The importance of balancing parry and dodge comes from the fact that both suffer from diminshing returns. That is, the more you % you have, the more rating you need to gain more of those stats. If you keep your parry and dodge balanced between each other, you are maximizing your avoidance gain.

We started out with a paladin tank on halfus, with a bear picking up the whelps and drakes, we switched the paladin to whelps because he was able to block a lot more damage. I am pretty sure the wol logs are still available, and you can see that he was blocking a substantial amount of damage. Enough damage in fact that it made a substantial difference in my mana pool. The stacking debuff was not a problem (he could Bubble it once if needed) but the reduced damage from drakes was very noticeable so we made the tanks switch.

Feebs,

Certainly, once you have enough stamina that you can't be burst down stacking damage reduction is arguably more valuable. However, unless you've got extensive experience with Sinestra, I think its fair to say that no one actually knows how much Stamina that is, or if its even at a level that's achievable in current gear. More mundanely, your "safe" stam level will be substantially affected by your healers. The question is how to gear given uncertain knowledge, and I have seen no sign of a emerging consensus.

Additionally, while Mastery is GENERALLY superior to avoidance, Padwicin's post below is an excellent reminder that there are always exceptions.

EDIT - This is unrelated, but I just realized that another way of looking at the belt would be dividing the 60 damage/second saved into the 0.45% damage saved from mastery, which gives a 13k dps equivalence. That is to say, if you're taking more than 13k incoming dps from blockable sources, then the Mastery (and by extension, STAM from another profession) is superior, while if its less than 13k then the belt is superior.

However, I have not tried the belt decoy yet, and I'm curious to see how it stacks up.

EDIT2 - Tried out belt tinker on Julak-Doom, the rare spawn in northern TH. Didn't take a real log, but eyeballing the results, I believe the dummy's timer ran out before it died (JD only hit me for ~9k after mitigation, so his melee is really soft), which is pretty spiffy.

In fact, its absurdly good. The 5 sec cast time is incorrect (its actually instant), anecdotally it can't fail which is nice (I got the +Crit fail against Halfus last week, which was exciting, but we didn't start the log until later in the night, and I don't recall him actually critting me), it absorbs 75k instead of ~18k and it has the same 5 min cooldown.

Certainly I can think of situations in which the Plasma Shield would be preferable, but for most of the time, the Cardboard Assassin seems clearly superior for most situations.

Doesn't STR also give you parry that should be taken into account?

You're right. I'm not sure on what the numbers are, perhaps someone does know them and can add them to my totals.

Although AD does feel pretty weak for a 31-point talent, it's by no means worse than the other options. There's no other other talent you can spend that 1 point on that will bring more benefit than AD in end-game raiding.

I'm not in the raiding scene at all, let alone cutting edge, but I'm pretty sure AD is far from "practically useless". As a passive talent it was "skill-less" and pretty clearly overpowered; I think that was mathematically proven. Maybe it's not as interesting as what some folks would like, but our job is to keep agro and take as little damage as possible. There's no denying that it does help with that second part and for most specs I'd say nothing else you can take instead is going to help with that in any meaningful way. And dead is zero agro. Combined with our other two cool downs? Amazing stuff!

Chaining DP -> GoAK -> AD is 32 seconds of significant damage reduction. A lot longer than 22 seconds!

Macro it all together? 90% damage reduction. 90% > 70%. You pretty much bubbled but are still holding agro. And if you still manage to die you get a 25k heal instead.

If the tank dies, whether it's a heroic 25 man raid or a 5 man normal or shit if you're soloing your dailies then most of the time that's it; game over; wipe it up and run back. This can and does help to prevent that. Shit happens. Your fault, healers fault, dps took too long, RNG fucks you. Yet AD can help overcome. It's off GCD. It's really only useless if you never press it. Or you and the people you play with play perfectly.

I am tanking Nef for my guild, and this becomes a very good button before a Crackle if you are sitting at low health, or if your healers need to focus on the raid more.

You say that like it's a bad thing. I'll trade threat talents for DR talents up and down the tree in Cata (especially with where our threat is at right now).

I am not sure if anyone mentioned that, but I got a dk in my raid, so Judgements of the Just talent seems quite useless. If you have one too, you might want Eternal Glory instead. (Do not pay attention to my current spec, specced for Cho'Gall)


As to the AD discussion, I always found myself dead even it if procced, so I just use it as a defensive ability, just like Divine Protection.


I was looking for the perfect balance between threat and self-healing. What I suggest you all to try out is, glyphed SoT to get 26 expertise, glyphed CS and glyphed WoG with WoG boosting talents. I can easily keep threat and nice dps with CD spam and finishing with WoG. Best self-healing/threat setup for me so far.

Vengeance is not capped at 10% of max health as indicated in the tooltip. The cap is actually (stamina + 10% of base health). This is different because 1 stamina now gives 14 health. The OP should be updated.

Source: MMO-Champion BlueTracker