Raid Warrior gear upgrade

Discussion in 'Tanks' started by Windance, Apr 20, 2022.

  1. Repthor Augur

    i understand what your saying. The odds are you wont avoid that hit when it matters as much as haveing more hp allways "on" have the chance to be effective. You will get more oppertunitys for the stars to allign with more hp then with maybe riposteing or avoiding a hit at the right time if we just looking at it from a purely defensive veiw

    as for shield ac thing its not just the ac softcap is also about the shield stance aa giveing you more mitigation on top even if we discount the shield ac softcap value
    Cadira likes this.
  2. Mayrn New Member

    I think the crux of a shield and hSta argument is that it is, for all intents and purposes, immeasurable how often it actually would cause you to avoid lethal damage versus hDex and Dual Wielding has measurable benefits. In most raids, you will never notice the difference between wearing a shield and having hSta, whereas, you will definitely see the difference DW and utilizing hDex in your damage throughput.

    You may think you feel a difference, and you can measure how many times the block triggers, but your anecdotal and circumstantial evidence does not equate to proof that it is preventing you from dying.
    Cadira likes this.
  3. Cadira Augur

    Don't think anyone's disputing that shield adds more defense but more that it's irrelevantly more (unless you have sk epic on then DW gonna trump any tiny gains you get from shield).

    I'm going to try and look at some real numbers soonish, see which hstat is truly the best and by how much (roughly).
  4. Repthor Augur

    your right we cant for sure know . but when the expasion starts out and your "behind the curve" as the tank its your job to do everything in your power to give the raid the best odds at keeping you alive so others can bring their primary function to the raid . then as u grow with gear and aas the stam will become less and less valueble as mobs will have less and less chance of killing you . and if the mob ever cant kill you thats when stam is totaly worthles.

    its an all or nothign thing. either your alive and everything is fine or your dead and things goign sideways real fast. its about finding the balance and to walk that line get as much dmg out as you can wile not dieing
  5. Tucoh Augur

    Would be interesting to see hdex vs hsta rates of riposte/block/parry against raid mobs. Not easy to parse but that kind of data seems sparse.

    Hdex 4 life though, DPS too much fun.
  6. Repthor Augur

    the issue there is to get any sense of parry ripo rates and to get rid of the rng you whould have to parse for hours . and well theres an issue with that as raid mobs shouldent live that long and if they do odds are you gonna die due to lack of mana and raid wanting to kill you instead =)
    Tucoh likes this.
  7. Tucoh Augur

    Yeah. You'd have to get lucky with an encounter that had a starting phase that could be easily tanked without a supporting raid indefinitely. No idea if ToL has that. And even then you'd only get stats on that mob, who knows how that'd translate to other raid mobs.
  8. Mayrn New Member



    I believe in the case that you are severely undergeared, I would agree with your assessment that you may need more mitigation to survive. I do not believe entering a new expansion's raids after raiding and gearing in the previous one counts as undergeared, especially in this expansion where that gap between the gear is lower than previous ones. That being said, if you are undergeared enough you cannot survive, say utilizing ToV group gear and trying to tank a ToV raid boss, no amount of Shield AC or hStam will increase your survivability above a threshold that would make your tanking sufficient enough to be more than a road bump.

    If that is the best case of needing mitigation to be relevant, the returns only get worse as your gear gets better making the need for these items useless. I believe the role of a tank is not to gear into a more mitigation heavy build, but to ensure proper CD usage while tanking, understand when to swap to another tank, manage raid targets' positioning, and understand the encounter enough to fill in in any of the roles required should some dire situation arise. Doing these four things will make you a competent tank, whereas, your perceived mitigation from gear is just a number that is largely inconsequential when it comes to defining what a tank is, at least when using relevant power gear.

    I would challenge people to to log your raids, and look at deaths of tanks and try to determine a root cause. I would be interested in your results, and would be very surprised if it did not come from one of three categories: significant gap in healing received, lack of CD usage when engaging a mob, vastly undergearing the content. There may be edge cases where something happens outside of that, but in my experience this is what it breaks down into today.
    Cadira likes this.
  9. Tucoh Augur

    Another way to look at it that I find useful is look at any event where you "almost die" and hit <5% (or whatever) health and recover. In that particular instance every little thing you and your support did to increase survivability saved your life. And also you might have screwed up tremendously and forgotten to hit your discipline after Fortitude/DPS discs or your cleric had the wrong tank targeted :D
  10. Repthor Augur

    well ofcorse cooldown useage is importent but thats not this thread
  11. Szilent Augur

    Szilent, Jul 23, 2020 Edit Report
    #39 Reply


    latest? these logs are *two years old*, of course the numbers are smaller.

    Regardless of the absolute numbers being smaller (again: because the logs are two years old), they show differences of 30, 40, and 60% in dps. In arbitrary events , not clean test cases.

    thanks for linking that thread, though. I have some great soundbites in that one. Reading back was entertaining. You were just as wrong two years ago as you are now.

  12. FranktheBank Augur

    Because warriors are a dps class. They are essentially a plated berserker that has a less egregious multibind key. Also sometimes they tank things.

    If Gorg is sustaining 1mil dps (which is very often) then thats basically what a dps needs to be doing to unseat him from his dps group spot.

    Or they need to pay me krono :)
  13. Gorgasm Journeyman


    My favorite thing from that thread is


    FranktheBank likes this.
  14. Gearrwin Lorekeeper

    As a non warrior player, what I am getting from this thread is that the raw AC value of shields is too low. Increase all shield AC by a factor of 2 or 3 and increase mob damage output to compensate. Problem solved.
    Wulfhere likes this.
  15. Cannikin Elder

    Guys, in your eagerness to debate DW vs. shield, I think you're missing the point of the question. The original post asked what to upgrade first. The relevant comparison is not DW vs. shield, but new weapon/previous weapon vs. new shield/previous shield (or other slots).

    You can activate and gain all the benefits of shield stance using any old rusty piece of crap from a level 1 decaying skeleton, so the only real benefit of upgrading a shield is AC. The HP upgrade is actually in favor of the weapon, as unless you're snowconing, you will always have a weapon in your main hand, whereas you probably don't always have the shield up. Weapon ratio upgrades improve DPS equally in all stances as well, percentage-wise.

    Luclin TS shield has 800 AC vs CoV with 735, so you're getting +65 real AC.
    Luclin TS warrior sword has 610 damage vs CoV 553, so you're getting +57 base damage.
    So the comparison is, is +65 real AC only when you're using a shield more important than +57 base damage pretty much 100% of the time (plus the benefit of always having the HP upgrade)?

    Yes, shields are unaffected by AC softcap, but ultimately the only thing that matters is your real AC total no matter where it comes from. 65 AC is what, a 0.5% increase to your total AC? Meanwhile upgrading the sword is a whopping 10.3% increase to mainhand DPS (and with it, things like rampage). Also, assuming you move your previous mainhand to your offhand, you're upgrading your offhand damage as well, so you'll be getting close to a full 10% increase in overall DPS when dual wielding.

    IMO, unless you have a slot with a warrior-relevant focus that's some ancient POS from 5 expansions ago or something, I would always upgrade the 1h weapon with ore first. There is no other single slot that proportionally upgrades your performance more than mainhand weapon. You can always make up the difference in AC from all other slots, but you can never gain more weapon ratio from any other slot.
    Windance likes this.
  16. Windance Augur


    That would be interesting to read. Hope you post it here.
  17. p2aa Augur

    Well, in two years, things haven't changed really, so these numbers are still accurate today.
    It's fun to see you being mad at your own parses that you posted.
    You are still as wrong as you were two years ago. I'm having a good laugh at it too.


    SK and Paladins are doing also great DPS when receiving full melee DPS support, especially SK.
    With the same ADPS support, competent melee DPS classes can sustain more than 1 million DPS, and actually bring some ADPS to the melee DPS group.
    It's pretty fun that you still believe doing DPS as a warrior requires skill, it's not.


    Yes and what ? I'm not speaking of shield AC, which is not subjected to softcap, nice fail.
  18. Warpeace Augur


    DPS will absolutely love you:)
  19. Szilent Augur

    are you not dealing much more damage now than you were two years ago?
  20. Gorgasm Journeyman


    It's weird you feel the need to make things up to justify yourself, but no you were speaking of character sheet AC, which encompasses the fact that shield AC ignores the soft cap.