Dropping Redoubt/Shield Spec for Imp. Devo

I remember reading a thread a while back on the WoW forums discussing whether after reaching a certain point, if gaining Imp. Devo would end up reducing incoming damage more than redoubt/shield spec would. I'm at the point where i'm using Devo aura for 5 mans and i have yet to step foot into karazahn(i'm .1% away from uncrushable...new belt and i'll be there) because ret. aura doesn't proc on anything but partial blocks, and i've heard it's more useful to use devo at that stage.

What i'm wondering is if anyone here has done the math on respeccing and perhaps tossing the points elsewhere(maybe dipping further into the ret tree, although i don't see much use out of it. Maybe imp. SoR from holy?).

I'm also curious about reckoning, as i've heard once you reach uncrushable, the proc on that is so low it's not even worth having. That would open up a bunch of points to toss around, i'm just not sure what people do apart from the cookie cutter build. It seems like i'm wasting talent points if things aren't proccing as often as they were and might be better spent elsewhere.

Any thoughts or suggestions from people who have done something similair to this?
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The answer is no. Shield Spec actually gets more effective the farther you progress, while imp devo does not.

Imp Devo, unless you have the 2-piece tier 5 healing set bonus, is only worth around 250ish armor. That's handy, but not 5 talent points handy. Shield Spec, on the other hand, is percentage-based. So, as your gear gets better and your block value inevitably rises (even if you're not stacking it), the return from shield spec gets larger and larger. In addition, block value doesn't suffer from diminishing returns in the way armor does, so it has an exponential increase on your effective health.

Say you're taking a 6k hit. Let's be generous and say imp devo is going to give you 0.5% damage reduction. Let's also say you have a measly 250 block value without shield spec. Here's the numbers:

Imp Devo: 0.5% of 6000 = 30 less damage taken
Shield Spec: 30% of 250 = 75 less damage taken

Shield Spec already beats the heck out of imp devo, even with a heavy bias towards imp devo. Now look at what happens as you gear up. Eventually imp devo will only be worth, say, 0.2% damage reduction, while your unspecced block value will increase to somewhere in the 300 range fairly naturally. Let's also increase the hit taken to 10k, just because farther progressed bosses hit harder.

Imp Devo: 0.2% of 10,000 = 20 less damage taken
Shield Spec: 30% of 300 = 90 less damage taken
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Me, LOL!

Let's try playing around with some numbers that should be near and dear to you.

You Armory listing is showing you at 12,512 Armor with Devotion Aura active, providing you 54.24% damage reduction against physical damage.

Improved Devotion Aura (5/5) would grant you 40% more armor from Devotion Aura, which at base provides 861 Armor. 40% of 861 is 344.4.

The formula for damage mitigation is: Reduction = (Armor / (Armor - 22167.5 + 467.5 * Enemy_Level))

For a level 70 enemy against your actual 12,512 Armor that works out to be 12,512/(12,512 - 22167 + 32,725) = 0.54236, or 54.24% as shown on the tooltip.

With Improved Devotion Aura your armor value becomes 12,856, which grants damage reduction of 12,856/(12,856 + 10558) = 0.54907, or 54.91%

So you take 0.67% less damage with Improved Devotion Aura. On a hit for 1000 damage you would save 6.7 damage going with Improved Devotion Aura. Not exactly spectacular.

Looking at your Armor entry you have 157 Str, and Block Value of 138. You should block for roughly 186 per block. Just dropping Shield Specialization increases your damage by 41.

While 41 isn't all that much, it is more than 6 times what you would be saving by having Improved Devotion Aura, and that is before you consider the impact Redbout has on damage you take.


Edit: Lore beat me to the punch (darned staff meetings getting in the way).
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Thanks guys. The old thread was long and everyone kept going back and forth as to which was better.

Now that i have a clear idea, Cookie cutter it is. Unless i need to change it to benefit a raid or something.
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Even in the raiding situation it is better to get a holy paladin to do it. Especially since the T5 holy set gives an additional bonus to the aura.
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Here is some math I did way back when to compare Shield Spec to improved devo:

No
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Indeed, unlink Shield Spec from Redoubt and you have a more interesting discussion for tier 1, but Shield Spec is really a must-have at least once you're at SSC/TK.

I agree that shield spec is better than devotion.

However, as shield spec is linked to redoubt, it costs 8 talent points, whereas imp. Devotion costs only 5.

Taking imp. devotion thus frees 3 points that may be better used elsewhere ... for example in POJ/spell warding, or even in reckoning/imp.BOP.

Of course I think it depends on what type of content you do. For raid bosses that hit slow and hard, I don't see shield spec having a large benefit (one of our worst mitigation talents ?), whereas in AoE tanking situations it is much more useful.

Imp. devo might be the worst talent of any class in any tree, shield spec scales quite well, you need to take redoubt to get there, redoubt is quite nice when aoe-tanking, nobrainer.
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LoL, a paladin tank!