Block Value question

Classes Warrior
1

TLDR: Equipping higher item level pieces makes the mitigation percentage of the block stat go down. Started the day at 41%, equipped higher item level gear from weeklies and it went down to 39.5%

Thought?

Hey, I recently leveled my warrior to L70. Just hit up the dream tonight and started doing the weeklies for gear and I noticed something that I don’t have an answer for.

When I equip new, higher item level gear, my block value goes down.

The block chance percentage varies based on mastery on the gear, but the actual block amount (the amount of damage that gets mitigated by each block) goes down.

It doesn’t matter what item I equip, shoulders, neck, weapon, trinket. Any item that has a higher item level makes that block value go down.

Any ideas?

I started the day with JUST over 41% block value. After doing some weeklies, getting some timewalking gear and turning in the weekly timewalking quest for an item, I have a higher item level, but my block value is now sitting at 39.62%. So it went down by at least 1.5%

Not sure what’s causing this to happen. I haven’t swapped out my shield to a better one yet. (just using one I got off the AH. It’s item level 424) I was wondering if it was a specific stat that adjusts it? I’d think strength, but gaining more strength from gear makes it go down. Crit makes it go down too. (I’ve gained more crit with new gear)

What is my block value supposed to be at? Does it level out and come to a static flat number at some point, or will it always fluctuate, and why does it fluctuate? I assumed the number would only go up.

Thanks in advance for any imput.

2

what are the stats on the two pieces, i believe that stat is tied to mastery, so if overall you lost mastery but gained other stats, that would do it.

3

I was dinking around looking at things.

Mastery is tied into block CHANCE. I noticed that as my CHANCE to block went up, my overall mitigation per block went down.

It evened out to be about the same amount regardless though.

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4

So no real info on why increasing all my stats would lower the block value? It just seems like a weird thing to code into the game. Your item level goes up, but your stat goes down.

5

I assume its a balancing issue so you cant stack Mastery and end up with 80% damage reduction with a good shield.

As i said, as your block chance goes up, the overall damage reduction goes down, and as your block value goes down, the tital damage reduction goes up.

Seems to seesaw around a set point. But the overall damage mitigation seems to float around an extra 25% physical damage reduction as a net gain

6

Armor and block both use the same K value in their formulas. I don’t know offhand what the formula for block is (might be the exact same as armor), but for armor it is dr=armor/(armor+k). K is a value that changes based on content. So K in season 1 world content might be 11766, but in season 3 mythic raid might be 19000 or so.

Essentially, by equipping higher ilvl gear, the against equal level target portion of the character sheet will adjust the value of K upwards and the value per point of your armor and block will appear weaker. What you want to compare is the against current target value on the character sheet while having the same target, so K will be based on the targets content level (or ilvl if it’s a player).

Stealing this from a shadowlands write up:
Because there is a relation between the ilvl of the content and K, there is also a relation between a pvp opponent’s ilvl and K. As such, trying to calculate armor based off of the tooltip while outside of an instance and targeting a player, yourself or without a target can give unexpected results.

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7

Thanks for all that info, it definitely helps clear it up a bit more.

8

On a similar but slightly unrelated note, is there a way to get details to track mitigation from armor and blocks?

I can see “shield” spells like ignore pain/Ursoc’s Fury, but I would love to see how much of my mitigation is tied to ignore pain vs blocking vs armor. And even what my crit block percentage is, highest hit blocked, how many attacks blocked and how many times I hit shield block ect.

Right now; at least with baseline plug and play details; it doesn’t track any of that. Just “shields” and heals under healing done.

Damage taken doesn’t show mitigated damage.

All that info should be tied to the combat log, but I have no idea where in the settings I would find it. Or is there another better addon that can track that stuff?

9

I don’t think there’s anything for armor, but details will show your damage blocked, absorbed, etc in the avoidance breakdown of damage taken.

10

I messed with it and it’s real janky. Either it calculates stuff or it doesn’t at all.

I did some small scale testing to see if it would do what I’m looking for and the results are inconclusive.

I attacked the tanking dummy in Valdrakken for about 5 mins and it calculated that I blocked 70 times, parried 26 times and dodged twice.

Then I went into the wild, found a mob to beat up, put up last stand for a 15 sec block and blocked every attack and it showed a total of 0 blocks. (Even through the floating combat text was showing blocks)

And yes, I swapped the data to the fight I had just had.

So unless I’m somehow using it wrong, some times it’ll count it and other times it won’t.

1 Like
11

Your best bet is probably going to be contacting the author of details