Just a few random thoughts …

New stamina scaling math

With the nerf to Sacred Duty, to calculate how much hp we get per point of stamina multiply by 10 to get the base stam -> hp number, then by 1.10 for our modifier (as opposed to the old 1.14 modifier). With that, we get 11 hitpoints from every point of stamina.

Armor is the new hotness

Coupled with the nerf to stamina, armor deserves another look as a tanking stat. While back in the days before 3.3 stacking armor was something for druids primarily, the inclusion of +armor items to the Emblem of Frost vendor has created an armor renaissance. Coupling that with the pattern of ICC boss fights rewarding physical damage mitigation (I’ll give examples in a second), you’re going to get a lot more mileage out of armor right now than you would stacking stamina.

Here are a few times where armor stacking is recommended:

• When tanking Saurfang, any damage you take is transferred to the people with Mark of the Fallen Champion. Any damage you can mitigate down or avoid completely makes the lives of the healers easier. The less damage you transfer, the longer the Marked folks will live.
• On Festergut the majority of the damage you will be taking will be physical (with the magical portion, the breaths, generally negated by inoculations). Festergut hits hard and fast and rewards not just being able to survive his hits, but minimizing the damage as well.
• If maintanking the Blood Queen, any damage you take is passed to the OT as shadow damage via the Blood Mirror. Therefore, the MT wants to have enough mitigation to minimize how much damage they pass through the Blood Mirror, while the OT (contrawise) wants to have lots of stamina to soak all the incoming shadow damage that they’ll be getting passed to them.

ICC is the first raid in a long time that rewards tanks for giving certain stats priority situationally. For Putricide you are rewarded for having enough avoidance to increase time between stacks of the P3 debuff, for Blood Queen each tank is basically assigned the mitigation role or the stamina role, and so on. We are encouraged not just to survive damage, but to prevent it. A welcome change of pace.

Right now, in my gear, I have around 29k armor and 65.83% physical damage reduction. Once I pick up the other three +armor offset pieces, I’m going to be rocking some pretty serious mitigation. I can’t wait.

No details yet, other than:

It’s an intentional change. Sorry that the fix went in before the announcement. The announcement should be up soon with more details.

And yes folks, this is justified, please don’t freak out. Probably a needed reduction in our superior stamina scaling. It sucks how they sprung this on us, but in the end it was justified. They were never going to buff other tanks to our level, this nerf was inevitable.

Last request: please don’t go forth and QQ, let’s be the bigger tank about this.

Update: Looks like Sacred Duty went from 8% stamina increase to 4%.

This is what happens when I don’t look at Maintankadin for a few days–and thanks to Honors for alerting me to this–an unannounced change in 3.3 was discovered that apparently ShoR is now on the melee table. This means that an enemy can now parry or dodge Shield of Righteousness. Which in turn makes expertise a much, much more attractive stat for us. But how attractive, you ask?

Under soft cap, expertise is now our best threat stat.

In addition to previous findings that expertise was “about 80% as good as dodge” for damage avoidance, now more than ever, being soft capped in expertise is mandatory.

Thankfully, we gain 6 expertise from talents and 10 from the SoV glyph, so we only need 81 rating to soft cap, a relatively easy goal.

Other side effects of the ShoR change: that’s another melee attack that will be proc’ing Mongoose or similar enchants.

Nonetheless! Tankadins, act accordingly.

My colleagues Honors and Wrathy have already written about this, but I wanted to throw my two cents in.

The conventional wisdom for a while now has been that 11 armor is equivalent to 1 stamina. Theck, however, has turned this assumption on its head by plotting out the value of armor based on how much of a fight is magical damage. In this post he has a graph basically showing various armor/stamina values–with this as the money quote:

So for a purely physical fight, armor seems like a pretty good deal. But for even a fight with 20% magical damage, Armor becomes devalued by 20%. This will generally be enough to make a Stamina trinket provide more EH than an armor trinket.

For an example, let’s look at the Glyph of Indomitability, since that’s what started this thread. It gives 1792 armor, which is equivalent to 153 stamina. However, for a fight with Y=20%, we get only (1-Y)=80% of that, or 123 stamina. For a fight with 30% magical damage, it’s only worth 107 stamina, and so forth.

It’s interesting because just about every fight has *some* magical component to them which means that the old 11:1 figure is just about worthless. This kind of throws out the window the ancient understanding of EH as a figure of armor and stamina, with no vacillating in between. Now, serious vacillation is needed.

What this means is that if you’re evaluating two pieces of gear, one with lots of armor and one with lots of stamina, you should choose the piece with more stamina (assuming the excess armor doesn’t exceed the value of excess stamina for the amount of magical damage in that fight). All that means, ultimately, is this is another point in the column of “stamina > all”. Stamina remains the safest bet, sadly.

Well, not totally, armor does have some worth. Just not as much worth as we assumed it had before.

On Saturday I did a quick Heroic ToC-5 with some guildees (I need badges for BOA stuff…) and during the Eadric fight I noticed something I haven’t seen in a long time on my pally: a big red number pop up. A crit. What the hell? Granted, it was only for 9k damage, but that was a bit shocking.

My immediate worry was I still had some Ret gear on from running around and doing the Loremaster grind. I popped open my character sheet and noticed a calm, reassuring defense number that was well about 540. I wasn’t sitting, either, so what could it have been? I knew that some bosses in game had spells giving them higher than normal crit chances (aka, greater than 5.6%), but I wasn’t aware that Eadric was one of them.

When perusing the tanking forums for my daily dose of bile-inducement I spotted this great thread which was compiling just such a list. And, of course, Eadric was on the list thanks to his Vengeance ability. I recommend checking out the initial post in full, but I wanted to share a few of these little cheaters for general awareness.

• The Argent Lightwielder mob in ToC-5 has an Unbalancing Strike that acts a little like the similarly named attack that Thorim uses in Ulduar.
• It is suspected that San’layn bosses (such Prince Keleseth in UK) passively have higher than normal crit chances. This may be an issue in Icecrown Citadel where we will be facing off against the Queen of the San’layn.
• One last thing to double-check: if you’re at 540 defense but get crit, hover your mouse over the defense number and see if your uncrittability number is at 5.6% or higher. There is a rounding error where you can be at 540 defense but only 5.59% uncrit, which would still allow you to be critically struck.

I wrote in my post yesterday that I hit the 40k unbuffed mark on Wednesday, which is a milestone in many ways, and a sad commentary in others. Think about it: I have eight times more health than I did at level 60, and that’s only twenty levels ago. That’s how out of control stat inflation has gotten.

Tanks running around with this much health does not lend itself to balanced boss design. To make up for such vivacious tanks, raid bosses need to hit that much harder to actually create any sense of danger for the healers (hence most Uld25 bosses and folks like Gormok the Impaler).

So then tanks can get two- or three-shot in progression raids and suddenly healing has ramped up to constantly healing the tank (even if they don’t need the heals at the moment) lest the boss fires off too many hits in a row and gib them.

And then this boss design cascades down into an arms race of sorts. Because tanks have too much health bosses hit harder, so tanks stack even more health. Instead of Pershing Missles, we’ve got dual stam trinks in our arsenal.

So avoidance be damned, full speed ahead on EH. Which then, of course, cascades down into the worth of a tank being solely determined by their effective health. Any EH advantage is perceived by the roiling, screeching masses as a huge disparity because in this brave new world of raid buffed tanks with 50k+ hitpoints all that matters is your raw effective health number. Utility is thrown out the window, avoidance ignored, and cooldowns discounted. All we care about is how many hits can you take before finally dying.

This is a huge fault in the design process right now because there are so many different flavors to each of the different tanks–strengths and weaknesses that makes each class unique. And each and every one of those differences is being discounted completely save for EH. It’s a huge betrayal of the concept of BTPNTC when a specific class might not be deliberately favored, but a particular aspect of boss design is, which then ipso facto divides the tanking classes into those that can compete on the sole basis of this one criterion, and those that have fallen behind.

To be fair, I don’t think Blizz anticipated how bad it was going to get. GC already admitted they hadn’t even dreamt of hard modes when designing Wrath, and because eventually hard modes had to provide better loot, the designers were forced into cranking out gear with iLevels that weren’t expected until much later into Wrath’s patch cycle. Maybe even not until Cataclysm. They now publicly regret that some dps is running around 70%+ crit chances and tanks are boasting 50%+ avoidance, though obviously not much can be done about that now.

But how will they approach this in the next xpac? Well, same thing they did at the stat of Wrath. Ratings diminishing returns will be jacked up so as soon as you ding lvl 81 you’ll suddenly have much less crit/dodge/etc. than you did at 80. That’s all well and good, but you know what else they expect to do? Jack up everyone’s health pools. That’s right: more stamina.

What do you think the upper level of raid-buffed tank health is going to be at Patch 4.3? 75,000? 100,000? Who knows–the sky is the limit!

… and that’s the problem. Blizz needs to take the opportunity of Cataclysm to tear the system down and rebuild it anew. Tone down the iLevels across the board, removing the huge jumps from vanilla greens to TBC greens to Wrath greens which are no longer necessary. Smooth it out so rather than wearing iLevel 200 gear after dinging level 80, you’re wearing gear that has an iLevel of 80. Then, of course, tone down mobs across the board so you can survive a level 80 mob in iLevel 80 gear.

Moreover, rather than letting the arms race continue, redirect tanking towards a more balanced experience where avoidance is more than just a necessary and random evil that would actually be worth gemming for. Make it so EH is no longer the only criterion for a successful progression tank.

Stat inflation is only beginning to get out of hand. Imagine how much worse it will be at the beginning of the next expansion when we’re all in iLevel 400 gear and rocking health bars that would make a vanilla instance boss jealous.

A major concern that is wracking the tanking world right now is the utter dearth of hit rating on 25man raid gear. Prior to the few upgrades I yanked out of the Coliseum this week I was sitting at full hit cap, 263. Now, thanks to said upgrades and swapping in the SoV glyph I find myself already soft capped for expertise (great) but now only at 175 hit (boo).

This problem is only going to get worse as I continue to get gear from Col25. If I were to deck myself completely out in those items, I’d be sitting at 214 expertise. That’s 26 skill, the soft cap.

Once the soft cap of expertise is reached, additional points of expertise come with a tps benefit reduced by half.

As such, I’m contemplating how much longer I’m going to delay before I ditch the SoV glyph… er, again. And, likewise, what I’m going to replace it with.

Because of the loss of hit that will be going hand in hand with this rise in expertise, the Glyph of Righteous Defense is a natural choice. What concerns me most about losing hit isn’t so much the tps loss, but the threat to the healers’ well-being if a taunt misses (which it’ll have a much higher chance to do).

I could swap in the Judgement glyph, but Judgement is such a miniscule part of my tps that the glyph wouldn’t have enough of an effect to be worthwhile. I’m definitely open to suggestions for replacements.

With the doubling of block value across items the stat, has become a lot more attractive than it’s ever been. One major reason for this is, as Paladins, we have the advantage of being able to consider Block Value as Effective Health. Because of Holy Shield it’s possible to keep ourselves block capped at all times, which in turn means that every hit we take will be mitigated by BV. So, if you have 2300 BV, it’s like having 2300 more hit points.

As such, when evaluating gear, I’ve started looking at any additional BV stat like it was an additional health stat. Consider the stat this way: Every 114 block value is basically equivalent to 10 stamina.

Oh, for the halcyon days of TBC when Block was the envy of the non-blocking tank classes (er, well, Druids). Now that stat has been getting the short shrift as of late, with the big hits of Ulduar making block all but useless. As this fact has dawned on more and more tanks, the zeitgeist is clearly turning against block.

Doxa has a great post about the inherent issue with the block mechanic on PRF. Money quote:

In the end, the reason tanks die is spike damage and paladins are eating more of it is because the % of damage mitigated through block value gets smaller and smaller when bosses are hitting harder and harder. 1700 damage mitigated is 1700 damage mitigated whether you’re hit for 2k or 30k.

That sums up the issue perfectly. Block is a bum mechanic that is becoming more and more outdated with every raid instance. And thankfully Ghostcrawler has recognized this. He wrote on the forums that:

Block was a fine stat back when bosses could do Crushing Blows. In their absence, it does feel like it has slipped as a source of mitigation. We (the developers and the community) were worried at the launch of Lich King that block would make warriors the best tanks, paladins second, and everyone else far behind. In retrospect we should have been more focused on the cooldowns and number of hits a tank could take in a row.

Which is the crux of the matter isn’t it? Right now tanks live and die by big hits and how they deal with them. Druids soak damage, DKs blow cooldowns and [had] lots of armor, and Warriors/Paladins… um… block? Clearly, in this brave new world of 20k melees, we are at a disadvantage, and something needs to be done.

Furthermore, Ghostcrawler then indicated in a later thread that block was indeed being looked at by the developers:

We don’t think block is cutting it as a mechanic, but the direction we are likely to take it is probably more of a change than you are considering.

Ominous. In any case, based on the example he gives it looks like he’s leaning towards a situation where non-block tanks would continue to use cooldowns/high HP and armor to avoid/mitigate large damage, while the block tanks would have block help them mitigate more damage on some big hits, and they would eat more of the damage on others. Block rating would go down but block value would go up, making block some sort of bastard child of avoidance and mitigation: mitigation on the RNG.

I can’t say I’m completely a fan, although it seems to be a step in the right direction. In the final analysis, giving up a baseline mitigation of around 1800 damage for occasional mitigation of 8000 damage (or whatever it works out to) would be a fair trade for what we need most: better survivability against the hard hitters of Ulduar and beyond.

EH as most of you probably already know stands for Effective Health, which is basically how much raw damage a mob has to deal to kill you. It’s a pretty potent number for determining proper gearing, derived from your total HP and your total armor.

Now, as I’ve blogged previously, I’m planning to drop Mining and pick up Engineering (for the +800 armor to gloves, among other reasons). Some people around here (looking at you Logan!) have been arguing against the switch, and with excellent points at that. So I’ve been holding off on pulling the trigger because the prospect of losing 50 stamina seemed pretty daunting.

Finally though I sat down and crunched some numbers, and I think I finally have the ammunition I need to make the jump.

Here are the EH numbers I received from this awesome calculator on the Tanking Tips site for each scenario:

Mining (33274 HP/25074 Armor): 83428

Mining with Toughness affected by Kings (33324 HP/25074 Armor): 83553

Engineering (32704 HP/25874 Armor): 83572

So, no matter what, it’s an EH gain. I think I’m making the right choice.