Mastery rating on gear

A quote from Eyonix a couple of months back:

Here’s how the system works: As you spend points in a given talent tree, you’ll receive three different passive bonuses specific to that tree. The first bonus will increase your damage, healing, or survivability, depending on the intended role of the tree. The second bonus will be related to a stat commonly found on gear desirable to you, such as Haste or Crit. The third bonus will be the most interesting, as it will provide an effect completely unique to that tree -- meaning there will be 30 different bonuses of this nature in the game. This third bonus is the one that will benefit from the Mastery rating found on high-level (level 80 to 85) gear.

Protection warriors have three masteries at present

- Damage reduction
- Vengeance
- Critical block

According to MMO-champion's Cataclysm warrior preview, the damage reduction is capped at 8.01%, and vengeance (hereafter referred to in this blog as "venge") is capped at 5% damage taken. This leaves critical block chance as increasing depending upon the amount of the mastery stat on gear.

Here's a picture of some new gear with mastery on it.

So what does mastery do for prot warriors then? Well, it's block value, essentially, isn't it? It makes our blocks bigger. It is therefore useless against spell damage and against bleeds, and it is RNG-based. With block now mitigating a fixed percentage in Cata it may be that larger blocks are valuable - certainly I normally block 2-5k damage per hit, whereas if the Cata block model was used I'd be blocking around 5-10k. To a certain extent the value or otherwise of RNG-based mitigation stats such as block and dodge will depend upon whether or not Blizzard's new healing model works.

The new healing model is for the tank not to be in immediate danger of dying in a 4 second window, so casters can wait to see if the tank takes a hit before deciding whether to heal. Healers therefore don't need to be spamming the tank constantly or at least can be using a small, mana-efficient heal rather than a powerful, expensive heal. If that's right then block and dodge might be useful, and mastery as a stat might be desireable.

Currently though it looks as if I'll be searching for stamina and armour on my gear, rather than mastery rating .

Back on track

The blog's been a bit light for the last few weeks. Partly because this is because I'm playing less warcraft, and partly this is because I've been dealing with the aftermath of the guild shenanigans and doing GM stuff.

When the guild split we lost our entire "ICC10 team 1", which was also the heart of our 25 man team. This included two of our guild's three MTs, plus two of our strongest healers, and our two best dps. Some people I liked very much ended up leaving, and I'll miss them.

We've had to start again, and are now a 10 man guild. My 10 man team, which had been on LK at about 20%, got split into pieces. The main piece is now our first team, or T1, and they finally got the LK kill (without me, the bastards), and are now 4/12 in hard modes. I decided to try to get a second team up and running, T2. This new team involves currently five or six mains, and some of the guild's better alts.

I'd never really understood before how much people's performance drops on their second character. Some people who are very strong on their main characters simply do not seem to be able to cut it when raiding on their alts. My new team has had some really really disappointing raids, and it's been quite frustrating. I have been concentrating on picking a consistent group, and it finally seems like we are getting some results at last and are turning into a decent team.

We killed 10/12 this reset, and I hope for better next week. I would be really disappointed if the guild split meant that I'd lost my chance to kill Arthas, but I think it's turned out for the best for the guild as a whole. The atmosphere is a lot happier now and people seem to be cheerful again.

Grass is greener?

I've been levelling a (blood spec) DK tank. It's interesting to see the differences between a blood DK and a warrior, although I understand that frost and unholy specs play a little differently.

Firstly, I am amazed at how overpowered the DK is in solo content. I can take on 6 or 7 mobs of the same level or greater and come out with full health. The self healing is really something special. I can easily solo elites of higher level (orange to me). Possibly one of the reasons that there are so many bad max-level DKs is that the DK is so very easy to level - run in, drop a DnD, spread your diseases (optional), death strike when possible to restore health.

Disease management is annoying when tanking. The diseases don't seem to last that long or be autorefreshed (or maybe I haven't picked up the talent or ability that refreshes them yet). Keeping multiple mobs diseased via pestilence is something that often gets lost during chaotic fights.

It's also annoying that you need to press four buttons to do decent AoE damage - frost strike, plague strike, pestilence, blood boil. That's 6 seconds for impatient dps to pull aggro from you. DnD is great, but it's on a long cooldown so is not always available for every pull or if adds arrive late in the fight. Warriors may complain that DnD is better than thunderclap, and indeed it is better in theory, but thunderclap is available every six seconds and hits hard enough to get the mobs onto you when you use it. Frost DKs get howling blast, so I guess this is something unique to blood.

I wonder how the rune changes will alter rotations for DKs in Cata. I haven't read anything recently but I recall the intent was to slow down rune recharge times by only allowing one rune of each type to recharge at any one time. Certainly DnD looks absurdly expensive for three runes if the rate of recharge is essentially halved - it will mean I think that you can't use any more rune-based attacks for 10 seconds afterwards since it would put a frost, blood and unholy rune on cooldown. Perhaps rune strike going onto the GCD will help DK tanks have a button to hit in those circumstances. In addition if your diseases last 15 seconds and you are only going to get a frost rune every 10 seconds, most of your frost runes will need to be spent on keeping Frost Fever up I think. This means death strike could be a bit of a luxury.

DPS is insane as usual - I am in tanking gear, with no dps talents outside the cookie cutter, only the heirloom shoulders and I am pretty much always top of the meters, and even single target it's possible to pull 500 dps or so. Nerf the buggers!

DKs have some amazing abilities - strangulate and chains of ice, for example - which seem to be lacking in other tanks and I think their "toolkit" is probably the best of any class other than the warrior. The two-resource system is just a bit too unwieldy to be comfortable - I see many complaints about the resources not being there when you need them for interrupts and for defensive cooldowns, and personally I find the requirement to have a blood rune available for rune tap, for example, to be potentially fatal.

My overall reaction is that there is just something a bit too clever about the DK class for me. I'm enjoying the levelling curve, but I don't think that my warrior is in danger of being replaced any time soon.

Busy week

1) Old guild split after I left.

2) Various people left.

3) Am now back in old guild, but promoted to GM.

4) LK still not dead.

Busy week.

Touch the sun

So I haven't been posting for a while because I had this brilliant "Guide to tanking the Lich King" post written, but, uh, we haven't killed him yet. We are consistently in the 20% range, but can't seem to get the last phase down.

And it seems that the kill is a ways off now, because my guild is in the process of a painful split. The personal differences between the various groups in the guild just got too much to bear, we were losing people all over the place, and there have been quite nasty moments in gchat and on the forum. What's worse, there was no push from the officers to fix anything (especially since some of them were the problem).

I decided to try to split the guild. I've set up a new guild called Icarus, and invited some old friends from around the server. I felt such a bastard for doing this - I'd been in my previous guild for nearly 5 years, and there is a core of players I've known for nearly all that time. It remains to be seen whether enough people will come so that we can organise a regular 10 man raid team but we'll see. I hope so - we have I think 6 or 7 members at the moment, plus I think I can rely on a few people from other guilds to come along too.

Still, everything changes I guess.

Stay on target...

Our best try at Arthas 10 so far is 38%. We have phase 1 and the transition phases nailed. We are pretty good at the Val'kyr phases, and hopefully we'll get a few really solid final phase attempts on Friday.

Each raid we get a little bit closer...

Last Word

I was called in to dps in one of my guild's 25 man raids last night and picked up the Last Word, which no-one else wanted and would otherwise have been sharded.

I've been trying to decide whether this weapon is any good or not. To compare, I am currently using The Facelifter, and I have Crusader's Glory which I might use for EH fights such as Saurfang heroic (if we ever get there). Leaving aside Crusader's Glory for the moment, and on the assumption that the Last Word proc has 100% uptime (which I believe it has), essentially the decision comes down to

Last Word http://www.wowhead.com/item=50179
1.8 speed
+21.1 dps
+12 stamina
+60 strength
+300 healing received

The Facelifter http://www.wowhead.com/item=51010
1.6 speed
+41 defence rating
+41 parry rating
+36 expertise rating

I think that the extra weapon dps and the harder devastates which derive from the strength (120 attack power), the weapon dps and the slower speed will be outweighed by the loss of expertise rating and the chance for fewer heroic strikes. So as a threat weapon, I think The Facelifter wins out although there is probably not very much in it.

The next consideration is defence. I use the two ilevel 264 crafter armour pieces and neither has +defence on it. I am about 20 defence over the cap, and so replacing The Facelifter with Last Word means that I will need to start gemming for defence. On the assumption that I will need to replace two +30 stam gems with +10 def / +15 stamina gems, and both of those new green gems will allow me to complete a +6 stamina socket bonuses (which I think is right), the overall effect of losing the defence rating is that I lose 21 defence rating and 19 stamina. Using that to restate the above gives me the following

Last Word
+60 strength (= 30 block value)
+300 healing received

The Facelifter
+6 stamina
+21 defence rating
+41 parry rating

The 6 stamina is trivial - 65 health or so, and so is the block value. We are therefore comparing avoidance on The Facelifter with the +health buff on Last Word.

The efficacy of the health buff is hard to measure and it comes down to the thorny old question of why tanks die. At present I never go from 100% to 0% in one hit. It simply does not happen. When I die it is often from a series of hits (soul reaper + melee on LK, or a string of unavoided hits on Festergut are the only times I can remember recently). Quite often my death lasts 3 or 4 seconds and is along the lines of - big hit - big hit - little heal - big hit - dead. The point is that I almost always get a heal of some kind during the burst period which leads to my death, be it an earth shield bubble popping, or a renew tick, or something similar. The +heals buff supplied by Last Word would be helpful in that scenario as follows (on the assumption that my healer is a holy priest, as she is now):

- Each renew tick would heal for an extra 200 or so (my rough maths based on EJ's overall coefficient of 3.3)
- A holy priest's flash heal would heal for an extra 320 -ish (EJ)

So on that basis, on the assumption that during the period of burst damage you get a renew tick and a flash heal the +health buff would be worth about 520 extra health, or about 47 stamina.

The +heal effect is broadly like +armour because you need less healing to go from an injured state into a state where you can survive the next hit. It might help if you think of it as an armour effect which is proportional to healing taken (and you don't know the healing taken because it will vary from occasion to occasion - you have to estimate based on what is reasonable).

There's a great quote about this weapon on Maintankadin

"the RNG of avoidance fails me roughly ~55% of the time; my healers, however, rarely fail me"

This makes sense to me - my healers normally manage to get a heal in on me, even if it's a small heal. Anything that makes that small heal better is essentially EH.

And there, I've made my decision! Once I've sorted out my defence stats, I'll be using this I think.