Prot questionsFollow

From what I've read, from a lot of people, this varies fight-to-fight, that it is very wise to keep two (maybe 3?) sets.

You will want at least a Stamina and an Avoidance set.

You would use Stamina on fights that involve a lot of AoE or Magic Damage, as Avoidance isn't going to help you a whole lot in there.

On Single Targets that use lots of heavy-hitting physical attacks, and on Trash Pulls, you will likely want to go for Avoidance, but don't go overboard.

A third set, could be a mix between the two -- having decent Stamina and Avoidances both.

My own tank (what WoW-Heroes says) is Uld-ready. I've got about 30-31k health unbuffed and my avoidances are in the high 90s too. I'm working on a stam set, but for the most part, I prefer the well-rounded approach as my guild usually uses me for an OT -- I need to be prepared for different situations.

Great. Thanks for the advice I appreciate it.

Anub in ToGC is a serious kick to the nuts of most tanks who have been disposing of their old gear as they progress. I really wish Blizzard would stop doing that. They base an entire expansion around enormous hits (many of which are magic based and bypass avoidance) and then throw in stuff like Anub's adds. In fairness, tanks aren't the only ones being twisted like pretzels in order to get things done in ToGC but it seems unfortunate to me. Doubly so when you look over the gear to be had in ToC and realize that it focuses largely on avoidance and very little on block.

On the other hand, it's nice to see a fight that makes DKs cry

My pally is toting some pretty mediocre gear these days but I managed as OT in ToC10 last night (and got a new neck and sword for my troubles). The general rule of thumb I've been following is to gem/enchant for defense if you need it for crit immunity and then whatever you have left over goes to stamina. I just picked up the Triumph libram last night, but even without it I'm block capped. Throw in the libram proc + stacked Blade Ward proc and my combined avoidance goes through the roof. (Something like 60% parry/dodge last night on the target dummy).

Most players have neither the time nor the inclination to build sets for two different tanking situations. At most they'll have a few pieces they can swap out selectively, and you can see all current raid content with one tank set. The specialized sets are things that you'll see for heroic/hardmode versions of raid encounters.

There was a lot of talk in the first few months of WotLK about mediocre tanks stacking stamina over all else. (I still remember the warrior I came across in the first 4-6 weeks of the expansion standing outside the instance portal to AN with 30k HP back when tanks with 24-26kk HP were doing well for themselves).

I upgraded my belt tonight and it pushed me below 102.4% avoidance w/ Holy Shield, which was disappointing. I gained about 1% dodge with the upgrade but lost about 2.8% block. I'm still beyond the block cap as long as my Libram proc stays active but I'm noticing that the uptime on the Libram is not 100%.

I don't mind crazy add fights. Kel'Thuzad in Naxx25 with only one add tank was a boneheaded strategy but it was fun as that one tank rounding up all of the adds. (And almost fun watching them all scatter when I got MC'd XD). Sartharion was a bit much as a pally tank, but I see that the T10 2pc bonus is a 2 second reduction to Hand of Reckoning CD. Also, with the new achievements posted from the PTR we can see that the Lich King fight will feature adds in some capacity, though whether or not they'll be tankable is undetermined at this point.

More to the original point, I don't like gear swapping as part of a gimmick that exists until you overgear the content. It's just a pain in the ***. Tanks are stacking stamina for a reason...namely that avoidance only addresses incoming physical damage in content where so much damage is either magic or comes in the form of physical damage where avoidance doesn't apply (ie. Gormok's Impale in ToGC25 ate our tanks alive for...more progression attempts than I care to mention). Right now our guild's main warrior tank is talking about going back into Naxx to farm BV gear for Anub in ToGC25. The idea that progression is basically halted pending Naxx farming runs + RNG is a bit disheartening. What's worse is that even if he gets the recommended BV on his gear, his health pool is going to suffer substantially and...he's a warrior. He can't even be block capped 100% of the time. BV seems to scale fairly well, but at the end of the day he's farming old content for obsolete gear to offset demanding mechanics in current content.

In a way, it's incentive for the guild to get me involved on my pally and help me tweak my gear a bit. I believe it's the head and legs for T9 gear that have the block value baked right in. Take those, new shield, Conquest libram and any of my current gear with BV and I could probably hit 3k block value without too much difficulty. It's just those 100 EoT right now that are preventing me from contributing <.<

I guess that if we can take anything from this, it's that tanks are unwise to dispose of old gear without giving thought to what it might be useful for in the future. In my case, I'm lucky that my pally is still toting mostly T7.5 epics so I can actually hang on to the BV gear as I upgrade. If I had vendored it all on the way to ToGC, I'd be pissed lol

What I have heard about the fight is that apart from a Paladin's threat capabilities, Warrior tanks trump with higher block value and an easier time getting passively capped. It works out to be some ridiculously high amount of incoming damage if your not passively capped with a good amount of Block Value. Probably the most extreme case of gear requirement for an offtank in WoW to date.

Edit: Found this on the Oboards:




Seems that for one reason or another the Devs are leaning back towards avoidance as a tanking stat.

link



Edited, Oct 30th 2009 11:20am by arthoriuss