Inc long-winded post about an idea that is constantly misunderstood and misrepresented. This is in the same vein as Wanderlei's comprehensive response, but hopefully will be a bit more relevant to today's tanks.
To start with, I'll quote Cider himself in his article regarding effective health theory:
Like always, this is not written to help the casual tank. It is written only for the tanks who are pushing through content beyond their gear level and wish to do it more effectively. This is what the Stamina Warrior is..."
This commonly gets lost in the fray. The idea of EH gearing - a focus on optimizing your health pool in an effort to maximize your effective health - is meant for cutting-edge progression. This is designed for the Kungens, who will still be wearing gear one or two full tiers behind when they face new bosses in new content. It was never meant to be a way of life for tanks everywhere, nor the pillar of all tank gearing and playstyle.
To begin with, some common (and faulty) statements regarding the issue. I'll try to order them logically so that each point seems connected to the following, as the issue must be viewed as a whole:
1) Gearing for EH causes the tank to take more consistent damage.
Nope. The size of the hits a tank takes will be determined by one thing: armor. Neither EH nor avoidance gearing has a greater focus on armor than the other. EH tanks will take the same size of hits as an avoidance tank, with the possible exception of cloak enchants. Avoidance tanks' health will seem to be less consistent, but that's because they're taking less damage. Which leads to point 2...
2) Gearing for EH causes the tank to take less damage overall.
Nope. EH tanks take specifically more damage. Again, because armor has zero to do with the gearing styles, the logic is simple: a stam-geared tank will be hit more frequently and for the same amount as a tank focused more on avoidance. The reason a progression tank focuses on EH gearing has only to do with the maximum amount of damage he can take with zero heals. That's what effective health is, and it has nothing to do with overall damage reduction.
3) Avoidance tanks are harder to heal.
Nope. Raid healers are not fragile creatures. They are constantly casting heals on you, they do expect damage at all times, and they will never complain because you avoided too many hits in a row. You will always have full hots on you regardless of how often you're hit, your priests will always be casting gheal, and your pallies will always be casting flash (or, god forbid, HL) on you. Shaman are, of course, the same thing as priests, only more useful (hay my hands are all red and dripping lol!).
4) Avoidance tanks will cause the healers to use more mana, or regenerate less.
Again...nope. Healers do not have rotations, designated wait-periods between heals based on your gear, or rely on predictable damage - especially when you undergear an instance. You will be spammed like the holy heavens, and your healers may make noises over vent that you've never heard before. There are two realms of thought here: either a) heals will land regardless of whether you take damage, in which case the point is moot because both tanks will take the same size of hits at the same rate; or b) when you are not actually hit, your healers will cast-cancel their heals, conserve some mana, and possibly remain outside the 5sr - this is the correct one, and strongly favors avoidance. See the follow-up below about the 5sr.
5) Because of the RNG (or Murphy's Law), an avoidance tank will eventually get unlucky and be gibbed.
Goodness no. An avoidance tank has a definitively lower chance of getting a bad string of luck than an EH tank. I'll repeat that: an EH tank is more likely to get gibbed due to an unlucky string of attacks. The entire goal of an avoidance tank is to provide consistency by reducing the number of spikes he takes. Was consistency used as a proponent for avoidance tanking?! Yes. Armor/avoidance gearing is about consistency. Forget everything you know about percentages and number generators. Wanderlei has illustrated this excellently, so I'll simply cite him rather than extending this wall (http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f192/1060-effective-health-theory.html, scroll down to post #2).
6) Avoidance tanks promote putting 10 dodge gems in every slot, and EH tanks use solely 15-stams.
Neither is true. Gemming is about playing intelligently, not sticking to one principle or another. As Cider often says, optimize your gear - don't balance it. If you get an avoidance-heavy item with a red and blue socket and a dodge socket bonus, make it your avoidance piece. Likewise, if you get an item with a blue and a yellow socket with a block rating bonus, you can safely gem for stam unless you're in particular need of hit. Witness the Gyro-Balanced Khorium Destroyer, which is an excellent choice to gem with hit even for an EH tank. Gem to optimize each specific item (EH, avoidance, threat), and you will never find yourself wishing you had more of one stat or another - you may find yourself wishing for 45-slot bags, though.
7) Subscribing to one camp or the other will have a significant effect on your stats, playstyle, and outlook as a tank.
If only.
The difference between a tank that focuses on avoidance or stamina is extremely small. Both will have large health pools, both will have quite a bit of avoidance, and both will have nearly identical armor. I could certainly re-gem everything I own with 10 dodge gems and put on boots of elusion again, but in that same thread I could also put a 10 stamina enchant on my shoulders. To be an effective tank, you simply need to know your class, your healers, your progression level and pace, and what you enjoy most. Simply chanting "stamina...stamina...stamina" will not be enough on its own.
Sidenotes:
The 5sr and you:
Something commonly misunderstood is that inconsistent damage promotes mana regeneration. To illustrate this idea, I’ll point out the 2 principles it relies on:
1) An avoidance tank is more likely to allow a healer to get outside of the 5sr.
Getting outside the 5sr for a raid healer is only possible when they are cancelling heals or you significantly outgear the instance (ignoring phase transitions, etc). In the first case, avoidance will allow a healer to cancel more heals, providing a higher chance they can do so successively and break the 5sr, and in the latter avoidance will result in less damage and therefore further time outside it.
2) Once outside the 5sr, an avoidance tank has a higher chance of allowing a healer to remain there for longer.
Through the wonders of simple logic, an avoidance tank has a higher chance of not being hit (significantly) for longer periods of time than a tank geared for EH. Once outside the 5sr, a healer regenerates mana every 2 seconds, so the key is to remain outside the 5sr once it is broken, not to break it more often. The most effective way for a healer to produce longevity is to heal in spurts. Sounds almost like what avoidance does, doesn't it?
Block Value:
Block value is the only other factor to consider when discussing EH vs Avoidance and the size of hits we take. The method of avoidance tanking I prefer does not designate BV as an EH stat and therefore ignore it, but rather embraces it. Block value can have a drastic effect on your damage intake, and serves the secondary purpose of being excellent for threat. Block value scales directly with armor, which we also take as a constant, so I have largely ignored it for the purposes of this thread, but it factors into gearing choices for my particular style of avoidance tanking nonetheless.
Hope that helps anyone trying to make sense of this sticky subject.
EH is not only Stam.
Ring of Sundered Souls - Thottbot: World of Warcraft is Avoid.
Ring of the Stalwart Protector - Thottbot: World of Warcraft is EH.
Phoenix-Wing Cloak - Thottbot: World of Warcraft is Avoid.
Slikk's Cloak of Placation - Thottbot: World of Warcraft is EH.
Gemming is not the only difference between EH und Avoid.
This is a tricky one since it greatly depends on how much the boss hit. Let me do an example:Originally Posted by Rime
Avoidance tank: can take 3 full hits and has 55% avoidance, so 0.45^3= 9% cance to get gibbed.
Eh tank. can take 4 full hits and has 45% avoidance, so that gives 0.55^4= 9% chance to get gibbed.
But lets say the next boss in the instance hits for slightly more, then the Eh tank can only take 3 hits and the chanse of getting gibbed is larger then the avoidance tank. Imo avoidance vs eh is to complex to give absolute trouths on what is best for every encounter since bosses do different amount and type of damage.
"This commonly gets lost in the fray. The idea of EH gearing - a focus on optimizing your health pool in an effort to maximize your effective health - is meant for cutting-edge progression. This is designed for the Kungens, who will still be wearing gear one or two full tiers behind when they face new bosses in new content. It was never meant to be a way of life for tanks everywhere, nor the pillar of all tank gearing and playstyle."
While this is true to an extent, it also isnt. A tank starting out kara with blue gear and trying to do a full clear of the instance. Thats an undgergeared tank. A kara tank doing End bosses of ZA, thats an undergeared tank. Effective Health is just a different way to survive the instance, and to allow you to switch out a piece or two for threat for instance. Now true once you overgear an instance or a zone, gearing for more avoidance will help, but Overgearing isnt dependent on just you. From the EH theory post
"Like tanking weapons, where faster is always better, when tanking new encounters, Stamina and Armor are always better. The set you use to tank new content should always have the highest Effective Health possible. As you get comfortable with an encounter, you wear more Damage Reduction gear (Armor/Defense/Dodge). This is a hard and fast rule."
"Gearing for EH causes the tank to take more consistent damage.
Nope. The size of the hits a tank takes will be determined by one thing: armor. Neither EH nor avoidance gearing has a greater focus on armor than the other. EH tanks will take the same size of hits as an avoidance tank, with the possible exception of cloak enchants. Avoidance tanks' health will seem to be less consistent, but that's because they're taking less damage. Which leads to point 2..."
Your just wrong there. Sorry to be blunt but the whole point of EH is the fact that you will take consistent damage instead of burst damage.
EH tank - 4k hit 4k hit 4k hit 4k hit 4k hit
Avoidance tank - 4k hit dodge dodge parry 4k hit
What one is more consistent?
3) Avoidance tanks are harder to heal.
Nope. Raid healers are not fragile creatures. They are constantly casting heals on you, they do expect damage at all times, and they will never complain because you avoided too many hits in a row. You will always have full hots on you regardless of how often you're hit, your priests will always be casting gheal, and your pallies will always be casting flash (or, god forbid, HL) on you. Shaman are, of course, the same thing as priests, only more useful (hay my hands are all red and dripping lol!).
See above comment about consistent damage. And yes, trained raid healers on a well known fight will be able to keep you alive no matter how you gear, but as you said yourself, the whole point about EH is taking more damage without heals. Undergeared healers, Latency issues, the occasional LOS issue all make EH tanks "easier" to heal in those times, because they have a larger buffer.
4) Avoidance tanks will cause the healers to use more mana, or regenerate less.
]Again...nope. Healers do not have rotations, designated wait-periods between heals based on your gear, or rely on predictable damage - especially when you undergear an instance. You will be spammed like the holy heavens, and your healers may make noises over vent that you've never heard before. There are two realms of thought here: either a) heals will land regardless of whether you take damage, in which case the point is moot because both tanks will take the same size of hits at the same rate; or b) when you are not actually hit, your healers will cast-cancel their heals, conserve some mana, and possibly remain outside the 5sr - this is the correct one, and strongly favors avoidance. See the follow-up below about the 5sr
Yes, if your in a raid and everyone has run it 10 million times, per the EH theory guide you should already be in avoidance gear. Otherwise I know i find it hard on my healer to predict incoming damage to a tank on a new boss fight for my guild. Must be nice to see into the future, i guess my priest didnt learn that skill. And one small flaw about your reasoning. I will use two starting kara level tanks from my guild, one is an Avoidance Warrior the other is a stam stacking one.
Avoidance warrior has 10k hp, 12k armor and 55% avoidance
Stam stacking warrior has 13k hp 12 armor and 30% avoidance
Now say they are both tanking Nightbane. His cleave can hit for 6k with around 12k armor.
So after 1 cleave Avoidance warrior is at 4k hp and cannot take another cleave where as stam stacking warrior is at 7k hp and can survive another one. So to prevent tank death. Avoidance warrior has to be healed a min 2k to prevent death where stam warrior could take another hit before dieing. This allows for the use of more manna efficient heals to keep the tank alive instead of having to use mana inefficient heals to quickly boost the tank back up.
5) Because of the RNG (or Murphy's Law), an avoidance tank will eventually get unlucky and be gibbed.
Goodness no. An avoidance tank has a definitively lower chance of getting a bad string of luck than an EH tank. I'll repeat that: an EH tank is more likely to get gibbed due to an unlucky string of attacks. The entire goal of an avoidance tank is to provide consistency by reducing the number of spikes he takes. Was consistency used as a proponent for avoidance tanking?! Yes. Armor/avoidance gearing is about consistency. Forget everything you know about percentages and number generators. Wanderlei has illustrated this excellently, so I'll simply cite him rather than extending this wall (http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f192/1060-effective-health-theory.html, scroll down to post #2).
The worst case scenario will eventually happen. An EH tank strives to make the worse case livable where as Wanderlei admits he doesnt.
A dodge can salvage a player error and make it as if nothing ever went wrong. Can you rely on it? Of course not, but the errors that result in tank death are usually only prevented by extreme differences in health and armor. To me, this really illustrates a difference in mentality: as an avoidance tank, I do not try to survive the worst-case scenario. I am willing to concede that as a wipe, run back, pot up, and do it again.
]7) Subscribing to one camp or the other will have a significant effect on your stats, playstyle, and outlook as a tank.
]If only.
The difference between a tank that focuses on avoidance or stamina is extremely small. Both will have large health pools, both will have quite a bit of avoidance, and both will have nearly identical armor. I could certainly re-gem everything I own with 10 dodge gems and put on boots of elusion again, but in that same thread I could also put a 10 stamina enchant on my shoulders. To be an effective tank, you simply need to know your class, your healers, your progression level and pace, and what you enjoy most. Simply chanting "stamina...stamina...stamina" will not be enough on its own.
The whole point of EH is so you can tank something above your current gearing level. If i wanted to be in all kara lvl gear to tank kara, yeah i could do that, But instead i started kara in greens and blues. Started Gruuls in blues and heroic epics. Thats what eh is about. Makeing sure your not the one holding the raid back because you cant abzorb the damage needed.
Block Value:
. Block value scales directly with armor, which we also take as a constant, so I have largely ignored it for the purposes of this thread, but it factors into gearing choices for my particular style of avoidance tanking nonetheless.
Block value scales with + str and Block value gear not armor. And on a side note, an EH tank is about stacking armor as well, not just stam... so the whole they are equal doesnt equal out imo.
@Gworn
I agree that EH gearing is not only because of gem-choices or a hyper-focus on stam (and specifically addressed this). However, as I mention, such items are actually quite rare. The cases you mentioned are nearly the only exceptions - funnily enough, I had originally made mention of the stalwart defender vs sundered souls comparison, but deleted it because it felt unnecessary. In both cases, I would simply advise the tank to use the superior item, or to vary their choice by the situation. Slikk's is simply superior, and is also an avoidance-specific item (Pepe's might be a better example of an EH cloak). In the case of the rings, both are situational and the stalwart will nearly always come out on top. As I stressed above, avoidance gearing places as much a focus on armor as EH does. Ring of the stalwart protector is a staple in a situation where its use exceeds block value or rating you find on most other t6 rings (brut).
@nips
I agree completely. And that was my entire point - it's too complex an issue for one answer to simply be the victor. The key to EH gearing has always been that once you achieve the minimum value required for an encounter, any further addition will detract from your effectiveness. My point is the same. Stacking more stamina is not always the most effective method. I'm not promoting that tanks should prioritize avoidance over effective health, I'm trying to put forward that tanks should not always prioritize effective health over avoidance.
@Lizana
You are referring to 10-mans, and you are referring to 10-mans which are specifically to the side of normal raid progression in terms of difficulty or order. It's no coincidence that your example is such a unique situation. I'm addressing this to tanks in badge gear wanting to try t6, or tanks in kara gear wanting to give t5 a shot. That bosskillers strats and ample resources for healers to learn the fight are available is an assumption I'm making, given that there is no new raid content coming out soon. You might find my assumption less rare than your example - or you might choose not to.
When EH tanks promote consistent damage, they are saying that they spread the damage more evenly. The idea is that they will take the same amount of total damage, but an EH tank will spread it into smaller chunks where an avoidance tank will take it, somehow, all at once. This is simply not true, and is what I was trying to put to words. Your example also shows 20k total damage vs 8k total damage during the same period. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but does that not simply seem like an argument for the sake of an argument?
EH tanks do not necessarily have a larger buffer, nor does any buffer necessarily translate into hard results. The only time where an EH tank has a foot up over someone who has more avoidance in their gear is when three situations coincide: your healers all experience a spike of latency, you take an unusually high amount of damage, and you die by only 1-2000 health in overkill. Being a tank yourself, I assume, you might have come to the same conclusion I have: spikes cause deaths, but deaths are more commonly because a tank takes a string of attacks - eg brut hits you 9 times in a row. They don't need to be faster than usual, it's simply more damage than can be healed by 3-4 healers. I also don't gear with LoS issues in mind, I gear for progression. Just my approach, I suppose.
Again, you use kara as an example, which is less relevant for a different reason this time. The difference between gear at anything in full epics will be much less pronounced (e.g. anything not-kara). You also fabricated specific attack sizes to further your argument - in reality, tanking is not so simply placed on a spreadsheet. Kara is also an environment where you have two healers. It is also the only raid environment where healers will possibly still heal reactively, though they shouldn't be. Priests don't follow the "my tank is low, bubble him!" mindset in 25-man raids, and mana efficiency is not at stake.
If you read lower in Wanderlei's post, the basis of his viewpoint is that he abolishes the worst-case scenario to the greatest degree possible. An EH-focused tank might just have that 1k health that saves him, but an avoidance tank will encounter the worst-case scenario drastically less often (his point about a self-fulfilling prophecy is very accurate). Using your above examples, lets consider the possibility that a tank will be hit three times in a row. Three is not an extreme, it's a reasonable shooting point. The avoidance tank has a 9% chance of that occuring. The EH tank has a 34% chance. I find myself more useful to my healers and raid when I strive to reduce the number of heart attacks they have, not when I try to survive the heart attack-inducing moments.
And to correct one point - the worst-case scenario is not livable. That is why it is called the worst-case. It isn't the "unpleasant-case" scenario. The worst case is when you're either parry gibbed quicker than heals can land, your healers all get a spike of latency, or you take a string of attacks in a row (several usually need to coincide). An EH tank tries to push the barrier of what qualifies as a worst-case; e.g., an EH tank tries to make the worst-case a 4 attack parry gib instead of a 3. An avoidance tank strive to make the worst-case scenario as unlikely as possible; e.g. it takes the warrior's unpleasant-case of 3 attacks in a row (34% chance with your example), and makes it the worst-cast (9% chance). Make more sense?
Block Value
...You are clearly just trying to be contrary. Block value scales in effectiveness with your armor, and armor alone. That was my whole point, and it's unimaginably clear: because block value only scales in effectiveness with armor, and I consider armor to be static between gearing styles, I will not factor it into this discussion.
"Block value scales directly with armor, which we also take as a constant, so I have largely ignored it for the purposes of this thread,..." Does it really seem like I think increasing your armor increases your tooltip block value?
Avoidance tanks stack armor, too. As much as humanly possible. Notice when Cider references Em, his specific words are "Defense/Avoidance/Agility/Armor tank theory."
I don't have any problems with your logic. I do note, however, that you are only having HALF the discussion. Our ability to throw up a shield block, or do anything useful, really... depends on having rage, which depends on us taking damage. One unpleasant scenario you did not describe is:
miss, dodge, parry, dodge, ..ooops, not enough rage for shield block/shield slam...etc...tank gets crushed, or someone pulls because they're right on your ass in threat and they didn't expect you to stop kicking it out...my raid leader and I have both moved away from heavy avoidance builds not because it was tough on the healers...but because people were getting threat capped. if you don't take damage, your auto-attack is not going to allow you to generate the threat you need to hold off 1200-1500 dps.
All in all:
Your job as a tank is to be able to survive the encounter, and to keep your DPS from being threat capped.
To do these two things, you have to find what suits you best, and thus far, I've found a mix of both works great.
Avoidance armor, and gemming for stam.
I'm at around 25% dodge, 20% parry, 20% block with 350ish block value, and 10% miss chance, an 18k armor rating, and 16.5khp unbuffed. I have my soft cap for expertise of 23, I'm close to my soft hit cap of 95, I put out nearly 1300 TPS rage permitting, with spikes up to 1600 when rage is freely incomin, and hit 20khp raid buffed. My avoidance isn't so high that I get rage starves in heroics, but isn't so low in raids that I take a flurry of hits.
Finding that perfect medium, and KNOWing your boss fights, IE Putting on MORE stam and less avoidance for caster heavy fights, and MORE avoidance for fast hitting, crushing bosses, makes the difference. More SBV for trash, more dodge/parry for bosses.
It's been stated 344034904394 times, GEARING TO THE FIGHT is what is key, work with your healers, if you have lots of pali/druid healers, than EH works wonders, as you will HIGH HPS incoming to you. More priest/shaman healers, avoidance works in your healers favor, as they can cast slightly bigger heals, with stopcast macro's if needed.
Gear to your fight, gear to your playstyle, gear to your healers. There is no RIGHT answer.
November 23, 2004 8:27:03 AM - Glomgore 10+ Years of tanking? Priceless
Interesting. I focused on stam stacking gem slots early on but gradually moved away from it as my gear level improved. I think you should mention something about relative stat comparisons and at what point stacking health is no longer worth doing.
I found in T6 that 16k-17k (with 18 or 19k armor) was the maximum health pool I needed unbuffed. The boss hits varied but the 7k hits were the numbers that made me decide to rebuild my gear for more avoidance. At that point it was no longer possible for me to survive 4 hits without healing (28k actual damage) using stamina stacking. I decided to sit at (1 + (3 X single boss hit damage)), so around 21001 hps buffed; and then ramped up my avoidance numbers to 65% or 70%.
I don't know how you can be rage starved with 7k hits + aoe encounter damage even if the hits only land 1 in 5 times. I can see it on a normal mode level 62 dungeon but not fighting somebody like Archimonde.
Ah, as for the items noted earlier I thought I would chime in. Slikk's Cloak of Placation - Thottbot: World of Warcraft is I believe the second best avoidance cloak you can get. And the Ring of the Stalwart Protector - Thottbot: World of Warcraft is I believe the second best avoidance ring you can get.
A better EH comparison would be Cloak of Blade Turning - Thottbot: World of Warcraft versus Phoenix-Wing Cloak - Thottbot: World of Warcraft
Last edited by minrog; 10-11-2008 at 03:30 PM.
Woops, thought I replied, guess it didn't post. Minrog actually said almost exactly what I would have, though.
I agree that rage intake is affected by avoidance, but having an effect doesn't necessarily mean that it's crippling. Really the only place where it's an issue is at the start of fights. In that situation, I'm happy to say "getting no rage, go slow for a moment" the same way I would say "missed 4 times, go slow for a moment." Making sure your dps isn't capped is a huge priority, but it's a priority in the long-term rather than as the fight opens. For my current level of progression, everything hits so stupidly hard that the first hit will give me rage to do whatever I want for several years (perhaps a slight exaggeration), but I should have mentioned that it can be another variable in how you choose to gear.
Really, though, it feels very dirty to me to think "I should gear so I take more damage, that way I'll have more rage." Kinda fundamentally against what I'm aiming for, even if a tank's job is twofold. Usually a little expertise and hit will do much more than a greater rage pool will (lolshardofcontempt).
I'm not an endgame tank by any means (I've only tanked up to ZA) or even a very experienced one. But there are some fairly simple observations:For the vast majority of tanks EH is the winning choice because we have some vague idea or hope that we'll be progressing, and because it makes it less tiring to tank content that we outgear. Avoidance gives endurance and allows us to run with healers who are undergeared, which are much less attractive benefits most of the time.
- You need enough EH to give your healers the time to heal you, reliably, before you die. The amount depends on the incoming damage, your healers, and factors affecting their ability to heal.
- Once you have enough EH, more EH will just make your HP bar move more slowly and basically cover for mishaps/allow stunts/let everyone slack. More avoidance will keep margins tight but save mana, or let +healing go further.
- The amount of EH that you need will go up when you hit your next progression tier, if you're planning to be progressing at all.
Again, we've said this multiple times and we'll say it again, the best option ANY tank can bring to their raid is to be versatile, keep multiple sets of gear, some with more avoidance strengths, some with more EH strengths, and some for more threat strengths.
Swap out pieces for the fight at hand, test yourself, test your raid, and bring the best combination you can to every individual encounter. Boss seems to be hitting you too many times for you to survive inbetween heals? maybe take out your SBV trinket for Moroes trinket. Finding that you're never falling below 80% because you have 24k hp while in karazhan? drop commendation of kael thas and toss on Shard of Contempt or a SBV trinket. Having rage issues because of too many chain avoidance streaks and throttling the DPS? Try swapping out Iron Choker for brooch for threat and Stam.
It's choices made in these scenarios that make us better tanks, blinding socketing any 1 way, or blindly gearing another way isn't the key to success. Think about each gear piece before you enter a fight. And sure you can have a general "run-of-the-mill" tanking set that you feel has a good balance between Avoidance/EH/Threat that you base all of your changes on, that's the best way to go about it anyways =].
See, I'm not convinced that either of these is the way to go.
In the new WoW, I look at it this way...
Stam stacking imo is for high magical encounters.
Avoidance stacking, the way it is now will not carry over with the addition of DR to it. It's just not going to be as strong.
However, Shield Block rating % for all accounts is NOT on DR's.
All that said and done I'll be stacking STR/STAM/DEF period and going for shield block rating and Value as my main focus.
Yellow slots will be Def/Stam gems
Red and blue slots will be Str/Stam gems
All Enchants will be Str/Def related where applicable.
My goal will be to have 40% shield block and to keep my Block value up around 5-7% of my total health pool.
I just feel with the upping of Str to block value, block % not being on DR, Critical blocks and of course the Shield Block ability itself this is the way to go for me.
I mean hell I know everything is a bit of a joke now till WotLK but still seeing......Illidan hits you for 2310 (5836 blocked) it just makes you giggle a lil inside lol.
Not to mention I actually like contributing to the DPS for a change, putting in almost 1400 DPS while tanking is just plain hot.
Last edited by Corian; 10-21-2008 at 09:58 AM.
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