A Question of Curses.

I came across this post by a curious warlock in the warrior section on my guild forum.

I have some melee questions for warriors and other tanks. If you would have the talent to reduce the physical damage to all by 5%. Would you spend 5 points in that? That means you use 5 points to get 250 hit points lesser if you where hit for 5000 hit points. To me it looks very expensive to gain that minor advantage. Warlocks in our raids also discuss who is on Curse of Weakness duty, which reduce the targets attack power by 350 for 2 min. We can only have one curse on a mob for each warlock. Now if I’m not on CoS or CoE duty my Curse of Doom would deal around 11000 dmg every third minutes (thx to Amplify Curse with 3 min CD) and about 7000 dmg in between that when Amp Curse is on CD. So my question here is, would you say its worth to use CoW instead of dealing around 8000 more dmg per min? I also think it could be better using 2 point to improve CoW by 20% rather than use 5 point in shadow embrace for 5% lesser melee damage to the raid. So the big question is should we make them slightly softer or should we bring the down slightly quicker ?

This got me thinking and I went off and did a little research regarding the properties of Curse of Weakness vs Shadows Embrace from the perspective of a tank.

After much reading I found that the two main points are:

1) Armour is a percentage reduction on melee damage, and actually benefits from increasing returns damage reduction. This means that the higher the percentile reduction stacks the greater the returns per 1% added.

Example:
A warrior with 50% DR hit for 1000 damage would receive 500 damage.
A warrior with 51% DR hit for 1000 damage would receive 490 damage.
490/500*100 = 98%
So a 1% increase on 50% DR actually means that the warrior takes 2% less damage than he would have.

2) That pretty much each boss has a different correlation for Attack Power to damage dealt, which would mean that Curse of Weakness would have a greater or lesser effect depending apon which boss it was used on.

These points lead me to conclude that unless you can quantify the damage reduction that CoW would have on a particular boss as higher than 5%, Shadows Embrace would be a safer option than CoW if it came to a choice between the two.

If you would have the talent to reduce the physical damage to all by 5%. Would you spend 5 points in that?

Considering that Protection Warriors spen a manditory 5 points in Toughness (A skill which increases your armour value by 10% at max rank), and even though, after stacking an unskilled 50% damage reduction, this has a greater return than a straight 5%. Had I the option I would still alocate 5 points to a skill which reduced physical damage take by a straight 5%.

Well that about concludes it on the reaserch I have done, If anything is wrong with my theorising please let me know, as you know I make no clames at competence. Just read the blog name for confirmation on that. :)

And by the way I know that you can have both CoW and shadows embrace on the one mob.



So until next time this is Stuntyone the Incompetent Warrior signing off.