Tier 7's bonuses and the value of non-set gear

Alright, I've become faced with a minor dilemma recently, and I'm sure it doesn't just affect me.

I had Greaves of Turbulence, which are a pretty good piece. It offers a good bit of dodge (which is still better than parry as I'm at less than 600 dodge) as well as some BR to help me reach block cap. 150 stam and 100 str really round out this piece as a good one. You can substitute any of your good offset pieces in this text and could probably say the same thing - they have good avoidance or block rating and are an all-around good piece.


The issue I've run into is with our T7.5 legs, Valorous Redemption Legguards. They've got 15 less block rating than the aforementioned Greaves of Turbulence and no dodge rating, but have more BV and with two sockets ultimately more stamina. I'd say that these legs are more clearly a threat piece (mmm big ShoR crits) or ideal for a low-hitting boss (i.e. Loatheb).

Assuming you can stay block capped with either piece, the bigger issue comes with the T7's 4piece bonus. T7.5 gloves/shoulders are pretty clearly best in slot - there's little argument about that. However, the shoulders, helm, and legs all have highly viable alternatives in non-set pieces. There are several helms that I would consider arguably better, though it's much closer than chest/legs, and then Dragonstorm Breastplate which is best in slot for avoidance. Chances are that players won't have all three of those slots filled in, however, and will have at least three pieces of T7.

Ultimately the question for your average tankadin becomes: Is this tier piece, which is arguably an overall downgrade (in almost all aspects except stamina and block value), worth using more often than the non-set equivalents when you factor in the four-piece bonus? How good is our four-piece bonus?

So far, I've found the only place where I think I'll need the extra time on divine protection is on Sarth with at least two drakes up, so I tend to stick with the Greaves, but I do gain some stam and BV with the T7.5. But with all the good non-set pieces floating around, it's a tough call for anyone.
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From what I understand once you get to the gear level you are currently at, BV becomes less usefull making the T7's a downgrade to what you currently have.

I would stick with the Greaves as long as you still have 2/5 of the T7's for the 2 piece set bonus. Our 4 piece set bonus is nice but I don't think it's worth a downgrade just to get an extra 3 seconds every 4 minutes.

All you would gain w/ the T7.5's is 28 stam & 63 BV at the cost of almost 2% Avoidance/Mittigation. IMO the 2% is > than the other stats.
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Not to mention, if you ever got the Malygos legs you'd keep those over the T7 legs to keep the 4 piece bonus anyway. (At least I would, though I'm not sold on the 4 piece bonus.)
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Ehhh... I really don't like the Malygos legs. Their stat allocation really underwhelms me, and I'd use T7 over them, but not necessarily over Turbulence.

The biggest non-set vs. set piece dilemmas seem to be:

T7.5 Chest vs. Chestguard of the Exhausted OR Dragonstorm Breastplate
T7.5 Legs vs. Greaves of Turbulence OR Dragon Brood Legguards OR Legplates of Sovereignty

The T7.5 helm vs. Thane's Tainted Greathelm seems like an interesting one as well because of the sheer avoidance on the greathelm that can be very very useful, but the 7.5 helm is pretty good otherwise too.
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It's not the first time i see someone say that the T7.5 helm is really good. For me it is the poorest set pieces of the 5 ones. Could you explain me your POV on this ? For me the http://wowhead.com/?item=40328 is much better.

More over many thanks for the debate, i'm also thinking on remove the 4 bonus of the T7.

The t7.5 helm has a good amount of EH and more threat. It's a comparison of that to less than a % of parry (DR on parry is pretty terrible). Both have their situational uses but I think it's just a matetr of playstyle. I use the t7.5 helm (and shoulders: <3 shoulders) for pretty much everything everything.

In regards to legs and chest... I use dragonstorm for 25-man boss tanking, and t7 (curse not having t7.5 yet) for add tanking, trash, and light hitters (lol Loatheb). Leggings I use t7.5 a large amount of the time, but switch to the greaves when I am trying to mitigate a large amount of AoE damage (for solo tanking sarth +3 adds on heroic I value the extra avoidance and block chance over ~80 BV)
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i'd think bv meta in 7.5 armor meta in thanes, and spell dmg meta in tempored titansteel for the awesome stam that piece has

Yeah, my guild's other tankadin is lusting over them like a child to candy, but I've told him he's got no competition from me. They seem really poorly itemized for us especially compared to dragon's brood.

Also, since I'm block-capped with the Greaves of Turbulence and not block-capped with the T7.5 legs, I've started using the former almost full time just because of that (though there are some places where I use the 7.5 for bonus.
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Kinda wondering, people still give BV a great score. Used to think like that myself, but starting to have some doubts really... Providing some maths:

BV, you say, is for trash/add/Loatheb tanking. Sure, but...

- Loatheb. At that gear level we're discussing, Loatheb is hardly a problem anyway. And getting pieces and pieces of gear just for 1 boss out of 17 (naxx + sarth + malygos) seems a bit non-justified.

- Trash/adds. Provided were' not talking about swarms (15+) adds that hit for about your block value (let's say 2.5k or less before block value), BV seems out of place. Why? Well. Let's take an add that hits for 4k before blocking. Let's say you block 2k and he hits you for 2k. with a gearpiece that offers 77 blockvalue that about 100 value after Redoubt. Well, if you have 1% more avoidance instead of that 100 BV (item budget and stuff), it would mean 1% more fully avoided hits. That hit equals to 2000 dmg avoided. So 1% avoidance in this case will be outscaled by BV only after the 21st blocked hit (20x100 = 2000). In the course of a fight, lasting 3 minutes (180 sec) and 2 adds hitting you, with 60% raidbuffed avoidance, that's like 40% blocked hits. With an attack speed of 2 sec, that would mean 180 total hits from the adds. 40% of them blocked = 72 blocked hits. Now if you add 1% avoidance, taht would've been 70 blocked hits and 2 avoided hits (2000 dmg). 72 blocked hits = 72x1900 = 136 800 dmg taken. 70 blocked hits = 70x2000 = 140 000 dmg taken. A difference of 3200 dmg for the whole fight only. Now, that's if we consider 1% avoidance to be equal to 77 block value in item budget. If the budget points are in favor of avoidance ratings (I don't know how they're distributed, that's why I am just guessing) the results will be even closer. Do you think that there can be a level reached where you get more from avoidance than from block value?
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My rough maths worked out to be 15%

Once you are blocking 15% or more of all physical damage then BV/BR/DEF take the drivers seat from dodge.
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At 540 Defense, when the tooltip says you have 5.6% chance to be missed, you really have a 4.11%.

I think the thing is, people want to choose between block value and avoidance rather than sit in the middle.

If an encounter favours block value you put a bit more on, if it favours avoidance, vice versa.

http://wowwebstats.com/kt4oks1vsurl5?s=238115-282928&a=Gxf13000403900a012#break
the warrior tank has about 3% more avoidance than me when i used my block value set (1.9k bv buffed with only 51% avoidance raid buffed i believe (maybe less).

we each tanked 2 adds, she took 7 less hits than me, but check the difference in over all damage taken in.

this also is with her thunderclapping both of her mobs and me only judging on one (i was tired...).

We each have similar armour/health values. Even discounting ardent defender hits on me, the difference is huge between a heavy blocking and higher avoidance route.

Granted this is a warrior vs a paladin not paladin vs paladin, you can probably consider that the gap would close somewhat in a paladin vs paladin situation.

So what i take from this is that really you're not going to do better going either direction unless you talk about extremes (loatheb for bv and patchwerk for avoidance). So we're left with a point in the middle, at a certain point avoidance gets hurt by diminshing returns and starts to fall away, the big question, should we gear to that point, or gear to the point where with raid buffs it becomes too costly? After that block value will offer us more for our itemisation i feel, and this is what blizzard has aimed for with diminishing returns, to not make avoidance the better stat to stack once you can get loads of it as it gets better every 1% you put in.

At the current item level most bosses hit light enough that block value comes out very well, especially when we drop to ardent defender. Others use so much magic damage that health becomes a more key factor, and few have HUGE hits where avoidance appears better.

Block value is a rawr physical mitigation stat directly proportional to the size of the hits. someone used morogrim as a good example, his hits did not dwarf magtheridon, but the speed he attacked made him far more deadly, we cannot assume that every boss in the future will hit harder, they may hit faster, use more magic damage or all sorts of other things. Right now you need to look at what is best for what we have and not use abstract numbers that don't occur (60% avoidance with 2k block value is a pretty tall order to obtain without gimping your top end health).

It's also worth pointing out the gear we can get right now is what we will be starting ulduar in therefore i go with the philosphy of building multiple gear sets focussing on a balance, block value or avoidance to best cope with what we get next major patch. What we have right now is not the issue as we know it can be handled fine in many combinations of gear and by different tanks.

Also don't underestimate the threat value from block value, as dps get closer it becomes more prominent, and avoidance actually loses you threat since you won't block as much (an old flawed arguement but perhaps worthy of note if you focus on too much avoidance)
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