I am looking for advice and some numbers regarding the new caps for block chance and mitigation in the Altar of Malice expansion. I am fairly new to main raid tank and am looking at my stats and attempting to figure where I can alter numbers to better suit my dps stats while also maintaining my Health, mitigation and block chance stats. Any help and advice would be greatly appreciated. Wildone
on the beta forums there was a graph with the mit values. I didn't take a snapshot and can't find it now but someone may have. Otherwise I want to say I it looked like we were gonna be needing 30k mit or so farther in the x-pac. But again I don't really recall and I didn't do too much testing on beta.
There isn't technically a cap on the attribute, "+Block Chance", but since your actual Uncontested Block percentage is hard capped at 70%, once you reach that point, more +Block Chance does nothing. As Genges mentioned, for Brawlers you only need around around 140 block chance to cap out your Uncontested Block while in defensive stance and with relevant AAs (such as Aversion). For anybody else, how much +Block Chance gear you need will primarily be determined by the quality of your shield, but you will be unlikely to cap it, feasibly. For the most part, however, MOBs in current content have enough Strikethrough to make seriously pushing Uncontested Block inefficient. I'd suggest getting +Mitigation Increase over +Block Chance wherever possible. In other words, I would take +Block Chance where convenient, but I wouldn't sacrifice your mitigation, or even in most cases DPS/Threat, when given the option.
Mr. Cheese would you say though that we can stop bringing up block at around 125 or so or do you recommend more than that? For a plate tank, that is. I guessed it would be a factor of levels for the cap, so 125 for a mob 5 levels higher than you but not sure if it works that way hehe.
The difference between normal avoidance checks and uncontested checks is that uncontested checks don't compare your attributes to those of your attacker. Level disparity has a major effect on normal, contested checks, and is a major reason why they are generally useless against orange-con heroic and epic targets, alongside crazy buff packages. Uncontested checks are just a straight percentage chance to block and attack, regardless of who the attack comes from. However, since gear has inflated to the point where reaching the cap on uncontested block is actually possible, the devs added Strikethrough, which is a straight, percentage chance to ignore a block/party/riposte and hit you, anyway. So you could describe Strikethrough as an uncontested chance to avoid an attack being avoided by the target's uncontested avoidance. Yes, that is exactly as ridiculous as it sounds. I really can't give you a solid number to shoot for as far as block chance is concerned. Since you can't reforge into block chance, you don't really have a lot of opportunities to push it significantly. Most tank gear has either block chance or mitigation increase, and in such situations you should always opt for mitigation. The only other way to significantly increase block chance is adornments, and most slots that take block chance adorns are competing with strong DPS-related choices, making the opportunity cost too great. In other words, theoretical optimization aside, it really isn't practical to set a block chance target value. Just take whatever you can get and don't worry too much about it.
I have heard this explanation for Strikethrough and i know it to be true. But it does not stop it from being the most Absurd Mechanic i have ever heard or dealt with... ever.
