what to do after Block Cap

[Schroom]

they should be about equal when you are raidbuffed to get the most out of it. As you get more parry from buffs than dodge, unbuffed this means about you could have up to 1 % more dodge. it always depends on yout values an the diminishing return how much more dodge than parry you really need to "synchonize" them in the raid.

[Era]

As I am now I have almost identical Parry/Dodge when fully raid buffed, so I suppose I've been doing it right then! :p

[daiceman]

Yeah imagine us using dodge on wrists when it launched, lol.

Nice, a fellow LW who wears plate!

[Cragwell]

I know this may come a little bit out of left field, but our DPS is actually pretty good on a lot of tightly tuned fights. On Madness I am doing 29k with a soft cap expertise and about 2.44% hit. I am strongly considering hit capping and hard capping expertise with the mastery reforging. That is *if* the heroic fights don't prove to be a question of EH. The normal modes certainly are no challenge to the health pool I am currently enjoying.

The very few deaths I do have are periods of time that I go for 8+ seconds with no heals due to player failure. That's only natural during progression content so I may stam up a little at the beginning of the heroic attempts. Just pointing out that our DPS can be a significant factor on some of these new fights. Threat is certainly not an issue but we can contribute to the overall output of our raid. Specifically in a 10 man.

[Xarlanther]

I agree with Cragwell.
People mention threat is a joke, which is true, but DPS is not.
There are some hard DPS races in DS and it certainly helps if you have 2 tanks doing more then decent DPS.

On madness both the tanks were doing close to 30k, which helped allowing us to go with 3 healers.
I am also going for hit cap and soft expertise cap while maintaining 102.4.

[melisandyr]

Like everything else, gemming for hit and expertise might be the right choice in certain circumstances.

The difficulty is, that gemming and reforging is pretty difficult to do per fight. So recommending hit and expertise *could* be a bad strategy if the benefits don't outweigh the drawbacks on all 8 dragon soul encounters.

You also shouldn't overestimate the impact of gearing for hit and expertise - your mitigation (and perhaps to a lesser extent your healthpool) will be pitched at around the previous tier's level. This may or may not cause you issues, depending on how confident your healers are with particular encounters.

A rather long winded way of saying: it might be the right choice on individual fights, but beware if you've just wandered into the thread and are looking for the best advice for the new tier; I'd certainly speak to your healers if you want to try this.

[celast]

xarlanther was that in 25m? I can see having it a big impact on 10, but on 25m?

[Cragwell]

At this time I only really participate in a 10 man raid. So I can't personally comment on how important tank DPS is in a 25 man.

I started down this path when I noticed that Heroic Ragnaros was pretty tightly tuned if you wanted a one meteor phase 3. We can push 25-30k on that fight with cooldowns and strength pots. On some attempts I even went with the strength flask instead of the stam flask because my health is sitting at 196k or so and I just didn't seem to need it.

The extra damage and parry % seemed like the right move for our raid.

So far I can say that Heroic Morchok is not in any way challenging to my health pool at 207k with 4.5% hit and 27 expertise. I am CTC capped and have dodge and parry both around 18% when fully raid buffed. 41% avoidance with miss calced in hasn't had any of the healers complaining. I don't forge away from avoidance, but I am starting to forge that extra mastery into hit and will keep you apprised of the Heroic results.

[culhag]

At least Zonozz-H hits very hard by the end of P1 (like over half my health) so I wouldn't sacrifice any survivability just for DPS.

Now what about replacing Mastery enchants with Armor, is the trade-of worth it ?
65 Mastery vs. 240 Armor on gloves
50 Mastery vs. 160 Armor on shield

[Awyndel]

No, its really not. Coz you will be gemming mastery somewhere else for it.

[culhag]

No, its really not. Coz you will be gemming mastery somewhere else for it.

Not necessarily.
It's not the case anymore with the new DS gear, but in full H-FL gear I was bloc-capped while gemming for Stamina (still keeping socket bonuses) and reforging Mastery into Avoidance, so I would really have traded Avoidance for Armor if I had changed my enchants.

So really the question is rather: once you're bloc-capped, at what point in the Avoidance diminishing returns does Armor become more interesting ?

[Awyndel]

I don't see anybody block capping with 2 stamina trinkets, full stamina gems, a flask and the souldrinker anytime soon. Specially if they chose the badly itemised 4set tier. So untill that time I will recommend efficient use of mastery.

Now using a mastery trinket for a proc or usage is another situation alltogether. So is gearing for avoidance or dps. In that case your mastery might well be useless.