bawbaag wrote:
I'm going to have to say that you are not yet geared for heroics yet.
You have a lot of low level blues at the moment which accounts for your low armour, you've boosted your HP by wearing 2 stam trinkets but this has come at the expense of your avoidance (which again is quite low). What this means is that you are getting hit a lot and not mitigating as much as you would hope to.
My first piece of advice would be to read Losie's sticky.
Then I would say run normal S Labs and SH a fair bit along with Normal Bot for the shoulders. Farm SSO rep for the neck and more importantly the shield.
Start using proper gems! Blue ones at least. I can understand that putting those on low level gear may not be worth it but the first steps to heroics you really need to push the limits of your gear. It gets a bit easier once you start getting badges regularly.
As a final word, you can probably manage one of the lower heroics but bring plenty of CC and a good healer. I would definitely say that you are nowhere near geared enough to be tanking heroics with no CC (perhaps with a T6 healer behind you....)
Keep up the good work though, gearing a tank is a long, hard, tedious process which is as unforgiving as it is satisfying when you pull it off.
I am going to disagree and say your gear is more than sufficient for H SP and H UB for sure. You need a really good healer to keep you up though. The first time I made it all the way through H UB my gear wasn't even as good as yours, but the healer was a holy priest with probably +1400 to +1500 bonus healing. As long as you are keeping your rotations correct you should be fine in H SP or H UB with a GOOD healer and competent DPS that can get the bosses down reasonably quickly without drawing aggro.
Superior Wizard Oil and an Adepts Elixer are good things to use, and using Devo Aura instead of Ret Aura will give you more armor (and in a week it will give the healers and extra 6% healing to anyone in the group too!)
The main thing for a tank in any heroic is the outcome is totally healer-dependent. If they can keep you up and you can hold threat, you won't have any problems. An undergeared healer will kill you though.
Edit: Also, CC is a BIG bonus. Not really needed for 2-pulls, helpful for 3-pulls, absolutely necessary for 4- or 5-pulls. The better the CC, the less mobs are hitting you. A rogue and a mage, or even 2 mages in the group makes life (and living) much easier. You CAN do it with your current gear though. Getting exalted with SSO for the shield and necklace is never a bad idea and doesn't take long, so do that, but don't give up on heroics! Just get a better healer and some CC in the group and make sure to mark the harder targets (such as casters) for CC. You will get it done!
Edited, Oct 8th 2008 12:56pm by jeromesimina One other edit... avoidance isn't THAT big a deal in heroics as the bosses don't crush. It DOES still help, but as long as you have 490+ def (which you do) you at least aren't eating crits.
Edited, Oct 8th 2008 12:57pm by jeromesimina Ok... I am having an edit-fest with this today! If your healer is your wife, help her research whatever PvP and/or PvE gear she can get to get her healing up to the +1300 to +1500 range, and I would also recommend Healbot or something similar. Will make it much easier for her to heal proactively instead of reactively and will even flash 1 second ahead of time when anyone is about to get a DoT/Debuff that she can dispell. You may have to run some regular instances to help her gear up more, but some of those will probably net you better gear as well, so do some research together and run some normals (AND heroics when you can) and you will both benefit greatly. If your wife doesn't mind doing some PvP, the +423 healing mace with a +81 healing enchant is just ridiculous for a healer... that is over +500 healing by itself!
Edited, Oct 8th 2008 1:05pm by jeromesimina Edited, Oct 8th 2008 1:57pm by jeromesimina Edited, Oct 15th 2008 9:50am by jeromesimina