Loading ...How to Talk about your Warrior now and soon
While in the WoW community you can get away with talking about how much Dodge you have like it’s something special, nothing screams noob among more educated Tanks quite like saying… “I have 27% to Dodge, is that good?”
The Now
If you want your Warrior critiqued first and foremost, always give Unbuffed values. This means no Gift of the Wild, no Fortitude buff not even your own Commanding Shout buff. You should also only talk about what’s relevant. While sometimes it’s the complete picture we want to discuss, the majority of the time it’s distinctly either Survivability or Threat.
Survivability Factors
- Armor
- Health
- Avoidance
- Defense
While usually Armor gradually improves with higher Tiered gear, it’s still very important to mention because it’ll be very obvious if you’ve neglected it.
The most universally important Survival statistic due to being valuable in both physical or magical oriented fights.
It’s kind of amazing that while Avoidance is probably the least used value when discussing Warriors, it’s also the most frequently mistaken value. Your Avoidance is a combination of your Dodge, Parry and Miss. It can be determined by adding your Dodge, Parry, your Miss % when you hover over your Defense and finally by adding the free 5% Miss. It should not include Block %.
We know 490 Defense is what’s required to make a Warrior uncrittable. Defense values usually aren’t a cause for concern or a topic of discussion, but they’re still always important to quickly mention if for whatever reason they’re unusually high or low relative to your other stats.
Threat Factors
- Hit Rating
- Expertise Rating
- Block Value
The Hit % cap is 142 Hit Rating for Tanks. Hit Rating as a threat stat inferior to Expertise. However, due to the ridiculously high amounts of Expertise on everything at Sunwell level, you’ll hear about End-game tanks going out of their way to find more Hit Rating. This is because they have so much Expertise not because it’s better than Expertise which it simply isn’t.
The Expertise cap is 57 Expertise Skill. The Expertise dodge cap is between 23-26 Expertise Skill. Since Expertise is twice as effective as Hit Rating until the dodge cap is reached while equally as effective afterwards, it’s best to push it in favour of Hit Rating until the Hard Cap is reached. (57)
Block Value has always been a tricky one to compare to the above values because they add a percentage increase in threat where as Block Value provides a more static increase. It’s important to always mention in relation to the other 2 though so that it can be determined if you’re pushing this value too much or not enough.
The Soon
Yes, there is an expansion coming and while all of the above is still going to matter, we can add 1 possibly 2 more items to that list once Wrath of the Lich King hits.
Strength
We know that the relationship between Strength and Block Value that currently is 20 to 1 is going to change to 2 to 1. This along with basically all of our abilities soon to be scaling with Attack Power is what’s going to make Strength discussion worthy. It’s likely that Strength is going to be outright superior to Block Value as a threat stat and it’s very possible that we’ll no longer even discuss Block Value in a threat setting as a result. (Which isn’t to say that it won’t shift to a much more talked about Survival role not to mention we’ll always use it for discussing the massive Shield Slam crits we all love :D)
Block %
We’ll certainly be seeing Block Rating become actually useful soon. It is not useful currently, but with the change to Shield Block it’s going to be. As to whether this will be worth discussing or not, that remains to be seen. It’s probable, but not quite as certain as Strength.
Wrap Up
So when you ask, am I ready? For the time being, you should mention your unbuffed Armor, Health, Avoidance and Defense. When you want to know how you can improve your threat. You should mention your Hit Rating, Expertise Rating and Block Value. When we’re playing at level 80, this is going to change, but not a lot. That being said, it is pointless to look at your gear and worry that it won’t be good enough for the Expansion. We’re going to get a lot of new gear and while it’s very possible that you’ll have a healthy chunk of your high end gear still at level 80 for the 5 mans, we know that we’ll replace it eventually and that it’s certainly not going to be with you forever at 80.
In the end, there’s 2 months left (Nov 13th) until the next expansion. So things are going to change, but I assure you that things aren’t going to change so much that learning about Now will be useless Soon.
September 15th, 2008 at 8:42 am
Defense ought to be added into the ‘Soon’ section. Based on the gear coming out of the 5-mans and even from Naxxramas, it looks like it is going to be very difficult for warriors to be uncrittable.
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Talldar reply on September 15, 2008 9:02 am:
Hm I’d wonder if so. The current enchants alone would make up for a theoretical lack of defense rating, which I don’t think will be an issue. There are gems, Enchanters and Rep-Rewards, so I really wouldn’t worry about uncrittability (whatta word). As far as gear-information goes by now, especially the NAXX-stuff looks decent to me, almost all tanking gear seems to have 30+ defense rating.
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Dunkealme reply on September 15, 2008 2:28 pm:
wowhead lists lvl 80 plate armor having a range of defense rating from a minimum of 36 to a maximum of 58. Plus it’s not that hard to have today defense at 512 if not 520…
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Rochelle reply on September 15, 2008 3:00 pm:
You really can’t look at what you have today because it is defense rating which means it is going to be less valuable as your level increases from 70 to 80.
To be clear, I am not just idly speculating. In order to become uncritable at level 80, you need the full naxxramas set and it has to be gemmed and enchanted almost entirely for +defense. That means, the way things are currently itemized, warriors are going to be getting crit when they first walk into Naxx. Compare that to TBC where a warrior can get uncritable fairly easily before setting foot into Karazhan.
Orenus reply on September 15, 2008 9:30 am:
Perhaps this is Blizz’s way of keeping us from just slapping Solids in every gem slot and stam enchants on every piece. We might have to start gemming and enchanting for Defense now. Not to mention strength.
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Arold reply on September 15, 2008 4:22 pm:
It’s still possible that defense issues will be addressed before release in the final balance pass. The situation in beta (as described on tankspot) seems too ridiculous to stand.
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Talldar reply on September 16, 2008 7:45 am:
Hm I really wouldn’t go crazy about problems we don’t yet have. I just took my current equip for reference, which isn’t amazing (nothing above kara + some badge-stuff). This is what I have for +Deff:
Helmet +33
Neck +17
Back +16 (Enchant +12)
Breast +26
Bracers +17
Weapon +13
Shield +22
Gloves +16
Belt +34
Legs +43
Boots +23
Ring1 +25
Ring2 +16
This makes for no less than 509 defense. I don’t have a single gem vor +deff and only one enchant. Also no trinket for +defense. If I wanted I could get up to probably 540 defense with the blue stuff in my bank, not to mention with the additional enchants, or gems.
Even considering the loss of +20 deff rating with the talent shift I’m not at all worried about staying crit immune - if I just keep my current equip I’d be fine. And assuming that there won’t be better items along the way to 80 seems a bit foolish.
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admin reply on September 16, 2008 8:17 am:
Currently… there aren’t better items on the way to 80 and the giant issue you’re missing is that you’re still going off of the 2.36 Defense Rating to 1 Defense Skill formula that’s currently in effect at level 70. When we hit 80 that ratio gets much, much worse. Currently it’s reported to be 4.915 Defense Rating = 1 Defense Skill.
So between Defense Rating being more than half effective and the loss of our 20 Defense Skill talent, (A loss of 98 Defense Rating at level 80) it has been proven that it’s currently very challenging to reach uncrittable at 80.
That being said, formulas can be tweaked, items can be added and even if nothing changes, as we progress we’ll reach the cap in due time.
Talldar reply on September 16, 2008 8:48 am:
Ouch, that I missed, obviously. Still I’m more the positive kind of person - it will work out somehow and we’ll eventually be uncrittable.
Sumendis reply on September 16, 2008 8:33 am:
I highly doubt that blizzard wants the plate-wearing tanks to start off in heroics/naxx being vulnerable to crits. That would create too much of an imbalance with feral druids who will be uncrittable right off the bat, naked, just from talents. So if blizz are true to their mantra of making all 4 tanking classes equally viable for everything (they’ve said this many times), then they gotta give us enough plate gear with enough defense (+ some gems/enchants) to achieve uncrittable relatively early at lvl80, with blue instance drops.
Otherwise nobody would take a warrior or paladin or DK to tank early on in naxx, they’d get splattered randomly by crits, everybody would take druids only, and where’s the brave new balance world then, blizzard ?
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Sumendis reply on September 16, 2008 9:10 am:
just found this quote from a blue post, it’s on mmo-champion:
“The fact that 3 of the tank classes are having trouble being uncrittable by Naxx is something we’re look into.”
Good to know they’re aware of it
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Gorrack reply on September 16, 2008 2:43 pm:
I remember seeing a post by blues over at mmo-champion saying they have been seeing a lot of folks having a really hard time being def capped for crits getting to lvl 80. I am not sure if they are working on that to rework the items…/shrug
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September 15th, 2008 at 9:27 am
Nice comment. I’ve been tanking for years and I still get confused about whether I’m supposed to add the 5% base chance-to-miss on top of dodge/parry/”defense hover” miss. So is that 5% base chance to miss the same regardless of opponent level?
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admin reply on September 15, 2008 9:45 am:
Yup, assuming you’re concerned with 70, 71, 72, 73 mobs. (I never concern myself with below maximum level research, although I’m sure you guys have noticed that by now ;))
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Kavel reply on September 15, 2008 10:03 am:
Very nice. That means my avoidance set sits at 64.64% pure avoidance, plus an on-use trinket that can add another 16% when needed, the SSO exalted neck which procs to add 5%, and the Eternal defender ring able to proc an extra 800 armor. Still leaves me at 18.7k HP and 16.8kHP too!
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Kavel reply on September 15, 2008 10:04 am:
18.7k Armor and 16.8k HP, rather.
September 15th, 2008 at 9:51 am
OK, I’ve just had a brief look at the PTR. I must be the only tank there - the entire Stormwind barracks is filled with warriors trying to hit target dummies with two two-handed weapons…
So, it looks to me like shield block rating will go from being worthless to being highly sought-after, until one reaches the passive blocking cap. In full badge+heroic gear stacking EH, my PTR character blocks about 530 damage. Since talented Shield Block is up 25% of the time, it’s worth reaching passive block for the remainder of the time, certainly for trash and even for bosses.
Defense is going to be a bit of a concern. My character went from 490 to 456, as a result of changed stats on existing badge gear to give strength. To stay uncrittable I have to swap three items (neck, trinket, weapon) for a significant loss of threat, or I can just equip the S1 shield. Certainly it needs watching and we may need to use some resilience to boost.
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Talisman reply on September 17, 2008 3:39 pm:
That’s actually a good point about the Strength and goes hand in hand with what Rochelle said about it being hard to get uncrittable. I get that strength is now a good stat for warrior tanks but do we need it eating up item points on EVERY tanking piece?
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September 15th, 2008 at 10:14 am
So with the update currently downloading do we see the new talents to lvl 80 tomorrow?
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September 15th, 2008 at 11:02 am
I suspect Hit Rating will be slightly more relevant in 3.0. Warriors are still saddled with a few spells notably Thunderclap, Shouts and Taunt. They likely are affected by Spell Hit and Crit currently. These stats will be generic in 3.0. Furthermore, it is also likely that the hit chance for spells against higher level targets will be reduced to their melee counterparts. While Expertise is certainly very important because of how it strongly affects some abilities, Hit Rating should affect ALL of your skills now. Knowing how to gear is important for any raider but being able to juggle everything is still the best.
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honorshammer reply on September 15, 2008 11:20 am:
Spell Hit and Hit Rating are combined into just Hit now and it affects both Spells and Melee.
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admin reply on September 15, 2008 11:56 am:
That’s a good observation. I don’t know if that’ll be enough to prioritize it over the Soft Expertise cap, but it’ll certainly make it more desirable once a Warrior is beyond that point when Expertise and Hit Rating are relatively equal.
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bosephus reply on September 15, 2008 2:07 pm:
This is a good point. On the PTR, I have 50 exp and 90 hit. Seeing thunderclap Miss on a target dummy is pretty annoying. Especially when it has a 6 second cooldown.
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Arvernien reply on September 15, 2008 2:33 pm:
All warrior attacks, Taunt, Thunderclap and the various shouts are not affected by spell hit rating, spell damage rating, or spell critical. They ar modified by hit rating only and have been for awhile now.
It’s an amusing joke to ask for paladin +spell damage gear for your “Thunderclap” set.
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Ivanstone reply on September 16, 2008 1:21 pm:
Taunts are affected by Melee Hit Rating (on live). Melee Hit Rating has no effect on Thunderclap and Shouts. The only confirmation regarding Spell stats and these abilities was from a Wowwiki page so I would take it with a grain of salt. Nevertheless the sum total of Warrior abilities should be affected by Hit Rating and Crit Rating come 3.0. When I get a chance later in the week, I’ll probably download the PTR client and give it a test.
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Rochelle reply on September 16, 2008 2:34 pm:
Taunts are affected by melee hit, and thats great. With the upcoming changes (I don’t know if its in 3.0 or WotLK) to hit (no more distinction between melee and spell) things like Tclap and Shouts will be in the same place as Taunt. Unfortunately, thats not a particularly good place because even though melee hit currently affects taunt, they still miss based on the spell hit table which means that in order for your taunts to not be resisted, you need 17% hit.
With the hit changes, its moving in the right direction, but for a truly meaningful change, shouts and tclap and taunt ought to be moved to the melee hit table instead of the spell hit table.
Arvernien reply on September 16, 2008 2:42 pm:
It’s pretty easy to prove that Thunderclap is not affected by +spell damage gear because it does a set amount of damage (123 at rank 7). Equip some and watch how the damage doesn’t change. This can be done mid combat by switching in a +spell damage weapon.
Rochelle reply on September 16, 2008 2:54 pm:
That is correct, but its also not really what I was talking about. I am talking about hit, not damage.
Arvernien reply on September 16, 2008 3:37 pm:
“they still miss based on the spell hit table”
I missed this part of your comment. It makes sense otherwise mobs could dodge or parry our shouts. Besides your hit rating should be around 148 to get the max benefit of 16%. Maybe I’ve just been lucky, but my hit rating is only 48* which gives me a 4.04% hit chance improvement, Mobs and bosses in Karazhan rarely resist my taunt. Well, at least the mobs that are not immune.
I’ll look at the WWS report for my last Karazhan run and see how often Taunt was resisted. At my hit rating, it should be resisted ~13% by bosses, 1% (there’s always a 1% resist chance) by level 71, 3% by level 72.
Have I missed your point again?
*Yes, I know 48 hit rating is 3.04% but I’m draenei and get +1% and, yes, I also know that this is unacceptably low.
Khrushchev reply on September 16, 2008 4:31 pm:
I know I read somewhere that they are lowering the spell miss chance to be closer to the melee miss chance (maybe the same?). I just can’t find it any more.
Rochelle reply on September 16, 2008 6:20 pm:
You are almost on the right track.
“Besides your hit rating should be around 148 to get the max benefit of 16%.”
Is where you go off a bit. its actually 142 that is the hit cap for warriors, not 148 and it gives you roughly 9% hit. That is enough to never miss a white damage swing. In order to get to the 16% hit cap for spells you need a massive 252 hit rating. So if you are hit capped for taunt/shout/tclap, you have 110 hit rating that ONLY applies to abilities - obviously a huge waste of itemization points. Since no one in there right mind would ever try to reach the spell hit cap just for those things, there will always be a pretty large chance for those abilities to miss. That, IMO, is a poorly designed mechanic when there is a relatively large chance for important spells to miss and that miss chance cannot be reasonably overcome through talent/gear choices.
I think what you probably read Khrushchev is that there is no longer 1% spell resist that is impossible to overcome. Currently a boss has 17% chance to resist a spell but the hit cap for casters is 16% because no matter how much +spell hit you have, there is ALWAYS a 1% resist chance. In WotLK they are taking away that 1%
September 15th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
I used to think that imba.hu would give me a good reference to where I stood with my tanking gear progression, and a good way to present myself.
I am not sure at this point if that is valid anymore, since it seems the less defense I have and the more pvp items I eq, the better the pve score I get.
In anycase what sense would it make to gear up now for Kara when the expansion is coming out in 2 months? I prolly should get as much “welfare epics” as I can and then move fast to 80 when the time comes.
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Arold reply on September 18, 2008 6:04 am:
Go into Kara today. Just do it. S2 PvP gear has a ton of effective health and will get you close to crit-immune if not there (I’m not gonna look it up right now) with resilience. Your avoidance won’t be any good, so it’s going to be tough on your healers, but it’s worth giving it a try.
Go all blue gems (and by that I mean stam or defense gems, not blue quality). If your priest and druid buddies are doing battlegrounds with you, get them to go for thier heal sets. Even if your Kara group only downs two or three bosses, that’s four or six epics you didn’t have last week. If you do well and down five or six, that’s even better. Even if you don’t down anybody, you’ll know where you stand.
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September 15th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
As for +def, we have to remind we lose +20def from talent.
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Arvernien reply on September 16, 2008 10:01 am:
When does the Anticipation Talent get wiped?
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Djiss reply on September 16, 2008 10:23 am:
In wow 3.0
We get 5% dodge instead of 20 defenses
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September 15th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
To determine your avoidance you can use a macro similar to paladin tank macro: It should look something like this:
/script DEFAULT_CHAT_FRAME:AddMessage(”Avoidance Currently at:”,0.8,0.8,1)
/script DEFAULT_CHAT_FRAME:AddMessage(GetDodgeChance()+GetParryChance()+5+(GetCombatRatingBonus(CR_DEFENSE_SKILL)+20)*0.04,0.5,0)
I have not tested this, as I just use the full paladin macro and subtract the block chance.
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September 15th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
My feeling on avoidance in the coming months is that it won’t be nearly as valuable. I just get the impression that they are tuning encounters so that RNG (which is kinda what avoidance is) is minimized.
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September 15th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
Veneretio, how much defense i need at lvl 80 to be uncrittable ?
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admin reply on September 15, 2008 9:19 pm:
540 is the current number if I recall. That being said this is skill not rating and the ratio of Defense Rating to Defense Skill could easily change because as people have already noted, it’s very challenging atm to reach uncrittable even when socketing specifically for Defense Rating.
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Arvernien reply on September 16, 2008 3:17 pm:
If I have done the math right you’d need a defense rating of 688 to get the 140 defense skill needed to reach a total defense skill of 540. It’s going to take some effort.
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Juniorkiller reply on September 17, 2008 5:53 pm:
Thanks you all
September 16th, 2008 at 9:02 am
Ok, 90% chance im wrong on this since you lot of well researched gods among tanks havent mentioned it. But im i wrong in thinking that we will be gaining 5 def skill per level as it has always been when leveling?
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admin reply on September 16, 2008 11:39 am:
Which means there’s also a 10% chance, you’re right. Cause you are right
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September 16th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
After reading all this is seems to me people are a little over worried about def rating. Blizzard will balance the classes. Even if it isnt done in day 1, over the first few WOTLK weeks, there going to reconfigure alot of formulas, even if just ever so slightly. Blizzard wants the tanking classes to be equal, they wont leave warriors stuck gemming for only def rateing, while druids get the def rating and bearform health boost. Thats not balance, and they WILL fix it. For as huge a company as blizzard is, and as many programers as they have, the chances are, theres probly like 3 guys just like you and me, working on balanceing tanks. Give them some time.
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MadTanker reply on September 16, 2008 1:36 pm:
Something I also thought of, there could be variables we dont yet see, such as wotlk items they havent released just yet, and are still working on. Either way I cant see them letting druids get there def rateing and bearform health boost, while warriors struggle to reach the needed def rateing. And have to give up most or all of there gems slots to get that far. That would make warriors a uselss tank class. It’s just not gonna happen.
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admin reply on September 16, 2008 2:15 pm:
I agree, there’ll likely be some kind of fix… that being said, currently Warriors do more than fine survivability and threat wise even with having to socket/enchant aggressively for Defense.
As gear progresses, you could slowly convert gems towards other attributes and eventually you wouldn’t need to socket for Defense anymore.
Think about it, is it so far fetched to have to Socket all for Defense when in the past we often Socketted all for Stamina? Not to mention if you want to socket differently you can wear Resilience gear since it’s still going to work for PvE.
There are options and Warriors are very strong atm. So change would be good, but lack of change wouldn’t be the end of the world either.
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Lancelet reply on September 17, 2008 4:34 pm:
That is exactly how I feel. They are changing the tanking game quite a bit and prot warriors weren’t left out in the slightest. I think they gave us a lot of new abilities and dimensions so we wouldn’t complain about not having our tank button.
Orenus reply on September 16, 2008 1:40 pm:
You’re quite right. I doubt we’ll go live without some improvements to defense itemization. However, one can make the argument that we *should* have to gem and enchant for defense at least somewhat prior to walking into Naxx. The lower we start going in, the more room Blizz has for itemization upgrades in subsequent raids. Whether they go that route remains to be seen, but it wouldn’t shock me. I’ve seen complaints from DPSers about hit rating being in short supply as well. It might be a trend.
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MadTanker reply on September 16, 2008 4:55 pm:
Yet another thing to think about is gear stats for the expac, im at work and cant look it up, but if tank gear for the expac has a higher ratio of stamina at 80, than top gear at 70 (IE: level 70 chest gave 70 stam, and level 80 chest gave say 80, instead the level 80 now gives 90 and less def rating.) it could be that blizzard is simply giving more stamina rather than def, and making tanks focus on something more specialized and limiting the stamina expantion we get. I know ive seen kara tanks in no so great gear, but it all had max sockets, +12 stam in each, and Wa’La=kick butt tank due to massive health, not gear. Just something else to consider.
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September 18th, 2008 at 2:34 am
This may be useful Vene, but the Expertise Cap is 26
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Namthe reply on September 19, 2008 7:34 am:
Wrong. The expertise cap *when attacking from behind* is 26.
When attacking from the front, it’s 57 as stated above.
Attaking from behind you have only dodges to worry about - when attacking from the front you can be parried too, so it’s that much higher.
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admin reply on September 19, 2008 8:03 am:
I think he was likely responding to the range I gave for the dodge cap saying it was between 23-26 to which he’s correct it’s the top end of that, 26.
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MadTanker reply on September 19, 2008 12:15 pm:
now i may be wrong, but I though when getting attacked from behind you could not dodge parry or block, only be missed?
Rochelle reply on September 19, 2008 2:34 pm:
thats true for players, but NPCs can dodge even when attacking from behind.