ShoR testing on the PTR

Candiru wrote:If we have a hard cap on block value now, can we have our 130% damage back?

We have a cap on BV's damage component, but ... below 2400, it's not capped. I will have << 2400 BV in my normal tanking gear, and in my "LOLBV" set, I'll still have substantially more than I currently do, even after the "nerf". I'm not worried.

Lore wrote:

Garath.Gorefiend wrote:On live, what gets us raid tanking spots is threat. Druids and DKs mitigate better, and are more optimal for hard mode fights. Warriors have more tools to play with.

What you're forgetting in this statement is that DK survivability (especially as Blood) and cooldowns have been given some pretty severe nerfs, Druid avoidance has been lowered relative to the other classes, and Warriors are receiving the exact same scaling nerf on Shield Slam that we're receiving on Shield of Righteousness. On top of that, we're gaining a fairly big EH increase through the new Ardent Defender (both as a function of the non-leapfroggable DR effect and the 30% self-heal).

This is why you can never look at single changes in a vacuum.

Also, if the only thing scoring you a raid invite is your threat output, you need to take a real serious look at how much you're bringing to the table as a raider.

What your missing is that our threat is getting partially capped, and meanwhile, from what I have seen on PTR, a lot of DPS classes are getting buffs...

What I am trying to point out, and obviously failing, is that its really really bad design to effectively cut block tank threat scaling with raid buffs. The cap on ShoR is severe. On the PTR, it does considerably less as a portion of our DPS/TPS than it does on live, and raid buffs didnt help.
I can understand Blizz wanting to limit our ability to do huge damage spikes. What I dont understand is why they set the cap so low. If they had set the DR base to 40*lvl and the cap to 50*lvl, it would be a lot closer to what we are currently seeing on live.

I am sure you have done some raid tanking on the PTR. Whats your threat lead looking like vs live?
If its anything like my experiences, our threat lead on the PTR is not as big.

I probably should of rephrased the part about what gives us tanking spots. What I meant is, that in my guild, the tanking core consists of Druid, DK and Paladin tanks. On live, if the boss fight requires high threat, then I, as the pally tank always get the nod.

I am not sure why your bringing up mitigation and EH changes into a discussion of tank threat though.

But to reprhase my point. Can you think of any real justification or benefit to PvE to only allow block tank threat to scale with raid buffs on only 75% of their TPS? Do you see this as good design?

But, if you do wnat to discuss AD, its not all EH increase...the mitigation provided by AD is actually less than it was....it is simply reliable now as it cant be leapfrogged. I will admit I love the new 30% self-heal, though I wish it would check for guardian spirit before getting consumed.

I'll reiterate that I really don't know what the fuss is about. Sure, this change sucks, but really is it something to whine about?

My threat is extremely high right now, and that is in max EH gear (Ulduar-25 HM and 10 HM BiS mainly), it sits roughly in the 8k+ TPS region, never really diping below 7.5k unless the stars shower misfortune on me with parry spam and miss spam. My BV is somewhere around 1.2k unbuffed, and won't go above the cap even with the change to temporary buffs. Therefore my threat won't have gone down at all, and will have infact just gone up (perhaps stayed the same, its 50:50 with the 100% scaling instead of 130%) with the doubling (my whole one item will now have more BV) and SoV change. I think the idea really is - use your damn survival set and do more threat in it - you shouldn't struggle to outthreat any tank or dpser right now - apart from Hodir HM where taunt spam is acceptable (depending on how you distribute the buff, if you keep it in melee then you shouldn't have much issues either!).

I cannot understand WHY you are saying it does less damage on live than on PTR because as far as I can tell unless you are doing some crazy gearing shiz - you shouldn't be at the cap right now - and if you are, then grats on your survivability because you must be making some serious sacrifices to hit that. Seriously stop running around like the sky is falling. Its not. Paladins will still be the highest threat tanks and you still won't struggle with threat if you execute 969 perfectly. EH and mitigation changes were brought up because those are the things that actually matter in our ability to tank things like hardmodes - when Steelbreak fusion punches your ass you'll forgive us for doing a little /care at some cap on an ability we aren't going to reach when geared correctly for heavy duty tanking. (I.e Why the hell do you even need a BiS threat set?)

"the mitigation provided by AD is actually less than it was" Whut? Do you not understand this change? It simply stops the leapfrog, it still works excatly the same as it did before otherwise (although the tooltip is slightly misleading, you'll have to accept that it still functions as before - the leapfrog, I tested it to be sure).

EDIT: I didn't mean to come across as rude, I just can't see what the major fuss is about.

Minarva wrote:"the mitigation provided by AD is actually less than it was" Whut? Do you not understand this change? It simply stops the leapfrog, it still works excatly the same as it did before otherwise (although the tooltip is slightly misleading, you'll have to accept that it still functions as before - the leapfrog, I tested it to be sure).

EDIT: I didn't mean to come across as rude, I just can't see what the major fuss is about.

If you would bother to actually test PTR vs Live, you would see that the AD effect on Live is calculated prior to blocked amount. The AD effect on PTR is calculated after blocked amount...net is less mitigation.

I dont have wild amounts of block gear on live...I generally run with about 1500 unbuffed BV which scales with buffs to about 1.85 and change with raid buffs...

Now, if you do the math, (1850+ (225*1.3) + (352*1.3)+520) * 1.3 * 1.1 * 1.06 is about 4730 per ShoR hit...9460 crit
(checked WWS from last raid and my ShoRs were a bit higher than that but its close)

That is without any other raid damage magnifier...

On PTR, I was getting 3828 k hit / 7656k crit ShoR regardless of how much Str i had or BV i added...thats my point... as a threat move ShoR on the PTR (our best threat move) is now weaker and effectively non-scaling.

Wearing exactly the same gear, on the PTR, that I normally use on live, with no buffs except kings, I was getting 3694 hit/7388 crit, almost at cap with no buffs...

I then got raid buffs, and ran the same test, they easily took me beyond the ShoR cap, damage stayed exactly at 3828/7656 no higher. As a percentage of DPS (and therefore threat), ShoR dropped markedly.

On the bright side, I was blocking considerably more damage...

Minarva wrote:I'll reiterate that I really don't know what the fuss is about. Sure, this change sucks, but really is it something to whine about?

My threat is extremely high right now, and that is in max EH gear (Ulduar-25 HM and 10 HM BiS mainly), it sits roughly in the 8k+ TPS region, never really diping below 7.5k unless the stars shower misfortune on me with parry spam and miss spam. My BV is somewhere around 1.2k unbuffed, and won't go above the cap even with the change to temporary buffs. Therefore my threat won't have gone down at all, and will have infact just gone up (perhaps stayed the same, its 50:50 with the 100% scaling instead of 130%) with the doubling (my whole one item will now have more BV) and SoV change. I think the idea really is - use your damn survival set and do more threat in it - you shouldn't struggle to outthreat any tank or dpser right now - apart from Hodir HM where taunt spam is acceptable (depending on how you distribute the buff, if you keep it in melee then you shouldn't have much issues either!).

I cannot understand WHY you are saying it does less damage on live than on PTR because as far as I can tell unless you are doing some crazy gearing shiz - you shouldn't be at the cap right now - and if you are, then grats on your survivability because you must be making some serious sacrifices to hit that. Seriously stop running around like the sky is falling. Its not. Paladins will still be the highest threat tanks and you still won't struggle with threat if you execute 969 perfectly. EH and mitigation changes were brought up because those are the things that actually matter in our ability to tank things like hardmodes - when Steelbreak fusion punches your ass you'll forgive us for doing a little /care at some cap on an ability we aren't going to reach when geared correctly for heavy duty tanking. (I.e Why the hell do you even need a BiS threat set?)

"the mitigation provided by AD is actually less than it was" Whut? Do you not understand this change? It simply stops the leapfrog, it still works excatly the same as it did before otherwise (although the tooltip is slightly misleading, you'll have to accept that it still functions as before - the leapfrog, I tested it to be sure).

EDIT: I didn't mean to come across as rude, I just can't see what the major fuss is about.

The problem isn't what will happen on day 0 of the 3.2 Patch. Its what will happen as you start progressing? I'm not in BiS EH gear as HM drops have been very unkind to my guild, but my gear is pretty much up there. My threat generation is pretty much on par with yours. However, some of our stronger DPS are now riding the line pretty close and if they burst up early they will overtake my threat. I've seen Warlocks and Mages push over 12K TPS on Omen for brief periods of time.

Also look at where you were when you entered Naxx. Threat was a joke then as I was near double the threat of the highest DPS. The DPS are scaling far faster than our TPS. Even at the end of Naxx, it wasn't much of an issue but it wasn't double either. ShoR was by far ourt highest scaling ability for threat. I doubt that the new SoV proc will scale anywhere near the rate ShoR scales pre 3.2. In fact, tests have proven that it will pretty much stop scaling very early on 3.2. The damage proc on SoV will replace lost damage to ShoR initially, but unless it scales similiarly to ShoR then our TPS scaling will be much less than pre 3.2. If the DPS continue to scale as fast, then they will overtake our threat.

In the end, this may be moot as TotT is a huge TPS increase and may be more necessary in 3.2.

Tanke into considerating, that Blizz maybe wants that to happen. Wants us to realize, that our DDs TPS grow faster than ours.
I've read somewhere, they don't want us (tanks) to only look for survivability / to be able to take more damage / insert rnd things here but also to look for threat.
And if the keep up to what the blues said we will end up gemming for strength/stamina instead of Dodge/Stamina

Serv wrote:Tanke into considerating, that Blizz maybe wants that to happen. Wants us to realize, that our DDs TPS grow faster than ours.
I've read somewhere, they don't want us (tanks) to only look for survivability / to be able to take more damage / insert rnd things here but also to look for threat.
And if the keep up to what the blues said we will end up gemming for strength/stamina instead of Dodge/Stamina

There is a limit to what we as tanks can do to look for threat. Its not like we can wear DPS gear and be able to tank the hard content. Our best threat stats are currently Strength, Hit, Block Value, Expertise. Two of these hit their soft caps already and once there they contribute very poorly to scaling. The only threat increase from Block Value came from ShoR, and that will effectively hit a cap very fast in 3.2. This will leave us with Strength as our only good threat scaling stat. The Strength on Tank gear easily matches that on the DPS gear, and i doubt that a few gems will have that big an impact, and the DPS already use such gems in their sockets. If they scale faster than us, it won't matter which gems we use. The DPS have far more stats they can seek out to increase their damage, and they can easily forego Stamina for DPS stats.

Lowering our scaling would have been one thing. But effectively capping another threat set is just a poor decision. They will have to change it in the future or it will become a worthless stat. Blizzard has repeatedly said they don't want worthless stats, and they seem to be trying to make BV a more attractive stat, but then they do this and make it worthless again.

Also realize that Strength contributes to our block value, and when the cap is reached Strength will scale even worse. No measure of planning and seeking out a balance in stats will overcome weak scaling.

Nah, don't me too serious. I was just wonderin what would happen if the really would stick to the point making threat a decent tank stat again.

I've got a bunch of items gemmed for str/sta an enchanted with dps enchants, just for fun. There is no point lookin for threat nowadays. It would make tanking a lot more interesting.

It really pisses me off when devs try to shift the blame on tanks gearing too much for survivability and not threat when they pretty much design hard modes that mandate survival tanking sets.

Tanks should not need threat sets. ATM they dont even need it. the only encounters where threat might be harder than usual are encounters that give ridiculous buffs to your DPSers and in such encounters no amount of threat gear you put on can match their tps gain. they are the ones who will manage aggro by using their class-specific threat dumps. if you can slap on 400str and 2000BV and miraculously do an extra 4000TPS, you must have been doing it wrong in the BIS survival set.

just because devs said early on that they dont want threat to be a huge issue in wotlk doesnt mean we as tanks should assume that we must have TPS high enough to render feign death, soul shatter, mirror image and vanish obsolete. think about it. your dpsers were designed to out-tps on vezax and hodir.

all said, it is a mistake to cap shor because of the pve ramifications. what's been previously said is right: an ability that is routinely responsible for 25% of our total threat is now demoted and essentially barred from scaling with raid buffs. pretty shortsighted move by blizz. even if they reinstated the 1.3 threat modifier for shor, we would still suffer from mass reduction in the value of all our threat related stats.

perhaps they should reduce bv scaling for shor and remove the cap. pretty simple fix for the mythic 19k shield slams but bv still retains its 3.2 vision of being a valid mitigation attribute.

(Didn't read the whole last page of replies so I could post this before I have to go back to work)

Grath.gorefiend you said earlier that this will mean none of our threat abilities have a scaling component, but that's not true as HotR will still scale w/ weapon DPS (iLvl), being our second biggest threat (in my experience w/ Sorthalis, it's about 2/3rds the threat of ShoR on live now, per cast) "move", I'd say we still scale just fine.

I imagine that a lot of the changes are just a band-aid and would hope people don't freak-out if something doesn't look good in the future, when the change to this change sucks, THEN we should all bitch. lol

I'm sorry this post is a bit out of topic.
I read a lot of people saying things like "bv is useless against boss hits, even in 3.2", have you considered the fact that with the AD changes, its effective dmg reduction will raise by a far amount ? 4k block vs 70% of 20k is 4k/14k, so more or less equivalent to 5k7 block vs 100% of 20k. Somehow blockvalue gets roughly 43% (1/0.70) more effective against "the hits that would kill you", which are the hits you want to be able to eat.
AD changes are definitely to be taken into account in 3.2 EH / survival estimations. I can imagine myself seeking high bv increases on gear rather than a few marginal % of dodge/parry.

Sophistie wrote:I'm sorry this post is a bit out of topic.
I read a lot of people saying things like "bv is useless against boss hits, even in 3.2", have you considered the fact that with the AD changes, its effective dmg reduction will raise by a far amount ? 4k block vs 70% of 20k is 4k/14k, so more or less equivalent to 5k7 block vs 100% of 20k. Somehow blockvalue gets roughly 43% (1/0.70) more effective against "the hits that would kill you", which are the hits you want to be able to eat.
AD changes are definitely to be taken into account in 3.2 EH / survival estimations. I can imagine myself seeking high bv increases on gear rather than a few marginal % of dodge/parry.

The PTR AD is an absorption affect rather than a damage % modifier and calculated after block.

Majiben wrote:

Sophistie wrote:I'm sorry this post is a bit out of topic.
I read a lot of people saying things like "bv is useless against boss hits, even in 3.2", have you considered the fact that with the AD changes, its effective dmg reduction will raise by a far amount ? 4k block vs 70% of 20k is 4k/14k, so more or less equivalent to 5k7 block vs 100% of 20k. Somehow blockvalue gets roughly 43% (1/0.70) more effective against "the hits that would kill you", which are the hits you want to be able to eat.
AD changes are definitely to be taken into account in 3.2 EH / survival estimations. I can imagine myself seeking high bv increases on gear rather than a few marginal % of dodge/parry.

The PTR AD is an absorption affect rather than a damage % modifier and calculated after block.

So they essentially nerfed STR for us by reducing its threat gain (via ShoR nerf) and its damage reduction (change of AD mechanic).

Noradin wrote:So they essentially nerfed STR for us by reducing .... its damage reduction (change of AD mechanic).

Not really unless you only tank weaker trash. For progression the AD change is a clear gain.