gearing for ulduar -.- help!

hello fellow tanks:)
im pretty new to tanking, juz started when WoTLK came up and honestly had no idea about tanking in general. (was a warlock during bc)And currently im the MT of our guild. Maybe you guys can help me in teaching some points regarding gearing myself for ulduar( current set-up The World of Warcraft Armory ). 1st of all, i tried reading a couple of websites and blogs regarding tanking gears, but i havent really gotten anything regarding armor. how does armor weight compared to raw stamina eg. monarch crab vs the 850 armor dodge trinket. another issue would be, is it really better to enchant my weapon with mongoose rahter than accuracy? with my current hit rating, i feel accuracy would be more beneficial. i would really appriciate assistance regarding my gears and advice on how to gear myself when ulduar comes. i understand tanks need a couple of sets too, stam set and a threat set, but thankfully threat isnt an issue for me so i want to have a well rounded gear set-up. thanks.

Probably belongs in the armory section.

Moved.

Well, your stamina is impressive, I'll say that, and your threat stats are good too. If I was going to change anything, I'd drop some stamina for avoidance, as you could probably gain 3 or 4% with some different gear selections/gems.

so should i gem for it? or replace my trinkets with avoidance?

Trinkets would suffice I think. Got a repelling charge or Valor Medal?

yes i have all the trinkets in the game for tanking.

Pop in the Repelling charge and try er' out :D

Imo your gear is really good. Only things I would do are get Tuskerrs to boots especially since you're a MT. You can easily afford to lose 7 stam in exchange for a speed increase.

Also I see you're using Ruthlessness as one of your rings. Replace that with a Sandborn and you'll probably get an extra 1% (maybe more) of avoidance. After that you can afford to replace acouple of those 24 stams for +8 expertise/12 stams to make up for the expertise on Ruthlessness.

hmm. i dont see any boss yet that requires me to use Tuskerrs on my boots. regarding the ring, i have the other 1 but i feel that the exp gain is btr than the dodge it gives. hmm..

So the way to think about avoiadance vs mitigation is as a reverse percentage (how far away from 100% am I now and what percentage will inbound damage be reduced by closing that by x%). Both suffer from a level of diminishing returns before the final value is produced (how many dodge rating produces 1% dodge changes as the total value for dodge grows) so there's no easy way to make a definitive statement of stacking a particular RATING value on avoidance vs mitigation. Having said that, percentage for percentage of delivered value, avoidance is better than mitigation and the amount better scales to inbound damage (the more inbound damage, the better avoidance is).

So some examples:
- You have 61% reduction in damage from armor. Increasing that 1% will reduce inbound damage by around 2.5% (1/39th). I'm rounding to make it easier to follow.
- Your avoidance is around 50% (i'm estimating your miss at around 10%) so each 1% of avoidance will reduce inbound damage by 2%

So 'wow this means that scaling armor is better than scaling avoidance', right? Depends on where you are in the cycle. Check the invidual pieces and see what moves the total more. 1% of armor at your gear level buys you more than 1% avoidance, but the avoidance is likely a cheaper stat to stack in terms of ilevel.

Now why did i start with that when your question was about stamina vs avoidance. Mostly because you asked about a mitigation trinket rather than an avoidance one and want to make sure that you could compare avoidance/migitation vs stam rather than just one or the other.

Basically the stamina equation is as long as you have 'enough' stamina to handle the inevitable spike damage, then avoidance is the thing to stack. Enough is a matter for personal preference, but for warriors/pallys seems to be somewhere in the 29/30k range unbuffed right now. Progression tanking will tend to favor a slightly more stam heavy approach.

That's a long way of saying, you are safe in the general case of sacrificing stam for some avoidance (gem or base item stats) but keep your higher stam gear around for specific fights.

thanks. guess i have to re-do my gears so its more balanced. il do abit of math lol

chardev.org v6 ~ a World of Warcraft character planner

Save yourself some maths :D

hmm.. it says no host connection

Try it again? it seems to be working for me, or google "wow Chardev"

it works now.tyvm