“Shield Block also grants you 20% reduction to magical damage taken”

On the face of it this sounds absolutely fantastic. However, having looked closer, I’m not so sure. Just taking the tier 8 content into account that I’ve seen so far (ie, everything up to General Vezax), exactly how useful is it?

• Flame Leviathan. You’re in a vehicle. Nothing to see here, move along
• Ignis the Furnace Master – well, there’s Scorch, so it might be useful if you’re an offtank standing in the fire for a long time, but that’s about it
• Razorscale – Useless in phase 1, nice to have in phase 2, but Flame Breath comes too quickly to negate it all the time. So kind of useful, but by the time you have 4 pieces of tier 8, you probably have good enough gear to survive the breaths anyway.
• XT-002 – Pretty much all physical damage, except for bombs, and if you’re getting hit by those you have bigger problems
• Kologarn. Again, all physical damage. Move along, nothing to see
• Assembly of Iron – Fusion Punch was made for the bonus. A nice reduction on an ability which can be reacted to. A decent use for it at last.
• Auriaya – well, if your raid’s doing it right, Sonic Screech will hit for so little as to be trivial. No really good uses here either.
• Hodir – Well, Frozen Blows might count, but odds are that if you’re wearing full frost resistance gear, you don’t have the 4-piece bonus. And if you don’t have full frost gear, you’re likely to be wearing SBV gear (Frozen blows that are completely blocked do no frost damage).
• Thorim – Steadily increasing physical damage. Not really much help
• Freya – Nothing hits very hard, really. I guess it might be useful for holding Exploding Lashers in place, but really, why dice with death when you don’t have to?
• Mimiron – Leviathan Mk2′s Plasma Blast was made for the set bonus. But after that? Maybe to relieve your healers a little in phase 2.
• General Vezax – again, if the tank’s taking magical damage, someone’s doing something wrong.

So, not great, really. In a fit of curiosity I looked over some old Sartharion + 3 drakes log parses to see if it might have been useful there. It definitely wouldn’t help enoughwith main tanking Sarth himself – the breaths come too often for that. For Shadron, Tenebron and Vesperon, maybe, but not a huge amount.

So, yeah, there you go. I wouldn’t say to knock yourself out trying to get the 4-piece warrior tier 8 set bonus, at least not yet anyway. There just aren’t enough practical applications to make it the killer upgrade it might appear to be on first sight.

EDIT: Veneretio points out that the set bonus comes into its own a lot more once you start to attempt some of the hard modes. I can see how that might be the case, but as I’m not yet running hard modes, I’ll wait to see them before completely reversing my opinion. On top of that, not everyone cares too much about hard modes.

For a start, Last Stand is having its cooldown reduced to 3 minutes.  When glyphed with Glyph of Last Stand, this suddenly means that Last Stand could be up all the time. I don’t believe for a second that will be attainable, but by nerfing the glyph to a 2 minute reduction, the minimum I expect to see, we’ll still see the ability available once a minute to boost health by 20% for 20 seconds.

Add to that the new glyph – Glyph of Shield Wall. It’s a similar deal to that of the Last stand glyph:

Reduces the cooldown on Shield Wall by 3 min, but Shield Wall now only reduces damage taken by 40%.

When properly talented with Improved Disciplines, Shield Wall too gains a 1 minute cooldown. This suddenly means that the 4-piece set bonus for Tier 7 gear (an extra 3 seconds on Shield Wall) means a lot more than it did.

There are two things that this could mean.

The first is that these are just the first iteration of testing and they’ll be nerfed back down to an appropriate level. Fine, I say. That isn’t too much of a problem – PTRs are for testing, and by making extreme changes and then gradually moving them back to a point where they’re comfortable, Blizzard can be sure to get them to a point at which they’re much better balanced against other tanking trees.

The second, and which has been partially borne out by the Hodir fight on the PTRs (melee strikes of 25k), is that we’ll be seeing a lot more encounters in which we take a lot of damage, like Patchwerk and Brutallus. It will mean that it’s not complete suicide for a warrior to tank an encounter such as Sartharion with all three drakes up. And, most importantly, it will make the decision to use panic buttons so much easier.

Of course, dual specialisation will be our saviour here too. A strict survivability spec might well depend on these two glyphs. Adding a full set of threat glyphs in the second means the choice is always there.

There’s a new shield enchant in town - Titanium Plating. And the question that has been going around my mind is – is it any good, or should I stick with the old favourites of 20 defense rating or even 18 Stamina?

To make the numbers easier, I’m going to make a few assumptions. The “typical” warrior who I’m going to use as my example will have:

• 25000 health
• 20% Dodge
• 20% Parry
• 20% Block
• 1000 Shield Block Value
• No raid buffs, such as Horn of Winter, or Blessing of Kings.
• Talents: 3 / 3 Vitality and Improved Shield Block (Protection warrior, right?)

Let’s look at the easy one first. The 18 Stamina enchant adds 191 health (180+6% from Vitality), leaving a total of 25191 health, an increase of 0.7%. Not that impressive, right? And as we add more health from food buffs, Power Word: Fortitude and Commanding Shout, its comparative value decreases. But for the minute, we’ll call it a 0.7% increase in health.

Now, 20 defense rating. Again, it’s not too hard to work out the benefit of this enchant:

20 defense rating = 4 defense skill (ignoring the remainder). That’s the same as 0.16% dodge, 0.16% parry, 0.16% to miss from the boss and 0.16% block. That’s an additional 0.48% avoidance, plus 0.16% block. That’s almost a half a percent avoidance, plus a 1000 HP reduction in one hit in every 625 – or an average reduction of 1.6HP per hit (ie, 0.16% increase in effective mitigation). While defense rating is subject to diminishing returns too, it scales somewhat more slowly, so as we get to 27000 health or more it’s probably going to be better to take the defense rating – 0.48% avoidance plus 0.16% mitigation sounds good to me.

And, finally, Titanium Plating. This is where it gets tricky:

20% block rating means that, on average, 1 out of 5 attacks will be blocked. So our average increase in health saved will be 40 over 5 attacks, or 8 health per attack.  so that’s a 0.8% increase in average block value. Doesn’t sound so impressive, does it? We’re forgetting one thing, though – shield block. If we assume we keep shield block up as much as possible then for 30s we will see a 0.8% increase in block value, followed by a 10 second period where everything is blocked, for twice the usual shield block value. But because the usual block value doubles as well as the enchant, we can disregard this in terms of percentages. So our new average increase is as follows:

(30s  0.8% increase) + (10s  4%) = average increase of damage reduction - 1.6%

Sounds good? Of course, 1.6% more damage mitigated does, but shield block isn’t necessarily going to be used that way. It might be used to generate extra threat, or as an extra crutch if healing starts to slide slightly. So we can’t assume that it will be up for 10 seconds in every 40. That is merely the absolute best case. And this additional reduction is going to be a much lower percentage of the incoming damage from a boss, who hits hard every 2.5s than it will be from an AoE trash pack which will be constantly beating on you.

Of course, Shield Block Value is also useful for threat, from Damage Shield and Shield Slam. Because our average block value (in the best possible conditions) has increased by 1.6%, so too will our threat from these damaging abilities. A 1.6% increase doesn’t sound much, and at the moment it probably isn’t, but in the future it may well turn out to be useful at higher gear levels, even though by then the percentage will be diminished. It’s also a benefit neither of the other two enchants will grant.

So, which is the better enchant? 18 stamina might have cut the mustard when 15k health unbuffed was the norm for tanks, but it’s starting to show its age. No, both the new enchants are, somewhat unsurprisingly, better. On reflection, I’d rather have the 20 defense on a slow-hitting boss. For AoE trash packs, where keeping up shield block is an excellent passive threat move, the extra threat from the plating wins out. Again, though, as shield block value increases the additional percentage mitigated by the plating is reduced. The higher the gear level, the more valuable the avoidance will be, as it diminishes at a lower rate, being spread across three stats (dodge, parry and miss).