For the most part to talent and glyph for Victory Rush will be up to the individuals play style and what they like which is as intended by Blizz as stated by a previous poster. I personally have found it usefull when I get a chance proc it does help to save the healers a little bit of mana. Are you sacrificing some dps for it, sure, I am sure there are some number crunchers out their that could tell us exactly how much if X were this and Y were that but for me it is about a 1-1.5k loss depending on the fight. Seems like a huge chunk, but sub 20% how long does a fight take 90 secs? tops? this means at most I would be giving up 135k dmg. Now since healers are doing triage more now than ever before who is number one on the list, us. Well if we can do something to help lessen the amount of mana required to keep us up then that might allow the healer the opportunity to move a heal to a dps target doing 12k dps and keep them up. Its a proc so obviously unreliable but still in my opinion a very useful talent to take and one that has kept me alive for the time needed to kill the boss when the healer went down.

As to Avoidance/Mitigation my healers have told me I am much easier to heal now that I focused on mitigation then I was when gemming and enchanting for stam. Currently I have 47% block, 14% parry, & 8% dodge. When a healer has to blow a big heal on you because you took an unmitigated hit it is a huge mana drain, avoiding the dmg all together would be nice, but the healers have told me they are much more comfortable with me taking steady damage then they are when I had gemmed and whatnot for stam making the dmg more spiky. My focus has been on pure Mastery since I am not really a big fan of Hold the Line since it seems like a chance for a chance if a chance happens. All of the above are just my opinions based on the couple weeks we have had in live to play around with this.

If you have a 50% block chance and a 30% critical block chance, you block half of all hits that land on you. You have a 30% chance to block for double the amount, when you do block.

Has anybody done any research on at what gearlevel we will be reaching near 100% dodge+parry+block?
Im already @ 12,5%+12,5%+46% with half heroicblues half 359 epics wich brings up the concern of what will the other tanking classes look like compared to a warrior at the gearlevel required for >100% dodgeparryblock?

edit: just as a clarification to what im after here, when you compare a paladin and a warrior
Paladins get more %block per mastery but once they reach a point where they block dodge or parry everyhing mastery becomes a wasted stat->forces a paladin to get more parry+dodge or exp/hit
Warriors get less block% per mastery but we would still benefit from mastery past the point where we block everything due to critblock

so given gearlevels would allow it this would already make our mastery far superior survivabilitywise.
Im interested in knowing what would the same thing look compared to a dk or a druid, even if gearlevels would never in reality go that large

Blizzard stated that bosses of later tiers will gain expertise, hit, avoidance and crit mitigation, in order to keep the effective crit chances / avoidance / etc. in control. We should no longer have mages that start the expansion 12% crit on critters and reach 70% crit on Lich King / Deathwing. Or tanks that were so slow they took about each single hit of a gnoll and are able to dodge or parry (!!!) more than half of the big dragon hits.

Hence, this question is somehow meaningless (and from my personnal point of view, it's good to remove those caps that are "too effective", and quickly become required for any serious raiding).

Isn't miss chance versus a boss, this tier at least, 4.4%? I though that's where the extra 2.4% comes from, it's your parry, dodge, block, and miss chances reduced by 0.6%.

Also, Zork, that post was made back in August, and the testing was done at level 82 vs much lower level mobs. Wrong level and way too early in beta for the information to be valid now. I assume you're referring to the first post that is.

Mastery is still the best stat if anything because it helps reduce and smooth out incoming damage, making you easier to heal.

There's no question that the Mastery cap is much softer for Warriors than Pallies and it obviously depends on your specific stats, but do people think its worth stacking Mastery beyond the point of being unhittable if you could avoid the damage instead? I still have to crunch the actual numbers, so I'm not sure if it something we need to worry about (I'm fairly sure its already an issue for Pally tanks, but I know warrior Block rates are lower) taking into account the on use Block is also an issue. I know its not up nearly all the time, but it would still makes some component of Warrior Mastery useless a portion of the time, doesn't it? I doubt its something to worry about yet, but what about later tiers?

Yes, it's absolutely worth it. A reduction of 60% from 30% is nearly 1.5x (42.86%) the relative gain in damage reduction compared to 0% to 30%, and it's still not on diminishing returns. It's more important to stack mastery for crit block beyond the unhittable cap than it is before.

Isn't there more to mastery than this though?

For one, as was more important back in wotlk, isn't it usually better to have a more consistent and less intense version of damage avoidance? Even if we are given that tank deaths due to spiky damage is removed when the tank performs appropriately (and judging from some previous posts, I'm not sure we are), could it really ever be removed so much that it makes up essentially 0% of all tank deaths? I guess what I'm saying is, shouldn't mastery be given a little bit more credit than just what damage it avoids, because it does help mitigate large spikes in physical damage better? I believe the line between damage avoidance and EH should be a bit less binary, with at least some consideration being placed on both. I'm not saying that we should rely on mastery solely based on this virtue, I'm just saying given that the line is so thin anyway, shouldn't this consideration tip the scales a bit?

Yes, that is my thought as well. BTW, these are the graphs that are being referred to:

[Warrior] Critical Block Mechanics

As I understand them, it means if you have a combined parry/dodge/mastery rating as defined in the title of the specific graph, increasing mastery rating from that point(x axis) will increase or decrease damage comparatively to an equal amount of dodge/parry. For example, the 4600 rating graph means mastery isn't as good as parry/dodge at reducing average damage. And after you hit the softcap(that's what those inflection points are), it still isn't better.

But, as you can see, the percentages for damage taken(y axis) are in tenths. This is really nit-picking the point. Which is fine with me, on a theoretical level. However, I honestly doubt your healer is going to notice the difference. If anything, you probably just caused a bit more overheal. After that realization, I'll go back to favoring mastery. Consistent damage taken will have much more of an impact and it's easier to fill out the attack table with mastery.

I don't think everyone is really interpreting those graphs and what they mean to Warrior tanking - they are just looking at them and saying "the graph says Dodge/Parry is better than Mastery at <insert irrelevant total "Avoidance" rating>."

Increasing Avoidance (Miss/Dodge/Parry) has always been the best way to take less damage over the course of the fight. When patch 5.0 hits and some other mechanic is added to the game, Dodge and Parry will most likely still be the best way to reduce the damage you take over the course of a fight. The thing is - tanks don't die over the course of a fight. They die with in seconds, or even fractions of a second. In very small time frames, Avoidance doesn't mean jack. What saves you is guaranteed damage reduction.

Regarding the quote from Dellingr's post: I don't understand why you would ever advocate moving away from becoming unhittable. Especially when tip-toeing the line between being unhittable with Shield Block up, or not.

The same regarding Impending Victory and saving healer mana. Healer mana will only be saved if the healer doesn't cast the spell. Healers will only stop casting a spell if they know a heal is incoming, and for how much. The amount healed with IV is predictable, the timing is not - therefore a healer will not stop casting. I'm not saying it's not going to increase your survivability, I'm saying it's not going to save healer mana.

First of all, it somewhat depends on how your raid is organized. I know in the past, in large raid groups, healers have healing assignments to mitigate the possibility that after a large spike in damage to three different raid members (or in your example, the tank and two others), all healers focus on one target and the other two die. In the case of healer assignments, your example is more or less invalid, because the assigned healer will not lock up his GCDs if the tank isn't taking damage (and so would not heal other raid members). In some situations, healer assignments may not be needed - but if the need for healing is light enough that healers don't need some method to organize who is healing who on the fly (i.e. that overhealing - or wasted healing, is not planned for), is a couple percentage points more avoidance going to matter?

Secondly, if your tanks drop only due to a forseeable mechanic which occurs periodically, realistically, your healers must prepare for you to take full damage for a set period of time (as avoidance does not work all of the time) unless you are able to attain an avoidance cap that your "EH geared" counterpart could not. And keep in mind that when we say "avoidance geared" or "EH geared", we're mostly talking about trinkets or the selection of which avoidance stat one chooses. But at a very basic level, when only the most severe scenario (you dying - which is binary) matters, and since the number of periods of tank spike damage very quickly decreases the affect of avoidance on the most severe case (unless the number of attacks in each "spike" is very high, in which case, avoidance's mitigation of spikes in damage approaches its' avoidance value), EH is going to reduce the number of tank deaths faster than avoidance assuming reasonable values for both. Wotlk should have taught us that.

It really isn't as simple as "if one tank takes damage the whole time, and another doesn't" because of diminishing returns, because the mastery geared tank only takes more damage over small intervals a certain % of the time - and therefore, depending on overhealing, may only take less healing an even smaller % of the time, and because mastery and avoidance stats compare so closely in terms of avoided damage. Your last statement implies that in raiding gear, converting x mastery rating to x avoidance rating will create a substantial enough difference to affect healers' decision making. How large is the x in this statement and do you have any concrete support for this idea?

My experience with tanking has been that when I just barely avoid dying through avoidance I say "Man, glad I had that avoidance" even though I don't know for a fact I would have avoided the blow naked, and when I just barely die I say "Man, why couldn't I have avoided that? Better get some more avoidance" when I don't know for a fact that any level of attainable avoidance would have been enough to avoid the blow. I guess what I'm saying is that basing your decisions solely on perception, especially pertaining to randomly occuring events, is a poor choice. Several studies on the affect the human brain has on the perception of random events support this claim (For example, see the study published in MONEY here: http://www.jasonzweig.com/uploads/11...oeconomics.pdf).