Is not as bad as it’s made out to be and deserves more consideration.
Now before you tell me I am wrong hear me out. I may not be a player who’s playing at the very top end of content when it comes to mythic raiding or m+ so what I am about to write out here may not apply there as well or at all. My approach to content in the game’s more of a casual one with the occasional low key or heroic raid every other week when my RL schedule allows it. But I’ve always enjoyed the theorycrafting side of things.
At the beginning of Shadowlands my go-to source of information for builds, talents and so forth was Icy-Veins and Wowhead like I’m sure many others have as well. There the general opinions of NS is that it’s basicly useless compared to Indomitable and that it should never be taken. However I felt the explanation was not very good and too short to be satisfying so I did a bit of testing of my own. I’ll assume that you already know how IP works so I will not go into that but below I’ve paraphrased the abilitys tooltip.
Ignore Pain
40 Rage
Ignoring 50% of damage taken up to X total damage prevented.
What I found was that with the talent the shield amount was increased by 40% at full health, around 70% at half health and down at only 10% health the shield provided was near twice the base amount. This might seem obvious at first as this is what the tooltip of the talent says that it does. But it’s worth looking deeper into what this means on a fundamental level. In an ideal scenario where you’re tanking your health should be pending somewhere between 50-99% of your max HP to ensure that you’re not at a risk of dying from the incoming damage and that the incoming healing is not wasted. Say then that you are getting an average benefit of around 50% in this scenario, that’s effectively 20 rage worth of extra damage prevented every time you press Ignore Pain and most of the time the IP shield’s broken by damage rather than the buff expiring.
Magic damage’s a prot warriors greatest weakness at the moment and IP’s the most consistent tool available to deal with it.
But Indomitable also comes with a benefit based on rage?
This is very true. The competing talent in this tier increases your maximum health by 10% and heals you for 4% of this new max health each time that Ignore Pain is used. This is great for surviving fights where you’re seeing very high damage where the extra health and healing might afford the healer(s) another second or two to catch the tank based on raw hitpoints. However it does precious little to actually reduce the incoming damage.
The extra self-healing is nice to have but it seems like only a tiny amount of healing compared to the output available from a healer. So long as you’re not dying then what % of health you’re at does not seem relevant and more of a secondary concern after managing your mitigation. Let the healer(s) worry about keeping your health bar topped up. The more damage reductions that are active on the tank the more efficient the healing becomes.
If you’ve made it this far through my rambling then I thank you for your time and attention. Does my thoughts on the talent have any merit at all or am I completely missing the point? What are your thoughts on the talent?
Hi, I dont recall what amoung IP givrs me currently but it is not a big deal, so additional 50% of it might be simply equal to 10% of extra health, but you are losing selfhealing.
The problem with Never Surrender is that it’s reactive, it only works on the IP if the IP is used at X health. If you use it at 100% health and drops to 50% health while it’s still active (impossible I know, and just for the example) then the reduction of it counts as it being casted at 100% health.
The other issue is that Indomitable gives a gameplay element that should be baseline and is thus highly diserable.
But the reverse is also true. If your health drops to 50% and you’re healed back up then you still keep the NS absorb bonus(You obviously don’t do this intentionally). It’s also worth noting that the shield amount from IP stacks up to about the amount of, I think, around two full IPs. From what I have seen NS is counted on top of this.
I agree that Indomitable gives a sorely needed self-heal which is a part of our kit that’s sorely lacking and which should be baseline. In addition to new applications of Shield Block extending the buff like it did in past x-packs instead of just applying a new one and wasting the remaining duration like it does now.
With my gear at the moment the base amount I’m getting from IP is around 6k. With 50% NS this goes up to around 9k from just one application of IP and around 18k with two. I’d say that’s comparable to having 10% extra health. The larger shield practically meaning that for 11 seconds the next 36k raw damage that you take you’re only hit by 50% of it. Granted you’re never going to have the shield capped out for more than a few seconds while tanking but the increased amount should in theory allow for a better IP uptime. Speaking of impossibilities if you can somehow maintain IP 100% of a fight then the reduction it provides is like having Shield Wall up for the whole fight.
It raises the question; At which point does the value of the self-heal become less than the value of the damage reduction?
I am not trying to argue that NS is better than indom all the time but I think there’s an argument to be made that the talent is largely undervalued for what it provides and that it can be comparable or even better in situations where external healing is available.
Well, i checked it also and currently i got about 6.9k. With this talent let say I could get 4k more per cast, but I also lose about 6k health + selfheal.
So assuming you have two IP cast, then I could get about 8k, maybe 10k more IP shield vs. Having 6k constant more HP and selfheal (for 80k rage, so cost of two IP it would be approx 5k).
That so, makes indomitable at least equal or better in terms in value of pure def it provides, and with more stamina it will scale better. Last but not least, you save 80rage you can spend on other skills.
I like your atitude, and would also love to have more variations with talents but here NS is simple lackluster - if it would reduce IP cost also by 40-100% then it could work
While that is correct the healing from Indomitable makes it takes longer to reach 50% health. There’s also the fact that Indomitable is way superior to Never Surrender due to Grievous.
Never Surrender just makes you die slower while Indomitable prevents you from dying.