Gladiator Stance, Versatility vs Mastery

[Loimulohi 0]

Hello everyone

 

As a sort of beginning Protection Warrior with an interest into Gladiator Stance I started reading the Gladiator Stance guide and ran into the God... I mean Moderator-given fact that Versatility is better than Mastery for a Gladiator Stance Warrior.

 

Now I thought that a tad odd, as I've felt from my other characters that Versatility tends to give, point for point, very little damage increase. So I started theorycrafting a little, starting with making sure that Mastery gives 2/3 attack power of the block chance it gives per point of Mastery, which equates to 0.00909% increase in attack power per point. Versatility, on the other hand, gives an extra 0.00769% (perhaps not the exact number) damage per point.

 

Now this tells us very little because of AP coefficients and whatnot, so we go further. I'll give the crafting for the four most important skills, Heroic Strike, Devastate, Shield Slam and Revenge. Playing around a little, it seemed that Heroic Strike has an Attack Power Coefficient (henceforth APC) of 0.77, Devastate that of 1.54, Shield Slam that of 3.18 and finally Revenge had an APC of 3.37. These coefficients were found by removing 123 AP worth of gear (no other stats changed) and calculating the relative change in the tooltip damage of the skills.

 

This meant that the percentual damage increase per point of Mastery would be for Heroic Strike 0.0070%, Devastate 0.0140%, Shield Slam 0.0289% and Revenge 0.0306%. Now if I am not totally mistaken, this already shows that only Heroic Strike gains more damage from Versatility, while all the others benefit more from Mastery, point for point.

 

Finally I decided to weigh this against the relative usage damage output of the skills in a fight. I did not gather data myself but instead used noxxic.com's simulations (available here). Now I have gathered that Noxxic ain't the best webpage for theorycrafting there is ('Cause Icy Veins is the best, obviously), but I figured that their percentages can't be totally wrong. Anyhow, take the following with a grain of salt.

 

With the relative weights I found Heroic Strike to gain an increase of 0.0012%, Devastate an increase of 0.0030%, Shield Slam an increase of 0.0060% and Revenge an increase of 0.0030% per point of Mastery. The relative weights per point of Versatility on the other hand are 0.0013%, 0.0017%, 0.0016% and 0.0008% respectively. It is now increasingly clear that according to my theorycraft Heroic Strike  benefits more from Versatility than Mastery but only by a minute amount while all other skills benefit more from Mastery.

 

 

Now comes the big question: What have I missed? What have I miscalculated? Where is my error? Or can it be that Icy Veins has simply misevaluated the damage increase Mastery gives a Gladiator Stance Warrior?

 

 

Cheers

-Loimulohi