How geared am I?Follow

Your stats seem pretty good for most of Kara, actually I'd say all of it if you're OT'ing. When my guild started doing Kara my hp and dodge were about the same, but my armor was just over 24k. I MT'ed up until the run where we first downed Curator and then the prot warrior who had been acting as OT switched roles with me since his gear became comparable to mine (he was Arms before we started doing Kara, so his prot gear was a little lack luster to begin with).

As an MT what would worry me about your stats is your health. The only boss in the 2nd half of Kara that I know for sure has crushing blows is Prince (there may be others but I don't know off the top of my head), and your health would make it difficult to survive an unlucky string of crushing blows.

Anyway, from the way you describe it, the problem your guild is having is more one of DPS, in which case the best defensive stats in the world aren't going to make a difference unless your healers have the mana regen to allow for slow killing. The first question I think you need to consider is do you like the people in your guild? If the answer is no, then it may be time to look for another guild. If the answer is yes, then there may be something you can do to improve your guild's performance.
What spec are your dps classes? Are any of the DPS classes coming to Kara as PvP spec? What abilities are they using? I suggest you send them to the class forums here if it looks like they may need some pointers on how to boost their dps. You mentioned that you're using consumables, but what about them? I know it can seem expensive for pots, elixirs/flasks, and food, but when everybody uses them, then it greatly increases the raid's performance.

The most important thing to remember is to stay calm and be patient about it. When my guild first started Kara, we sucked... big time. We had problems on trash pulls. Moroes and Maiden each took a week or two of attempts. But now we clear the whole thing with no problem, and that's with two drunk tanks and a stoned healer.

Your stats are definitely fine to be tanking the entire instance. I was tanking Prince with 24k armor, 14k hp and 30% dodge. If you have a priest for Fort buff and a pally for Kings, + food buffs, consumables, etc.. you should easily reach 16k hp+

I'd give you an armory but I'm respec'd resto right now due to a lack of healers in guild. Druids are OP, what can I say. :-)

Anyway, Most fights in Kara are DPS races. It's all well and good to have a couple good tanks and healers, but if your DPS blows, you're gonna die. It's just how it works. The longer the boss is up, the more time someone has to make that one mistake that's gonna wipe the raid.

I went into Kara as an OT with a guild I was new to. Their highest dps was 650 and the lowest was in the 400 range. IT sucked. Yeah they could do it, but it took a long time and tested the gear of the tanks and the skill of the healers way too much.

Now I started my own guild and picked up 22 members in about 2 weeks with a merger bringing us 10 more this week and we are tearing the place up. Our DPS ranges from 950-500 now with most averaging around 600ish.

Keeping that in mind, if they're new to kara and have no badge gear, they probably aren't going to be able to put out huge dps. That's where farming those heroics for badges and the first half of kara for drops is going to push their dps up quickly. Also like Kag mentioned, if they aren't using consumables, they're just making everyone's life harder. Consumables can make the difference between 450dps and a raid wipe and 475 dps and kicking that boss's ***.

Last night we went in for our normal run and cleared from start to just before chess in 4 1/2 hours with 2 wipes total. One from both healers getting sacrificed back to back on ilhoof and one was because our hunter clicked on the door as it was opening and he autoshot at Shade with only himself and 3 others in the room lol.

Either way I agree with Kag, if you like your guild, check them yourself, tanks are expected to take charge whether they are the RL or not. Being a tank is just like being a healer, you need to know every class and how they do their jobs so that you can understand who might accidently pull aggro from a triple crit, who should be putting seed of corruption on ilhoof, soaking hate bolts from curator, etc...

If you don't like them, get out, find yourself a decent guild clearing Kara and have fun!

BWT here is my Armory with links to guild if you need a new home :-)
(I was healing Kara with 1100+heals to start for lack of other healers and you can see how 2 weeks in kara with my new guild has helped my resto gear)

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Thorium+Brotherhood&n=Galenmoon

Edited, Jul 2nd 2008 4:42pm by Galenmoon

Your defenses are way overcapped! With 415 Defense you need 0 resilience. I'm guessing that you have some PvP gear that you're using for PvE, which is fine. You should feel free to eliminate some of your defense-adding gems/enchants if possible and replace them with AGI or STAM. This will help your dodge(agi) and increase your hp(stam).

Thanks for all the helpful responses, consensus seems to be that I'm about where I guessed I was. Just nice to know as more than a noobtastic guess.

I've relogged in my tank gear and should be in that for a while...hopefully long enough for it to stick in armory.

I know I have way more def/res than I need, but I have ZERO +def enchants or gems and other than being too high in that one area, this delivers my best combo of armor/hp/dodge. I know I theoretically have too much PvP gear right now, but the pieces I have (S1 shoulder and helm, S2 chest and bracers, S3 belt, S4 gloves) were all very big upgrades from what I had before. (The standard "pre-raid" stuff like Stylin Purple Hat, Heavy Clefty Chest, Umberhowl's Collar, Manimal's Cinch, Verdant Gloves)

And my next two upgrades are in the area of armor: cape and ring. I still need one of the high armor capes from my weaksauce green...Capacitus hasn't dropped thoriumweave in like 20 kills, that prick. And I'm pretty sure my next badge purchase will/should be Ring of Unyielding Force. Those two upgrades will put my armor over 28k so that's my main gearup goal right now. Too bad the ring has def and 2 of the 3 cloaks have def or resilience. I just can't get away from that stuff!

And yes, good catch Kawainui...I haven't spent my last talent point after a recent(week or so)/temporary resto respec. I got everything I wanted and can't decide if I want I want natures grasp or 1/3 primal tenacity or 1/2 of the new-n-improved nurturing instinct. Probably grab NG since I'm doing more arena and BG these days, for the gear of course...gotta get more resilience, lol.

To Kagenite and Galenmoon's points, I do like my guild. I don't know enough about the other classes to judge their specs or rotations or consumables or anything, really. And not enough about "raid operations" to constructively criticize group composition or boss strategy.

We just got this new hunter that has T4/T5 gear and for some reason he seems up to take us on as a "project" -- making Omen and Vent and GroupCalendar mandatory, the works. So we'll see how the guild takes to him. I'm on board, but if they aren't up for it I'll follow him somewhere, or the three other toons that bailed last week. : /

My main argument against PvP gear is that, depending on how you play, you can rack up badges for gear faster than honor, marks, and arena points. And badge gear is generally a step up from or equal to PvP gear (for PvE).

If you have the Kara quest line tanking ring, I highly urge you to not waste badges on Ring of Unyielding Force!!!! Instead, save up for Ring of the Stalwart Protector (60 Badges). The Kara quest line ring in conjunction with the 60 badge Stalwart ring, will give you a really strong ring combination, and you won't be wasting badges picking up one badge ring only to replace it later with another badge ring.

Other than that, get the badge tanking cloak, Slikk's Cloak of Placation as priority IMO. It's the best overall feral tanking cloak in the game as far as mitigation goes and there's very few cloaks that you'd use in its place to tank with even if you wanted to aim for other stats instead of pure tanking stats.

Anyway, you're more than fine to tank the entire instance assumming you have a competant 10man group. I'm of the opinion that dpsers doing less than 450dps in most heroics or kara simply do not belong there.

***My own version of a, imo, similar guild situation as the OP; Feel free to skip!

At one point my ISP sucked so bad that I had to leave a day guild for another (probably just over half a year ago) that was up much later hours of the night. In that guild there was all sorts of issues ranging from poor tanks to poor healers to poor dpsers. As a tank I think I was the only thing allowing the guild any serious progression. It was like no one cared to put any effort into their characters. They all only logged on for kara, pass or fail for the night and then log off.

I told another druid (the guild master) how to gear himself more appropriately but he would not BG for anything. He had such a strong dissaproval for PVP gear in PVE play to a point that I felt like I was debating with him on the topic more than I should have ever had to. There were so many complications and confusions in the guild on how to gear because on one hand you've got an anti PVP gear guild master that wants to try to tank on druid (but not willing to put in any BG effort at all) and just wants to do kara as dps (200dps; I could do that easily in just white damage) until he gets the gear to tank with, and on the other hand there's people who would /tell to me asking what I thought about different gear options for the varying classes and in a lot of cases some of the comparisons asked of me included S3 belt/bracers/feet and occasionally an arena s3 piece.

There was an obvious issue with the guild master and several other players in the guild, because of this 'guild master's version of the gear you should wear' VS 'this new comer Torzak's version of what you should wear'. And a lot of my suggestions would be in favor of some of the S3 pieces compared to the alternatives I was asked to compare against(The only exception I'd not favor pvp gear would largely be for paladin and warrior tanks). It got to a point that the guild master was always doing a /who on me and b1tch1ng at people in the guild who happened to be in the same instance as me like I was a bad influence or something. When more realistically they went to instances with me as opposed to other tanks in the guild because with me tanking we rarely wiped (and this was before I ever got my first piece of t4 or 5). It was just stupid lmao. I left the guild and shortly after so too did a few others(more or less, the people that did leave all went their own ways). A lot stuck around for far longer than I'd ever have expected, but eventually/recently some others finally left and found themselves in a Hyjal/BT guild (not the one I'm currently in) like a week after leaving the guild.

My point of this whole ****** paragraph, sometimes guilds hold people back. Held back in terms of progression, held back in terms of friendships, self denying an in guild social life in fear of starting drama, etc etc. A guild from my own two eyes' perspective that wasn't able to reliably clear kara in any portion of the time I was in the guild or even months after I left it, spit out players (in game friends) that were hyjal/bt ready and easily accepted and used consistantly in raids within a whole whopping two weeks of leaving and joining another guild. Just that easily! From kara drama to hyjal/bt. One of the resto druids (someone I email/chat with even outside of the game) ended up with the hyjal tanking staff her first visit to Hyjal.

JeeBar continuously offers insight and help on these forums and often has questions of his own trying to learn how to best approach various situations. I'm seriously of the opinion that on your own, JeeBar, you're easily ready for the task of learning SSC/TK or maybe beyond assumming a guild offered you the chance at it. I'm in no way trying to suggest that your current guild has issues quite exactly the same as something I've before seen, but it should be no secret that guilds can hold players back. And being that it's your subscription fee and your free time, I strongly feel that you, or anyone, should be able to enjoy the game to their fullest potential without being held back.

***END

Now let's see how much I fail at linking gear heh.
Edit: Guess I got the gear links right

Edited, Jul 5th 2008 12:04am by Torzak

Hehe, I have a 4 year-old and a just-turned 3 year-old, I totally understand. I wonder how many mama-bear and papa-bear druids we have?