Ciderhelm Dodge Gems

[kevin77477]

I always find myself looking at some of the top end raiding guilds tanks for ideas with gems/chants for specific fights, and I noticed ciderhelm was gemmed with all dodge gems. I never had the courage to do this but I was wondering what fight could this be for? I've tanked every boss in ulduar including Algalon (10 man), although I have not downed him yet was curious if this idea was for that fight? I have not had been able to try anything this extreme with this fight yet, but if anyone has any opinions on if that would help tank damage and be worth sacrificing the stamina to do it. This may have sounded like a dumb question, but anything that helps me take less damage on that fight I'm happy. I usually test things on my own but with a 1 hour lockout on this fight I did not want to waste any attempts considering I could not regem/chant in that amount of time without taking too much time away from attempts.

[Ciderhelm]

Vezax!

Very slow swing speed, tons of reaction time for healers, and overhealing is less wasteful.

But I'll probably wind up changing back to Stam tonight.

[Krenian]

I want my s'word.


That is all.

[kevin77477]

ty for such a fast response , I did hard mode last night and downed him but on 10 man. 25 man only got a few hard modes done not quite there yet. Honestly though I might copy your idea for 25 man so thank you. If u have any gems/chants advice on algalon as well i'd love to here it.

The World of Warcraft Armory

there is my current armory i was messing with specs before i logged last night

[Ciderhelm]

ty for such a fast response , I did hard mode last night and downed him but on 10 man. 25 man only got a few hard modes done not quite there yet. Honestly though I might copy your idea for 25 man so thank you. If u have any gems/chants advice on algalon as well i'd love to here it.

This would require me to be on Algalon.

I have not reached Algalon on 25 and I do not run 10-mans very often.

[kevin77477]

I'll keep checking so when you do maybe you can help me lol. I do not know what to do, this is the first boss I'm stumped on with gems/chants/gear selections. I've never seen a fast swing timer like his before.

[Krenian]

I would figure you'd wanna go mitigation wise because if he's swinging too fast, it probably means that you're bound to get hit a lot and very often and in that retrospect, you may as well just soak the damage in instead of giving your healers a heart attack on the fight and have you sometimes fine, other times, spike down so fast.

That's my thoughts anyway.

[Ferfey]

This is something that has been brewing in the back of my mind for some time now... as a DK I feel like I have "enough" stamina that I should gem for stamina/dodge or even pure dodge. I'd like to be able to make an educated decision rather than feeling my way through it though.

We aren't really doing any of the hard-modes in Ulduar 25 and have the ability to 1-shot *most* bosses (damn you Hodir) each week.

Is there a graph, equation or general rule of thumb (like get enough stam to take 2 big Vezax swings unhealed and live, then gem dodge)?

[Coro]

Personally, I started doing the same thing with my DK (who is now my main) and I realized sta is still the best way to go. The big thing to remember is Diminishing returns, you don't have to worry about DR with stamina, which means your healing will be more consistant. Also, where DK's are great on HP now, remember were about to lose quite a bit in the patch, so if you start stacking dodge and give up 1k hp for 2% more dodge, remember your about to lose another ~1k hp.

It's all on play style and healers too. If you have 2 pally healers in 25s, consistancy is a lot more important, cuz they are just gonna keep hitting you with flash/holy light. If you have reactive healers (priests, shammies, druids) then dodge might be a better way to go, if they are spot healing or aoe healing as well.

[Ciderhelm]

If you have 2 pally healers in 25s

You have just described my dream raid. We haven't had a holy paladin raider in months.

[kevin77477]

We use a holy pally and a priest to keep up the 25% armor increase on the tanks, maybe I'll try to go with EH gear and see maybe its the spike damage that is messing us up. If thats the case they are going to hate me. Dont steal my PALLY CIDER! j/k

[Rotton]

We haven't had a holy paladin raider in months.

Good to see our guild isn't the only one with pally shortness. We have one ret paladin in the raid usually.

[Oorag]

Did place tanking Vezax with all those dodge gems work out good for you? Ide imagine there would be even more rage problems than normal.

[Esch]

Geez. We run enough paladins that it's not unusual to have one get dropped from the buff list. Then again, I'ld like to get another resto druid, we can't seem to keep more than one good tree in bloom at a time.

@Ciderhelm - are you doing a standard Vezax fight, or were you working on the hardmode, with all the dodge? I'm the default tank for him, and I know that folks are going to clamor for HC Vezax the moment we're one shotting him.

[Ciderhelm]

Did place tanking Vezax with all those dodge gems work out good for you? Ide imagine there would be even more rage problems than normal.

I got pulled in for 10-man Vezax last night. Rage was awful. I haven't done 25 yet. I'm going to see if I can slide tanking off onto our two new tanks until vezax so I don't have to tank anything big 'til then.

Rage wouldn't be a big issue if this were also a UA build, but because of my glyphs last night I had to be in a standard Prot build (my UA build is optimized for Steelbreaker).

I'm really undecided on the whole thing.

[kevin77477]

For 25 the damage is going to be so much more that without the extra avoidance healers might be oom by the time the animus is down. I'm very curious if the gem dodge idea works for it, it sounds like it would. Is that the spec with glyph of vigilance in it?

[Oorag]

I got pulled in for 10-man Vezax last night. Rage was awful. I haven't done 25 yet. I'm going to see if I can slide tanking off onto our two new tanks until vezax so I don't have to tank anything big 'til then.

Rage wouldn't be a big issue if this were also a UA build, but because of my glyphs last night I had to be in a standard Prot build (my UA build is optimized for Steelbreaker).

I'm really undecided on the whole thing.

If you place tank Vezax in 25 man and decide to try a UA build, you will absolutely have to use a 2 min / 2 min variation. You'll also probably want to have your interrupters kick out searing flames earlier in the cast rather than later. Long cast times + slow swings = rage.

I really think its a good idea tho, and I was thinking of doing something similar for Vezax 25 hard mode. When we did get the 10 man cheeve tho, I did use just a standard deep prot 2/2 build.

Oh yea, you'll want to open up with Last Stand as your first trick instead of Shieldwall, that way if your DPS is on track when the Saronite guy comes out you'll have your Shield Wall for that Surge.

[Coro]

You have just described my dream raid. We haven't had a holy paladin raider in months.

Meh, we usually have 3 holy pallies, 1 priest, 1 druid, 1 shammy. I'd love to trade some pallies into priests :P

[Tarigar]

You have just described my dream raid. We haven't had a holy paladin raider in months.

WTS Pally healer... I have 4 pally healers in the guild 2 ret and 1 prot for a total of 7. For our other heals we have 4 priests 2 holy/shadow, 1 shadow/disc and 1 holy/disc(this is including dual spec). Then we have 2 druids resto/feral and boomkin/resto and 3 shamans 2 resto/elemental and the other is elemental/resto... We are generally priest heavy or pally heavy there is no happy medium .

[robbon]

We have gazillions of pallies....all with DK alts.... i think they breed on our server.

Our standard recruitament spammage starts with Sorry no DK or PALLY spots.