When you are past CTC, the next step to smoothness is minimizing normal block amounts, the new worst case scenario. The difficulty seems to be determining which is smoother, more mastery or more avoidance. The Power of Avoidance thread offers nothing in this regard.

I dont find it confusing but lets look at 2 hypothetical situations and ill be using a lvl 85 mob just for convenience sake. Lets say this warrior has 17.5 dodge 17.5 parry and 55% block. 5% miss+17.5% dodge+17.5% parry+55% block= 95% CTC. This warrior would have a 35% crit block chance before hold the line. Under the 2 roll system you'd see a crit block 35% of 55%=19.25% of the time. And under the percentage based method its exactly the same.

Now this warrior has 17.5% dodge 17.5% parry and 70% block and 50% crit block. 5%+17.5%+17.5%+70%= 110% coverage. Under the 2 roll system you'd see a crit block 50% of 60% used block = 30% of the time, but under the percentage based youd see one 50% of 70% =35% of the time.

I have not found any testing on this, mainly due to mastery still being bad past the CTC cap in both cases. Its just wait shade of bad is it.

Thats fine if this is how you define "smooth". In my view, "worst case scenario" is tanks health reaching 0 in a short period of time. This may happen in a variety of ways. And minimizing "normal block" may not be the only or the best way of reducing the chances of this happening. Hence the article. May be dated and not talk about mastery in particular, but things like TtL and BT are not going anywhere any time soon.

What about 17.9999999? 10.0000001? I would like some math to show where I should draw the line.

And whats a spike? Does "normal block" always cause a spike? Is it the only way to get a spike? Is there a possibility that "normal block" is just a part of the picture?

If you show me a significant log where someone with "17.5% dodge 17.5% parry and 70% block" blocks 70% of the time, we will talk about the second case.

Exactly this. We should not be overly concerned because stamina is superior to avoidance this tier. But the mastery system is unlikely to change mechanically--so now is our best opportunity to find out how mastery really works.

To us, a physical damage spike is caused by a string of normal blocks in a row. We lower the burst damage by making crit blocks more common, so that regular blocks are less common. We lower the frequency of burst damage by turning those blocks into avoidance.

Excuse the mistake, I misstated how it works.

Stacking avoidance lowers the frequency of blocks, making a string of blocks less likely.
Stacking mastery mitigates blocks when they happen, by sometimes causing crit blocks. Mastery cannot always be counted on to mitigate damage like armor does, so we should think of mastery similar to how we think of avoidance, at least until the crit block cap is reachable.

Due to DR, we lose about 20-25% of dodge/parry rating in BiS gear. Turning 69% blocks into 0% dodges is more effective, but we affect less of the combat table when we do so. Mastery affects the combat table at a constant rate post-CTC, but turns 69% blocks into 38% crit blocks.

Best-case scenario for mastery:

179.2 Mastery rating gives 1.5% crit block, which we divide into 60% block on the table to get 0.9% crit block.
179.2 Dodge rating gives 1% dodge before DR, or about 0.75% dodge.

Since a dodge or parry is 55% better than a crit block, crit block gets reduced to 0.495%.

For mitigating damage, dodge and parry need to be losing 50% of their value to make mastery better. For both dodge and parry, this happens at ~12,000 rating.

You are clearly misunderstanding. The difference is, is crit block literally a 2 roll system or is crit block a sub percent of your total block chance? AKA the percentage method. So when your past the CTC cap, is crit block based off of your total block chance including that passed the cap or your actual used block chance. I never said that warrior was blocking 70% of the time. I just said that he had 70% block chance.

Surprising numbers ahead!

I went to World of Logs and checked out a few bosses' damage numbers. Yor'sahj seems to be around 50k on plate, which after some math means about 125k before armor. Since warriors at CTC have block as their worst-case scenario, 125k*0.69*0.40, or 35k for a blocked swing.

Plugging that into the Burst Time formula from TS:

Burst Time(# of attacks)=(1/avoidance)((1/(1-avoidance)^(HP/Worst-case boss damage))-1)

BT=(1/a)((1/(1-a)^(HP/35,000))-1)

Comparing a mastery set, an avoidance set, and a stamina set gives:
Mastery: BT=(1/0.3969)*(1/((0.6031)^(229,831/35,000))-1)~=67.2096 swings
Avoidance: BT=(1/0.5117)*(1/((0.4883)^(228,515/35,000))-1)~=208.6897 swings
Stamina: BT=(1/0.3969)*(1/((0.6031)^(262,213/35,000))-1)~=108.8069 swings

For higher boss damage, these numbers get closer. The mastery set is clearly behind because we haven't accounted for crit blocks in the formula. We don't account for crit blocks because we are assuming a worst-case scenario of all regular blocks.

If we do account for crit blocks, we multiply the average boss hit (50k) by (crit block%*0.38+(1-crit block%)*.69)
Plugging those numbers in, we get:

Mastery: BT=(1/0.3969)*(1/((0.6031)^(229,831/50,000/0.525018))-1)~=208.3661 swings
Avoidance: BT=(1/0.5117)*(1/((0.4883)^(228,515/50,000/0.593156))-1)~=487.4533 swings
Stamina: BT=(1/0.3969)*(1/((0.6031)^(262,213/50,000/0.556607))-1)~=292.9105 swings

Edit: I used my own BiS mastery, stam, and avoidance sets for this. Invariably, your numbers will be different. However, even for larger boss damage, the ranking of avoidance>stamina>mastery remains.

You are confusing yourself, there is no crit block on the combat table. Its a separate 100die roll that knows nothing about your block chance.

You can't just avg out critblock and stick into the formula, its a different animal and works differently. There are also other things to consider, ie HtL, etc. Yorsahj is a bad fight to start with because its a magic fight and BT best describes a physical model. Usually, the lesser the hits in relation to the health pool, the more it favors avoidance. In addition, you need to assign some sort of limits, beyond which BT becomes meaningless as it simply exceeds the duration of your major CD. In other words, you have overstated avoidance and they are all a lot closer to each other than your numbers suggest. Most of the time, you would be looking at Stam > Avoid > Mast past CTC, but its not like you should go all out on one of them ignoring the cost.

Resolute would still be better even if we were to stack mastery. Or stamina. Its just a better ring all around. So go figure.

Ok look. I usually try to stay out of these things. But, do you actually have any evidence of that, or a source you would care to share? This has been the commonly held assumption yes; but what people seem to be asking for here is evidence, not repetition of the very assumption they are questioning. Personally I have always assumed the game is smart enough to assign crit block to a % of the overall block (regular and crit) portion of the combat table based on your crit block %, which should be functionally identical in outcome to a 2 roll system while only needing one calculation per combat table update rather than a separate roll per every melee attack... but just saying it does not make it so.

Either way I eagerly await more constructive exploration of all the possibilities.

On the contrary, I haven't been confused at all. Until DS gear, it has not been possible to test either of the scenarios as the results would be unconclusive, and you still need near full heroic gear so that there is enough disparity between the results that they could be decisive. The game is smart enough to look at your stats and assign crit block on the table as a sub portion of your block. Your combat table would look like this. It would also be more resourceful for the system to do it this way since its all in 1 roll.

Um, because no one stacks their block that high but whatever. We will convert to boss level to demonstrate since you mentioned a boss. So 40% avoidance + 70% block-102.4%= 7.6% past the block cap. So with shield block up 70% block = 82.6% crit block. So 82.6% of 70%=57.82% seen crit block chance which is lower than the 62.4% used block chance. So in graph form

In other words 25% increased block chance does not equal 25% seen crit blocks. That said Ultraxion would be the best fight to test it out on. Though we need data from countless logs to make sure. You will need 2000+ melees to have your margin of error low enough to have conclusive results.