Mighty fine post.

Excellent, excellent post! Thank you Ciderhelm, I've picked up quite a bit of useful info from your guides.

Reported for stickiness.

Can I be a noob for a second and ask when did we find out that/if 1h spec affects shield slam? It's not really counted as a "weapon" in itemization (it's under the armor category)

Thanks for the guide, great work.

Does anticipation raise your baseline defense? Would having +20 defense from Anticipation allow you to skirt crushing blows from most non-?? level mobs?

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However, in the words of Satrina, "Mitigation is subject to diminishing returns, but Armor is not." What this means is, Armor provides a linear increase to lifespan, if not mitigation.

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This is a common misconception and is just plain wrong. Yes, your life expectancy when fighting solo against an enemy scales linearly with armor. Your overall survivability does not.

The reason for this is that the healing per second you require diminishes at the same rate as mitigation. I had a much more eloquent post typed up but it got eaten by the "you must log in and I'm throwing away all of your POST data" monster. To summarize it briefly: the only things that matter in a group environment is the amount of overall healing you require and your ability to survive burst damage. Both of those attributes suffer from diminishing returns when improved by armor.

Once your armor values start sinking into DR, it's much more valuable to stack avoidance and health to allow you to survive burst/spike damage and require less overall healing. Even that isn't entirely true, since there are fights with excessive stuns or huge damage attacks where armor is valuable. The point is often made moot by the fact that the top end items happen to offer the most of all of these values. I suggest hanging on to items with exceptionally high stats for any given tanking area for use in individual fights. Learn how the mechanics work and play smart.

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This is a common misconception and is just plain wrong. Yes, your life expectancy when fighting solo against an enemy scales linearly with armor. Your overall survivability does not.

The reason for this is that the healing per second you require diminishes at the same rate as mitigation. I had a much more eloquent post typed up but it got eaten by the "you must log in and I'm throwing away all of your POST data" monster. To summarize it briefly: the only things that matter in a group environment is the amount of overall healing you require and your ability to survive burst damage. Both of those attributes suffer from diminishing returns when improved by armor.

Once your armor values start sinking into DR, it's much more valuable to stack avoidance and health to allow you to survive burst/spike damage and require less overall healing. Even that isn't entirely true, since there are fights with excessive stuns or huge damage attacks where armor is valuable. The point is often made moot by the fact that the top end items happen to offer the most of all of these values. I suggest hanging on to items with exceptionally high stats for any given tanking area for use in individual fights. Learn how the mechanics work

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Certainly. There is definitely room for discussion regarding this. Also, one of the next additions is going to be very clear that you cannot use a single set of items for the entirety of this game.

Here is how I described this in the last guide, and this will be revised and edited here:
First, using a base armor of 9500 with Defensive Stance (and assuming we are not using Greater Stoneshields), the damage range comes out as between 7,503 and 10,151. This is much lower than the nearly 30,000 max damage a Hateful Strike is capable of, though the damage is still very dangerous.

Now, let's add Greater Stoneshields to this. The damage range changes to between 6,633 and 8,975. This is over 1,000 less maximum damage using a consumable -- meaning more healing efficiency overall through the course of the fight (Assuming three Hateful Strike tank rotation, Patchwerk uses Hateful Strike roughly every ~3.6 seconds on a target).

When you look at your character pane and see an increase of just 2 or 3 percentage points of mitigation with armor, it may not seem very impressive. But when your armor is reaching near the 70% total mitigation range, 2 or 3 percentage points will change your actual incoming damage up to 10% on something like a Hateful Strike.

Overall I am not a math expert in any form, nor am I particularly skilled at explaining math concepts. If you don't have a clue what I just said, that's forgivable, I didn't really have a clue what other people were saying until I could see the tangible effects of armor in a raid -- I learn more through tactile and visual interaction than I do from reading.

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Has this been confirmed behavior for Defiance? My tests showed that the additive nature was true for a Druid with Feral Instinct, but I haven't seen any data to fully confirm that Defiance must also be additive.

Once we can prove it, then we'll need to get Kenco to update his threat mod, and all the corresponding static values. ;)

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It's always been additive with both Feral Instinct and Defiance. In the Patch Notes I believe I brought up in another thread, Blizzard specifically notes that Threat reductions became subject to multiplicative returns, but this was in response to stacking multiple reductions and trinkets. Also, thanks for verifying this for Druids as well with the research. :-)

This, from the WowWiki -- which I thought was managed by Kenco? --
Bonuses to threat generation applies in the same way as reductions since patch 1.12, with the exception of the innate "Defensive" threat of defensive stance and bear form and the talents for those stances, defiance and feral instinct, which add together for a 45% total bonus.

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I concur here--incidentally my noticing of reflecting an AoE spell happened in the Black Morass as well, though i believe it was something like an Arcane Explosion instead. But I definitely reflected the part that hit me, and would assume that it still hit some of the other people in my party. Unfortunately, because of the lack of information you get in your combat log regarding this ability it's hard to draw any final conclusions.

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Just a note on this: I've seen my combat log report a reflect of an AoE spell before, if memory serves it was a Blast Wave. I was in a tough fight at the time and couldn't verify the result, but the not-AoE thing needs more checking. Obviously it isn't working in most cases but may work in some.

If memory serves, the Blast Wave was from a riftlord in the Black Morass.

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I changed the wording slightly. I haven't seen this, but I believe it is possible, and will check it the next pass through.

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i just wanted to point out that post patch 2.0 this is incorrect. they changed the threat reduction to 10% and the same is true of the burning soul talent, which you did not put on here.

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Fixing!

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Does anticipation raise your baseline defense? Would having +20 defense from Anticipation allow you to skirt crushing blows from most non-?? level mobs?

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No, not that I know. It's primarily a booster talent (and a good one) with relatively good returns.

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Can I be a noob for a second and ask when did we find out that/if 1h spec affects shield slam? It's not really counted as a "weapon" in itemization (it's under the armor category)

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I'm positive that One-Handed Specialization affects Shield Slam. That's tested by myself.

Next time you respec, you can test some of these without costing a copper. Just get to Shield Slam in your talent tree before One-Handed Specialization if you can go that deep w/o the points -- then go check your Shield Slams on an unarmored target. Since Shield Slam has a small damage range, you won't need much data. Then, add the points from One-Handed, do the same Shield Slam on the same target, and you'll catch the difference.

Great job!!! You answerd some questions i had wonderd about and i have had my tank almost a year now. Thankyou, and keep up the good work!

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It's always been additive with both Feral Instinct and Defiance. In the Patch Notes I believe I brought up in another thread, Blizzard specifically notes that Threat reductions became subject to multiplicative returns, but this was in response to stacking multiple reductions and trinkets. Also, thanks for verifying this for Druids as well with the research. :-)

This, from the WowWiki -- which I thought was managed by Kenco? --
Bonuses to threat generation applies in the same way as reductions since patch 1.12, with the exception of the innate "Defensive" threat of defensive stance and bear form and the talents for those stances, defiance and feral instinct, which add together for a 45% total bonus.

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Don't trust anything on WoWWiki (or any Wiki in general), use it to lead you to the actual truth which may or may not coincide with whatever your Wiki of choice is telling you.

I'm inclined to think that Blizzard left everything is multiplicitive in threat mechanics in there, but I lack the desire to test myself as I don't need to worry about such an inconsequential difference just yet. If you actually got something from Kenco testing this stuff (and not something attributed to him on WoWWiki) it would be a much stronger case.

Good information however on the rest of the items.

For actual mechanics I've noticed that Heroic Strike is a much stronger threat building attack espeically with a fast weapon, currently using a 1.3 Warp Splinter dagger and it works exceptionally well, and in quite a few cases I can't spend all the rage in Karazhan style encounters with every attack being Heroic and using other abilities as the come up. Nine rage Heroic is the best talent points you can spend if you are that deep.

Great write-up. Thanks for the read, Ciderhelm.

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Don't trust anything on WoWWiki (or any Wiki in general), use it to lead you to the actual truth which may or may not coincide with whatever your Wiki of choice is telling you.

I'm inclined to think that Blizzard left everything is multiplicitive in threat mechanics in there, but I lack the desire to test myself as I don't need to worry about such an inconsequential difference just yet. If you actually got something from Kenco testing this stuff (and not something attributed to him on WoWWiki) it would be a much stronger case.

Good information however on the rest of the items.

For actual mechanics I've noticed that Heroic Strike is a much stronger threat building attack espeically with a fast weapon, currently using a 1.3 Warp Splinter dagger and it works exceptionally well, and in quite a few cases I can't spend all the rage in Karazhan style encounters with every attack being Heroic and using other abilities as the come up. Nine rage Heroic is the best talent points you can spend if you are that deep.

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Believe me, WowWiki is generally the last place to find 100% reliable information and I understand this. You will find that portions of this guide do not correspond to WowWiki, and I tend to believe in my own testing and observation over the Wiki. The Wiki's math corresponding to Parry, for instance, I take significant issue with because I have seen speed increases of up to 50% and as low as 12% in just the most recent tests.

However, I would suggest jumping back a ways, specifically to the 1.12 patchnotes. You are operating under the assumption that all Threat modifiers have always been multiplicative; instead, they have generally all been additive, which caused server-side issues once enough reductions were stacked. These values were changed in 1.12 to be multiplicative -- and the patchnotes clearly state they only apply to Threat reductions.

Most Threat testing is done without Defiance being factored in at all. Antiphaze (in this thread) is the player who has brought up testing with Feral Instinct -- the exact replica of Warrior Defiance -- showing that it is 1.45 when added together, not 1.495 (the multiplicative version).



As for Heroic Strike -- we are in 100% agreement and if you check out either of the prior versions of this guide, there are several sections dedicated to explaining Heroic Strike and finding the best and fastest weapons to match it. Even with Devastate spam factored in, it is still more Threat generation with the fastest non-Dagger weapons than it is to get slower weapons which do more for Devastate.

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These values were changed in 1.12 to be multiplicative -- and the patchnotes clearly state they only apply to Threat reductions.

Most Threat testing is done without Defiance being factored in at all. Antiphaze (in this thread) is the player who has brought up testing with Feral Instinct -- the exact replica of Warrior Defiance -- showing that it is 1.45 when added together, not 1.495 (the multiplicative version).

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I bring it up, because Kenco updated his guide (on the old WoW boards) assuming that all threat mods were multiplicative. His KLH Threatmeter addon is still using this behavior: all threat mods in KTM are listed as some base multiplier, and then run through a single check to combine them all.

So, assuming we're correct that Defiance is additive (since FI is proven to be), then we need to let Kenco know! ;)

And the WoWWiki guide is originally based on Kenco's numbers, but is not maintained by him (or anyone, heh...thus the wiki!)

Hey Ciderhelm, I have indeed reactivated my email address since I am playing some now and doing addons again. Feel free to forward people on if they desperately want to talk to me.

I am not going to update this til I can reformat the thread properly, but a quick update (much thanks to Satrina):

M70 = AC/(AC + 10557.5)

M73 = AC/(AC + 11960)

Those represent the accurate equations for Mitigation vs lvl 70 and lvl 73 creatures.

Excellent guide.

Question for clarification:

The innate threat values you listed - are they static? In other words do they change based on the stance multiplier that you're in? Or is it only the damage that is caused by some of those abilities that changes based on the multiplier of which stance you're in?

Great guide! Thanks!

too lazy to change to my warrior but the stun resist racial on orcs was nerfed to 15% vs the old 30%

so at a max its 30% resist not 45% unless i miss read i don't remeber seeing anything that boosts it higher then that

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Q u o t e:
The innate threat values you listed - are they static? In other words do they change based on the stance multiplier that you're in? Or is it only the damage that is caused by some of those abilities that changes based on the multiplier of which stance you're in?

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The static threat values are added to the threat caused by damage, before the stance multiplier.

Total Threat = (damage_threat + static_threat) * threat_mods

Cider's been fighting the good fight of warrior information for a long time now. Hold The Line was great stuff back in the day.

Reporting for stickitude.