FFXI: Back Tanking

I just saw some people talking about using a technique they call "back tanking" to fight some of the harder monsters in FFXI. This works on huge mobs that have frontal AE cones like many WoW bosses have. Onyxia and Nefarian are perhaps the most iconic such examples. The boss points at the tank so you position your tank away from the rest of your raid. That way only the tank gets hit by the huge breath weapon. Simple, right?

In FFXI huge mobs actually don't turn to face the person they're attacking. (And since there's no target of target function this makes it hard for the healer to know who's got aggro as I found out when we used Tom's dragon rune in an MMM maze.) So the tank runs behind the boss but stays in melee range so the boss doesn't move and therefore change the way it faces. Now no one is in front of the boss to get hit by the breath! It turns out the boss just won't use their breath attacks in this set-up and will use other attacks instead, which can be abused since some raid-wide AE attacks only get cast when the tank is in front as well.

This just seems weird and wrong to me. But is it abusing a bug or a creative use of game mechanics? Did Square intent to have dragons fought with the whole raid cowering behind the boss? It seems simple enough to fix (let dragons turn like smaller mobs do) so I'd assume it was kosher but it still feels like cheating.

BMI: 22.09 (-.16)

Wii Fit Age: 26 (-7)

10-Man Heroic Chimaeron Timings

I've poured over a recent log of our first 5 heroic Chimaeron pulls with an eye on getting a feel for the proper timing in terms of tank rotations. I'd read a few different ways that it could be done and wanted to see if I could work out exactly the order things happen on the fight to work out the pros and cons of each rotation along with how cooldowns could be lined up. It turns out everything happens in a very exact, precise order, so this should be very possible. In particular, the fight can be broken into 30 second chunks each of which follows this exact rotation (with one exception):

Melee Swing -> Melee Swing + Break Application -> Double Attack -> Caustic Slime x2 -> Melee Swing -> Caustic Slime x2 -> Melee Swing + Break Application -> Caustic Slime x2 -> Massacre -> (Feud, maybe)

The exception mentioned above is the very first 30 second chunk. The melee attacks are sped up at the start, likely because of a combination of two reasons. An attack speed debuff isn't applied before the pull, and they changed the encounter a little in a hotfix which forced Chimaeron to reset his swing timer after a massacre. As such, the first rotation has time for an extra melee swing before the massacre, and that swing will always be a double attack. Also, the first rotation can't end in a feud. The first rotation, therefore, is:

Melee Swing -> Melee Swing + Break Application -> Double Attack -> Melee Swing -> Caustic Slime x2 -> Melee Swing + Break Application -> Caustic Slime x2 -> Double Attack -> Caustic Slime x2 -> Massacre

Feud phases work the same way as a normal phase on heroic mode with the exact same rotation except there's no invincible bot up and you're guaranteed to not get back-to-back feuds. An interesting thing that I didn't realize until I looked at the log is Chimaeron actually continues to spew out two Caustic Slimes during the feud phase, so the healing needed is double what I thought it was. Also of note, there's only ever one double attack during the feud. (He does cast it a second time at the end which is certainly scary but it gets cut off by the ending massacre. You may need to maintain your attack speed debuff to make this be true but you better do that anyway.)

So, how do we tank this? When it comes right down to it there are 4 different levels of melee attacks in the fight and 5 different levels of the break debuff and the trick is managing which of the attacks gets eaten by who has which level of debuff. On normal this rotation is pretty trivial since there's only 2 levels of melee attacks:

• Normal auto-attack which can't kill anyone at more than 10k health. Anyone with a taunt and a healer can tank this regardless of break stacks.
• Double attack. From the logs it looks like I get hit for about 140k from a base swing, with some variance. (140k is the high end.) You need to remain above 10k from the first swing to live through the second one with the bot buff, so if I have 150k health I'm fine. With 1 stack of break I need 185k health. With 2 stacks I need 220k health which I hope can be seen as clearly right out. I can cool-down that if I need to, but by default I'm dead if I don't avoid one of the swings.

The solution, of course, is to have one 'tank' eat the auto-attacks (which means they get all the break stacks) and one actual tank taunt in and eat the double attacks. As long as they get healed to full before each double attack (you have about 14 seconds to heal up from the massacre) you can't lose a tank. (Well, assuming the 'tank' gets healed over 10k every 4.8 seconds anyway.)

On heroic things get a lot trickier. You have two new classes of attacks to look at:

• No-bot auto-attack. These hit for 140k, and there are 4 of them to eat. The second one applies a break debuff, so if you're planning on having one tank eat them all you'll be taking a couple of 175k swings as well.
• No-bot double attack. Even without a break stack you have 280k potential incoming damage so you need to use at least one cool-down here. If you have one break (likely since it was applied not 5 seconds earlier) you have 350k incoming. 2 stacks is 420k. Yikes!

Break lasts a full minute and you could get a feud phase 30 seconds after the last one. This means counting on the same person to accumulate breaks during a feud phase is sketchy to say the least. Doing so could mean eating a no-bot double attack with 3 breaks for a whopping 490k incoming damage. I understand some raids deal with this by rotating Ardent Defender and Guardian Spirit but we have neither a prot paladin nor a holy priest among our main specs. It is possible to heal two tanks up during feud and have one eat the breaks and the other eat the double attacks but this wastes a lot of healer mana if you get any avoids at all. One tank sucking up a break and popping a cooldown rates to save healer mana (the ending massacre wipes out any extra healing above and beyond what is needed).

The rotation we were working with last time and will probably keep going forward is to use a plate DPSer (ret paladin in our case) as the 'main tank'. He eats all the normal auto-attacks and therefore also eats all the non-feud breaks. 'Off-tank 1' (OT1) taunts in to eat all the normal double attacks until the first feud. These are all 0-break botted double attacks so there's no need to use any cooldowns of any kind. During the first feud he takes all 5 hits. This requires using at least a powerful cooldown for the double attack since it's 350k incoming damage and probably using a cooldown for the other hits too if possible. (As a blood Death Knight I can use bone armour for the entire phase for a 20% reduction and icebound fortitude for the double attack for an extra 50% reduction which actually lasts 18 seconds so will hit a couple normal swings too.) Then once the feud phase is over OT1 does nothing else since he has a 2-break. His job is completely replaced by a second tank filling the exact same role. This new tank (OT2) will taunt in for normal double attacks and will tank the second feud phase in its entirety. Note that even if the feud phases come as fast as they can OT2 will be filling the off-tank role for at least a minute and therefore OT1 will have dropped his break stack by the time the second feud has ended. This means he can easily step in and tank double attacks after the second feud phase, restarting the cycle.

The only potential problem here is OT1 may have to tank a feud phase 2 minutes after he last tanked one. Icebound fortitude has a 3 minute cooldown and therefore won't be up. I'll need to use vampiric blood, dancing rune weapon, and the hoping defense to survive. (Possibly get an external cooldown from someone else as well.) I should still have bones on the bone armor, so I should have 20% damage reduction and 15% more health. So I'll be at 222k max health and prevent 20% of the incoming 350k damage. So I'm dead by 58k. Oddly enough, if I got hit by the last melee attack I should have a large enough blood shield to live through this! Probably I should also pop my darkmoon faire trinket for an extra 10k health to make sure the blood shield is good enough...


You can also use the same rotation with a third tank instead of a plate DPSer but this doesn't seem to have a lot of merit. The main tank just screws around with a 4-break stack the whole fight so he's useless at stepping in and doing anything else. Possibly you could run it with no set main tank, and have the old feud tank become the new main tank. This would let you refresh the cooldowns on 3 different tanks for the feud phases which could be important, but would cost you a DPSer during the final burn phase. It does gain you a third speed bump in the burn phase, too, which may be worthwhile. I'll find out when we actually make it to phase 3.

I've also heard it done with 2 tanks. In this case you end up just holding on to the boss after a feud phase until the other tank's break stack drops, which often entails eating normal 3-break double attacks which is pretty sketchy. The guy who claimed to do it this way was the one with the Ardent Defender/Guardian Spirit rotation which makes me think it's doable with the right composition but that it's not worth looking into further for my purposes. We have a ret paladin and a DPS DK who can fill the 'main tank' role here without losing all that much damage in the process.

Mortal Strike in PvE

One of the people in our raid core this expansion is adamant that Blizzard designs 10-man fights to use at most 2 tanks and at most 3 healers. He gets really mad when we try to do things with 3 tanks or 4 healers because that's "not intended" and there has to be a normal way to get things done. I don't have any faith that Blizzard knows a thing about balancing 10-man raids (Sarth+3 anyone?) so especially right at the start of a new tier of content I think trying lots of things makes sense even if it's "not intended".

We pulled our first hard mode of the expansion last night and I made the comment that I didn't think 2 tanks was even remotely feasible due to the fight mechanics, which got another snippy comment about Blizzard's intentions. So, it's time to justify to myself with math why I don't think 2 tanks is feasible from a numbers point of view let alone a logistical point of view. The primary reason I feel this way is a healing taken debuff applied to one of the tanks, so we need to assess what this debuff essentially does.

If a tank isn't taking very much damage (Kurinaxx, 2nd boss in BM, or the dogs in ICC as examples) or the healers can trivially overheal them then a mortal strike debuff doesn't really do anything. It turns the abundance of overhealing into actual healing and reduces HPS numbers across the board without actually impacting how the fight works out. The healers just do their thing and everything is fine. The only real concern here is if the buff ever stacks to 100% healing reduction, because then the tank is just going to die.

If the damage is high enough that the tank is actually in danger of dying normally from spikes (Broodlord in BWL) or if healer mana or throughput is a real concern then things are different. In the spiking out case the tank's 'time to full' goes up which makes it more likely he gets exploded, but if you have enough extra healing you can just brute force this out.

In the mana or throughput case you can model the mortal strike debuff as proportionally increasing the tank's maximum health pool and incoming damage taken. (A lot like comparing a stamina stacking tank to a block stacking tank, actually.) For a while this doesn't hurt because the healers won't have any trouble keeping the tank alive, but eventually the amount of 'damage' they have to heal gets absurdly high.

The time for the tank to go from full to dead remains the same since both their maximum health and their incoming damage remain proportionally the same, but the amount of incoming damage just keeps going up and up until the healers either run out of mana or simply become unable to deal with the amount of damage. So if we know how much the healers can handle we can work out how high a mortal strike proportion we can live with. To know these things we have to know how much damage the fight is putting out and what the healers can deal with both short term and long term.

The fight I'm interested in is heroic Halfus in Bastion of Twilight. First let's look at the absurd case of a single tank and see where we become unsustainable, but to do that we need to take a look at how much damage is being done by each of the parts of the fight. I tanked each part of the fight that we released last night, so all numbers used here will be for me (a stamina tank, not a block tank).

Death Strike Redux

A month ago I went over the distribution of different Death Strike results for a BWD run. After making that post I downloaded a mod to try to better track when I should Death Strike and when I should _not_ Heart Strike (because it would use a death rune). I've also gotten better gear (base death strike value went from 12211 to 13396 in that month, so I've gotten about 10% more base health). How have things changed, if at all?

I used to get a lot of 'full big heals', with almost 52% of all Death Strikes across Argaloth, trash, and 5 BWD bosses. (Though only one pull of Atramedes.) This week I had only 37% 'full big heals'. Chimaeron was again the biggest contributor, this time going up to 76% of my Chimaeron Death Strikes being a 'full big heal'. And it's only that low because of the 99% healing penalty during the final phase and my inability to properly handle it. (I should probably just delete them straight up.) Chimaeron is a pretty ludicrous fight for Death Strike anyway, with it consistently healing in the 47-55k range.

Filtering out Chimaeron, I had 42% of my Death Strikes being a base heal of some kind a month ago. This time around it was almost 60% being a base heal. Sadly the percentage of 'full base heals' barely changed and the increase came from extra overhealing. I do get to keep the shield, apparently, so that's not abysmal. It does mean that stamina is actually better than I was previously giving it credit for, though, with so much of my Death Strikes being base heals.

If I filter out Argaloth and trash (who cares about those, anyway) things come a little closer together. The big change is I lost 10% from my 'full big heal' number and moved it to a 'partial base heal' number. I think this is going to be because our gear as a whole is just better. Healers are more willing to throw extra healing my way since they have better gear. I mitigate more damage, reducing the size of my heals. And I have more base health, turning some previous big heals into base heals. (A heal could be a 'big' heal if it was just a few points above base.)

The final thing I cared about, which I didn't go into last time but which I still have the raw data for, was frequency of Death Strikes. Back in the middle of December I looked at Death Strike frequency and found I was hitting the button every 12.5 seconds which is way below theoretical maximums. At the time I was never using Outbreak and was often spamming Heart Strike when it lit up, burning away death runes. This is bad, and I've been trying to get better at it. Have I succeeded?

Well, a month ago I was at 10.7s on Argaloth, 13.3s on Omnitron, 15.3s on Maloriak, 8.4s on Chimaeron, and 10.3s on Atramedes. This week I was at 9.2s on Argaloth, 10.2s on Omnitron, 8.9s on Maloriak, 8.7s on Chimaeron, 8.5s on Atramedes. On the surface this is _way_ better than before and may also help explain why I'm overhealing more with Death Strike and getting more base heals with it. I'm just using it more (and not timing it very well other than Chimaeron).

Digging a little deeper, I had to make some assumptions on both the Maloriak and Atramedes numbers. It's not really fair to ding me for not Death Strike during the air phases of Atramedes, for example, since I don't fly and can't hit him with it. So I cut out big gaps in the log that presumably were air phases, but if I was being really terrible it would have been cut out too. (I really don't think I went 40+ seconds without hitting Death Strike when he's on the ground, but it's possible.) Similarly with Maloriak, when there are no adds up I can't hit Death Strike. Unfortunately here I just tend to not hit Death Strike period. (I frequently have to pull adds in to me and use Icy Touch to facilitate that. If I'm using a melee strike on anything it's going to be Rune Strike, not Death Strike, at least until I get 6+ adds on me.) I think just flat out throwing the Maloriak numbers out is wise. However, this does beg the question of why I'm tanking Maloriak's adds at all. If incoming tank damage was at all relevant on the fight it really seems like the block tank should be on adds and I should be on the boss.

Chimaeron was a little worse this week than last month but that's actually explained by Pounda having aggro when we transitioned to phase 3 instead of me. I ran off to a corner and waited for him to die (and therefore didn't hit any buttons). Possibly this is wrong and I should be getting in my anemic beatdown while Pounda survives. I also did my best this week to not hit Death Strike excessively during feud. He knocks me back to 1 right after anyway, so it's pretty much wasted. I want to end feud with 2 frost, 2 unholy, and 0 blood runes active and I know I did a better job of that this week than last month.

One thing is clear, though. I am doing a lot better at hitting the button more often than every 12.5 seconds. My tanking stat valuation post assumed Death Strike every 12 seconds with 50% being base when in actuality it's more like every 9.3 seconds with 60% being base which substantially increases the value of stamina, mastery, and haste relative to armour, dodge, and parry.

But this is all for farm content. I'm in almost full 359 gear so comparing how I do against Maloriak's adds is a little silly. Unfortunately I don't actually tank the hard fights we're doing right now (Howling Blast is both fair and reasonable) so it's hard to judge where I actually stand. Hopefully we actually get to work on Nef or heroics soon so I can have some bigger numbers to crunch.

Glyph of Vampiric Blood

I've read in several places that this is actually a good tanking glyph. My gut feeling has been that I wouldn't use it even if it didn't occupy a glyph slot but I haven't actually looked at what it does.

Unglyphed Vampiric Blood increases healing taken by 25% and gives a last stand ability for 15% of my maximum health. These effects last for 10 seconds and the ability has a 60 second cooldown. Typically I use it if I unexpectedly dip low. Frequently I also hit Rune Tap at the same time. Sometimes I just use it as a 'tanking cooldown' on high damage aspects of a fight when Icebound Fortitude is on cooldown.

Glyphed Vampiric Blood increases healing taken by 40% and has no other effect. It lasts the same amount of time and has the same cooldown.

So, what does that actually do? If I chain it with Rune Tap then unglyphed I immediately get .15 of my max health plus 1.25*1.15*.1 of my max health for an immediate heal of .29375 of my max health. If I chain it with Rune Tap glyphed then I get 1.4*.1 of my max health for an immediate heal of .14 of my max health. So right off the top I'm worse off, but eventually I'll be better off. After X raw healing with Y raw max health I'll be at either 1.25*X+.29375*Y or 1.4*X+.14*Y. The equilibrium point is when X = 1.025*Y. Or, after I've been more than healed to full. So after I've been healed to full any extra healing comes at a discount for the healers (or if it's steady huge damage the extra healing percentage could theoretically keep me standing).

Without rune tap the math is even simpler. 1.25*X + .15*Y compared to 1.4*X. This reaches equilibrium when I've been healed for my max health.

No matter why I'm hitting the button, if I end up at max health I'm going to be satisfied. Unglyphed is strictly superior until I get that much healing poured into me. Glyphed could only makes sense if I never get topped up to full but need healing for way more than my max health in 10 seconds and a 25% boost to healing isn't good enough. (Or this happens every minute and the healers barely run out of mana?) I just can't see it ever being useful.

I feel vindicated.

Death Strike Base Hits

Sthenno posted a comment asking about how often Death Strike lands for just the base heal. I assumed 50% in my analysis on how good stamina and mastery were but that was mostly just a guess. I decided to parse through our last raid and break it down by fight to see how close that guess was. (It's important to do it by fight since Chimaeron was one of the fights we did that night and it is certainly not typical.)

Fight	Overheal Base Heal	Partial Base Heal	Full Base Heal	Overheal Big Heal	Partial Big Heal	Full Big Heal	Total
Argaloth	4	1	4	0	0	6	15
Trash	9	3	15	6	9	45	87
Omnitron	13	1	11	3	8	31	67
Maloriak	4	1	12	0	0	4	21
Chimaeron	7	0	15	1	2	57	82
Atramedes	1	1	2	0	1	0	5
Total	38	7	59	10	20	143	277

Fight	Overheal Base Heal	Partial Base Heal	Full Base Heal	Overheal Big Heal	Partial Big Heal	Full Big Heal
Argaloth	27%	7%	27%	0%	0%	40%
Trash	10%	3%	17%	7%	10%	52%
Omnitron	19%	1%	16%	4%	12%	46%
Maloriak	19%	5%	57%	0%	0%	19%
Chimaeron	9%	0%	18%	1%	2%	70%
Atramedes	20%	20%	40%	0%	20%	0%
Total	14%	3%	21%	4%	7%	52%

There are 6 possible outcomes here. The first is terrible and likely indicates I hit the button at full without having taken much damage in the last 5 seconds. The second is semi-reasonable. It's a base heal with some overheal in it, but at least it wasn't a fully wasted button. It also doesn't happen much at all. The third category is very reasonable. I get a full base heal and shield out of it and it's probably better to get 25k now when I need the healing than to wait and risk death or wasting healer mana in the hopes of getting more. The 4th is a little weird and rarely happened except on trash. It indicates I'm taking a real beating but got healed to full by other sources. This shows bored healers or excessively hard hitting trash than anything on my end I think. The 5th is a lot like the 4th except I snuck in for some healing. The last, and thankfully biggest, category is when I snag all of a large heal. Chimaeron skews these numbers a little (and would be worse if not for a lot of weak Death Strikes during phase 3) but you can argue Maloriak skews the numbers in the other direction.

I find it interesting that trash provides the biggest non-Chimaeron Death Strikes and even then is very close. I guess trash just hits really hard compared to bosses who do more raid damage. Base heals actually only make up 40% of all my heals, and even that is stretching it since the overheal ones don't get any extra benefit from more stamina and the full overheals don't get anything from mastery either. Really it's more like a quarter of relevant Death Strikes are for the base amount. I think this is because my first look into things was on Argaloth and has skewed the way I look at things a little. Real bosses hit way harder than Argaloth. In the context of my last post this makes stamina worse but it makes mastery better.

All this makes me think I need to get or build a rune mod. I saw reference to one on EJ that showed your current Death Strike heal that I may download and check out.

Detailed Tanking Stats

Once upon a time the only tanking stat that really matter was maximum health. Sure, armor was good and you wouldn't say no to avoidance and threat stats but when given a choice it was all stamina all the time. If you had a socket to stick a gem into you put stamina in there, no questions asked. Imagine my surprise then when I wanted to get a stamina gem cut yesterday and nobody had the pattern. Apparently the 'mana matters' world of Cataclysm has changed things enough that everyone wants other stats instead. I got someone to buy the pattern for me and cut my stamina gem regardless because I'm still a fan. But the question is, should I be a fan? My mastery scales with stamina and mastery is my favourite rating so it seems like if any tank wants stamina it should be me. But, should I like stamina?

Also, I recently put on the Darkmoon Faire tanking trinket, replacing my old normal Putricide armour trinket. Now, that trinket has more armour than the new round of armour trinkets does, so it's entirely possible it's just better than current trinkets. The question here then is how good is armour relative to stamina and dodge?

Well, as a tank, what am I trying to accomplish with my gear? There are 3 different things I could be trying to accomplish:

• Inflict more damage to the enemies, increasing my threat and killing them faster.
• Save healer mana.
• Stay alive in dangerous situation.

The first option has generally been ignored in all my time tanking. I've never really had a problem holding aggro assuming the DPS let the mobs get to me (and if they don't then no amount of strength on my gear will matter) and that has held true so far in Cataclysm. If I get to stick a Rune Strike into a mob I get to keep it. If I don't then I have troubles. The solution here isn't to gear more threat stats, it's to just hit Rune Strike. As far as damaging the boss goes I do what I can for sure (I specced unholy with gargoyle and all the pet talents last expansion to do more damage) but it hasn't seemed critical to sac other stats for damage at this point.

The second option was relevant WAY back in the MC days (I geared avoid back then and stacked defense to try to get uncrittable back before anyone else did and I remember some healers were able to keep me up by changing how they healed and others just threw all their mana away) but hasn't been relevant since. The claim now is it's relevant again. I'm honestly not convinced. Healers certainly complain about mana more now than they used to and in early heroics I spent most of my time at medium to low health. But now, in raids? I'm full most of the time and if I'm not full I feel like I'm in real danger of dying. In heroics I used to hit cooldowns to try to save healer mana because I didn't feel like I was going to get spiked out. In raids I definitely feel like there are lots of spots where I could die and that I need to save my cooldowns just to live. Healer mana may matter a lot more in terms of how they handle raid damage and such but it feels like as a tank I just get spammed up reasonably often.

The third option I like to quantify in terms of what happens on the way from full to dead. Last expansion in particular I likened my health to a trinary system. Either I was at full life, or I was almost dead, or I was dead. Some people took this to the extreme and cared solely about "Effective Health" which took armor and health into account and completely ignored avoidance entirely. I've been a bigger proponent of "Tank Points" which take a long term look at how much damage you expect to have to take in order to be killed. A dodged attack absorbs the full amount with TP and is worthless in EH. The reality is probably somewhere between the two extremes and I tried to account for that in TBC with my own TPish program by adding in a parameter for spell damage that couldn't be avoided with dodge or armour and just cared about health. (Resists too, if the fight had enough magic damage.)


Finding the balance between those three things is non-trivial. I've tended towards just caring about the third weighting and assuming everything will work out fine with the other two. I think that model was clearly right in the last expansion and that Blizzard is claiming to be trying to change things this time. I'm not convinced they've succeeded but I can certainly find a value for every stat according to each of the three valuation systems to assign a relative ordering based on what I seem to be falling behind on.

The incremental value of each stat depends on my current stats. This is true because some stats interact well with each other and because some stats provide diminishing returns. Some stats have caps; getting more hit than the cap is useless for any of the three options. I will be comparing the value of stats according to how much a rare gem of that type would grant. For armour I will work out the equivalent amount based on the 346 trinkets.

Stamina

Increases my maximum health which increases my time to live between full and dead. Increases the amount healed by my base Death Strike which generates threat from healing, which puts up a shield which keeps me alive longer, and which saves healer mana by healing myself and preventing damage with the shield. It also increases the amount I get healed by Rune Tap which has similar implications for threat, mana, and survivability. I believe it also increases the base health of my blood worms which increases the amount they heal which could save the healers some mana. Increasing maximum health also increases attack power from Vengeance which increases threat. 

60 stamina is worth 756 health. Assume half of my Death Strikes would benefit from a bigger base and that I use Death Strike every 12 seconds. Then every 24 seconds I gain 53 health and a shield for 59, which is about 4.667 healing per second and 2.208 threat per second. Say I Rune Tap once a minute, then it also adds an extra 7.56 healing and threat per second. Blood worms seem to get about 25% of my extra hp as hp themselves and heal for 5% of their hp per stack. They explode at around 7.25 stacks every 15 seconds, so this adds an AE heal of 4.568 healing per second per target. Vengeance caps at 10% of my max health, so assuming I maintain a full Vengeance stack (requires taking 18k/s incoming damage which is not a given) I'd also gain 75 AP. Working out what that is worth is more effort than I want to put in, so I turned to BloodSim and ran a sim with about my stats and then again with some extra AP. It claims 1 AP is 3 TPS for me, so the extra 75 AP would be 225 threat per second.

1. 235 TPS, ~100 DPS
2. Assuming worms hits 2 people and none of the healing I gain is ever wasted, 21 HPS.
3. 12 ADPS, 756 max hp.

Armour

Flat reduction of all incoming physical damage that isn't avoided in some other way. By comparing ilvl 346 trinkets it looks like you now get 2.664 armour per stamina in stat points on an item. So, to fit my comparison, I need to account for 213 armour. My runeforge weapon enchant boosts this armour, so 222 is the real compare number. Compared to my current armour this will reduce all incoming physical damage by 0.333%. Assume I'm getting punched for 34k every 2 seconds and I'm flat out avoiding 31% of incoming attacks. As such, it would prevent 39 damage per second. Armour also adds attack power for DKs, so I'd gain 7.1 AP from the armour for about 21 TPS.

1. 21 TPS, ~10 DPS
2. 39 HPS
3. 39 ADPS

Dodge Rating

Spiky reduction of incoming physical damage. With my current dodge rating and agility levels I'd gain .1813% dodge from 40 dodge rating. Again assuming an incoming swing of 34k every 2 seconds this would prevent 31 damage per second. 

1. No effect
2. 31 HPS
3. 31 ADPS

Parry Rating

Spiky reduction of incoming physical damage. With my current parry rating I'd gain .1742% parry from 40 parry rating. Again assuming an incoming swing of 34k every 2 seconds this would prevent 30 damage per second. 

1. No effect
2. 30 HPS
3. 30 ADPS

Mastery Rating

Makes my Blood Shield better. 40 mastery rating is .2231 mastery, which adds 1.7849% of my Death Strike heal into the Blood Shield. Assume I land a Death Strike every 12 seconds and that half of them are for base (same assumption as for Stamina above) and we'll give twice base for the other half. I believe I'm around 180k buffed hp right now, so the base Death Strike is 12600 and double is 25200. So 40 mastery gives me a shield of 337 every 12 seconds or 28 damage prevented per second. 

1. No effect
2. 28 HPS
3. 28 ADPS

Haste Rating

Improves rune regen rate which increases amount healed by Death Strike. It also increases my threat in pretty much all ways since it increases my melee swing timer and lets me pump through the same proportion of extra everything. I guess it doesn't improve my dots or reduce the cooldown on rune tap so it's not quite a straight proportional improvement but it should be close enough. 40 haste rating would add on an extra .3124% haste to my existing 20.39% haste. This would bring my rune cooldown from every 8.3063 seconds to every 8.2848 seconds. This is a .2595% increase to everything. A quick look at the Omnotron encounter shows I have about 7k DPS right now, so a .2595% increase to that is an extra 18DPS and around 36 TPS. As well that would increase my Death Strike healing/shield from the current 3323 HPS by the same ratio, or a gain of 8.6 HPS. This would help the threat as well by just the heal, or an extra 4 TPS.

1. 40 TPS, 18 DPS
2. 8.6 HPS
3. 8.6 ADPS

Hit Rating

Makes my interrupting and debuffing more consistent on top of increasing threat. Since runes aren't spent if the ability misses and I'm not GCD capped it's hard to work out the actual gain from hit rating. Currently on a boss I miss 4.98% of the time with melee attacks and 13.46% of the time with spells. 40 hit rating improves the melee hit chance by .33% and the spell hit by .39%. These are bigger numbers than the haste ones so theoretically if my resources were spent hit would be better than haste for everything. But they aren't. Missing a death strike is bad if I get pushed from a big death strike to a base death strike from the delay (or if I die from the delay) but really hit just isn't great. I do want to cap it out if possible to make sure my interrupts hit, though.

1. Unclear
2. Unclear
3. Unclear

Expertise Rating

Right now I'm exactly at the point where dodges are gone. 40 expertise rating would decrease dodge/parry each by .33% (same as melee hit) and doesn't help spells at all. So up to the dodge cap it's twice as good on melee and worthless on spells as hit it. After the dodge cap it's just worse than hit. And it isn't needed for interrupting spells or applying debuffs, so it's not very good at all. I wanted to get up to the cap to help  Death Strikes be more consistent, and I'm there, so I really don't think I want to work on removing more parries.

1. Unclear
2. Unclear
3. Unclear

Crit Rating

Increases threat and has no impact on surviving at all. (Death Strike heals can't crit.) I appear to crit right now on 2% of my abilities (7% on some of the abilities that are glyphed to crit more). 40 crit rating would give me an extra .2231% crit. Averaging things out a bit and assuming about 4% of my stuff crits now I'd be going from 1.04 to 1.042231 or an increase of .2145%. This would be about 15 DPS and 30 TPS.

1. 30 TPS, 15 DPS
2. No effect
3. No effect

Agility

Part dodge rating, part crit rating. 40 agility gets improved by mark, so it's really 42 agility. 1 agility is worth .4103 dodge rating (.4308 post mark) and .7357 crit rating (.7724 post mark). 

1. 23 TPS, 12 DPS
2. 13 HPS
3. 13 ADPS

Strength

25% of strength goes to parry rating. Also, strength is worth 2 AP each. Strength gets buffed by mark and Abomination's Might so 40 strength is really 42.84.

1. 257 TPS, 129 DPS
2. 8 HPS
3. 8 ADPS

Every fight is different, of course, and the relative ranking of mastery to dodge depends a lot on the fight. One with spiky spell damage and reasonable melee damage favours mastery heavily. One with brutal melee swings (like Chimaeron) favours dodge rating with mastery being completely useless. I can also get better with my Death Strike timings which makes mastery, stamina, and haste better compared to armour and dodge. Stamina is oddly my second best threat stat (makes me wonder about the Vengeance capping assumption) and is a pretty good avoid stat too, plus it adds to max hp. I definitely feel like at the present time I should keep stacking stamina.

But what about Unidentified Organ? How good is 1890 armour and 240 stamina compared to 193 dodge, 128 mastery, and a cooldown use or 482 stamina and a cooldown use?

Organ - 1126 TPS, 489 DPS, 430 HPS, 394 ADPS, 3024 max hp

Darkmoon - 239 HPS, 239 ADPS, last stand use

Vial - 1887 TPS, 803 DPS, 169 HPS, 96 ADPS, 6073 max hp, dodge use

It feels like I should probably use Vial and Organ, sadly. If I had a heroic Organ it would be even better. 

Tank Rating Follow-Ups

Over at OGT we've had two raid nights now with Argaloth and Magmaw downed. My automated logging hasn't worked properly yet so I've only had partial data from both raids but I do have some numbers to look at now in terms of the different ratings. (I ended up having to DPS Magmaw, so tanking data there is a little suspect but at least I was topping the meters in ungemmed/unenchanted leveling greens.)

To start with I reforged everything I had into mastery as I suggested I would. I now want to look into the impact that mastery had and what likely would have happened with parry or dodge in their place. I'm also going to take a look at haste since if stacking mastery to improve Death Strike is good then maybe stacking haste to get more Death Strikes in is good too.

One thing to note about Blood Shield that I wasn't realizing until recently is it only absorbs physical damage and does nothing to spells. I wonder why that is, maybe a pvp nerf? Also, the log parser we use (World of Logs) fails to accurately reflect Blood Shield at all. It seems to be assigning all the absorption from it to Divine Aegis which really boosts the discipline priest's numbers, but I think I can still get worthwhile data out of it. Finally, overheal doesn't count for squat so pounding a Death Strike out when I'm at full wastes the healing and the shield.

The kill fight lasted almost 5 minutes. In that time I used Death Strike 24 times, or once every 12.5 seconds. Each Death Strike averaged healing for 10775.  Each point of mastery rating increases the resulting shield by .000349162 per healing, so on that fight a point of mastery rating was worth 3.76222 healing every 12.5 seconds.

The boss has a bunch of unavoidable damage floating around and a melee swing that can be dodged/parried. He attacked me 62 times total with his melee swing, or once every 4.83 seconds. When he hit the swing averaged 18000 damage. Ignoring diminishing returns for now one point of dodge rating prevents .000056497 of the damage. One parry rating was therefore worth 1.01695 healing every 4.83 seconds. Normalizing for the same time period as Death Strike, it was worth 2.63186 healing every 12.5 seconds. Clearly this is worse for this specific fight since there is diminishing returns on top of that.

What about haste? It's been very difficult to find a formula for this, but I believe my runes cooldown every 10/(1.2*(1+hasterating/12800)) seconds. With no haste rating they should refresh every 8.33 seconds. Assuming a linear improvement and 12.5 seconds between Death Strikes then one point of haste rating would add on an extra .00000625 Death Strikes every second. With my current mastery adding on about 93% of the heal as a shield this is adding 10775*1.93 healing per Death Strike, for a total of .12997 healing every second. This is 1.62467 healing every 12.5 seconds.

Haste is clearly bad compared to mastery but it's not nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be. It also has a threat component to it which the avoidance stats don't have which isn't relevant for me right now but could be in the future. I do find it amusing that str/sta/mastery/haste could be good tanking gear, though. The plate DPSers will love me!

I also feel like my Death Strike frequency isn't often enough and I need to work on ways to make it better. I'm also not sure it's fair to compare dodge/parry on a fight where the boss only spends half his time swinging at me and his dangerous move isn't a melee swing at all. Mastery is certainly better on this specific fight for sure but I can believe it will end up worse on a lot of fights. Time will tell as we actually get into a more diverse set of encounters.

Blood Worms

I haven't actually built a tanking spec yet for level 85. I had a rough one at level 80 and then got tapped to tank some dungeons at level 84. I had 4 talent points to spend at that point and figured I'd just throw them anyplace and go rather than think about it. Those places were Scent of Blood for more Rune Strikes and Blood Parasite because pets are cool. I figure I'll build a real spec soon, but part of that is figuring out what the different talents actually do. What are these blood worms and what are they doing? I went to the log of our first raid and went into the section for the Argaloth kill. This isn't a perfect fight to work things out on but it's the best I've got.

It seems I spawn a blood worm every 15 seconds or so when I'm actually fighting. 12 of the 13 blood worms actually killed themselves to pop a heal and the 13th was alive when the fight ended. When a worm exploded it healed everyone nearby for 1666 times the number of buff stacks it had. On average it had 7.25 stacks on explosion, so it was healing over 12k to everyone nearby on average. A 12k AE heal every 15 seconds feels good. I try to hit rune tap on cooldown when anyone in my party is damaged and it's only a 6k heal every 30 seconds.

Now, rune tap has the advantage of being on demand, no range restrictions, and healing me personally for more like 16k when I hit it so I like it more but it seems in a world where healers are willing to leave people at not-full the blood worms will pump out an awful lot of extra healing to those nearby.

Which is the main problem with bloodworms. Who exactly is 'nearby'? On Argaloth the answer was hardly ever me. Our rogue and the hunter pet were nearby almost every time. Sometimes it also hit people in the other tank group. (Especially Byung for some reason... I guess maybe he was standing on the melee side of the other group? Elemental shamen are melee units, after all...) Overall for the fight they only did 2.28% but that's completely mana free healing and feels ok.

On top of that they do damage as well. Unfortunately they don't do very much of it. They were only 0.28% of our damage on the fight. They swung for only about 630 damage a swing and tend to die after 7 or so swings. It's not nothing, but it's not exactly something either.

If there were fights where the heal actually hit me as the tank I think they'd be very solid. Unfortunately we also threw some attempts at the Conclave of Wind encounter and bloodworms healed me for 84 across the entire night. They actually did a substantial amount of healing on our ret paladin who was fighting my mob, doing 105k healing or 16.6% of the total healing he took over those attempts.

I think they probably need a design change to be a reasonable option. They either need a much larger radius so they'll heal the tank no matter how big the boss is, or they need to melee from the front without providing parry haste, or they need to make the heal always hit the DK who made them along with the people in melee range. They're just not consistent enough to build a positional strategy around and if they aren't healing a few people or a tank they're not powerful enough to justify 2 talent points. I'm not sure what I could take that's better though. 2% spell hit probably.

Initial Tanking Rating Thoughts

Today we're going to be attempting our first raid of the new expansion and as such this marks the first time I've really thought about tanking stats in a few months. I should head out and reforge my gear, but I don't know what to reforge to! I intend to really model this stuff out in the future and getting data from an initial raid will certainly help that, but for now I want to just do some napkin math and get something started. So I need to get a rough idea of what the different stats do. I did a look at some random World of Logs recap and found a boss swinging for about 20k. I'm going to assume he swings every 2 seconds. I also assume I hit Death Strike every 8 seconds and maintain debuffs with free runes from Runic Empowerment. I also seem to not have threat issues at all on anything I pump Rune Strikes into, and it can't be dodged or parried. So...

• Expertise Rating - absolute garbage
• Hit Rating - helps keep debuffs up in a timely manner, helps Rune Strike hit, still pretty bad
• Haste Rating - lets me Death Strike more often I guess. I will do more math on it for sure, but my gut instinct is it's garbage
• Parry Rating - 1% parry negates 100 damage every second in the long term. It takes 177 parry rating to get 1% parry, before diminishing returns
• Dodge Rating - 1% dodge negates 100 damage every second in the long term. It takes 177 dodge rating to get 1% dodge, before diminishing returns
• Mastery Rating - 1 mastery makes Death Strike put up an extra shield for 6.25% of the amount it healed for. With 140k max health it will heal for a minimum of 14k, so 1 mastery prevents 109 damage per second in the long term. It takes 179 mastery rating to get 1 mastery with no diminishing returns

If the boss hits harder or faster then parry/dodge get better. As I get more health or as I get more parry/dodge then mastery gets better. If the boss does a lot of non-avoidable attacks like magic then parry/dodge get worse. If the boss hits hard enough for Death Strike to heal for more than 10% max hp then mastery gets better.

All told it looks like mastery is probably the best and is what I'm going to reforge into for now. We'll see how things stand after tonight, though!