# Tag Archives: theorycrafting

## Tankadin Patch 5.4 Survival Guide

Protection paladins are receiving a number of peripheral changes in 5.4, but nothing that changes our core mechanics.  We’re still going to be stacking haste thanks to Sanctity of Battle – in fact it’s even on two of our tier … Continue reading

Posted in Tanking, Theck's Pounding Headaches | | 60 Comments

## EF & You?

If you’ve been paying attention to the PTR patch notes, you’ve probably noticed that there’s a big change coming in 5.4.  I’m not talking about the change to Grand Crusader, which is mostly irrelevant to how we gear and spec.  … Continue reading

| | 75 Comments

## Stamina Breakpoints?

Last week I investigated two different situations where Simcraft was giving a user stat weights that seemed wrong.  These turned out to be pretty interesting, and are situations that other players could encounter at some point, so I decided it … Continue reading

| | 12 Comments

## Updated Diminishing Returns Coefficients – All Tanks

A few weeks ago, Taser contacted me about calculating the avoidance diminishing returns coefficients for monks to greater accuracy.  As you might remember, we managed to do this for paladins a little less than a year ago by using an … Continue reading

| | 11 Comments

## Simulationcraft 101: Getting Started

As I mentioned on twitter last week, version 530-5 of Simulationcraft has been released.  This is the first version to include the Theck-Meloree Index, a damage smoothing metric we developed in a series of previous blog posts. However, Simcraft is … Continue reading

| | 124 Comments

## Blood, Toil, Tears, and Threat

A few days ago, my friend Llarold asked me if I had done any calculation about the new threat bonus on taunts in 5.4.  In the past, I had worked out a rough formula for how long it took to … Continue reading

| | 17 Comments

## The Making of a Metric: Part 3

In our last installment, we nailed down the weight factors we’ll use for our smoothness metric.  Today we’re going to wrap it up by specifying normalization conditions for the histogram and formally defining the metric. To refresh your memory a … Continue reading

| | 55 Comments

## The Making of a Metric: Part 2

In our last post, we decided on a functional form for our metric.  And while I didn’t write it out in full mathematical formalism, the pieces were all there.  In short, we start with a damage histogram $H(x)$ computed by … Continue reading

| | 19 Comments

## The Making of a Metric: Part 1

Simulationcraft now has full support for protection paladin mechanics, and hopefully in a week or two I’ll get around to writing a how-to blog post on using it and interpreting the data.  Once I write a few batch files, it … Continue reading

| | 39 Comments

## SotRdämmerung

As was pointed out in the comments on a previous blog post, the protection 2-piece-turned-4-piece that returns holy power when Bastion of Glory (BoG) stacks are consumed will allow us to keep SotR up 100% of the time.  That comes … Continue reading

| | 59 Comments