what to do after Block Cap

[Schroom]

So, first of all sorry if a threat about this already exists, but I tried and couldn't find it.

well , as this subject appears more and more often on the official Blizzard Forums I would love to see some math proving what is better after reaching Blockcap.

my personal first guess was to try to minimize the DR between Parry and Dodge, and then to stack both of them equally.

the other possibility often discussed is to stack Stamina to the max after reaching Blockcap.

now with my toon: http://eu.battle.net/wow/de/character/d ... m/advanced

I tried 2 different approaches on how to gem.

the first one was to ignore the socket bonuses, an try to reduce the the DR.
I simulated the whole thing with Shannox 10 man HM as my opponent, fully buffed, with flask of the Steelskin and dodgefood, as he hits quite hard. (the soft enrage is included in rawrs calculations )

this gave me following results:

Code: Select all

HP: 198593
Avoidance: 33.8974%
Total Mitigation: 88.91%
incoming DPS: 14.888,1

then there was the other possibility, to try the same thing, but always take the socket Bonuses, this is my actual set (if you check the link to my toon recently enough after this post)

this gave me:

Code: Select all

HP: 200203
Avoidance: 33.6363%
Total Mitigation: 88.86%
incoming DPS: 14952.5

so the second on gives me 1610 more HP but the incoming DPS go up by 64.4.

which in my eyes seems to be very little so I chose possibility No 2 (also to finally reach 200k on Block cap ^^)

but to get even more deep, I retook our almost forgotten EH Model.

so our first possibility gives me: 628764.9780 EH (considering the Block cap)
with the second one I have: 633862.39644 EH

So I gain 5097,41844 EH with the second model, which, considering the incoming DPS being almost 15k dps, very little.

So I ask of you almighty theorycrafters, what strategy is the best to investigate further?

[Central]

Stam seems to be the most logical path, as threat is a joke.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/a ... e/advanced is my armory. I've just gone from 25m raiding to 10m, however, while maintaining blockcap I'm able to go with stam and push 215k hp buffed, while maintaining 102.4 CTC and a slightly higher dodge chance over parry. As you can see, socket bonuses are always met, to obtain the best stam gain. Mastery food and Stam flask is used. Avoidance stacking seems nice at first, but becomes bursty and heavily DR'd. Stam has no DR and allows more of a cushion for healers, while not being a mana sponge because you are still ctc capped.

[Schroom]

yes, that's what I thought. your strategy is about what I had in mind for the future.

[Chanserv]

IMO just talk to your healers see if they would like a bigger pillow or not. if so go stam. If not go avoidance.

[Javvo]

I definitely prefer Stamina. Tanking has always come down to effective health. It's all that matters, especially when healers have nearly infinite mana. The biggest argument for going avoidance in the past is to make your healers not have to "spam" you. With the health model in Cataclysm, tanks and the rest of the raid have so much health and healers are spamming regardless.

Nearly gear capped I've decided to forgo the T12 4-piece bonus and use the Helm of Blazing Glory and the Beth'tilac chest, rather than those respective tier pieces. Doing this and changing some gems around I gained nearly ~6k health this past week.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/c ... o/advanced

http://www.askmrrobot.com/wow/gear/usa/ ... l/javvo#v1

[Sur-Pseudo]

soon as I hit block cap I started swapping back to stam -- right when I got block cap I did not feel comfortable with my HP on heroic bosses because I had to sacrifice some stam/mastery gems...

Soon as you hit block cap, I'd aim for re-balancing to stam+mastery gems like you were before... aiming for socket bonuses for the nice stam boost

[golfinguy]

I love avoidance and would love to stack dodge/parry.

However, with diminishing returns and the rating per point effectiveness - stamina seems much better bang for the buck.

Oh ya - like above - go back and get all the socket bonuses if you didn't before. Free points.

[fuzzygeek]

Once I hit over 200k hp raid buffed I started swapping mastery for avoidance, because being blockcapped while having 17% dodge and parry is hilarious. Granted I use elixirs to bump up to 103%, but the prismatic flask is arguably more effective than the stam flask anyway.

We're 25M 6/7H with no real delusions that we can do Heroic Rag, and I'm really not seeing a need for more stam at this point.

[theckhd]

This topic has come up enough times and in enough places over the past two weeks that I've written a fairly lengthy blog post about it. It's the same thing I posted at EJ yesterday, so if you follow the 4.3 prot thread there's nothing new. But I figure that far more people read this forum than stay up-to-date with the 4.3 prot threat at EJ.

[Sur-Pseudo]

bah, my last reply stunk.. yay phone posting...

Soon as I hit 102.4+, I:
1. Started to aim for 102.4% WITH the TB trinket on -- I wanted that as my "base line" to help with magic-intense fights.
2. Slowly re-gemmed my +STAM socket bonuses properly for Stam/Mastery
3. Slowly re-gemmed my Prismatic sockets to Stam/Mastery

That's about as far as I got... I don't foresee any reason I would socket for dodge or parry other then the rare red gem with a good socket bonus. Theck's blog post pretty much summed it up.... I felt squishy with the lower HP after the mastery transition, so my first step was to build that back up.. and points/sockets wont allow for much more play.

[Awyndel]

Ah nice blog post Theck. I was getting worried the sky wasn't blue anymore. But you put things right .

[Schroom]

right, that was EXACTLY what I was looking for. BIG thanks man.

[daiceman]

I totally agree with theck on this one. I think many people hopped on the "only noobs stack stam" bandwagon when cata rolled out because it was getting tiring to keep repeting the old "stam stam stam stam" mantra of BC and Wrath.

[Awyndel]

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

[Era]

I have a somewhat related question, so I'll just throw it in this thread. I remember reading that due to DR we should try to balance our Dodge/Parry numbers to the point where our Dodge is just a little bit above Parry. However, I see a lot of prominent tanks (Theck included) having Dodge almost a whole % higher than Parry.

Just how balanced should these be, and what are the benefits in relation to how close you can get to that balance?