Prot Warrior confused why still squishy

Hey guys just joined tankspot and couldn't think of a better place to post up my question.

Ok recently i've had a few healers in random heroic cata dungeons saying i'm squishy and i'm really curious i actually followed askmrrobot down to the detail. I really have no idea what i'm doing wrong, my apologies if I did something wrong but I really am interested in becoming a better tank.

Askmrrobot

SCORE: 26711 (80.56%)

: http://www.askmrrobot.com/wow/gear/usa/thaurissan/ramlyburger

Also my Ilvl: 383
BTW i'm using slightly cheaper gems due to financial issues and i'm only missing 2 enchants cause they require certain reputation levels.

Much appreciated for stopping by =)

First off Askmrrobot is not great. its alright for DPS, but for tanking its misses some of the important parts about how our stat priority changes as we gain stats. Also missing enchants are missing enchants, its kinda like turning up a garage asking if you can get better performance out of the car by tuning up the engine whilst ignoring the fact one or more of your tyres are flat. your Gear is a little behind the curve at the moment, most people having been farming DS for months so healers tend to expect a tank to massively over gear the 5 man content.

Warrior tanks first gearing priority is reaching 102.4% CTC (block chance + parry chance + dodge chance + 5), at this point as long as you're not being hit from behind mobs will never land a successful hit, the best they can hope to achieve is that their attacks will be blocked. this makes warriors damage intake a lot less spiky.

Stacking mastery is the best way to do this and you should keep your parry and dodge rating amount eqaul whilst doing this. Before reaching this point you should be gemming Fractured in Yellow sockets, Keen in red sockets and Puissant in blue sockets, and it if the socket bonuses aren't mastery it may be worth ignoring them and gemming pure mastery. Generally if a piece doesn't have mastery on it you should reforge something to mastery, generally you should reforge from Haste before crit before Hit before expertise before dodge or parry

the general stat priority is;
Mastery>dodge+parry>stam>armour>>>>>>>>>>>everythi ng else

Once you've reached 102.4% the stat priority changes to be;
Stamina>parry>dodge>mastery>armour>>>>>>>>>everyth ing else

Currently you are below 102.4% by a little over 6%, you ideally want to find 733mastery rating. A good source would be replacing Veil of Lies, until you hit 102.4% static stam trinkets aren't your friends, even if they proc mastery. I know they look good on the epeen, but they really should be replaced ASAP with a static mastery trinket. The one form TB is easily obtainable from farming the dailies and despite its 359 ilvl is still the best choice for some T13HC encounters. Alternatively theirs a drop from Beth'tilac in FL and the Avengers of Hyjal Rep str DPS trinket is has enough mastery that it shouldn't be passed over just because its not aimed at tanks.

I see you don't glyph for Demo shout? Are keeping it up 100% of the time? if not why not? it along with the Thunderclap Debuffs should be up 100% of the time , together they offer a 28% damage reduction against boss melee, which on almost every fight is the single largest source of your damage taken as a tank (unless you stand in the fire a lot, which you really shouldn't) and on bosses like Morchok or Madness or blackhorm are vital at shrinking tank killers and raid wide damage spikes.

Really you ought to be maxing either Incite or shield specialization or both, not maxing Incite kinda infers you don't get nearly enough rage, dropping points from shield specialization kinda infers you're more than happy with your rage gen. Incite is a ridiculously good talent. Personally I'd drop gag order, its a redundant talent for PVE, and max both incite and Shield Spec.

Your gear is more than good enough for LFR and 5 mans, so unless you have poor tanking habbits (positioning, debuffs) healers are just getting spoiled by all the 390+ raid geared tanks floating around.
I have never seen AskMrRobot point a tank in the right drection. It's better that you learn your class and stat priorities, and use your nogin and a calculator to figure it out, IMO. Maybe I'm jsut old fashioned though.

Let's talk spec and glyphs.
http://www.wowhead.com/talent#LG0cZ0...ozbu:0oVckZMko That is my spec of choice. Yours works too, except Gag Order is kinda not worth taking outside of PVP. I know, it's a flashy cool looking tool, and all the other tanks get a ranged silence, and you geel liek a outcast without one! Welcome to WoW's broken talent system.
As for glyphs, I have no idea why you have Glyph of Furious Sundering. Change that to Demo Shout would be my suggestion.

Your Legs and Boots are gemmed incorrectly. Put pure mastery into any of the sockets that dont have it already. I hope you didn't spend money on the green epic gems....

Dailies.... I know it's the end of the expansion, but if you want to tank all of Dargin Soil, and maybe poke your head into a heroic raid boss or two, you have your work cut out for you. Go quest out all of Deepholm, this will get you alot of Rep with The Earthen Ring for your Head Enchant, and at the end you get Therezane, which is for your shoulders. I also highly recomend doing TB dailies for the tank trinket(mastery/use resist). And you know what dailies get you: a suprisingly not too shaby chunk of gold!
If the tank trinket drops off of spine, you can use it if you so choose, I don't personally like it at all, some people do though.

Wow that's actually really confusing :confused: LOL, don't get me wrong i've been a tank for quite some time i know how to do my role right. Just that i find this calculations and stuff really confusing.

Guess worst situation, i gotta go dps sadly =(

which bit is confusing?

I personally find tank stats easier to manage than dps ones with the way the system works at the moment. I use titan panel and have a plug in called broker_unhittable. This lets me see how close I am to ctc capped so I can tell when I need to reforge/gem away from mastery. Pretty simple at that point to to just do all reforges myself.

For dps, you have hard caps that should be as exact as possible with hit and/or expertise. I actually have to use simulationcraft and wowreforge.com to get my reforging right for dps.

Guess it just all depends on how "exact" you feel the need to be.

If you're not willing to put in the effort then you can settle for being mediocre at tanking, dps or anything else you don't put effort into and that 1 cataclysm raid achievement point will be lonely. Rather than just give up and do dps (still requires some due diligence on your part to be any good), why not pick apart what these guys are telling you and ask questions about what you don't get? Free advice from a good community > roaming around in the dark any day.

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Originally Posted by sifuedition

For dps, you have hard caps that should be as exact as possible with hit and/or expertise. I actually have to use simulationcraft and wowreforge.com to get my reforging right for dps.

Guess it just all depends on how "exact" you feel the need to be.

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Apparently you haven't met reforgelite. Reforging my DPS is way easier than my tank.

Oh and re: confusing gemming/reforging/equations:

The equation teng pointed out is accurate and not all that difficult. You just have to make sure that your dodge%+parry%+block%+5 is as close to 102.4% as possible. After that, then start worrying about stam. I would actually simplify what Teng said and ignore socket bonuses (unless it's +30 mastery or better) and just gem strat mastery.

% dodge + % parry + % block + 5% = 102.4% = Winning at Life

Until you get to 102.4 CTC, mastery is your "best stat" in that it will get you closer to full CTC than Parry and Dodge since Mastery is not currently affected by Diminishing Returns. This meens you reforge and gem you gear to get the highest amount of mastery you can get untill you reach 102.4
You will also want too keep your dodge and parry as close to eachother in value as you can since they are effected by DR at the same rate. After you are comfortably hitting CTC you let your parry go a little higher than your dodge for Hold The Line. Also keep in mind when calculating your CTC that strenght raidbuffs will increase your parry rating.

Any further questions or anything you would like clarifyed?

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Originally Posted by Aggathon

Apparently you haven't met reforgelite. Reforging my DPS is way easier than my tank.

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I actually had a reforging addon that could get as close to 102.40 as I could by hand (there was about 0.01% in it). If only I could actually remember what it was called :/

Well... if you have enough ilevel that you can hit CTC without gemming I can imagine that Fetzie. It's way easier to get to hit and expertise caps with just the raw rating on gear than it is as a tank until you're in H-T13 year.

Before I could get away with using pure stamina gems I would let the reforging addon do its best, and then see how much I could change through gems. Oh, and yes it was expensive enough to make me want to spend a couple of hours writing a spreadsheet.

This post seem to relay heavily on the stats,but what i would add to all of the above good advice is. Are you using your Cool Downs timely. My guild has a warrior tank that is geared to the hull and cant hold aggro (or his health) worth a darn. He cant seen to time his defensive CD's correctly to incoming damage. i'd say that you also look into this, shield block, Demo shout, your stuns (concussion blow, shock wave) and thunder clap. these along with your built in regenerating abilities are important to keep on CD during large mob pulls and boss fights. i assume that this toon is an alt that does not get much love.........

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Originally Posted by The Doc

This post seem to relay heavily on the stats,but what i would add to all of the above good advice is. Are you using your Cool Downs timely. My guild has a warrior tank that is geared to the hull and cant hold aggro (or his health) worth a darn.

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I find these days it's not so much about holding aggro, it's about getting aggro off the bat. With the buff to threat, as long as you're hitting the mob first, or after the first hit looking really mean at it, it will stayed glued to you. Most dps can't grasp the concept of aggro v. threat i.e. of letting the tank get a cleave on the mobs (if it's a pack of them), or a rend/thunderclap to grab aggro, before the dps start spamming multi-target attacks.

Also, is your warrior putting Vigilance on one of the melee? Building up vengence quickly could help to grab aggro back and build threat if the dps doesn't want to hit the tank's target.

A lot of bad warrior tanks neglect their rage dumps, Or don't take a couple of really mandatory talents. In most cases where tankdeath isn't likely a tank should be fine to pop recklessness on the pull not only does the increase chance to crit really help the increased damge taken helps stack vengeance faster and gives him the rage to do something with it. Reallyu the only fihgt where aggro should be an issue is the Madness and it should only be the Large tentacle, as the rest of the deeps can wind up on the claw, but the tank has nothing to stack vengeance.

My sincerest thanks guys for stopping by and adding in all your inputs. I'm just really overwhelmed at the amount of calculations and maths actually required to be a proper tank LOL, I've been tanking since level 15 and all i thought was holding aggro balance parry and dodge and stamina & mast of course.

Now all i need to do is to process all this information and put it into practice, hope you understand coming from a "beginners" point of view its quite a daunting task.

Now what comes to mind is, will it be worth trying to understand and put this information to use as the next expansion should be coming anytime soon. Not too sure if the mechanics will change or remain the same.

If you learn how the current mechanics work, learning the new mechanics in MoP will be considerably easier. If you want a nice, simple introduction to block mechanics you can have a look at my guide, Sections 7-12 are fairly class-agnostic with regards to the mechanics described.

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Originally Posted by Fetzie

If you learn how the current mechanics work, learning the new mechanics in MoP will be considerably easier. If you want a nice, simple introduction to block mechanics you can have a look at my guide, Sections 7-12 are fairly class-agnostic with regards to the mechanics described.

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Impressive spreadsheet, seems like all i ever would need. Would you say this to be true?

And after reading the thread it seems like its really spot on.

If you click on the shamefully large image in my signature it will take you straight to my guide for paladin tanks, scroll down to section 7 for the mechanics explanation that also works for warriors.