Well first of all it's a 10 % stat increase instead of only 5 % from MotW/BoK and second of all it does stack!

Example: (You can pretty much watch any kill vid from the last two weeks and will always see the buff being used)
YouTube - Sinestra vs Ensidia 25Man Heroic Hunter & Mage PoV (Cataclysm)

I can confirm intervene regularly works for me as a warrior. I routinely (and safely) let my druid tank eat the first double attack since I can't really keep the boss off of him anyway at that point as he has berserk up so I just lean on intervene instead and it works like a charm.

Pets seem pretty iffy right now ... our hunter tells me that basically all of the debuffs his pets can cast last 4 seconds and then get DR'ed to 0 for the rest of the fight. I guess it will be fixed in 4.0.6. I would not be surprised if this is the case with intervene as well.

Intervene has a minimum range.

I would assume the pet runs back to behind the boss shortly after intervening and isn't in range when the boss actually goes to attack. If it's a warrior's intervene that isn't working, make sure both the warrior and the tank are stacked until the attack actually goes through.

I'm pretty sure its not a range issue, but more of the fact that blizzard doesn't want pets to be able to intervene a boss mechanic, though I could be wrong. It seems that there are a few glitched with it overall so I definitely wouldn't count on it to save your life.

Also I'd suggest picking up [Twilight Dragonscale Cloak] its the most stamina on a cape currently and can come very useful on the majority of fights. (Not so much Chimaeron)

The problem with this is that it's going to be different for each person based on mastery rating and preferences. My understanding is that avoidance is calculated as a single roll with the exception of critical block, which is a second roll after the block has been decided. Because of this, the benefit of additional critical block value is proportional to your existing amount of block (ie, mastery) as having a higher chance to block increases the probability of critically blocking when additional critical block is added without corresponding block only value.

According to the established numbers, the .13% total avoidance you are losing is going to be greater than the mitigation you gain from the critical block, but this is a very min/maxing thing (granted, min/maxing is what these forums tend to be about).

Another side of that coin is that Hold the Line also increases your threat (through the additional 10% critical chance, also because parry generates rage while dodge does not, so there is a marginal RagePerSecond gain there), which while not an issue now (I often have a huge threat lead on my DPS), it might become an issue with the 4.06 nerfs to HS/Cleave.

So honestly, do what you want.

EDIT (ADDENDUM, Original text not changed): I'm actually not so sure that my idea of critical block being a second roll is correct...I read that somewhere (forgive me for not being able to link the post) but that seems to be very inefficient in terms of server resources. I feel like this can be accomplished with 1 die roll (Critical Block Chance = (Block Chance% x CBC%)), but I don't think that affects my original hypothesis as Critical Block continues to represent a subset of Block. So a higher critical block chance will continue to have a greater effect on a higher rather than lower block chance.

AFAIK it is like any other hit... If you hit a mob, a roll comes in, which tells if the attack will be miss/parry/dodge/block, if you do hit, then another roll comes in which tells if it's a critical strike, or a regular strike, same happens with block critical strike. The fact that it wouldn't be inefficient in terms of server resources is correct, but still, that is the way it's done...

You're mistaken. As far as I understand:

Your attacks against the enemy occur in one roll (except maybe against a prot warrior for crit block), which determines whether your attack Hits, Crits, is Parried, is Dodged, is Blocked, or is Missed. As you increase your Hit chance, "is Missed" is pushed off the table (Hit cap removes Miss from the table completely). As you increase your Crit chance, Hit percentage goes down by the same amount (hit converts into Crit). As you increase Expertise, "is Parried" and "is Dodged" are diminished (until capped).

Your enemies' attacks against you are the same but in reverse. However, when you block, a second roll occurs, which determines if the block is critical.

Also, when a player is blocked by a (prot Warrior) player, a second roll occurs for Crit Block.

EDIT: clarify warrior -> prot warrior

I'll add two points here :
- the combat table mechanism is pretty weird sometimes. It's clearly consistent in times, but there are for example no general answers wether players attacks are done one a 1-roll or a 2-roll system. During TBC, hunter community research (I guess that's the same for rogues, but I'm not sure) that the auto-attacks were done with 1 system and special (yellow) attacks were done with another system. There is no way to guess it before checking.
- When theorycrafters refers to 1-roll or 2-roll systems, they do not speak about implementation details. In fact, it is possible to implement the 2-roll system with a single roll : it is sufficient to split the "regular hit" case of the first roll in two different cases, one for effective regular hit, and one for critical hits. What these terms refer to is the question whether critical hits (or blocks) are a subcase of or independent of regular hits. In a two roll system, your effective critical chance is equal to regular_hit_chance X crit_chance, whereas in the 1 roll system, your effective critical hit chance is simply your crit_chance.

Yeah so I was basically saying (and following your terminology) that unlike critical hits, critical blocks are a subcase of blocks, whereas critical hits are separate from regular hits.

So you may have 28% hit on the combat table, and 14% crit. This gives you a total effective %, that 42% of your attacks will land, and half(edit incoming), sorry no actually it's 1/3 of those landed attacks were crits. The remaining 58% of your attacks are dodged, parried, blocked, or miss.

But if you can block 30% of attacks, and critical block 30% of the time, that doesn't give you an effective block rate of 60% where half of those blocks are crit blocks (and I'm assuming 0% dodge and parry to avoid pushing block off the table)... It actually gives you a block rate of 30%, where 30% of those blocks are crit block. So... 30% of 30% of attacks against you are crit blocked, while the other 70% of 30% of attacks are blocked.

I was also curious about the optimal Parry:Dodge ratio, so I wrote some MatLab code to try and figure out what's best. It's based off a very basic fight with 4 incoming attacks during a 10 second interval. Here are my findings:



Here's how I went about things:

1) I wrote a bit of code to calculate the expected percent of damage taken from a boss level mob given armor, parry, dodge and mastery ratings. It assumes shield block usage on cooldown.
2) Fix armor rating at 36K
3) Let mastery rating vary from 2000 to 4000 in increments of 400.
4) For each mastery value, let the sum of dodge and parry rating vary from 2000 to 4000 in increments of 100.
5) For each value of dodge + parry rating sum, begin with equal ratings. In small increments, increase parry rating and simultaneously decrease dodge rating to simulate reforging. Keep track of expected percent of damage taken for each difference.
6) For the parry and dodge ratings that minimize expected percent of damage taken, find their ratio and record it. Plot the optimal ratio for each dodge + parry rating sum value.
7) Repeat this for each mastery rating value.

The graph should be fairly self-explanatory. Let me know if something is unclear.

@swcarden
When you list optimal parry/dodge ratios, are they:
a) Ratios of post DR percentages (with the inclusion of non-DR avoidance)?
b) Ratios of their respective combat ratings?
c) something different?