Sun Eater and now whatFollow

S3 will have rating requirements. They will be dropped slightly. The season 4 pieces that require a rating requirement will have a HIGHER rating requirement than the current season 3 pieces.

I still wouldn't touch the PvP shields with a 10 mile pole, but you're right. Those options are there and available to anyone who might find use for them in their kit.

First, I liked how you tactfully left off the "/end sarcasm" on my post. Thanks for tailoring my quote to fit YOUR agenda.

Second, you bloody asked why the Cudgel! Forgive people for giving responses to your own questions.

Thirdly, I never discouraged anyone from PvPing for tank items, only the ones that have no place in a tank's gear set up (which is most of them). If you go research my posts you'll find that I have agreed the Gladiator's weapons/shields were good for a tank. That said, there are people like me that wish to have NOTHING to do with PvP whatsoever, and so there is nothing wrong with presenting a perfectly viable alternative that is, guess what!, acquired through PvE content! That is what the Cudgel of Consecration is: a great threat weapon with high stamina (through a blue socket) usable by Paladin tanks that is acquired by running PvE content.

For those that don't mind PvP, sure go for the Gavel. If not, go for the Cudgel. Simple as that.

EDIT: a little comparison here. Merciless Gladiator's Gavel vs. Cudgel of Consecration (sporting a Solid Star of Elune).
- same Stamina
- Cudgel has +2 intellect
- Merc has +20 spell damage
- Cudgel has +3 spell hit
- Merc sports 18 resilience
- Merc is .3 seconds faster (1.6 as opposed to 1.9)

Nearly identical. Now the Merciless Gladiator's Shield Wall vs. Dawnforged Defender (one of the better easy to acquire PvE shields).
- Merc has +855 armor
- Merc has +30 natural block value (reduced to -3 overall taking into account the Dawn's Equip bonus)
- Merc has +17 stamina
- Dawn has +18 dodge rating
- Dawn has +13 hit rating
- Merc has +31 resilience

Clearly if you are more concerned with stamina/armor, Merc is for you. If you need avoidance from your shield, get a PvE shield.

Edited, May 23rd 2008 12:33am by Maulgak

That would be rather hypocritical of me, considering I have both the gladiator's gavel and shield wall on my paladin, and a merc. gladiator's shield wall on my warrior. The resilience makes them awesome for resist fights.

I put forth a pretty fair comparison of the weapons, and as I said, you have to put the Cudgel out there for consideration because it is very comparable to the Gladiator's Gavel, yet it is accessable through PvE, and there are people out there who just don't like to PvP.

I mean, I'll give an example just using what you said:

S1 mace costs over 25k honor. I don't know what kind of playtime you put in grinding honor but there's no way an average person is going to get 25k honor in a single day. Especially not if they're pugging.

what do you get for a 10 min steamroll BG win on a weekend (wsg/eots/AB)? 300 honor a game?

would take 13 hours to get 25k honor if thats the case.

The daily is worth 400 honor, but that says nothing of the task of actually winning the necessary BG, which can be a tall order for Alliance on most Battlegroups. The best way to earn honor pieces now is to play the BG you need marks from until you have enough, then rotate the four BG's and continually turn in the repeatable quest until you have the required honor.

The problem is AV. Since 2.4, AV has gone from a 10-15 minute boss race to a 30-45 minute reinforcement grind. This happened right when I was in the middle of grinding out my initial Resto PvP gear for my Shaman, and after struggling for a few days, finally capped off by spending 37 minutes in an AV for 20 honor, I was so exasperated that I almost re-rolled Horde.

As it is, if you can PUG 1-1.5k honor an hour as Alliance on a typical Battlegroup, you're in pretty good shape. Anything over that would amost certainly require a good, geared raid.

Some classes PvP has definite upgrades, even into BT you will see PvP swords at the S3 level outstrip PvE equivalents. Same with druid gear, same with hunters same with a number of classes.

Smart player takes the upgrades that are upgrades for Pve whether they are Badge, PvP or rep.

The trick though is having smart enough to realize what is an upgrade and what is not. Which a lot of players aren't smart enough to do. Also the types that spend 2-3 weeks farming PvP epics and try to skip kara, which is a level of failboat so titanic in the making that it bears no real discussion you can only sit back and say "ok that is just terribad"

Edited, May 24th 2008 11:47am by bodhisattva

i didn't really want to rehash this thread but i had to from sense of pride.

Kara run over the weekend, Prince came callin, pally answered. first attempt we got struck with a bad infernal and i got hit hard, got parried twice, and was stripped of HS charges while we were adjusting.

2nd attempt, went smooth. it was a straight up tank n spank. my goal was to kick out as much threat a possible while also staying alive for phase 2. i wanted to actively see what switching out avoidance/stam weapons would do to my threat generation:

inital aggro

weapon swap. King's Defender(adam chain/oil) and Sha'tar shield(18 stam/no rune).

threat at the end. neither mage nor warlock has to dump threat.

end result. Prince down in 5 mins. this included a prot warrior on dps and 3 healers. AW was used initially and at about 50%.

i think i was running with 500 spell dmg to start the fight, which may have been overkill seeing as i finished the fight with double the threat of the 2nd highest. either way, weapon swap method seemed to work in this sitation...even considering the weapons i swapped were not the ideal.

I sincerely hope it's not pride in your DPSers...



316 seconds for your entire raid to do 1.1m damage. That's an average of 3,481 raid DPS. As a pally tank with him ripping into Holy Shield, you're going to probably be doing 450 DPS against him. This brings the DPS for the rest of the raid down to 3031. Let's say the prot warrior is only doing 300 DPS. That means the 5 DPS classes in your raid are doing 2731 DPS combined. By straight averages that means they were doing roughly 546 DPS. Here's my conclusions:

Holding aggro over people who are doing 546 DPS is easy, especially if you can give them salv, so maxxing your threat is irrelevant.

Your 877 TPS initial screenshot is a low average, due to you being in a 7-second streak of no shield blocks (or possibly even longer, but all I can see is you're down to 3 seconds left with no charges used)



Yes there are situations where you can have DPS that puts out such horrible threat that the threat output of the tank is irrelevant. However, I think you will find that if you're tanking with players that have comparable skill and comparable gear, DPS generally has zero problem pushing your threat boundries.

EDIT: Also:



You ended the fight at 170 damage in the ending threat screenshot, I'd be interested to see what weapon/shield combo you use that gives 330 spell damage.


Edited, May 27th 2008 1:52pm by Ialaman

It gives 225. With the 40 damage enchant it would be 265. You're still 65 short. The highest spell damage shield in the game is only 42 and that drops off Archimonde. He may be including the damage from wizard oil but if he's using that I don't know why he wouldn't put it on the King's Defender as well.

Even if you used the S3 mace (247) + 40 spell damage enchant + shield off Archimonde (42) it wouldn't be 330 spell damage. It'd be pretty close at 327 though. :)


Edited, May 27th 2008 2:18pm by Ialaman

Total threat doesn't matter nearly as much as TPS. Sure it sounds like you did more threat in the "2nd half" but you aren't splitting the halves by time. You spent more time in the "2nd half" which is why you were able to do more total threat during that time while doing less TPS.



Look man, I don't want to argue this with you. The simple numbers show (and the numbers and screenshots you posted actually support this) that if you are tanking with DPS characters that are as geared and skilled as you are, then they will be pushing the threat limits. Swapping an avoidance weapon in is costing you a ton of threat for a negligible amount of avoidance, and is highly discouraged if you are tanking something that is being actively DPS'd. Yes, there will be times when your DPSers are so bad that you can go low-threat and do better, but a 5-minute-long Prince fight is not standard.

Pretty much. These are the same DPS-ers, I assume, that put out less damage than him on a constant basis when he's Ret.

There is no way that going from 50% hp left on prince to 2% hp left on prince took you only a minute and a half. The screenshot where he is at 2% has your AW cooldown at around a minute left, which means it was over 2 minutes used, and that's in addition to the remaining 30-45 seconds from the 52% screenshot. I'm likely to believe that both halves took roughly the same amount of overall time, judging just by some quick math. The fact that you had similar threat in both phases would be from his dual wielding on your holy shield.



Even in dungeon blues a DPS character should be putting out more than 564 DPS. By Kara-end raiding they should be putting out 750.

How does the new WotLK stamina --> spell damage conversion change this? Will we be using more avoidance weapons once this comes in to play because we will have enough threat generation without a spell damage weapon?