Too much stamina on warr tank?

In the last few days, a few people have mentioned to me that I'm just stacking stamina.

I was under the impression that the goal was to shoot for around 160k health unbuffed, and to keep your total percentage of block+parry+dodge at about 75% (so that shield block would account for the additional 25% and top you off at 100%).

Have I completely misunderstood the goals here?

Here is my armory link. I'm primarily running heroic ZA/ZG and BWD.
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte.../malahk/simple

Thanks for any thoughts on the subject!

Mastery continues to have an effect, even when your shield block would put you over 102.4% (excess block becomes crit block chance). I would change the pure stamina gems for puissant emeralds, and perhaps also use the jc mastery gems.

Your health will increase when you get more gear, focus on increasing your mastery. Get exalted with baradin warders - the 321 mastery/400 resist on use trinket is very awesome (will take you about 2 weeks)

160K unbuffed refers to HM raid tanking. This assumes several things, one of them being you have a certian about of mastery ( from items, specifically raid gear or tier peaces) . I would strongly suggest jemming mastery and parry, not stam. Even assuming your tanking HM raids, you still jem chant reforge those 2 stats and just switch to a stam trinket. You really want to aim for you block to be over 50%, then blend in parry to pro hold the line. Currently, Id would assume healers have a bit of trouble keep you up as a result of large damage spikes.

So how much health should I shoot for as I starting switching out gems?

5 x Solid Ocean Sapphire - into 5x Puissant Dream Emerald (30 stam / 20 mastery).
3 x Solid Chimera's Eye - you can probably leave in due to your low base health, but deffs switch em to mastery once you get more gear.
2 x Defender's Demonseye - into 2x Fine Ember Topaz (20 parry / 20 mastery).

Rule of thumb when gemming a protection warrior is:

Blue - Puissant Dream Emerald (30 stam / 20 Mastery)
Red - Fine Ember Topaz (20 Parry / 20 Mastery)
Yellow - Fractured Amberjewel (40 Mastery)

Basically with this set up even though your HP is lower you will actually take less dmg over all and have a smoother dmg income providing your healers with some stability.

Also I notice you reforged off a bit of mastery .... never do that ... always convert anything else to mastery over the opposite if you have to reforge.

Diminishing returns starts kicking in at about 13.5% dodge/parry but mastery has no diminishing returns. Mastery is the number one stat for warriors basically allowing us to be unhittable for 10 seconds out of every 30 seconds throughout the entire fight ... the higher your mastery the more blocks/crit blocks you'll get and lower your incoming dmg will be.

also more mastery = more block = more rage = more threat also


also with your chants you can change the 44 stam on your Gloves to 50/65 mastery (depending on your ability to get maelstroms for the 65) and the boots enchants should either be lavawalker (increase movement speed slightly and mastery rating by 35) or straight out 50 mastery to boots.

So basically the setup I have listed above will reduce your incoming dmg and provide you with alot more rage which is all win for a prot warrior ... hope this helps you.

Depends on your raidsize, progress and assigned healers. For 10m heroic mode there's no boss left where i'd go for the stamina route (gemming + flask + double trinket) thanks to the 4.1 shieldblock buff as a warrior. For starting with raiding you'll want enough hitpoints to survive Chimaeron's Double Attack (shield block will be up every time so don't worry to much about it) and Electrocute on Nefarian while kiting the adds, that's roughly 140k unbuffed.

If you start reforging, enchanting and gemming for mastery while picking up different trinkets (mirror + crab) you can increase your amount of block/critblock (plus two totally awesome trinket effects) by 6% in exchange for ~ 15k hitpoints. And yes, you can run all raids on normal mode with 160k hitpoints buffed.

Sirloin, you're awesome!

Ok, I tweaked my gems and enchants like you suggested. I also tweaked some of my reforging since my parry was well over the diminishing returns line and I still needed more block.

Before:
Dodge: 11.94%
Parry: 15.32%
Block: 45.27%
Mast: 1586 = 16.85
Health: 159155

After:
Dodge: 11.80%
Parry: 14.56%
Block: 49.07%
Mast: 2040 = 19.38
Health: 154871

Check my armory again and see what you think.

Thanks again!!!

Looks good to me, few small things you might want to look into: reforge expertise>mastery on chest, 65 mastery enchant on gloves instead of 50, windwalk enchant on weapon, get the tol barad trinket.
Gemming is a bit of a personal flavor you could change those 101 stam gems to 67 mastery gems but your stats look good the way they are.

Yeah everything looks great now .. only thing left is like the above poster said ... reforge that expertise on your chest to mastery and you'll probs hit the 50% mark and also reforge the hit on your shield to dodge or parry.

an easy trink to get is the tol barad one with is http://www.wowhead.com/item=68713
probly one of the best warrior tanking trinks in the game atm.

I'm a little nervous about reducing expertise or hit, since I'm already having issues getting initial aggro due to misses, dodges, and parries. Should I still proceed?

I'll get to work on the trinket. Sure wish the valor point tanking trinket was better.

Yes.

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Originally Posted by Malahk

I'm a little nervous about reducing expertise or hit, since I'm already having issues getting initial aggro due to misses, dodges, and parries. Should I still proceed?

I'll get to work on the trinket. Sure wish the valor point tanking trinket was better.

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I would proceed with the other mentioned tasks first. as for threat, Im starting to see more and more concerns about it... so im really not sure. personally, I run with 2%hit or a little more and 18 expertise. However, Im geared so my block/dodge/parry are high enough to ensure that I dont die due at my own accord.

Seriously - a tank cannot complain about threat when they have 3/3 in bloodcraze and 0/3 in deep wounds.

Malahk - here's what you should be looking at:

A) Marking your kill priority, skull and X.
B) Tell DPS to hold off until they see TC.
C) Focusing on Skull -> HT ->Charge+SB ->SS -> Rend (repeat until Rend lands) -> TC .... Then Rev/Cleave/Shockwave as needed.

In this scenario you'll apply rend to all your targets, so by the time skull, and then X are focus-fired down, DPS can't catch you on the others.

Talents - move the 3 points from Blood craze into Deep Wounds - better single-target threat (better than cruelty, thunderstruck, etc, Deeps wounds is the best optional threat talent, per point, out there).

What's your rotation? Using an optimal/near optimal rotation/priority system > hit/exp. I'm currently running the most hit/exp I've run with all expansion (~.7% hit and 12 exp or so - and I'm looking to drop the exp #) and threat isn't really an issue if DPS doesn't go beserk at the beginning (or focus-fires off-target adds).

Marking targets, Deep Wounds, a good priority system each >>>> hit/exp (though if you have to choose between hit and expertise, always pick expertise, it's functionally 2x as hit until 26exp).

Find wartotem's spreadsheet (if you can't find the post, I have it linked in one of my posts in my sig) and plug yourself into it. Start playing around with the numbers so you can get a feel for why abiltiies are prioritiezed over others.

Hit/Exp are really a crutch and nothing more, let's get you standing on your own two feet :D

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Originally Posted by Loganisis

Seriously - a tank cannot complain about threat when they have 3/3 in bloodcraze and 0/3 in deep wounds.

Malahk - here's what you should be looking at:

A) Marking your kill priority, skull and X.
B) Tell DPS to hold off until they see TC.
C) Focusing on Skull -> HT ->Charge+SB ->SS -> Rend (repeat until Rend lands) -> TC .... Then Rev/Cleave/Shockwave as needed.

In this scenario you'll apply rend to all your targets, so by the time skull, and then X are focus-fired down, DPS can't catch you on the others.

Talents - move the 3 points from Blood craze into Deep Wounds - better single-target threat (better than cruelty, thunderstruck, etc, Deeps wounds is the best optional threat talent, per point, out there).

What's your rotation? Using an optimal/near optimal rotation/priority system > hit/exp. I'm currently running the most hit/exp I've run with all expansion (~.7% hit and 12 exp or so - and I'm looking to drop the exp #) and threat isn't really an issue if DPS doesn't go beserk at the beginning (or focus-fires off-target adds).

Marking targets, Deep Wounds, a good priority system each >>>> hit/exp (though if you have to choose between hit and expertise, always pick expertise, it's functionally 2x as hit until 26exp).

Find wartotem's spreadsheet (if you can't find the post, I have it linked in one of my posts in my sig) and plug yourself into it. Start playing around with the numbers so you can get a feel for why abiltiies are prioritiezed over others.

Hit/Exp are really a crutch and nothing more, let's get you standing on your own two feet :D

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I should probably explain that I'm not new to tanking. Been doing it since Molten Core was the only end game content. I really have no issues maintaining aggro once I've got it, single target or multi-target, and I'm well aware of how to get and hold aggro... I simply have noticed that some boss fights have gotten off to rockier starts when my first SS and Revenge both get dodged or parried. I'm not really "complaining" about this, I'm just nervous about it getting worse.

As for my talent build, as I said, I'm not having issues maintaining aggro. I went with blood craze in order to help with heals on adds and packs when I was still grinding regular heroics. I don't see deep wounds helping me with my initial aggro issue, but I think I will still go ahead and switch to it now that I'm trying to help out with as much dps as possible on boss fights.

In case you still would like to know, my opening attack usually begins with a HT -> Charge. Single target, I move to SS and revenge (if avail), rend, and devastate. Multi-target, I move immediately to rend and thunderclap.

Once the opener is done, my single-target priorities are as follows:
1) Revenge
2) Shield Slam
3) Devastate

I use thunderclap to refresh rend appropriately, and hit shield block when it's up.

Multi-target is a mix of extra thunderclaps and cleaves, still hitting SB when it's up.


Sirloin, I'll go ahead and reforge the exp and hit to mastery like you suggested. Thanks again for your advice!

Yeah DW to much about initial threat man, usually if people pull threat at the start of an encounter its their bad not yours ... if your guild is asking you to spec into hit and expertise so you can hold opening threat they are wrong ... sacrificing maybe a global cd in their dps rotation at the start is a small price to pay for your tank to be able to spec pure dmg reduction.

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Originally Posted by Malahk

I should probably explain that I'm not new to tanking. Been doing it since Molten Core was the only end game content.

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I was responding to what you posted, that you were nervous about dropping threat stats. I didn't know your history, just what you identified as the problem. The experience I've had, the experience of better tanks than me on this site is threat stats aren't needed (and really at this point, with avaialble gear, at any point). All I know is you had a concern with threat stats and that that concern has been show (and I've seen it first hand) to not be a major concern (outside of the fact that the way vengence work is funky and DPS actually has to pay attention).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Malahk

I really have no issues maintaining aggro once I've got it, single target or multi-target, and I'm well aware of how to get and hold aggro... I simply have noticed that some boss fights have gotten off to rockier starts when my first SS and Revenge both get dodged or parried. I'm not really "complaining" about this, I'm just nervous about it getting worse.

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Welcome to Cataclysm. It's not Wrath anymore, there isn't snap aggro. I know many tanks still cling to the mindset that if you can't generate instant, unpassable, threat then it's a tank problem. It's not. We have MT tanks that can pull enough threat in the first 10ish seconds on a boss that we're not catching them. Or they can pull enough threat that I can't hit CS because if I get a good crit string I'll rip off them. Regardless of whether they're pulling great threat or they've got some misses in there - if DPS pull, it's a problem with DPS not the tank.

Like I said, I think too many tanks and far too many DPS still thing a tank that doesn't have godly aggro in the first 5 seconds is fail. Do your best, and DPS needs to pay attention, but don't gimp your survaiblity for extra threat.

A bad miss/parry/dodge streak stinks - we've all been there. But it's not a failure, it's part of the new design. Unless your DPS is such that you absolutely MUST have full-out DPS on the pull, a slightly slower start isn't going to hurt the kill attempt.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Malahk

As for my talent build, as I said, I'm not having issues maintaining aggro. I went with blood craze in order to help with heals on adds and packs when I was still grinding regular heroics. I don't see deep wounds helping me with my initial aggro issue, but I think I will still go ahead and switch to it now that I'm trying to help out with as much dps as possible on boss fights.

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Deep wounds will help on the pull if there's a crit - so maybe it won't help every time on the pull, but it will help some portion of the time. One thing some are looking at is Beserker -> Reckless-> Defensive -> HT-CHarge/SB->SS-> go to try to get a few more crits in at the beginning before the boss really ramps up and starts pounding you. If you're not having threat issues - then it isn't needed (but you should still have 2/3 in deep wounds before 2/2 in Cruelty to be optimal). You said you had threat issues but you didn't have deep wounds.

Blood craze looks good on the surface, but in a single target environment, it's not that great. With multiple targets it's *slightly* better. If I'm not mistaken, the 3% HP is actually broken out over 5 seconds, so even at 200k HP, you're looking at a 6k over 5 seconds, or 1,200 hps. Which sounds good but that's less than a HoT tick by any heal class that's raiding with a 200k tank. And with the swing timer (some one correct me if I'm wrong, I've read it's 2.6 seconds - wasn't it 1.5 in Wrath?) of 2.6 seconds you're looking at, unless there's additional AoE, a pretty low uptime (10% chance every 2.6 seconds to heal for 1.2k/s at 200k HP)... 2.6 seconds, 5 second duration, and 10% proc chance, that means it's going to be something like 5 seconds every 26 on average (lets say 20% even though it's slightly less) uptime, for a 1,200*.2 = 240 hps average? I'm tired - my math (and maybe an assupmption or 2) may be wrong - but I think that's ballparkish. (it gets better if it's a 1.5 second swing timer, up to what, maybe 400hps average?).

It's just underwhelming when you really look at it. For such a small heal, a 6% increase in damage done via Deep Wounds for the same 3 points just, well, rocks.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Malahk

In case you still would like to know, my opening attack usually begins with a HT -> Charge. Single target, I move to SS and revenge (if avail), rend, and devastate. Multi-target, I move immediately to rend and thunderclap.

Once the opener is done, my single-target priorities are as follows:
1) Revenge
2) Shield Slam
3) Devastate

I use thunderclap to refresh rend appropriately, and hit shield block when it's up.

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You're doing it wrong. SS w/ HR > CB > SS > SW > (Rev/Rend/Dev) at full vengence - or something very similar to that. In a single-target environment SS should always be prioritiezed over revenge. Always.

SW (shockwave, not sheild wall) shouldn't be used until you hit about 50% vengence though - that's when it's better scaling through AP make it better than Dev/Rev. There's some math out there that shows on average, waiting until the CD right before SS comes up to use SW/CB and using Rev/Dev instead to try to get a SnB proc is optimal. But it's a fairly limited change iirc - and using SW/CB on CD (behind SS) is good.

One thing you can do on the opener is use HT -> Charge + SB -> SS -> Rev -> Dev. Popping SB (which isn't on the GCD so can be used at the same time as charge) so your first 2 SS at least, if they hit, hit with Heavy Repurcussions (more if you get lucky with SnB procs).

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Originally Posted by Malahk

Multi-target is a mix of extra thunderclaps and cleaves, still hitting SB when it's up.

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Which add pulls are problematic? There are probably some great fight-specific suggestions that can be made.

boss swing timers are (unless there's a gimmick) 2 seconds, which properly Debuffed by the tank 2.4seconds

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Originally Posted by Loganisis

Like I said, I think too many tanks and far too many DPS still thing a tank that doesn't have godly aggro in the first 5 seconds is fail. Do your best, and DPS needs to pay attention, but don't gimp your survaiblity for extra threat.

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But it's the first 30ish seconds that counts for the (faster) kills, prepots are still ticking for 22+ seconds and everyone pops their huge cooldown so they can squeeze in another round later into that fight. In addition: all trinkets will procc in that timespan for the first time and the expensive weapon enchants will grant additional attackpower/int at least one time.

Looking at a first 40 seconds of our last 10m heroic Al'Akir phase 1 dps race:
70k dps peak on an arcane mage with arcane power, pom, prepot + mindlessly spamming arcane blasts back to back
51k dps peak on a fury warrior with deathwish, recklessness, inner rage, prepot
38k dps peak on a ret paladin with wings, zealotry, prepot and only one Art of War procc
13k dps peak on my tanking warrior with prepot, 2x inner rage, 2x shieldblock, recklessness, 5 sword&board and 4 incite proccs - two missed shield slams and three missed heroic strikes/devastates

Without any form of help on initial threat (tricks - don't forget that tricks grant a dps=tps boost as well, misdirect or arcane mages) you'll have to get some threat stats in order to maintain aggro when your dps are decked in heroic raid gear.. well at least i do on my warrior. On druid i just pop berserk and on my paladin alt our dps isn't in full heroic raid gear yet so wings + 3 hpo divine plea is regulary enough.

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Originally Posted by klausi

But it's the first 30ish seconds that counts for the (faster) kills, prepots

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If by faster kills you're talking about WoL ranked fight faster kills. That doesn't matter. That's a guild choice.

Now if that's needed to end the first phase quicker because that is the one where most deaths occur making other phases harder/impossible - then yes, throw on some more expertise would be useful to the raid because it would help in the first chunk of the fight. But that's a fight a hard-mode fight specific issue. Not a 'how should I gear for base'.

IF the raid is hitting an enrage timer and absolutely needs to go harder earlier, then exp > hit is useful. If not, it's not. For 99.9% of raids. If, over the course of an encouter, a raid finds something else is needed for a specific fight, then yes, adjusting is good. But the reality is, for nearly every case... DPS needs to watch their threat. If they're going to pre-pot, fine. But unless it's needed to down the boss, it's just going to make them ahve to be more attentive to their threat.

Al Akir is kinda a pain with his swing timer and all the movement but that said I don't recall any threat issues in p1 with no hit, no expertise, no salv, no tricks and a single MD. P2 is another story (10 man) and is tricky but thats where having good DPS with a brain really helps and intervene/gag order are golden.