Crushing Blows, the Attack Table, and How it All Adds Up

Thought I'd write up a simple guide for the beginning Tankadin, just looking to start into some of the early raids, as an introduction to some of the more complicated aspects of tanking. I've seen a lot of threads on these forums asking questions like "What does uncrushable mean?" "How much defense do I need?" and so forth. There's plenty of guides out there, but I haven't seen any with a real Paladin focus, so here we are.

What is a Crushing Blow?
Any mob 3 levels or more above you (assuming you have the maximum "unbuffed" Defense skill for your level) has a chance to inflict a Crushing Blow on any normal melee ("white") attack. Crushing Blows deal 150% normal damage, and the mob's chance to inflict one begins at 15% at +3 levels, increasing by 5% for every additional level. Additional Defense skill beyond the maximum (350 at level 70) does not reduce this chance.

So what can I do about it?
I'm glad you asked. Let me introduce you to my good friend, the Attack Table. I will warn you, however, he comes with a bit of a story.

When something attacks something else, it's up to the server to make whatever random decisions are necessary and present the result. If random boss A takes a swing at you, the server needs to decide whether it was a hit, crit, miss, or crushing blow, or if you dodged, blocked, or parried it. However, there are tens of hundreds of thousands of millions of even larger denominations of people playing World of Warcraft at any given moment. Each server typically has to support upwards of 10,000 of them at once during peak hours, and every single time anything makes any sort of attack anywhere, the server has to figure out what the outcome was. If every attack required 7 individual random possibilities to be determined, that would make a potential 70,000 random numbers generated at once, in a split second - which is no daunting task even for the superest of super computers.

So, Blizzard came up with another option. Instead of checking to see if the attack hit, then checking to see if the attack crit, then checking to see if you dodged, and so on, it rolls 1 number between 0 and 100, with two decimal places. It then totals up all the possible outcomes, and assigns each of them a value or range of values between 0 and 100. This is called the Attack Table, and it looks like this:

Excellent break down.
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Very nice break down. Having read most of this information in one form or another elsewhere, this is by far the most succinct version I've found.
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http://worldofs4dfish.blogspot.com

Agreed, this is excellent.

One small problem: there's a consistent 'fence post' error... 1.00% to 5.00% is actually 4.01%, not 5.00%. The table should start from 0.01% to 5.00%.

Are there any records on which bosses have the higher crit/crushing chances?

Supposedly the Malicious Instructors have a higher then normal crit chance as well, unconfirmed but I saw discussion about it on the EJ boards.

I have also been hit with a crushing blow by a fellow player who was mind controlled by a mob in Heroic Slave Pens.

That was odd.
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The maximum amount of miss is 10% right?
So any miss from defense past 5.6% is thrown out?
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That would make sense.
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Where did I leave my book of matches?

maybe he had some items with +wep skill and with the mind control he was a mob for the server
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