Here's the situation. I am one of the 2 "main" tanks. I say main tanks because most ICC fights requires 2+ tanks. Ok, apparently, there are healers are complaining I am hard and harder to heal compare to our druid tank. I gear for armor/HP. I am the tank that takes the festergut super buffed punches (that is the 2nd tank
The druid is gearing entirely for avoidance and they think I should gear avoidance to help out the healers (some of them are also new and not as geared as others in guild for long). Our tanks, healers, raid leaders (who some also tank or has tank alts) think that my EH gearing is not helping in ICC 25 as much as if I would gear for avoidance. I did my gearing choice and decided to go off set. Specifically on festergut, the only times when I died was when I mis judged/used cooldowns properly. And it doesn't really happen too much. I just couldn't agree on going avoidance there helping healers more than going EH would. They also don't seem to regard whatever chance to live simulations is out there for tank gears. Also, they argue heavily on the benefit of avoidance (using probabilities where you have 0.2 percent of getting hit 5 times in a row (or maybe 4) over EH for these bosses. they gurantee that with the avoidance gears, a tank can't take more then 5 hits in a row due to probabilities......that's just....I am not trying disrespect thier opinion but I honestly think if healers can't keep up an EH tank on festergut, then the same tank in full avoidance would not help.
we have been downing these bosses consistently everyweek (got green dragon first time tonight) out side of LK, sindragosa, professor.
can any tanks or healers from guilds that has been doing ICC 25 (normal) give their perspective on this?
my armory
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-s...n=Psychocrasha
and also, few healers aren't as geared but I think they are not undergeared for current bosses (excluding LK, sindragosa, professor since we haven't attempted them in 25).
Btw, my other point is magic damage, festergut and lady deathwhisper both also do AOE damage that tanks can't avoid...so why avoidance over EH?
I also reading reading somewhere that gearing for expertise > hit. I was informed that ICC bosses most of them don't parry haste and so expertise becomes s purely a threat stat . does this then changes the usefulness of expertise when compared to hit?
Last edited by psychocrasha; 03-12-2010 at 03:16 AM.
You want your highest Effective Health tank on Festergut on his 3-inhale time. Gearing for hp & armor is the way to go AND you need to very carefully chain cooldowns to survive 3 inhales - just gearing alone wont let you survive. From what i've experienced, the really hard part to Festergut is 2-inhales. You need to keep your cooldowns for 3rd inhale, healers still have to deal with aoe raid damage. This is the part where EH shines. Gearing for avoidance is the equivalent of your healers asking if they can slack and that's not an option on Festergut. They probably want some time out on you to help on the raid healing but sorry, that's something they need to sort out between themselves through better organization than asking you to downgrade yourself.
Your gear is in excellent shape and you have about the same stats as i have when i tank Fester25. Personally i'd go for even more health by plugging full stam gems into the belt & legs as those are pure EH gear with high bonus armor.
So, the question comes down to, what are your healers failing on? Keeping you up on Inhale2 or Inhale3? Inhale3 = you not using your cooldowns properly. Inhale2 = your healers not doing a good enough job.
As for the bear druid, if his EH is higher, put him as the 2nd tank. Then you can afford to use some of your cooldowns on the Inhale2. But whatever order you start out with, you're both going to end up eating all sorts of inhales, so you need to both have the EH to survive it (and you certainly do)
Your gear looks great, I regularly tank (as second tank on Fester) with 4k less hp than you, less dodge a smudge more parry (less than 1%) and less armour, our first kills would have been less another 2k hp, so there is absolutely no problem with your gear - this is not a "i'm so uber statement" but more an indication that you should be able to comfortably tank Fester without any "iffy" moments. As Fled says, if you're dieing at 2 stacks that's either - healer issue, ranged taking too much damage from vile gas, too many healers being stunned by vile gas, or lack of communication that a tank switch is coming up. If it's at three stacks then it's a cooldown usage or communication issue - we still use the holy pally party bubble to help cushion the incoming damage at 3 stacks and to cover it comfortably.
Despite what seems like a lot of magic damage, 70-80% of fester's damage on tanks in normal melee-type, not that I would advocate changing gear.
Have you tried either Putri or Sindrag - what was your experience tanking on them, also what is your normal tank-healer team made up of?
**Give me a hug and I'll defend you with my life**
Blog: http://www.tankspot.com/blog.php?550-Shortypop
Last question first, no the bear has I think 10k less HP than me when buffed. I think it is If I remember. currently I have 60k hp buffed. I value armor+stamina a lot but they seem to be stuck on past raids where we had little choice on EH gearing.
this last time that I died, I used last stand, and enrage regen, and also shield block was up if I remember correctly. that was before the third inhales or at the beginning of third inhale. But according to them, I took 5 hits straight and thus not healable. bear tank died on boss before tank switch and he took 2 unlucky hits says him...but isn't that clearly a healing issues there that a tank dies there that early? i mean I would think it is either the tank's, or healers fault.
yes cooldown usage is crucial there and I know it when I screwed up but apparently our tank healers say that they have to do every thing to keep me alive even with shields and what not.
I will point them all to this thread. If there are more inputs from others, it would be greatly appreciated.
We have only started to do professor 25 and given it few tries. I never got around tanking him since we used our bear tank and we didn't get to 3rd phase. I did tank him in 10 man and it was never a threat. Sindragosa 10 we had our other alt tank tank her until I had to switch in...25 haven't done it yet.
we have usually 2 pally tank healers at least, and then we have priest. druid, maybe shaman (if needed).
I use flask, food, and armor potion so I don't know what more I can do for making it easier for healers other than going avoidance as suggested which I can try under pressure but I don't think it is the way to handle that fight.
Last edited by psychocrasha; 03-12-2010 at 12:26 PM.
Having played both parts of the tank/healer game and having had endless discussions/quarrels with our guild healers, this is what i've noticed:
Back in Karazhan, hell, even in MC/BWL, incoming tank damage was such that healers actually had time to switch to other duties. A tank carefully planning his gear around a good balance of EH and avoidance could end up making life very very pleasant for a healer. The healer could then both keep the tank up and help out on raid healing, paying attention to other stuff etc.
As incoming tank damage went up, importance of EH jumped up considerably and raids started switching to dedicated tank healers with massive healspamming, whether the tank took damage or not.
From what i understand, Blizzard's intention is to move back to the point where "stack armor & hp and have your healers spam heals mindlessly" is going away, meaning a balance between EH & avoidance will probably make it back.
But that day is not today. Especially Fester is not that fight. What we do on 10man (havent paid attention to how they organize it in 25 - i only lead 10mans
The times we've encountered problems is what Shorty said - healers get vile gas, the other healers need to switch between raid & tanks and you need to start managing cooldowns. This usually ends up meaning you dont have enough cooldowns to last P3. If that happens you need to coordinate with your raid to ask for external cooldowns and you should be fine.
How i do my cooldowns is, i usually pop a trinket + enraged regen if i get too low on P2. If things really get desperate i pop last stand. I also pop shield wall when Fester is in the last second of his Inhale cast. Just as shieldwall is about to end i pop a second trinket and an indestructible pot. By this time, all healers should've managed to switch to tank healing and they should be able to keep up your 60K ass with armor pot alive even without external cooldowns for the few seconds left before exhale.
Your gear and gearing approach are in line with the majority of tank theory crafters in this forum. Your guild healers are not.
There is a phenomenon that can occur in a group when healers begin to think "tank X is easier to heal than tank Y". It's not uncommon. Maybe it starts because of a confidence thing, or some mistakes, or difference in cooldown usage, or because you were mean to a healer once and they don't like you. What you describe right now is one of the usual consequences of that phenomenon... they start grasping at differences trying to understand why. Since they don't know why you "feel harder to heal" they will grasp at what they can see. What can happen right after that, is that it starts becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy... because healers think you are harder to heal, they stop trying as hard to save you.
Now sure, if your druid is able to get away with an avoidance set and still have enough EH to survive big hits, then they are going to need less overall healing. When they get blown up by festergut or arthas and you've got bits of bearfluff spread all over the floor, they might think differently. What you can do is point your officers to sites like this, or to armory pages of top tanks (like Xav) and point out that top tanks gear EH. Or you can try to find out if there is something else that is really driving this "harder to heal" feeling and tackle it directly.
Things I noted from the quick peak at your profile, you don't have the Last Stand glyph, and instead you're using the one glyph of devastate, that's a 1min on a cooldown that you'll be using every fight and in WoW 12 seconds is a lifetime so imagine a minute
Some other things that are from here on my personal opinion, I see you got a pvp shoulder enchant, remove it and put a descent pve enchant from the sons of hodir, I see you're putting in alot of stamina sockets, fundamentally its not that wrong but if you really want to have a good time at tanking while staying alive ofcourse you should consider some more avoidance.
Smack a 20defense on your shield, a 2% threat and 10 parry on gloves, exchange the Satrina trinket for the triumpf armor one you might think its a bad idea to loose that much stamina but consider that the stamina trinket has a 3min cooldown while the armor one has a 2mins and ofcourse armor is your very good friend.
Put a proper 22 stamina on your feet and replace the mongoose enchant with a blade ward.
Replace those 10hit + 15stamina gems with 10defense and 15 stamina instead, your hit should be around 200-220 to be in a descent level anything above that is more then useless as the only things you'll miss is taunt and you got vigilance in worst case scenario.
Make sure you're applying all debuffs you can and have all consumables on you, foods and flasks are common sense.
The best thing a tank can do to lessen the healing on him is rotating cooldowns, with 2 trinkets, 3 of your own abilities and a shield block every 40 seconds you are not gonna be dying anytime soon unless your healers are braindead, with the advices I have just given you its more then likely you'll lose a good chunk of stamina from your total HP but consider this, every boss hits for a certain ammount on each hit, be that spell or magic, you can have some ressistances towards spells but your best defense for them is HP so that's why you stack so much stamina, but in every encounter there's an even bigger deal of Physical dmg involved, the more you avoid or migitate that dmg the more you'll be in line with the current requirements for encounters, because as we cannot effectively migitate spell dmg other then those ressistances which are not always present for 1 reason or the other, we can do alot about physical dmg reduction trough Armor, avoidance and cooldown rotations. The following formula should work out well for you, find out how much average dmg you take per hit, calculate your full buffed HP and make sure you can take up to 2 hits without heals, if you have that much stamina any more than that is good but not as great as avoidance or armor (expertise/strenght) because if you don't get healed for the third hit then some healer is screwing up really big time.
I only have a 10/12 experience in ICC 25 but what has worked for me for gemming atleast is:
Yellow gems - Defense + Stamina (Hit + stamina in case of hit being bellow 200)
Red gems - Expertise + Stamina (dodge and parry + stamina is good but I've found that expertise works best as it boosts overall raid performance due to your dps being alot better)
Blue gems - Pure Stamina
Again I say these are my own prefferences and only apply for Prot Warriors, I've found them to work remarkably well thus far and with some tank-healer communication my greatest concern has been my dps output and I have forgotten that I could actually die on any encounter.
Disagree with most of what Jin27 said about enchants. Your shoulder and shield enchants are fine.
I also disagree.
Stamina and armor is where it's at; my armory profile is in my sig. Check it out. I'm not amazing or anything, but I've built my toon from all that I've learned here at tankspot and I'm an obsessive min/maxer, generally my toon reflects the current theories and gearing strats.
What I've learned from Tankspot:
- Stamina and armor are the things to stack in ICC, including gems and enchants.
- Avoidance is important, but if you have a choice between avoidance and EH (like say shoulder enchants) pick the EH one; there's enough Avoidance on gear as is.
- Gem for stamina, get one purple gem to activate your meta, preferably in a socket paired with a blue to get a +12 stam socket bonus (like the T10 helm). That purple gem should be expertise if your below softcap, dodge if your above.
- Hit rating is a threat stat, if you don't have threat problems, don't gear for it. If you have threat problems then it's more likely your priority, glyphs, or spec then gear. Glyph of taunt and glyph of devastate allow you to focus on gearing purely for mitigation, yet glyphs should be swapped on a fight by fight basis to maximize yourself. Expertise is always better then hit.
- Listen to Aggathon, Kojiyama, and the like, there's a reason they are so respected around here, oh, and listen to Kaz, or he'll banhammer you back to dalaran.
- We're sick of eh vs avoidance arguments. Both have their merits, we're currently seeing EH dominated gearing strats because it's best for current content.
Your healers were correct for content circa 1.5 years ago; currently EH is king.
After looking at your armory I can make the following suggestions:
- Replace the yellow gem in your shoulders with stamina.
- Replace all non-blue gems in your legs & belt with stamina.
- Use Rhinolicious Worm Steak to get above the expertise softcap.
- Equip those boots you got last night! That expertise is HAWT! Gem for straight stam and get tuskarrs on them.
- Your spec is great, but consider the taunt glyph where landing your taunt is crucial, as the advice above will drop you by about 100 hit rating.
As for playstyle, pop those indestructible pots, keep up your debuffs, time your cooldowns right, and your golden.
Your on the right track, don't listen to your naysayers. Point them here. To this post and it's responses. The only thing in your gearing strategy I would recommend is to stop matching sockets and stop itemizing for hit rating.
Cheers!
Be a Champion, not a hero.
Drae
You can afford to drop a lot of hit, you play Alliance. Alliance have Draenei. People like staring at digital-behind so I doubt you'll ever be without one.
drae has it spot on.
Originally Posted by psychocrasha
As Festergut powers up, his hits stop becoming 'unlucky' and start becoming 'normal' your healers have to adjust for this. The Druid should be able to use both Barkskin, and Enrage (Provided they have 4pTier10) to shave off some of that damage during the second inhale. At which point you'll taunt and enter your cooldown rotation.
During the second inhale most of your healers should be on the tank with 1-2 left to heal the raid. During the 3rd inhale raid damage is pretty much non-existent, and you should be getting 95% of healing done. If the healers can't work this out assign who stops raid healing and switches to tank healing for every inhale so that it is perfectly clear who is doing what.
Make very sure you are running a fully powered AP Debuff on Festergut. If you have a Balance Druid for unglyphed Insect Swarm, so much the better but the 3% Miss is still subject to RNG. You must plan to be hit around 65-70% of the time (Hi2youavoidance debuff) for whatever the value of the hit is. Use Stoneskin, Devo Aura, Indestructible Potions, etc.
Your gear is not the issue here.
[QUOTE=Jin17;388529]Things I noted from the quick peak at your profile, you don't have the Last Stand glyph, and instead you're using the one glyph of devastate, that's a 1min on a cooldown that you'll be using every fight and in WoW 12 seconds is a lifetime so imagine a minute
I originally had last stand glyph and I changed it last week. the reason being, I felt I had times when I had OT out threating me (who continued using tanking abilities after I taunted and got boss back to him) so I looked at our tanks glyphs, and they use devastate....so I though it would slightly help my threat if I use that as well.
Things I noted from the quick peak at your profile, you don't have the Last Stand glyph, and instead you're using the one glyph of devastate, that's a 1min on a cooldown that you'll be using every fight and in WoW 12 seconds is a lifetime so imagine a minute
Some other things that are from here on my personal opinion, I see you got a pvp shoulder enchant, remove it and put a descent pve enchant from the sons of hodir, I see you're putting in alot of stamina sockets, fundamentally its not that wrong but if you really want to have a good time at tanking while staying alive ofcourse you should consider some more avoidance.
Smack a 20defense on your shield, a 2% threat and 10 parry on gloves, exchange the Satrina trinket for the triumpf armor one you might think its a bad idea to loose that much stamina but consider that the stamina trinket has a 3min cooldown while the armor one has a 2mins and ofcourse armor is your very good friend.
Put a proper 22 stamina on your feet and replace the mongoose enchant with a blade ward.
Replace those 10hit + 15stamina gems with 10defense and 15 stamina instead, your hit should be around 200-220 to be in a descent level anything above that is more then useless as the only things you'll miss is taunt and you got vigilance in worst case scenario.
Make sure you're applying all debuffs you can and have all consumables on you, foods and flasks are common sense.
The best thing a tank can do to lessen the healing on him is rotating cooldowns, with 2 trinkets, 3 of your own abilities and a shield block every 40 seconds you are not gonna be dying anytime soon unless your healers are braindead, with the advices I have just given you its more then likely you'll lose a good chunk of stamina from your total HP but consider this, every boss hits for a certain ammount on each hit, be that spell or magic, you can have some ressistances towards spells but your best defense for them is HP so that's why you stack so much stamina, but in every encounter there's an even bigger deal of Physical dmg involved, the more you avoid or migitate that dmg the more you'll be in line with the current requirements for encounters, because as we cannot effectively migitate spell dmg other then those ressistances which are not always present for 1 reason or the other, we can do alot about physical dmg reduction trough Armor, avoidance and cooldown rotations. The following formula should work out well for you, find out how much average dmg you take per hit, calculate your full buffed HP and make sure you can take up to 2 hits without heals, if you have that much stamina any more than that is good but not as great as avoidance or armor (expertise/strenght) because if you don't get healed for the third hit then some healer is screwing up really big time.
I only have a 10/12 experience in ICC 25 but what has worked for me for gemming atleast is:
Yellow gems - Defense + Stamina (Hit + stamina in case of hit being bellow 200)
Red gems - Expertise + Stamina (dodge and parry + stamina is good but I've found that expertise works best as it boosts overall raid performance due to your dps being alot better)
Blue gems - Pure Stamina
Again I say these are my own prefferences and only apply for Prot Warriors, I've found them to work remarkably well thus far and with some tank-healer communication my greatest concern has been my dps output and I have forgotten that I could actually die on any encounter.
haven't read it all but just to quickly point it out, I do use the IL245 armor trinket. but the few times I used anything but stamina trinket on fester, I died...so I usually ended up try out the armor trinket, or corpse tongue and then I switched back to a stamina one. Corpse tongue did do well on 1 fester fight but I believe we also had slight different healer arrangement at the time.
To be honest, I don't use cooldowns on second inhale, I save them all for 3rd inhale so that I essentially don't take a full hit ever, any hit is mitigated. If you can't be healed through the second inhale damage without a cooldown, you shouldn't be tanking fester 3rd inhale.
Everything said in here is 100% accurate, and I can guarantee you that the reason your healers think you are "hard to heal" is that you are taking the majority of damage. Gear for EH on fester, you'll be fine.
0 inhale-1 inhale is mostly raid damage with a bit of tank, 2 inhale is mostly tank with some raid, 3 inhale is all tank. That's what your healers need to understand about the encounter, and respond accordingly.
Use the armor trinket, pair it with the black heart or corroded skeleton key. In reality, the corpse tongue coin is un-reliable. You could have got RNG'd into a good attempt, but the chances of that happening again are not high. Avoidance is a CHANCE that something will happen, not a guarantee. You can get RNG'd into taking 5 consecutive hits that will kill you because you sacrificed EH. Currently I run with ~40k unbuffed health, ~32k unbuffed armor, and I have been told that when I take fester on 3rd inhale I'm easier to heal than the other tanks. It's all about knowing how/when to use cooldowns, and gearing for EH. Cooldown usage is absolutely key in the festergut encounter.haven't read it all but just to quickly point it out, I do use the IL245 armor trinket. but the few times I used anything but stamina trinket on fester, I died...so I usually ended up try out the armor trinket, or corpse tongue and then I switched back to a stamina one. Corpse tongue did do well on 1 fester fight but I believe we also had slight different healer arrangement at the time.
Last edited by MellvarTank; 03-12-2010 at 08:06 AM.
RNGesus - Saving you unreliably since BC.
http://i689.photobucket.com/albums/v...ellvarsig3.jpg
Use Rhinolicious Worm Steak to get above the expertise softcap.
I am already using Rhinolicious Worm Steak to get 27 expertise
and by the way, I was told by tanks that hit is more important then expertise and should have hit max at 8% before I worry about expertise (if for threat), but everywhere I read is that expertise was better...though I am also told only 2 bosses in ICC do parry haste and that does seem like expertise is less attractive then?
It's also funny that I brought up using taunt glyph and I was question why because they think 8% hit means you don't miss taunt...i said taunt is spell hit and needs more than 8...but then someone said, no, 8% for taunt and the taunt glpyph works because that is 8% and that is all need for 100% taunt (with 8% hit)...I was speechless and thought I was wrong but I looked again and taunt is on 18% spell miss
Being that most of us tanked ToC 10/25 with ~100 hit or less, I'd say expertise is more important still. lol
ICC gear is swimming in hit, the expertise is where you will have an issue.
RNGesus - Saving you unreliably since BC.
http://i689.photobucket.com/albums/v...ellvarsig3.jpg
Expertise negates Dodge and Parry.
Glyph of Last Stand is entirely situational. I run x2 prot specs (see my armory link in my signature line), the one with Shield Wall and Last Stand Glyph hardly ever gets used. Glyph of Devastate on the other hand is good all the time. It great for threat since you get the threat of the 2 sunders being applied (even at a 5 stack) with 1 ability and allows your DPS to lay into a fully sundered target faster, thus increasing raid DPS. It also allows you to get that 5 stack back up quickly should it fall off during the encounter.Things I noted from the quick peak at your profile, you don't have the Last Stand glyph, and instead you're using the one glyph of devastate, that's a 1min on a cooldown that you'll be using every fight and in WoW 12 seconds is a lifetime so imagine a minute
The PvP Shoulder enchant is hands down the best choice.
If you need the defense +20 Defense to shield is a good option, if you don't need the defense +18 stamina is a much better option. For gloves +240 armor or +18 stamina are superior choices to 2% Threat & +10 Parry. Trinkets are situational, you should change them depending on the fight, both the ones you listed are good.
Tuskarr's Vitality is hands down the best choice.
In my humble opinion Blood Draining or Mongoose are the best tanking enchants currently available. Blade Ward is not an enchant, it is a waste of enchanting mats.
You do not want to blow your trinkets on CD. Save them for when you really need them to ride out a rough patch. If you need to blow both your trinkets combined with shield block on CD, your healers are slacking, badly.
Yellow Gems: +30 Stamina
Red Gems: +30 Stamina (except 1 to activate your meta, either a Exp+Stam, Dodge+Stam, or Agi+Stam). You can also drop additional hybrid purples into red slots where the socket bonus is +9 or higher stamina.
Blue Gems: +30 Stamina
Do not ever gem for hit. As many have said above, most of us (including myself) tanked ToGC 25 with less than 100 hit rating. To be honest, I never noticed the difference. Take what you get on your gear in the form of equips though the natural course of upgrades.
Last edited by Bodasafa; 03-12-2010 at 08:21 AM.
There is something so appealing about backhanding someone across the face with a shield.
Put the Last stand glyph back on and get rid of the devastate one, altough its a nice threat boost it won't be as much as if you increase your expertise, as has been suggested get the expertise food and put on some mixed exp/stam on red sockets and your threat will be fine with ofcourse the proper rotations and don't forget that vigilance on the OT or the highest threat generating dps. And with that you have 1 more survivability glyph on and less to worry about. As for the trinkets the previous dude that mentioned the combination of a migitation trinket + the stamina one from frost emblems I'd say that this was also the best thing for me aswell and altough corpse tongue coin does prove to be a bit upredictable it does work well enough for me aswell.
My last piece of advice I can give you is talk to your healers and see how they collaborate in healing your raid, no matter how good geared you are you'll still be at the mercy of the healers, so if 1 of them isn't doing a good job you will still die.
Make sure that you notify before taunting, a common cause of tank deaths is because 1 or more healers is casting a big heal on the main tank and when you taunt off by the time the big heal lands on the other tank and healers focus on you, you'll be on half HP or dead. So having a forewarning helps alot, that I had to find out the hard way
Lets not forget that the game is a team effort and you're not supposed to be a 1 man army, other then your own cooldowns there are external cooldowns, passive benefits from certain classes, a good raid will always make the most of the player's ability and not neglect to use them, a clear example I can give is a holy priest not using Guardian spirit once during hard hitting boss fights such as Festergut, 1 such powerfull external cooldown can be the difference between a wipe and a kill when used properly, as I like to say myself every little bit counts so get them strategies clear with your fellow guildies beforehand.
P.S: @Bodasafa
As I said m8, it was my own personal opinion and it has worked peachy for me, after all its pure bullshit to take less than to take more and I hate to repeat myself but yet again every bit counts, so instead of a 30stamina on all it is also viable to put something else in aswell, if Blizzard had intended for tanks to use all stamina they'd have made all tanking gear with blue gem slots and not as they are now. Defense has been my favorite stat since TBC and it still is so having more of it won't cripple you. Consider the gemming policy similar to Formula 1 races, would you rather go in a race with a bigger gas tank and hope it lasts the entire race with all of its ups and downs or would you rather play it safe and have a pitstop or 2, meaning let a hit be dodged or parried or heck even missed just 1 more time if possible?
Last edited by Jin17; 03-12-2010 at 08:37 AM.
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