Recommended Melee PvP Expertise?

I’ve become obsessed with my melee abilities getting dodged and parried. On my Ret, I’ve gone entire Zealotry durations with every Crusader Strike being dodged/parried. I’ve struggled to GET Zealotry going because of failure to land Crusaders, and a total lack of talent procs.

I’ve had Mages dodge my Throwdown after Heroic Leaps, I’ve had Rogues/Ferals dodge 10 Rends in a row without using CD’s, and…

… TLDR, I’ve been losing my mind over this crap.

So I regemmed and reforged my Ret and my Warrior to have 11%/9% expertise respectively. Is that going overboard?

And if you say yes… … … Is it REALLY, though???

What do you guys think? I feel like if this prevents even two abilities from being avoided, then I make up for the damage loss of going strength/mastery with the itemization. Thoughts?

Get behind the mob to avoid being parried, and then you only need the dodge cap. Expertise is your second priority after getting 8% hit.

No, that’s not enough expertise. You want 20% expertise rating if you want both dodge and parry to be off the table. For human that’s 515 expertise, not sure what it would be for orc. Get reforgelite classic and use that.

You could just go for dodge cap, but I do both because as a warrior in both 2’s and 3’s I’m generally the focus target and I dont want to get parried.

Also its 5% hit not 8% for pvp.

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You don’t prio mastery as your 2nd stat on a warrior it’s crit.

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When I say 11%/9% I mean that’s the value it’s actually taking off for enemies to dodge or parry. My expertise on sheet says “36%” aka 36… score? They really made it weird. Level 36 expertise??? Lmao.

But yeah. Enemies have 9% less chance, for my Warrior. I had previously had the “level 20 expertise” that you mention, which is -5% dodge/parry. But that didn’t feel like enough… I was still being dodged by Mages, Warriors and DK’s kept parrying me, and god knows Rogues & Ferals dodged the crap outta me still.

I myself have 11% parry on my Warrior. So even with level 36 expertise, which is -9%, I would still parry myself 2% of the time.

This blows my mind! I feel like I’d gain maybe… 3% crit for totally refocusing into it. Meanwhile, Warriors get 2.2% per mastery “point” which seems higher than average, with a good effect I thought. I also thought Mastery procs give us extra rage, but maybe not??

the ret i play ret dk with goes with 25% because he has the trinket and sometimes he still misses cstrikes thru dodging

From an 8 year old guide:

Stats priority.

Just follow the next pattern.
5% Hit > Strength > Crit/Resilience > Mastery > Haste

*Where is expertise?
This is a matter of perspective, whether you prefer a safety stat (such as expertise) or crit.
You must have at least 20, you don’t want to miss casters because you won’t have many chances to actually do some damage to them. While reading Arena Junkies forums, I saw that a lot of warriors stacked expertise up to 28~ because of the amount of ferals and rogues in arena.

20 expertise - required. You should get 10 expertise from gear and an additional 10 from Glyph of Seal of Truth.

I agree the base 20 (5%) is all that makes sense. Beyond that, flank them.

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^the funny one is Gouge, since they have to be facing you. Not sure if there are any other moves like this.

My rogue buddy got tilted the other day when a Mage parried Gouge. We were laughing how this makes little sense

You want …
5% hit chance = 0.00% chance to MISS target lvl 85.
20% expertise = 0.00% chance to dodge or parry target level 85.

These are base numbers from the character stats tab against a level 85, and are only relevant if your target does not have any defensive modifiers nor do you have debuffs.

Yeah, my concern is druids, really. Rogues have high dodge too, but i have no problem squishing them.

But SOMETHING about ferals… i feel like i can never move their health bar. Not sure if that’s cuz of dodge or something else.

There is a lot that goes into this.

First, without watching you pvp, there is no way for me to know what’s going on. If you have details (the addon), you can always go back to the fight between you and the druid and see whats going on.

One thing to note. Druids are generally night elves. So they do have an additional chance to dodge. So the 5% reduce chance to be parried/dodged does not wipe their dodge chance off the table.

Also druids get extrea heals while in cat form, and their bear form is just tanky as hell. Also, they have 2 AMAZING defensive cooldowns on quite a short cooldown timer. I know on my druid when I get rushed by a warrior or pally, and they pop all their CDs… I’m swapping bear and popping mine… Again, without watching your fights, there is no way for me, or anybody to know exactly whats going on.

That said… Druids outside of their enraged regeneration window, are not hard to chunk. Especially if you catch them in a stun in cat form.

If you’re at 20 expertise… I’m willing to bet it’s not the 1% chance to dodge that’s keeping them alive. (And druids cant parry).

I thought cat form had rogue levels of dodge. (About 20%?)

I’m fully pvp geared on my druid. I have 24% dodge on him in cat form. 0% parry 0% block. 3932 resil. So the dodge is a little higher than I thought.

I just did a few quick games to see how often I’m dodging melee attacks.
Game 1: Arms Warrior/Ret Pally
Result Paladin:
Crusader Strikes Dodged = 0
Judgements Dodged = 0
Templar’s Verdict Dodged = 1
HOJ Dodged = 0
Hammer of Wrath Dodge = 0
White Hits Dodged = 6
Total % Dodged = 6%

Warrior Results
Mortal Strikes Dodged = 1
Rend Dodged = 1
Overpower Dodge = 0
Heroic Strike Dodged = 1
Heroic Throw Dodged = 0
White Hits Dodged = 11

Total % dodged = 11%

Warrior seems like he was missing a bit of gear, only had 116k HP. So may not have had the 20 expertise rating.

Game 2
Blood DK (Gross)
Ret Pally

My total Dodge was just over 8%

Game 3
Prot Pally (Gross)
Disc Priest

My total dodge was 18% mostly the white hits from the pally

All in all… I’m not sure I would invest more than 20 expertise on my warrior/pally/DK/Rogue just to counter that extra dodge. I think at that point you’re just losing too much in crit. I’m not sure where the deminishing returns are, statistically or the math behind it. But every top rated player I’ve inspected seems to be at either 20 expertise or 24 Expertise (If they have the heroic expertise trinket from raids).

I’m personally at 20 and I honestly don’t notice myself getting dodged all that often on my warrior. Im sure it happens vs druids and rogues, but overpower makes up for that IMHO.

As I mentioned before, I’m trash on my ret, so I don’t take my games very serious and I’m low MMR on it (Under 1500), so It’s hard for me to even have any input.

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5% so you wont get dodged by clothies any more than that and you are playing with yourself

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Well, it’s important to know if you were able to keep yourself facing them or not. They’ll use all their abilities if they manage to get behind you, but the white swings will just keep coming and not care. So that’s what I’m seeing with your posted results.

Always gotta try to get behind your target on offense. But that’s a defender’s game; it should be next to impossible to make sure you get behind someone without using abilities to do so.

I’m gonna be completely honest, I think gemming/reforging/etc for expertise is a waste in PvP. But I don’t know if that’s right or not.

Here’s why:

You can gem, enchant, reforge, everything for expertise. You hit that 5% reduced chance to dodge mark. But that doesn’t account for your opponent (be it a rogue, feral, whatever) having close to 30% dodge.

So you do all that gemming and everything to go from what, 30% dodge to 25%? I would rather just put all those gems and reforges into resil/crit. It feels way more valuable.

But maybe someone else knows more than me.

It’s not right. Expertise to 5% reduction is critical in pvp. Imagine if you were on your hunter and you tried to scatter shot a healer and missed…

Those are not the 2 classes that you’re getting to the 5% cap for though. And even if you’re not completely removing the dodge off the table, it still helps.

All the crit in the world does nothing if you miss your attacks. Every top pvper in the game gets to either 20 or 24 expertise on the classes that require it.

It’s kind of like getting to your spell pen cap on classes like Ferals. You just have to make sure your CC isnt gonna miss on a critical target.

I have about 20% dodge in my druid in cat form, but I’m a tank and all my gear is reforged to dodge.

A PVP or DPS druid is probably closer to 15%.

edit: I see someone posted they actually have 24% in full PVP gear, which seems odd to me but maybe the ilvl difference is that much of a big deal with PVP gear being at 365.

This is Vizual posting on my druid… just to show that I do in fact have a druid in full pvp gear lol.

My dodge rating is 25% now not 24%. So it actually went up. I’m an idiot and accidently had one of my int rings on from my resto set.

Anyways. Dodge as a cat 25%, when i pop into bear it goes to 31%. Not shifted I’m at 21%. with 3932 resil.

This is in full 365 gear with the 359 weapon.

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