Do not parrygib your Sindragosa tank

We had a simple question today, about a heroic mode tank who got parry-gibbed by Sindragosa.

Melee dps need to remember that whilst parry-haste is mostly off in ICC, which I wrote about in February, it is on for Sindragosa and Deathwhisper, but it’s really Cindy for whom this risk is real due to her melee damage hurting.

Here’s a diagram to help your dps.

June 24th, 2010 | 2 comments | From: Tanking in general | Tags: , , , , ,

Parry-haste confirmed to be mostly off in Icecrown Citadel

Posting here on parry-haste, the proc nerf and following me on Twitter.

The other day I posted about preliminary findings which show ICC has parry-haste mostly turned off for the raid bosses. Theck’s confirmed that now, and my gratitude to the original writers Tbdsamman (parry-haste addon) and Clifton (wrote the log parser).

Boss Can boss parry-haste? Marrowgar no Deathwhisper yes Deathbringer Saurfang no Festergut no Rotface no Putricide no Prince Valanar no Prince Taldaram no Blood-Queen Lana’thal no Sindragosa

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February 11th, 2010 | 11 comments | From: Raid and 5-man guides, Tanking in general | Tags: , , , , , , ,

Parry-haste doesn't seem to exist in ICC

1. A clever nerd wrote an addon which checks if the boss you’re fighting has been parry-hasted.

2. Another clever geek wrote a script which parses logs to determine if parry-haste was seen.

3. Combined conclusion so far is that the only boss in Icecrown with parry-haste turned on is Deathwhisper, and possibly Saurfang.

Read the thread discussing it and download the addon from links within. If you’ve got matlab you can also get the code to

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February 9th, 2010 | One comment | From: Tanking in general | Tags: , , , , , , ,

Dual-wield, weapon speed and expertise

Frost dual-wield tanking is very popular now. Six months ago, many people were violently against the idea. A year ago, it was so bad I put up a sticky on deathknight.info and policed all discussion into it, because it came up all the time.

Now, it seems to be a debate of the past. I barely ever see questions about parrygib or complaints that DW Frost tanks are dying because they’re pretending to be rogues, or whatever. A few things changed, notably the Nerubian runeforge and the Thassarian talent, but I also think people just realised parrygib risk is negligible now because they didn’t see DW tanks dying like the naysayers had suggested. Some of the bosses also have parry-hasted turned off by Blizzard.

Here, I’m going to revisit the relationship between expertise and weapon speed for tanks, and weapon speed and threat. I’m not going to cover the basics here, that’s in my main dual-wield tank post. I’ll compare DKs with Warriors for baseline purposes.

Warrior parry-haste risk

I need to the number of parryable attacks per minute.

Special attacks

All of a warrior’s tanking attacks can be parried except for shockwave, thunderclap, demo shout and conc blow. Even revenge and heroic strike can be parried. Those unparryable attacks are lower in the priority system used by tanks in a typical fight.

A warrior’s threat priority has two parallel streams: (1) shield slam > revenge > devastate > shockwave | concussion blow; and (2) heroic strike, when it doesn’t conflict with the first stream. See readers’ comments below for elaboration.

Let’s assume in every minute a warrior uses: thunderclap once, demo shout twice and conc blow once. Those five attacks can’t be parried. Let’s also assume a fight where the warrior is not rage starved, and can just keep going at it.

There are 40 GCDs in a minute. Five are used on non-parryable specials, leaving 35.

Auto-attack

There’s also auto-attack, at weapon speed, the whole time. Many of them should be replaced by heroic strike, but since that can be parried too, for this analysis it nets neutral. Let’s use Rimefang, 1.6 speed. Lovely tanking weapon and readily accessible.

Auto-attack at 1.6 speed is another 37.5 attacks per minute.

Total

Grand total of 72.5 parryable attacks per minute, based on specials + auto attack.

Side note: When first writing this analysis, had thought the best way to work it out was to look at a log parse, and take the proportions of attacks used. After feedback from readers, it appears that was unnecessary since the proportions of attacks would only matter if a good number of them cannot be parried. I have included the logs I did look at in ‘further reading’ below, in case you’d like some verification of what happens in Saurfang.

Death Knight

It’s more difficult to model the interaction of a DKs abilities such as Rime, so I’ve used the simulator to get an ideal case.

Special attacks

A two-disease DK priority will be: icy touch > plague strike > rime howling blast> obliterate > blood strike > frost strike. A Frost DK played appropriately will use Howling Blast on every Rime proc, which is not parryable.

A single-disease DK will not use plague strike, but for modelling I’ll base it on two diseases since it’s a worst-case for the boss gaining parry-haste.

Read more… » continue reading

January 11th, 2010 | 23 comments | From: Death Knight tanking specifically, choose equipment | Tags: , , , , , ,

Why can't bosses have expertise?

On PTR tank forums, that question was asked. Players scale up, why not bosses too? Ghostcrawler’s response:

It’s something we actually talk about quite a bit. We won’t do it for Icecrown, but it could happen in the future.

The basic problem is that bosses don’t scale with gear. Their health and damage go up. That’s it. You might avoid a first tier boss 30% of the time and a final tier boss 60% of the time. That means

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October 23rd, 2009 | 2 comments | From: Cataclysm speculation before Beta | Tags: , , , ,

Avoidance value of expertise

In late August, Theckhd of Maintankadin started an epic post to work out, if expertise was an avoidance stat, how good would it be? The exact ratios below apply to paladins, but the principles can be applied to warriors and DKs too. I’m not sure it works for druids because they’re so dodge-oriented in the first place.

Update Feb 9th 2010: most bosses in Icecrown do not parry-haste, so expertise is just a threat-stat in that perspective. Read more.

Update

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October 6th, 2009 | 3 comments | From: Gear and stats, choose equipment | Tags: , , , ,

3.3 Death Knight dual-wield tanking

March 23 2010: checked for 3.3.3.

Can and should a DK dual-wield as a tank? Patch 3.22 made it possible, with rune strike now being effected by Threat of Thassarian. Patch 3.3 now lets you DW tank with DPS weapons. DW for DPSers in Frost is very strong.

Sure a tank can do it too, but is it wise? What should the lead tank say about it to their corps?

No parry-haste, Feb 9 2010, almost none of the Icecrown bosses have parry-haste turned on. Therefore, parrygib is irrelevant on most bosses. Therefore, don’t worry about expertise anymore!

3.3.3

For the highest threat dual-wield frost spec in 3.3.3, see this forum post. I do not recommend Icy Touch spam builds.

Original post continues:

The questions relate to survival and threat. To work it threat, I used my simulator.

Threat

  • impressively, the threat on dual-wield (“DW”) tanking is the same or slightly higher than a two-hander, based on a like-for-like simulation I did.
  • for the stat values for threat (to help choose gear or weapons), I provide a complete equivalence table here.

Survival: incoming damage

  • if a DK tank has two fast tank weapons and 30+ expertise skill, they will receive about as many parry-hasted attacks as a warrior with one fast weapon and 26 expertise
    • this is because warrior’s attacks can nearly all be parried, but some of a DK’s cannot (icy touch and howling blast)
  • because of their itemisation (dodge/parry/defence), you should end up with up to 2% higher avoidance from two tanking weapons; a lot relatively if you’re already around 60%
  • note you no longer lose the 2% stamina from Gargoyle runeforge, but gain net 1% avoidance from swordshattering runeforge, because of the new 3.3 runeforge.

Gear and expertise stats

  • ideally you would get two slow tank weapons, but they don’t exist except for the now old Broken Promise. With two slow weapons you only need 21+ expertise skill, 26 is preferred.
  • you could get two Peacekeepers, for example
  • try to get Quel’Serrar from Onyxia, it’s lovely
  • in the new 3.3 content, tank one-handers are Bonebreaker Scepter, Rimefang’s Claw, and Lucky Old Sun. The latter two from 5-mans.
  • now in patch 3.3, you can dual-wield two slow DPS weapons (as opposed to tank-itemised one handers) and runeforge them with the new one-handed version of Gargoyle, called Nerubian
    • slow one-handers give significantly more threat, and lower parrygib risk, so I’d suggest that’s a good path to go
  • expertise: you should bias your gear selection towards expertise
    • you could use two expertise/stam gems, I’d say (that’s not scientific, but based on a notion of minimal compromise on the primary tank stat). Otherwise, like in any tank spec, gems should tend to be all-stamina.
    • if you need more than two gems to reach this expertise target, you should consider not DW tanking at all. Go get a two-hander instead.
  • your gear is going to still need 540 defence with the Nerubian runeforge’s 25 included towards that total.

To help choose betweeen weapons, read my longer post on survival vs threat.

More about expertise and hit»

Spec

  • there is not much variation, this is the main spec.
  • alternatively, for 1.5% more single-target threat you can move 2 points from KM into [Scent of Blood] for this spec but note the KM procs are useful in AOE situations for howling blast, so you lose that edge
  • for [Improved Icy Talons], it is more difficult to spec well, best to read my full discussion with specs
    • 3.33 changed the stacking for IIT, my full analysis is here.

You cannot DW tank as Unholy or Blood, not enough threat. Frost is it.

Rotation / priority

Read the full post here.

Simulation

I have run several tests at i213, i219, i226 and i245 gear levels. I’ve compared DW to 2H, and cross-compared Frost DW to Blood and Unholy. The general theme of results is this: dual-wield frost generates slightly more threat than 2H, and more of it is physical (less frost), with a much higher proportion of damage from Howling Blast (because it procs Rime on offhand).

Patch 3.3: Two fast tank weapons -vs- two slow DPS weapons: two slow weapons are notably more threat and less parry-haste risk. Read my complete analysis of threat from weapon speed.

So, should I do it?

Remember most ICC bosses basically don’t have parry-haste turned on!  This post was written before that was known. » continue reading

Expertise reduces the chance the boss can parry you.
Bosses have a 14.25% parry chance and reducing that to 1% would take 467 expertise rating (= 57 expertise). That’s massive and it’s not sensible to even try to achieve that when stacking stamina would be more effective instead.

For level 83 the soft cap is 6.5% dodge or 26 expertise (214 rating), and the hard cap is 14.25% parry or 57 expertise (468 rating). Source.

Expertise rating:skill conversions:
*  1 Expertise Skill reduces the chance your attacks will be dodged/parried by 0.25%
* 32.79 Rating is equal to 1% less chance your attacks will be dodged/parried.
* 8.20 Rating is equal to 0.25% less chance your attacks will be dodged/parried and thus is equal to 1 Expertise Skill.

To-hit

Spell Hit and Melee Hit scale differently with Hit Rating. You need 26.2 hit rating for 1% chance to hit with spells and 32.7 hit rating for 1% hit to melee attacks.

Dual-wielding, the offhand has a 24% chance to miss rather than the usual 8% for two-handed weapons. Note, your special attacks (eg. frost strike) disregard the offhand miss rate, your special melee attacks are 8% and spells are 17% even if you are DW tanking. To-hit does not effect your survivability, just your TPS.

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September 22nd, 2009 | 104 comments | From: Death Knight tanking specifically | Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

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