 31k, took 14k), (swing 3) 127k, (swing 4) 82k (113k with heal, 31k BS with 100% mastery), 99k (BS absorbed 31k, took 14k).

Point:
Yes, the damage output appears to favor DK mastery. On the fourth swing the warrior/paladin would be around 60.5k while the DK would be at 82k with an absorb ready for the next attack.
However, it is a roller coaster of damage for the DK and could very well force the healers into a proactive healing role as opposed to a reactive role, the former costing a considerable amount more of mana.
The factor here is the disparity between the hits. Warriors (no critical block)/Paladins incoming damage range will be between 15% - 22% of their total HP on Halfus. DKs will have a range between 7% and 22%.

Takeaway:
I would be in favor of a change in terms of how BS works. I am perfectly fine with the proactivity of the heal, but I would rather receive a static % of absorption that stacks with itself. Something akin to DS giving 1% reduction in physical damage, up to X% based on the damage taken. For example: A mob hitting for 1 HP would make a very slow ramp up time, 1% (minimum) per hit up to 30%, requiring 30 DS. On the converse, if Storm Rider slams me for 35% of my health, I would assume that I would gain a portion relative to my health (around 11% mitigated) requiring 3 DS to cap.

Hi,
Sparkdktank: your simulation seems wrong on some points:
- Warriors and pals have way more armor than we do so their passive mitigation may be higher than you think.
- If we assume a classical raid boss, the swing will hit you every 3seconds, so obviously you cant afford to death strike on 2hits over 4, or at least not during a consistent period of a fight.

Appart from that I had some issues last night in raid that I wanted to share in case I'm not the only one:
- I happened to be criticaly hit by Nefarian 10 in normal mode while in blood presence but I have no logs for yesterday night to check how often it occured, is there currently a bug about it?
- While on Chimaeron hm(10), if I'm not under Icebound fortitude, I'm taking swings for 200k+ dmg with just 1debuff, and while I have very low hit/expertise, I'm not abble to ensure a BS to be there anytime. With the Icebound fortiude being 18sec(4t11), how do you manage to survive an entire feul without counting on luck?
- Last thing is about minimum heal for DS, when I have 180.000 hp, I'm being healed by ~12k/strike, that's 7%; should it be 7%*1,45 with the improved DS or is that normal?

Since no one has posted about it here yet, I'd like to point out that when you reset your talent points via a trainer (not by switching between primary and secondary specs) your current Presence doesn't deactivate. So if you respec while in Blood Presence and then pick the Improved Blood Presence talent, its benefits (including crit immunity) don't apply to you until you switch to some other Presence and back.

Missing the point completely. There are about a dozen other flaws with my ad hoc math, but the point that I am again trying to make is that the huge disparity between incoming damage makes it very difficult for the healers.

I suppose before I give up trying to relay my point, I'll try this: Ask you're healers how easy it is to heal you compared to a Paladin/Warrior.

Well, actualy I think I didn't missed your point that much, but I have to admit my way of saying it sucked.

For each type of tank there are a few possibilities when taking a hit (whitout cooldowns and other weird stuff), which I try tu resume in the table below. My point with the armor is quite suportive whith what you say:
In this table I assume a single hit of 100.000dmg with no mitigation factors and then show what are the possible consequenses depending on the tank type. (of course maths are absolutly not good)



Max dmg: DK= 45.000
war/pal=35K

This table clearly (or at least I hope) show that the DK is possibly taking larger hits, even if compensed with the following DS. This may lead your healers on the wrong decision when choosing what they're gonna do, and that was probably your point when you asked about our healers thinking war and pallys are easier to heal.
The fact is maybe healers could use something to show the hidden part of our lifes bar, meanning bloodshield.

So, if your point is to say we are difficult to heal because we count as an unpredictable self healer, yes, I totaly agree with you, and I think we may have to compensate for that by having Higher HP pools to give some more margin to our healers.

PS: And now I think about it, with stuff getting better and better, the "Armor reduction only" part of the table will happen less and less until it completly disapears for both war and pallys

SparkDKTank, you are discussing blood shield numbers while not even mentioning avoidance, while your gear is fully stacked towards avoidance (with some stam stacking, not sure why). Does this not seem a bit strange to you? Additionally (I cannot access the paladin's armory page for some reason) the warrior is completely stacked for mastery (~21 mastery, and 24% avoidance, vs your 14.67 mastery and 31% avoidance. So yes, if you stack for avoidance and the warrior stacks for mitigation, he will mitigate more damage. I am still, apparently, missing the point of your post.