Tanks should never stack stam in Cataclysm. (Actually, it's a question.)

[gacktt]

I haven't encountered a "regular" three hit scenario yet even on hardmodes, maybe Cho'gall will do me this favor?

Chogall auto attacks for 45k + 25k flametongue damage. Attack speed seemed good.

Nefarian p1 has 2 dragons auto attacking for 40-45k each + shadowflames and then electrocutes.

I'd expect the damage to be higher on 25mans.

On hardmode the damage would be so stupid you'd wonder if ghostcrawler was drunk when he wrote his "triage/lower damage/more people on 80%" junk a few months ago for cataclysm.

[lostplotman]

well my analysis of it all is that NO ONE SHOULD STACK 1 STAT ONLY.

1 thing i am not seeing in this whole thread is the consideration to hit and expertise. so u all know TANKS NEED A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF IT TO NOT MISS AND HOLD AGRO... simple isnt it? if i miss and dont deal damage and the dps DONT miss and keep smashing the boss then the boss will move off me.

secondly i am going to quote 2 ppl and agree/disagree with them.

"Evereghalo: Magic damage is not mitigated by anything on your list but stam.

You may be healing but you have not tanked, so you do not know what is the cause of all the damage. A lot of what tanking now in raids is proper use of cooldowns, and knowing or having the experience of when the most appropriate time to use them is.

Having said that pure stam stacking isnt the smartest thing to do, but your critisism of tanks that stack stam and another stat also seems unwarranted. "

Yes he may not have tanked but i do both and can tell you that i can advise most tanks on how to improve their tanking by seeing their damage so the "unwarranted" part is wrong. you are correct in saying that nothing in his list mitigates Mdamage. also id like to say that stam stacking is what i have been advised to do via many online posts of feral tanks, no one has had a problem with my tanking yet and i tank LOTS or raids now days.

second person id like to quote is.
"Gacktt: Stamina = best survival stat, gives us threat, gives us more damage.

Lets compare our trinket slots at 346ilvl.

285 mastery = 2.20 block and Cblock, 3% block for pallies.

427 stamina = 7500 hp with all modifiers, and 750 attack power on tough bosses. This also scaled with blood craze and enraged regen.

There's no way in hell I would trade 10% block for 40k hp. Also almost every boss does 75-80% of his total damage as magic damage on the raid, avoidance does nothing about this, and having 100k hp with a low health raid means you can focus on raid healing, having 60k hp means you need to get healed, 10% block won't reliably change anything.

There's not a single fight where I would choose another stat over stamina."

when u compare a gear to another try n specify what char class you are telling it is best for. second part to complain about is your health pools you are dealing with. if a tank came to my raid with 100k HP id kick him. 100k is nothing, thats 1 hitable. even with avoidance. HP should start from ~130 and get to ~200 give or take a couple thousand HP. and i can think of a couple of reasons to balance off your stam with avoidance or block or mastery. mastery for 1 as almost ANY tank is essential. example is bear tanks. every point of master we get reduces more damage (including magic damage) done to us every time a skill kicks off when we critically hit. so are u saying that i should remove all crit and go for stam instead? crits are half my threat too. so agi for instance gives us armor, crit (for damage reduction and threat), dodge (avoidance), and we have talents that convert it to more usefull stuff. therefore your arguement of saying "only stack stam" is now mitigated by talking about other character classes.

dont get me wrong people who read this. i dont wanna say "stam is bad" or "stam is better than anything else" do ur research and look at your talents to decide what the best stat combo is for you. then do heroics with a healer u know and ask them "how easy was i to keep up?" if they say "omfg dude ur so squishy" then try something else. on the other hand if they say "easy as dude" then u know u have a nice balance. atm its TRIAL AND ERROR GUYS, while ppl are still learning their roles just try n plan the best u can with what u got.

[klausi]

There's no way in hell I would trade 10% block for 40k hp. Also almost every boss does 75-80% of his total damage as magic damage on the raid

On the raid, not on the tank.

List of melee damage for our last week of raiding:
Halfus 75%
Valiona 93%
Council 70% (p3 "dps")
Cho'gall 47%
Magmaw 62% (+25% mangle)
Omnitron 89%
Maloriak 73% (kiting duty)
Atramedes 64%
Nefarian 58% (kiting duty)
Conclave 69% (frost guy)
Al'Akir 48% (tanking all adds as well)

The idead behind stacking stamina to survive the magical stuff is almost totally invalid because it hits every raidmember and nobody is stacking stamina. It only becomes interesting when a magic attack + one or two melee hits kills you and such situations doesn't appear to often - they are predictable and that's what cooldowns are designed for.

ps: the actual difference between a 359 mastery and stamina stacked warrior tank is roughly 16k hp for 8% block and the lower one is still sitting at roughly 150k hp, that's 170k raidbuffed.

[Demoneyes82]

1 thing i am not seeing in this whole thread is the consideration to hit and expertise. so u all know TANKS NEED A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF IT TO NOT MISS AND HOLD AGRO... simple isnt it? if i miss and dont deal damage and the dps DONT miss and keep smashing the boss then the boss will move off me.

For most tank classes the only issue with threat is in the first few seconds of the fight. It is generally not a good idea to be sacraficing mitigation, health, or avoidance for hit and expertise this early in the expansion unless interrupts are critical and they're the only ones interrupting.

[Güth]

On the raid, not on the tank.

List of melee damage for our last week of raiding:

Now, is that melee damage or physical damage? since some attacks are counted as physical aoe and are mitigated by armor. I can't see why any of those bosses would be melee attacking your raid unless your tanks died and then that data becomes moot.

*Disregard this, browsed through too quickly and thought your chart was a list of melee damage done to the raid and not tanks.

[feralminded]

Ardenthal, good points about the myth of DR on parry vs. Dodge. I would like to know the math of which is truly the best way to gear for minimum long term DPS though but I can probably math it out myself.

As for magic damage it's always a HUGE misconception that tanks take a lot of magic damage. They just simply don't ... the vast majority of damage a tank ever tanks in any raid is physical. If there ever was a fight where magic damage was a huge component you'd again see resist sets coming out of the woodwork as they'd just flat out be superior for those fights ... but you won't since those fights simply don't exist ... end of story.

[Kazeyonoma]

There are however mechanics IN fights where a large magic damage based attack will occur that only the tank has to deal with, but more often than not, those types of mechanics are not random, and allows tanks to proactively use cooldowns to help mitigate the incoming damage with.

By and large, the majority of damage intake to tanks is physical.

[Andenthal]

It's less about how much damage you take over the whole encounter, and more about how its delt. For example, Sartharion's (3D) breaths weren't a huge part of the total damage done to the tank after it's all said and done. But at 25k a pop (or whatever), they are typically more threatening to the tank than the physical damage component of the fight.

Mimiron's Plasma Blast falls into the same category, as does Sindragosa's Frost Breath, etc, etc...

[feralminded]

Agreed but as Kazey already said you usually could deal with them. I had a CD of some kind for every Sindy breath when I was tanking her early on (eventually got to the point the healers didn't care, even on heroic). Current content is even more Cd through damage spikes than ever before (although I can't think of anything that's a magic spike off the top of my head ... but I also haven't seen Nef yet). Yeah there's an awful lot of magic damage that goes around in Omnitron but none of that's gonna kill your tank ... its far more likely to kill dps or a healer. It just stikes me as misleading at best when people claim that stamina = magic defense. True in the purest sense, irrelevant in the practical sense.

I mean don't get me wrong, I've got plenty of stamina on my warrior and I am a huge EH fanboy in principle ... but I do agree with the assertions that if you are clear of a 3 shot then you're probably fine and are better off on reducing overall damage (regardless of whether you want to do it through avoidance or mitigation).

[Kazeyonoma]

don't get me wrong though, I'm not advocating stacking avoidance.
mitigation and stamina have a relationship in that they make each other better. so you can't really do all or nothing.

with avoidance though, how do you figure 3 hits? cuz the boss on average hits for something? soemtimes he hits harder, sometimes he hits less, it's not a static amount. you have to also figure the incoming heals too that are landing inbetween those hits. The part of having more hp/stamina is that it gives your healers a larger buffer to get you healed back. Avoiding attacks will often just end up leading to overheals. Healers don't just sit there and wait till you take damage, magic or physical, they need to heal you, consistently.

[MellvarTank]

427 stamina = 7500 hp with all modifiers

Just to throw this out there.... Last night on Chimaeron I was blocking ~44k damage per hit (soaking the double hits). That's a hell of a lot more benefit to me than 7500HP. I'll take the block thanks.

[montalon]

From my time tanking in cata

I think my item lvl is around 378 with 225k buffed(with dungeon finder), Prot warrior
Dodge 15(about)
parry 14(about)
and my block is 50%
thats 79% for my defensive skills (someone told me that the total for that should be atleast 75%) so I think im good in that area.

I asked people in my randoms in the 4.3 dungeons how much they normaly see tanks healths, they said around 185K(with dungeon finder) or so.

So i think im doing good in all the fields so far, even with a good amount of health. I usuly stack in stam but dodge/master/parry when I need a socket bonus. One day in a random a healer said "A tank with 2 stam trinkets /facepalm" And I asked if they had a hard time healing me. They said no it was a lil easy infact. I then asked why they think it's a fail to have stam trinkets, they could not answer that besides "I waste my mana more." But at the end of a fight (besides bosses) they always have atleast 50%. I'm a little confused on the issue of stacking stam. I guess because my gear is a bit higher so I can but I don't get crap for it and they seem to think its easyer. (Please no trolling I just I had to post this on the topic)

[Bigbad]

Necroing a year old thread is bad.

Getting unhittable is more important then stamina at this time but its viable to stack stamina after you get unhittable. 5 mans can be done in 353 gear so using that as a reference for gearing isn't helpful. That said some trash packs in there do hurt a little just know where it hurts and use a cd and you can tank halfnaked with a fishing pole.

[Aquacea]

Hey there. I've been Off tanking in the newest Cata dungeons, and occasionally playing the role of Main Tank. I was geared up with Stam and Agility, and recently switched to adding in more Mastery. Bear tank Mastery is a damage reducer, so this helps the healers. I communicated with the healers from our group and specifically the healer who was assigned to me. I wanted to get first hand knowledge of whether or not the switch helped me. According to the healer, it was much easier to keep me alive. My HPs are about 176K raid buffed which is plenty.

I suggest going to a site like www.askmrrobot.com to check your gear and optimize where you can. Now, if only I can get those jewel crafters to stop charging 9K for a Queen's Garnet. ARGH!

[Katarn]

Hey there. I've been Off tanking in the newest Cata dungeons, and occasionally playing the role of Main Tank. I was geared up with Stam and Agility, and recently switched to adding in more Mastery. Bear tank Mastery is a damage reducer, so this helps the healers. I communicated with the healers from our group and specifically the healer who was assigned to me. I wanted to get first hand knowledge of whether or not the switch helped me. According to the healer, it was much easier to keep me alive. My HPs are about 176K raid buffed which is plenty.

I suggest going to a site like www.askmrrobot.com to check your gear and optimize where you can. Now, if only I can get those jewel crafters to stop charging 9K for a Queen's Garnet. ARGH!

AMR was reporting incorrect weights up until fairly recently (especially for something like Heroic DS25). Check it again in a few days once they've been regenerated. It'll stop recommending Mastery for straight tanking.

[Dreador]

Ask Mr. Robot is still terrible, it doesn't know what goals you want to hit for avoidance. I'm really not sure what it's basing its decisions off of, actually.

Seriously though, this is a necro thread and it's a little off topic at this point. If you want your gear evaluated or have questions about what you, personally, need to focus on, I would suggest making a thread in the "HALP! I need advice!" section.