Blocking

Some of the other warriors in my guild were having a strokie-beard meeting about blocking yesterday, and the consensus is that they expect a nerf pretty soon.

Apparently it is already possible at T7 level to build a "crush immune" set so that every attack is blocked irrespective of whether Shield Block is activated, and one therefore wonders whether this will be the norm at T8 and beyond, which would put Druids and DKs at a serious disadvantage.

My theorycrafting is pretty rule of thumb, but I understand the general principle that diminishing returns are necessary at high levels of gear, because "expected time to live" (ETTL) increases exponentially rather than linearly at high gear levels.

Example - suppose you are fighting a boss that hits you every second for 100, and you have 1000 health. You would therefore expect to live for 10 seconds without a heal landing. Now add 25% avoidance - you would expect to live for 13.3 seconds. Add a further 25% avoidance and you would expect to live for 20 seconds. You have therefore had more benefit from the second slice of avoidance than the first.

All those clever people at EJ and Tankspot have done some pretty graphs to work this out in detail (for example http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f200/37241-power-avoidance-preliminary-results.html ), but you get the idea.

Anyway, this is why I could understand Blizzard applying DRs to avoidance in Wrath of the Lich King - I had thought that the DRs would smooth the ETTL graph to a line, in the same way as the armour DRs, although I now understand there are different curves for parry and for dodge, for some bizarre reason.

Block value (and to a lesser extent block rating) still however provide an exponential benefit to ETTL for a linear increase in gear and since Druids and DKs can't benefit from this I guess there will be nerf sooner or later.