Block Capped...Last of my kind?Follow

*cliche moment*

It all depends on the fight.

Ok, now that the inevitable is out in the open, I personally strive to remain block-capped in whatever gear I am in. I agree with you that any damage not taken is a good thing: ie blocked hit is still better than a full on white swing, even if only by a small amount. I know the type you are referring to though, with the !@#$ ton of health, but very little avoidance. I have a habit of inspecting any Warrior/Paladin with a shield (unless obviously Holy) and looking at their gear/talents. I often cringe when I see nothing but stamina everywhere.

Maybe it's just me (and you ;) ), but I don't believe "ZOMG, STAM STAM STAM!!!" is the best way to go.

your assuming the 150+ im talking about are wearing naxx gear over mass stam gear like BS made gear...which they are'nt, staying hit capped and high health is fine, im talking about people that neglect every stat other than stam, opting to wear anything that is tank related that has the most stam, reguardless of item level (and yes i've seen guilds go into ulduar with people waring all the craftable bs pieces for the stam). I've actually armoryed a couple of the higher health people that ive seen (both warriors and pallies) that i've seen with < 50% avoidance, and i've watched both pallies and warriors alike with over 35k unbuffed get destroyed by bosses that shouldnt pose any real threat because its taking multiple healers to keep them up then when the group takes an aoe they switch off to heal them and the tank dies

with my current gear i've tanked a handfull of 10 ulduar hard modes with no trouble

the most noteable of the kind of people im talking about was a warrior with 49k buffed in 25 naxx that i had to take over as mt because he kept dying with healers that never let me die once

Yeah i guess i haven't seen that lvl of retardation when it comes to stam stacking. Sounds like that warr with 49k was getting crit alot which goes beyond the argument of stam stacking vs staying blocked capped. But the reason the nubs are stacking stam is because they see the elitists doing it and think that is what they should be doing even at their gear lvl.

Just to kind of sum up my opinion, I don't think you need to strive to be block capped, but you should strive for +50% pure avoidance(miss+dodge+parry), once you hit that as a pally you'll be in good shape and most likely block capped anyway. Basically there's no substitute for understanding the mechanics of your spec/class. People always say pally tanking doesn't require alot of 'skill', and i'd have to agree that 969 is pretty much facerollable, but the 'skill' comes in the preparation for specific encounters.

Knowing when to use block gear, or threat gear, or resist gear, or soak/stam gear is important, especially in a casual or pug raid where the leader might not really know all the tank requirements for a specific encounter. For instance on KT being block capped while MT'ing KT is pretty worthless. He hits like a girl when not casting, but when he gets a cast off it hits for 18-24k, stacking a bit of stam or even a resist belt can be very beneficial. Or on Thorim it makes sense to stack an extra 8% block(if you don't have a tanking druid with pvp gear)so you can solo tank him thru the -200defense debuff by keeping HS up to stay uncritable.

It really depends on play style.
A lot of bad players will ONLY stack Stam because they don't have a clue.
Smart players gem Stam, but gear avoidance.

As for Block, that is the LOWEST priority of all stats a tank looks for post 540 Defense.


Dodge > Parry = Stam > Block > Block Value of Shield

Now obviously this is based on the value of the stat (you'd obviously take 120stam over basically any dodge/parry less than 200).

Dodge is the absolute best stat once you are Def capped. This means YOU CAN'T HIT ME!

Parry is nice, but is very subpar for Paladin in comparison to Dodge. With the SUPPOSED changes to Blade Ward it's nicer but these are unconfirmed. Don't AIM for Parry but definitely don't turn down a good piece with it.

Stam is HP. Some fights, your avoidance means nothing. Fights with constant, unmitigatable damage(Hodir, Mimiron, Algalon) as well as fights with massive magic damage (Sarth 3D, others I am sure but slip my mind) Stam is king. I can't tell you the number of times I've had to take over tanking because I beat our mitigation king Pally due to my having 6k more HP.

Block is nice, since the higher your Block chance, the higher to stop a chunk of damage. The problem is unlike Dodge/Parry, the damage stopped is a small amount (1k-2k or so) based on your...

Block Value of Shield which determines how much you absorb in a block before taking damage. Generally you only find this stat with Block so no need to aim for or avoid it.


Basically you have a few important things to look for as a tank.

1: 540 Defense. Without this you cannot tank(for long)

2: Acceptable HP (40k+ for Uld, buffed of course)

3: 50% Avoidance

4: ~24% Block.

Block again, is least important for a few reasons.

1: Mitigation < Avoidance.
2: Holy Shield = 30%. Redoubt = 30% ~10% of the time you get hit it activates for 10sec

So basically you can assume an average of +45% Block at all times. Not an exact number(I'm sure EJ has one) but a decent guesstimate for gearing.

All how you want to play, it seems a lot of Uld gear has more Dodge/Parry, but some still pulls out the Block/Shield Block Value.

QFT.

If you are running heroics or Naxx10, and you want to see huge health meters, reroll druid tank plz.

The way I see it, once you get up to around 26-28k, you should start getting some avoidances when you can. I don't turn down stam when I see it, of course... but yet I don't go out of my way to get it either. When offered a good choice, I'll go for avoid over Stam, assuming I'm 28k+, which I am.

Of course, there are gem slots and enchants, where Stam is the only good option. By all means, take it.

I think a big part of the trend towards stamina is that there are just so many fights where block is either insignificant or entirely useless for a lot of the damage coming your way. Being block capped creates the biggest benefit when you're tanking large groups of mobs that don't hit all that hard. When the size of the hits starts to scale upwards, the benefit of blocking attacks starts to scale down. When the damage isn't coming from a physical source, the benefit of block is negated.

I remember when I was starting to gear my pally and I'd come across a warrior that was BS/JC toting bracer and glove sockets stuffed with JC-only stam gems with stamina everywhere else they could stuff it and being aghast at their health pools (and simultaneously shocked that they'd forgo any kind of avoidance to get it). Then I look at some of the boss fights (not even counting Ulduar) and it started to make sense. Not complete sense, but it made sense nonetheless.

Right now the biggest challenge I'm seeing with tanks is that only a small handful truly have enough of an understanding to at least explain why they gear/augment the way that they do. The rest are just following the crowd. Our guild has two players in it right now (one warrior, one DK) who are frothing at the mouth to go to Ulduar, but our last couple of runs have been either delayed or canceled due to a shortage of tanks. This got them to thinking that they should gear to tank so then they'd have to be brought along because it's better to have a nub tank than no run (at least, in their eyes it is). The resulting calamity has been both amusing and a little irritating as they struggle to grasp the basics of just gearing a tank...I've managed to successfully refrain from openly declaring that I won't be there on their first few heroic runs as shiny new tanks :P

The difficulty I see with gearing/augmenting a tank these days is...as others have said...that everything depends on the encounter and it can take quite a while to accumulate two sets of tank gear. Ideally, every tank would have a stam set and an avoidance set, but depending on how active (and successful) you are in the game, that's not always a viable option. So do you gear for magic damage (stack stam), physical damage (avoidance), or try to find an appropriate balance?

And let's face it...dps have Recount as their e-peen meter. Healers do to some extent as well. Tanks have...health. If you're big on impressing people in your PUGs, massive health pool is one way to do that.

I set aside my pally in March with mostly BiS tier 7.5 gear and at the time, I was in the top 5 Alliance prot pallies for gear (based on one of those questionable rating sites). Now I'm working on gearing my warrior and there's a substantial difference. For starters, warriors can't ever hope to be block capped 100% of the time. They are, by default, block capped for 10 seconds out of every 40 if they're using Shield Block every time it comes off cooldown, but the other 30 seconds is a completely different story. As a result, there's no real objective target to shoot for when it comes to combined avoidance and the easiest thing to do is just go for crit immunity and then stack stam. What that means is that Joe Pally comes along and is tanking next to the stam-stacking warrior and feels his e-peen shrink because his health pool can't match up if he's been working towards (or maintaining) block capped status. Tanks tend to be a competitive lot and when you're playing as a tank in a game that no longer favors one class over another as the go-to guy for the majority of encounters, there's a little bit of nervous anxiety that sets in if you've got a not-so-informed raid leader making decisions on who gets to tank what if the RL sees the health pools and decides...like so many other players...that more health universally translates to higher survivability.

In the end I would say that maintaining block capped stats as a pally tank is not so difficult that a pally tank should forgo it for the sake of stamina. There's no one raid instance in WotLK where it would serve no benefit.

Agreed, which is why people have started to refer to it as being "unhittable" rather than "block capped" It's the same thing but people seem to get stuck on the Block part.

As others have said, hitting 102.4 isn't really too difficult, you shouldn't really gem for it I'd say, if you're in the 95+ avoidance range I think you're more than fine. Now obviously the better your gear gets the closer you'll be to it without trying but that's not a bad thing. I usually just let my gear handle it and I go for a stam/threat balance, but really if you wanted to you could go for just stam(I don't personally like this, but it has it's uses), but at lower gear levels it's a bad idea.

I miss WoW related Mindel posts.

Your pseudo-rant is extremely valid as many tanks just go all gaga over EH. While often that is the way to go the people that do it well are itemizing their gear properly in other ways.

Game mechanics aren't hard to learn.

Awareness is.

This is the gear warr/pallys have wanted since the start of Uld. As nearly every piece prior with bv contained a bunch of worthless block rating and no other avoidance stat. Now we have gear that boosts threat and mitigation(bv) paired with dodge/parry or hit rating/expertise. Basically a lot less wasted itemization imo.



Basically there's no other threat generating ability you can use if you're using 969 correctly. Every 3 cycles you can sub HS for AS or against demons/undead you can sub in holy wrath as well(although i would advise subbing these for judgement against faster hitting mobs). But in general HS will always generate some threat. Unless of course the mob never stops casting, in which case HS is a complete waste.


It does have DR now, at ~3400 or something it is actually useless as a threat stat.

I maintain high stamina and high avoidance, the best of both worlds imo.

Fully raid buffed(25) I roll with 30% dodge.

Unbuffed(no kings, sanct, nothing) I'm at 38k health.

I gem entirely for stamina except to meet my meta requirements.

The reason that most people gem for stamina is because it is the only tanking stat that is not subject to diminishing returns.