Each time you deal a melee critical strike, you gain Savage Defense, reducing the damage taken from the next physical attack that strikes you by 25% of your attack power.
What does this not do?
-It does not mitigate magical damage.
-It does not proc if the target is immune to attacks.
-It can not proc while you are stunned or incapacitated.
-Scale with incoming damage.
What does this do?
-Crit% chance to proc a one-time damage reduction equal to 25% of AP.
-This works out to about 40% chance for current gear and around 1500-1700 damage reduced(equivalent to block for paladin or warrior).
-Our combined swingtimer of swipe+maul is about 8 attacks every 7.5 seconds before factoring in haste. This means we're dealing with a about 1.0 swingtimer when correcting for lag.
-It takes on average 2.5 seconds to get a crit against a single target based on these assumptions.
-1500/2.5=600 damage reduced per second on average.
-Multiple mobs will increase the uptime of SD, but never beyond our combined swingtimer, so at best it will reduce damage by 1500 per second.
When will it be good?
-Trash tanking when dealing with a relatively small amount of mobs. More mobs increases the uptime, but beyond having 2.5 mobs(2.5*0.4=1.00=100% chance to crit on atleast one mob every second) there is litle gain. Multiple mobs infact simply scale the unmitigated portion of attacks since when working properly, SD is only intended to block one such attack, regardless of size, for the given amount(1500 low end estimate).
-2.5 second swingtimer boss hitting for less than 37.5k(15k DPS)(based on assumption of 12% protector of the pack and 30k armor post-3.1 as opposed to 37k armor pre-3.1 vs. a lvl83 mob which is a reduction of mitigation from ~73% to ~69%).
-Faster swingtimer reduces the portion of attacks SD reduces, balancing out at 15k DPS for a 1.0 swingtimer being the highest 1.0 DPS for which SD is beneficial.
-Basicly, as long as the physical damage portion of the fight does not go beyond 15k DPS SD is a buff.
When will it not be good?
-Extremely fast swingtimer/multiple sources of very small(less than 4.8k unmitigated) physical attacks.
-Slow, hard hitting bosses.
-Bosses for which physical DPS portion is over 15k.
Logic. Pretty great isn't it?
