I am confused why even using the best in slot optimizer it is giving me so much crit. Most people would go to the fact its not that good for actual TMI ratings or in general tank survivability as with dodge it is a mechanic that can be finicky and not always applicable to the most damage types. Could it be due to diminishing returns?
If you post a snapshot we can take a look at your particular case – the optimizer gives a totally custom solution for each combination of character and settings, so it’s hard to comment without seeing it. Instructions on how to do that in this post:
Without seeing the specifics: none of the secondary stats are that much stronger than the others from a pure survival point of view for Brewmasters. Shifting most of your crit to another secondary isn’t all of a sudden going to make you way tougher. You probably won’t notice much of a difference. The play might feel a little different if you e.g. move it all to haste, but you won’t feel much weaker from a toughness perspective.
That said, crit/vers are generally better offensive stats. So there’s not much downside to favoring those two stats in all situations.
Here is the pawn string that it seems your gear sim gives:
( Pawn: v1: “Vashtv - Guardian”: Class=Druid, Spec=Guardian, Armor=15.85, Agility=13.72, Stamina=5.28, MaxDamage=2.56, MinDamage=2.56, Versatility=10.21, MasteryRating=9.82, CritRating=7.59, HasteRating=3.60, Leech=7.21, Avoidance=2.40, Indestructible=0.01, MovementSpeed=0.01 )
This is a great example of the gear recommendations that it gives for what I am assuming all TUF since its the setting I’m using.
I’m am experimenting with other things in game right now. My question is why is crit so heavily recommended when its known to be one of the MOST unreliable stats for tanking? And I am a guardian druid. But most tanks have some dodge/parry aspect held on crit as I have seen with my other tanks and it often recommends crit to the TUF setting. It makes sense that crit haste is recommended for the damage version of your gear optimizer. But not so much for the TUF option. Or at least I would assume, TUF would want to give reliable damage intake?
Can you post the snapshot for this case? (instructions in the last post from yellowfive)
We need to be able to see all your settings to look at this in detail
Also sorry… not sure why I read that as Brewmaster instead of Guardian when I replied!
So hopefully they uploaded in the order I put them in. It looks that way here where they are linked. But if I manipulate the fight settings some of it gives outcomes that more accurately represent what I was discussing earlier. And the final uploaded image is the default settings. And the raid and m+ settings are extremely similar outcomes at default. Now I’ve joined some theorycrafting discords and things and they’ve talked about stat weights and why. And it seems like the sim is heavily leaning onto dodge in the guardian druid’s case for defenses. Which is what I was talking about, and they uploaded correctly cool. And if a live chat of some kind would be better just lmk I didn’t see that option but if it would help I can reach out however. And I’ve started playing with the tank options a lot more as well along side the custom fight options and its showing results I’d expect to see.
I’m glad you are making use of the customization options - that is what they are there for! We generally argue that there isn’t truly one way of gearing that you need to adhere to, especially for tanks and healers, who do not have a great metric to measure performance.
To make the snapshot we are asking for, use the help link:
And then use the button on the pop-up:
Post the ID that is generated:
So off the top of my head without actually loading your specific settings, just talking about Guardian druids in general:
As was mentions above, there is a lot more room for play with tanks. Our model might favor one stat a little bit higher than another model – there are a lot of assumptions. As for the value of crit for all-defense on a Guardian, you can also play around with the damage breakdown under tank options. If you put a lot less emphasis on physical damage, the value of dodge will go down quite a bit.
Dodge on tanks has been a topic of discussion for a long time. Yes, it is inherently more random which a lot of people don’t like. It was a bigger issue way back in older versions of the game where a boss’s melee attacks could one-shot tanks on hard fights. Thus things like TMI came about to emphasize anything that would smooth out these extreme spikes.
Nowadays it isn’t nearly as bad as it was (though things can certainly get scary at times). The main difference is a lot more active mitigation and cooldowns for tanks. These are far more important to smoothing damage than which secondary stats you have.
Crit is of similar value to the other secondaries for defense for a Guardian if you are taking mostly avoidable damage (which is the case on a lot of boss fights and M+ packs). That said… I understand that it is unpopular, so I’m fine adjusting it a bit in our next update – basically building in a slight “penalty” for dodge. There are some scenarios (like slow, hard-hitting enemies) where it averages out just fine compared to other stats, but in practice can feel unreliable.
But all that aside, the main difference you’ll see on our site for Guardians is low haste in an all-defense build. Most other sources really like haste, even though it doesn’t work out to be as strong as mastery or versatility (or even crit) for toughness. People just like the feel of a faster play style regardless of whether another build would be tougher.
There’s also the issue of tank damage. The tank theorycraft community heavily favors damage for tanks for many reasons. It’s more fun to do some damage. It’s the only thing that you can measure well on a meter or combat log. It helps in hard M+. So there is some implicit bias towards tank stats that are pretty good for toughness, but also good for damage. The two best damage stats for a Guardian are crit and haste. So because haste is a good damage stat, and it feels nice, therefore it is recommended as the best stat overall.
Our optimizer lets you do an all-defense strategy, which is something you won’t find anywhere else. Thus it will have different results… like low haste, higher crit than you would expect on physical-heavy fights, etc. If you move that slider closer to the DPS side you’ll see something much more similar to other sources because that is effectively what they are doing.
I don’t mind some dodge/parry (since usually tanks use crit for one of those) being built in. As in pack pulls it can be very useful. But there’s so much magic damage as well such as swells in THOT that it can feel extremely poor. I miss your TUF rating and all the customizations and information that came from it I know it may be unable to continue. But with the way it is designed especially many of the dungeon mechanics do magic dmg or hit very hard phys. And it is dodgeable but when it hits with a somewhat heavily weighted dodge build it hurts. So a weight reduction on it in a defense focus build could help it feel more reliable. If crit is actually better than haste for survivability that’s fine but when I was in simc it sometimes came out that haste could be better and more reliable.
If you find yourself worrying more about magic damage when it comes to toughness, definitely adjust the damage breakdown in the tank options:
That said… even if it feels like there’s a lot of magic damage in a fight… when you look at logs, it’s still mostly physical. But that’s not to say the physical part is the “hardest” part of the fight, so it’s fine to optimize for the parts of the fight where magic damage dominates.
One advantage of the newer optimizer we starting using in Dragonflight is that we can offer this higher level of customization. The tank simulator was cool and I miss it too… but simulation is just too slow to allow people to make these kinds of customizations, rank any talent combination, etc.
Ive tried using that but it still was weighing crit heavily so I just started simming a bit using simc.
As we said in previous posts, it’s very hard to say what’s going on without seeing your specific setup – it could also be influenced by what you have available.
When I optimize using generic characters I’m not seeing it go crazy with crit, it’s much heavier in mastery and versatility for toughness. Then it shifts to higher crit/haste the further you go towards DPS.