Invasion of the Palibads.Follow

Even in Normal Lv80 dungeons, you don't want your tank eating criticals.

If I recall, the bosses are at least Lv81 which would take a def of 530 to be uncrittable against a Lv81 mob, right?

I remember running Oculus, it was _hard_ and I'm not talking the drake phase, that mage I remember he hit pretty hard with his physical hits, and then the boss where you teleport around on the platforms, those groups hit like trucks (for a normal dungeon) too if I recall. I know I wouldn't want to be eating criticals there either.

And then you got HoL... or HoS, too. Or CoS.

I can't think of any places in these dungeons where I'd want to be taking critical hits.

At Lv80, fresh 80, in full Lv78-80 BoEs, 530 def is easy to attain. To step into a dungeon without it, you'd have to purposefully not equip cheap tanking gear you can pick up out of the AH as soon as you dinged 80.

535 will likely take a little enchanting or a BoP or two, or a couple thousand gold for things like a Titansteel Shield Wall (which you *should* pick up asap anyways).

540, definitely need enchants and gems, no way around that. BoPs would be very nice at this point too, and if you can reach 540, chances are you probably have at least 24k health and you should be starting heroics anyways.

Very few people go to Normal Lv80 dungeons; you get no emblems of conquest for doing so, you'd almost need a group of friends who aren't quite geared to step into heroics (any DPS who knows their class/rotation can pick up the full crafted blue PvP set and step into a heroic and do enough DPS to clear the dungeon).

So, when you ding 80... one should ask themselves... "should I just cheap-*** my way through Normal Dungeons for a couple weeks to get BoPs in Normal, or just skip that and do a few days of Argent Tournament to come up with the money to buy a REAL tank set that will get me through N-ToC and into H-UK and the like?"

I think the answer would be pretty clear to me. Why purposefully gear to 'barely be good enough' when 'easily able to' is not hard to come by? Face it, a full set of Tempered Saronite/Daunting isn't expensive. Titansteel Shield Wall goes for about 1k-1.5k on most servers, that'll take you 5-10 days at max worth of dailies (which you should be doing anyways, the Teldrassil/Sen'jin Protector is just too awesome of a weapon to pass up) will give you the money for that, and not to mention, you will be needing Sons of Hodir rep anyways. Also, if you enjoy Dual-speccing, you'll want to do Knights of the Ebon Blade for the boots. I remember getting 350-400 gold per day doing Argent Tournament, Knights of the Ebon Blade, and Sons of Hodir. Doing that, 3 days would get you the Shield Wall, and another 2 maybe 3 would get you your Tempered Titansteel Helmet.

It isn't hard, TBH.

Edit: The Priest in the OP said he is Lv79... that means he's probably doing the "Level 80" dungeons -- HoS, HoL, Oculus (*shiver*), CoS, etc. I can't imagine why he'd want to step into the <Lv75 ones.

Edited, Oct 4th 2009 10:53am by Zariamnk

Huh.

I was thinking it was 3%, my bad.

Theoreticals like "You could if you performed the experiment on the Sun" (which is an impossibility) is a far cry from using an outright confusing/misleading term like "Defense Cap".

"Defense Cap" implies that anything over 540 is worthless, when you couldn't be any further from the truth.

Once you are "Hit capped", then yes, adding any more +Hit is worthless -- you can free up some +Hit if you gemmed/enchanted for it and not lose anything.

Once you are Crit Immune at 540, and you end up with, say, 545 or something, it is OK to keep that, you're not wasting itemization points outright. You might not be completely optimal, but at least you're not utterly wasting it like you would +Hit once you got Hit capped.

If we keep running around saying "Defense Capped" is 535/540, then people will think erroneously that 541+ is worthless. It is better that we do what we can to ensure the misconception doesn't get started (or any more widespread) in the first place. There _are_ still new tanks gearing up, just like the some of the thread-starters in this and general these last couple weeks.

Now, stacking Defense to 560, 570+ etc godly levels is of course Not Optimal by any means, but it doesn't hurt to have a few extra points. My tank had, for a little while, 552 because I had just swapped a cape and a ring. I dropped her down to 542-ish in favor of getting a bit more stamina and replacing some lost Dodge Rating, and I noticed Block and Parry chance dipped nearly half a percent on both. Not exactly a "small" change. Not a big one, but not a small one.

Edited, Oct 5th 2009 3:56pm by Zariamnk

For those that do not want to become a Palibad due to unfiltered garbage in this thread:

At level 80, to be crit immmune for raid bosses requires 540 defense. If your tanking heroic bosses its 535 and if you happen to run with this 'effecive health tanking glyph' its 536 for raid bosses. Going over this is not a bad thing. It increases your avoidance (miss, parry and dodge) as well as increasing your mitigation (by increasing your block rating). No one does it anymore because these days raids (talking about Uld and TotC) favour physical mitigation (armor and block value) and large healthpools to sponge mana from healers soak heavy hits from raid bosses that would otherwise kill an unlucky avoidance tank that relies on the RNG to survive.

It's accepted by most progression tank folk now that avoidance is only worth stacking after you can comfortably take two hits in a row and not die without a heal landing.

I believe Blizzard are doing away with defense altogether in the next expansion, making crit immunity a talented skill similar to feral druids. Until then the above applies to anyone thinking about tanking.

Edited, Oct 6th 2009 1:03pm by arthoriuss

It's not just players of Paladins. I blame ToC. It is now possible for a fresh 80 to ignore the Wrath progression path of running dungeons and heroics and instead try to leech on to a series of ToC runs and be rewarded with a very good gear set.

My point was more to make it clear my frustration with what I saw as people nitpicking with a term that is widely accepted.

However

has changed my mind.

Basically because I also thought that while 540+ was not worthless, compared to other stats it was a complete waste of time.

Well done on educating me!

Caster gear is a lot more generous than plate gear.

There's different slots for different specs, but they are interchangeable. You could put on Healing gear as a mage and get away with it, because +Spellpower is +Spellpower, whether you are using it for Healing or Damage. Hell, Healing gear even has +crit a lot of times, for you.

The only difference is that Healing Gear tends to switch out Hit for Spirit.

But if you've got a healthy enough Hit Rating, equipping some healing gear won't hurt your DPS too badly, especially if you're going from Frostsavage to ilvl200 purples.

Paladins, however, are a different story.

Equipping Holy gear on Ret is fail; there's no +strength on Holy gear. It is all Int/Stam/Spellpower/Crit. The Crit helps, the Stam is meh, and the Spellpower is meh.

Equipping Prot gear on Ret is meh, you at least get +Strength, but no Hit or Crit and the Defense/Avoidances are nigh-useless to a Ret.

From what I could tell, in N-ToC, there are 2 pieces (or is it 3?) for Prot, Ret, and Holy. Cloth, there's 2-3 Caster and 2-3 healer pieces and a caster Necklace and Trinket.

Since Casters can mix gear, that means you can get 4-6 pieces of gear for a cloth caster (more if you're a Druid/caster Shaman!).

Casters are hella easy to gear, for this reason.