Mongoose

Anub'arak hits for 27500 on average in 25 man.

Armor mitigation: .16% * 27500 = 44

27500 - 44 = 27456

.36% * 27456 = 98.84

98.84/45000 = .22%

In order for Mongoose to be at least as good as Blood Draining, you need to see 5 stacks of blood reserve less than 1 time out of 20 times that you are reduced to below 35%. Clearly, Mongoose is better than 26 agil to weap. However, depending on how often you get reduced to below 35%, Blood Draining isn't necessarily better than mongoose. In order for Mongoose to pull ahead of Blood Draining, you would need to be getting hit to below 35% more than once every 5 seconds. I'm assuming that between auto attack and 1 sec global cooldown on specials, you should be able to get 5 stacks of blood reserve up in 5 seconds.

Next, I'll try and apply the same approach to Blade Warding. Even if the numbers I'm crunching can be considered to be gross exaggerations of what is happening in a fight, I'm applying the same exaggerations consistently. After these calculations are finished, I will test Blood Draining to see how closely its performance matches up with my assumptions. I think that Blood Draining is really the only enchant that needs to be tested for in-game performance, because it's the only one not based on avoidance chance. It's ability operates on a completely different mechanic, which, IMO, makes it very refreshing

Nope. It takes about 50 seconds since there's an internal cooldown on the stack procs of 10 seconds.

Bryn88,

You're right, I missed that, thank you.

So the question changes slightly.

In 50 seconds, will you:

A. Avoid the hit that kills you when you are below 35%

or

B. Stay above 35% for 50 second periods throughout a fight.

If you can "stay safe" for 50 seconds, then you have a free smart health pot usable about 2-3 times per fight. I'll take a look at my math and see if I can tweak it to figure out EH ratio to total health with the 10 second internal cd.

It will be interesting how these scenarios play out in ICC. -dodge but could be that could make blade warding that more favorable because it's parry.

However, I heard that they will decrease the size of the boss hits and increase their frequency, so we should actually see fewer times when we are below 35%, allowing us to accrue more stacks of blood reserve.

If we assume that you are going below 35% at least once every 50 seconds vs Anub HC which seems pretty reasonbale then the heal from Blood Draining will be 400 per 10 seconds since at that rate every stack you get will be used. It doesn't matter if it is used at one stack or at five, as long as you never waste a proc due to being over 5 stacks it will be a total of 400 healing per ten seconds.

If your 44 number is accurate then Anub would have to be hitting you 400 / 44 = 9.1 times per ten seconds which seems quite unlikely.

But look a bit more. Mongoose is, an average of an extra 0.53% chance to dodge, on average. So if we take a situation where you tank anub for 4 minutes and he is melee attacking every 2 seconds for 27.5k on average.

In total he will attack you 120 times. Lets take a slightly low 60% total avoidance figure.

So your avoidance becomes 60.53% on average due to mongoose meaning in 120 swings you take 27,500 * 0.0053 * 120 = 17,490 less damage due to the avoidance on mongoose.
You will also take 44 less damage on 45% of the attacks that hit due to the armor increase. So that is 120 * 0.3947 * 44 = 2084 less damage due to the armor proc.

Total damage mitigated by mongoose, on average will be: 19,570 damage per fight.

In 4 minutes you will use 24 stacks of Blood Draining for 9,600 healed.

So in that particular example the mitigation you get from mongoose is about twice as much as the healing you get from Blood Draining (using the OPs 45% uptime for mongoose figure).

So the question then is how much of the mitigation you are getting from Mongoose comes at a time when you need it? That is going to be directly proportional to how much of the time you spend "in danger" however you define that. All of the blood draining comes when you are in danger, i.e. on low health. You would need to be in danger about 50% of the time for mongoose to provide better mitigation at those times. Whether you are or not only you can decide.

This is interesting because your argument seems to support Blood Draining more and more as your gear is upgraded. More stamina, mitigation, and avoidance on gear means less time spent "in danger", allowing Blood Draining a greater opportunity to reach 5 stacks.

I was arguing the opposite, comparing the benefits of Blood Draining and Mongooose as a percentage of health. Since Blood Draining does not scale with increased stamina, i.e. it's not healing for a percentage of your overall health, it becomes less meaningful with increasingly better gear. "Better" meaning higher stamina.

However, instead of comparing Blood Draining's heal to Mongoose's dodge/armor based on "overall tank health", I'm starting to think that it needs to be based on a combination of "time spent in danger" and "size of incoming hit", which previous posters have already theory-crafted on.

Something that has not been considered is:
Blood Draining's benefit is effectively working with any type of incoming damage; melee, magic, or AE. Mongoose only works on melee attacks.

But getting the 5/5 effect once every 50 seconds isn't more hps than getting 1/5 effect every 10 seconds. It seems to me that Blood Draining only loses efficiency when you go past those 50 seconds without a need for its effect.

With regards to the changes in 3.3 including the debuff Chill of the Frozen Throne. The reduction in avoidance would seem to reduce the effectiveness of mongoose's agility boost. Also bosses hit comparatively less now and so tanks should be taking less spikey damage, which should mean blood draining is consumed less often and therefore provides less frequent but larger heals.

This question has plagued me for some time. While I don't have a conclusive answer (wtb mathematical model of blade ward), I can share some thoughts which otheres here seem to have overlooked.

First up, in a raid-buffed situation, unless I've missed something Mongoose is worth 132 agility due to Blessing of Kings. Everything I've seen above calculates Mongoose's value from 120 agility.

Second, though it's obvious, I feel like it should be stated explicitely that when comparing Blade Ward to Mongoose, your mileage may vary. All of these damage-mitigated totals and similar stats seem to be calculated using entirely arbitrary before-proc stats. Since the two enchants are affected by seperate diminishing returns curves, this arbitrary base stat array can't be used to extrapolate generalized payoff ratios (nor. without a complete breakdown of stats used to model, can what we get be normalized for a parry/dodge split balanced for DR). Generally speaking the more parry rating you have, the worse Blade Ward is going to look compared to Mongoose, but this is a loose rule and there is plenty of room for odd cases.

Third, Icecrown so far seems to favor fights that involve tank-swapping or time-dispersed damage to the off-tank. Due to the way Blade Ward behaves when you're not being attacked this causes mayhem on the math. For example, when evaluating Blade Ward on Saurfang, the buff uptime is a useless number: because you will never parry when you're not tanking him, more procs will run down to time and more buff timers will refresh due to stacking, but this increased uptime takes place mostly while the buff does nothing. Calculating exactly how much timer refreshing extends off-period procs into the live period on average should be doable for warriors, but it's a messy probability calculation I don't have the patience for in the early AM hours. If you care, note that off-period Mongoose procs still provide the threat benefit, unlike Blade Ward.

Fourth, I'd just like to point out that the Blood Draining advocates in this thread seem to be enamoured with its being "always there when you need it", but to my eyes that is hardly more certain than Mongoose or Blade Ward. Just off the top of my head, here's some questions that aren't easily answered:
How often do you take damage > 35% of your health pool?
How often do you drop below 35%, then catch a wave of overhealing before the next hit lands?
How often do you drop below 35%, then get overkilled by 1801-2200? Blood Draining at 5 stacks will fail to save you from about half of these.
How often do you drop below 35% and catch less than 5 stacks of Blood Draining?
How often are you saved from death by Blood Draining, then killed anyway before your healers can stabilize you?


After stirring the pot so much, I can at least contribute one or two certainties. Provided I haven't forgotten anything, Mongoose proc should yield 295.68 armour (132 agi @ 2 armour per agi = 264, +10% 5/5 toughness, +2% meta gem). Mongoose proc should also yield 1.795% dodge before diminishing returns (132 agi @ 73.53 agi per 1% dodge).

I can agree that when using mongoose, I usually have within 1% of 30% uptime for tank-and-spank boss fights.

I can state that I enjoy the fact that my mongoose procs never wholly "miss" (provided I'm being attacked) due to the armour component, and suffer from less spikey behavior than blade ward's consumeable buff.



I can also suggest the basis for a strategy to employ for analysing Blade Ward (which would require a full parse to use)... please check my logic. Here's my thought:

thesis: avoidance value of blade ward = (parries caused by blade ward) / (times attacked when able to parry)

define:
(parries caused by blade ward) = (times a stack of the buff was consumed) / (percentage of your parry chance contributed by blade ward (pPC))

pPC = (average parry chance increase from blade ward at buff consumption (aPI)) / (average parry chance at buff consumption (aPC))

aPC = (("base" raid-buffed parry chance) + aPI)

aPI = (average parry chance increase from 1 stack at consumption (aPI1)) + aPI2 + aPI3 + aPI4 + aPI5

aPI* = (increase in parry chance at * stacks from parry chance at 1 less stack) * (percentage of buff consumptions which occur with at least * stacks active)



The number you get using this will obviously be a literal-value-in-this-case number, but averaging out the results from enough fights should give you a real expected value for your enchant. What I've posted is essentially psuedo-code, so if anyone familiar with combat log parsing wants to automate the algorythem it should be straight forward.

The thing is, Blade Ward/Mongoose do something different than Blood Draining. Its like trying to compare an Avoidance Trinket to a Stamina Trinket. Both of them provide something valuable, but they provide that value in a different context. If you want more avoidance, you should go with Mongoose or Blade Ward, if raw health is what you need, then you should use Blood Draining. I strongly doubt that there is enough difference between them to use one type when gearing according to a different philosophy.

My point is that that outlook makes no sense to me. Blood draining is not "raw health," it is a chance of a variable-size heal, much like blade ward is a chance to not suffer a variable-size hit. Your example of stam vs avoidance is a different case: the reason we consider stam/ehp seperately from avoidance is that avoidance is RNG based. Blood draining can and will still fail for reasons outside of player control, so it's really more comparable to avoidance than stamina despite having the word health in its tooltip.

Right, it is a chance of a variable size heal, and you do not always know what the heal will be, but unless you are constantly flipping back and forth between over 35% health, and under 35% health (which will still result in small heals about every 10 seconds or so), or you go from over 35% health to dead in one shot, the chance that you will get SOME type of heal from it is nearly 100%, not having at least one stack up while attacking something just doesn't happen. To my knowledge, there is no stamina or health enchant for weapons, so if you want health on a weapon, Blood Draining is pretty well your only option. The lowest it can heal you for is 360 health. Looking at a few of our guild's parses (Heroic Northrend Beasts and Lord Marrowgar), it looks like the average heal I am getting from it is about 1200. On the low end, that makes it worth about 1 Solid Majestic Zircon, and on average, that makes it worth about 4 of them. Yes, there are cases were it will be worth nothing, but, since I can't get health on my weapon in any other way, I am willing to deal with that.

Agreed, I wish there was something better/more interesting for tanking enchants.

Well, it doesn't have a thread because it's important, it has a thread because it's confusing. You're not any more likely to wipe a raid because you chose Greater Inscription of the Whatsit over Heavy Borean Armour Kit for your shoulder enchant, but the only reason we don't bicker over that is we all feel well informed enough to decide. When it comes to weapon enchants, many of us find the choices difficult to evaluate because discovering what they actually do is computationally hideous.

RE: blood draining and the EH arguement. If you're going to play the hardline EH card, you want 26 agility. After talents and raid buffs that's going to net you ~62 armour 100% of the time. Ok, it's insignificant EH, but it's EH. Blood Draining isn't.


Is there a recount-style addon that tracks your HP totals cross-sectioned with a timeline? It would be nice to know how often I am between dead-from-average-hit-damage and dead-from-average-hit-damage-plus-3200, how long I sit there, etc. I always check my death log on boss fights, and I almost never get overkilled by less than 5k, but there's a selection bias there.

With ICC now upon us and the second wing opening this week I've been revisiting threads regarding tanking weapon enchants for some further insight before selecting a (possibly) new enchant for my argent defender. Given that the totc gear really lacked hit, I eventually went with Accuracy - my healers weren't complaining about keeping me up so threat boost it was

The new ICC gear seems to be loaded with hit rating and there are some choice pieces with big chunks of expertise on them also, add in the two piece tier 10 set bonus and I think we'll be doing nicely on threat.

Now most of what I've read places Mongoose above the others purely because it's an all-rounder, reasonable up-time, armor and dodge from the agility netting us a nice increase to overall damage mitigation.

However I can't get away from the thought that Blood Draining is there when you need it, one of the things that's making paladins such a popular tank right now is their argent defender that's also there when they need it. Now I know comparing the two is probably a bad idea given that AD will always save them providing it's not on CD and it heals for far more than blood draining even at 5 stacks.

The simple fact is though, Blood Draining could save my bacon preventing the wipe - this certainly appeals to me as a tank as i'm sure it does to all.

The second thought I've had is regarding the new ICC itemisation and the dodge debuff making us look towards massive amounts of armor once again rather than avoidance (as we know avoidance scales with itself, the more you have the better it becomes and we've just lost 20%).

I'm personally looking towards items like the emblems belt, chest, crafted leggings etc with those huge armor values boosting our guaranteed mitigation.

Now forgive me if I'm wrong, as I have no maths to back this up I'm simply using common sense here - but surely having a higher armor value also helps Blood Draining do it's job even better. Namely you drop below 35% health it heals you for approx 2k (at 5 stacks) possibly saving you from the killing blow on the next hit allowing your healers those precious second to top you off or use guardian spirit to save you. However with a higher armor value it reduces the damage taken in the worst case scenario (ie a hit that's unblocked).

Please bear in mind I'm not looking at the enchants based off a "what the best overall mitigation" standpoint, I'm looking at it from a "What's going to save me ending up as a stain on the floor of ICC".

Thoughts people?

I think to many people are worrying about the enchant saving them in the ohshit scenario, rather than overall. Blood Draining might help you survive an oh shit situation, but an enchant like mongoose can help you from never even getting into that ohshit scenario in the first place.

Personally I've been using bladeward, but I will probably switch to mongoose now that I have a new weapon. I personally just don't like the lack luster ammount of health that blood draining heals. A 400 every 10 seconds will not help you survive at 20k hit, and in most cases if a healer gets to you in time, they will be more than 400 health over the required survival point. Even at 2000, which is less likely, it seems a little low to make the difference of life and death. All of this is considering that you go below 35% before dying in the first place...

I would have to agree with Hikarodesu. I would rather enchant for overall benefit. In an "ohshit" scenario, more than just the tank factors in, such as healer capability, DPS capability, utility classes being able to pull something out of their hat, etc. I don't think a simple enchant is really going to help save the group, but rather should be put to use as an overall preventative measure.

I'm not quiet sure how you figure. You effectively get a stack of blood reserve every 10-12 seconds. You almost always have a stack on you, and even if you are ping ponging back and forth above and below 35%, every other time you will usually have at least 1 stack up. Granted, its only going to heal you for about 400 or so, but you still get something, which is basically what the OP said.

I can't remember what thread it was on, but someone asked if Blade Ward had become better at all with the recent change to proc mechanics, so I ran with it enchanted in ToGC tonight, log here: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

Northrend Beasts:
6 procs total for 11.2% uptime, never stacked past 1
2 procs activated for 1733 damage total
3.3% maximum increase in avoidance
20.34% parry listed, 25% attacks parried, 4.66% parry increase over listed

Lord Jaraxxus:
10 procs total for 35.1% uptime, three 2 stacks (two activated), one 3 stack (activated).
3 procs activated for 6320 damage total
5.2% maximum increase in avoidance
20.12% parry listed, 22.41% attacks parried, 2.29% parry increase over listed

Twin Valkyr:
12 procs total for 25.8% uptime, one 3 stack (zero activated)
7 procs activated for 11,312 damage total
7.5% maximum increase in avoidance
20.12% parry listed, 21.27% attacks parried, 1.15% parry increase over listed

Anub'arak (add duty):
14 procs total for 4.4% uptime, one 2 stack (activated)
13 procs activated for 12,805 damage total
A very miniscule amount of avoidance added that I don't really want to math out right now, sorry .


One interesting thing about the Anub log is that it looks like it stacks off of Cleave:

[20:37:44.013] Jamesvz gains Blade Warding from Jamesvz
[20:37:44.013] Jamesvz gains Blade Warding (2) from Jamesvz

Will run more tests in ICC. It doesn't look like a bad enchant all around, but it could definitely be a bit more consistent. The damage it adds seems pretty irrelevant for any serious tanking application. From just this log, I would say this enchant could be made better by increasing the uptime and proc rate and nerfing the actual effect by a good margin. We'll see what happens in ICC, though.

EDIT: Should also mention that the avoidance increase isn't necessarily accurate since those may have been parried anyway.

EDIT2: Added my listed parry versus what was actually parried.

Still unsure of who the winner is in this debate i decided to troll a bit and parse the logs of some guilds which have killed Lich King heroic. Since the general consensus is that Blood Draining is a good EH enchant and is "there when you need it", and also given that Arthas can quite often bring a tank to less than 35% health with 1 melee hit, one would assume that Blood Draining would be a great situational enchant for such a fight. Keep in mind that the enchant has a 10 second internal cooldown and is most effective when at 5 stacks.

After browsing through the parses of 2 guilds which have killed Arthas on hard mode I was surprised to find that Blood Draining barely healed tanks at all, regardless of their role in the fight. In both of their successful encounters, the maximum amount of direct heals from the enchant was a meager 12 for an average of almost 1300. The lowest was 2, but did heal for almost 3k.

Keep in mind that the Lich King encounter is incredibly melee intensive on tanks, and each hit can be in excess of 40k (unmitigated). Also, this fight generally tends to last upwards of 18 minutes, and the fact that in such a large amount of time Blood Draining only proc'ed between 2-12 times is rather disappointing. In our most optimistic sample, the total healed by Blood Draining was 15543 over the course of 18 minutes and 31 seconds. Compare that to the uptime of Mongoose in such a fight and the damage intake it would reduce from the bonus armor it provides on each melee hit.

Is it safe to assume that Mongoose would mitigate more than 15543 damage in an 18:31 fight? If we figure conservatively that the average tank takes 2 million melee damage over the course of the fight (MT or OT) and that Mongoose has an average uptime of 25% that means that 500,000 melee damage is subject to armor mitigation provided by Mongoose. I'm not totally sure what the conversion would be for calculating what percentage of damage the extra armor Mongoose mitigates, but if we take a very low number, lets say 0.5% then Mongoose would stop 25,000 melee damage which is more than the healing provided in the best case scenario I found. In the other scenarios such armor mitigation would provide up to 5x the benefit.


Logs:

Premonition
MT: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis
OT: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

vodka
MT: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis
OT: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

Hmm, 25k hp spread out over 18 minutes is not a very big deal though..

It would be interesting to know if any of the Blood Draining procs actually saved the tank from dying of the following hit

Edit: Capital H, I.

0.5% is honestly a high estimate for how much additional damage reduction 240 armor would give, especially for warriors that stack armor. For example, if I have full raidbuffs, I sit at 40108 armor (before armor potion or ring proc), and thus 70.68% damage reduction from a level 83 attacker. 240 additional armor brings the dr to 70.8%, for an increase of 0.12%.

So using that 500,000 melee damage you cited, the damage reduced by the armor provided by mongoose is 600, assuming my level of armor. The argument for mongoose's avoidance and threat remains valid, but from an EH standpoint it's rather negligible.

EDIT: .5% of 500,000 is 2500. maybe you meant 5,000,000?

@Skyhawk:

Firstly, LK Heroic is a 15:00 to 15:30 encounter as the Beserk timer ist 15 minutes and you can zerg him a bit after he berserks. The logs show it as 18 to 19 minutes because of the roleplay part after Fury of Frostmourne is cast.
Secondly, you should be aware of the different phases of the encounter and thus different incoming damage on the tanks.
Being the OT on this encounter (log), it's like this:

Phase 1 (tanking all the adds): heavy physical damage
First transition phase (tanking Raging Spirits): medium spell and physical damage
Phase 2 (tanking the remaining Raging Spirit, afterwards tanking the Valkyrs' Life Siphon): at first medium spell and physical damage, later heavy (but steady) spell damage
Second transition phase (tanking two Raging Spirits at the same time): heavy spell and physical damage
Phase 3 (tanking the remaining Raging Spirits, afterwards crushing the Vile Spirits): heavy spell and physical damage, afterwards heavy (burst) spell damage

Thus for me, Blood Draining is a no-brainer at LK. In P1 it's all about surviving the damage spikes like a frenzyed Shambling Horror's Shockwave which hits for ~75k. The Raging Spirits can also deal some nasty burst damage casting a Shriek for ~25k instantly followed by a melee hit for ~25k. Tanking the Valkyrs means there is a steady flow of ~10k spell damage per second, combined with an Infest hitting I sometimes drop below 35%, proccing Blood Reserve (Mongoose wouldn't do anything for me here).
Later on in P3 you spend several minutes in the Frostmourne room dodging the Spirit Bombs, so the weapon enchant is irrelevant there. When crushing the Vile Spirits I rarely have a lot of Blood Reserve stacks up, but a one stack heal for ~500 is better than nothing and Mongoose again wouldn't do anything for me here.

As a conclusion, you should be careful at judging enchants by just watching at the numbers. 17k heal in a 15 minute encounter might seem low at first, but 17k heal at the right moments can decide the outcome of the fight. In addition to that, it would of course be much more than 17k if LK was a 15 minute tank and spank encounter.
Not saying that Blood Draining is great, but from my point of view it's the best for tanking the current heroic content.