Imp Devo Aura, Toughness, AnticipationFollow

Imp. Devo is next to worthless. You won't be using it alot. I've only used it against bosses, and sometimes it's even better to have Ret aura up.

If you're sitting below 90 defense, take Anticipation. If you're at or above 490, take Toughness.



490 defense makes you uncrittable to any current mob. Defense also adds a little bit of avoidance to each stat (Block, Parry, Dodge), but after 490 scales down more, so loses value over pure avoidance stats.

Edited, Feb 5th 2008 11:39am by Dathur

what level are you?

imp devo is pretty lame, i wouldnt recommend it. when tanking i have ret aura on almost all the time.

If you are leveling with a group of friends then +def isnt all that big a deal. out of your 3 options i would choose the +armor one, not the +devo aura.

Also, there is a section on builds in the FAQ.

Thanks, Redoubt was the very first thing I grabbed at level 10 and up
At least now I know to stay away from Imp Devo

I've been insanely cautious with putting points in now because when I first started up, after I got redoubt, I grabbed divine intellect and spiritual focus because I can't seem to convince the hunter that their pet is there for a reason. After that, I saw Pursuit for Justice, so I then went to grab that because of the speed. When traveling, the hunter can't stay off cheetah so I wanted to keep up as much as I could. Not knowing, the mage has me on follow a lot so I found myself turning around and walking backwards just so he could keep up with me, which turned out to be a pain in a group. So I rerolled for the 2nd time and am now at what I should of started at, prot, with a little holy.

Thanks a lot for the feedback, it's gonna save me that gold to reroll again if I had gone with imp devo. Cause you know... I need to save as much as I can for my first mount... 90 silver is a lot.

Just in case:

As I was reading, I noticed you said that you rerolled after misplacing your talent points. You don't have to reroll your character if you did that, you merely go to your trainer and ask for a respec.

Now, if reroll is just your word for it, I apologize.

Edit: Wtf fingers!?

Edited, Feb 5th 2008 2:16pm by Dathur

While redoubt is nice while leveling and in early gearing stages, I sure wish that it wasn't linked with Shield Specialization. Once you pass into uncrushability (and especially when you reach passive uncrushability) the benefits of Redoubt shrink pretty damn fast. Improved Devo Aura, while not life changing, would at least provide SOME benefit during raid boss fights.

Just pull multiple packs, use block-oriented gear instead of avoidance gear, and a really strong shield spike. If you're trying to dumb down your gear, I don't see how blocking more and thus taking less damage is going to help you.

I'm just saying the extremely situational event of that happening and having redoubt for that is still better than the 400 armor you get from Imp. Devo aura. Cause something some of the time is better than nothing some of the time. 400 armor might as well be 0 armor, especially as your armor gets better.

Also, grabbing multiple groups eats all of your charges when you put up HS then redoubt procs and you get more blocks in.

I have heard of it and the scaling seems to go the other way. As you increase your armor you get diminishing returns as you get more armor.

The formula for calculating armor is:

 
              Armor 
---------------------------------- 
(armor - 22167.5 + 467.5*mobLevel) 

plugging in some values for a level 70 mob which is what the tab shows you:

@12000 Armor = 53.20% DR
@12400 Armor = 54.00% DR (Increase by 0.80%)

@17000 Armor = 61.70% DR
@17400 Armor = 62.23% DR (Increase by 0.53%)

Show me one instance where it is worthwhile and I will show you a situation where it should never be a possibility.

For instance, your statement that redoubt can keep you UNCRUSHABLE? First off, you don't want a random proc-on-hit to be what keeps you above uncrushable. Second, there should never ever be a case where you are being hit with 9 or more attacks by a single boss in a 10 second time span. Having or not having redoubt should never EVER be a factor in uncrushability.



While a nice chart, let's tweak it a bit to make it more reasonable for at least raid zone trash. Bump up that base damage to 3500. Now, one more quick key change... Block. Let's give a nice round 500 block value and redo your chart! This will put the base amount to appear to be 3000, so the first column will appear to be off.

Armor 						 0	 5k	10k	15k	20k	25k	30k 
DPS taken 					3500	1810	1250	935	725	550	410 
DPS reduced by the last 5k armor 		0	1190	560	315	210	175	140 
relative DPS reduction by the last 5k armor	0	39%	31%	25%	22%	24%	25% 

What this shows is that, while there is a low point in the 20k armor range, with a 3500 base damage and 500 block value, due to the mechanics of block (blocked damage being calculated at the end of all mitigation calculations) armor scales very nicely with block. Increase your block value and you even further increase the value you get out of every point of armor that you have.

Your calculations would have worked phenomenally for a Druid, though.


EDIT: It's worth pointing out that the point where increasing armor's lowest will vary with every mob and every player. Higher damaging mobs will shift the point higher, and a higher block value will push it lower. Either way though, every 5k armor increase gave over a 20% relative reduction in damage taken. Would I like my devotion aura to drop the relative physical damage I take by around 3% Hell yes.


Edited, Feb 5th 2008 4:58pm by Ialaman

nice numbers.



Can you add the 400 armor from Imp Devo to this line right here and figure the difference?

to see what what it would actually do at this lvl.

Edit: just for the Damage Taken before and after block, i mean.

Edited, Feb 5th 2008 3:45pm by RuenBahamut

Your numbers in your final column seem to be a bit off. They should be:

37.50%
30.81%
27.10%
25.01%
23.97%
23.76%

Now I will admit that I used some poor wording when I said the scaling of armor. I had intended to say the stacking of armor, because as you can see, while there is a diminishing value per 5k armor added, it still is a very significant and worthwhile percentage.

While the amounts it adds are debatable, there is one thing that all sides have agreed on. It DOES decrease the damage you take. Keep in mind that we are comparing talents against Redoubt.

In boss tanking gear with full buffs and holy shield up I am currently at just over 106% avoidance, completely uncrushable short of a stun. No boss mob in game (that can crush) will eat through those charges before the buff duration is over. Therefore going from 106% uncrushable to 136% uncrushable by adding 30% block is going to be 0 value, because that extra 30% will never come in to play.

So if it's worthless during bosses, what else is there? Well there's raid trash, which can eat through holy shield depending on how many mobs you're tanking. Of course, trash can't crush, so uncrushability isn't as much of a factor, and as I said before, I'm at 90% miss/dodge/parry/block base, so there's only 10% of attacks that are landing as hits anyways. Redoubt, IF it's up, will only add the block value in terms of damage mitigation, as well as the shield spike damage, because if holy shield is up redoubt (as with bosses) will never have an impact due to uncrushability status. While this might sound nice, you also have to keep in mind that since I personally run with 40% block chance in my trash mob set, only 1 out of every 5 blocked attacks while redoubt is up will actually be DUE to redoubt being up. (this means that there will be times when redoubt procs and is used up without having prevented any extra attacks). Basically, per redoubt proc, it will block 0.8 extra attacks. For 5 talent points, that's not much, and the damage mitigation it would provide is actually INFERIOR to improved devotion aura.

So if it's not useless in any raid situation once you surpass a certain gear level, we come to your example of gearing down for 5-mans. I won't even bother trying to argue this point but will simply say, if you want to spend 5 points for a talent that may be useful when you to back to trivial content, by all means, go right ahead.







I said it before, but I'll repeat it again. Redoubt is great when leveling. Redoubt is good for gearing up and entering raiding. However, there is an undeniable point where redoubt will never have a noticeable impact on any group, but we are still forced to take it for Shield Specialization. At high end gear levels you are forced to spend 5 talent points on something that will never benefit you.

You might be referencing wrong to find out the %reduced. It should be the [damage reduction from previous armor] cell divided by the [damage taken after block] cell from that previous armor. A 1.5% reduction from the 15k armor's 945.81 damage taken would be a reduction of 14.18 damage, not 22.28

deleted for redundancy.... i answered without reading all the replies... sorry.

Edited, Feb 5th 2008 9:54pm by toolofjesus