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I'm gearing towards 10 man main tank content. I just want to make sure I'm on target:
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...trung/advanced
Please reply with any constructive criticism.
Currently working on exalted rep gear for Back and Wrist slots. As well as Head enchantment.
Thank you!
Moved to HALP! forum.
Well you have most of the items you can get before entering a raid. But I think you can polish them up a little bit better than you have already done.
About your gear:
- Get rid of all the expertise
- Balance Parry and Dodge more
- Decide on what you want to focus with your gems and stay true to it
- Don't know about your ranged weapon
You definitly don't need expertise for thread and it does not give you anything survival vise. Parry haste is gone. You have one expertise gem, you have decided to reduse parry for mastery instead of expertise. Don't do this. Your biggest problem at the start of raiding will be your healers going oom. Do everything to help them there. Avoidance and Mastery are king here.
But there is more going on for warriors: When we hit Shield block, we get 25% additional block. We can make this to a little Shield Wall every 30s (or 1/3 of the time). It works like this: against bosses we have an adjusted hit-table of 102.4%. The trick is to move every normal hit from this table. 5% is always a miss. When we have SB up, we have another 25%. So we need 72.4% combined dodge+parry+block to move every normal hit from the table. If we can do this, we will never get a melee hit for more than 70% of the original value while SB is up. It's a flat dmg reduction of 30% 1/3 of the time. This is quite big, because your block is not a rdm number anymore for this time. (Even better, every block spilling over the 102.4% will be converted to crit block, so our chances to reduce the dmg to 40% get even higher.)
So: You really, really want to have those 72.4%. No threat stat can be this good. (But I will come back to threat, later.)
Now about parry and dodge:
They have the same affect ingame - one attack that does not connect. No parry haste or anything like this, anymore. Further they got the same deminishing returns (beside of a little initial part). So to get the most avoidance, it's best to have their ratings close together, to hit as few DR as one can. Well warriors have Hold the Line, that adds some more crit block when you parry, so parry should be a little bit higher than dodge. But yours are quite far away. Parry is near 15%, dodge is below 10%. At around 13.5% deminishing returns start to hurt you. You have some going on with your parry. Switching some Parry to dodge will give you a higher sum without missing much on parry and hold the line.
About your gems:
You have some quite weird gems, there. Just decide what you want to archieve with your gems and than stay true to it. I can think about 4 schools of geming strategies that one could have today:
- all pure stamina (with whatever you need to activate the meta, but it's probably stam, anyway)
- all pure mastery (with whatever you need to activate the meta)
- getting set bonusses with stacking as much stam as possible (blue: stam, yellow: stam+mastery, red: parry+stam)
- getting set bonusses with stacking as much mastery as possible (blue: stam+mastery, yellow: mastery, red: parry+mastery)
Pick one of the above. If you are starting to raid and running heroic 5mans the last two will probably be the best for you, because healers going oom is much more a concern than instant tank death and the only thing that stamina does is give a buffer against quick tank deaths. However you do it, the differences will not be much. Raid buffed a tank entering raids has about 160k HP. The difference between going full out on stamina against geming only for mastery is about 8k life. That's about 5% life. On the other hand, you gain about 4-6% block if you solely focus on mastery against the stamina setup. Sure, it's a difference but they are not extreme.
As a rule of thumb: If you don't die because of few hits, you probably don't need more stamina. If your healers complain about your survivabilty you maybe should rethink your geming. If the don't go oom constantly, you probably don't need more mastery. If they go oom because of bad execution or your raid getting too much dmg, your gemming will not help them much anyway.
Wether you go for stamina or mastery. I myself would advise to get socket bonusses. As before, you don't loose much for doing so, but you just gain additional raitings which add up. You just get more by doing so.
About your ranged weapon:
As I said I'm not sure about them. You got the pvp-thrown weapon. Well there is not a good blue tanking ranged weapon, anyway. So it probably does not change much, anyway. But you should remember, that resilience does not do anything in pve, now.
If you take something from the PVP-related stuff (well it's the PVP-faction) take the trinket that gives you mastery and the on click magic dmg reduction. There are some encounters where it is quite good.
About your talents:
- Take Vigilance
- Ask yourself if you really use Intervene to Safeguard someone
Safeguard:
Well there is a discussion going on about the value of the Safeguard talent in the general forum here on tankspots. There are some who think it's quite good at least for special encounters. Others (and me) don't really see the value. I think you should read it and come to your own conclusion. But the most important point here should be if you would ever actually use it. You should only take it if you use it. If you don't use it, those two points serve you better in a dps/threat talent or even Impending Victory (another talent with heavy discussion around it, that should only be taken if you actually use it).
Vigilance:
So now I'm back to speak about threat. As I said, you don't need expertise and hit for threat. I've less than 2% hit and 2 expertise at the moment and don't have any threat problems, ever. Your survivability is much more important. Sure if you miss the first few hits, you may have problems to get the initial threat. But in raids you may have a rogue or hunter to ensure your threat for the first few seconds. And taunt does not miss anymore. But that's only a problem for the first few seconds. Later on you will be miles away from your dps. You will have quite high Vengeance stacks, so your AP will be quite high.
And here comes why I advice you to take Vigilance. It gives you 20% of the Vengeance the target would have. Most encounters consist of two tanks. When you place Vigilance on the other tank, you get the Vengeance of 20% of the dmg the other tank gets. Additionally to your own. That's quite a nice AP buff. And it ensures you to start with much higher dmg when you start again to tank if you had no target for a given period of time (during trash, or taunt-bosses).
Well you are the tank, but at least in the first tier of Cata and especially in 10mans your dmg counts. With high vengeance stacks, you often will be competing with the low dps. There are even gimic encounters where you even can reach 1st in dmg done. So if you can improve it easily, do it. Because everything that you contribute here helps your healers with their mana since they need to endure a shorter period of time.
Vigilance also has another effect: If you place it on the other tank, you can taunt more or less all the time. So if you lose a target, you can definilty get it back. (Taunts don't miss anymore.) Even if you need your taunt to switch targets with the other tank or something.
About your glyps:
- get rid of the sunder armor glyph
- don't know about heroic throw glyph
You don't use sunder armor, you use devastate. Don't glyph for anything you don't use.
Heroic throw may be okay, if you definitly want to start with a full stack early. I like cleave more. Well it's for multiple targets, but there is much contend even in boss encounters where you have to tank multiple targets. I don't think one or the other makes a big difference.
I'm still reading, but THANK YOU for taking the time and being so thorough!
***edit***
Finished reading =0)
Reforging:
I've re-evaluated my reforging decisions and will be reducing all hit and expertise instead of dodge where available. Even after that my parry was still too high, so I reforged some items to reduce parry and increase dodge, now they are within 3% of eachother.
Gems:
Gems will be the fourth choice that you mentioned, since raid buffed I have no trouble hitting 160k. (getting set bonusses with stacking as much mastery as possible (blue: stam+mastery, yellow: mastery, red: parry+mastery)
Glyphs:
I've Changing Heroic Throw to Cleave, and Furious Sunder to Demo Shout. To explain why I chose "furious sundering" I thought that since no warrior tank uses sunder anylonger, why would Blizz make a glyph for it? Convinced that they're not crazy, I equipped it and assumed it also applied to the rage cost of devastate (since the stacking effect of devastate is sunder armor) however I have not confirmed this. Perhaps someone in the tankspot community has asked that same question.
Talents:
Eventhough I do frequently use safeguard, its situational at best and most of the time the group i'm with is capable of compensating for themselves. So Safeguard -2 talent points and Vigilance +1, Booming Voice +1.
Thank you so much for the in-depth evaluation!
***edit #2***
Would safeguarding a 2nd tank in a raid be seen as hugely beneficial? Especially if switching back and forth?
About the sunder armor glyph:
DPS-warriors use Sunder Armor. Well not all the time, but it's a debuff quite valuable for melee. So if nobody else applies it, a dps-warrior would apply it during a boss encounter. I've not read that it's a good idea to use the glyph for them, but since they use the ability, it's not a dumb thing to have those glyph.
About safeguarding:
As I said there is a hot discussion about this here: http://www.tankspot.com/showthread.p...ng-it-in-raids
Read it, think about it, maybe enter the discussion there. It's not a good idea to have a mirror discussion in this threat, too. As I said in my first answer: I myself don't think it worth to take it as a default talent for a default raid setup.
I think other "external" CDs have a much lower situational/opportunity cost. Like the ones priests and paladins bring. If you don't have any of those and feel that you need another one and think that you can manage to apply it safely at the right moment - go for it. But I don't see it as a "must have" in every encounter. Especially when there are encounters where you have to be far away from the other tank at the time, where the external CD would be usefull.
But that's just my oppinion. Make your own. Read about it. Think about it. Take the talent and find out if you are using it. Pass on the talent and look if you will occassionaly think "well we would have survived it with safeguard". Switch your spec accordingly. But don't just take it (or miss on it) just because someone else said so.
After those changes I've received nothing but compliments from healers in heroics and even while tanking Baradin Hold. I think your analyses has made me a believer in Mastery stacking over Stamina as long as 160k health can be easily reached. Thank you again.