Protection Warrior Mastery in The War Within

In almost all cases, our mathematical models produce similar results to advice you will find elsewhere on the internet – as you would expect since we are all playing the same game!

Protection warrior mastery is an exception though… no matter how we run the numbers, it always comes out as a significantly better stat than other sources say.

Is there an error in our calculations? Are there variables being taken into account by others that a calculation can’t capture?

Usually if we go over our code and calculations enough times, compare it to logs, and so on… we can converge on a similar result to everyone else. It’s a bit frustrating that we can’t in this case, so we’re looking for some feedback to try and figure out what is causing the difference.

General Stat Priority

To start, let’s summarize the general position on mastery (and other stats) that you’ll find out there:

Wowhead

To paraphrase: versatility and critical strike are of similar value, haste is slightly better, mastery is slightly worse, but all secondary stats are pretty good. The reason that mastery comes out below the others is because it does not improve your damage reduction against unblockable sources, and it grants the least damage output.

Icy Veins

It is essentially identical to the wowhead guide in both conclusions and phrasing.

Method

Again, the same stat priority. It is a little more negative about mastery, saying that because of stats like Shield Specialization the defensive part of mastery is a bit redundant.

Analysis

So let’s dig into this, focusing on comparing mastery to versatility. We’ll look at defense, then offense.

As an aside: why are we ignoring critical strike and haste? Because they are generally weaker than mastery and versatility for defense, and generally better for offense. The preference for these stats comes from an overall preference in the community for offensive-leaning builds for tanks. Keep this in mind – you must move the slider on our site closer to the DPS side to get builds that are similar to the generic recommendations elsewhere. We are one of the few resources that gives you an option for a purely defensive build, and it will look very different.

Haste is also heavily preferred for “feel” more than any numerical benefit. Haste will always be worse on paper than people feel it is in-game, because people generally like the shorter cooldowns and faster gameplay. Just note that this faster gameplay will NOT necessarily make you tougher or do more damage than balancing haste with other stats. We adjust for this preference in our optimizer to an extent. We think that some people go overboard on haste to the deteriment of raw performance, so we make this adjustment subtle enough to get an amount of haste that still feels pretty good but is in balance with other stats.

Also note that haste’s value can depend heavily on your chosen talents. For example, some combinations require a lot more haste to keep high shield block uptime, and thus haste will be preferred more. Other combinations require very little haste to keep shield block up, and thus lower values will be recommended. And perhaps counterintuitively, a talent like Into the Fray generally makes haste better as it multiplies with your haste from gear.

Defense

Versatility

780 versatility rating will reduce your damage taken by 0.5%, and this applies to every type of damage that you take. It multiplies with every other form of damage reduction so there isn’t any weirdness complicating things.

If we convert to an equivalent required to get 1% damage reduction (DR):

1560 versatility rating = 1% DR

780 versatility also increases all healing and shielding (most notably ignore pain) by 1%.

Mastery

Mastery has three effects that can impact damage reduction:
700 mastery rating increase block chance by 0.5% (before DR)
700 mastery rating increases critical block chance by 1.5%
700 mastery rating increases attack power by 1%

The block chance part isn’t very important – we would agree that it is usually redundant due to high uptime on shield block, so we’ll just ignore it.

The attack power part can more or less be considered a 1% increase to all healing and shielding. Ignore pain scales with attack power, and the other largest source of healing for a warrior is usually leech which scales off your damage, almost all of which scales with attack power. You might have some trinket effects that don’t scale with attack power, but the healing part is usually somewhat small for protection warriors so this is an OK approximation for comparison purposes.

The critical block chance part is very valuable. It is worth looking briefly at how blocks work to understand its value.

Blocks are functionally similar to armor. Your shield has some large-ish number on it, like 92757 for an ilvl678 shield (max level season 2 gear). This can be multiplied by a few talents, like Shield Specialization and Brace for Impact, so your final block value would be more like 132271 most of the time. This will decrease the damage of a blockable attack by ~46% against a raid boss in a mythic raid (there is a formula for this and some constants that can be extracted from the game, we can post the full details if anyone is interested).

NOTE: The effectiveness of block (and armor) goes down at higher difficulties. There is a constant associated to each difficulty that increases the armor/block constant (and thus decreases the effectiveness of those stats). For example, in a heroic raid this example would decrease damage by ~48% instead. We will be talking about mythic raid difficulty, which is the worst case value of mastery for a protection warrior.

A critical block simply doubles this amount: so 46% becomes 92%… but there is another consideration: no single source of DR can exceed 85%. So a critical block is capped out at an 85% damage reduction in this example. It is not difficult to cap out your critical blocks at 85% reduction (and it’s not hard to go to a tanking dummy and see this in action by throwing up shield block and looking at your combat log for a few hits). (Side note… for this reason we find the Martial Expert talent in the Colossus tree a bit weird… it’s only useful at low gear levels where you aren’t already capping out the size of your critical blocks).

So in this example, we can use a little algebra to convert our 700 mastery into an equivalent damage reduction percent to compare it to versatility:

regular block = 46% DR = 1 - 0.46 = 0.54 multiplier on damage taken
crit block = 85% DR = 1 - 0.85 = 0.15 multiplier on damage taken

If we are assuming a near-100% block chance due to shield block, we are assuming that we would have at least done a regular block on any blockable attack. So the value of increasing our critical block chance is only the gain over a regular block, not the full value of a critical block. We can determine this by thinking of a critical block as an extra DR multiplier applied on top of a regular block:

0.15 = 0.54 * (1 - x)
x = 1 - 0.15 / 0.54 = 0.72

Thus a crit block is equivalent to applying another 0.72 or 72% DR to that attack.

So now let’s get the amount of mastery rating required to get 1% DR on average over all attacks via critical blocks:

700 rating = 1.5% crit block
1.5% crit block = 0.72 * 1.5 = 1.08% DR

648 mastery rating = 1% DR

But… not all damage can be blocked, and the amount can be highly variable based on content. Mythic+ is very heavy on blockable damage. Raids are lower. But if you look at any random log… it is rare that a protection warrior’s damage taken is less than ~40% from melee attacks. That’s damage TAKEN… and a warrior’s DR on blockable attacks is very high compared to other kinds of attacks, so even in a raid it is very rare for less than ~60% of raw damage to be blockable. We’ll use 60% as a decent worst case estimate:

648 mastery rating = 0.6% DR (only affects 60% of incoming damage)

1080 mastery rating = 1% DR on average over a worst-case fight for blockable damage

Offense

The comparison of mastery to versatility is interesting. Almost all damage scales with attack power. Mastery is a straight multiplier on attack power, so generally speaking 700 mastery rating = 1% damage gain, and 780 versatility = 1% damage gain. Where things can shift in favor of versatility is direct damage effects from gear like trinkets – those do not scale based on attack power and thus mastery has no impact. If these are enough of your total damage, then versatility overtakes mastery by a small amount.

In practice, mastery and versatility are extremely close in value for offense, with versatility being a little “safer” as a damage stat because you don’t need to worry about it suddenly losing some value if you change your trinkets.

Questions

OK that was a lot more detail than anticipated, but it raises one big question: why does almost everyone rank mastery as the weakest stat? By our estimations, it is significantly better than versatility for defense, and approximately equal or just slightly worse for offense.

If we just go ahead and say mastery is slightly worse in all real world scenarios for offense, even if you are going for a higher offense build… mastery’s superior efficiency as a defensive stat would probably make it a better use of budget than versatility in all but the most skewed builds (i.e. you could get just a bit of mastery to cover your defensive needs, and gear more heavily for crit and haste to have better overall damage without being too squishy).

What could be causing the difference in results here?

  1. Is there a flaw in our calculations? Let us know if you see one!

  2. Is the fact that part of mastery only applies to blockable attacks perceived as a big downside, to the point that it massively devalues it as a stat?

  3. Similar to 2: is the fact that crit blocks are a chance and thus feel a bit like dodges and parries making it unpopular because it is unreliable?

My suspicion is that it is some combination of 2 and 3. People prefer the guarantee of versatility, even if over the course of a fight it is significantly less reduction than an equivalent amount of mastery.

Following up on the calculations above, in a worst-case scenario for mastery it would bring ~40% more total damage reduction than an equivalent amount of versatility. In Mythic+ it would be significantly better than that.

The more random nature of critical blocks and the restriction of part of mastery’s impact to only physical damage should certainly penalize its value a bit. But 40% is kind of a lot of “free” damage reduction to leave on the table… are we perhaps being excessively punitive with our evaluation of mastery? Especially in a Mythic+ setting we’re talking about mastery being 60% or more effective for overall damage reduction than versatility, point-for-point. Should we be favoring mastery more heavily at least for Mythic+?

Please let us know your thoughts!

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Hello !

By no mean i know or play protection warrior. But here are some consideration i would add to the discussion.

  1. Historically, magical dommage was the principale source of “why tanks die”. It was mainly seen on monk tank with exceptionnal physical defense and probably one of the weakeast for magical. This biais induce some kind of reversion about the mastery.
  2. Kind on the same topic, something that calculation are not taking in consideration. Previously you had the simulation to answer that and even with that is wasn’t really use for the BiB. The variation of HP. In other word, to balance stats outside of calculation you ask the question : Do i die ? From what ? What reduce that ? And the answer may be versatility.

Even if the death % is higher (if i refer to the % showed in the previous simulation) it doesn’t mean you died violently or not ? Maybe the goal is to smooth out for the healer or in the opposite direction, if you push the dmg taken to extrem numbers (like pulling lots and lots of add in MM+) you should be able to not die what ever number you have on you. but for a very small amount of time like a dirac.

Hopefully it giving you some matterial to think about !

Yeah – from way back in the day, there has been this idea that reducing total damage taken is less important than “smoothing out” your damage taken.

So the question for a protection warrior becomes: does the superior damage reduction of critical blocks smooth out your damage taken by more or less than versatility? It’s kind of hard to say without a simulation…

In most cases you are continuously taking melee damage during a fight, so significantly reducing that melee damage theoretically allows your health to be higher on average before any other big damage event hits you. Couple this with the fact that critical blocks can pretty easily have a high chance to happen, as much as 50% or more is not tough to reach, thus mitigating the randomness of them a little bit. (Also, in say Mythic+ where you are taking a lot of smaller melee hits at a higher frequency on e.g. a big pull, mastery is a clear winner as that will smooth things out for you. A single slow-hitting enemy with huge melee hits is the worst case for things like crit blocks and parries.)

The other piece of this old argument is that fights are often designed such that smart cooldown use is meant to cover big non-blockable damage spikes. You aren’t really meant to stack versatility to survive such events (except in the most extreme cases like very high Mythic+, where the whole game changes – very specific strategies are necessary at such levels and they don’t really apply to most people’s game experience).

Also consider a talent like Spell Block – every 90 sec you can make all of your mastery work for you on spells for 30 sec. That could be a pretty efficient way to cover those gaps where your other cooldowns aren’t ready, making use of the superior scaling of mastery over versatility on magic-heavy fights.

All of that said… sometimes people just like the less “fiddly” versatility stat to mastery, where you don’t have to think about anything, even if it’s technically weaker.

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Ignore Pain doesn’t scale with attack power anymore.

About crit block… does it actually make sense to go above 50%?
50% is like every second hit would be a crit block.
To get every hit crit blocked it would take 100% mastery…

20% = every 5th hit crit blocked
25% = every 4th hit crit blocked
33,34% = every 3rd hit crit blocked
50% = every 2nd hit crit blocked
100% = every hit crit blocked

What would be the sweet spot here?

And maybe aiming for like 25% crit because of the set bonus ?

I still miss the days when we had a simulator.

As a prot paladin who always plays on non-meta builds, I want to say that the general opinion of the community always chooses “simple” strategies. Everyone wants to see something like collect X% haste, vers is better than mastery, crit is the worst stat, etc.

I think that vers feels good enough to not worry about choosing gear. Even if mastery is actually better or at least not worse. In fact, in a couple of weeks we may get a change in priority in guides as there will be a greater variety of stats and people will play more difficult content.

It is also possible that vers works better in situations where CDs are used poorly.

Are you sure? I believe that the maximum amount that it can absorb scales with attack power (and they increased this value by 30% with 11.1). If you overlap several uses close together there is a cap at 30% of your max health, but in a scenario where it matters the size of each individual cast is the limiter, not this cap.

As for getting more crit block chance… if you think crit blocks are good, I don’t think there’s really a natural stopping point other than 100% chance. You won’t see any sudden drop in value at some lower crit block chance.

Yeah this makes sense… especially for someone who is trying to write a 1-2 page guide for every player to follow. An easy set of rules for which stats to get makes more “sense” to the average player and is easy to set as a goal.

In contrast, our optimizer can pursue an arbitrarily complex moving target and adapt to the gear you have available in your bags, etc… the simplicity comes from being able to just press a button and import it into the game. I have been using our site for so long that I sometimes lose sight of this fundamental difference in perspective.

And yes – versatility does have the appeal of consistency and simplicity, so I can see that pushing it ahead of other stats for many people.

For now we are trying an adjustment to mastery in the optimizer for protection warriors – the value of critical blocks have been suppressed a bit. As for haste, how much the optimizer gets will depend heavily on how offensive your strategy is and your chosen talents. In particular the combination of Enduring Defenses, Heavy Repercussions/Into the Fray, and Champion’s Bulwark will significantly change your baseline shield block uptime, which is a big contributor to the value of haste.

That said… if anyone is down for experimenting, try out a really heavy mastery build and let us know how it feels in-game. Do you feel pretty tough? Damage feel low or was it fine?

It was mentioned in one of the changelogs but it is not listed in the official 11.1 changelog.
However, the changelog on wowhead for the spell does show the change:

Yeah the raw spell data extracted from the game says:

Fight through the pain, ignoring $s2% of damage taken until ${($s1)*(1+$@versadmg)} damage has been prevented. Repeated uses of Ignore Pain accumulate, up to ${$mhp*$s4/100} total damage prevented.

s2 = 50.0

s1 = 5.6875 * Attack Power

mhp = max health

s4 = 30.0

So parsing that using the spell effects in the data:

Fight through the pain, ignoring 50% of damage taken until (5.6875 * AP)*(1 + vers) damage has been prevented. Repeated uses of Ignore Pain accumulate, up to 30% of max health total damage prevented.

Also note that protection warriors get a 2x multiplier on the AP part, so it’s really 11.375 * AP per cast.

It is also easy to verify in game – take some strength off your gear and watch the tooltip for Ignore Pain go down.

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