No, I am talking about alternating periods with and without 2T buff. The whole point is that even with high amounts of mastery reaching block cap seems... unprobable even with activated trinkets (~4k mastery on demand post upgrades). 2T bonus without block capping then might become complimentary to self-healing, i.e. it doesn't matter when to WoG yourself as long as you don't have 2T buff already and don't cause overhealing with WoG. Less overhealing, better smoothening due to alternating periods with and w/o high block chance - good part of it. Low stacks of bastion (so less healing per WoG) and overall less damage healed per HoPo - bad part of it.
And, oh, WoG is off GCD.

I was talking about 2xShoR-WoG2* case. Quick and easy numeracy shows following HoPo/sec requirements:
ShoR-WoG2: 0.3846
ShoR-WoG1: 0.5
3ShoR-WoG2: 0.5789
2ShoR-WoG1: 0.6363
First one with Throne's ilvl gear will cause heavy overflow of HoPo, unless you go full mastery and ignore hit and exp caps. I am not sure last one is achievable without Divine Purpose, so I excluded it as well. 3ShoR-WoG2 might be tricky to pull, 'cause it requires either 3 back-to-back ShoRs** or 2 ShoRs followed by WoG1 then 1 ShoR followed by WoG1, where WoG1 requires just 1 HoPo available, so for repetition of such cycle one would have to generate HoPo for first 2 ShoRs of the next cycle within WoG1 buff duration. IF one would choose alternating buffs as his HP spending strategy, ShoR-WoG is the easiest way to go. It is still unclear if it is of any use compared to 100% 2T15 uptime, though.
*Which would be, actually, better as ShoR-WoG1, but I doubt it is reasonable to ShoR at 4 HoPo and stall HoPo generators for 3 seconds for exactly 1 HoPo WoG.
**With both CS and J off cooldown and 5 HoPo pooled, one could perform J-CS-filler-filler-CS-J and have those 3 back-to-back ShoRs without procs or insane haste, but I highly doubt it would be a viable tactic for any case, unless you're trying to line up ShoR/2T15 buffs with something else, be it encounter mechanic lasting 6+ seconds or simple DP+2T15 combination.

Edit: can't? Even with haste build? O_o
Edit: Probably, not. Amounts of haste required a insane.

You don't have 33% miss+avoidance against a boss. You're lucky to have about 20%. For starters, you have exactly 0% miss. In my current gear, I have about 7.5% dodge and about 19.5% parry (rounding up in both cases). Level-based avoidance suppression knocks those down to 3.0% dodge and 15.0% parry, for a total of about 18%. I also have about 25% block (rounding up again), which is only 20.5% against a boss, with mastery contributions.

Given those numbers, the chance that an attack lands outside of SotR coverage is a little over 65%. That gives you a two-in-a-row chance of 42.5%

Adding the 4-piece bonus in drops your one-attack probability to 32.4% and your two-attack probability to 10.5%, considerably higher than your 4% estimate.


2-blow series are the worst case for the S rotation because there are so many of them. With a control/haste setup you generally see SotR cast intervals of under 7 seconds (6.6 seconds in this case). That's less than 5 boss attacks, so let's round up and make it 5. With 5 attacks, you'll cover two with SotR and have three remaining that are left up to the RNG, which is two potential 2-attack sequences (i.e. in the sequence S - S - A - B - C, A-B and B-C are two different potential 2-attack spikes).

However, S generally performs much better for 3-attack series. First of all, the fact that we have a 6.6-second SotR interval means that there are actually relatively few 3-attack series that SotR doesn't cover. For every S-S-A-B-C we have due to SotR being 7.5-seconds or more apart, we have about an equal number of S-S-A-B sequences that don't even contain a 3-attack danger. So right off the bat, you've halved your possible danger periods.

Second, note that a three attack string of "hit, hit, block" is 2.6 damage out of a potential 3, or 86.67% theoretical throughput. Thus, it isn't just strings of 3 completely unmitigated attacks that we're considering. Blocking one attack out of three isn't enough to keep you below the 80% threshold, you'd need to block two (or avoid one).


I disagree. Lower damage taken is more or less meaningless, because throughput melee damage simply isn't a problem in this environment. Why do you think we treat avoidance as "garbage," according to recent blue posts? It's the same fundamental problem - avoidance is just a passive TDR stat in an environment where TDR is pointless, because throughput damage is assumed. You assign enough healers to the tank to handle throughput damage (which, at this point is one), and move on to dealing with the actual complexities of an encounter. For TDR to have an impact, it would have to reduce the number of required tank healers from 2 to 1, and that just doesn't seem to happen in practice.

I also disagree that it clearly "wins" in the 2- and 3-swing periods. It's twice as good for 90% 2-attack spikes, but also permits more 80% spikes. It's got a similar trade-off in the 3-attack category, giving more protection from 80% spikes but shifting more of those spikes up into the 90% category.

However, let's think about what this means. For a 2- (or 3-)attack swing to be dangerous, the boss has to be hitting you for half (or 1/3) of your health plus acquired healing. Heroic bosses can hit for around 300k damage per swing. We have 750k HP or so, plus around 100k healing per second while we're actively tanking (a low estimate, as we're likely getting an average of 150k HPS just to keep up with throughput for such a boss). So 2 attacks isn't actually all that dangerous (in fact, we take two-in-a-row all the time in practice).

The three attack strings are actually a bit more dangerous in this "underhealed" situation, because we're looking at 900k potential damage in about 3-4.5 seconds, with a possible health+heal pool of 1000k-1150k. Again, still a scary moment for a healer, but not fatal.

What will kill you is when you take 2 or 3 back-to-back attacks when you didn't start at full health in this "underhealed" scenario. However, for that to be the case you had to be taking damage before that string started, which means you're not really interested in 2- and 3-attack strings, you're interested in 4+ by definition.

This is why I tend to focus on 5-attack strings as a default, by the way. In my experience, what usually kills me is trickling down to half health and getting spiked at the end over 6-10 seconds while a healer is limited in throughput (by some encounter mechanic, or dead, or what not). A 5-attack string is nominally 6 seconds if we're ignoring the time before and after the bookend swings. This is why we care about 5-, 6-, and 7-attack strings - they're actually the far more common killer than getting "globaled" by 800k+ damage in two attacks separated by 1.5 seconds.

See above - I think cutting it down to 5 seconds is fairly unreasonable, even in 25H encounters. It can happen, of course, but it's far more common that you started that 5-second period at low health, which means you're really interested in a time period longer than 5 seconds. That's why I don't think the 2- and 3-attack data is very useful to us in general. If we were regularly in danger of dying due to back-to-back or back-to-back-to-back melees, which have time intervals of 1.5 and 3 seconds respectively, we'd be dropping like flies. Triage healing wouldn't work in that environment - it's essentially what we had in Wrath. The fact that we're not getting "globaled" anymore should be enough proof that 2- and 3-attack strings aren't as relevant anymore.

It is highly unlikely they'd let it go in without an ICD because that would definitely unbalance us compared to other tanks with regards to AoE. Get something like Ony Whelps again and it's almost a constant stream of GC procs.

And yes, it will be a DPS (and HoPo) loss, but it doesn't look too bad. If it's a 30% chance on avoid and we have 20% avoidance, that's effectively a 6% chance every 1.5 seconds (or .04 HoPo per second) compared to a baseline CS's 20% every 4.5 seconds (which is .0444_ HoPo per second) Considering that 4.5 seconds is closer to 4.0 for many it becomes .05 HoPo per second.

And all of that is assuming perfect use of GC procs, which just doesn't happen. I have a feeling we might not notice the change overall.