Thinking about Dropping Ardent Defender

I've defended the Ardent Defender talent for months, just based on my gut feeling about it.

However, after installing Afraithe's Ardent-Fu tracker, I've been seriously dissapointed by the results.

On a typical T5 raid night -- with me doing a mixture of MT'ing, AE tanking, Trash Tanking, etc. -- Ardent Defender is mitigating less than 1% of my incoming damage and saving me from death only a handful of times. Almost exclusively, these "saves" are occuring during a "raid collapse" type situation, where my death was inevitable anyway. Would I spend 5 talent points for 1% dodge? No way.

Question: For anyone else who has the mods and tracks this information, do your results square with mine?

I realize that AD scales as your gear scales, but realistically, I'm going to have only a couple thousand more hps this expansion, if that, so I'm really looking at an AD threshold that improves by 500-600 hps.

Dropping AD would let me put points back into Reckoning for extra threat, or maybe Crusade instead.

Are you looking at the night as a whole or per fight?

My stats:

Whole night: 0.5-1.5% typically
Per fight: Either 0% or 5-15% (on both successful and nonsuccessful attempts)

Also make sure to clear the sucker before the run each time or else you will get all the data spread over time.

I find that trash pulls tend to spread out the DM/DT value quite a bit as AD rarely kicks in on those and there are a lot of trash pulls.

So far I have been pretty happy with AD. When it kicks in, it works well. Though it doesn't always kick in and there are some nights where you rarely see it.
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I've been looking at both per fight and per session. The per session numbers are the ones that I stated. The maximum I've ever seen for a fight was 5.5% and 1 death saved.

I run with some sketchy healers in Gruuls usually i have a shammy healing me when i tank olm, since i get feared all the time with deathcoil i just spam consecration to hold aggro while lock pets take it down ...

AD saved me 5 times last tuesday per palatank addon. So that justified it for me.
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Aerieus Level 70 Bloodknight - Hellscream server

Less deaths are better than more deaths?
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<3 Tankadin at Heart.

Not necessarily accurate: Armory

Yes, but that's exactly my point.

AD "saved" me a bunch of times during a collapsing raid situation. But what did it really save? I died 10 seconds later than I would have otherwise.

Most of the tanking I do now is MH trash. AD kicks in and prevents a raid wipe almost every time I get knocked down by an abom.

Great topic, and one I go back and forth on also. Currently I do not have it as I have been the guild MT so far. As I hand over boss tanking/spike damage fights over to my other tanks (as their gear catches up) I will continue to gear towards trash and specialty encounters where pallies do great. At that time I will spec back over to it.

For boss tanking I wouldn't use it. For trash or fast attack encounters I would. I love the improved crusader and to me is worth more then AD.

I'm thinking about kicking you in the knee.
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armory | youtube | stuff

It's a legitimate question...leave the snarky comments to joke posts in general.
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Well it is true, I also tend to see it a lot more in trash fights than I see it at bosses. But as has been said on these forums countless of times: "it's not all the times that it doesn't save you, it's the one time that it does" It's like a passive last stand, without cooldown.
Sure, you could drop it, if your guild has had BT on farm for months and is yawning at fighting Illidan anyway. I'd say the risk of dieing then is quite slim. But on new encounters or encounters that not everyone is perfectly geared for, it's invaluable. Heck even otherwise, people might screw up and you might live to tell about it and kill the boss anyway.
I'd agree it could do with less than 5 talent points though, I mean the 3rd to last tier and 5 points (and let's face it, taking less isn't worth it), Last Stand is in the 3rd tier and is 1 point...
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If it is weak, kill it before it gets stronger. If it is strong, weaken it.

As I said before, I've defended this talent consistently and since beta, but actually seeing the numbers, I'm not sure its worth it.

Of course, less deaths is better than more deaths. More threat is better than less threat, though.

By having AD I have to make a tradeoff for Reckoning or Crusade -- is it worth it?

For the amount of mobs that stun, parry-KO, etc, you'd think no one would ask this question.

Yes, taking one more hit in a bad situation is INFINITELY WORTH IT.