To deal more damage and contribute more to the kill mostly, and also to rank on world of logs for fun. What you say is not quite true, there is some break even point where your survivability is so high that making it a little higher doesn't really help the raids overall survivability at all. E.g. if you currently take 5 damage per hit, and have 10,000 hp and healers heal for 5,000 per cast, then if you improve your gear to only take 4 damage per hit. Yes it makes healing you easier 20% easier.. but healing you is already so easy as to make no realistic difference as to how well the raid survives.

Now, obviously we are not in any state close to that, but does the slight changes in gear between dps and survivability really increase raid survivability? By having your full survivability gear do your healers gain more time in which to heal the rest of the raid? Or do the tank healers still focus entirely on you because if they were to stop healing you at the time when you got bad rng and took big hits you would die if they were healing someone else? In my specific case, no matter what I wear my healers do the later and always focus on me, so there is no difference to overall raid survivability. And of course there's no difficulty in keeping me up when I am dps reforged.

I do reforge to full survivability for heroic Baleroc since there are healer issues with keeping me alive (even in full surv reforging), but for other bosses dealing a bit more damage and getting us a kill slightly faster seems to be more useful.

Personally, I'm sporting a full passive CTC with raid buffs with a 379 ilevel (using 4set bonus, all except helm), and have started to change equipment out of mastery already (sinestra boots instead of crafted ones, and the first +60 stamina gems are appearing in my gear, remaining covered even when using Stay of Execution instead of Mirror/Essence of Flame), but that's being a night elf (you could consider that an additonal 239 mastery in terms of CTC), and having both professions with an option for mastery (blacksmithing and jewelcrafting).

Anyways, I do consider the 4 pc bonus extremely useful. Even If I were on the verge of unhittability (+-1%), I will probably stick with it. If I were further away from reaching passive coverage, I would have sticked with it too, for the 20 seconds out of 30 in which you remain covered. In the case in which you have surpassed the CTC, you will be exchanging additional stamina (changing mastery gems to stamina gems, or parry/dodge, or devalued mastery) for the 6% parry. I don't remember right now the cost (will check it later) of CTC of using 378/391 set shoulders against 384/397 ragnaros shoulders, but it won't be enough for me to disregard the 4 pc bonus.

Abou the chest, the set one brings less CTC, but I don't really consider a waste using the set chest instead of beth chest, since it doesn't have hit/expertise on it, and pass the full CTC I will redirect the mastery to either parry, dodge or stamina anyways. Stamina for a time until I feel comfortable enough.

I am talking about Full CTC too. chardev 8 - WoW Cataclysm is a profile with full CTC without using any heroic FL or raggy loot, with BS+enchanting.

that doesnt have full CTC tho. You have 67,97 Block meaning you have .97 wasted block chance.
You do not recieve benefit from mastery untill you reach a full percentage of benefit from the mastery rating.

You get one mastery point for each 179,28 worth of mastery rating.
You get 1.5 block and critical block chance per mastery point.

179.28 / 1.5 = 119.52

You do only get benefit from mastery every 119.52 worth of mastery rating (rounding down)
What this means is that if you're sitting on 4299 (as you are in your example), you've wasted 116 mastery rating, which could of gone to other nonwasted stats, like parry. Or you can change one gem from stamina + mastery to pure mastery so that u reach 4319 mastery, which is only 17 rating above the next breakpoint, leaving far less mastery wasted.
I find it surprising how little of the Prot Warr community (at least here on ElitistJerks) knows about this. This is how mastery works for all classes, and it is extremely important for protection warriors in specific because of the low amount of stats you get from one point of mastery.

I've got work to go to at the moment, so don't have alot of time to talk about mastery balancing, But if you would like to learn more, head over to the boomkin section of EJ as they were the first ones to find out about this, and then proceded to test it.


Also; Essence of the eternal flame is not worth using, even if you're just trying to reach full CTC for show.

Really? You've never reforged or changed a piece of equipment with less than 119.52 mastery difference and noticed your block percentage changing? I could be wrong, but I don't think this mechanic has ever been in place during Cataclysm, at least I've never noticed it before.

And your second statement is laughable. How much magical damage are you gonna take on fights like Shannox/Domo compared to physical damage? Obviously you'd be foolish not to use Mirror on fights like Rag/Nef heroic. But really, any tank worth their weight got multiple trinkets to swap between depending on the fight.

Edit: You can't really come here and state people are clueless, then make obvious false statements and expect non insulting/snap replies.

Can someone explain DR on parry and dodge for me please? i just see DR DR DR everywhere but no explanation of how it works.

Is it like ccs? I mean like if i have say 10% parry chance and if i parry then i have 5% and so on? Is it the same for dodge?

It means that as your Dodge rating goes up, new Dodge adds less to your final observed Dodge than your prior Dodge did. So we try to keep Dodge close to Parry to avoid some DR. And we may reforge from Dodge and Parry to Mastery which is not subject to DR. We may value Mastery higher than both Dodge and Parry, partly because of DR.

So looking over the prot 4p bonus I'm not sure I like it. I already don't like having to rallying cry when I'm tanking because I can't use last stand as a personal cooldown most of the fight. Now I have shield wall that is a raid cd and I can't use most of a fight that I have to conserve it for a raid wall. I'd much rather have the 4 piece untie last stand from rallying cry, make rallying cry not effect the warrior who casts it or can't be cast while last stand is up and vice versa, and reduce the cd by 1 min. I can see alot of complaints coming from other tanks if warrior tanks are to have 2 raid CDs if the 4 pieces have any indication of what will be coming in the next tier.

In regards to Diminishing Returns on Dodge/parry, what still has me confused is the ingame tooltip. When hovering over your displayed Dodge/Parry percentages on the character sheet, the tooltip says "before diminishing returns", although from what I've heard and seen, the numbers on the sheet are very much the numbers in practice. What's the deal here?

I made this complaint on my own forums too, Runtime. I argued that of all the tanking 4-set bonuses, only Paladin maintain untied use of the mentioned ability in their set bonus Divine Guardian, while Prot Warriors (and to a lesser extent DKs and Ferals as they do not have personal/raid CDs with a shared CD as in Rallying Cry/Last Stand), lose the option of a personal defensive CD if their shield wall is needed for a raid CD at a particular interval.

Conversely, one can argue that this is a blessing for raid utility and that we already had enough personal CDs to survive; ie: on-use trinkets such as [Mirror of Broken Images], [Vial of Stolen Memories]or [Scales of Life], external CDs like Pain Suppression or Guardian Spirit, or even potions like [Earthen Potion] or [Mythical Healing Potion].

As we don't know the mechanics of the upcoming fights in the Dragon Soul raid, and witnessing firsthand the heightened use of "your turn to save the raid now" style raid CD staggering used in such Firelands fights as Beth'tilac (Phase 2), Majordomo Staghelm (Scorpion) and Rhyolith (Phase 2), this could hint of more to come with the unveiling of these set bonuses. Outside of Last Stand and Shield Wall, we do get amazing protection just by putting up Shield Block at the right moments and may be able to save Shield Wall for its raid utility.

I would like to hear the community's thoughts on this. Please comment!

I'm assuming you mean 5m for Shield *Wall*, not Shield Block. I think you're forgetting that you'd be 3/3 Shield Mastery reducing Shield Wall's CD to 2m unglyphed.

Barring any rediculous raid effect that can't be handled by PW: Barrier, Aura Mastery, Spirit Link Totem, etc, I am doubtful that there will be any reason to glyph for Shield Wall for that extra 10% raid damage reduction, when there are so many numerous raid CDs already before these set bonuses go live. We shall see what Dragon Soul entails however.