A valid point, and perhaps I am looking for a definitive yes or no in a sea of maybes, but I can't seem to justify using SoT anymore. Given the healing picked up (with GoBH) is ~4x the damage output sacrificed, it just feels like giving up too much for too little in return when using SoT now. Given, I am running mastery preferenced to haste, so perhaps increasing haste will make the choice less one sided if it truly does scale well with our output.

Don't get me wrong, as a long-time ret I am all for maximizing damage when possible and logistical within mechanics, but I feel like we could fill a niche as a passive raid- (or at least melee-) healer which would free up that extra DPS spot for a far better ROI. Even if our healing did not accomodate 2 healers, but allowed for our shamans to LB for mana or monks to SCK, I'd be interested to see which of those options allows for greater overall raid dps output.

I guess we'd need to know average values of heal-spec DPS abilities (plus benefits like SCK's heals, LB's mana return) and see if the allowance of those abilities would surpass personal DPS increases through the use of SoT throughout the fight.

I've only seen 5 of the 6 fights in MSV, but outside of Garajal there really isn't much that's a serious DPS race. Elegon sphere's I guess, but they are (or should be) dead before censure really has a meaningful effect. Everything else that has a moderate DPS check also seems to have heavy raid healing needed during that phase (Feng in phase 3, or 2 if he gets flame stacks for example), where it seems SoI would be more helpful to raid success.

Am I overlooking something that tips the scales in the favor of SoT?

Gearing section totally rewritten. Will be working on DPS section in a bit.

In a nutshell, our stat priority in general goes:

Hit (to cap) > Exp (to hard cap) > Mastery = Haste > Avoidance

The only real question is Mastery vs Haste. Both are about equally good at smoothing damage intake (in the context of being Hit and Exp capped, which means the peaks have already been cut off virtually all of your spikes) with the real question being which of their strengths is more useful to you.

- Mastery is slightly better at reducing damage taken overall. Also, in a situation where you can somehow pump up your effective ShoR % Mastery can really shine. Tank swaps being an obvious situation for this, but there are others. Tanking Will tonight, watching my health bounce up and down even with ShoR up, I slightly regretted stacking Haste instead of Mastery.

- Haste gives a significant boost to your outgoing DPS and tank DPS matters quite a bit more than it used to. My stacking Haste was pretty handy getting everything down in time on Elegon last night.

Avoidance, assuming you're Hit and Exp capped, isn't as bad as its been made out to be. Sure, its not as good as Mastery or Haste, but capping Hit and Expertise resolves most of its spiky-ness issues making it a productive stat. Avoidance is roughly between Mastery and Haste in terms of damage prevention but instead of having a situational Pro, it has the Con of slightly spikier damage than Mastery or Haste which is why its last.

So, you'd be avoiding gear with Avoidance and its your first choice to reforge to another stat, but in terms of evaluating gear, its really not that much worse than Mastery or Haste. If I had a piece of gear with Mastery/Hit and had the potential to pick up a half-tier upgrade with Mastery/Parry, I'd take the Mastery/Parry piece in a heartbeat.

I posted this question to Theck over on maintankadin, but I am curious what the rest of the community thinks about this:

I recently saw a post on maintankadin in the "What seal with the 10.3.12 hotfix?" thread by Kihra:

"» Tue Oct 09, 2012 8:24 am

"PsiVen wrote:
I noticed that it was VERY important how I timed my ShoR for the short facepunch phases"


Yeah, I think I underestimated just how much damage you can reduce if you play correctly instead of just punching the boss in the face with SotR whenever you can."

It got me thinking:

All of our simulations are assuming that we are using SotR at every possible interval, as soon as we are able. Let's say hypothetically, that we don't care about DPS as a tank and am only concerned with my overall damage intake to smooth and reduce the amount of damage I take and amount of healing I need.

Would pooling to 5 (but not wasting HoPo) and timing as many SotR's as possible to the actual swing (be it autoattack swing timer, or large physical damage attacks) decrease the damage we take even further and thus change our gearing strategies?


The reason I ask is mainly, I don't believe that it is Blizzards intention for us to be essentially gearing/reforging as a DPS would. I'm sure that they are 100% aware of the intricacies between our secondary stats and are just laughing at us knowing that we don't have a grip on this whole active mitigation thing yet (where good timing, maybe ie. skill) is what separates the damage intake of a good tank from a poor tank. Even our rotation just doesn't scream "choice". We gain HoPo, we spend it immediately. There isn't really any skill outside of can you remember our rotation, albeit more complicated than the past, to generate the most HoPo as possible. It all seems much more Ret than it should with these new active mitigation changes.

Shield of the Righteous is off the GCD, so when you use it has little to no effect on the rest of your rotation. Clearly you won't sit on 5 HoPo, so pooling constantly doesn't actually change your uptime significantly over the length of the fight; it only gives you a bit more control over where that coverage is. It would not change your gearing strategy in regards to hit and expertise cap, although clever usage could make mastery stronger than haste if you manage to have ShoR up whenever it is going to give you the most damage reduction.

On another note, I find the haste/mastery gearing rather interesting, coupled with the fact that strength is roughly equivalent to parry; you could opt for strength enchants (and gems?) for a decent tank set that could put out a healthy amount of DPS. I would think that Dancing Steel would be a strong alternative to River's Song, for instance (1650 str for 12s at 1 PPM vs. 1750 dodge for 7s at 2 PPM).

When it comes to gemming, there's more to parry vs strength than just the avoidance value of each. The parry gem of course gives more avoidance, but the strength gem can do double time in Ret pieces and helps contribute a bit towards WoG healing and SS shielding. Compared to the numbers vengeance gives it probably won't be noticed that much, but the same can be said of the extra parry too. 320 parry is roughly .36% versus the .176% from 160 strength after Kings as well as increased damage and healing.

On pure prot pieces I'd probably be gemming expertise in my red slots. Depending on socket bonuses I can also see reforging out of expertise on items only to add it back via gems. With the latest bug concerning challenge mode gear scaling I'd also avoid reforging into expertise or hit if I was doing those runs.

Theck's simulations look like they cover swings pretty well, otherwise he wouldn't get such results from the 2-7 swing tests. For those who don't have a swing timer addon, Quartz is the most well known because it's been around since BC if I recall correctly.

As I replied over at MT, this has no effect on the simulations. I'm using a 1.5-second boss swing timer, so SotR always covers exactly 2 attacks. It's essentially like simulating a player that is timing his casts to boss swings. The results would be slightly different for a player who does this poorly on a boss with a longer swing timer, but they should be about the same for a player that's carefully timing their casts.

Also, I still think you're giving Blizzard too much credit. :P They're good game designers, but I highly doubt their internal testing and design looks at the sort of spike metrics I worked up. I'm sure they look at spike damage to make sure no tank is severely at risk, because the 25% health buff is evidence of that design consideration. I think it's optimistic (at best) to assume that they thoroughly test each secondary stat to see how that metric changes. Especially given the number of classes/specs they have to design, it's unlikely they have time to do anything that thorough for individual classes.

I believe I will be revered with Shado-pan this coming Tuesday. What is the opinion on the strength vs stam trinkets that I can buy for 1750 valor? I don't know which to buy.

One tiny correction:
Colossus actually absorbs 8,000 damage: Colossus - Spell - World of Warcraft

With Windsong now proccing from nearly everything and boosted by your highest haste value, does this push the enchant past Colossus? With Seal of Insight active, you've also got an additional +10% spell haste to consider for how often it procs. While crit is worthless for survivability, haste and mastery are still very, very strong stats.

This is an excellent point on something I've been remiss on correcting (the list is starting to pile up. Stupid dailies are taking way too much of my time).

For the record, Colossus kind of sucks. ~10k absorbs are trivial in current content and the proc rate isn't nearly high enough to make up for it. Windsong just keeps looking better and better, but River's Song and, surprisingly, Dancing Steel both look attractive on paper as well.

Colossus needs a buff to be considered among the serious options for tanking, but I'm not yet sure which of the other three will be the winner.

HotR breaks CC, and CS does not. This is crucial for challenge modes, if nothing else.