Well since the title of the thread is referencing group warriors, this isn't really about raid tanks. But IF it's true that it's completely impossible to overcome raid boss strikethrough, then stacking HDex as a raid tank is completely worthless in a raid setting. IF that is the case, you should be stacking HAgi for the defense skill mod (or HSta for HP gains). Trying to "balance" your heroics is, again, the worst thing you can do at this point, short of taking off gear slots and tanking pants-less. Giving up 500 HDex means nothing (from a damage taking standpoint), and trading it for ~100 HAgi is a worthwhile trade IF you're not overcoming the strikethrough barrier for the mobs you're wanting to tank. I don't know if the above is true though. Your opinion doesn't really matter much in the debate either, since there's no facts. There's no proof. And until you have a tank that stacks 1-1.2k HDex and is still seeing <1% riposte/parry against raid bosses, there's no reason to think that raid bosses are negating several hundred more heroics this expansion than previously. Using statements like "I'd imagine", "the devs wouldn't", "I don't think" have zero bearing at this point. Before TBM launch, I would have never thought the devs would let group tanks gain several HUNDRED points of a chosen heroic stat. I wouldn't have thought they'd be letting group warriors upgrade 100+ ac in their non-vis slots. Yet here we are. Talking about the augs that have 40 heroics, you're still not required to use them. As a group tank, I'm stacking HDex to the max I can. I'm not touching the +40 HAgi augs, as I won't be remotely close to overcoming the strikethrough for HAgi and the smaller benefits of the defense mod from HAgi is diminished even further when you're able to stack percent on percent of skill based avoidance and have less attacks making it to the hit/miss check. So for me, the 32 HDex far outweighs the 40 HAgi or HSta. A friend of mine is in the +HAgi camp, and we're planning to compare things when we're fully geared up in another couple of weeks. I expect my avoidance numbers to blow his away, but we'll see what happens then.
Again, this is likely going to be a matter of balancing to achieve capped mod2's and getting as much AC as possible. The last few type9's I buy are likely going to be the lower ac, higher HP +avoidance +shielding augs to make sure I stay capped if needed. Avoidance mod2, if I remember correctly, is 1% avoidance at the hit/miss check for every 10 points of Avoidance mod2. Shielding is a flat % off the DB portion of a mob's damage swing. I honestly have no idea how much of current mob's damage is split between DI and DB, so I don't want to give you an answer on shielding without knowing if 5% shielding is taking off .02% of a mob's swing or 3% of a mob's swing. One of the other tanks around here might have more light to shed as far as recent trends for NPC DB/DI spread.
Before TBM I was in maxed out TDS tier 3 group gear, all the best augs attainable outside of a raid (soul of grandmaster included), and maxed heroic AAs (fort, vitality, etc.). In that gear enslaver of souls killed me in 1.5 rounds (like instantly). Now I am in full TBM group gear with highest AC augs, 750 hdex, and maxed heroic AAs. In this gear I have successfully tanked and beaten everything several times over. I riposte,block, and parry approx 25% of attacks (combined) and dodge 3-5%. Average hit taken is mid to high 4000. I look at my daily tank parses to get these numbers (these are all TBM mobs). Imho AC is still king, even with the loss of hps and mod 2's. Once I have enough currency I may try stacking other heroics.
If you guys want something to compare 600/975 Hdex. Parse of 68657 seconds with 975hdex on A merchant in PoLife Parse of 76310 seconds with 600hdex on A merchnat in PoLife while trying to keep AC/HAgi as close as possible as parse#1
Thanks for the numbers Orbital. Interesting to see that your dodge chance actually lowered when you added 3 tiers of HAgi between the setups.
On parse dummies, someone managed to prove that with 6 tiers of 25 heroic dex difference, he had his riposte increasing of 6 % and his parry increasing of 6 %, which seems in line with 1 % per tier (the heroic dex range he had was in the 450-550 range difference) On real mob here, we see the result of 15 tiers of heroic dex difference, with a span this time of 600-975 range difference. The riposte rate is + 4,5 %, the parry rate is + 3 %. We are far from the + 15 % we could have expected on the dummy parse. It proves imo that : 1) Heroic dex (and Heroic Agi) avoidances benefit does less good on real mob than dummy 2) There is for sure a diminishing return on the avoidance benefit the higher you boost your heroic (so you will see better results increasing your heroic at lower tiers than higher tiers)
I don't think dummies have strike-through, the mob Goodurden parsed appears to have about 66% strike-through (which double dips AFTER heroic strike-through reduction) Based on Dzarns avoidance formulas the expected Riposte measures up to about what it should be, the Parry is like 2% too low and Dodge also is like 4-5% too low. Unless Devs can set Strike-through per avoidance or w/e
#1 was fairly obvious already, just due to mob strikethrough + heroic strikethrough. #2 has absolutely no proof here, or in any other thread I've seen thus far. While Orbital has a fairly significant parse size, it's possible we'd see a shift in the numbers if we ran the parse again or for a longer amount of time. When I originally parsed out heroics and helped Yoda formulate the 25 tier step back in 2009, it took hundreds of GB worth of log files with the parses averaging out to about 3-5M swings each. Please don't "prove" a theory by looking at 2 parses. From the above parses, I could postulate that raising your HAgi lowers your dodge rate and thus should be avoided. Not that there may have been a change in focus item or some such. There's also a ~1% increase in shield block chance, which shouldn't be there. Surely that's from the extra 100 HInt he added right? The post does do a decent job of showing that heroic strikethrough CAN be overcome though in the group game, and you can start to see returns on your heroic investment. Rakknar's anecdotal evidence is pointing in that direction as well, and is a good answer to the original question posed in the thread.
From what I see, the dodge / ripo / parry (ignoring FOA padding) rates vs bosses is still ridiculously low, as in 0.5-1% each. So you're right on main bosses. However, the skill %'s are at expected levels on trash and minis (like fear golems)... at least most trash, for some zones (eg PoHealth) the skill %'s on trash is about 1/2 of what I'd expect.
Honestly, I have no idea Tarvas. Yoda was the statistician from TSW, I provided the log files. However, I would surmise that unless Orbital switched out his ID focus from range, or was using CV in his lower agi parse (unlikely), there's at least a swing of at least 1% actual chance that could happen. This is backed up by the block chance having a 1.17% change as well, when there should be very, very similar percentages between the parses. *NOTE: I could be completely wrong here. There might be something else at work that isn't being accounted for.*
Isn't dodge the last thing checked in the avoidance roll ? And if that is true the more you parry, riposte and block the less rolls that dodge does ? I am pretty sure I not only chose dex because it gives 2 avoidance checks over 1 it was also my choice because the checks were the first checks done in the avoidance roll. Now this is just from memory but I believe it went Miss - Parry - Block - Riposte - Dodge Also Tarvas for your paladin losing avoidance mod 2 is huge it's like negating the entire reason to get higher heroics. Avoidance > Mitigation > HP
Defensive skill check order is: Riposte Parry or Block skill Dodge Shield/Staff Block Accuracy/Miss DI Roll. The order of operations is accounted for in the parses and in the percentages used for the defense skill chance (not actual fire rate) at that step of the process. The dodge chance (not rate) is calculated as total dodges divided by total swings minus the ripostes and parries.
So if I am understanding this when given a choice between stats (within reason) I should gear for HDex > Best Dodge Item > Avoidance to 100 > AC > Damage Shielding > HP?
Avoidance to 100 - Shielding to 35 i think it is ? - AC - Hp / Heroics The dodge item get the best you can always but don't lose stuff to gain a better effect. Some times other tanks are different than me but I feel augments for a tank should be highest ac with pref heroic dex with hp. Basically the minimum value of ac I look at atm is 45 and I also only go for augs with hp just because an aug has 5 more ac but no hp on it I feel it is weaker than the augment with 5 less ac but 150 + hp I go 1 ac = 10 hp , If the ac is not above the hp in the stat conversion it is not an upgrade.
Ask ten tanks this question, and you'll get eleven different responses at this point in the game. The majority of stats you're chasing fall into two categories: avoidance and mitigation, with the majority of them falling under avoidance. Avoidance Mod2, Improved Dodge and Improved Parry foci, HDex, HAgi all fall under avoidance, while AC and Shielding are under mitigation. Before Heroics were introduced, it was fairly simple. Best foci available + capped avoidance/shielding, then stack AC as high as possible and toss on some HP as you can without sacrificing too much AC. Now that you're able to stack Heroics, there's some reason for debate again. There's a LOT of overlap in the avoidance portion of damage survival now. How much Avoidance Mod2 is worth a rank of ID or IP focus or a tier or 2 of HDex/HAgi? How much is it reasonable to sacrifice to gain another tier of your chosen Heroic? My gearing strat right now is to get/keep the TDS rare tank range and neck for the IP7/ID7 foci. Being able to jump a tier (or two) of HDex MIGHT get me to change one of the items out for IP5/ID5 from TBM group. The rest of my gear would have to be just right for this to happen though. Once I get my hat in the next couple days, I'll have all TBM group visible. Each piece of that has gotten the 210 ac aug and a 32 HDex aug. For non-vis, I'm getting all of the drops that have type 5 and 9, as I'll be able to stack 210 ac augs in there, on top of the ~30 ac already on the item. When fully aug'd, the items are ~280 ac. For the final few non-vis items, I plan to switch over to the lower ac, higher HP type9 augs to keep my avoidance/shielding closer to capped out, but that might not even happen. If I'm within a few points, I'll likely just stack the high AC type9's in the last items as well. I have no plans on touching the HAgi, HStr, or HSta focused +40 slot augs. For type 7 augs, I'm stacking HDex+AC. I still have some type7 HAgi augs laying around, and once I have the gear options available in a month or two, I plan to do some parsing on the options of the type5/9 non-vis versus the non-vis with just type5's, lower AC and higher heroics to see the change in mob DPS in the real game. I also plan to swap the 32 HDex augs out for 32 HAgi augs to see the change in mob DPS as well. And while I had previously parsed out the IP/ID foci to be roughly a 1% evasion gain per focus level against test dummies, I plan to parse them against real game mobs as well to see if it holds true, or if mob (heroic) strikethrough is butchering the focus to worthless levels. The whole gearing aspect in TBM is largely just gearing up for the Anashti missions though, for me anyways. I tanked a named in each zone (Yes, even Render/Argin the Blaze, and bokon fanatic) in a mix of TDS T2 and RoF T3 visible, and non-vis ranging from RoF to TDS T1-2. This was pre-shield of dreams. This was without running last stand except on the named with the 20k mana drains. Some of the named were not slowed. The gains from making sure Stout Defense, Field Protector, Brace for Impact, Blade Guardian, Commanding Voice are running are much bigger than a lot of the gearing decisions, in my opinion. Cycling in Flash, NTTB, CoA BP, Fabled Ball of Golem Clay, Third Spire, Warlord's Bravery when needed is a huge boost to surviviability. I haven't even paid enough attention to Dichotomic Shield to really even use it, outside of 1-2 named kills. This last spiel of a paragraph was to say: "Do what you like; it probably won't really matter anyways if you use your tanking tools diligently."
Shielding and 100 avoidance > all Shielding sort of the opposite of what AC and most mitigation abilities do. It reduces the DB number in the DB + DI(1-20) equation. Every 10 points of avoidance is 1% chance increase to avoid the attack. So at 100% you have a 10% increase. I think that's right. It's been years since I worried about those stats since they've been maxed since pretty much DoDh. Why are you wasting endurance on Commanding Voice? Or do you not have a shoulder clicky equal to 20%?
No, I don't. Group shoulders only have a 14% click. The CotF/TDS rare shoulders have 20%, but I haven't gotten those, and likely won't. Will probably just be using TBM type5/9 for stats and continue to use CV, since the endurance usage is negligible.
