The Light and How to Swing It: So you hit the block cap -- now what?

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 24 other people, obsessing over his hair (a blood elf racial!), and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense.

Here we are, finally at the block cap. It's been a rough few months, but the dream first conceived when the paladin mastery was announced has finally been realized. All that Firelands gear has left us fat with mastery and finally reducing all melee hits taken by 30%. And it feels so good.

Some of you might now be asking yourselves -- where do I go from here? (Ditto the folks who are within striking distance of this lofty perch.) Once you've hit the block cap and are overflowing with combat table coverage, you'll need to get proactive when it comes to managing your stats. Every point of mastery rating that carries you past 102.4% CTC is a point wasted, just cast right out into the Twisting Nether. We'll need to prevent all this horrible waste with efficient reforging and regemming and with an unhealthy amount of gear juggling.

Quick digression for new tanks and folks not yet at the cap: I've written in this space columns about what combat table coverage/the block cap is and tips on how to hit it efficiently. If the following seems to be little more than Greek (or random trumpet noises) to you, I recommend checking out those columns.

What's the optimal way to cap?

The best way to hit the block cap is with only one mastery trinket. That might not be possible initially, but you'll find that needing only one mastery trinket opens up a world of convenience for you where you can pivot on a dime to boost a needed stat. The quickest way to provide a big boost to your stats in the shortest time possible isn't hearthing back to Orgrimmar and reforging eight pieces -- it's equipping a different trinket.

For example, Baleroc is funny in that because of how his dual wielding is coded by the game, he requires 103.4% CTC to achieve total coverage. At just 102.4% (which works just splendidly on other bosses), he can still sneak in melees here and there. Likewise, Inferno Strikes require even more mastery to completely block -- something in the neighborhood of 110% or higher, according to testing done at Maintankadin.

As such, this is a pretty compelling reason to cap with just one mastery trinket, because you'll then be able to apply a second mastery trinket to that second trinket slot. Suddenly, you're sporting another 4.81% CTC and you can laugh off Baleroc's stacking of hit rating past the cap. What a noob.

Moreover, capping with only one trinket allows you to put in an expertise trinket for some extra DPS while remaining block-capped against the Hungry, Hungry Hatchlings during Alysrazor. Flexibility!

You could also have enough mastery that you can mooch off provided raid consumables like fish feasts and cauldron flasks, instead of quietly sipping your Lavascale Minestrone and elixir cocktail in a corner. This might be a tall order, though, with Elixir of the Master providing 2.82% block chance and Lavascale Minestrone providing .73% more CTC than an avoidance meal. However, keep in mind the Prismatic Elixir is beastly, so pinching pennies will have some cost.

Beyond the block cap

What should you be stacking past the block cap? Stamina. Avoidance is well and good, but what the advice for gemming dodge and parry past the CTC cap boil down to is the same logic that backed the strategy back in Wrath -- that a hit avoided is always better than a hit taken. You can add to that the Cataclysm-era determination that healer mana is a precious thing and you'll likely suffer OOM-death if you take too many hits.

While that's a reasonable assumption, it doesn't really hold up in current content. The biggest threat to tanks now, as it's been in the past, is burst. Eliminating a random hit here and there with an extra .9% avoidance won't in the big picture improve your survivability more than extra hit points will against burst. Those hit points will always be there to steel you against the hit; the avoidance might be out to lunch.

Likewise, healer mana (while not, as the French would say, Wrath-esque) is hardly a precious commodity. If they can keep you up while block-capped with mana to spare, adding a percent or two more avoidance chance will not prove the defining line between their springing a horrific mana leak and their Potions of Concentration going unchugged. Once you're at the level where block-capping is possible, healer mana just isn't in the same level of consideration as it would be if you just started tanking heroics and was stacking nothing but stamina.

As tanks, we're always gearing for the worst-case scenarios. With that reasoning, I've always found it hard to sacrifice itemization for something that might work, when I could build a fatter buffer between myself and whatever numbers pass after the "O:" in World of Logs. And that's without considering how much avoidance you're shoveling into the furnace that is diminishing returns.

A pure parry gem gives me .18% diminished avoidance at my current avoidance levels. A similar stamina gem will always give me a little more than 1,000 raid buffed hit points.

Post-cap itemization

If I may be so bold as to pimp my spreadsheet in this space again, I'd recommend running your numbers through the sheet before you make any gear choices. Check your raid buffs, and see what your total combat table coverage picture is like. If you're solidly over 102.4%, it'll tell you how much mastery rating you can safely slough off.

You'll want to make a good effort of regemming to start gaining the benefits of your gear's socket bonuses. There's a ton of untapped stamina locked in there that you've probably been ignoring thanks to militant mastery stacking. Convert red sockets to Defender's Demonseye, blue sockets to Solid Ocean Sapphires, and yellow sockets to Puissant Dream Emerald.

You'll likely have to do this piecemeal as upgrades free up more mastery to be ditched. Eventually, the end goal is to have activated every stamina socket bonus, picking up multiple thousands of hit points in exchange.

As for enchants, I'd leave them be. Competing enchants (to the accepted best choices) are often terrible, affecting neutered stats we don't care about like armor or agility or giving less itemization bang for your buck (like Earthen Vitality). Thus, it makes more sense to keep the mastery enchant and free up more itemization for stamina elsewhere.

Reforging can be used to fine tune your mastery, but when the choice is between block chance and avoidance chance, there's hardly any benefit. Don't reforge all your mastery to hit or expertise, or something crazy like that -- threat still doesn't matter at the block cap. Especially after it's been taken out back and hit with a sack full of doorknobs. You'll gain more using the usual pre-cap strategy of reforging all your pieces to mastery and then (again) reap the itemization benefits in stamina gems.

Enjoy it while it lasts

While it may be a blast marching around like tiny gods, this dream isn't going to last forever. Blizzard said before 4.2 launched that it wasn't happy with the idea that paladins can block cap and is intent on stopping it, but the developers didn't have the time to make it work (or, in this case, not) for the Firelands patch. So be forewarned that our precious mastery is firmly in their crosshairs. Don't get too attached, and enjoy the rush of constant, guaranteed melee mitigation while you can.

The Light and How to Swing It shows paladin tanks how to take on the dark times brought by Cataclysm. Try out our 4 tips for upping your combat table coverage, find out how to increase threat without sacrificing survivability, and learn how to manage the latest version of Holy Shield.