The Negative Effects of Durability

In most games, durability is an advantage. Items with a high durability last longer than items with lower durability, and thus are more valuable. This makes intuitive sense.

In WoW, however, high durability is actually a disadvantage. It seems counter-intuitive, but looking at game mechanics quickly shows why. The most common form of item damage is the 10% durability loss from death. However, the cost to repair an item is based on per point of durability lost. An item with higher durability loses more points for each death, and thus costs more to repair for each death.

For example, take two items: blue boots with 50 durability, and epic boots with 100 durability. Let's say it costs 10 silver to repair one point of durability. After one death, the blue boots lose 5 points of durability, and the epic boots lose 10. It costs 50 silver to repair the blue boots, and 1 gold to repair the epic boots. Having lower durability was actually an advantage for the blue boots, which just does not seem right.

And this has a startling amount of ramifications, especially in the endgame.

First, gear with higher item levels tends to have higher durability. That means that as your gear gets better and better, your repair costs increase. Because the raid dungeons do not drop increased amounts of cash, it means that the amount of gold needed to support raiding increases as gear gets better.

This is a big problem for healers and tanks. As a character levels, the rate of gold farmed continues to increase, allowing them to keep pace with their increased costs. At 70, though, this changes.

For DPS, the rate of gold farmed continues to increase as new gear is gained, allowing the DPS to match the increase in repair costs. However, for healers and tanks, the new gear does not help increase the rate of gold farmed, meaning that they have to farm for longer periods of time to keep up with the increasing durability on their gear.

Secondly, the increasing repair costs leads to higher cost of death, which leads to more risk-averse behaviour. When a single wipe costs 5g or more, a healer or tank is less likely to engage in risky actions like joining pick-up groups. This is bad for the game as a whole, as it works best when people are actually willing to do things, to take the risk of dying.

The solution is to change the repair mechanic. Rather than repairing on a per-durability-point basis, repair costs should be done on a fixed percentage base (by level). It should always cost the same for a level 70 to repair from 0% to 100%.

To return to the above example, if costs 5 gold to repair from 0% to 100%, both the blue boots and the epic boots cost 50 silver. So for a healer or tank, it takes them the same amount of time to farm for gold to support their new gear.

(The DPS ends up with more free time, and possibly more money as a result, but I don't really see that as game-breaking. At least not as game-breaking as forcing the healers/tanks to farm for continously longer periods of time. Besides, the rogues and hunters already avoid half the wipes anyways.)

This way there is symmetry between the percentage loss when dying, and the percentage gain when repairing. Costs are now fixed, and no longer require increased farming time. Durability is once again an advantage as--not counting deaths--an item with high durability will last longer and not cost as much to repair.

Rogue Joke

From Cephas of Twisting Nether:

Jesus: "I can offer you eternal Salvation."
Disciples: "Can I get Might or Kings instead?"

Retribution Respec

After the last post about making money, I tried out Auctioneer and Enchantrix. Talk about information overload! I quickly gave up on AH trading and instead respecced to Retribution (20/0/41).

Retribution is a lot of fun! Four digit crits are awesome. Probably not that amazing to any DPS readers, but as a paladin, it's funny to see. As well, Retribution is very gratifying on a visceral level. Your charcter does special attack animation, giant numbers pop up, your hands start glowing white, and there's sound effects. I was gleefully killing stuff all over Blade's Edge at first.

It is a lot more mana-intensive than I expected. I've always viewed Retribution as fairly mana-efficient, but it can be very mana-hungry. However, this is mostly judging Command. In fact, if you use Seal of Command (Rank 1) and don't judge, you can get 95% of the damage and greatly reduce your mana usage. I'm contemplating macroing SoC so I can left-click for Rank 1, and right-click for max rank.

I also totally understand the comments about threat now. I only went on one instance run as Retribution, but I had to be very careful about threat, even with one of our main Kara tanks tanking.

(It was a pretty weird run. Normal Shattered Halls with Prot Warrior, Feral Druid in bear, Retribution Paladin, Rogue, and Priest. We didn't really use crowd control but just tanked and killed everything. We probably outgear the instance at this point.)

I wasn't even doing that much damage. I was hovering at about 70% of the rogue's damage, though that was with tossing a few heals here and there. But I'd start attacking and then I hit a 2K Crusader Strike crit, 2K white damage crit, and 2K SoC crit--all at the same time--and the mob would be attacking me. Good thing I wear plate.

Between Retribution and selling off a lot of the enchanting materials and primals I had accumulated, I managed to increase my gold levels substantially. I'm still a long way off from the epic flying mount, but I'm in a much better position than before the weekend.

I'm not entirely sure if I'm going to stay Retribution. My healing is okay, but I'm missing Blessing of Kings. I would like to try out in a raid, just to see how things work. Quite honestly, for a 25-man raid, having at least one Retribution Paladin is probably a good idea. For a 10-man, though, I'm not really sure.

Melee and Terestian Illhoof

There are certain fights where paladin meleeing just works out perfectly. One such fight is Terestian Illhoof in Karazhan.

I'm usually assigned to heal the warlock who is killing the imps. What I try to do is drop Consecration every so often to help her out. But this leads to mana problems, and I usually end up having to drink a mana potion or stop the consecrations.

So last night I tried a different strategy. I put Judgement of Wisdom on Illhoof, and melee'd with Seal of Wisdom, healing the warlock as necessary. It worked spectacularly well. I was able to consecrate every 8 seconds, keep the warlock up, add a little bit of melee damage, and end the fight with over 30% mana. I think the fight went a bit faster and much smoother than normal.

In retrospect, I probably should have used Seal of the Crusader for a bit more damage and a bit less regen, but I was really concerned about mana from our previous experiences with him.

Money

The thing I find hardest about being Holy is making money. I like Holy fine when I'm raiding, but solo it's just painful. I also have a tendency to die a lot when soloing, which adds more repair bills, wiping out any profit I'm making.

As a result of this and gemming/enchanting/upgrading gear, my gold total has been steadily going downwards. I'm now hovering around 100g, which is pretty low for Outlands. At this rate, my epic mount is years away.

So, the question is: how do I earn gold?

I'm trying the daily quests, but so far the Skettis fire-bombing eggs is the only one I can do with any regularity. On the others, it takes forever as Holy, and is terribly boring.

Grinding, again, I can't stand with this spec. I'm not a fan of it at the best of times, but Holy just seems so boring, and each fight takes so long.

I tried mining, circling the map looking for ore, but it seems fairly hard to find, or perhaps I was following someone else who was mining.

I wish I had an 70 dps alt, but my closest ally alts are in their 20s and I'm a slow leveller.

Any suggestions for what would be a good way to earn gold?

Helm Update

In the end, I went for the T4 Holy helm.

It will probably be the most useful for the next little while, given that I'm still Holy specced. As well, I did get a really nice weapon, and I should balance it out with some healing gear.

Finally, my previous healing helm was [Mask of Inner Fire], which is more a shaman DPS helm. Not to mention that it looks like Catwoman's mask, meaning the T4 Helm is a big upgrade in the style department.

I also got Exalted with the Shat'ari faction over the weekend, and picked up [Gavel of Pure Light]. My healing set is doing pretty well now. I'm trying to find someone with the Spellsurge enchant, but failing that I'll put +81 healing on it.

Second-worst Quest in the Game!

Adversarial Blood is a terribly designed quest. In all of WoW, only the Silithus Field Duty quests are worse.

Basically, it's a group quest where you need to summon and kill 4 bosses, and loot a quest item off each boss. This is the sequence of stuff that you need to do:

1. Kill living arakkoa until you get 6 Shadow Dust (25% drop rate).
2. Use the Shadow Dust to get a potion that lets you see invisible dead arakkoa for 15 minutes.
3. Kill dead arakkoa until you get 10 Time-Lost Scrolls (~50% drop rate). These arakkoa are actually pretty tough, and you'll have to deal with the living arakkoa at the same time.
4. Use 10 Scrolls to summon a boss.
5. Repeat 4 times.

This isn't all that bad, especially if you're in a group.

Until you realize that the boss only drops one quest item for the entire group, and you have repeat the above process for each person. This is insane.

As a general rule of thumb, if you have a Group quest to kill a boss, you should let the group complete it together. This way, everyone gets the quests together, works together, completes them together, and is rewarded together. Shared accomplishment is the key.

Quests where you have to repeat the quest for each person in the group are not fun!

Heck, the only reason the Silithus quests are worse is that you couldn't set it up so that everyone was at least on the same quest. Instead, half the group would be working on a quest that they did not have.

Group quests are all well and good, but you need to be able to work on and finish them as a group!

Prince Dead, Loot, and a Dilemma

My raid downed Prince Malchezzar (and the Legions he commands) today. It was my first Prince kill, and the second Prince kill for the guild.

It's a neat fight, but I find some of the other raiders' reaction to it very puzzling and, to be honest, a bit frustrating. First a description:

Imagine a grid. Malchezzar is tanked in one of the squares on the edge of the grid, and the raid sets up in an adjacent square to dps him. Every so often an infernal will fall down and occupy a square, making it uninhabitable, and unable to be moved through. The square the infernal falls on is essentially random.

(There's also some other stuff involving enfeebles dropping people to 1 health, very fast attacks leading to crushes, and flying axes, but it's not really relevant to my issue.)

The problem is that the raid often insists on staying in the same squares, and hoping that no infernals hit the two key squares. Which is crazy. Every time we did that, infernals would box us in, and then when one did land on a crucial square, we would be unable to move to a safe pair of squares.

Of course, every time this happened, people would say that it was just bad luck, that if only the infernals had come down on different squares we would have been fine. But just because a fight has a random element, doesn't mean that you can't come up with a strategy to deal with that random element.

If you wipe over and over to the same thing, it is no longer bad luck, but bad strategy.

In any case, we eventually started moving more, shifting the Prince early, and keeping the number of escape squares high. And it worked. One dead Prince.

Then he dropped loot: [Helm of the Fallen Champion], [Gorehowl], and [Ruby Drape of the Mysticant].

We have no shamans and so the rogue and I roll off for the Helm and I win! Yay, Tier 4! Up next is [Gorehowl].

RL: Roll Need
*crickets*
RL: Roll for toy
*crickets*
Me: Umm, I'll take it no one else wants, but doesn't warrior tank want it?
Warrior: Nah, not interested.

So I have a random [Gorehowl]! Woot! I feel kind of bad about winning the T4 now, but I really wasn't expecting the lack of interest in the axe.

But anyways, this leads to the dilemma of what I should do with the T4 Helm. I currently have the T4 Protection gloves and the T4 Retribution gloves (from a raid when there was no other paladins/rogues/shamans). And I'm also currently Holy Spec and mainly healing in raids.

I'm still kind of interesting in tanking, and I do have a decent tank set built up where the T4 Protection Helm would slot nicely. But I don't think my guild needs me as a tank anytime soon. I could get the T4 Holy Helm, but then I would end up with 3 pieces, each from a different set, and that just seems silly to me. But Retribution is tempting me, and I would have [Gorehowl] to smash faces with.

I really have no idea which helm to pick.

Raiding and Recruiting

Tobold is sure that the raiding population is in decline. I am not sure I agree with his assessment, and he does not really provide any sort of proof that this is the case.

First of all, it's still fairly early in the life of TBC. People are still levelling and working on 5-mans and all the non-raiding content. Raiders are used to devouring content, so it may not seem like a lot, but there's a lot to do.

Secondly, I'm not sure that the actual number of people raiding is decreasing. Judging by the Guild Progression sticky on my Realm forums, I would say that there's at least the same number of people raiding as there were pre-TBC. The only difference is that they are spread across three or four times as many guilds.

However, one thing that is not in doubt is that existing raiding guilds are having troubles recruiting. All raiding guilds suffer from turnover, but there used to be a constant stream of new recruits that would make up for it.

What I think is happening is that people are not leaving their levelling guilds. Pre-TBC, your average levelling guild would maybe get up to 10 level 60s. They wouldn't be able to do anything however. A few would quit the game, a few would reroll alts, and a few would apply to the raiding guilds.

But now, that group of 10 70s will attempt Karazhan. Maybe they won't do very well, or proceed at a much slower pace than the raiding guilds are used to, but it's preferrable to having to leave your friends in the levelling guild.

But the downside of this is that a significant source of recruits for the raiding guilds has dried up. And raiders see people leaving their guilds through natural attrition, and no new players joining, and so complain that there is something wrong with TBC content. That raiding is dying.

But it's possible that raiding is healthy, and may become more popular than ever before.

In any case, what should a raiding guild do for recruitment? My only real thought is to conduct recruitment on a guild level. Allying with a guild that is doing one run of Karazhan could probably net enough people to do the 25-mans.

I think that before we can substantively conclude that "raiding is dying", we need more solid proof. It's possible that raiding is indeed dying, but it is also very possible that the situation I have outlined above is correct, and raiding is healthy. It also accounts for the perception by raiders that raiding is dying.

Goal for the Paladin Class?

There are a lot of posts on blogs and forums--including this one--arguing for "fixes" to the paladin class, and changes to the various talent trees or spells.

Rather than spelling out specific changes we'd like to see, let's look at it from another angle. What is the goal for Blizzard? What should a successful paladin class look like?

Here's my definition of success for the paladin class:

Everyone expects a Holy paladin to melee.

If whatever changes Blizzard makes results in this, I will regard those changes as successful. If the changes do not result in this, those changes will be unsuccessful in my view.

For those of you who would like to see changes for the class, what are your criteria for success?

Specs and Fun

It's interesting how much difference your choice of spec makes. Not just in terms of effectiveness, but also in terms of playstyle and fun.

Holy is boring me out of my skull. It's fine when I'm in a group, but is terrible when soloing. Judge/Seal every 10s, Holy Shock every 15s. Attacking only one mob at a time. I'm so looking forward to going back to Protection or Retribution.

I've also run into this same situation with a Rogue. I rolled a Rogue to act as a farming alt for Coriel, but I didn't like the way it was playing and abandoned it at level 20. Up till then I had been speccing into Assassination, with an eye on getting Mutilate.

I was thinking about picking the rogue up again, and I realize that what I didn't like about the rogue was that it moved so slowly while in stealth. I was avoiding stealth because of this, pulling with a gun, and generally not playing a rogue effectively.

So I looked at the Rogue trees, and noticed that there's a talent in Subtlety that increases your speed in stealth. One respec to Subtlety later, and my rogue is fun again, and I stealth all the time.

2.1 Focus Macro Update

Patch 2.1 apparently changed how conditionals are handled, so here is an updated version of the focus macro I posted a while back:

#showtooltip spell
/clearfocus [target=focus, dead][button:3]
/focus [button:1/3, target=focus, noexists]
/cast [button:1/3, target=focus][button:2] spell

Patch 2.1 Impressions

Or the alternate title: Why Coriel Will Never Get an Epic Flying Mount.

So with patch 2.1 out, I decided to respec. I was having a really hard time choosing between 0/49/12 with the new Improved Holy Shield, or 0/19/42 as discussed in the previous post. In the end I decided to try out Retribution.

I respec, which costs me 35g. I accidentally assign the very first talent point to Improved Devotion Aura instead of Redoubt, ruining the build. So I respec again, 40g.

The build is really nice for soloing, questing, and killing single mobs. Even with my pathetic Ret gear, stuff was dying really fast. I really like the new Vengeance. I only have around 15% crit, but I was achieving perma-Vengeance easily (well, on elites and mobs that actually took some time to kill). The build is less survivable though, especially when taking on groups of mobs.

As well, the new debuff timers are pretty spiffy. Very nice for reapplying debuffs. I can't wait to see them on my warlock.

Right before Karazhan, one of the officers contacted me and told me that two of our healers would not be able to make raids for the next little while, and would I mind respeccing. I went back to Stormwind and respecced quickly to 50/11/0, 45g. Ironically, I ended up speccing Improved Devotion Aura. I wasn't expecting to spec to Holy, so I didn't have a good build in mind and ended up tossing 5 points in Improved Seal of Righteousness. I completely forgot about Improved Blessing of Might, which is my standard use for the extra 5 points when going Holy.

Heh, I'll probably end up respeccing Holy again, but this is sufficient for now.

I healbotted the raid. (Yay, #1 on the healing meters. Boo, #1 on the overhealing - 18%, I'm out of practice.) It's really hard to tell the actual effect of the Illumination nerf with the new spec and improved gear.

I must say that healing is surprisingly more fun when giant green numbers are popping up over the heads of other people. It's feedback that you are affecting the actual game, and not just the interface.

I'm not too thrilled by the new "greying out" of buttons. I very often have the mob as my main target, then press the button (while the previous heal is casting), then choose my target for heal. I find it's a good tactic for melee-healing, and for watching what the boss is doing and who he is targeting. But it means that a lot of buttons are always greyed out, which is silly.

Other than that, I think the Blizzard raid UI is finally up to a decent standard, with the introduction of Main Tank windows, and showing people's targets. I'm probably going to ditch sRaidframes/oRA2/CTRaidAssist, and just use the default UI.

I haven't had much of a chance to check out the new quests. I'm looking forward to those, but right now all the early areas are so crowded.

Retribution Off-tank Build

First, let's make the assumption that there is a warrior or druid MT, and the paladin is the OT. Would a build like 0/19/42 be better than the standard full protection build?

Retribution OT Build: 0/19/42

(Switch points from Anticipation to Precision once you have the necessary defence from gear.)

The big difference is that the Ret paladin is not going to be crush immune, but the Warrior/Druid MT is the one going to be handling the bosses and worrying about crushes. Combined with decent tanking gear, this build is more than sufficient to handle all non-73 mobs.

And once tanking duties are finished or not necessary, this build can pull out a 2H and add significantly more damage. If the paladin is in a DPS group, they can even switch to Sanctity Aura and boost everyone's damage.

(Just to be clear, if you are tanking anything during the fight, you are wearing tank gear, not Retribution gear.)

I don't think that this build will be sufficient to MT anything, but given that most groups already have a warrior (or druid) MT available, this build might be a more useful OT build than a Protection build.

You could also do a similar build but go Holy. However I don't think it would work as well, due to limited mana and +healing in tank gear. As well, if a normal 10-man has 2 tanks/3 healers/5 dps, one tank fights would be better off as 1 tank/3 healers/6 dps, rather than 1 tank/4 healers/5 dps.

The increased damage Retribution brings synergizes well with generating threat as an OT. This build would also bring 3% crit for the raid, allowing you to get the increased threat from Judgement of the Crusader at the same time, and Sanctity Aura for the DPS group.

I'm seriously considering respeccing to this build. I'm generally last on the tanking depth charts for my guild, so I never actually need to main-tank. This would make it a lot easier to maintain threat right behind the main tank, as well as be more useful in a fight like Shade of Aran.

The biggest thing stopping me from respeccing is 5-man play. Would this build be enough to tank a 5-man, or what other role would I take up? I am leery of a Ret paladin's viability in an actual DPS slot, at least with the gear I have. (Let's put it this way: I think I have less than 1000 AP in my DPS gear.)

Musings on Spell Damage

Something about the way +spell damage and healing works has always struck me as wrong.

In the current system, the amount of bonus an individual spell gets is given by a coefficient which is related to the cast time of the spell. Specifically, it's cast time divided by 3.5. This means that all spells get the same benefit from +spell damage over time. You get the same benefit from spamming Flash of Light for 15s as you would for spamming Holy Light.

And that seems wrong to me. Holy Light is the more powerful spell. It should get a bigger boost than Flash of Light. Indeed, the fact that both spells benefit equally from spell damage makes Flash of Light the better spell, in a way. It's cheaper to get the benefit of spell damage with Flash of Light.

Take a look at Blessing of Light. Blessing of Light gives a small bonus to FoL, and a much larger bonus to HL. This feels right. There should be an advantage to using the more powerful spell.

I think that rather than using cast time to determine the coefficient, a different metric should be used. To me, the best measure would be the amount of mana spent per second while casting the spell.

If you spam HL, you are spending 840 mana every 2.5s, or 336 mana/s.
If you spam FoL, you are spending 180 mana every 1.5s, or 120 mana/s.

Eyeballing that says that HL should get about 3 times the benefit in spell damage that FoL gets (on a per second basis). Intuitively, that seems reasonable to me. HL is our power spell, represented by its higher cost, and it seems right that our powerful spells should get more benefit from spell damage.

Blessing of Light tracks this ratio. BoL grants HL roughly 3 times the benefit it gives to FoL.

Because benefit is not linked to cost, +spell damage biases the caster towards cheaper spells. Restoring the link between benefit and cost will make using more powerful spells more attractive.

Old Posts About Hybrids

In light of the current discussions about hybrids, I'd like to point to a couple of my older posts. These were written back in December, after patch 2.0, but before TBC actually came out.

• Nefarian and the Hybrid Paladin



• The Price of Specialization

I think they sum up a lot of how I am feeling about the paladin now.

Relative Power Level of Fluid and Modal Hybrids

Kaziel posts a response to my previous post about fluid and modal hybrids:

Fluid hybrids cannot be equal power to single purpose classes, for game balance. In raids, underpowered classes or specs would (and are) shunned. Balanced fluid hybrids would never see endgame except in limited circumstances. Making hybrids modal allows them to be brought up to similar or equal power as a single purpose class without disturbing game balance too much, thus allowing them a place in endgame.

Here's the problem with this statement: being a hybrid (regardless of type) is in itself an advantage. If a modal hybrid was as good as a pure class, why would you bring the pure class? And if the pure class is better, why would you bring a hybrid?

If the hybrid is fluid, the fluidity is the reason you bring the hybrid. Sure the paladin may be a worse tank than the warrior, but she can off-tank an add, and after the add is killed, can help heal the warrior through the enrage. Fluid hybrids allow a raid group to adapt to multiple stage fights better and more smoothly because the hybrids can take a different role during each stage.

But if the hybrid is modal, she is a tank for the entire fight, and after the add is killed, becomes pretty much useless. In this case, why take the hybrid tank at all? Why not just take another warrior?

WoW sidesteps this problem a little bit by re-defining the pure classes (warrior, priests) as hybrids, thus allowing them to drag the other hybrid power levels up. But there is still a lot of sentiment that "priests should be the best healers". But if this was the case, why would you bring paladins? If priests are the best healers, modal healing paladins cannot tank, cannot dps, and would have worse healing than a priest.

1. Modal hybrids must be equal to pure classes at the given role, else the pure class will be preferred over the hybrid for that role.
2. But if they are equal at the given role, the hybrid is better because it is a hybrid, and offers additional options for the player.

This is a paradox. Blizzard has resolved it by redefining all tanking and healing classes as hybrids. Paladin healing can be as good as priest healing, because priests are modal hybrids and can become DPS.

A fluid hybrid does not need to be as good as the pure class. But they do need to be good enough to perform their part. And that is where historically that WoW has failed. Allowing hybrids to be good enough to, say, off-tank a mob while still retaining their fluidity to help heal after the mob is dead.

And the reason this is so, as most people pointed out in the previous post is because of gear.

Hybrid Theory: Fluid vs Modal

This post is inspired by a thread on the WoW forums. Unfortunately, I can't find that thread anymore. I really should start bookmarking good threads.

Imagine you have a DPS warrior in a lower level instance. Suddenly the tank goes down. What do you do?

You swap in a shield, taunt, and take over tanking. You probably aren't as good as the tank, but you can substitute well enough to finish the fight.

In this case, you are acting as a "fluid" hybrid, able to switch from one role to another while in the same fight.

The other extreme type of hybrid is a "modal" hybrid. A modal hybrid can switch from one role to the other, but not in the same fight.

A lot of people roll hybrids because they want to be fluid hybrids. To be able to equip a shield and take up tanking if the tank gets into trouble. To be able to drop back and support the healers. But, increasingly WoW hybrids are becoming modal hybrids. Your paladin can be a healer for this fight, or a tank, but you have to choose before the fight starts.

Indeed, the fluid hybrid disappears totally at endgame. All that's left is modal hybrids.

I think this theory goes to the heart of my current dissatisfaction with the paladin class. I rolled and played as a fluid hybrid, especially in 5-mans. But now, hybrids are almost entirely modal. For this instance run, I am a pure tank. For this boss fight, I am a pure healer.

The interesting question becomes why have hybrids in WoW gone almost entirely over the modal side?

Quick Background on WoW Combat

This is in response to a couple of comments to earlier posts. It's a quick, simple explanation of how the hit table works in WoW. It should provide enough background for the previous few tanking posts. I posted this as a response on the WoW forums. If you want additional information, check out the tanking guide Fortifications by Ciderhelm.
---
Imagine that everytime the mob swings at you, there is a table of possible results and a number from 1 to 100 is rolled. The number rolled is matched to the table entry, and that entry is the result of the attack. For example, a simple combat table might look like:

Roll Result
----- ------------
41-100 Hit
26-40 Crush (150% damage)
21-25 Critical (200% damage)
16-20 Block
11-15 Parry
06-10 Dodge
01-05 Miss

This is basically what happens in WoW when a mob attacks you. As you increase your defensive stats, the chances of each event change. If you have 490 Defense, criticals disappear from the table. As the block/parry/dodge/miss entries grow, they "push off" the upper entries.

So after getting a lot of tanking gear, the table might look like this:

Roll Result
----- ------------
91-100 Crush (150% damage)
51-90 Block
31-50 Parry
11-30 Dodge
01-10 Miss

Notice how hits have been pushed off the table entirely? And now you only have a 10% chance to get crushed?

If you got 10% more block/parry/dodge/miss, crushes would be pushed off the table entirely. You'd still take damage, because you take damage everytime you block. But you wouldn't take non-blocked hits, crushes, or criticals.

Because crushes are the last things to be pushed off the table, achieving this state is called being "uncrushable".

Best Lore Post Ever!

From Sylan of Gilneas, on the WoW paladin forums:

Lore changes. Evolves.

After Uther died Paladins lost their confidence. Paladins realized that they were mortal. Vulnerable. This fear has pervaded since Uther's demise and shows up in every aspect of the Paladin class to this very day. In fact, Paladins are so shaken that even their god-mode bubbles have begun to falter. At first Paladin lost their ability to use both bubbles back to back but as time went on things got worse. Priest learned of how shaken the Paladin faith was and learned to twist their magic to the point that they are now able to completely remove the god-mode bubble.

It is rumored that Uther's death may also cause Paladins to lose some of their ability to regenerate mana.

It's all in the lore if you know where to look.

Wow. That explains so much!