On Ultraxion, check the tooltip of the Shield Block buff you gain when you use shield block. It tells you how much %crit block it is giving you. If you use Shield Block again before the previous buff runs out it will increase the reported %crit block from the tooltip. This combined with the fact that logs show people getting near 100% crit blocks is pretty conclusive evidence that using shield block again before it does run out is stacking itself, or that the way shield block calculates the crit block portion is "current crit block value including all procs + excess block over CTC" so the excess gets repeatedly added while to the existing crit block buff until you reach the crit block cap (100% total).

This is also a reason why a prot warrior can safely wear a very large amount of dps gear while tanking this fight if you're having trouble with hitting the enrage timer on 25man, though with the 5% hp nerf now it's not as big an issue as before.

At least for our warrior tank on HC ultraxion, after refreshing Shield Block 8 times, he still managed to recieve two melees from ultraxion that were not critically blocked.

I expect that your prot warrior let shield block drop at some point. Most likely, this is related to using Heroic Will when the buff is about to expire.

From my own testing, a prot warrior in ilvl 397 will only need 3 uses of SB to crit block cap. After that it's just a matter of making sure the SB buff doesn't fall off.

Taken from our Ultraxion kill log this week:



As you can see Shield Block was refreshed 8 times before it fell off and still our tank managed somehow to recieve a bunch of normal blocks.

Look at these two parts.

Shield Block's duration is 20 seconds on Ultraxion. It looks like SB was not refreshed in time, so it likely fell off.

Ah yes, Interesting. That's probably because our logger was inside Heroic Will during the time Shield Block was refreshed.

[21:19:17.146] Karz afflicted by Heroic Will from Karz
[21:19:17.146] Karz casts Heroic Will
[21:19:18.858] Karz's Heroic Will fades from Karz

From what I understand, rend is always worth applying if you will get its full duration. Thunder Clap is ideally used just before the last tick of rend, but Shield Slam has a higher priority for dps/threat. Essentially, with ~1.5 seconds left on Rend, check if SS will be up. If SS will be up, use TC. If SS will not be up, use something else, then TC on the last tick.

If your rend actually falls off though, make sure to reapply it (after checking SS).

This is obviously not relevant if you're refreshing your Rend through B'nT. Yes, TC is more expensive than Rend but you're not paying for the increased Rend duration, it's a free side-effect. As such you can refresh Rend whenever you want with TC without a dps loss. So basically just TC whenever you have a gcd to spare (you'll probably want to do that a lot anyway because of the atk spd debuff), try to do it before your Rend runs out and you should be fine.

Thunder Clap can also not be dodged or parried, so that's pretty cool. Nothing like a bad string of those wasting time. I have no problem at all refreshing Rend. In AoE situations and specced into Blood and Thunder it's absolutely amazing, and even single target with today's de-emphasis on hit and expertise, I'll take a very likely Rend refresh with a bit of damage over a string-dodged Rend attack.

BnT refreshing Rend is almost always what I've done right as Rend is about to fade. It's been more annoying to do lately since 4.3 due to Rend no longer applying/refreshing on targets that Thunderclap misses though, but that's just the nature of RNG.

I did post a bug report thread after 4.3 dropped regarding BnT's new bug, but after two minor patches it hasn't been fixed (or it's "intended" and they've said nothing). It really feels like Blizzard is in apathy mode right now.

EDIT: For those interested about the Blood and Thunder bug, I've got some logs to display what it was doing compared to how it's acting now. It normally doesn't create problems, but we all know RNG will do otherwise.

Tier 11 Example (Source: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis)
Notice only 4 targets take damage (the 5th was a miss), but 5 Vile Swills still get Rend refreshed regardless.

Tier 12 Example (Source: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis)
Only one target in this scenario, but that consequently makes this much easier to see. Rend refreshes as expected.

Tier 13 Example (Source: ]World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis
Heavy AoE situation, but still easy to see behavior. Thunder Clap targets 13, hits 11, and only 11 get/refresh Rend. This behavior is changed from the way it has worked the entire expansion, thus leading me to conclude it's bugged. Come to think of it, I should probably bump my bug report post and include these logs.

More likely it was bugged before and fixed now.

The talent was never bugged, it was simply one of those changes that slipped under the radar in 4.3. It was an official change. Both iterations (refreshing / applying Rend even if TC missed vs. only applying / refreshing Rend if TC hit) are / were working as intended.

I recently acquired a H Hand of Morchok. I don't have numbers for the souldrinker proc, but I'm inclined to do some testing to see which is better in certain situations.

My theory is that the proc causes lots of overheals, and the Hand should be used for added stam/pushing tank's dps higher. Is the proc on Souldrinker really good enough to surpass a higher ilvl weapon on dps and avoidance stats?

In terms of raw survivability, Hand of Morchok is better (the extra stamina from HoM is EH, which is superior to an unreliable RNG heal).

In terms of damage output, Souldrinker is better. I'm not sure of the exact DPS increase that the proc gives, but it is a substantial boost (Mew is saying it's worth about 500 DPS). If your raid is running into issues with DPS checks more often than tank deaths, then I'd go with the Souldrinker. Personally, I've found that for most encounters, DPS was more of an issue than tank deaths, but that may vary depending on your raid.

Also, keep in mind that you'll need less and less EH as the DS nerf continues to stack up, which makes HoM less appealing.

I also found that, even on unlucky days, SD was higher dps than heroic HoM. The added weapon damage doesn't transfer through most of our attacks, so even at 1/3 of the average proc chance, SD wins.

The EH increase might also be a distraction, since even one proc from SD on the way down will make SD better. We could model that with a burst time analysis, but I don't know how useful such an analysis would be.

Again, it depends on what you need. Souldrinker's proc offers more TTL, while the extra stamina from HoM is more EH.

Using Souldrinker for the survivability benefits in Dragon Soul is a bad idea, honestly. Bosses test our EH far more than our overall damage taken/healing... when was the last time that you were slowly worn down from full HP to dead? It wasn't even terribly common in Tier 11, and increased healer mana regeneration has made it a complete nonissue.

Got conversation with guys from my guild about life after ctc. I was sure that stamina is a king, my opponent told me that mastery is superior, due to further reducing spikes on me, so I went to chardev, planned protwarrior with BiS gear and 've done lil' maths.

I found that avoidance after ctc is much better to stack, than stamina or mastery. Here is the link to the table. Correct me if I'm wrong.

P.S.: I'm counting only physical avoidable damage.

It depends on number, speed, and size of attacks incoming.

Few large attacks (Ultraxion/Zon'ozz/Blackhorn/Spine Amalgs/Madness) you want stam.
Many small attacks (Yor'sahj/Boat adds/Spine blood) you have more freedom to choose avoidance.

Essentially, if you can't survive 3-5 regular blocks in a row you need more stam; if you can survive 20+ regular blocks in a row avoidance/mastery is superior.

It's all part of a Burst Time analysis. Since the hardest bosses this tier have large, slow swings (upwards of 200k before mitigation) and/or huge magic burst damage, stamina is better.

EDIT: Analyzing your chart, I notice that all the options have more than 200% "amount of healthpool received." I think that's where you're tripping up. When you have received 100% of your HP, you're dead. Everything after that point is irrelevant. The stam builds live about 1-2 swings longer under heavy damage situations than an avoidance build because they have a larger pool.

By comparison, avoidance builds offer the best damage reduction, assuming that your healers can keep you up. The problem with such builds is that bad luck still happens and tanks fall over after a string of blocks.

I've set 2 sec swingtimer and 200k damage after armor recduction. "Amount of healthpools" represents how many damage you got, measured in healthpools.

I didn't count that healers might drop me. With 50% avoidance and 50% block, there is only 12.5% chanse I'll recieve 3 blocks in a row and 6.25% for 4 in a row, thus it's possible, but much unlikely.

The fact that you don't fear dying says a lot. 1 in 24 swings (1-2 pulls) you take a ~210k damage spike over 4 seconds and 1 in 64 swings (3-4 pulls) you take a ~280k damage spike over 6 seconds.

What you seem to be saying is that you scare your healers on a regular basis. Your healers have to be constantly spamming you because you want to take less damage over the long term. Personally, I prefer the stamina route.

Untrue.

In a raid scenario, what kills tanks is burst damage. An unreliable heal for 3% of your health (maybe slightly more than 3% if Field Dressing affects the proc, which I assume it does) can't be counted on for Devastate+melee+shout combos on Blackhorn, for instance.

As a tank, you have three priorities in a raid.

Priority one: you must be able to hold aggro. With the current amount of threat that the tank classes are able to generate, this step is trivial unless your DPS overgear you by an insane degree, and pretty much every tank out there can safely ignore it. In the past, there have been encounters where threat was somewhat more important due to various fight mechanics, although that hasn't really been the case for any encounters this expansion, with the possible exception of Domo before they nerfed DPS aggro on that fight.

Priority two: you must be able to survive the worst-case scenario. Stamina, armor, resistances, and cooldowns all figure into this. Damage absorptions effects (Power Word: Shield) also grant temporary benefits here. Once you're able to consistently live through the burst damage that bosses will throw at you, then you have enough EH (effective health) and you can move on to step three. How much EH you need will vary depending on the content. For instance, during tier 10, bosses hit so hard that you never had enough EH, and as a result, tanks were never able to move past this step.

Priority three: you must mitigate or avoid enough damage that your healers are able to keep you up throughout the fight. Basically anything that reduces your overall damage taken throughout a fight will figure into this. Avoidance, armor, resistances, absorbs, and self-healing all play a part here. How important this step is will vary depending on healer mana regeneration and healing output. For instance, if a healer can top you off from 1 health to full every second without running out of mana, this step would be largely trivialized, because there wouldn't be anything you could do to affect what they did. In ICC, this was what happened, more or less, because healers never ran out of mana and healed for most of your health bar in a single cast.

After you've fulfilled those three requirements, you can choose to focus on DPS stats (hit/expertise) in order to help your raid push through various DPS checks more easily, because your survivability isn't an issue at that point. This is what you see a lot of tanks do on Ultraxion, because you're never really at risk of dying unless you're not managing your cooldowns properly and the enrage is an issue (or at least it was pre-nerf).

There is no possible situation where step 3 comes before step 2. It doesn't matter how much self-healing you have if you won't survive Impale, or Psychic Drain and a melee swing at the same time.

In Cataclysm, healer mana regeneration has scaled up from tier to tier so much that we're seeing a similar situation, especially in 25-mans where there's wider access to mana regeneration cooldowns like Mana Tide Totem. The only situations where healers are ever hurting for mana is when you're under-healing encounters (guilds are using three or four healers on encounters designed for six, and they're STILL managing it), and even then, it's the raid healing that will run them dry, rather than the tank healing.

This tier, the only tier where I'd probably use Souldrinker over Hand of Morchok for the survivability benefits is Yor'sajh, since the EH requirements for the fight are actually relatively low, while the purple debuff makes self-healing more valuable. There are other fights where I'd definitely use it, but that's for the substantial damage boost rather than the healing.

Stamina is generally a much better choice after CTC, due to the fact that basically all of the burst damage that you'll encounter in Dragon Soul is unblockable. For example, look at a fight like heroic Hagara, where you need to be able to survive Focused Assault. For that, the only stats that will help you are stamina and armor, and you can't stack armor. Other examples include Zon'ozz (Psychic Drain), Madness (Impale), or Morchok (Stomp).

EDIT: Read the "tank steps" in the post right before this one for a look at the reasons why.