Diminishing returns on Dodge and Parry

[Forgrim]

Just creating a new thread since I couldn't find an existing one that talks about this.

At what point is the diminishing returns on dodge and parry so severe, it might be worth reforging to hit and expertise at little cost? I ran a hit/expertise set at the end of FL for all the farmed content and not missing the boss became a constant for me. I miss every DS boss like no other and it frankly bothers me now.

I'm approximately 38% dodge+parry (CTC capped, the rest with mastery). I'm assuming there's no hard number of dodge/parry that is calculated and its better to go to hit/dodge from there, but decided to ask my fellow theorycrafters to see if they came up with a random number to aim for. Getting hit/exp capped at the expense of say 4% dodge/parry would be worth it for me...not so much 14% tho.

[Mirawen]

There's a lot of "clear-cut" numbers, but a lot of it also boils down to your ability, the ability of your healers and the rest of your team as well. It's obviously better to be fully CTC capped to avoid your healers being caught off-guard, and you ending up with a couple of unlucky swings to the face, bringing you into the dust. That said, it's just as much your personal preference, as well as the ability of the team you're working with. Can a healer bring you back up if you take a 160k hit to the face, knowing fully well that half a second later, you're going to get a similar hit to the face?

[Koatanga]

I believe the original question was:

If you assume he remains CTC-capped, at what point does DR on dodge/parry make it preferable to spend remaining budget over CTC cap on hit/exp? I don't know that there is a reasonably achievable figure in this patch at which the DR becomes prohibitive.

But as Mirawen said, it does come down to what healers can take, and how your DPS is performing. If you have plenty of heals to get through the fight, but adding a bit of dodge/parry does not make the difference between 2-healing or 3-healing a fight, then you might as well contribute some DPS.

If healing is tight, then the extra avoidance is better.

In my experience, if you are in a pro guild that advances rapidly, you probably have ace healers, so give yourself some DPS to help meet enrages. If you are in a casual guild, then you probably want the avoidance.

[Fenrìr]

I'm sitting at nearly 19% dodge/parry. I told myself that if and when I ever hit 20% dodge/parry, I'm going to start on hit/exp.

I think it's more of a personal thing, but that's my choice as I feel that the DR on those two stats will be quite harsh.

[vexryn]

I believe the original question was:

If you assume he remains CTC-capped, at what point does DR on dodge/parry make it preferable to spend remaining budget over CTC cap on hit/exp? I don't know that there is a reasonably achievable figure in this patch at which the DR becomes prohibitive.

But as Mirawen said, it does come down to what healers can take, and how your DPS is performing. If you have plenty of heals to get through the fight, but adding a bit of dodge/parry does not make the difference between 2-healing or 3-healing a fight, then you might as well contribute some DPS.

If healing is tight, then the extra avoidance is better.

In my experience, if you are in a pro guild that advances rapidly, you probably have ace healers, so give yourself some DPS to help meet enrages. If you are in a casual guild, then you probably want the avoidance.

I'd still move in the direction of survival. If you're pushing content where the enrage timer is an issue, eeking out every bit of survival so that you can eventually drop a healer seems far more appealing (or allow for a healer to throw a few dps spells, or even allow for an atonement priest).

Picking up some hit/expertise gear is fun for farm content to put up bigger numbers, but I have trouble seeing any realistic environment where I'd take a single point of hit/expertise for progression.

[theckhd]

I'd still move in the direction of survival. If you're pushing content where the enrage timer is an issue, eeking out every bit of survival so that you can eventually drop a healer seems far more appealing (or allow for a healer to throw a few dps spells, or even allow for an atonement priest).

Picking up some hit/expertise gear is fun for farm content to put up bigger numbers, but I have trouble seeing any realistic environment where I'd take a single point of hit/expertise for progression.

I'm rarely one to come to the defense of hit/exp gearing, but in this case I think it's merited for a few reasons.

First of all, it's fairly unrealistic to assume that the amount of survivability you can gain from gemming/enchanting is enough to let you drop a healer. You need enough healers to cover the spike damage throughput, and nothing you do above block-cap makes enough of a difference to affect that. In addition, dropping a healer "eventually" is meaningless in progression. You gem and enchant for what gets you the kill now, not what might let you kill farm content more efficiently a month from now.

Second, you can gain a pretty appreciable amount of DPS through hit/exp gearing at very little survivability cost. It's pretty easy to trade a few percent dodge to reach hit/exp cap; going from 2% hit and 10 expertise to 8% hit and 26 expertise is an increase of about 5k DPS. It costs about 1200 rating to do that, or ~6.8% dodge pre-DR (probably 4-5% afterwards). Note that it's likely quite a bit less than that, simply because we always have a little hit/exp from gear that we can't get rid of.

Finally, it's worth noting that once you reach block cap and attain "enough" stamina to survive, you have a lot of flexibility in how you proceed to gear. At a certain point, adding more stamina, dodge, or parry really doesn't make a distinct difference in your survivability. Most guilds build their healing plan around spike throughput, not average throughput, so reducing overall damage taken isn't that important. So even losing 5% dodge at that point isn't very dangerous, because it's 5% that you don't actually need and aren't making great use of.

I'll also note that I think the hit/exp paradigm is considerably more useful in 10-mans than 25-mans, simply because 5k DPS is a much bigger component of raid DPS in 10's than in 25's. However, I've seen quite a few prominent tanks in both environments gearing this way for progression. I'm sure that the quality of your healers makes a big difference here; the better they are, the more easily you can make that transition. In practice, I'd guess that hit/exp gearing hinges more on that factor than anything else.

[Rhiannon]

Picking up some hit/expertise gear is fun for farm content to put up bigger numbers, but I have trouble seeing any realistic environment where I'd take a single point of hit/expertise for progression.

Experience some 70k wipes and then come back and say that.

Not once during our Ultraxion 25 heroic progress did I die to anything other than my own screwup, with 5 healers (3 of which were dpsing for large portions of the encounter), 26 expertise, 5-8% hit and a heroic heart of rage. The simple fact is that on a lot of this tier's fights, just like tier 12, knowing how to use your cooldowns intelligently and gearing for a reasonable amount of dps stats while maintaining block cap is going to increase your chances of clearing encounters, especially in the first few weeks of the tier when enrage timers are most difficult.

Assuming your dps are somewhat competent they're not going to be able to just pull 4-5k extra dps out of thin air just like that, which means that adding hit/expertise is often a fairly efficient way of increasing raid dps.

Then again, I suppose this varies a lot on the quality of your healers.

[culhag]

What I was wondering is, what about replacing Mastery enchants with Armor ?
65 Mastery vs. 240 Armor on gloves
50 Mastery vs. 160 Armor on shield

Obviously the Mastery can be regained through reforging, so at what point in the Avoidance diminishing returns does Armor become more interesting ?

[PsiVen]

Dropping Mastery is much worse than dropping Dodge/Parry since you still have to make up that CTC elsewhere. The choice is really between 100 stamina and 240 armor, which I think is pretty clear-cut against the armor kit.

If you drop 1200 avoidance for threat stats, you need to drop 400 more avoidance for mastery, and you lose 600 stamina there (less if you had a gearset that couldn't be fit together without too much mastery). But in that case you're trading survivability for threat. In the case of armor you're trying to get more survivability out of it, so dropping a ton of stamina doesn't make sense IMO.