So when does block become at all useful?

As someone still farming Naxx BV is nice, but I can appreciate how the serious uld raiders find it useless against big hitting bosses. Strangely most of the tanking items I've had drop in naxx have been + Block Value and Rating. This suggests to me either Blizzard didn't think it through i.e. making drops in naxx only useful in Naxx or heroic or they are intending to push us back in the trash tank role?

Nikachelle wrote:Sad in the sense that clearly block was never thought out properly.

Block was thought out well when it was the only method to stop crushing blows. That was an end-around way to make block mitigate a lot more damage than just the block value.

What wasn't thought out properly was the elimination of crushing blows from content. They took away a large percentage of block's power with that change. I have to guess that they didn't see this because the only raid content they had working was Naxx, and it's not apparently in Naxx.

If they fix this by bringing back "special-damage-only-mitigated-by-block" then they have to redo balance across the board again. It's a complicated problem and I understand why they've been slow to solve it.

Discus wrote:As someone still farming Naxx BV is nice, but I can appreciate how the serious uld raiders find it useless against big hitting bosses. Strangely most of the tanking items I've had drop in naxx have been + Block Value and Rating. This suggests to me either Blizzard didn't think it through i.e. making drops in naxx only useful in Naxx or heroic or they are intending to push us back in the trash tank role?

Naw, for the most part there's plenty of other gear. Unfortunately using just 3.0 content it wasn't possible to be block capped without using at least one or two pieces of block rating gear, but with 3.1 content available even to Naxx raiders (via BoE) I expect that it's possible now.

Just skip those block pieces and save your DKP/EPG/SK/lucky dice for the def/dodge/(parry) pieces.