Austere vs. Eternal Primal Diamond

[Paviel 0]

I've been looking over the Protection Warrior's guide on this website, and I noticed that it recommends the Austere Primal Diamond (+2% to armor value) rather than the Eternal Primal Diamond (Blocks decrease damage by 31% rather than 30%, Crit blocks by 61% rather than 60%).

Not that it particularly matters, since the legendary meta makes both of them obsolete, but I was wondering on what grounds the Austere Primal Diamond is considered better than the Eternal Primal Diamond. What calculations did you make to come to that conclusion?

[Desos 18]

i´ll try to give an explanation: Since most tanks work with an active mitigation build instead of an avoidance build, the dodge rating on the Eternal Primal Diamond is very unfavorable and you´re better served with the stamina on the austere.

And for the boni on both gems:

The damage reduction through the Eternal would be favorable if you could block a high number of incoming attacks with reliability.

This is not possible with current gear, not even close

So the always-present (melee) damage reduction via armor is better suited for this case.

Correct me, if I got anything wrong^^

Edited July 26, 2013 by check0790

[Estarriol 167]

Between the two, I'd agree with the Austere for now. Come 5.4, the Eternal would be more useful. However, I completely disagree with Check's assessment thereafter. Warriors DO block a high number of attacks with reliability. In fact, when Shield Block is up, we block 100%. thus, with proper SBlk usage, that extra block value would be put to good use. This still leaves us with the measely dodge given by the gem. That dodge isn't really giving us anything, thus the stam of Austere is better.

With that said, here's the important part: both of those gems are crap. As a warrior, you already have an immense amount of defenses that are fantastic for reducing physical damage. Go for Effulgent, instead. It gives you the stam bonus as the static stat, which is nice, but more importantly it gives 2% reduced spell damage. You can block all sorts of physical damage, the same cannot be said of magical damage. Ultimately, the choice of your meta's bonus is relatively small, but great tanks are made by a myriad of small improvements that combine to make a massive difference.

[Tarazet 144]

I agree with Estarriol on the Effulgent meta, with reservations. The key here is that 2% extra armor is not 2% damage reduction from physical attacks, but Effulgent does provide a flat 2% damage reduction against magic. The rub is that magic damage is usually raid-wide, so there's less of a need to specifically single it out since it's balanced to be the same for everyone. In T14 Effulgent was a lot more useful than it is in T15.

[Estarriol 167]

I'd disagree with that. Fan of Flames is a targetted, hard-hitting magic attack. Same with Explosive Slam. Lei Shen's final phase DoT is magic and on tanks only. Mar'li's casts and Sul's casts are both affected by the Effulgent. Megaera's breaths will be reduced. Soaking puddles for Ji-kun would benefit from the Effulgent. Primordius' and the heroic adds' DoTs are both reduced by the Effulgent. In t15, almost every fight has some hard-hitting mechanic dealt with by the tanks that is magic-based.

[Tarazet 144]

I'd disagree with that. Fan of Flames is a targetted, hard-hitting magic attack. Same with Explosive Slam. Lei Shen's final phase DoT is magic and on tanks only. Mar'li's casts and Sul's casts are both affected by the Effulgent. Megaera's breaths will be reduced. Soaking puddles for Ji-kun would benefit from the Effulgent. Primordius' and the heroic adds' DoTs are both reduced by the Effulgent. In t15, almost every fight has some hard-hitting mechanic dealt with by the tanks that is magic-based.

There is a fair amount of magic damage taken by the tanks, but it's generally not the largest source of damage. Every boss in ToT melees you; there's no Lei Shi in T15 (other than maybe Mar'li on Council).

[Estarriol 167]

The largest source of damage is not always the one to worry about. I'd be very surprised if anyone died from nothing more than Suen's melee attack, for example.

[Detritivores 0]

Greetings fellow warrior tanks! I'm with Estarriol on this one, all the way. While the abilities he's talking about aren't top of our damage taken charts on total damage in most cases, they do represent the largest single hits or otherwise spikiest moments in most fights. Any little bit to help against this is incredibly valuable. It's the same reason we cap hit/exp to maximize rage gen and active mitigation. It's all about smoothing incoming damage as best we can. If we were concerned only with total damage mitigated with no regard for spikiness, then we'd all be rocking straight avoidance builds. But that's obviously not the case. Same logic applies here.

Offtopic, but I have to ask... Estarriol, I spied on your armory and saw you in mostly dps gear and hard gemmed for crit. Is this some kind ptr experiment? Or just a bizarre combo that you happened to log in? Thanks!

Edited July 30, 2013 by Detritivores

[Dots 0]

Agree that while the magical damage on ToT encounters might be less than the melee damage overall, it is often the more important damage. Effulgent is probably the better choice for someone that doesn't have access to Indomitable.

Offtopic, but I have to ask... Estarriol, I spied on your armory and saw you in mostly dps gear and hard gemmed for crit. Is this some kind ptr experiment? Or just a bizarre combo that you happened to log in? Thanks!

I don't know for sure if Estarriol is doing this, but you can tank most ToT bosses in DPS gear + shield as long as healers are comfortable with it. Stat priority should be something like hit/expertise > crit > mastery. This way you will at least do a bit more than just half the DPS of some other tank classes.

[Detritivores 0]

Haha I see... Well I'll have to give that a try. It'd be awful nice to do more than half my offtanks dps without bathing in lightning on purpose.

[Estarriol 167]

Please don't do that. Stay with Hit to 7.5%>exp to 15%>mastery>parry=dodge. My crit gear is my DPS gear. When I'm soloing, doing dailies, or doing old content, I go into my DPS gear in prot spec to make things go a bit faster. Don't do it in ToT! It is needlessly risky for no real benefit. A bit of scumbag DPS isn't worth it. If you're having trouble with damage output, I can try to see if I can help with that. Are you tanking with a monk or druid? They have massively better DPS than prot warriors at the moment, so getting out-damaged by them is kind of inevitable. Are you stacking Bloodbath and Dragon roar? Are you waiting a few seconds after taking the boss before using those abilities? How about Heavy Repercussions?

Also, be very careful. I see no reason to be taking excess damage for epeen purposes and there are many ground effects that do not give vengeance.

[Dots 0]

Of course this is just a way to spice up some otherwise boring farming. I wouldn't recommend doing this for anything you don't already outgear, let alone progress raids. You would be surprised though, my overall damage taken per second on e.g. Tortos and Durumu did not really increase compared to regular tanking gear.

 

There are some encounters where it might actually be better while progressing, but you have to know what you are doing. For example tanking priestess on heroic Council or heroic Megaera. These encounters can be tight on DPS and a lot of the damage is magical anyway. Shield Barrier does not depend on tank gear at all, though your stamina would of course take a hit.

 

Anyway, don't want to derail this thread any further.

Edited July 31, 2013 by Dots

[Estarriol 167]

Most of the (dangerous) damage on Council comes from the spiky damage of Frozen Assault, which benefits from SBlk and therefore mastery.

The only way I'd condone scumbagging would be in a 10m you outgear by a solid 20 ilvls or so. Other than that, focus on improving your rotation over trying to gimick.

Edited July 31, 2013 by Estarriol

[Detritivores 0]

Haha sorry, didn't mean to get us all riled up. I figured it was some nonserious situation like that, just curious. I was mostly kidding about lightning baths and trying out my dps set in the raid. Although it does just so happen that I am tanking 10 mans that I drastically outgear, with a druid offtank, so there is a little room for bad decisions >.>

I do make use of the things you mentioned (Bloodbath/Dragon Roar, Heavy Repercussions, so on), and my output is reasonable. (Obviously not crushing the druid or anything, but it goes about as well as I could hope for given our current situation. Fairly irrelevant too at this point. It's been a looong time since we saw an enrage.) I was more just curious what sort of scumbagging techniques people were up to. Way off topic, I apologize.

Hooray effulgent primal diamonds!

[Tarazet 144]

Haha sorry, didn't mean to get us all riled up. I figured it was some nonserious situation like that, just curious. I was mostly kidding about lightning baths and trying out my dps set in the raid. Although it does just so happen that I am tanking 10 mans that I drastically outgear, with a druid offtank, so there is a little room for bad decisions >.>

I do make use of the things you mentioned (Bloodbath/Dragon Roar, Heavy Repercussions, so on), and my output is reasonable. (Obviously not crushing the druid or anything, but it goes about as well as I could hope for given our current situation. Fairly irrelevant too at this point. It's been a looong time since we saw an enrage.) I was more just curious what sort of scumbagging techniques people were up to. Way off topic, I apologize.

Hooray effulgent primal diamonds!

 

My main is a Druid tank. I've been raiding with the same team in T14 and T15 and I pretty much move in lock-step with them DPS wise, almost always in the top 3 on the meter and sometimes #1 by a substantial margin (Mel'jarak, Tortos, even Durumu oddly). Our DK is always trailing way behind in damage.. but he is more survivable than I am now because he has stronger active mitigation tools and uses them beautifully.

 

Recently I've been gearing up my Paladin. Even with Haste on every piece, ilvl of 500, 496 sword, I struggle to hit 25K on the dummy. If I don't have Vengeance the damage is embarrassing. If I do have a decent amount of Vengeance, then I can come close to what my Druid was doing at the same ilvl, but it's really a required condition to do any damage at all. The Druid is always on and always eating faces, because of its high crit chance. He can pull threat off the DK with no Vengeance at an equal gear level. It's ridiculous..

[Estarriol 167]

My offtank until recently was a bear. I just didn't get to have any threat for four months. =( At least bears are fluffy and adorable.

[Detritivores 0]

I feel your pain. I've developed the habit of pulling guns blazing, dps pre-pot, the whole nine yards. And that helps... most of the time. But God help me if he gets a good string of crits going before I've built enough vengeance... Fluffy and adorable indeed.

[Dots 0]

Most of the (dangerous) damage on Council comes from the spiky damage of Frozen Assault, which benefits from SBlk and therefore mastery.

The only way I'd condone scumbagging would be in a 10m you outgear by a solid 20 ilvls or so. Other than that, focus on improving your rotation over trying to gimick.

 

For Frozen Assault, it's better to have a cooldown up and then use Shield Barriers.

 

Tank DPS usually won't make a big difference in 25m, but in 10m it can. For some 10m encounters, it will benefit the raid if the tank sacrifices a bit of survivability for more DPS.

[Estarriol 167]

For Frozen Assault, it is best to dodge. Therefore, the unnamed cooldown is better if it is a dodge trinket. However, to say it is better to use SBar exclusively indicates you have a bit of a misunderstanding of the mechanic and of warrior active mitigation in general. SBar relies heavily on vengeance and thus is an extremely poor choice for a tank concentrating on Sul and taunting after Frozen Assault begins due to the very low vengeance that tank would have. There is a particular point of vengeance where SBar will begin to overtake SBlk in terms of damage mitigated per use. This point shifts based upon mastery, attack damage, and attack speed of the boss/mobs. Due to Malakk's extremely high attack speed, vengeance must be fairly considerable before SBar overtakes SBlk, especially on a mastery-stacking warrior. SBar's effectiveness at low vengeance suffers due to how quickly Malakk can strip it off, whereas SBlk mitigates every attack during its duration. Certainly the later stacks of Frozen Assault are well-handled with SBar, but the first few (depending on circumstances) are better off mitigated using SBlk. The circumstances where a tank is likely to have enough vengeance at the start of the Assault to use SBar exclusively include tanking Mar'li and Malakk simultaneously when Frozen Assault begins. Other than that, using a charge or two of SBlk smooths the incoming damage until you reach a point of solid vengeance and switch over to SBar. Using SBlk is completely viable and not an inferior choice. A dynamic decision based off of estimates of the size of SBar versus the amount likely to be blocked by a charge of SBlk is the best choice. Thus, a warrior on Council, facing Frozen Assault still benefits from mastery.

Tank damage matters in 25m. Tank damage matters, simply. The devs have made this abundantly clear at every opportunity. Having a solid rotation is all-important, though. It provides better survivability with the side benefit of damage output. Working on improving this will do more than saying you simply must stand in the goo in order to meet an enrage. Especially if said goo doesn't even provide vengeance. Having this attitude of "I must stand in things in order to do maximize damage" is akin to a DPS saying they simply need more gear and insisting that their rotation is perfect. While scumbagging for vengeance and more gear DO improve output, they'll do little without that solid rotation at the core. Especially in the case of scumbagging for vengeance, the rotation is essential to make sure that the scumbagging is "safe" and that is turns out to be beneficial. It is most useful in high-level progression raiding where the raid's ilvl collectively is towing the line of being sufficient to meet the enrage. In this case, it is an experienced warrior with a good rotation who is scumbagging to increase the raid's chances of success. Thus, I advise rotation over fire-bathing in a thread where people are asking for tanking advice.

I feel your pain. I've developed the habit of pulling guns blazing, dps pre-pot, the whole nine yards. And that helps... most of the time. But God help me if he gets a good string of crits going before I've built enough vengeance... Fluffy and adorable indeed.

Fluffy and adorable... and good at fite. I prepot, too. It helps, but the coming changes in 5.4 should be a breath of fresh air. Depending on the fight, you may look into DPS trinkets for the nonce.

[Dots 0]

However, to say it is better to use SBar exclusively indicates you have a bit of a misunderstanding of the mechanic and of warrior active mitigation in general.

Time to get off that high horse.

I didn't say use SBar exclusively. Just like you didn't say to use SBlock exclusively before that, so I didn't pretend like you did. If you really want to dissect this specific example:

- The unnamed cooldown is a damage reducing one like e.g. Demoralizing Shout or Shield Wall. These cooldowns generally make SBar better since Vengeance and thus the value of SBar is not lowered by them. SBlock on the other hand now prevents less damage than it would without a cooldown that already decreases damage taken.

- 1 SBlock right after taunting is certainly still good. Vengeance will reach acceptable levels for SBar just a few seconds after taunting Malakk and should then outperform SBlock.

- Even a tank wearing DPS gear should still have 50+% critical block. Mastery is not really what I would call an effective stat to stack in this situation though. The gains are fairly minor, so the trade-off for DPS stats may well be worth it, depending on what a raid group is struggling with more. Especially 10m.

- Dodge trinkets like the Shado-Pan Assault one are obviously great in this situation and can be used on top of Demo Shout or Shield Wall. Since it is only a trinket slot though, this doesn't affect the overall gearing strategy much.

Having this attitude of "I must stand in things in order to do maximize damage" is akin to a DPS saying they simply need more gear and insisting that their rotation is perfect.

Nobody was talking about standing in things to increase Vengeance. Edited August 3, 2013 by Dots

[Detritivores 0]

I was. I made a flippant remark about lightning baths early in this thread >.>

[Dots 0]

Alright, let's say nobody was advocating it then. ;)

Edited August 3, 2013 by Dots