# Warrior Block Calculations – Part 4

In the last three posts, we’ve built up the equations we need to calculate the survivability stat weights for warriors. In this post, we’re going to summarize the equations we need, and then plug in numbers to see how it all works out.

Note that I’m not going to go through the derivation step by step here. I’m just going to list the equations we need, and then analyze them. If you want to know where a particular expression comes from, you’ll have to slog through reading parts 1-4.

Required Equations from Part 1:

In part 1, we built up the normalized scale factors $\Delta_i$:

$\Delta_{\rm ar} = \frac{1}{f_{ar}}F_{\rm ar}F_{\rm av}F_b\large$

$\Delta_h = \Delta_e = \frac{1}{f_h}F_{\rm ar}F_{\rm av}\Phi_{\rm bh}\large$

$\Delta_s = \frac{1}{f_s}F_{\rm ar}F_{\rm av}\Phi_{\rm bs}\large$

$\Delta_x = \frac{1}{f_x}F_{\rm ar}F_{\rm av}\Phi_{\rm bx}\large$

$\Delta_m = \frac{1}{f_m}F_{\rm ar}F_{\rm av}\Phi_{\rm bm}\large$

$\Delta_p = \frac{1}{f_p}\left [ F_{\rm ar}\Phi_{\rm av} F_b + F_{\rm ar}F_{\rm av}\Phi_{\rm bp} \right ]\large$

$\Delta_d = \frac{1}{f_d}\left [ F_{\rm ar}\Phi_{\rm av} F_b + F_{\rm ar}F_{\rm av}\Phi_{\rm bd} \right ]\large$

where $f_{ar}$, $f_h$, $f_s$, $f_x$, $f_m$, $f_p$, and $f_d$ are the factors that convert rating to percentage for armor $(f_{ar} = (Ar+K))$, hit, haste, crit, mastery (in this case, rating->mastery), parry, and dodge, respectively. $F_{\rm ar}$ is the armor mitigation factor,

$F_{\rm ar} = K/(Ar+K)$,

where $K$ is a constant that depends on player and target level, and $Ar$ is the player’s armor. $F_{\rm av}$ is the avoidance mitigation factor,

$F_{\rm av} = 1-A$,

where $A$ is the player’s total (post-DR) avoidance. $F_b$ is the block mitigation factor:

$F_b = 1-G(1+C)B_v – (1-G)B_c(1+C)B_v$,

where $G$ is the probability that an unavoided attack becomes a guaranteed block, $C$ is the critical block chance as determined from mastery, $B_c$ is the player’s total block chance, and $B_v$ is the player’s block value (30%). $G$ has the form,

$G = R_{\rm SB} T_{\rm buff}\large$,

where we’ve implicitly defined the Shield Block buff duration $T_{\rm buff}$ and the Shield Block cast rate $R_{\rm SB}$, which will be defined later on in the rage generation section.

We also have the factor $\Phi_{\rm av}$, which represents the avoidance mitigation factor’s scaling with dodge and parry:

$\Phi_{\rm av} = \frac{1}{k_d}\left ( 1-\frac{A_d}{C_d} \right )^2\large$

with $A_d$ being the player’s post-DR dodge from sources subject to DR, and $k_d$ and $C_d$ being the avoidance diminishing returns coefficients. We’ve assumed here that dodge and parry are properly balanced. And we have the factors $\Phi_{\rm bi}$, which represent the scaling of the block factor with respect to different stats:

$\Phi_{\rm bh} = \Phi_{\rm be} = \gamma_h\phi_{\rm G}\large$
$\Phi_{\rm bs} = \gamma_s\phi_{\rm G}\large$
$\Phi_{\rm bx} = \gamma_x\phi_{\rm G}\large$
$\Phi_{\rm bp} = \gamma_p\phi_{\rm G}\large$
$\Phi_{\rm bd} = \gamma_d\phi_{\rm G}\large$
$\Phi_{\rm bm} = \gamma_m\phi_{\rm G} + \beta_{vm}\phi_{\rm BV} + \beta_{cm}\phi_{\rm BC}\large$

where we’ve incorporated definitions from the differential block factor equation:

$\phi_{\rm G} = (1-B_c)(1+C)B_v$
$\phi_{\rm BV} = [G+(1-G)B_c]B_v$
$\phi_{\rm BC} = (1-G)(1+C)B_v$

as well as factors from the equation for $dG$:

$\gamma_h = \rho_h T_{\rm buff}\large$
$\gamma_s = \rho_s T_{\rm buff}\large$
$\gamma_m = \rho_m T_{\rm buff}\large$
$\gamma_x = \rho_x T_{\rm buff}\large$
$\gamma_p = \rho_p T_{\rm buff}\large$
$\gamma_d = \rho_d T_{\rm buff}\large$

and the factor representing diminishing returns on block:

$\beta_{cm} = \frac{f_b}{k_B}\left ( 1-\frac{B_{cm}}{C_B} \right )^2\large$

where $f_b$ is the mastery-to-block-chance conversion factor (1.5%) $B_{cm}$ is the player’s post-DR block chance due to mastery (i.e. the part that’s subject to DR), and $C_B$ and $k_B$ are the diminishing returns coefficients for blocking.

We’ve also used $\beta_{vm} = f_{cb}$, which is the mastery-to-crit-block conversion factor (1.5%).

In the expressions for $\gamma_i$ we’ve defined some factors $\rho_i$ which represent the scaling of the SB cast rate with different stats. These will be defined in the “Part 3″ section.

Required Equations from Part 2

In part 2, we modeled the rotation. We defined $\Theta$ and $\Theta_s$, the melee and spell hit factors:

$\Theta = 1-(\mu-h)-(d+p-e)$
$\Theta_s = 1 -(2\mu-h-e)$

And used a stochastic matrix method to determine the steady-state probability factors:

$\Pi_2 = (0.6 \Theta)(1- 0.6 \Theta)$
$\Pi_3 = (1- 0.6 \Theta)^2$
$\Pi_4 = 0.6 \Theta$

We then determined the cast rates for different abilities:

$R_{\rm SS} = R_{\rm rSS} + R_{\rm SnB}$
$R_{\rm rSS} = \Pi_2/4.5+\Pi_3/6$
$R_{\rm SnB}=\Pi_4/4.5$
$R_{\rm R}=(\Pi_2+\Pi_4)/4.5+\Pi_3/6 = R_{\rm SS}$
$R_{\rm shout} = 1/60$
$R_{\rm TC} = 1/6 – (2/15)\Theta_s$
$R_{\rm D} = R_{\rm D0} – R_{\rm TC} – R_{\rm shout}$
$R_{\rm D0}=(\Pi_2+\Pi_4)/4.5+2\Pi_3/6$

And we defined some differential cast rate factors $\chi_i$:

$\chi_{\rm rSS} = 0.6(1-1.2\Theta)/4.5 -1.2(1-0.6\Theta)/6$
$\chi_{\rm SnB} = 0.6/4.5$
$\chi_{\rm SS} = \chi_{\rm rSS}+\chi_{\rm SnB}$
$\chi_{\rm R} = \chi_{\rm SS}$
$\chi_{\rm TC}=\frac{2}{15}$
$\chi_{\rm D0} = 0.6(2-1.2\Theta)/4.5 – 1.2(1-0.6\Theta)/3$.

We then went on to calculate the effects of parry-haste, giving us definitions for the auto-attack rate:

$R_{\rm AA} = R_{\rm AA}^{(0)}(1+s)+cR_{\rm att}$

$c = 0.24 P \left ( \frac{R_{\rm att}}{R_{\rm AA}^{(0)}(1+s)}-\frac{2R_{\rm att}P}{R_{\rm AA}^{(0)}(1+s)}+2P\right )\large$
$P = A_{p0}+A_p$

in terms of the incoming attack rate $R_{\rm att}$, and two more definitions that represent haste and parry-haste scaling of auto-attacks:

$\pi_s = R_{\rm AA}^{(0)} – \frac{0.24 P (1-P) R_{\rm att}}{R_{\rm AA}^{(0)}(1+s)^2}\large$
$\pi_p = 0.24 R_{\rm att} \Phi_{\rm av}\left ( \frac{R_{\rm att}(1-4P)}{R_{\rm AA}^{(0)}(1+s)}+4P\right )\large$

Required Equations from Part 3

The shield block cast rate is found from the rage generation equation (link):

$R_{\rm SB} = RPS/60$
$RPS = \Theta[(1+0.5E)(5R_{\rm AA}/R_{\rm AA}^{(0)})+10R_{\rm rSS}+15R_{\rm SnB}] +(8/3)\Theta_s-3$,

where $E$ is the enrage buff uptime, $R_{\rm AA}^{(0)}$ is the player’s base auto-attack rate, $R_{\rm AA}$ is the player’s auto-attack rate after haste and parry-haste effects, $R_{\rm rSS}$ the rate of regular shield slams, $R_{\rm SnB}$ the rate of Sword-and-Board-affected Shield Slams

where $m$, $d$, and $p$ are the hit, dodge, and parry caps (7.5% each), and $h$ and $e$ are the player’s hit and expertise percentages.

The $\rho_i$ found in the $\gamma_i$ expressions come from the derivative of the Shield Block cast rate equation, and are:

$\rho_h = (\sigma_h+\sigma_E\epsilon_h)/60\large$
$\rho_s = (\sigma_E\epsilon_s + \sigma_{AA}\pi_s)/60\large$
$\rho_m = (\sigma_E\epsilon_m)/60\large$
$\rho_x = \sigma_E\epsilon_x/60\large$
$\rho_d = \sigma_E\epsilon_d/60\large$
$\rho_p = (\sigma_E\epsilon_p+\sigma_{AA}\pi_p)/60 = \rho_d + (\sigma_E\eta_{1p} \ln x + \sigma_{AA}\pi_p)/60\large$

where we’ve made use of the following definitions from the Enrage derivation:

$E =1 -0.8 q_1^{N_1}q_2^{N_2}q_3^{N_3}$

$q_1 = 1-x$
$q_2 = 1-C$
$q_3 = 1-u$

$N_1=6 [ (R_{\rm SS}+R_{\rm D}+R_{\rm R})\Theta+R_{\rm TC}\Theta_s+R_{\rm AA}(\Theta-g) ]$
$N_2 = 6 R_{\rm att}(1-A)\left [ G+ (1-G)B_c\right ]$
$N_3 = 6 R_{\rm D}\Theta$

$\sigma_h = [5(1+0.5 E)R_{\rm AA}/R_{\rm AA}^{(0)} +10 R_{\rm rSS} + 15 R_{\rm SnB} + \Theta (10 \chi_{\rm rSS} + 15\chi_{\rm SnB}) + 8/3]$
$\sigma_E = 2.5 \Theta(1-E)R_{\rm AA}/R_{\rm AA}^{(0)}$
$\sigma_{AA} = 5\Theta(1+0.5 E)/R_{\rm AA}^{(0)}$

$\epsilon_x = N_1/(1-x)$
$\epsilon_h = -\eta_{1h}\ln (1-x) – \eta_{2h}\ln (1-C) – \eta_{3h} \ln (1-u)$
$\epsilon_m = N_2\beta_{vm}/(1-C) – \eta_{2m}\ln (1-C)$
$\epsilon_s = -\eta_{1s}\ln (1-x) – \eta_{2s}\ln (1-C)$
$\epsilon_d = -\eta_{2d}\ln (1-C)$
$\epsilon_p = -\eta_{1p}\ln (1-x) + \epsilon_d$

$\eta_{1h} = 6\left [ R_{\rm GCD}-R_{\rm shout}+R_{\rm AA}+\Theta(\chi_{\rm SS}+\chi_{\rm D0}+\chi_{\rm R})+\chi_{\rm TC}(\mu-d-p) \right ]$
$\eta_{1s} = 6\pi_s (\Theta-g)$
$\eta_{1p}= 6\pi_p(\Theta-g)$

$\eta_{2d} = 6R_{\rm att}\left [\gamma_d(1-A)(1-B_c) - \Phi_{\rm av}(G+(1-G)B_c)\right ]$
$\eta_{2m} = 6R_{\rm att}(1-A)\left [\beta_{cm}(1-G)+\gamma_m(1-B_c)\right ]$
$\eta_{2h}=6R_{\rm att}(1-A)(1-B_c)\gamma_h$
$\eta_{2s}=6R_{\rm att}(1-A)(1-B_c)\gamma_s$

$\eta_{3h} = 6[R_{\rm D}+\chi_{\rm D0}-\chi_{\rm TC}]$

Tying it all together

At this point, you might expect that I would start back-substituting expressions. There are two reasons I’m not going to do that. The first is that these expressions are complicated enough that doing so is futile. It’s hard to get any useful information out of these expressions once they become too complicated to read. It’s a little easier to glean intuition by simply evaluating all of the different factors we have and understanding why they’re positive, negative, small, large, etc.

The other problem is recursion. If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed the following quandary:

$G = R_{\rm SB} T_{\rm buff}\large$
$R_{\rm SB} = RPS/60$
$RPS = \Theta[(1+0.5E)(5R_{\rm AA}/R_{\rm AA}^{(0)})+10R_{\rm rSS}+15R_{\rm SnB}] +(8/3)\Theta_s-3$
$E =1 -0.8 q_1^{N_1}q_2^{N_2}q_3^{N_3}$
$N_2 = 6 R_{\rm att}(1-A)\left [ G+ (1-G)B_c\right ]$

So $G$ depends $R_{\rm SB}$, which depends on $E$, which depends on $N_2$, which depends on…. $G$. This isn’t a simple thing to solve analytically, and the expressions will end up getting even worse in the process. A similar situation happens for haste, mastery, hit, and dodge when we try to evaluate $\gamma_i$ and $\eta_2i$.

It’s much faster to use recursion to do this numerically. Basically, we make a guess at $G$, and then evaluate the whole chain, recalculating $G$ at the end. We then take the new value of $G$ and repeat the process. We do this until a certain tolerance threshold is reached – say, the maximum change in value of any of these variables changes by less than $10^-13$%. It turns out that only takes around 12 iterations, so it’s not particularly time consuming.

Numerical Calculation

The code I’m using to calculate the results can be found here:

derivations_warr.m

You can see that I’ve more-or-less reproduced all of the equations from this post, and written small loops to handle the recursive definitions. The input values I’m using are:

$Ar = 40000$
$A = 0.35$ (5% base miss/dodge/parry plus 10% dodge and parry from DR)
$A_d = 0.1$
$A_p = 0.1$
$A_{p0}=0.5$
$B_c = 0.55$
$B_{cm}=0.4$
$B_v=0.3$
$C=0.37$
$h=0.02$
$e=0.02$
$s=0.1$
$x=0.05$
$\mu = 0.075$
$d=0.075$
$p=0.075$
$g = 0.24$
$u=0.3$
$R_{\rm AA}^{(0)} = 1/2.6$

$k=0.9560$
$C_d = 0.65631440$
$C_b = 1.351$
$K=32573$

$f_{ar} = Ar+K$
$f_m = 179.28004$
$f_b = 0.015$
$f_cb = 0.015$
$f_d = 176.71890258/0.01$
$f_p = 176.71890258/0.01$
$fs=128.05715942/0.01$
$fe=120.10880279/0.01$
$fh=120.10880279/0.01$
$f_x = 179.28004$

$T_{\rm buff}=6$
$R_{\rm att} = 1/2$

Numerical Results

Plugging those in and multiplying by $10^5$ for ease of analysis, we get the following stat weights:

$\Gamma_p=1.2220$
$\Gamma_d=1.1779$
$\Gamma_m=0.8315$
$\Gamma_h=0.6048$
$\Gamma_{ar}=0.2510$
$\Gamma_s=0.2254$
$\Gamma_x =0.0700$

Parry and dodge rank at the top, as expected. Parry pulls ahead of dodge by virtue of increased rage generation through parry-haste, but it’s a pretty small effect. Mastery doesn’t fare too badly for warriors, but it’s definitely not as attractive as dodge and parry. I was actually a little surprised at how well mastery did, figuring that the Shield Block mechanic would suppress it some. In fact, it does – about 80% of mastery’s value comes from the raw mitigation of more critical blocks. Only about 12% comes from increased block chance, and the other 8% comes from increased Shield Block uptime (via more critical blocks increasing Enrage uptime).

Hit and expertise help increase rage generation and significantly impact Shield Slam casts (by reducing Revenge misses/dodges/parries), so it has a strong effect on resource generation. Note that armor is actually ahead of mastery in terms of itemization, because you get 4 armor per itemization point. Haste and crit both provide some increased resource generation (from auto-attacks and Enrage uptime, respectively), but they’re both weak effects.

While we’re at it, let’s see what Shield Block and Enrage uptimes look like:

$G: 80.88\%$
$E: 80.10\%$

That’s an incredibly large uptime on Shield Block. Most of this is due to the changes in this last beta push – doubling the Enrage bonus and reducing Revenge’s cooldown both had a significant impact on rage generation. Let’s quickly look at the breakdown of rage sources:

$AA: 6.58$
$SS: 2.14$
$Sh: 0.33$
$TC: -0.96$

So our net rage generation rate is 8.09 rage per second, and the majority of it is coming from Enrage-buffed auto-attacks. Shield Slam is only accounting for a little over 2 RPS because we’re at low hit/exp. At 7.5% hit/exp, we jump up to about 9.7 RPS, a little over 7.5 of it from auto-attacks and 2.5 from Shield Slams. At that level of hit/exp, Shield Block uptime reaches 97% – nearly block-capped.

This is a bit of a problem, in my mind. Shield Block is rather powerful because it forces block-cap for a fixed time period, and we’ve seen how unbalancing that was in Cataclysm. If warriors can successfully reach 90%+ uptimes on Shield Block, it will become a balance problem. I’m not sure what the solution is – nerfing the duration on Shield Block would do it, but that would make Shield Block a bit more timing-intensive too. Lowering rage generation rates seems like the simplest way to do it. They could keep the Revenge change, since that makes the rotation more interesting, but drop the auto-attack accumulation rate so that it’s on par with Shield Slams. That could be achieved by dropping the Enrage bonus, or by keeping Enrage at 50% but dropping the normalized rage generation from auto-attacks from 5/second to 3/second.

Conclusions

In this series, we’ve seen that the warrior equations are much more onerous than the paladin ones due to the complications of parry-haste, Enrage, and auto-attack-based resource generation. Nonetheless, we slogged through it to get stat weights, and those stat weights seem reasonable given what we know about warrior mechanics. The dodge/parry values aren’t highly inflated because Shield Block’s guaranteed block effect doesn’t get consumed, unlike the Paladin version. And since warrior mastery isn’t simply block chance, it interacts with their active mitigation and keeps mastery attractive. They still see a mitigation benefit from hit/exp, haste, and even crit due to faster rage generation, but those effects are all weaker than the increase from “true” tanking stats. All in all, the system doesn’t seem too bad.

The real eye-openers are the rage generation levels and subsequent Shield Block uptimes we’re seeing in the model. If accurate, those suggest a potential balance problem as warriors gear up and can afford to reach hit and expertise caps. Of course, there could still be changes in the pipeline for warriors, so it’s too early to tell.

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### 8 Responses to Warrior Block Calculations – Part 4

1. Ohgodbees says:

I checked on the beta yesterday, TC doesn’t cost any rage for Prot, so that’s even more rage to push 100% SB uptime. Like you said, this is a balance issue, but I also see an issue where if they reduce the length of SB, then it’s going to devalue hit/exp by a lot. I feel that the value of those stats and mastery are in good places right now relative to avoidance. They provide less reduction in damage taken, but provide for smoother, more controllable and predictable intake, which would seem to be where they should balance stats.

I’m not really sure what they can do to prevent SB capping, though.

• Dalmasca says:

I noticed the same thing with TC, but even in those circumstances, there is an implied rage generation cost if it pushes back a SS or Revenge cast since that would slow S&B procs and normal-SS rage generation. Probably very minor, but Theck’s attention to detail in these posts has been phenomenal, so I didn’t want to omit mentioning it.

Also, with regard to the Glyph of Incite, that interaction’s benefit to Enrage uptime for tanks (via Ultimatum) was removed with the latest beta patch. It now simply increases the damage of the next HS/Cleave by 100% without guaranteeing a critical strike. I like the simple, clever changes like that.

As far as Enrage uptime goes, I know you treated Berserker Rage usage as a stochastic event, but wouldn’t it make more sense to treat it as a conditional event (i.e. – when Enrage is down, hit BR) and then use the stochastic up/downtime for Enrage via other mechanics? Then you can estimate how frequently Berserker Rage would need to be cast for maximum uptime. I’m sure there are plenty of tanks willing to make a simple Power Aura to track Enrage uptime and pop BR accordingly to maximize results. Any idea what that delta of ideal usage vs. on-cd usage is?

• Theck says:

As I said in part 3, without GoI we’d just eliminate $q_3$ and $N_3$ and put a 1.3 modifier on $R_D$ in $N_1$. So it doesn’t completely eliminate the effect on Enrage uptime, but it does make it a lot smaller.

I didn’t realize TC lost its rage cost; that does lessen its rage generation impact. Note that we’ve modeled TC as filling in for Devastate only, so it never pushes back SS/Revenge, but it will mean fewer Devastates and thus fewer Ultimatum procs.

We can’t easily treat Berserker Rage as a conditional event simply because the rest of the process is random. You could estimate the ideal case by calculating the stochastic uptime via $1-q_1^{N_1} q_2^{N_2}$ and then adding 0.2 for “perfect” utilization of BR (bounding the result by 1, of course). But that’s probably an over-estimate, because some of that stochastic downtime will occur during the cooldown of BR.

If we’re willing to ditch the analytical approach, we could numerically simulate the net effect on Enrage uptime and assign an attrition coefficient to the uptime granted by BR (i.e. $0.2alpha$, where $alpha$ is bounded by 0 and 1 and represents how efficiently we fill gaps with BR). But frankly, I don’t expect the difference to be large enough to significantly impact the scaling factors.

• Dalmasca says:

Ya, I’m quite happy with that glyph change. I’m curious if that will widen the potential gaps in Enrages, even if the overall uptime isn’t significantly changed, just by virtue of letting RNG have more sway over the effect.

To be honest, by the time I got to the end of the series, I had forgotten that we established TC as a substitute for Devastate (ha!). I bet warrior tanks of past expansions can hardly believe their eyes seeing a rage-less TC hit the servers after so many years of tweaking it to just be functional.

I see what you mean about BR utilization though. With only ~8% of mastery’s value coming from increasing Enrage uptime, I don’t think an event with such a short uptime will have any meaningful effect, especially when it can be negated by RNG (crit/crit block occurring during BR’s duration).

Also, given what you said about the dramatic increase in Shield Block uptime at hit/exp cap, does mastery’s value change significantly? After all, we’d be gaining more (up to 17%) opportunities to crit block, which accounts for most of mastery’s value (~80%). It seems to me that even then it’s worse Dodge and Parry in terms of itemization.

Getting back to what you said about solving the SB uptime/rage income problem, wouldn’t a Prot-only solution be ideal, instead of altering class-wide rage mechanics? Would altering the rage gained from SS or changing its cd be suitable solutions?

Btw, as I was reading maintankadin, I was pleasantly surprised to see that your location is my hometown. It’s a small world, I suppose! Thanks for the reply and all the awesome work you’ve done!

• Theck says:

Mastery doesn’t increase dramatically at hit/exp cap. It’s still only giving 1.5% chance to mitigate an additional 30% damage, while avoidance is giving 1% chance to mitigate an additional 70% damage. Even after DR, avoidance wins that. At 7.5% hit/exp, here’s what I get (after making the ultimatum change and setting Tclap’s rage cost to zero):
$Gamma_{ar} =0.2368$
$Gamma_d =1.1032$
$Gamma_p =1.1526$
$Gamma_h = 0.6162$
$Gamma_x = 0.1177$
$Gamma_s = 0.2544$
$Gamma_m = 0.8247$

$G=100.00$
$E=75.83$

$AA =7.35$
$SS =2.52$
$Sh =0.33$
$TC =0.00$
$Tot=10.21$

Dropping it back down to 2% hit/exp, I get:
$Gamma_{ar}=0.2450$
$Gamma_d =1.1440$
$Gamma_p =1.1872$
$Gamma_h =0.6031$
$Gamma_x =0.0979$
$Gamma_s =0.2221$
$Gamma_m =0.8388$

$G=88.98$
$E=73.71$

$AA =6.43$
$SS =2.14$
$Sh =0.33$
$TC =0.00$
$Tot=8.90$

As far as the rage income issue, I’d rather see the bulk of one’s rage come from active abilities than auto-attacks. Right now I think warriors are out of whack, insofar as 75% of their rage generation comes from an essentially passive source. I think it would be a better balance if they got ~3 RPS from AA and ~3-4 RPS from Shield Slam.

If that impacts Arms/Fury, then appropriate changes can be made to those specs to fix them. I don’t know what their situation looks like, but if they’re also getting 75% of their rage passively, then it’s probably a design issue worth confronting in those specs as well. At worst, if they like passive rage gen for Fury/Arms, they can just give them a spec ability that doubles rage generation from AA.

• Dalmasca says:

Wow, those are some shocking results again. I agree completely about rage income and was just making a similar case in a fury warrior thread the other day with regard to BT. I was debating a warrior who wanted to remove active sources of rage entirely… *facepalm*

Seeing only an 11% difference in SB uptime leads me to believe that hit/exp capping still won’t outweigh avoidance in smoothing out damage intake. Flattening the curve by only that much doesn’t make up for dodge/parry’s itemization advantage in my mind. Who knows though? I could see healer mana concerns or fight mechanics swinging that paradigm in the other direction occasionally.

Do you think these mechanics, if left unchanged, will dictate any shift in preference for paladin or warrior tanks? Right now, they seem to be the inverse of Cata’s first tier where Paladins started out with a much smoother damage curve.

• Theck says:

It depends. Mastery is worse at total damage reduction than dodge/parry for paladin tanks on live, yet we prefer mastery even if we can’t reach block cap. TDR isn’t always the end-all, be-all metric. That said, I think your intuition is right, and hit/exp are far enough behind dodge that they won’t be the preferred stats.

I’m not sure what you mean by preference, but the difference between Shield Block and the new implementation of SotR has definitely reversed the roles of the two tanks. Warriors will take smoother damage than we will, provided reasonable SB uptimes. But with the newly-announced rage changes, maybe their uptime will drop to 30-40% and we’ll be about even.