stat balance for heroics and BH

Howdy,

I've seen various mentions of 9/10/45 or something like that for avoidance and block balancing, but I can't find the thread where it was discussed.

So assume I'm just doing heroics, with the tribulations that LFG brings. What would a proper stat balance be for dodge/parry/block for heroics and BH? I'm currently at 10.2/14.3/43.6. Once I get a few more gear pieces (getting close for the WH boots) I'll do some reforging, but I'm not sure what the target should be.

Any advice?..

When it comes to reforging, there is no balance - mastery is better than parry and avoidance period. It's (a little) better for damage reduction and a lot better for combat table coverage (block capping). Any piece without mastery should probably have one stat reforged into it.

When choosing the balance between parry and dodge, aim to keep parry about 1% higher.

The real choices arise when choosing whether to reforge threat or avoidance to mastery, and when picking "sub-optimal" gear (e.g. parry + dodge vs mastery + threat). In those cases, it depends on whether you care about threat and how you value damage reduction vs combat table coverage.

For 5 mans, there's a case for having a "threat set" with expertise at 24 and hit capped vs L87 enemies. Switch to survival gear for nasty pulls and perhaps bosses that don't require interrupts.

For BH, just wear survival gear. I have gone for a mastery heavy orientation, but one focussed on damage reduction would be equally defensible. (I've noticed on recount that I tend to take more damage than other tanks, which is a concern for me but generally I feel robust and no healers have complained.)

For heroics, you should be fine with what you have now, assuming you have anything north of 120k hp unbuffed. You *can* do heroics with less hp, but some pulls become iffy. This also isn't accounting for Luck of the Draw buff.

Ideally, you'd be shooting for a closer balance between Dodge and Parry. Trading in some of that Parry for the exact same amount of Dodge rating will result in a net gain of overall avoidance, due to diminishing returns.

Honestly, I'd say if you're geared for heroics, you're geared for BH. Its a very low stress encounter as far as tank damage goes. He melees like he's got a pillow in each hand. The primary difficulties currently are beating the enrage timer and the healers keeping up with dispelling debuffs. Assuming the tanks taunt after each Meteor Slash (or whatever its called), and people don't stand in fire during his AoE phase, the healing is actually fairly easy, if mana intensive.

Granted, none of this is to say someone casually inspecting your gear won't get their panties in a wad if you don't meet their arbitrary standard for what is aceptable gear to do the content you're attempting.

Take a look at my stage three character models. The first is designed to model a tank newly ready to raid, while the second is a tank who passed that point but is focused on heroics over raiding.

The primary difference between the two is that stamina is more valuable when pressing into progression content, because stamina gives you padding against any unexpected incoming damage or drop in healing. For content that you master, though, mastery (heh) provides more damage smoothing and a reduction in damage taken.

As mentioned above, there's no such proper balance of mastery to avoidance stats. Just aim for maximum damage reduction (MDR) or combat table coverage (CTC). Various guides here show models for both. (I show MDR.) Balance discussions for surivival gear are between mastery and stamina; for farming gear you can also throw in balance discussion versus threat if you want lolfarm.

Thanks all.

I have been looking at the gearing guides extensively to prioritize upgrades, so I've got a good idea of what's there, but I haven't really looked at the CTC issue yet. Lunch time reading today.

Sounds like I do have too much parry. My health is at 145k or so, so not a problem there. My next gear will be the rep boots, but I haven't really tried reforging yet since the gear has been changing so much.

I have an idea to manage threat and survival sets by having a set of rings and trinkets to swap out. Since I'm not raiding the gear choices are limited. I did pick up the BOE dodge/parry cloak last night as I got it for 3.5k, so I can work on other faction gear before eventually going back to Hyjal rep.

econ21 wrote:When choosing the balance between parry and dodge, aim to keep parry about 1% higher.

Question on this. Is the conventional wisdom 1% higher parry BEFORE or AFTER raid buffs?

I noticed last night that outside of raids, my parry is almost 2% higher than my dodge, but once in our regular raid with all the normal buffs, I had exactly 1% higher Parry.

Is that about where it should be?

Aerron wrote:

econ21 wrote:When choosing the balance between parry and dodge, aim to keep parry about 1% higher.

Question on this. Is the conventional wisdom 1% higher parry BEFORE or AFTER raid buffs?

I noticed last night that outside of raids, my parry is almost 2% higher than my dodge, but once in our regular raid with all the normal buffs, I had exactly 1% higher Parry.

Is that about where it should be?

Yes, that's post buffs.

You get more dodge from buffs because of the higher contribution from agility (compared to the parry contribution from strength).

For heroics I'd say that as long as you stay around ilevel 350 you could start slapping in dps-gear and kick hitrating and expertiserating to caps. It'll cost you some 3% aggregated avoidance and 15% block. The lost block would primarily come from having two "dps" trinks instead of two mastery ones.

You should expect to see some 3+k increase in dps, which really helps when you're saddled with underperforming DD from the LFD. An added benefit is that you can pretty much AoE down mobs WotLK-style, which in turn cuts time spent for your daily 70 VP by a very large margin.

yappo wrote:For heroics I'd say that as long as you stay around ilevel 350 you could start slapping in dps-gear and kick hitrating and expertiserating to caps. It'll cost you some 3% aggregated avoidance and 15% block. The lost block would primarily come from having two "dps" trinks instead of two mastery ones.

You should expect to see some 3+k increase in dps, which really helps when you're saddled with underperforming DD from the LFD. An added benefit is that you can pretty much AoE down mobs WotLK-style, which in turn cuts time spent for your daily 70 VP by a very large margin.

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. I'll admit to having a sloppy rotation, but I notice my AOE is lacking, so I could use the boost there. I'm not having any problems on bosses, it's add control that's annoying. Once I grind up some more gold I might invest in a Soul Blade, or wait till I get the Arch 1-H for a pure threat weapon.

yappo wrote:which really helps when you're saddled with underperforming DD from the LFD.

or when your guildy is playing thier os and has crap gear for it cause they have been focused on tanking
<3 halabar

bldavis wrote:

yappo wrote:which really helps when you're saddled with underperforming DD from the LFD.

or when your guildy is playing thier os and has crap gear for it cause they have been focused on tanking
<3 halabar

Oh, I never get THAT underperforming people from the LFD. If I want a truly atrocious run, then I make certain it's five people from the guild. Strange, considering three of us, without a doubt, are raidworthy.

If you want I can offer a 3k dps rogue always standing in fire, a 4k hps healer going OOM before the first target in a trash-pull is dead (if said healer hasn't already died in fire by that time), a 13k dps mage who would be raidworthy hadn't it been for the matter of standing in fire, and a few other culprits who pull random targets at random times with pets walking around on random aggressive.

There's a reason I try to avoid falling below 10k dps at any time. My guildies have taught me to handle almost anything LFD can throw at me

hal was tanking a heroic with me on my warrior...
well i hadnt played fury in a few weeks, and hadnt praticed enough to have the priorities in my head firmly, much less muscle memory back

couple that with craptastic dps gear and you can imagine how bad my dps was

i think i was doing like 6k on some fights, which is sad because i can do 5k tanking on my warrior.....(7k on my druid given the right boss)

halabar wrote:Once I grind up some more gold I might invest in a Soul Blade, ...

I would strongly recommend that. For someone stuck mainly with running 5 mans, it's a great investment. It seemed to me that once I had that weapon, any threat issues disappeared. It's weird, because Theckhd's numbers imply Cookie's tenderiser should be a decent substitute for a higher tier weapon. But it did not feel like that.

econ21 wrote:

halabar wrote:Once I grind up some more gold I might invest in a Soul Blade, ...

I would strongly recommend that. For someone stuck mainly with running 5 mans, it's a great investment. It seemed to me that once I had that weapon, any threat issues disappeared. It's weird, because Theckhd's numbers imply Cookie's tenderiser should be a decent substitute for a higher tier weapon. But it did not feel like that.

As a stop gap since I got the 1-H axe from H VP last night to replace the axe from H DM, I put avalanche on it instead of mending. Might also try a trinket I picked up that's a str trinket with mastery on-use, and see if that makes a difference as a stop-gap.

Cookie's still would be my ideal as I'll get the expertise bonus since it's a mace. But if I see a cheap Soul Blade...

bldavis wrote:

yappo wrote:which really helps when you're saddled with underperforming DD from the LFD.

or when your guildy is playing thier os and has crap gear for it cause they have been focused on tanking
<3 halabar

We just all need to be on at the same time to practice...