This is sad. It probably means in an Imp Icy Talons build we'd gain more from Black Ice now than KM, which used to not be the case.

two questions;

1. I picked up [Corpse Tongue Coin] yesterday. There is one mention of it back a few pages that states that it procks at and below 35% - is there anyone here that is using it and what do you think of it?

2. Posts 2482 and 2486 mention that frost presence now gives 8% hp and IBF base has been changed to 30%. I can't find any evidence of this in patch notes or on my paper doll. Unfortunatly I changed a few pieces at the same time and dont remember what my HP was before I did it so I can't check the truth of the statement. Where is this information coming from?

edit; the trinket is iLVL 264 of course.

MMO-C keeps a log of blue posts. It's not the first time ballance changes have been hot-fixed without having tooltips updated.

MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Tanking and Survivability Changes

I passed on CtC recently. It's a nice trinket, however dodge isn't particularly good value for us. You must also not fall into the trap of thinking that it'll buff your WotN. What's most likely, is that after the first time they are triggered together, they then trigger at staggered times, meaning past the first time it's unlikely they combine. ( Unless, theoretically, you're getting the living shit kicked out of you so frequently, you dip below 35% reliably every few seconds, meaning they probably will overlap every 30 or so.)

Frankly, Glyph of Indomitability and the new and improved Skeleton Key are both better than CtC. And so is Unid. Organ, even taking into account certain encounters may lead to bad uptime.

Thanks for the link.

I am more interested at where this CTC could be usefull. Curently we are going for high EH in one manner or another but I wonder if avoidance becomes an issue later on. The trinket seems particulary designed for fast incoming physical damage.

Healers are not always able to heal us. Blizzard did it before.

Trinkets are tough to compare and that's how blizzard has stated they want it to be.

If you compare CtC to Glyph then you're really looking is hits taken w/ CtC divided by hits taken without compared to Damge Reduction with Glyph divided by Damage reduction with out.

Ie. Assuming without either trinket you hit 60% of the time and have 35% damage reduction without a trinket equipped and you gain 3% damage and avoidance with either trinket.

57 / 60% = 5.0%
32 / 35% = 5.72%

At those values Glyph is superior, since you get an extra 0.72% damage reduction over the long term. However if Glyph increases you from 30 to 29% and CtC from 70% hit rate to 67% then CtC would be better. So it depends upon you're gearing to really define which once provides more survivability. Of course you have the constant reduction vs RNG based reduction to deal with too.

I can see it as a fight dependent usage too. If you're kiting Slimes on Rot, CtC maybe better since you really want to avoid everything you can, same for DBS, increasing chance of avoiding hits while marked is probably good idea. While mitigating as much damage as you can while tanking Fester means using Glyph on that fight.

Except that you're not including the 3% from insect swarm (or the hunter equiv).

I personally don't believe the 16% hard cap with talents and all that included either, but that low level mobs have higher miss rates is a known 'fact'. We're talking about boss level mobs here that might have some kind of miss cap, but it is not known whether this is affected by talents or not. I see you took a crit as well, stuff like this really makes data a lot less trustworthy!

Okay. Look. To paraphrase Morbo, "CAPS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY." The "cap" listed in the table of DR effects is not "this is a hard limit to anything ever ever ever", it is "this is the maximum one can achieve from stats". Otherwise, an ability such as Deterrence would be UTTERLY useless, and such is clearly not the case. Talents that provide a flat % increase or adjustment to an avoidance stat are very much not included or affected by DR. Some spells, such as Stoneskin Gargoyle, also provide an effective nondiminished avoidance adjustment.

Just like with all of the other things, the 16% cap is almost certainly, CERTAINLY, unless one stat works completely unlike all the others and I don't think it does, only related to miss derived from stats. Level differential and racials are almost certainly not included, and talents (such as Dreadplate) are DEFINITELY not included, so it would be a fairly sensible extrapolation that spell effects such as Insect Swarm are in the same bucket as talents, as they also provide a flat % adjustment.

Like I said there were less than 100 attacks include in the recount of the type of mob I was using to test that were done to other characters (a low level hunter and pets doing quests I think) including the single crit. This wasn't meant to be definitive testing but rather a challenge for those who think there is a cap to provide some data or testing that supports that position. I think less than .5% bad data is good enough to support the conclusion that there isn't a 16% hard cap on Miss (which the original DR Miss Cap testing also supports) when there is no evidence to the contrary.

Also the only testing done on DR Miss Cap, which is nothing like a limit to the achievable miss rate, that I have been able to find (Whitetooth's) was also done on low level mobs. As far as I know no one has done any testing on boss level mobs to establish any sort miss cap or any testing which would indicate that boss's have a hard cap on target avoidance that other mobs do not have. I don't remember any such caps showing up during the BC 100% avoidance tanking fad which I would have expected them to if they existed.

I think all the Miss Cap references stem from a misunderstanding of Whitetooth's testing. And, I think it is worth clearing up this confusion since it could lead to people giving up avoidance unnecessarily.

Many Moonkin I see have a glyph that removes that (but increases their damage done by swarm). I don't think it is something to count on having.

Personally I don't like glyph, but that's because I have The Black Heart and while it's proc based, it averages out to about 1k armor iirc and also has some decent stam.

Anyway, SiS and CsK are great for 99% of encounters, CtC I don't rate at all tbh, as the proc relies on you dropping to 35%, so I'd stick with the first 2 and if you really want pickup Glpyh for festergut (and probably other encounters I'm yet too see).

I'm running CsK + TBH at the moment and will replace TBH with Organ it/when I can.

There's been quite a bit of discussion about not using the glyph of Insect Swarm in the Moonkin Raiding thread, and at least this post claims it to be only around 150 DPS loss.

So especially when we move to hard mode content, it might be a good topic to discuss with your moonkins. Losing 150 raid-DPS for extra 3% avoidance sounds like a pretty good bargain.

Re CtC: It's an exceptionally bad similitude to model the trinket as a flat damage increase, as surely what's important about it is that it applies mitigation when you supposedly need it the most: under 35%. You're doing the item a disservice if you equate it to a flat damage reduction. That's like saying Ardent Defender is practically a 30% heal over 2m, which it patently is not.

Also, the main reason I veered away from CtC, raidbuffed I'm sitting on 72.5% damage reduction from armor. More when the Ashen Verdict ring procs. The 6k+ armor provided from the CtC would be almost halved as I'd cap out on armor. Something to deffinitely take into concideration when calculating it's net worth. And that's not taking into account UA, which frankly I'm planning to spec out of.

On an unrelated note: Since the recent buff to our EH, I'm feeling like I have perhaps too much Sta. I'm seriously considering ditching the +51sta gems from JC and going instead for +34Dodge gems. Fully raidbuffed in Frost I'm sitting at around 53k life, with only one stamina trinket. When I get a UO it'll be even more than that. My reasoning is that a health-pool only serves as a damper, a buffer which determines how long the healers have to fill up your box. Riding on the assumption that they're not starved in a time-sense, then stacking Sta only prolongs how much they can slack, in contrast to stacking avoidance which in fact reduces the total amount of intake. Does anybody have any feedback on this choice?

I'm also considering swapping from Nerubian Carapace to Swordbreaking for similar reasons.

I've always been an advocate of balance over "moar stam!", but I don't imagine you'll find many people who will agree. I think it will depend a lot on what the HMs actually entail. On some encounters, depending on your role, more stam IS certainly a benefit over avoidance/mitigation (BQL OT), and on some, it's a detriment (BQL MT). I can see a lot of instances where I think avoidance/mitigation/balance may be helpful on HMs, like Saurfang. If he starts hitting harder and faster, less avoidance is going to seriously hurt the raid as a whole when the Marks start going out.

The general argument for EH is something like, "If you have 50k health and get hit for 30k, then healers only have to heal you for 10k for you to be able to survive the next hit (vs. having 40k and needing 20k healing to survive the next hit)." However, that ignores the second hit, after which you will need 30k healing regardless. The other part of the argument is that stam doesn't have a DR, and that it works on magical damage as well. To some degree, that is true, but realistically, the vast majority of damage tanks are taking is physical. Of course, there are exceptions, but they are fairly rare.

I felt much the same way - until the RNG went against me and the raid started wiping on farm content. There are a number of fights where it's easy to take upwards of 40k damage in less than a GCD if you fail to evade twice running. I've seen situations where tanks who far outclass me both in skill and gear have been wrecked simply because differing haste values caused the two Holy Paladins to synchronise. They never slacked, they never really did anything wrong; we just wiped because the tank got a huge whack of overhealing and a perfect storm took him out before he could be healed again. This is the converse of your argument: stacking avoidance only slightly reduces the chances of you having a bad streak, but stacking health makes it harder for that perfect storm to occur.

The reality is that a balance is best, and it all comes down to breakpoints. Going from 40% avoidance to 42% only reduces your chance of taking three straight melee hits from 21.6% to 19.54% and it doesn't affect magic abilities at all; if 2% more health would let you survive those hits, then 2% health is better. On the other hand, once you have enough health to survive three straight hits without receiving a major heal, no amount of health makes a real difference until you reach the point where you can survive four hits unhealed.

I pointed something like this out a long time ago, but: realistically, the total amount of stam you can gain by "stam stacking" doesn't feel like a game-breaker to me. I have a total of 18 gems on my gear, which amounts to 6k health. If I replaced them all with dodge gems, I'd get about 400 dodge rating from them, which I think is about 4%. 6k is a decent chunk of health, but the number of times I've been killed by amounts of that size is pretty rare. Of course, I'm not going to run out and change out my stam gems to all dodge gems.

Oh, I think my original post was that the difference between gemming for bonuses and gemming exclusively stam gems was (for me at least) like 750 health.

At least for Valithria, around the 6:30-7m mark is when the adds just start pouring in, so if you were losing control after that, don't sweat it. If it was before that, that is typically a DPS problem that can be fixed by positioning better, better communication regarding incoming adds, or possibly even just 1 tanking it on 10 man to get an extra dpser.

As far as pallies go, don't compare to them. They are a full head above the other tank classes currently, especially in ICC where everything is undead.

While we're on the topic of threat, is anyone else wondering how the ridiculous disparity in 2 piece Tier10 bonuses made it to the live server? Why does every other tanking class get a +20% damage increase to both a single target and AoE ability (and in the case of Paladins, the single target ability is also a 3-4 way cleave) while we get only D&D?

So far as blood my single target threat has remained adequate, but honestly the DPS I run with is usually fairly low. Future scaling issues are IMO a cause for concern.

The Marks do damage regardless of whether a tank gets hit or not actually, they don't actually take the same damage as the tank. I noticed this when healing the fight on an alt and it's easy to test empirically by just watching health bars. When the tank has an avoidance streak and takes no damage at all, the Mark targets contain to take DoT ticks.

You could argue the warriors got 20% to SS and SW. SW is technically their equivalent of DnD and SS (was up until recently) their version of RS. Frankly, looking at the paladin and warrior set, I can only surmise that we'd be much more justly served if it was 20% to DnD and HB. It'd also solidly cement Frost Threat, though sadly it'd quite possibly be a nail in Blood-tanking's coffin.

The setbonus is in my experience definitely best for Blood as it stands now, helping to fix its sustained Aoe threat, of which the other 2 specs have no issues whatsoever with. It does not address any snap-threat situation for DK's, which is in my eyes why it is a rather weak bonus, since that is our real weak spot.

At this point I would like to see the 2set say "Rune Strike can now proc things again". But I'm hoping for a patchnote to list this under fixes.. One can wish!

for UH tanking build, are 5 points in Necrosis worth it now? I guess now you only get any threat benefit from Necrosis when you are out of RP - does this mean the end of Necrosis as a tanking talent?

Strange thing is, perhaps this is the case but where does that leave SoB ? It's never been a DPS move and now it's not a tank move either?!?!

Whilst I agree 2pc is abhorrent, when I blogged on it a few good paladins complained about their 4pc which is really terrible. They get a pathetic 12% dodge, whereas we get 12% damage reduction.


On miss cap, I think there was a valid argument.
Whitetooth's testing showed a cap around 16% and it was on lower-level mobs, that testing Ismail just did showed a miss of 25% also against lower-level mobs.
Perhaps I'm overlooking something (likely); but I can't see how there is a material difference between the two tests? If no difference, the results are certainly intriguing.

Here's Whitetooths' test.

Here's a key phrase which I wonder about:
So if he could be hit, he has not pushed 'hit' off the attack table, which means in fact that he has not reached the miss cap: ie. it's higher than 20%, and his conclusion was the wrong way around.

Maybe there's an obvious or subtle theory point we're missing here?