SoV's dot application could always be dodged/parried (one of three Prot directly expertise-affected attacks) since the 3.2 PTR.

When comparing expertise rating to dodge rating, the first cap doesn't matter, because the dodges that are eliminated by 26 expertise don't create parry haste. (hence the name "parry haste" ^^)

When comparing expertise and strength concerning threat, the summary specifically says "above the dodge soft-cap".

Yeah I didn't quite think that one through :\

I made another pass over the calculation and fixed a few more things. The previous calculation ended up being correct if treated as a first-order approximation. This time around, I've corrected one or two more errors and run the algorithm iteratively to get the numbers to converge.

Warning: it's rather long and mathy, not exactly light reading. Not that I expect that to deter anyone. The post contains tables and links to the matlab code used, as well as a step-by-step analysis of where the errors were in previous calculations, and how I went about fixing them.

View topic - Calculating the avoidance value of expertise - Maintankadin

Tentative results: Expertise rating is 75-85% as good as dodge rating for reducing incoming damage, 70-80% as effective as dodge at reducing the number of attacks that land, and still 1/3 as good as STR for threat above the dodge soft-cap.

Wow. Thanks for this great answer Theck. You've displayed your expertise once again (sorry, I couldn't resist). My understanding is now that expertise up to hard cap is a valid strategy as it double dips in threat and avoidance (If the extra expertise doesn't come at the expense of stam, etc)

However, I'm Assuming you can't plug both avoidance and threat stats in the same mathematical formula and say 1exp = x dodge. So you wouldn't be able to say expertise > dodge or viceversa in absolute terms. Am I right?

Similarly to financial investor models, and with particular regards to potential parry-haste damage spikes, would you say that a risk-averse tank may privilege expertise while a risk-loving tank would prefer dodge?

That depends on what "=" means. If you mean it is better at reducing incoming damage, or better at reducing the number of attacks that land, those could be directly compared to dodge. But you couldn't say that expertise is more likely to allow you to avoid a particular attack (especially relevant for special attacks that can be dodged, and are not affected by parry hasteing of the boss's auto attack), and it can be more risky to gear expertise since it will result in no reduced incoming damage/reduced number of attacks that land against bosses that do not parry haste.

Great analysis, though. I think I will no longer actively avoid expertise when gearing my offspec.

In their case, I think they do it primarily for threat, because nearly all their attacks can be parried. I've never seen a thorough analysis like this done on the mitigation/avoidance benefit of it, but it's possible that the Warriors have known this all along and I wasn't aware of it. I don't read the warrior sections of tankspot too often.

In any event, you could come up with a universal "value" for expertise that includes both aspects like Kenobe wants. But you have to assign some sort of arbitrary weighting to threat and avoidance, the values of which you'll never find a consensus on. So it's probably not worth bothering to try.

As far as I'm aware the value of expertise in terms of damage reduction is not widely known in the warrior community, and like most of us I think they simply dismissed it as minor / irrelevant. I'm not intimately familiar with the maths you've posted but at a glance I think it could fairly easily be shoehorned into a warrior's perspective. You wouldn't need the 1-boss_avoid factor, since the SoV interaction isn't there anymore, but on the other hand the warrior rotation is much more dynamic, so you'd probably need to pull averages out of combat logs / reports in order to calculate player_swing_speed, instead of basing numbers on a static rotation.

Oh, and I can't remember my maintankadin password, so here is the link to the thread which initially investigated and determined the exact mechanics of parry haste, confirming the 0.24 factor ((0.4*0.4) + (0.4*0.2) + (0.2*0)).

Do the calculations take into consideration that you'll be getting less parry-haste yourself due to the boss getting less attacks in? This would mean very slightly less threat and also just as small of a boost to survivability if not.

@Zealer: Yes, the calculations do indeed factor that in. If Theck doesn't mind me reposting a bit from his thread, the calcs for player and boss haste respectively are:

player_parryhaste = (1+((player_swing_speed.*(player_parry./100).*0.24)./boss_swing_speed))

boss_parryhaste=(1+((boss_swing_speed.*(boss_parry./100).*0.24)./player_swing_speed))


Note the variables in each, and how they are related to each other. These are all used in some degree in his calculations and the iterations do indeed reflect us getting (very slightly) less parry haste. If you want more parry haste of course, you could start stacking parry itself... But the thread on Maintankadin can give you a fair idea about that too if you're willing to read in between the lines a bit.


Edit: I misread what Mex said, and thus deleted my reply to him.

Hello all. I'm relatively new but wanted to ask the community's insights on the upcoming changes to protection changes as regards threat generation. With the shift to Strength as the spell power coefficient, I was wondering what usefulness [Libram of Valiance] might play as a threat generation libram. I honestly haven't read the ret threads far enough to find the calculated up-time on the libram but if my statistics training and understanding of mechanics is right, the buff has less than a 0.3% chance of falling off. I'd assume that means it could be effectively treated as a static 220 str/132 sp buff. How useful is that compared to the other alternatives for threat generation?

I ask because I have found myself unsurprisingly and increasingly challenged as our DPS continually gear themselves and refine their techniques. We have at least one hunter typically on hand, but rarely any rogues, so with the general demise of the effectiveness of Misdirection and for the sake of DIY, I don't wish to rely on third parties to keep ahead of the TPS curve. 3.2.2 has me looking around for other libram options aside from Obstruction, especially as my 4-pc Aegis bonus breaks up and Shield of Righteousness loses its punch. Will the 200 strength be superior for overall threat generation as it multiplies across each ability?

I've posted a new thread about it in the Suggestions forum. Shame they don't allow clickies to work, but oh well.


@ Angael: Strength is our strongest threat stat, and it will get even stronger in 3.2.2 with the TbtL change. If you're not worried about the dodge from the other libram, by all means get Valiance and start smacking things around with it. If you find that's not enough, redoing some of your gear and talents will help too.

Argh I'm just about at the expertise cap and I'm looking at future pieces of gear I'm going to get that have even more expertise. I'm an offtank a lot of the time and that expertise could go to much better things. Why does Blizz have to be so obsessed with that stat...

Anyways, I noticed divine sacrifice + divine guardian were "required" talents in the field manual topic, and I have them myself, but I often find myself wishing I had guardian's favor + improved hammer of justice instead. Why are these talents considered necessary? People are saying let Holy Paladins cast sacred shield since it scales with SP it'll be better and divine sacrifice should be left up to ret. We still are supposed to be keeping up sacred shield on ourselves right? And our divine sacrifice will still be better than a ret's because it still takes into consideration your total HP even when bubbled right?

Also one more thing, are we supposed to be healing ourselves at any time in a battle? Or even flash of light ourselves for the HoT then pull? Because I'm pretty much wondering what the hell is the point of the +crit heals part in the "touched by the light" talent. Specifically if Blizz doesn't want Holy Paladins up there and is making the other part of that talent strength based.

As Theck proved with his calculations, expertise isn't a bad stat at all.

DiSac can be nice to have in offtanking situations where you can afford to bubble, and it is useful in several ToC situations. SS is similar in that the extra shielding we can provide ourselves when a holy holy isn't around is useful, but it isn't too hard for healers to take care of that little bit of extra damage every few seconds. This may or may not change come Heroic ToC 10 and 25 coming out on Tuesday, but those might turn into cases of minmax so to speak. We can safely assume that they won't be nearly as hard as Yogg 0 though.

The only thing that seems remotely logical for the healing part of TbtL is in case a prot pally uses it in PvP or something when there isn't much else to do. As for healing ourselves, by all means do it if you're not really engaged with anything. I was OT for Jaraxxus but whenever there weren't maidens or infernals hopping around I'd switch weapons and help heal a bit because there wasn't much else to do. The jerry-rigging of paladin stats is annoying, but hopefully come Cataclysm or 3.3 we'll have a better solution.

With Heroic ToC coming out this week, I suspect I'll be switching my 2 of my 3 discretionary points in the prot tree from Divine Guardian to Improved HoJ. Faction Champions is an annoying enough fight (and the Heroic version scares me enough) that the extra interrupts will be helpful. Prot makes a very effective anti-healer lockdown / cleanser combination, even more so with faster HoJ. Coupling that with the fact that my raids regularly have 2-3 rets and 2-3 holy, and that all of the rets and one of the holys spec DS/DG, I find that we're not very wanting for DS casts in our raids.

I'll be curious to see what they do with some of the heroic ToC fights though. Since they don't want to be too reliant on one class, I doubt they'll introduce a raid-wide damage mechanic that requires it, because that would unfairly bias the instance towards having one paladin. That might be OK on 25-man though, considering past encounters (Razuvious especially).

Anyway, the real reason I came over here today was to update everyone on the ongoing discussion of expertise's avoidance value. There's an updated version of the calculation, as well as some work on it's relative value in reducing spike damage. The results for the calculation came out very similar to the previous version:
73% as effective as dodge rating for reducing damage intake for a reasonably fast-hitting boss (2.0 swing speed after JotJ)
86% as effective on slower-hitting bosses (2.4 swing speed after JotJ)
2x-4x better than dodge rating at reducing spike DTPS, if you believe my metric (spike_DTPS * redux_probability).

I don't want to quote the entire calculation, since that would probably be a violation of rule 2. But I'd like feedback about the calculations if anyone has any, especially to make sure I haven't overlooked anything.

Theck, While you don't mention it in this particular post, in prior posts you've referred to Expertise as providing, very roughly, 1/3 the threat of an equivalent itemization amount of STR. Is that assuming pre-cap or post-dodge cap (presumably if you've gotten above the parry-cap, its doing nothing)?

While even a non-DG Holy Paladin will have a better SS, the talent is very useful in 10-mans (if you have a Holy Pally, SS the other tank) and 5-mans (not that you need it).

The talent (along with Sheath of Light) was introduced in 3.0 as part of the much touted ability for hybrids to perform the roles of their other specs at a very basic level (ie good enough for non-heroic dungeons while levelling, etc). The stat conversion and boost to healing throughput via bonus crit healing (either upfront or as with sheath, in HoT form) are intended to help bridge the gap between prot/ret and holy. This was at a time when dual-specs were still only theoretical, and they wanted (I think) to make sure that people were able to get groups for instances while levelling, instead of the old "LF2M Tank + Healer Ramparts, PST." It's a relic of a previous design paradigm, the impact of which Blizzard has attempted to minimalise by placing deep within the prot tree.

Entirely speculatively, I would expect to see it removed with 4.0, but we'll see where their design takes us.

Theck, the expertise vs dodge in burst reduction is very interesting; as far as I can tell the math on the averages is correct. However if you're considering worst case scenarios, I think it's probably worth considering that we have two parry-able attacks that are independant of each other (auto-attack/SoV and HotR), which can and will potentially sync up. Averaged out in a damage-taken-over-the-course-of-the-fight sense this phenomenon isn't relevant, but when considering and comparing worst case scenarios I think it's worth factoring in double parries (especially relevant if you're working with reckoning, as well). This would considerably lower the 0.6*T factor (as well as the likelihood of the worst case scenario being realised, as well), although I don't think my napkin maths is enough to determine exactly how much. It would, of course, raise the max value of expertise in burst reduction (currently 4x dodge).

That's post-dodge cap. It's about 2/3 as good as STR if you're below the soft cap, though with the amount of expertise on Coliseum gear I suspect very few people will be in that situation for long.

Hm... that's an interesting point, I'll have to think about that some more tomorrow morning when I'm more awake. I'm too tired right now to decide whether that just gives me a multiplicative factor, or (more likely) whether I need to sum the probabilities for single, double, triple, etc parries (with a player_attack_speed of around 0.5, we technically get 3 parry-able attacks that can cause boss parry haste for a 2.0-swing-speed boss.

HotR is deflectable, not parryable (since it is ranged attack), and according to wowwiki deflects don't speed up melee swings.

TBTL's crit healing bonus was a result of the behavior Blizzard saw in TBC: If a Paladin tank was not tanking a fight, he'd be healing, because Prot Paladin DPS was horrible and very easy to run OOM.

Problem was, a Paladin tank did not take Illumination. This would lead to situations where a Paladin would actually have to build a Prot-Healing set on top of his Holy-Healing set, with the Prot-Healing set avoiding spell crit at all costs, since spell crit did not do anything significant if you lacked Illumination.

Thus, Blizzard put a crit healing bonus on TBTL in the hopes that Illumination-less Paladins would then still see some value in spell crit. Sheath of Light in Ret works on the same principle.

TBTL having a crit healing bonus only sounds silly now, in the context of a Prot Paladin capable of dealing 2k DPS for an extended amount of time against a target he isn't actively tanking, while wearing tanking gear, but absolutely made sense in the context of TBC when the talent was being designed.

Hmm interesting. Is that going to affect expertise value?

This may be a stupid question but with these calculations with the value of expertise, they're great for bosses, but does expertise keep any of its value while tanking adds or trash? Would a non-boss mob parry as much as a boss and gain the same speed buff? I mean I believe expertise has to be worse with AOE tanking, because you can potentially dodge/parry all incoming attacks while you can only put out so many attacks for the enemy to parry. If it's mostly a "boss stat" then I'll more actively avoid it.

Also, I forgot to mention, anyone else annoyed by the lack of hit rating on TotC gear? I believe not a single piece of hit gear drops from TotC 25 and only 1 tier piece has it. I already notice my judgment of light missing and not refreshing more often, my vindication not being up 100% of the time like it used to, my taunts missing more often and random abilities I use to gain quick aggro missing as well. Am I pretty much going to have to put up with this or should I be "wasting" gems/enchants on hit?