Sar's Yarn

CTC: The not-so-short* Sar version

So it's been nearly three weeks now since Dad died, and slowly life is returning to normal. We have his ashes, the funeral is all paid up and done and dusted and the family are seguing back into normality slowly but necessarily. Back to work like I'd never been away and back into raiding as well.

Raiding wise I took it easy for the first week, just to ease myself back into the old routine, helming some Tier 11 runs, because in all honesty I wasn't up to the stress of doing progression stuff for that first week back, so T11 content was absolutely ideal for me, just to give me a raiding environment to ease back into. Then last week I started into the T12 content, Firelands. So far it's been pretty easy, with 3 kills under my belt so far (2 x Bethtilac and 1 x Shannox). So far in total Thunder are sitting at 3/7 already, with Beth, Shannox and Baleroc conquered, and Alysrazor and Rhyolith on our radar having had a couple of nights so far on each.

So far the fights look pretty easy, it'll just be a case of mechanics practice in order to get a good bit into the content, and I'd imagine we'll be up to Ragnaros in about a month or so tbh. It's hardly a ton of content to be fair, and a pretty big misjudgement by Blizzard offering such a short raid tier, especially if we're meant to be raiding it for 6 months as we are with each raid tier generally (T10 and ICC was a big exception, as it was end of expansion content and therefore lasted a year while Blizz polished off Cata for release).

The other big news is that my plans for Thunder are starting to bear fruition. In order to survive the demise of WoW, which will probably come about in the next 5 years or so, I've started our expansion into other games. The first one up is Rift, and Tkalec has taken on the GM reins there to get us up and running in our second game. The current Thunder Council will oversee all games we start out in, and each game will still have its own GM/Council that are responsible to the Thunder Council. Hopefully it'll function well and allow us to retain members even if they leave WoW and decide to try other games out. It's always better to play new games with people you already know, so that's the idea behind it, and we will be expanding into other games as time goes by. The next one we'll kick off in will likely be SW: TOR when it gets released towards the end of the year.

 

So, about that titular CTC...

Yep, onto that. The 4.2 patch brought a couple of changes, and so far the Holy Shield change hasn't made MUCH difference. Still a pain knowing that most of the time I'm taking 10% more damage than I used to, but having the extra button I suppose is coming in handy. Especially in the likes of the Bethtilac & Shannox fights where the last 20% or so are pretty frenzied and there's a lot of tank damage going on.

Plus currently with my CTC set, I'm about 0.76% away from the block cap

For those for whom the above sentence makes no sense, don't worry, grab a cup of coffee and I'll explain

You're saying I can dodge bullets?

For every attempt to hit made in the game, be it by a boss on you, or by you on a mob or a boss, behind the scenes WoW rolls a virtual dice to determine the outcomes. Big dice. 100 sided dice to be fairly general (102.4 sided dice to be exact, but I'll get to that bit later). So for every time you activate an ability you will have a roll made for you behind the scenes, and the dice roll determines if your arcane missiles hit the boss, or if they missed. Or if your Avengers' Shield hits, misses, get parried or dodged. The majority of the time, even with zero hit rating these rolls will result in you hitting the boss.

The CTC I mentioned earlier stands for Combat Table Coverage. The Combat Table is basically the table with 1-100 (say) with the determined outcome against each dice roll. Now each player in the game regardless of gear and stats has a basic 5% chance to dodge a boss attack. Healers, dps, tanks, ranged & melee all have that 5% chance to pull a swift one and duck the boss's cleave. So when the dice is rolled and the result lies between 1 and 5 congratulations! You've just managed to dodge that nasty head splitting attack!

Beyond that basic 5% chance for bosses to miss you you then have other stats stacked on top. So next up comes Dodge. As a tank my dodge rating will be a lot lot higher than any other class. Most tanks are, as Dodge is one of our basic stats we look to build upon with it being a secondary "Green" stat on our gear. So as a tank with dodge rating, I have about a 12% chance to further dodge attacks, on top of the 5% chance I already have from my base chance. That gives me a 17% chance to dodge a boss attack completely. So if the dice results in a number between 1 and 17 then I've just managed to completely avoid the boss and his attempt to splatter my head open like a ripe cantaloupe.

Next up is Parry, which is like dodge, except I manage to get my weapon in the way and deflect the attack resulting in no damage taken. So in essence dodge and parry are the same thing really. With my stats that's another 13% chance to not get hit. That brings me up to 30% or thereabouts to be missed, dodge or parry an attack. So I basically have a 30% chance to avoid all melee damage and hit attempts on me by the boss.

When you're ready, you won't have to...

Furthermore there's Block. I'm a shield class, so I usually have a big frickin lump of metal on my left arm to block attacks. Now a blocked attack, unlike one that is dodged or parried, does in fact result in taking damage. Currently as a Paladin tank my block, in conjunction with my Meta-gem (which adds an additional 1% block value), will block 31% of damage taken, after armour reductions etc.

With 40,000 armour, any hit I take is automatically reduced by about 60%. So if the boss hits me with an attack that would normally hit unmitigated for say 100,000 hit points, that gets reduced by my block to 69,000 damage. My armour will reduce that by a further 60% resulting in damage around 27.6k. A big reduction from the original 100k.

After that your cooldowns come into play, such as Holy Shield (extra block value of 20%, meaning a 51% damage reduction upon a successful block), Divine Protection (basic 20% damage reduction) and so on. It's at this stage absorbs like Power Word: Shield etc are also accounted for.

So after all that, my basic block chance (thanks to Paladin's Mastery interpretation) is about 67%. Now with that 67% that means that 67% of bosses attacks will be successfully taken on my shield, not in the guts. Thankfully. So add in the earlier 30% chance to dodge or parry an attack, and that has me sitting at about a 97% chance to mitigate or dodge/parry a boss attack. Buff food and Mark of the Wild or Blessing of Kings will bring this up further, so at the moment, fully buffed etc I am sitting with a total of 101.64% chance to dodge, parry or block an attack. Sadly, still not enough...

Moar than 100%? Lolz whut?

Yep, 101.64%. You see bosses are always considered to be +3 levels above maximum level players, regardless of what level the player is. So even now Arthas, even though he is level 80 content, and was at the time thus considered as a level 83 NPC with regards to game mechanics, is now considered level 88 for level 85 players. It's a game mechanic thing in order to stop bosses becoming too trivial and allowing players to solo content too early.

So for every level above you, a boss (or other mob) has a bonus extra 0.8% chance to hit you successfully, getting past your dodge, parries and shield blocks. With raid bosses in T11 and T12 being considered level 88 (+3 to max level players), that results in them having an extra 2.4% (0.8 x 3) chance to hit you over and above your already 100% mitigation. That means tanks have to have 102.4% avoidance (technically not avoidance, more mitigation, but that's the common parlance) in order to remove unmitigated hits from the aforementioned Combat Table.

So that Combat Table will look something like this for me without buffs (Bosses Dice roll vs Result):

1: Miss
2: Miss
~ (5% miss chance from rolls >1 to <6)
5: Miss
6: Dodge
7: Dodge
~ (12% dodge from >6 to <18)
17: Dodge
18: Parry
~ (13% parry from >18 to <31)
30: Parry
31: Block
~ (67% block from >31 to <98)
97: Block
98: Full painful kick in the nads
99: Full painful kick in the nads
100: Full painful kick in the nads
Boss bonus levels!
101:Full painful kick in the nads
102: Full painful kick in the nads
102.4: Full painful kick in the nads
Combat Table Ends.

 

Buff food and Elixir of the Master will give me an extra 315 mastery which will push those full painful kicks in the nads another 4% or so further down the table (actually called pushing hits off the table!).

So that's how CTC works, and why it's desirable for shield tanks (Paladins and Warriors†) to try and get to that magical 102.4% chance to mitigate an attack (which is called being Block Capped, as you're capping the Combat Table by your block chance), as it will make sure you at least block all attacks, thereby taking a minimum of 31% less damage, before cooldowns, and thereby making me a hell of a lot easier to heal, as that's 31% minimum that healers don't have to expend mana on healing.

Your chance to hit the boss works on similar principles, which is why players have hit ratings, expertise and the likes, to reduce the chance that the boss will push your attempts to hit off his combat table, or be dodged or avoided etc.

Didn't think I'd do all that when I set out to write this post, but there you go!

 

*Those who have suffered my raid leading will attest to how long my fight explanations are - sometimes it'd just be quicker to watch the Tankspot vids

† DK's and Druids function slightly differently. DK's use a lot of dodge & parry with self healing as mitigation (Death Strike spam!) whereas Druids in bear form still operate on the model of dodging attacks or soaking them up with high health levels, which isn't ideal in the current healer-mana-micro-management raid environment, which is why bear tanks are having such a hard time at the moment in WoW.