25 March 2011

Why I Stack Mastery.

I've gotten a lot of questions from friends, guildies, even total strangers in game asking me why I stack mastery to the detriment of anything else. The most common points of confusion originate in either a Wrath mentality, where stamina was stacked and nothing else, or from a belief that parry and dodge are better because they allow no damage to come through, rather than merely a 30%-60% reduction like block does.

Let me start by stating what a warrior's mastery does. Critical Block is the name of our mastery, and if you mouse over the link, you'll see that it increases our block. Back in Wrath, block was a pretty miserable stat. There were two ratings one had to increase, block rating, and block value. The former would increase the chance to block, the latter, the amount blocked. Needless to say, to get any sort of interesting value from the stat, one had to stack quite a bit of both, and while effective against trash, really didn't do much against bosses. Block for warriors today is much more interesting. It blocks a solid 30% of the incoming attack, and has a chance to critically block for 60%.

Dodge and Parry

So the question remains, why stack mastery over any other stat? I can explain this simply for each individual stat, and explain why mastery trumps anything else easily. First, consider dodge and parry. Their main advantage over other stats is the fact that if you dodge or parry an attack, you simply get no damage. They used to be somewhat different stats, but these days they're pretty much exactly the same. In fact, that's why they are no good to stack anymore. They're exactly the same, and start to be affected by diminishing returns at the exact same rate. Diminishing returns is simply the tendency of a stat to lower in value the more of it you have. For parry and dodge, it starts almost immediately. This means attempting to stack them, even evenly to get the most out of them, will only yield very small returns. It's like trying to swim upstream, we're not really meant to do it. The advantage mastery has over these two stats is that it suffers from zero diminishing returns. You can stack mastery until your eyes bleed and never start to suffer in stat gain. This is important because the more you increase at least one of these three stats, the more it pushes normal hits off the hit table.

What is the hit table? Simply put, the boss has 102.4% chance to hit you with an attack. It rolls an invisible die and checks it against your dodge, parry, block, natural miss chance, or hit. Critical hits are taken off the table due to the talent Bastion of Defense, which every tank should have. So, the higher your mitigation and avoidance stats are, the better your chances of not being hit by a "hit" attack are. That is to say, a full unmitigated punch to the face. Once your dodge + parry + block + 5 = 102.4% or higher, you are officially "unhittable". Please don't take this to mean you cannot be hit, merely you have pushed the "hit" attack off the attack table of the boss. That 5 by the way indicates any mob's chance to naturally miss you. Also, each skull level mob is considered three levels above you, and that gives them a +0.8% chance to hit you for each level, adding up to 2.4%, which is why it's not an even 100%.

So that alone explains why mastery far outweighs lesser stats like dodge or parry, it's lack of diminishing returns allow you to add up your totals much faster, and hopefully get them into the seventies or eighties. Combine this with Shield Block and you are over unhittable status, and any excess becomes critical block, allowing you to block for 60% reduced damage. Quite a powerful stat!

Stamina

The next argument that people make is that stamina is still better than mastery, because it allows you to soak up more damage. There are many very simple problems with this logic that are immediately apparent. First of all, stamina is like a bucket that has a hole in it. There is a hypothetical maximum, but one is usually being hit enough that this maximum doesn't really ever get reached. To get your hit points filled up, someone has to heal you. Constantly. The more hit points you have, the more they have to dump their own bucket's water (their mana pool) into yours. Before long, their bucket is dry, and you can only watch the remainder of your water slowly trickle away until you're dead. Healers cannot spam heal and keep tanks topped off through a hundred seventy thousand hit points. Healers who are quitting the game and spending all their time on the forums complaining about how healing isn't fun are usually healing incorrectly, and have tanks who gear incorrectly. Wrath was about healing people through massive damage, Cataclysm is about avoiding that damage in the first place.

Your job is to make the healer's life easier in any way you can. Having a massive health pool is the opposite of that. The stats one sacrifices (like mastery) to gem for more stamina, are not worth the added damage one takes. Which brings up another point. The bosses in Cataclysm don't hurt as hard as Wrath's when done properly. Their normal auto attacks are not in danger of killing you in one shot. So why do you need massive health pools? That was the very reason we stacked stamina in Wrath, was to avoid the insane damage the bosses would deal in a single attack. Then the healers would pop us back up with a massive heal that cost nothing, and we'd be back at it. It's not like that anymore. Damage tends to be a lot more manageable now, and high stamina is not as important as reducing the damage that comes in. Mastery does this better than any other stat. It cuts the damage down in sizable chunks and makes the healers sweat a lot less. They can use their slower heals and not worry I will go down before it goes off.

The last reason I want to see stamina stacking go away is to avoid people's false idea that the tank with the most health is better geared. This is not the case. Unbuffed I have less health than a good number of lesser geared tanks in my guild who stack stamina. But healers don't like to heal them, because they have no mitigation and they end up using their entire mana pools keeping them up. If nothing else, avoid stamina stacking for your healer's sake.

Gemming and Reforging

Now that we've established that mastery is the best stat by quite a lot, the question remains how to gear for it. Enchanting is something I rarely talk about as there is usually one accepted "best" enchant per slot, so that leaves gemming and reforging.

Simply, I gem for pure mastery. I use Fractured Amberjewel and nothing else. I see a lot of tanks either avoiding it as a whole, or using whatever half/half mastery gems they can to get the socket bonus. I can tell you flat out that socket bonuses are rarely if ever worth it. You often end up sacrificing 20 mastery for 30 stamina and 10 dodge, or something equally as poor a trade. If the bonus is 20 mastery or more, then it might be worth it, but so far I haven't seen any bonuses that good.

Reforging is a generally simple process for the warrior tank, and where we actually can get the most out of our stats if we really tweak them. There are two simple rules we follow:

1) If it doesn't have mastery, get mastery. (Hit or expertise are ideal stats to trade)

2) If it does have mastery, reforge to keep your dodge and parry ratings as equal as possible.

That's it. The reason we keep the two equal is because they suffer diminishing returns at the same rate, so you get more bang for your buck if neither is higher than the other. Keep in mind I said dodge and parry rating which means you'll have to mouse over their percentages to see the numbers. Their actual percentages might vary by as much as 1% or so.

Developer's Intentions

The final reason to stack mastery is because it fits the thematic intention of the developers. This is usually a safe stance to take, as usually remaining true to the class will best results. It is only people who try to hack the system or use something beyond the intention of Blizzard that get nerfed eventually and end up crying about it. Starting out on the right foot will keep you honest and allow you to really see what makes the warrior such a great class. Simply looking at the Protection talent tree reveals why mastery is meant to be the best stat. Shield Specialization is proof on its own. It provides a good deal of rage every time you block. The more you block, the more rage you'll accrue, the more threat you'll deal. If anything, this talent makes the stat almost a threat stat. Hold the Line is a talent people point to when justifying why they are stacking parry, but the fact of the matter is, adding 10% to a stat you're not stacking doesn't really do much. The talent, if anything is meant to add even more block when you do parry, not be an excuse to only parry.

I hope this has efficiently explained my reasoning behind stacking mastery to the detriment of everything else. I've been experimenting with it for several weeks now and have had great success. Healers who previously would end up out of mana after a trash pull are now able to keep up with me as I chain pull an instance. It's really quite an effective gearing strategy, and I highly recommend it for your own warrior. Thanks for reading!

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