A little late on this, but Str shouldn't be 1/4th of the Neutral value. It should be what it actually is, 1/4th of the parry value.

I like this way of looking at gear a lot though since I think the max EH era is gone. Now we're trying to maximize TTL/minimize incoming damage and having values for armor vs avoidance vs mastery is the primary difficulty in that calculation.

Regarding itemization cost of armor, can you extrapolate that from the two armor trinket versions? Failing that it seems like most of the 359 trinkets offer +321 to a stat (times 1.5 for 482 stam to stay consistent with standard itemization cost) where the armor gives 1285, that's another baseline measurement indicating it's 4 armor per point.

(Aside, would it break the game to have an Inferno Ruby cut for 160 armor to give us a good survival option in red sockets?)

If that value is accurate, are you saying each 1 point of armor is roughly 40% as valuable as 1 point of mastery, or 4 points of armor is 40% as valuable as 1 mastery? If it's the first case, armor trinkets are the best trinkets available by a wide margin (60%) versus all but perhaps stamina.

I'm slightly confused over how to fit in Windwalk into the tanking concept aimed at of being block capped.

If you aim at being block capped with the proc active, it means you won't be capped 60-68% of the time.
If you aim at being capped assuming the average effect of the proc, the same thing is true, although you will be closer to cap, and push a chunk of block off the table when the proc is active.
If you aim at being block capped without the proc. Then the proc simply turns block into dodge. Which while useful, isn't anywhere near as usefull as turning a hit into a dodge.

Does Windwalk remain the best enchant even when you're block capped, or is it only really useful when you're below block cap?
What would take over at block cap ? Mending ? Pyrium Weapon chain (40 hit rating and 50% disarm reduction) ?

I'm confused as to why pushing blocks off the hit table once you are block capped is bad. Doesn't that just mean you will totally avoid more hits, which is better for survivability?

I think there's a problem with your armor valuation as well. To avoid spamming this thread with equations, I've posted the analytical derivation over at MT.

In short, an analytical approach gives each point of armor a valuation of ~1/7 that of mastery, or 0.14273 (rather than the 0.35 you found). If you consider it in terms of itemization (4 armor for every 1 mastery), it increases to about 0.57. So in other words, armor is a little over half as good as mastery for damage reduction in terms of itemization. It also means that the 160 armor enchant to shield is only worth about 23 mastery, less than the Blocking enchant gives.

Of course, I may have made a mistake, and I encourage people to double-check my calculus. But it's pretty straightforward, and some simple sanity checks seem to match the value I came up with. This might mean there's an error in the spreadsheet you used.

First time poster here, Long time reader.

So far i have noticed that threath is really no problem in raids, Maybe our dps isnt insanely hard but so far on omnitron/halfus its been a cakewalk, the healing is tough tho and i often seemyself put on insight and spamming word of glory on the raid. Is anyone feeling this way, Or is it just me not trusting my healers enough. I know HP´ain supposed to be topped, put people are often below 10-15%.

Also, Can we expect to hit block cap this expansion, My current itemlevel is 252(equipped) and im at 75% total. block beeing 48.44% So it feels like its a bit to go still.

Increasing your avoidance once already block capped certainly has value. The question is whether its the best use of those itemization points. Increasing your Mastery once you're already blockcapped has zero value to a paladin tank, while increasing Avoidance would have some (though the value is less than it would be if you weren't blockcapped, because then you were pushing full hits off the table, and now you're pushing blocked hits off the table).

The question, which we cannot yet answer, is whether putting those itemization points into Stamina would be an even better use. Really, you'd want to take points out of Mastery and put those into Stam rather than moving the avoidance points (if you've got the option) but until we see hard modes we just don't know. Heck, maybe threat will magically become a big deal and you'll want to stack hit and expertise. I don't think that'll be the case, but we really don't know.

It just seems to me that, in a theoretical sense, this statement doesn't really make sense. It just seems that if you have nothing on the hit table except blocks and completely avoided hits, that pushing blocks off the hit table in favor of avoided hits would actually be a good thing. I know we can't actually discuss real numbers regarding itemization on gear that doesn't exist, I was simply responding to a theoretical situation as presented in the manual.

To be fair, he is correct that the particular section he quotes is poorly worded. Point for point, mastery is better than parry or dodge in terms of damage reduction up to the block cap. Having too much dodge or parry is not exactly a problem though. I do agree with emptyrepublic's assessment that having once hit block cap, you should probably funnel excess stats into expertise, but if you wanted to gear entirely for survival you would in theory be fine with continuing to gain dodge or parry past the block cap (this would be assuming you had already changed mastery gems and enchants to stamina where possible). In this case your concern would be to balance dodge and parry as much as possible to minimize your losses to DR. Naturally this is a few tiers of gear away from being possible, if ever at all.

I keep seeing people talking about block cap as if it were some hypothetical thing in late cataclysm or something. Just to make this clear, block cap is possible in 359 gear. You need gems, enchants, food and elixirs for that, but it's definitely doable. And it is very strong in normal modes (i.e. probably recommended for most, if not all encounters), not because of the EH gain you get for being block capped but simply because avoidance is king and mastery is the best avoidance stat. If this all-out mastery strategy is viable in hard modes or you actually need more stamina for some huge unavoidable attacks is still not really clear. Guilds that are doing hardmodes right now seem to handle tank gearing in many different ways. We will only start working on hardmodes after xmas break, so I can't really comment on that.

My point of confusion seems to have gone somewhat lost in translation.
I never implied pushing blocks of the hit table is bad per se, other than this means you've wasted some of your iLevel somewhere.

My real question was:
Is windwalk still the best enchant if you are block capped? Or would another enchant take over ?

If you aren't block capped, then the merit of Windwalk is significant, turning a hit into a dodge is good.
If you are block capped, then the effect only turns a block into a dodge, and this is considerably less of an impact (pun intended).

The runspeed is cancelled out by PoJ (it shouldn't stack if PoJ tooltip is correct).
I'm not sure I want to rely on a proc to happen for getting extra runspeed.


From a pure theoretical p.o.v. you're probably right on the boss swing. i'm just havign this nagging feeling about it. The point of block capping is to smooth out damage intake and reduce the amount of heartattacks on the healers. Once you reach that point, the difference between a percentage of 2 of blocks on a random interval turned into dodge isn't really going to make life on your healers all that much different. Whereas something like mending which has a fairly regular amount of extra healing probably helps more to smooth out receiving damage even more.

Afterall. If actual damage intake reduction was the real issue, we wouldn't be reforging pure avoidance into block. The whole reforging idea is about smoothing out, not about reducing total damage taken, we're likely taking more total damage, but smoothed out more. This is easier to heal. Shouldn't the rest of the gearing/gemming/chanting then be centered around that also? continue to strive to make us easier to heal. Even at the cost of taking more damage taken than the bear/warrior/dk tank next to us ?