Today's question: Deep wounds and impale

[Kevin]

The tool tip for deep wounds says at rank 3 it will do 60% of your weapon's average damage in a 12s bleed. Is this 'average damage' the weapon list damage, or the damage you do factoring in attack power etc? Is the bleed linked to the damage on the crit that triggered it? IE say HS crits for 700, will it do 0.6*(700), or is it going to track the non crit number?

Also rank 2 impale ups your 'critical strike bonus damage' by 20%. How is this calculated? For instance on a regular crit are you doing +100% without the talent, and +120% with the talent?

I am curious about these because I am considering going from a 17 arms 34 fury build to a 13 arms, 33 fury, 5 protection build to increase my mitigation for raiding. I have Deathbringer as my mainhand weapon and get a lot of DPS via overpowering, and am trying to figure out if the trade on damage for mitigation is worth it. Our guild lost a lot of veteran healers so we have a new crop of guys without all the +heal gear, and I think I need more mitigation.

AP is used in the deep wounds calculation. If crusader is up when it procs or if battle shout is down, the deep wounds ticks do more or less damage.

You will get more mitigation from the 5 points in anticipation in most raid tanking situations than you will from 5 in shield block. In raid tanking situations you have plenty of rage to be able to spam shield block. Many of the mobs are right around a 2.5 second attack speed so your block value is effectively (your block chance + 75) / 2. OK so that isn't great math but it gets you a good number. The faster the mob attacks the less effective block you get from the shield block skill since it can only block one attack and with a 5 second cooldown you'll face more attacks with it down. 10 defense while not a lot is .4% dodge, .4% parry and .4% block as well cutting the mobs chance to hit you and to crit you by .4%. I haven't been able to test but there is a theory that the def from anticipation might work like "natural" defense making you seem like you are L62 for the purposes of crushing blows as well. Since anticipation will help cut down on crits and other other damage spikes while giving you pure avoidance over mitigation and since you'll have a very high effective block rate using the shield block skill you should see less damage spikes, which are what generally give healer the problems. Crits and crushing blows are generally what get the tank killed in a raid. Well what will usually get them killed is a healer getting hurt or killed, but assuming the healers are OK, it's the damage spikes. Anticipation helps get rid of those, block not really.

Honestly though I think you're wasting 5 points in the def tree. If you are going into the def tree you want to go at least 15 deep or 31 deep. 5, or 10 or 20 or 30 just don't usually make much sense because of what you have to give up. Getting 5/5 in deflection for the extra parry chance would be good. Moving points to get those 3 more talents could be worth it. 3% parry is more mitigation than 5% block.

Unfortunately with the way the trees are set up, it's very hard for a fury build to get any meaningful points in protection since most every warrior build benefits more from tactical mastery than it does from anything else. And this is alright since fury builds are the highest DPS builds you can get with end game gear, I don't have a problem with them losing out on some of the mitigation talents for this.

I still see the 31/5/15 builds as the only really viable ways, via talents, to get OK tanking and OK DPS. You lose a bit of mitigation and a bit of effeciency to the full prot builds (but you really only need 2 full prots for most raid encounters) you lose a bit of damage to the arms/fury and fury/arms builds. But if you want to help your healers more, just work on getting better tanking gear. A fury warrior in good tanking gear will have more mitigation than a protection warrior in mediocre tanking gear. The class is just that gear dependent. Just like a protection warrior in good DPS gear can out DPS a fury warrior in mediocre DPS gear (well that is really more dependent on the weapons but yeah).

Anyway just some of my advice on it. Had you said you lost one of your better prot spec tanks and you were likely to be the #1 or #2 tank on most of the runs you were on, then I would have counciled differnetly. But if it's just a few healers I don't see the gains being better than just doing more DPS to kill the mob faster, if you aren't the one tanking it.