Main Tanking KaraFollow

You're short um 30 some def, so change your feet/body to obtain 490 def.

With 490 and 13k unbuffed you're good to tank all of Kara. You should also be able to tank HKM in Gruul's.

Gruul is a pushover once you get him the first time. Loot reaver in TK is also quite easy. I would rate some of the later bosses in ZA as some of the hardest in the game. You can easily down bear boss and eagle boss with a well geared kara tank, but you wont get much further than that. Each raid has their own easy and hard bosses. Lurker in SSC becomes quite easy with a bit of coordination, while Vashj I would rate as one of the most difficult raid bosses you will EVER encounter. Good luck in your progression!

Your unbuffed armor is 15-16k? How the hell? lol. My unbuffed armor is like 12k, and I can't figure out how to get it all that much higher.

Hmm, I actually have no idea what boss you're talking about lol. The chestpiece I'm wearing actually is from Mech. You thinking of Breastplate of the Bold? I tried to get it a few times but it hasn't dropped yet, and it's only a marginal upgrade. Has 0 upgrade armor-wise, which is what I think I'm lacking.

Edit: Now that I read it again I think the second paragraph of your post is to the OP, not to me :P

Edited, Jan 22nd 2008 12:28pm by duvar

My question doesn't have to do with gear, but it does have to deal with tanking Kara.

I'm curious about which Pots would be best as a MT.

You have a choice of the Super Healing Potion, Ironshield Potion, Heroic Potion, and Haste Potion. All benefit tanking in some way.

Super Healing Potion: For obvious reasons, regens health for those moment when the healers aren't keeping up for whatever reason, that fraction of a seconds worth of extra health, could make the difference from a wipe to a victory.

Ironshield Potion: Again for obvious reasons, 2500 armor for 2 minutes, which each pot has a 2 minute CD, so essentially you have an extra 2500 armor for the entire boss fight.

Heroic Potion: Kind of like a second Last Stand, plus it grants an extra 70 strength, which adds a little more DPS and TPS to the mix.

Haste Potion: +400 Haste, I'm not exactly sure how haste rating converts over to attack speed, but +400 doesn't seem small on any accounts. I could see these as very usefull in the beginning of the fight. Pop a haste potion, increased attack speed, is increased rage, is increased TPS, is a bigger gap on total threat between you and the DPS to allow the DPS to go all full bore earlier in the fight.


I see all having some good benefits to MT in raids, but I can't decide. I could easily use the Haste Potion 1st then spam Ironshield throughout the fight, but that would leave the Super Healing pot out of the question since it's more of a situational Pot and Ironshield will be taking up the CD. But again I don't even know if the Haste is really worth it since I've never really used it before. Any advice is apreciated.

I made an interesting Excel Spreadsheet today. It uses Effective Health theory to determine how much Effective Health is added by various types of buffs, potions, equipment upgrades, etc. It's specific to each character, but here's some of the numbers I came up with for my character. I assume that the target is a level 70 elite mob in all of the following calculations.

Commanding Shout -> 8.78% increase to EH
Ironshield Potion -> 11.18% increase to EH
Stoneshield Potion -> 8.95% increase to EH
Elixir of Superior Defense -> 2.01% increase to EH
Last Stand -> 30.00% increase to EH
Super Healing Potion -> 16% increase to EH
Heroic Potion -> 5.9% increase to EH

These are all when used by themselves and no other buffs active. Things change slightly when you have lots of other buffs. Let's say I have a Scroll of Protection V, Prayer of Fortitude, Commanding Shout, eating a Spicy Crawdad and an Elixir of Superior Defense.

Now the above numbers change to the following:

Ironshield Potion -> 13.16% increase to EH
Stoneshield Potion -> 10.53% increase to EH
Last Stand -> 36.56% increase to EH
Super Healing Potion -> 16.84% increase to EH
Heroic Potion -> 5.9% increase to EH

The ordering is still the same in that Super Healing Potion provides the largest boost to effective health. But by changing my stats via various buffs you can see the gap is closing. Ironshield Potion is only 3.5% behind Super Healing Potion when I'm buffed, vs. almost 5% behind a Super Healing Potion when unbuffed. So the answer may be different for you, it depends on your stats.

For the healing potion I simply assumed that you have a health pool of exactly 2,000 more than if you don't use the healing potion. Since it actually restores anywhere from 1,500 to 2,500 I assumed a normal distribution so that over time it recovers 2,000 per usage.

The math I used was as follows, feel free to correct if it's wrong.

M = Mitigation
A = Armor Value
H = Health
EL = Effective Health
ELPH = Effective Life Per Health

M = A / (A + 10557.5) (reference)

ELPH = 1 / (1 - M)

EL = ELPH * H


Combining all these equations to get one simple equation gives:

EL = H * (1 + A/10557.5)

So in the case of a Super Healing Potion it's basically "Increase H by 2,000 and recalculate". In the case of an Ironshield Potion it's "Increase A by 2,500 and recalculate".

In my case, A = 11889 and H = 12274.

EL = 12274 * (1 + 11889 / 10557.5) = 26095.98

Increasing H by 2,000 gives

EL' = 14274 * (1 + 11889 / 10557.5) = 30348.22

Instead increasing A by 2,500 gives

EL'' = 12274 * (1 + 14389 / 10557.5) = 29002.45

Sorry, should have added. You can use that to derive a general expression that will allow you to determine whether or not you should add a certain amount of armor or a certain amount of health. If anyone wants I can show the derivation, but basically if you have to choose between adding 'h' Health, or 'a' Armor, you should choose health if and only if

h/H > a/(10557.5+A)



Yea, unfortunately effective health theory only really demonstrates what happens if a mob is beating on you from full health until you're dead, and you're receiving no healing. An Ironshield Potion will likely last over the course of being hit 50-60 times, and it will probably end up mitigating far more than 2,000 damage over those 50 or 60 hits. If a mob is hitting you for 3,000 per hit and you're at 53% mitigation, that means it's raw damage is around 6382. Increasing your armor by 2,500 gives you 57.8% mititagion, which means each hit is now around 2693. So it's doing about 307 damage per hit less. It would only take being hit 6.5 times to make up the difference in the potion.

Cliffs notes: If it's near the end of the fight or it won't last much longer, use a health potion. If it's a trash pull and you're going to be tanking multiple mobs at once, use the Ironshield. If you're almost dead and the pull isn't even close to being dead yet, pop Shield Wall and Last Stand, then use the Ironshield Potion :P

Edited, Jan 22nd 2008 3:32pm by duvar

I pop those like candy, after I relized that the CD is less? than the duration of the pot. I only use them on the hard hitters (Nightbane, Prince, no need for Netherspite because of the red beam, ALL bosses in ZA... only cleared bear and eagle so far but we're getting there). There's also the 2000 armor ones, if there are no ironshield pots. The 2000 is cheaper than the Ironshield pots.