So you're heading to Northrend, huh?

[Xav]

So you're a warrior (or maybe paladin) in Northrend about to hit 80 and start tanking some 5 mans. You've got your full set of Tier 4/Tier 5/Badge/Sunwell gear, whatever it may be. Looks good, right? Your gear's still better than all the quest rewards so you haven't picked anything up yet.

That's all well and good. You've probably even tanked some of the 80 5 mans succesfully. Maybe even a heroic or two. But then, suddenly, splat. You just die. To a boss you've tanked before and that didn't hit too hard. So you check your combat log, and... you were crit. Crit! As a tank! The one thing you aren't supposed to let happen. Turns out all your old gear is still good, but your avoidance levels fell, and more importantly, your defense fell big time. So you may only be at 3.4 or something reduction on crit immune, a far cry from the -5.6 (540 defense) you need for any boss-level mobs (-5.4 or 535 defense for level 82 bosses, though)

So, what to do? Well, the same thing happened to me, and that's why I'm writing this. I did a few things.

First, I dug up my old Hydross trinket: [item]Scarab of Displacement[/item]. It's always been a great item for resist fights, since it has a huge amount of defense on it and nothing else. I wear it full time on beta now for the time being.

Then, I re-equipped [item]Shadowmoon Insignia[/item]. Very similar to the Scarab, it's got a ton of defense and some dodge on it as well.

Then, I asked our guild jc's to cut me a ton of +12 defense gems (the new ones, green quality, should be very plentiful), and put them into every socket I have. I kept two blue gems in gear (stam/def is good for this) for the 12 defense rating / 5% block value meta.

Now, other things you can do, which I did as my gear changed and I got upgrades, is to change your shoulder enchant if you're using the Sapphiron one from Naxx 1.0, back to the defense/dodge enchants of aldor/scryer. Same with the helms. I put a 17 dodge / 16 defense enchant from CoT on my new helm rather than a ZG one. I enchanted my chest with 15 defense rating rather than health. I enchanted my cloak with 12 defense rating rather than armor or dodge or agility. I've kept a stable 540 defense in my tank gear on Beta while upgrading my other stats.

When all was said and done, I was finally back to crit immune in my gear. Sure, I lost some health, but that didn't really matter - I never came close to dying until I got crit for 17860 by a heroic 5 man boss when I was already down some health, as it enraged.

Some of the best items from the 5 mans / heroics we've seen at the moment are the Arcane Shielded Helm from Heroic Nexus Arcane-Shielded Helm - Item - World of Warcraft as it has a lot of defense, armor, strength, and so on.

Conveniently, another massive upgrade from Heroic Nexus for even fully sunwell geared tanks is the Cloak of the Enemy Cloak of the Enemy - Item - World of Warcraft It's got an enormous amount of defense, and some hit rating which never huts, as well as high stam and strength. There wasn't a single truly "great" tanking cloak for any one class in all of Sunwell, so the best people may have is things from hyjal trash, badge, t5, etc, which fare even worse due to lower item level. Pick this up as soon as you can.

Another is the Dragonflight Great-Ring from The Oculus, (lvl 80 5 man). Dragonflight Great-Ring - Item - World of Warcraft It's got high defense which is very valuable, and some hit rating as well as high stam/strength.

A huge upgrade is always in our weapon, and you can get a huge one by running Lightning Halls (lvl 80 5 man) for the Eternally Folded Blade Eternally Folded Blade - Item - World of Warcraft It has about equal defensive stats as our weapons we used at 70, slightly more, but it's the dps increase and higher stam that makes it worth it.

Another solid upgrade is the shoulder slot - from Caverns of Time: Old Stratholme, a trash drop that is BoE, you may be able to find these on the AH or from guildies running it if they already get a pair, or don't need them. Crusader's Square Pauldrons - Item - World of Warcraft They've got a nice amount of defense and a solid portion of actual avoidance on them, whereas even the Sunwell tank shoulders (Perseverence, for warriors), don't even have pure avoidance

An amusing thing I noticed is that the [item]Collar of the Pit Lord[/item] from Brutallus became useful again due to it being pure defense/expertise, and the expertise was no longer wasted, since the rating changes caused my overall expertise in tank gear to be at like 5% - thus the expertise from this neck was still very good. Far cry from its actual use on Live servers @ 70 right now - where the expertise is usually unnecessary and highly redundant if you're in full sunwell stuff.

Those are the best upgrades I've really seen so far for people - many of them I used or still use. I will likely be updating this post as time goes on and more items are discovered, but basically it's meant to be a good tip for any tanks heading into Northrend.

You may be trucking along just fine and being highly effective, but it can all come to a depressing grinding halt when you suddenly get crit out of the blue for your life bar. Do your best to become crit-immune again. Perhaps run those old instances now for the trinkets if you never got them. Keep enough extra supplies on your characters to re-enchant your gear in all locations so you aren't slowed down at 80 trying to re-fit yourself.

There's nothing more painful to the ego than to die by getting crit

Update: I also want to say - demog made a very nice gear listing of stuff currently known from WoTLK in Beta, and his covers a broad range of tanking gear types. My thread will mostly just cover high defense items/items used to efficiently reach the defense cap so you aren't crit. If you're just looking for overall tank upgrades or for gearing a new character/reroll/whatnot, you can use his listing to plan it out.

Check his thread out at http://www.tankspot.com/forums/gear-...gear-list.html

[Kazeyonoma]

good to know, thanks Xav.

[Nez]

Thanks for the info! Time to start digging up some old goodies I see.

[tobarstep]

Nice! Please do keep this updated. This could become the "Pre-Naxx Gear Guide for Warriors".

[Xav]

Nice! Please do keep this updated. This could become the "Pre-Naxx Gear Guide for Warriors".

Yeah, I think that's the direction I'm going to take with it.

[Ciderhelm]

I moved this to the News forum temporarily to help it build exposure. I'll move it back to the Theory forum once it gets bumped too low.

[Worldie]

Interesting read tho, and pretty much the same plan i was, altho i was using [item]Figurine - Empyrean Tortoise[/item] instead of the Scarab, better clicky imo since AP is a valuable stat to lose

[Galushi]

At this point im wishing they left our 20 Defense talent alone.

[Shortypop]

Presumably we can use pvp gear with resilience to get us uncrittable as well.

[Mangea]

At this point im wishing they left our 20 Defense talent alone.

Yeah, from the sound of things it looks as though staying at or above 540 is going to be a delicate balance. But then again, remember what it was like hitting 70? Just barely at 490 Defense, low avoidance, and reaching 12k HP and 12k armor was a milestone. Then we got the badge gear with loads of Defense on it, and life got easier. Looks like it's going to be like that again.

Honestly, I can't wait! It's kind of silly, but I just don't feel like logging into live WoW these days simply because it's not WotLK. Even with the balancing act that we'll have to play with Defense, I'm stoked about it. It's something new!

[Galushi]

Granted i don't think my tank gear at 70 should last till 80...But currently my standard kit that has me at like 567 defense with mixxed t5/badge gear. But just lvling to 80 the change of rating worth and loss of 20 def will put me to 497ish, and thats adding the 50 defense ill get from the levels. It's weird going from about 80 over the cap to 40 under the cap, just by leveling.

[khelben]

Presumably we can use pvp gear with resilience to get us uncrittable as well.

this sounds too much like a druid thing...hehe

[Galushi]

Oh thats not even counting the defense ill lose from the reitemization of my gear to add in more strength.

[Galushi]

this sounds too much like a druid thing...hehe

Yeah, too bad they get 6% crit reduction from talents.....

Now i almost want something like that lol.

[Minaba]

Thanks for a well written and very usefull article Xav
I have all the BC items you mentioned so I'll be sure to hang onto them
Will be refering back to this when I'm rolling along levelling

[Gellor]

Quite a few people have picked up on the defense shortage on plate itemisation already. Having to arbitrarily gem pretty much every slot for defense seems contrary to Blizzard's goals of WotLK, of choice and getting away from anything be "must have".

Hopefully they will realise the problem and remedy it. An obvious fix is to reduce the itemisation cost of defense on WoTLK items, like they did with stamina in TBC.

[kedicik]

hmmm i think this will hurt droods a bit more than other tankers... i know we need less defense to be uncrittable but, we need to keep a high amount of hp, and dodge (our only avoidance). i can easily say all the items for warrs are perfectly tuned for tanking in tbc, so i dont think any warrior had problems for being uncrittable... but when it comes to leather, except clefthoof set (which is beggining to tanking set) i dont remember defense on any item. so we have to get it with enchants, gems etc.

the suprising thing for me is, i was expecting that we ll need more defense to stay crit immune, but i thought there would be new gems, enchants, items, with higher defense attributes on them. with all the reading i have done, i saw +12 def gem but nothing else. if thats the case, i hope blizz is still working on that issue ^^

[Boozefighter]

Druids are crit immune via talents now.

[Edgar]

Thanks for the heads up, as I'm currently not in a guild I'll go ahead and get my JC up so I can cut those babies myself.

[Galushi]

I ran a few more numbers while talking to shorty, and i'm getting sadder and sadder. Compared to what I've seen off wowhead with ratings required for crit and defense and such, they are increasing the amount of rating need by 136% to gain the same value. Instead of roughly 2.365 rating per 1 defense @ 70, we need 5.591 rating per 1 defense @ 80. This is a *136%* increase in rating required for the same benefit. This is compared to the 50% increase required in going from 60 to 70. This is a very harsh downgrade to our level 70 gear.

Basically take whatever your +defense on your character is and divide by 2.36. That will give you how much +Def you will have at 80. Add that to 400 and see how close you're gonna be to the new magic 540. Pretty sad huh?

As i said in a previous reply and now redoing the numbers a little more carefully, my current 564 defense on Live will be a whopping 482 once I hit level 80. I'm not sure if the mechanics change in relation to leve, but that leaves me short of crit immunity for lvl 73 mobs while I'm lvl 80. Thats painful.

By comparison, at level 80 it will take 92.86 resilience rating to get 1% crit reduction. To get that same crit reduction you need 139.78 Defense rating. Of course defense will give you avoidance (miss/parry/dodge) and mitigation (block), but resilience might be required for those of us that aren't sunwell geared to hit crit immunity.

One thing I looked at is the LK Arena 1 blue pvp gear. The set has fairly similar strength and stamina compared to the Naxx10man Tank set. One thing that may be nice about it though is that if you combine the Gloves with the Shoulders you will get 118 resilience because of the 2piece bonus. That is equivelent to 177.6 defense rating of crit reduction. It comes at the cost of a large chunk of avoidance, but may be worth going for initially to more easily achieve crit immunity.

Meh, thats all i got atm.

(p.s. Sorry i was bored, heh)