Is my warrior kara-ready?Follow

For OT? Absolutely, provided you respect to something sane . . . get an 11/5/43 cookie-cutter OT build. Those cookie cutter builds exist for a reason, they're tested and proven to simply work.

For MT? No. You'll get owned by more than one boss, and even by a few trash pulls where you'll have to tank more than one unless you've got an optimized CC team (which rarely happens even in good guilds).

You have roughly 34k of EH and 35% pure avoidance and MT in Kara needs about 37k and 40% pure avoidance. But you'd do fine through early bosses provided your healers are on the ball.

Fix your build and go OT.

Now, that said, if you have to find PUGs instead of guild runs, you will have a problem being accepted into a run as a tank. PUGs want their tanks over-geared for an instance because, being PUGs, they have no idea if their healers are even marginal, and they want a measure of safety so that even with a total lack of coordination and talent they can manage to get their badges.

You will need a raid to work with you. With only 43 hit and 11 expertise, you will have a hard time holding threat against 5 or 6 dps'ers in better gear than you have going off on a boss.

Weaknesses with easy fixes I are:

(1) get yourself a better tanking weapon. Something with 1.8 or lower speed. It doesn't take much to get exalted with SSO and Inuuru's blade is an upgrade for you. So is the exalted shield. Get them both.

(2) Get into a few heroics and drum up about 130 badges (if you do something like BoT and the daily every day that's less than 2 weeks of badge grinds.) Pick up Siilk's Cloak, Phalanx Bracers and Ring of the Stalwart Protector.

(3) Fix your enchants and glyphs. Get the 16 def/17 dodge head glyph, the 15 dodge/10 def shoulder glyph, get def or dodge on your new Siilk's cloak, get 150 hp on your chest, get 2% threat on your gloves, put a felsteel shield spike on your shield, put 20 str on your sword.

(4) get to work on your BS skill. You're at 375 mining, so go start mining! Alternately, go mine, sell everything and farm up the cash for some epic BS crafted items. Such as the Epic Belt of the Guardian (pally but still far superior to yours) and the Helm of the Stalwart Defender.

Do those 4 things, along with fixing your spec, and you'll be easily up to the point where you can MT in Kara. In the meantime, you'll be OT'ing in Kara and picking up some great upgrades while doing so. As you get those upgrades, take a look at my list and decide if the things I suggest still make sense. For example, if you get the Gilded Thorium Cloak from Illhoof, then you won't need the 35 badges for Siilk's Cloak. Likewise if you get the Vambraces of Courage you can forget the badge bracers. Make sure you get the Violet Ring quest and keep upgrading it as you get faction. Do as many of the quests as you can to increase your faction as fast as you can - the exalted kara ring is a fantastic tank ring.

Whats EH? Thanks!

How do you measure EH? Thanks!

That's not what EH is. Effective health is, in simple terms, the amount of raw damage you can take before you die, and a measurement of armor and its relation to stamina. That's it. It has no bearing whatsoever in connection to keeping you alive for the same amount of time that avoidance would.

Each point of armor you get makes stamina worth more. Each point of stamina you get is increased in effectiveness by your armor. 17k HP when modified by 16k armor isn't just 17k HP in terms of the raw damage you can take, it's 'X' amount of health after you factor in the mitigation you get. It's not a substitution for avoidance calculation, saying if it fails you need this much to live. It's a separate calculation of how long you will live in and of itself.

Edit: I looked over what you said again in your above post, and realized that when you talk about 'of all your avoidance fails, this is how much EH you need to live' you're talking about your time-to-live based off of your EH. I might be splitting hairs, but the two are not the same thing. While related, EH is exactly what I stated, simply a calculation of how much raw damage one can take based off of stamina in relation to armor. The time line you have for survival is a separate idea that is derived from your EH formula, but the two are not the same thing.

Edited, Aug 3rd 2008 6:07am by FletusSanguine

Hereis an 11/5/43 cookie cutter for you.

To the extent that time is not part of the EH formula you are correct. However, it is the case that time is a factor of taking damage. When one talks about a boss encounter, one talks about how much damage the boss does not just per hit, but over time. Encounters are not a moment, but an event. EH is a relationship between armor and stamina (you'll notice I gave the formula), and that relationship is precisely a relationship that ignores all avoidance and block value (unless you're talking EHB, which is a different formula and takes into account block value).

Given all of that, it is perfectly correct to say that EH is a measure of how much health you would need to survive an encounter if all of your parry, dodge and defense were 0.

In the same way that light can be talked about both as a particle and wave, so to can EH be talked about as a relationship to a real encounter or as a relationship between stamina and armor. You're taking the definitional approach -- in other words, you're stating the tautology that EH is defined by stamina and armor, so therefore EH is about stamina and armor. That is correct. In my view, that information is not by itself worth much. The reason EH is important is that it provides information about how your armor and stamina effect an encounter. As you say, "raw damage before you die." Raw damage happens over time. If you have exactly 34k EH and some mob has a static raw damage output of 34,001 per hit, then time will be a non-factor.

I would argue that precisely because mobs put out damage over time. EH is the relationship between your life and that damage. Thus EH does tell you about time. The only time it would not be is if a mob had an instant attack and did not further damage at all for the rest of the encounter.

I have found both of these pages on TankSpot very helpful for Kara readiness:

EH calculator

Raid Minimums

The vast majority of trash in Kara will be tankable as an OT by this guy provided the raid takes his gear level into consideration.

For trash, have him off tank the weakest mob, and CC the stronger. On the stables for example, shackle or trap a horse and let him tank a stable hand.

If he pulls Oz for the Opera Event, he gets to kite the tinman. He won't have to tank anything. If he pulls R&J he might have a problem, but can probably handle J. For the stables, he will have some problem with Attuman, but if the MT is geared well, the MT can hold both and just let him dps. He also could live through Attuman if he takes him, spell reflects the curse and disarms liberally while keeping shield block up. It won't be pretty but he'd probably live, if Attuman eats his own curse, he's a @#%^ cat till phase 3. The raid can help here considerably by burning midnight to 25% just as fast as they can.

Ultimately, it has to be remembered that Kara is doable with a single tank. He can be there as OT to spam shouts, TC, and help with some trash. He will be fine in that. He's not going to stand up to the bosses by himself for the most part, though he'd do fine with the animal mini-bosses and Attuman if he has a bit of skill and his raid helps him.

Is he ideally geared for the task? No. Can he live and contribute? Yes. If he's guilded, and his guild is skilled at raiding, he would have no problem going (and should be well enough improved in gear after one or two runs to start to more fully contribute). For a PUG, he probably would be rejected outright, and I wouldn't trust a PUG to work with his limitations well enough for it to work out ok anyway.

When my guild was getting ready to move on from Kara, we identified a need for a few more tanks. We weren't quite to the point of having Kara on farm status, but we knew the place pretty well. I still had a few blues (Grom'Tor's Charge, how I miss thee!), but I also had most, if not all, of the purple armor pieces and t4 drops from Kara as well.

Having an OT who listened and was willing to learn was fine. Him spamming shouts allowed me to focus on threat generation, and we did just fine. The two real problem were Aran and Nightbane the first because of the pure dps nature of the fight and the second because of the need to hold multiple, often hard to find skeletons was just beyond his skill level at the time.







Edited, Aug 5th 2008 2:33pm by kingpatzer

ohh ok lol im sorry when you showed the link i assumed thats the gear you wanted us to see...sorry :)

Weapon: Put greater agility on it. This will help mitigation and is more important than AP (str) or damage. There are some that will argue, and not without reason, that this is actually better than mongoose or executioner for tanks as it is a constant presence and is not dependent up on a proc.

Shield: drop the stam enchant and put a felsteel spike on it. This will help with threat and is about the only place I ever recommend trading stamina for anything. But new tanks in 5-man content need threat help, and this is an easy and cheap way to address that without too much pain.

Hands: either superior agility or the glove reinforcement crafted things to up your armor. They're about equal in effect. I prefere the armor for newer tanks and the agility for tanks who are above about 45k EH. But there really isn't much difference in effect here. If you have threat problems, the 2% threat enchant here can be a very good choice.

Shoulders: work your rep and get the greater inscription, but the lesser is what you have and that's the right choice.

Feet: get fortitude -- 12 stam. Not a huge upgrade and can wait till you improve your boots

Chest -- exceptional stats or exceptional health. Both are good.

Helm -- work your keepers of time faction (Durnholde is actually pretty fun in my oppinion) and get the head enchant from them. It's very much worth your time.

Legs have it right.

Back -- 12 dodge -- that's almost 1% pure mitigation and is a great enchant.

Any dps'er in equal gear can pull threat off of a tank without any trouble. In places like Kara you will find yourself in DPS fights where everyone is burning cool-downs to drop a boss.

Every tank should always be worried about threat. Do you ever lose a mob in heroics? Even once? If so, then you need more threat generation. Once you have "enough" armor and stamina to survive most encounters for you level, the next most important stats for every tank are expertise and hit -- precisely because they help with threat. If you look at the badge gear, you'll notice lots of expertise on the tanking gear. It's there for a reason. Stam is greater than all most of the time, but you can't ignore threat either.



That's because it simply isn't true.

Any raid will take a tank in t6 gear over a tank in blues precisely for the same reason they'll take a healer with 1700 healing over one with 700.

It is not that skill is not important, it is. But to say it's greater than gear ignores the fact that this game is built on a progression scale. Kara and every 10 and 25 man above it, contain gear check encounters that a raid that is inadequately geared will simply fail at, regardless of skill.

When Kara was new, people did enter it in blues. But they didn't complete it in blues. Those raids did it as progression content, getting so far, then having to stop there as the raid increased their gear level across the board, then progressing to a new gear check and doing the same thing. After multiple raids, the "all blue" team was in plenty of purples as they finished the content.

You are ready for OT'ing in Kara, but you won't tank Prince or Nightbane, or probably even Curator, in what you have and live, no matter how skilled you are. Raid tanking is not 5-man tanking, there is still a skill element, but it is as much about being geared for the encounter as it is being intellectually up to the challenge.

Edited, Aug 11th 2008 11:49am by kingpatzer

Unfortunatly, my guild is 5/6 TK and 5/6 MH and don't even bother anymore to do kara/gruul/maggy, unless for alt badge runs.
They always want a ''smooth'' run instead of giving me a break and proving myself.
I know kara like the back of my hand...



I just wanted to say that it would be easier to let me run along till say curator for some purple upgrades/badges and let me get gear through that in stead of trying to pug heroics with ppl that are under-geared...

I'll grant that. Would you agree that it is unlikely? Tanking prince in blues is going to require that everything fall into place perfectly. It can happen. I'm sure it has happened dozens of times. But I bet it has failed much, much more.