Toughshield or +18 Stam on a MGShield Wall

So I think I finally decided to replace my Dragonheart Flameshield with the MGSW... stayed up till 1:30 a to farm out last min honor. Amazingly won a couple of games with me as prot (didn't want to respec for 135, and then respec tonight for the raid). Laughed my ass off when a MS warrior decided to all out on me, I ended up killing him at the end with a Capt. America Shield. Final damage to me from that warrior: 1810. I can just imagine the look of frustration on his face: "WTF! Why isn't he dying! I'm pushing buttons as fast as possible!"

So I'm picking the MGSW over the barrier or the Redoubt because I'm sick and tired of people complaining that I have less hp than our warrior, but the high block value makes me want to... well have more block value.

But then I tell myself... nonono... you grabbed this shield for the stam, you should put more stam on it... but then the other little celestial being on my shoulder says... but Reyia...... BLOCK VALUE.

Now all of us know that CAPSLOCK IS LIKE CRUISE CONTROL FOR AWESOMENESS!!!!!11!!ELEVEN, so that little guy must have some kind of awesome powers.

I'm leaning toward BV. My current BV in stam gear which gets me to 13k unbuffed is around 293... my BV in BV gear is around 495. Add in the 30 some odd BV from the upgrade... so what would you guys do?


P.S. Sorry for the near nonsense of this post. I'm working an 8 hour day, then going off to raid, after getting 3 h of sleep last night.

Glad Shield Wall is a very high stamina/armor peice.

I find it most effective to keep with the general theme of a peice of gear when enchanting/gemming it.

In my opinion, 18 stamina is best suited to a heavy Effective Health shield.

A shield more focused on block value, Nightbane's SoID for example, I would match with a 18 BV enchant.


Shield spikes are generally not worth the sacrifice of the alternatives for a raid tanking shield, and are really only useful for farming (with a few limited specific exceptions).


Intellect to shield contributes nothing.

Although not applicable to this shield imo, you left off a block rating option, which is what I'm planning on throwing on the ZA shield for AoE once I get it.

You're not putting Block Value on the highest blocking shield in the game? For shame

Get two and get both enchants.

I thought about the get 2 scenario =P

I should pop a second scenario...

If I get a second shield.. should I get:
SW#2, enchanted with opposite
Redoubt + stam
Redoubt + BV
Barrier (zomg 1/3 spelldamage) +stam
Barrier + BV

But it seems like you guys think i should get stam...

But... BLOCKVALUE! (see there are those caps again... and we all know about the cruise control...)


Why block rating? It seems like such a small niche... considering that redoubt procs quite often off a big aoe fight to pad things out?

Dorvan wrote:Although not applicable to this shield imo, you left off a block rating option, which is what I'm planning on throwing on the ZA shield for AoE once I get it.

I had the same question myself. Being that I'm still short (haven't got my libram - 2.xx% with HS up) from Uncrush, I was wondering about enchanting my MGSW with block rating.

Problem is there is ONE person on Shandris who has the frackin' enchant.

reyia wrote:Why block rating? It seems like such a small niche... considering that redoubt procs quite often off a big aoe fight to pad things out?

Block rating counts towards 102.4%. Block value does not unless I misunderstood.

I personally lean toward stamina, but I do have block rating on my blocking shield. Since it gives about 2% extra block chance, I wouldn't give it up for a slight improvement in block value unless I can already completely block hits without it... which is quite a ways off yet.

PsiVen wrote:You're not putting Block Value on the highest blocking shield in the game? For shame

Nope, I ran the numbers and relative to my current gear I get more mitigation from 15 BR than 18 BV assuming that my Holy Shield charges are getting eating up very quickly. I'm not sure how well that last assumption holds for AoE tanking in Hyjal though, any thoughts?

uhhh hellooooo... we are forgetting the most important one:

SPIRIT

lusisia wrote:

reyia wrote:Why block rating? It seems like such a small niche... considering that redoubt procs quite often off a big aoe fight to pad things out?

Block rating counts towards 102.4%. Block value does not unless I misunderstood.

My point is, redoubt will proc very often against large numbers of individual hits. That, combined with Holy Shield, will insure that you will be blocking a large majority of the unavoided hits anyway. Why enchant toward the niche times when neither hs or redoubt are up to have an extra 2 percent to block?

Redoubt, although maligned, is the pally answer for scaling damage mitigation across multiple targets. As number if incoming damage sources increases, number of blocks increases proportionally.

BV scales with number of targets because redoubt does. Adding BR does not, as it's simply ~2%, and that small boost is, for most situations, going to be shoved off the end of that hit table anyway.

Unless you're short in avoidance for crushability, I'm unsure how BR would be a decent choice.

Of course, I can be dense at times.. I mean... I TOTALLY FORGOT SPIRIT OFF THE LIST. ZOMG! Can't edit the post after the votes!

reyia wrote:My point is, redoubt will proc very often against large numbers of individual hits. That, combined with Holy Shield, will insure that you will be blocking a large majority of the unavoided hits anyway. Why enchant toward the niche times when neither hs or redoubt are up to have an extra 2 percent to block?

Personally, I really should dig up some number on it. My gut feeling is that when AoE tanking large (e.g both packs of murlocs) numbers of mobs, the majority of my time I am without both redoubt and Holy Shield. The question of block rating vs. block value is obviously quite affected by just what % of the you are without those, so it's something I'll try to look into.

Dorvan wrote:

PsiVen wrote:You're not putting Block Value on the highest blocking shield in the game? For shame

Nope, I ran the numbers and relative to my current gear I get more mitigation from 15 BR than 18 BV assuming that my Holy Shield charges are getting eating up very quickly. I'm not sure how well that last assumption holds for AoE tanking in Hyjal though, any thoughts?

I am almost certain that if you redid the numbers and added in redoubt, BV would come out ahead of BR.

I would write a quick script to simulate this, but I am a bit busy at work... though I'm trolling forums. I suck =p.

reyia wrote:

Dorvan wrote:

PsiVen wrote:You're not putting Block Value on the highest blocking shield in the game? For shame

Nope, I ran the numbers and relative to my current gear I get more mitigation from 15 BR than 18 BV assuming that my Holy Shield charges are getting eating up very quickly. I'm not sure how well that last assumption holds for AoE tanking in Hyjal though, any thoughts?

I am almost certain that if you redid the numbers and added in redoubt, BV would come out ahead of BR.

I would write a quick script to simulate this, but I am a bit busy at work... though I'm trolling forums. I suck =p.

Well if you're talking about relying on redoubt then it might make sense but I'm simply scared to rely on a proc as part of my mitigation/avoidance count.

lusisia wrote:Well if you're talking about relying on redoubt then it might make sense but I'm simply scared to rely on a proc as part of my mitigation/avoidance count.

We're not talking about boss tanking but AoE stuff here, which changes a couple of things:

-- First of all, uncrushability is no longer a concern becasue the mobs in question don't crush

-- Secondly, the hits are frequent and small in nature, so it makes sense to look at mitigation purely in terms of average damage taken. "Spikes" aren't a big problem because each individual hit it's very hard, and so streaks of hits or misses don't have a huge effect on the ability of a tank to stay up.

Haven't time to come up with real numbers but I think this simple thought experiment might be enough to prove my point.

Suppose the following:
No crushes
No crits

Lots of mobs, doing some non-massive bout of damage.
Lets just arbitrarily say that you're getting hit for 3 times per second.

Assume you have shield spec, so 18 BV = 23.4 BV after talents. Let's just say 23 BV

Forget about redoubt for a second. Let's just assume that every holy shield charge is getting burned every 10s. This means that you will save 8x23 damage or 184 damage every 10s at the very least.

Every 10 seconds, there should be 30 strikes. Assume 8 of them are already accounted for, so 22 strikes remain. Lets just randomly say your shield block is around ~20%. That's ~4.4 strikes. Lets just give the benefit of the doubt and say you block 4 more with straight block percent, so you end up blocking 4x23= 92 damage

Let's just choose some arbitrary amount of time, lets say ~17 seconds. At this point, the ~1.9% in block rating that a shield block enchant should account for ~1 extra block. Let just say that your block value is oh.. 500.

Assuming that we can burn through all 8 charges of holy shield in the first 7 seconds of the cooldown with the number of strikes, and figuring in the 20% block chance, you end up saving:
((8x23)x2)+(4*23)+((7*3)*.2)*23))=552 damage saved.

So without figuring in redoubt at all... and a lot of mathematical handwaving, for values of BV under ~ 500, BV > BR.

I assume that redoubt will have the effect of increasing the number of blocks, and thus the damage saved by having it. Now, its a much harder piece of math to figure out the percentage of time that redoubt is up considering that redoubt can reapply itself, but assuming that with either redoubt or holy shield, that you can eliminate hit from the table, then it seems like the more redoubt is up, the less effective adding additional block value is.

I'll leave it to someone with more math skills than I have to figure out the math on redoubt.

I voted int cause it was the funniest option!

In all seriousness though, stam is the most versatile of the enchants, it will give benifits in any case, you can't block when tanking elementals for instance, or if you're tanking something that hits stupidly slow the BV drops alot in value aswell, and spike/int just aren't serious options at all :p

Thanks for the brief look, there are a lot of tweaks I think should be made about you model, but it's a good place to start (for the record I'm at about 550 BV, so that would make BR vs. BV a toss up for me thus far ).

The adjustments I'd suggest actually likely tip things further towards BV, but here goes:

-- More hits/sec. I suppose that because I'm thinking of Morogrim, which may well be an atypical case. I'd love to have a Hyjal Pally chime in on how many mobs they tank at a time on that trash, since that's really what I'm trying to prepare for. This reduces the effect of holy Shield

-- On the other hand, first 8 hits aren't automatic blocks. Some will be avoided, which I think changes the analysis with regard to the number of remaining hits, number of non-HS blocks, etc.

-- Block %, 20% seems rather low, which will also increase the effectiveness of BV.

I think this has me convinced that HS and Redoubt make the difference in choosing BV over BR, but I might fiddle around with a little simulation in the next coupled of days for kicks, I'll let you know if anything comes of it.

In general;

Stamina is king.

Block value is not.

I recall a discussion some time ago about redoubt where much math was done, and it was determined that (assuming that you were getting hit so often that redoubt charges would always be used up before the buff expired) redoubt would be up about 41% of the time.

When it comes to block rating and value, you do of course want a balance between the stats, since their effects on damage prevention scale with each other. In general, I tend to favor block rating in AoE tanking since it reduces the frequency of damage spikes from multiple unblocked hits.

For boss tanking though, I'd still recommend stamina.

Kvaern wrote:In general;

Stamina is king.

Block value is not.

That doesn't mean that BV should be discounted. Increasing mitigation has the effect of amplifying the amount of current stam that you already have.

That being said, I threw stam on the shield, mostly because 15 arcane dust is trivial, whereas 10 Primal Earth's is less trivial.

Copied over to the ptr today to try out ZA with the guild...

Warrior: Well.. looks like the pally change evened out that health gap, you have a bit more hp now.

(Checks buffs)

Me: Umm.. can i have fort please?

Warrior: WTF? You didn't even have fort on?

Sitting at 19.5k hp now... 2k more than the MT =P

Dorvan wrote:

lusisia wrote:Well if you're talking about relying on redoubt then it might make sense but I'm simply scared to rely on a proc as part of my mitigation/avoidance count.

We're not talking about boss tanking but AoE stuff here, which changes a couple of things:

-- First of all, uncrushability is no longer a concern becasue the mobs in question don't crush

-- Secondly, the hits are frequent and small in nature, so it makes sense to look at mitigation purely in terms of average damage taken. "Spikes" aren't a big problem because each individual hit it's very hard, and so streaks of hits or misses don't have a huge effect on the ability of a tank to stay up.

Well I found the person (the ONE person) on my server who had the block rating enchant. By getting it put on, I gained a little over a full point against my crushability. That and additional stam (I was using Aegis of the Sunbird with a +18 stam enchant).

In my case, I'm having trouble finding time to run Heroics with the two nights a week I'm currently doing Kara. My wife takes priority so I don't see the Libram coming in the next few weeks If I can just get the damn Jadeskull, I think I'll be okay and can move a few points back to stam. I think I'm sitting at 1.2% crush before getting raid buffed.

So in my case, the block rating enchant worked very well for me and allowed me to pick up a few additonal stam and a fuckton of block over what I had previously.