Yesterday we discussed how the Combat Table is important from a ‘getting hit’ point of view. Today, we’re going to dish out some damage ourselves, so let’s see how the Combat Table relates to when we are the ones doing the attacking!

I refer you to our first post on the Combat Table for reference on how the basic mechanics work. So why do we care about when we are the ones doing the damage? For a tank, damage equals threat, and threat equals a smooth tanking experience. One of the ways to scale your threat is to do more damage, and to do more damage, you need higher DPS weapons, AND you need to be able to hit the mob!

As players, we can help our chances to hit mobs by adding +hit to our gear. Let’s take our handy test Combat Table from our previous post:

As you can see, we have a 5% chance to outright miss an attack. If we can mitigate this miss chance, that will directly increase how much threat we can generate. Adding 1% to hit, will remove 1% to miss. Unfortunately, adding 1% crit will not reduce your miss rate, it will only increase the amount of hits that are crits. As an example, if we add 1% hit, our new combat table will be:

Increased chances to hit will directly impact the amount of threat you generate. Unfortunately not much tanking gear comes with +hit so if you want to get some +hit, you will need to choose wisely.

If you are an Armorsmith be sure to work to get the [item]Breastplate of Kings[/item] line of breastplates. This is also another reason why [item]King’s Defender[/item] is so nice.

So how much Hit Rating do you need?  Well, about 16 Hit Rating translates into 1% to hit. So you don’t really need need more than 80 Hit Rating which will give you 5% to Hit.

In closing, definitely do not gimp your tanking abilities to get +hit, but if you can get some +hit, you will absolutely see an increase in your threat generation.

A few days ago we discussed the importance of using Shield Block and mentioned the Combat Table. Today we are going to go over the Combat Table, what it is, and why it is important to understand how it works.

Basically the Combat Table determines when an attack will hit or miss and what kind of hit the result will be. The Combat Table factors in the chance that an attack will flat out Miss, be Dodged, be Parried, be Blocked (partially or fully), be Critically Hit, be Crushed by Crushing Blows, or be Hit regularly. The order here is important, as the higher your chances of defending an attack can push the other types of attacks off the Combat Table. The order is as mentioned:

• Miss
• Dodge
• Parry
• Block
• Critical Hit
• Crushing Blow
• Hit

There is actually an additional option called Glancing Blows, but that is for player attacks vs MOBS and here we are mainly interested in tanking mobs, not dealing damage.

All of these options are combined into a single table that results in 100% of attacks. A single random number is generated to determine the result of an attack. Let’s look at an example:

Let’s say you are fighting a MOB of equal level and that you have the following combat table when the mob tries to hit you:

A random number between 0 and 99.9 is generated. Let’s say the random number is 43.2. If you look up the value in the table, you see that a Critical Hit will be scored.

Now, let’s take the same numbers above, but let’s assume you had activated Shield Block like in our discussion a couple of days ago. Shield Block adds 75% to Block. When that 75% is added to Block, other attacks will be pushed off the end of the table.

As you can see, when you increase your Block by 75%, it effectively pushes off all attacks off of the table, guaranteeing that you will at least Block the attack.

I hope this has shed a little more light on how NPC attacks are resolved and further solidifies the reasoning behind Shield Block, as well as give you more insight in general why you want to have higher avoidance values (Dodge, Parry, Block).

Next time we will discuss the Combat Table a little more but from the perspective of players attacking NPCs!<

Matthew over at WoWInsider.com does a great job of getting warrior information out to the unwashed masses in his blog, The Care and Feeding of Warriors.

In his latest post, he discusses the Don’ts of grouping with a warrior.  They are all great points.  Probably my biggest pet peeve are the rogues who cheap shot the mobs right when I pull, thus starting out my fight a bit rage starved.<

Recently it came to my attention that one of our warrior tanks was never using Shield Block while tanking. And I mean never! When I asked him why wasn’t he using Shield Block, he said because he was already uncrittable without using it. I then asked him about Crushing Blows to which he claimed he never saw crushing blows occur.

That night, I took some combat logs and uploaded them to WoW Web Stats (WWS) to show that he indeed was being crushed and causing his healers some undue stress!

Let’s look at what exactly Shield Block does. Shield Block is a 10 rage skill that increases a warrior’s block rate by 75% for 1 hit or 5 seconds, which ever comes first. You can further improve Shield Block by picking up the tier 3 Protection Talent, Improved Shield Block which will allow your Shield Block to block an additional attack and also adds 1 second to the duration.

As long as a warrior has a cumulative base 25% dodge, parry, and block, using the Shield Block skill will push Crushing Blows off of the damage table (we will go into this in another post) against even level or below mobs. Against higher level mobs (73 for boss mobs), you actually need 27.4% to be Crushing immune.

So what is a Crushing Blow? A Crushing Blow is an attack made by an mob that is 150% of the damage caused by a normal successful attack. Crushing Blows are spike damage that can kill a player rather quickly.

Being Crushing Blow immune is very important against raid level bosses to prevent tank death and a probable ensuing raid wipe. Because of this, against hard hitting bosses, it is imperative that warriors keep Shield Block up as much as possible while retaining mob aggro.

Next time, we will discuss the damage table as mentioned above and go into greater detail about how exactly Shield Block and other tank abilities can cause a tank to become Crushing Immune