[WotLK] 4.0 Warrior FAQ - Page 13

Akimo · 10/19/10, 5:20 AM

Q: I thought Parry sucked.
A: Parry now converts at the same rate as Dodge, and has the same diminishing returns. It also has synergy with the Hold the Line talent. As such having about as much, or slightly more, Parry as Dodge is a good mark to aim for.

Alright. Does this mean I should reduce my dodge until it's at the same level, or slightly below, parry?

That means I would be at 21%~ of both - And would have added another 10% to blocks through mastery, by reducing my dodge by 6%.

Morghie · 10/19/10, 7:54 AM

Originally Posted by Sair

Seems like the Mastery affecting Enraged Regeneration is just a tooltip bug, and it doesn't actually benefit.

I have done a few tests and the above (unfortunately) seems to be true.

Test #1
HP: 56,266
Mastery: 15.32
Enraged Regeneration tooltip percentage: 53%
Expected heal: 29,821 over 10 seconds => 9 ticks of 2982 + 1 tick of 2983
Real heal: 21,472 over 10 seconds => 8 ticks of 2147 + 2 ticks of 2148
Real percentage: 38%

Test #2
HP: 42,766
Mastery: 9.07
Enraged Regeneration tooltip percentage: 46%
Espected heal: 19,672 over 10 seconds => 8 ticks of 1967 + 2 ticks of 1968
Real heal: 16,320 over 10 seconds => 10 ticks of 1632
Real percentage: 38%

Conclusion: Not only does Enraged Regeneration NOT scale with mastery, it seems to be healing for too little considering the base heal percentage is 35% and Field Dressing is supposed to increase that amount by 20% (up to 42%)

Clap · 10/19/10, 11:46 AM

These numbers are confusing me,

Fury

* Slam now deals 150% weapon damage, up from 100%.
* Whirlwind now deals 75% weapon damage, up from 50%.
* Raging Blow now deals 150% weapon damage, up from 100%.
* Bloodthirst now scales from 75% of Attack Power, up from 50%.
* Bloodsurge now also makes Slam free to cast.

My raging blow is 125% and my whirlwind is 50%, bloodsurge doesnt state anything about being free on the talent, 2 days ago before rolling restarts my whirlwind was 65% weapon damage and i'm not sure about raging blow, the numbers are changing frequently but as it is my WW is at 50% weapon damage and Raging Blow is 125%.

Kylael · 10/19/10, 11:57 AM

I think these were Cataclysm beta changes that were erroneously attributed to also being live hotfixes on MMO-Champ.

jazman84 · 10/19/10, 9:40 PM

Have all the buffs to the Beta been moved to live? I have read posts saying the Opportunity Strike has. What about the Slam and Overpower buffs?

Agar · 10/20/10, 4:16 PM

Originally Posted by Seerow

Not to be disrespectful, but was any of this tested before you just said that Mastery sucks for prot? Because there's some theorycrafting going on on the live forums, with a couple of people independently building sims to check the relative value of dodge/parry/mastery, and right now it looks like your clear winner is Mastery > Parry == Dodge for overall mitigation. This is partially because of the faster scaling of mastery, so you can stack up to higher amounts and greatly reduce the chance of a regular hit landing much faster, and partly because a blocked attack still can proc Blood Craze, which accounts for a fair bit of healing in PVE now.

Here's the relevant thread: World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Prot Theorycraft - Mastery/Parry/Dodge

The relevant theory crafting here is based on the current beta values of prot mastery which is 1.25% block + 2.5% critical block. Currently on live servers however prot mastery only gives 1.25% block + 1.25% critical block and until this buff comes to live servers, mastery is still below parry and dodge from a mitigation standpoint.

Seerow · 10/20/10, 10:38 PM

Originally Posted by Agar

The relevant theory crafting here is based on the current beta values of prot mastery which is 1.25% block + 2.5% critical block. Currently on live servers however prot mastery only gives 1.25% block + 1.25% critical block and until this buff comes to live servers, mastery is still below parry and dodge from a mitigation standpoint.

As far as I'm aware the initial few posts made were based on the 1.25% crit block percent, and got pretty much the same results. Only later on did he update his sim to reflect the beta value to see the exact difference it made, and as expected Mastery remained ahead.

Jerrald · 10/21/10, 10:55 AM

Originally Posted by Darian_TruBlade

Fury

* Slam now deals 150% weapon damage, up from 100%.
* Whirlwind now deals 75% weapon damage, up from 50%.
* Raging Blow now deals 150% weapon damage, up from 100%.
* Bloodthirst now scales from 75% of Attack Power, up from 50%.
* Bloodsurge now also makes Slam free to cast.

With these buffs >20% is execute spamming still viable over maintaining your rotation, or should it be used only to stack executioner and a filler for when BT and RB are both on cd. also is execute > bloodsurge

Skyhawk · 10/21/10, 11:28 AM

Just to chime in a bit more on the Mastery/Parry/Dodge conversation, here are some Hold the Line uptime percentages (with times included per fight) with a Parry rating of roughly 21%. The sample size isn't great (sorry) but from what I do have here it looks like you can count on HtL being up for a majority of any fight you're taking constant melee damage on.

Halion
3:56 - 79.4%
3:41 - 92.3%
5:52 - 67.8%
1:02 - 33.3%
5:44 - 85.7%

Saurfang
2:13 - 53.4%

Rotface
2:35 - 54.7%

Blood Prince Council (Taldaram and Valanar)
2:27 - 67.0%

Putricide
3:53 - 44.9%
* ooze phase highly diminishes this percentage

As far as how this is related to the Mastery/Parry/Dodge conversation, obviously the more Parry you have the higher the chance HtL will proc. With this in mind I didn't reforge any Parry to Mastery rating, just Dodge, and remember that Mastery also affects critical block percent (as does HtL). Some of the block values I found in the logs were pretty nice to look at (Mastery rating of 15.71):

[18:22:45.142] Halion hits Slaymode 6153 (O: -1, A: 8249, B: 21603)
[18:23:00.038] Halion hits Slaymode 9121 (O: -1, A: 5014, B: 21202)
[18:23:38.734] Living Inferno hits Slaymode 7046 (O: -1, B: 10568, R: 4893)
[18:23:49.195] Halion hits Slaymode 9250 (O: -1, A: 4396, B: 20468)
[18:24:11.508] Living Inferno hits Slaymode 7849 (O: -1, B: 11773, R: 5450)
[18:24:13.964] Living Inferno hits Slaymode 8126 (O: -1, B: 12188, R: 5643)
[18:26:00.652] Halion hits Slaymode 15673 (O: -1, A: 411, B: 24125)
[18:39:24.694] Prince Taldaram hits Slaymode 289 (O: -1, A: 14295, B: 21875)
[18:39:49.107] Prince Valanar hits Slaymode 18492 (O: -1, B: 27737)
[18:40:12.156] Prince Taldaram hits Slaymode 891 (O: -1, A: 16771, B: 26492)
[18:40:15.583] Prince Valanar hits Slaymode 15534 (O: -1, A: 1890, B: 26135)
[18:18:56.166] Deathbringer Saurfang hits Slaymode 7970 (O: -1, B: 11955)
[18:18:59.759] Deathbringer Saurfang hits Slaymode 7519 (O: -1, A: 1824, B: 14014)
[18:31:20.658] Rotface hits Slaymode 5577 (O: -1, A: 1934, B: 11266)

This is just a small snippet of some combined logs, but it's pretty clear that Mastery is conceivably our best stat especially now that Armor has been reduced. Because of the relationship between Parry and HtL it doesn't really make much sense to reforge any Parry rating if you value Mastery, which leads to the conclusion that our defensive stat priorities should be Mastery -> Parry -> Dodge, and the only thing that should be reforged to get more Mastery is Dodge.

McC · 10/21/10, 6:12 PM

I've been involved in the Theorycrafting thread over in the official forums and thought I might share some of my findings. Please be gentle.

First, HtL's uptime is easily modeled by

H = 1-(1-p)^(10/a)

where p is your parry chance, a is your attacker's attack interval (i.e. number of seconds between attacks), and H is your time-averaged uptime for HtL as a percentage of the fight. Simulation bears this equation out, though it will obviously be much more erratic for shorter fights than for long ones.

Second, thinking about block/dodge/parry in an abstract sense, they all contribute to whether or not you can be hit by a full attack or not.

Dodge and parry result in no damage, while block results in 40-70% of the damage you would have taken without mitigation, before armor and other absorptions are factored in. It is always better to take a lesser hit than to take a full one. Mastery increases Block at a faster rate than dodge/parry rating increase dodge/parry. Consequently, until you attain sufficient block+dodge+parry+miss to avoid all full hits, mastery is substantially better than dodge or parry per percent avoidance provided. Mastery can not (currently) exceed 40% of your unreforged, combined dodge+parry rating, so that provides a hard cap on how much mastery you can have, given your current gear. The remainder should be split almost evenly between dodge and parry, with slight (<10%) favoritism given to parry due to HtL.

Once you have sufficient avoidance to not be hit by any full hits, mastery immediately loses all value: it is always better to take no hit than to take even a mitigated hit (no, I'm not talking about the value of EH here; that's an entirely different matter). As such, mastery should only be used at this point to ensure one remains unhittable, and all available points should then go toward dodge/parry, maintaining the same ratio mentioned before.

Here are some example cases (also posted on the WoW forums):

Using 1750 rating points...
Best avoidance: 15.8%, 15.32%, 48.79% (84.92%)
        DR: 520
        PR: 530
        MR: 690

Using 2000 rating points...
Best avoidance: 16.92%, 16.61%, 51.51% (90.04%)
        DR: 590
        PR: 610
        MR: 790

Using 2500 rating points...
Best avoidance: 19.18%, 18.86%, 56.96% (99.99%)
        DR: 740
        PR: 760
        MR: 990

Using 3000 rating points...
Found an unhittable configuration!
Avoidance: 24.7%, 25.17%, 45.25% (100.12%)
        DR: 1170
        PR: 1260
        MR: 560
Damage taken: 23.13%

A few caveats:

None of those cases actually add up to the number of rating points they claim to use, because I'm simulating in hops of 10 rather than hops of 1 to speed things along. The actual values will be within 10 rating points of those.
I'm also not 100% certain about my damage taken calculation, which will ultimately influence nothing in terms of weighting dodge/parry/mastery against one another.
Parry rating may not be as important as parry itself, because of the contribution green strength now provides to parry rating. You can reforge gear-derived parry rating, but not gear-derived strength, so the amount of parry you can actually shunt around is likely going to be smaller than the amount of dodge you can shunt around.

I hope this is useful.

Taliafears · 10/22/10, 2:49 PM

Has anybody seen a critical block on a boss' special attack? I am fully reforged for Mastery and was browsing through the log for Marrowgar last night. 19 blocks of Bone Slice, none critical. The other warrior did not critically block Bone Slice either. Found a couple other random logs and couldn't find anybody critically blocking Bone Slice.

Varze · 10/22/10, 6:50 PM

Originally Posted by Taliafears

Has anybody seen a critical block on a boss' special attack? I am fully reforged for Mastery and was browsing through the log for Marrowgar last night. 19 blocks of Bone Slice, none critical. The other warrior did not critically block Bone Slice either. Found a couple other random logs and couldn't find anybody critically blocking Bone Slice.

Confirmation on my logs, at least that special attack received no critical block on my end.

Edit: Correction after further analysis it looks like I didn't crit block Sindies cleave after all, sorry for the mistake.

Moophisto · 10/29/10, 12:29 PM

Originally Posted by Varze

Confirmation on my logs, at least that special attack received no critical block on my end.

Edit: Correction after further analysis it looks like I didn't crit block Sindies cleave after all, sorry for the mistake.

It's been labeled as a bug.

Any attack which can be blocked should also be able to be critically blocked. If this does not happen, it's a bug. We will investigate e.g. Marrowgar Saber Lash and Sindragosa's Cleave.

Blue Post

• Scorned · 12/05/10, 5:55 AM

ATTENTION

Just a friendly reminder to anyone who hasn’t caught the announcement post that’s been globally stickied on the boards: Most of the current threads on this and other class-specific boards are going to be locked in approximately 24 hours to make room for the shiny new Cataclysm era. If you have any last-minute posts you’d like to add or discussions you’d like to wrap up, now is the time to do so.