Tharia

It's not that block is useless.
I think they feel blockrating/value are not really attractive stats when those encounters, where you really care for mitigating as much dmg as possible, hit for 20k+. So most tanks just end up with any blockvalue that happens to be on their gear in form of strength and try to avoid any gear that has any more BR/V on top because pretty much every stat is better.

My Armory

 

Dekkar

I believe that having the 1-minute duration Sacred Shield (given that it stacks to an extent with other paladins' Sacred Shields) is much more valuable than 3% (potential over)healing received. Having that Sacred Shield up all the time is going to contribute to your survivability more than 3% extra raw healing dealt to you by the nature that absorptions do not overheal if you are tanking a boss. Tanking a boss implies that you are taking enough damage to use up all Sacred Shield procs on yourself.

 

Theck

Block Value only contributes to threat via Shield of Righteousness. Assuming the proc is affected by Redoubt, it should contribute 1.3*1.3*225=380 base damage to ShoR. After factoring in talents, gear, hit, crit, buffs, and debuffs, this should come out to be about 619 damage on each ShoR, or 619*1.43*1.9/6=280 TPS.

To get from the 380 to 619, I used the relationship between the net bonus of the Libram of Obstruction buff from this calculation, which used a mostly-Ulduar gear set and a 53/18 spec with 3/5 Conviction and 3/3 Crusade. The Libram buff gives a net of 968 damage after all effects are considered, which means the raid buffs give you a net multiplier of 968/(1.3*1.3*352)=1.63.

How much threat you actually gain by this depends on what you're replacing with T8 though. For example, I've run TPS calculations with a gear set that uses 4/5 T8, and recently repeated them with the set I used to calculate the base->net modifier in the last paragraph. If you dig around in those two posts and compare the lines for a standard 969 with JV glyphs, you'll see that Majiben's gear set (4/5 T8) beats out mine (2/5 T8) by around 100 TPS. That number will be very volatile though, as one piece of gear swapped here or there can make a pretty noticeable difference if it's got more or less STR or Hit Rating itemization than the piece it's replacing.

 

Qalor

The problem is that, point for point, block just doesn't add near the amount of mitigation as other stats. While I agree that it's very nice that paladins can get to 100% block to have that guaranteed mitigation, with how hard bosses hit, block value just doesn't improve your survivability like dodge, parry or defense will. If they made some bosses with smaller, speedier attacks it could be worthwhile, but not with the 20k+ hits Ulduar bosses do.

 

Kacynski

While we´re at the topic of blocking, you may forgive me a question that could be considered dumb:

Where can I see the BV on my ingame character sheet? Or is there any other way to show it, like the different makros floating around, shwoing the percentage of total avoid (block, avoid, parry) you´re currently haveing.

Any advise is greatfully considered,

greetings
Kacynski

 

vorda

Hover over your block chance.

 

Marlah

After reading up on the discussion about Sacred Shield and speccing Divine Guardian I am very interested on trying it on our next raid. However, I have a question: How often should i refresh Sacred Shield? Once a minute? What should my rotation - in theory - look like using SS?

 

Ranjurm

You should rebuff it roughly every minute, a little before or after (the Absorption effect can linger past the parent buff). You should be substituting it in for one of the following:
Consecration - If you want to save mana
Judgement - if you are using the libram of the sacred shield but not if you are using the LoObstruction. If you are not hit capped you do run a mild risk of your melee slow debuff falling off but if the debuff is being provided by another this is a good slot
HotR - lowest threat option left.

Many fights have portions where you are not in melee range of the boss or are not holding the boss at that moment. Right before you are about to reengage the mob is a good time to refresh SS since it requires no substitution.

 

Mordekhuul

I'll also recommend the mod TankPoints, which in addition to the useful calculator provided with /tp calc, adds more views to your character sheet that show things like BV directly.

(Also, don't sign your posts - or you'll end up with an infraction from the mods - read the posted rules for forum use, and welcome).

 

Jebraltar

The issue is with the scaling. It has to be expensive, because otherwise trivializing heroics becomes (even) easier. Blocking 4k damage, for instance, wouldn't be unreasonable against an Ulduar boss, but it brings you close to not even taking damage in lesser content. Right now, they compensate for that by requiring high block values (ie: higher than the 1200 or so you get from strength/talents) require that you basically give up on being anywhere near other tanks in terms of avoidance.

Reducing block's reliability makes it more okay to have it block a disproportionate amount of small attacks - you don't have the "melee-immune" problem where a tank can gear so that every attack is fully blocked, but you're less likely to have the "block is completely out of proportion to the damage taken."

It was fairly well balanced for T7, but with T8 inflating health pools and damage (and focusing more on very slow, very big hits), block's starting to have difficulty keeping up with %-based reduction.

 

◊ Cathela

The reason block wasn't an issue pre-WotLK was because in TBC and earlier, it also provided the extremely important service of eliminating crushing blows. If your block value was, say, 10% of what the boss hit you for, then sometimes a block reduced the damage from 100% to 90%, but sometimes it reduced it from 150% to 90%. So not only did it provide effectively more mitigation, it also used that mitigation to eliminate large damage spikes.

Block value wasn't much use for mitigation back then, because even if you had a blockvalue of 1 you could still eliminate crushing blows. Its only real use was as a threat stat for warriors (pretty much their only threat stat back then; it was like spellpower was for us) and sometimes mitigation for AoE tanking paladins. Basically it's only since 3.0 that block value has really been intended to matter as a mitigation stat against bosses, and so far that's pretty much been a failure. The problem is exactly what Jebraltar says: it scales ridiculously well at one end of the spectrum and ridiculously poorly at the other end.

I've tried to make blocking work, even going as far as to specialize myself as my guild's AoE/add tank. And to an extent it works; in my high-blockvalue gear I can tank half a dozen Pummellers easily with minimal healing. But a tank that hasn't specialized in blocking doesn't need all that much more healing to tank crowds, and that tank is going to be much better at tanking bosses.

Part of the problem is the ridiculous fact that almost all gear with blockvalue on it also has block rating, so if you really want to stack blockvalue you have to pick up a crapton of excess block rating. (In my blockvalue set I've got something ridiculous like 80% total avoidance unbuffed without Holy Shield up.) But even if it was easier to get gear designed for a high-blockvalue setup, I still doubt it would work well as a gear strategy for serious tanking.

EDIT: Aaand while I've still got the last post, the other benefit of getting high-blockvalue gear was that it improved your dps when you weren't tanking. But that too is a much less pressing concern now thanks to dual-speccing.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

Marlah

The Leviathan's Coil is one of the best rings you can have as a tank. In the way I am gearing it is BiS.
Does anyone think this will change post 3.1.2 when they nerf it?

"The Leviathan’s Coil ring has had its armor reduced from 882 to 448 to properly reflect the item level"

 

Saltycracker

[The Leviathan's Coil] looks like it will be edged out by [Signet of Winter] and [Fate's Clutch] in terms of BiS gearing depending on your taste for the lost defense.

Right now using LC and Signet of Winter seems to be a good combo if you can spare the defense.

 

vorda

Take it from someone who's been using the Zul'drak/sapphiron armor ring in my BiS Naxx set: defense-less rings are a bitch to use. If you do decide to use them, make sure you compensate the defense you need to stay capped in the highest ilvl def enchants.

And use Rawr a lot to plan your character.

Anyway, I did it before and I'll probably do it again (sitting exactly on 540 defense), but only once I have all the other items I want.
Coil+Signet is the best combo for now imo.

 

◊ Cathela

Non-defense rings are annoying, although if they're part of your usual tanking gear you can generally gem/enchant to accomodate them without too much pain.

My take on the rings is that once crits are eliminated and the hit table is full (i.e., guaranteed block), I'd rather focus on worst-case burst survival than anything else. From that point of view, the important differences are:

[The Leviathan's Coil]: 448 armor, 94 stamina

[Signet of Winter]: 448 armor, 89 stamina

[Fate's Clutch]: 114 stamina, 41 expertise (assuming a green gem for the socket bonus)

If you're picking two, then the Coil is obviously one of them, and for the other it comes down to 448 armor on the Signet versus 25 stamina and 41 expertise on Fate's Clutch. Against physical damage, 448 armor is going to amount to around 0.80% relative damage reduction before blocking (assuming you're around 30k buffed armor). For the clutch, 25 stamina is going to increase your health by roughly 0.75% (assuming you're around 40k buffed hp) and 41 expertise rating will reduce parries and dodges by 1.25% each.

Between the two, I think I'd take the clutch for the parry-haste resistance and the extra magic damage soaking, but it's a fairly close thing.

EDIT: Also, this is basically why I don't like tools like rawr for tanking, because they do analysis based on your average performance over a long period. That's fine when you're talking about something like dps; if you have low dps most of the time but you do a lot of dps in bursts, it's the same as doing a higher steady dps without any bursts. But a tank who has great mitigation most of the time but occasionally takes a huge burst of damage isn't the same as a tank who has slightly lower mitigation but doesn't take damage bursts.

(I admit I don't know much about rawr, so I may be underestimating the sophistication of its modeling.)

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

Saltycracker

I would really like people to stop considering Expertise as an avoidance stat; expertise is a threat stat and a bad one at that for Paladins. It is VERY marginal, and you would most likely do better stacking equal amounts of dodge/parry as you will most likely avoid a hasted attack anyways. Paladins especially have very little use for it, and it is a threat stat for Warriors/Bares/DKs. 5 times out of 10 you are more likely to get parry hasted by undisciplined melee than your white damage anyways just from viewing WWS reports from our Ulduar nights. There are very few stationary bosses like Brutallus/Patchwerk in Ulduar.

 

◊ Cathela

Fair point. A few thoughts here:

In the details about parry-hasting, this sort of goes back to my point about rawr and "average" performance. It's true that adding avoidance helps against parry-hasting, but adding expertise gives you a route towards actually eliminating it altogether. Even if "spending" the same number of rating points on dodge or defense would lower your average damage taken, stacking enough expertise can guarantee that the boss won't autoattack more often than its base attack speed (barring other people getting parried, which I admit is a problem.)

As far as threat, one case in which expertise is pretty significant is using HotR to pick up adds, since it can be dodged and parried (deflected). The only places I can think of in WotLK where this is important are picking up Sarth adds, and grabbing the mobs in Thorim's arena, and I wouldn't call it crucial in either one, but it can be annoying to have a mob deflect your HotR and then run off after someone else.

Overall though, you're right: expertise is small potatoes for threat and not much more important for mitigation. In this context though, I was looking at the case where the stamina on one ring roughly balances out the armor on the other ring, but the ring with the stamina has a huge amount of expertise on it, so I felt fine using that as a tiebreaker.

But you could also argue that instead of using expertise as the tiebreaker I should have gone and looked at the avoidance on the rings. In that case Fate's Clutch still wins, since 48 def + 39 dodge is going to be more avoidance than 43 dodge + 34 parry, but anyway.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

Saltycracker

Re: Rings

Yea, I agree with you. Expertise is just icing on the cake after the dust clears. Fate's Clutch wins purely on iLvl.

As for as armor vs. avoidance I just try to stay alive through 2 consecutive attacks, where a third without heals will kill me. As long as I have enough effective health to soak 2 hits, I lean towards gear to pick up avoidance, hence why I am leaning towards the Signet of Winter.

Sorry if my response was a little sharp. I am trying to stop our Warrior tank from gemming expertise, as he thinks parry hasted attacks are more dangerous than they really are.

 

Jackinthegreen

I guess this reply is to your warrior tank then?

I agree that parry-hasted attacks really aren't a huge issue. Yes, preventing extra attacks is nice but for gemming there is a far better return by using dodge instead of expertise. If your hit table is full and you need to have something from a red gem, Strength is always useful for us plate tanks. Agility would be second and potentially more useful depending on circumstances and gear.

 

• Mex

I am by no means an expert on warrior tanking, the last boss I tanked as a warrior was Magmadar, but from the armouries of many of the warriors I've seen, gemming expertise seems to be a fairly viable strategy. I think it has much more to do with threat than with avoiding parry haste though, since TPS is a significant issue in many hard modes. I know that in TBC at least, below the soft cap expertise was a better threat stat than hit for warriors, and I'm unaware of any mechanics changes that would affect this (AoE tanking possibly, with the higher emphasis on shockwave / Tclap).

That said, don't underestimate expertise as a TPS stat. We get 16 'base' from talents + glyphs, but that still leaves 8 to get from gear before we're soft-capped, and until that point it's still quite viable. Str and hit beat it, but I think it's at least roughly around the same level as BV. It's worth realising that it does have a very small value as an avoidance / eh stat, but it's certainly not enough to ever focus on over parry, for instance.

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. ... this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.

 

Theck

It's not quite as good as BV. It's only our 5th-best threat stat, roughly equivalent to AP before you reach the dodge soft cap at 26 expertise skill.

More importantly, if you look at the third graph in that link you'll note that once you reach the dodge soft cap, expertise drops significantly in value, falling to 9th place. At that point, you're actually better off with agility or armor penetration for threat.

 

Ivriniel

While we're talking about parry haste, does anyone have a list of bosses in Ulduar that are actually using parry haste?

 

Marlah

Disclaimer: If my math fails please do not be to hard, it is ages since I done any math! All numbers are based on the information in the OP, which of course I might have mixed up or something like that

[Enchant Cloak - Titanweave]: 16 defense rating is roughly 3,25 defense skill, which is something like 0,13% dodge/parry/block/miss. Bonus: Apart from the avoidance this enchant gives it does make defense cap way easier to reach.

[Enchant Cloak - Major Agility]: 1% dodge is 52,08 agility. So 22 agility gives roughly 0,42% dodge (22/52,08). 22 agility also gives you 44 armor and 0,42% crit. Bonus: This enchant becomes much better when you add Kings.

[Enchant Cloak - Mighty Armor]: Armor is our most reliable mitigation sources, and it becomes even better when you factor in blocks. I did not manage to calculate how much I would gain from 225 armor at 27 281 armor (64,17 DR%) self buffed but I am thinking it is quite significant.

I am also no expert on the mechanics behind miss, so as you might understand by now this comparison is hardly top notch. However the question remains: Which enchant would performe best on an Ulduar main tanking paladin?

My guess is putting my money on the 225 armor but I am not sure. Currently I am rolling with +16 def rating on Cloak of the Makers. Altough it might probably come down to how I can most efficient maintain def cap (resocketing might be worse than the benifit of re-enchting my back).

 

qixxin

Speaking purely bang for buck, Major Agility is the best enchant being worth 22 itemisation points as opposed to the 16 on Titanweave and Mighty Armor.
Major Agility will give you 0.46% dodge when you include kings and an extra 48 armor which is roughly an extra 0.11% relative damage reduction (see formula below).
Titanweave will give you 0.39% full avoidance (using 41 rating = 1% avoidance) which isn't as high as Major Agility, but also gives about 0.13% block chance as well, which depending on your gear, may give better mitigation or not.
Using Quigon's damage reductions formula's adjusted for a level 83 mob, an extra 225 armor will give you an extra 0.51% relative (to your current damage taken) damage reduction at 27281 armor:

 

Ranjurm

When comparing avoidance enchants you also have to factor in the DR on those sources of avoidance which are very volatile on a per tank basis. Additionally, no raiding tank would be caught without kings so it's best to simply include it in your calculations.