• Mex

BoK will still be better for ret, and in 10 man especially it's worth remembering that the extra int is a not-insignificant boost to their mana regen, depending on the rest of your group lineup. Holy will of course prefer kings / wis. I think you're still likely to be out of luck when co-ordinating blessings in 10 mans, and left self-buffing 10 min sanc on yourself.

This is between us and the chickens, Ma'am, and I'm going to ask real nicely that you stay out of it.

 

Shalcker

That's quite interesting and useful piece of math, thank you.

It is, however, simplified to ignore stepwise nature of stamina gains for burst time, as noted further down in that thread. We can look at stamina gains as shifting "death point" toward higher values of hits, but it definitely depends on actual hit range (as opposed to average hit value used there) - for some fights stamina gains in range available for gemming (or trinket swap) can be entirely irrelevant, while avoidance gains increase your "burst avoided" chances all the time, even if gain is relatively minor.

Edit: It does, however, depend on fight, and cannot be used as gemming advice without analyzing each

 

Kenobe

I have a question regarding expertise and more specifically the hard cap.

I understand 26 expertise allows you to ensure that your hits as a melee/tank will never be dodged and 56 expertise rating would mean you will never be parried.

It was never realistic in the past (as far as I remember) to try to be expertise capped against parries but it seems very doable now given how much expertise we have on the TOC gear and the SOV glyph. For example, I'm currently sitting on 47 expertise rating (glyphed) and I'm far from having the best gear available.

Should we now strive to reach the expertise cap and spare our healers from nervous breakdowns due to boss parry haste?

Also, is there a point when stacking avoidance where, due to diminishing returns on parry and dodge, expertise becomes more valuable (up to hard cap) than dodge and parry?

 

Wrathblood

Ashstrike,

I disagree on SoR being useless for Prot, but perhaps I just have an inadequate grasp of the mechanics. My understanding had been that Prot shared the 15-second rule with Ret (if your target will be up for more than 15 seconds use SoV, and SoR for stuff that dies faster than that), which leaves plenty of situations where you'd want to tank with SoR. Off the top of my head the situations where I typically use SoR include: virtually all trash in virtually any heroic, Thorim Phase 1, Razorscale against the adds, Coliseum against the champions (accidentally DoTing mobs is bad).

Sure, I use SoV (outside of heroics) 90+% of the time but that's a far cry from "there is no reason to use SoR as a tank", assuming the 15 second rule still holds.

 

vorda

Not at all, our auto attack speed is MUCH quicker and HoTR also applies SoV. The real rule is that you need 3 SoV stacks up on average over the mob's lifespan. As prot, this is nearly always achieved.

Also note we rarely get SoTP as prot, and SoTP has a larger effect on SoR than on SoV, so the average may even be a tiny bit lower for us.

 

Theck

There's also the fact that you're getting 10 free expertise while using SoV (assuming you have it glyphed, which you should since it's the best passive threat glyph we have).

 

Haelfdane

That may be true but I'm not convinced glyph spots are best used on direct TPS. Maybe that will change after 3.2.2 but right now I'm just not seeing any threat issues at all and prefer to use the glyph spots for utility and increased survival. When/if the time comes where I need to think about a glyph spot to switch to TPS, I guess the RD/HoS one would go, since it's probably unnecessary but does provide some peace of mind.

As far as SoR, yeah, it's totally unnecessary right now. If you want to see some threat in 5mans, throw on a strength/block set and go to town. Should be able to put out not too much under 3k DPS that way with SoV. Yes, that's DPS, not TPS, and better than that with better gear.

 

Theck

It's not worth gemming or enchanting expertise for threat. STR or hit rating (if below the 8% melee cap) is just far better as a threat stat than expertise is after you reach the dodge soft-cap. The mitigation value from reducing parries is hard to model, but here's both a long and short version:

Short Version: It's fairly weak, and since your avoidance is probably good (55+ range for an ulduar-geared tank) the likelihood that you'll take a normal hit followed by a parry-hasted hit is pretty low.

Long Version: A rough approximation that works fairly well for modeling parry haste is:
where "boss_parryhaste" is a multiplier that you use to determine the effective (or net) swing speed of a boss. boss_parry is the chance for a boss to parry you, which at the soft cap is 14-6.5=7.5%. For a player swing speed of 1.3 (quite reasonable with raid buffs for a 1.6 speed weapon), and a boss_swing_speed of 2, this works out to be 1.0277. In other words, your parries are effectively giving the boss 2.77% haste over the course of the fight (equivalently increasing damage taken by 2.77%). Each point of expertise skill (8.1975 rating) would drop this by 0.092%.

Comparing this to avoidance; if you have around 60% avoidance, and around 30% of that is from dodge, then 8 points of dodge rating would give you 0.1107% more dodge. The damage you take over the course of a fight will then drop from a factor of (1-0.6) to (1-0.601107), or a reduction of 0.28%; 3x more effective than the point of expertise skill.

Of course, this is all assuming you're averaging over the entire fight, which isn't what you asked; your concern was the spikes of damage due to parries. Unfortunately, that comparison is trickier, because expertise and dodge work differently. We could just as easily say that instead of 2.77% haste, the boss gets 2.77% more attacks over the course of the fight due to parry hasting. For a 5-minute fight, you'll take 150 attacks from a boss with a 2-second swing speed, meaning that you'll get on average 4.266 parry-hasted attacks during that same fight. It takes 8.3696 expertise skill to drop that to 3, another 7.2826 to drop it to 2, and 7.2826 to remove each of the last two as well. You can say with certainty that those 4 attacks will not happen if you hit the expertise cap.

But we can't make a similar statement about dodge rating. 7.2826 expertise converts to 7.2826*8.1975=59.70 rating, and 59.7 dodge rating would convert to around 0.81% dodge from an equivalent amount of dodge rating. On average, out of those 154 attacks, you'll dodge 154*(0.0081) = 1.25 of them by choosing the dodge rating instead of the expertise. So you'll take less damage overall by using those itemization points on dodge rather than expertise, but there's no guarantee that you'll dodge any of the 4 parry-hasted attacks like you get with the expertise.


This is interesting, because up until now I had never sat down and worked through the math for expertise's avoidance/DR contribution. I had basically been discounting it as tiny and not worth considering, but from this it seems like it's really not that much worse than avoidance. It's about 1/3 as effective as dodge rating at reducing damage intake, and only 20% weaker than dodge for reducing the number of attacks you'll take, with the benefit that it removes the attacks that are more likely to contribute to large damage spikes. It's also about 1/3 as effective as Strength for threat output above the soft-cap (slightly less in 3.2.2 as STR will be getting stronger). So it double-dips as a threat and avoidance stat. It makes me slightly less annoyed by the large amount of expertise on Coliseum gear. Hopefully someone will check my math to make sure I haven't made any errors that artificially inflate its value.

 

Theck

Well, I suppose I should rephrase that statement as "If you're going to use a passive threat glyph, it should be SoV rather than Judgement." I can see the value in using 3 utility glyphs, but in all honesty I haven't found a situation where I felt the RD glyph was necessary enough to swap it in. At worst I'd probably swap it back and forth with the HoSalv glyph fight-to-fight based on what was more useful.

 

Theck

Also, on an unrelated topic, Rhiannon and I have discovered something interesting about SoV stacking while poring over an old combat log. It seems that the SoV proc damage is being based off of the smallest stack size on the target; in other words, during the initial build-up phase, our SoV proc damage will be limited until all Ret paladins in the raid get their stacks up to full size.

This is odd, because the behavior I had read about earlier was the exact opposite for Rets - that they were seeing larger procs than they should be due to Prot's quickly-applied 5-stack. I can't remember for sure if that was only until they applied their first stack though.

<edit> Looks like Rhiannon beat me to it and posted it here in the Ret thread. Still probably worth mentioning here though, since it's a noticeable nerf to our initial aggro. I plan on submitting a bug report on this later today in any event.

<edit2> Found the post I was thinking of, suggesting that the Rets saw 5-stack level procs until they got their first stack. So this would be consistent with what we found (though again reversed) - that the proc value is based on the smallest stack applied by any paladin in the raid.

 

Haelfdane

Yeah I saw that in the ret thread. It makes the weapon speed issue more interesting as long as it's there (hopefully a bug they'll fix, but maybe intended??). A quick stack seems less important if it's going to be gimped by the slower ret stack anyway but will the slower speed-higher damage per swing help offset this or make no difference really? Probably just academic anyway, I for one don't plan on going back for a Broken Promise in response to what is hopefully a bug.

 

• frmorrison

Regardless of your preference for having Exorcism and Seal of Blood, those tools are gone and will not return.
Taunts can provide "burst threat" assuming your HotR SoV hits + Cons wasn't enough threat; the two taunts (both off the GCD) will add to your threat if someone is higher threat that you. Hand of Reckoning if used as a pulling mechanism provides burst threat. I usually use HoR then Avenger's Shield for pulling.

Millions of words are written annually purporting to tell how to beat the races, whereas the best possible advice on the subject is found in the three monosyllables: 'Do not try.'

 

• emptyrepublic

The damage for Hand of Reckoning is 1 + (.5 x AP). So you will do holy damage equivalent to the strength displayed in your character sheet (~1000-1200 for decently geared tanks), assuming you don't have an AP buff up. This damage can also crit. Works very well for the purposes of pulling and getting a start on threat. Like frmorrison said, an immediate follow up with AS and you should be set.

 

Theck

This matches my experience. My HoR regularly hits for around 2k+ and crits for around 3500 (raid-buffed, of course). My standard pulling technique is now HoR+AS+Judge and then open up with HotR. My gear is at such a point that HotR is actually a higher-threat ability than ShoR because I've got very little block value, which is probably common for tanks that gear for heavy avoidance.

Also, in response to the question about a slow weapon like BP vs. a fast weapon, I'd agree that this makes the slow weapon even more attractive. The real weak point is that BP is our only option outside of DPS gear, and BP has less avoidance and stamina than most of the higher-ilvl fast weapons. So it comes back to a TPS vs. survivability question, which is never an open and shut case.

 

Haelfdane

Ketheriel:

Regarding threat, if survival is such a non-issue that you were using Martyr/Corruption, then you can certainly afford to put on more threat gear. I have seen ridiculous numbers from HoTR with my threat set which is loaded block and strength (greatness plus new ret libram), and this is on 5mans, so not raid buffed, but the trinket and libram are good for a frequent +500 str. Basic point here is that if you need more avoidance and stamina for a big single target fight, then obviously use that gear, but if you are needing more snap agro on multiple targets, change your gear and SoV is just fine.

 

Theck

As an update to the expertise calculation, I've found and corrected some errors in the original version. They make expertise out to be a much stronger contender than initially estimated, again assuming all of the math is correct.

The details can be found here, unless you would prefer I just copy/paste them into this post:
View topic - Calculating the avoidance value of expertise - Maintankadin

 

Theck

Don't take it as gospel yet. For one thing, it hasn't been double- and triple-checked by anyone yet. For another, the results seem almost too good to be true, which always makes me skeptical until I have enough time to re-work the math from scratch and analyze every step carefully. A threat stat being that efficient at reducing damage taken just feels wrong intuitively, even if it is capped once parries are removed from the attack table.

 

• Arikah

Thanks for bringing this up, this goes nicely with ret's T9 bugs to be fixed :| Ret's do see 5stack level procs until we get our first stack up, but this generally only occurs with DS hitting non-targeted debuffed targets, courtesy of prot spamming HotR. With any luck we can get this fixed for 3.2.2.

 

• Mex

The maths looks correct, but I think it's worth adding a qualifier that this comparison is only accurate in situations where parry haste is active on a boss, and where a boss's ability to parry isn't inactive (be it a permanent condition, like Kologarn, or a temporary one, like a boss currently casting). The casting situation (I believe this is still correct, that both players and NPCs have their avoidance disabled while casting spells with a cast time) would be very difficult to accurately model, but would probably be the sort of thing easily handled with common sense.

fake edit -- there's also avoidable, non-auto-attack attacks by bosses, again probably just worth noting that this contributes to the subjective nature and importance of not simply making gearing decisions in a vacuum based on this info.

This is between us and the chickens, Ma'am, and I'm going to ask real nicely that you stay out of it.

 

Jackinthegreen

The casting could perhaps be modeled on average cast length per minute, or something similar where we can safely assume the boss will be casting X% of the time, meaning the value of expertise during that time is practically nil.


Another variable on expertise value is how much parry haste affects the boss based on the attacks it can benefit from being parry-hasted. As with players, a slower swing time for a boss will mean that parries have proportionately more effect to them, and thus expertise will gain value for those fights.

 

Nutron

Is this before or after the expertise first cap (26)? If it's before, what would it be after.

 

Saltycracker

Here are a couple data points from my last night's raid. It looks like the dot application can be dodged/parried/missed. Is this a bug, or is this blue trying to bring paladin attacks in line with other tank classes?

2009-08-26 19:15:28.383 Saltycracker's Holy Vengeance(R1) missed Thorim.
2009-08-26 19:15:28.383 Saltycracker's hit Thorim for 682 damage.

2009-08-26 19:14:35.261 Saltycracker's Holy Vengeance(R1) was parried by Thorim.
2009-08-26 19:14:35.261 Saltycracker's crits Thorim for 1251 damage.

I couldn't find any hit/dodge combos in my log as I run about 5.5% expertise.