blocking, and it's usefulness as we progress

Ok, we're saying bosses now can hit for as much as 12,000. Yes, thats true.

The question is, of those bosses that hit for 12k, what is their actual swing timer?

iow, if a boss hits for 6k and hits you 3 times in 2 seconds based on his swing speed. You take 18k damage, or 9k dps.

A boss hits you for 12k and he does that every 2 seconds, you take 6k dps.

The size of the hit is pointless, its the dps that matters.

As long as you can survive that one hit, and the healers can heal you in preperation for the next hit. Then it could be a 29,000 dmg hit, once every 10 seconds, its only 2.9k dps.

With that said, block is better on fast hitting bosses, we've known that for a long long time. For hard slow hitting bosses, avoidance is better because the RoI is gonna scale better based on just that.

Patchwerk I block the shit outta him, despite his insane attack speed. Overall, my thoughts on any boss are going to be an avoidance mixture, of 20-30% dodge, 15-22% parry and 20-30% block. Thats going to be a well rounded tank, that is going to have a very good advantage over the other tanks that cannot do the bottom, and thats block.

RNG is still not your friend. I actually got lag instagibbed a few times getting tossed back and forth between Feugen and his twin buddy. You hit the ground, take 4-5 k dmg, and because of mob placement you could end up twisted around and take some shots to the back, next thing I know, poof dead.

I used to believe that the more avoidance you could stack the better off you were. Anymore, with the way block affects our threat, and our mitigation, If you could give me a 25/25/25 split set dodge/parry/block, I wouldn't complain, add in holy shield, you'd have 105%.
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I meant it correctly, I was probably tired and typed it out in a bass ackwards way.

When I've consumed more pillow time and less crappy sleep time I'll refresh my thoughts.

The basic jist of it, size of hit means nothing till you take all the mitigation and avoidance and pool it all together, a mixture seems far more adventagous now, since block rating is no longer a stat to just push a hit off the table, it now actually mitigates damange for us thanks to block value now being a worthy stat we can get, not just "oh look I can all of a sudden block 40 more damage, that'll help those 9k hits in BT and so on and so forth)
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Assume he means return on investment.

Your either investing in Block gear or investing in Avoidance gear.

The size of the hit does matter for the gear choice.

Lets say you have 2 sets of gear both block capped.

Block Gear set has 1500 BV and ~47% pure avoidance.
Avoidance Gear has 1000 BV and ~53% pure avoidance.

I agree, if your MT on Patchwerk then maybe you can get away with a block set.

But you will take more damage in block gear. The incoming damage will be smoother and your personal DPS/TPS will be higher.

But, lets say instead your soaking his Hateful Strikes.

Those hit considerably harder (think about 22000 on average).

In this case, you want the avoidance gear. The 500 BV is never going to come close to making up the difference for 6% lost avoidance.

In a nutshell, BV gear is great when the incoming damage is relatively small.

So for multi-mob tanking of trash BV gear wins.

For light hitting bosses, BV gear is great. It lets us maximize our threat.

For any boss that hits even middling hard, avoidance gear will always be my choice.
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Garath Lvl 80 Paladin, Gorefiend

The main problem with BV in the past is that we've never really been able to stack enough of it for it to be useful, and we never had an ability that would actually use it.


Now, though, with the diminishing returns being put on avoidance, it's really tough to stack. I personally prefer going for the BR/BV gear because it reduces the amount of spike damage we take, which allows our healers to predict more how much healing we will need. In turn, this reduces overheals, and we have less to worry about from those "long strings of no dodges/misses/parries."
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If self esteem was mana, emos would be rogues.

my research shows

<6K> avoidance

@ 6K per hit they are even

> 6K per hit avoidance > block

at 10K it's 1/2 as good

20K 1/4 as good


Now you figure in the fact that block value is EH of sorts, I'd say at or around 6K You'll always prefer block value (more predictable damage), but as it approaches 8-10K, I think it's time to swap that block value gear out for avoidance.

Whats interesting about all of this is how it relates to a post I made yesterday about wanting to put together a block rating set...

http://maintankadin.failsafedesign.com/viewtopic.php?t=18573

I agree that a dodged attack eliminates the damage entirely, but the concept of a block instead of a dodge has a bit more magic to it.

OK, so thats not a compelling reason....

I am also thinking about how so many of our abilities are about shields and blocking. Heck, we throw our shield now in proportion to our block value

Perhaps I am odd, but I kind of like the concept of a tanking team with niche talent tanks. Put me on the fast hitting boss, and the warrior on the slow hitting boss. Put the DK on the magic boss... Have the bear take the adds! all aspects of a group need to function as a team to work properly.

I think this will become way more viable when dual speccing comes to fruition. We wont feel like dead weight when we aren't performing primary spec functions. besides, we can also provide lots of utility... we can help with HoP and HoS etc. when not on the slow hitting hard hitting boss or the magic boss.

Thanks...
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Tronden of Runetotem (US)
Guildmaster <Guardians of Azeroth>