def+res pvp tanking

[septic]

I was wondering what will happen if you gem your tanking gear with resilience gems and resilience enchants. (PVP wise off course). Will you become harder to kill than having just resilience gear ? is the 540 def rating helping you in any way pvp wise ?

I imagine the potential of DK tank in pvp would be great if both resilience and def help you stay alive.

[Magnuss]

Defense reduces the chance for you to be critically hit as well as increases your dodge, block, and parry stats at the same time. Resilience reduces your chance to be critically hit and reduces the amount of damage taken from critical hits and DoTs. Basically having high defense and resil together will make you harder to crit, while maintaining the majority of your tanking stats. The issue that you run into is that if you are a "tank" in pvp, then chances are people are going to notice and generally try to ignore or CC you. If you do get focused really hard, the resil and def together will keep the damage lower, giving you the ability to last longer, however more often then not the tank will get overwhelmed after a certain period of time.

Losing the damage stats on pvp gear and gaining the avoidance ones on tanking gear are only worthwhile in certain situations. Usually a tank is hard to kill with or without resil due to their high health pool and def rating already. It would be more effective to have higher end pvp gear, with pve dps gear while keeping roughly the same amount of survivability. Keep in mind as well that resil scales alot better in crit reduction then def rating does.

[Satorri]

Aye. With PvP gear available, you'll get a better balance of survival and damage output from that then from pve gear.

That being said, before the new pvp gear was opened up, I was using a lot of my tanking gear to make me very hard to kill. Defense increases our dodge/parry chance, AND miss chance, which still applies in pvp (though their hit rating will reduce that miss chance and their expertise will reduce your dodge/parry). It's not hard with strong tank gear to be very hard to kill in pvp, but you may find that what you lack in dps comes back to bite you in the butt for arenas, since they can reassess targets and you can only do so much to protect your partners.