Geming

[conanobrian]

I am working on my tank gear set and I have finally been able to get thru heroic dungeons without too much trouble as long as the group is good. Link to my armory: Conanobrian@staghelm

I do not have any gems yet b/c i've been replacing gear but now that i have some semi perminant stuff i'd like to gem it. My main concern should pbly be stam right now as i have about 127k i think without buffs. After buffs i hit about 160k with luck of the draw and shout.

Also i know absolutely nothing about gems. never used them.

[Loganisis]

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...brian/advanced Copy and paste the link in the future.

Gems for warriors are:

Red = Parry/Mastery
Yellow = Mastery
Blue = Mastery/Stamina
Meta (helm) is Sta/Armor.

You'll also want to reforge.

If it doesn't have mastery, reforge into mastery (even if it means reforging dodge/parry).
If it has mastery and something other than dodge/parry, reforge the something other into dodge/parry.
If you can reforge haste* first, then hit, then expertise, then dodge/parry, then mastery

*Haste is only thrown in there becasue when gearing, something with a ton of mastery and haste, though technically a DPS item, might be an upgrade and the haste could become dodge/parry.

You'll want to try to keep parry roughly 2.5% higher than dodge through reforging.

You're missing a few enchantments too - blocking on your sheild, a mastery enchant over stamina on your boots, the higher stamina enchant on your chest, the enchants on your wrists, legs and cloaks and for you rings - are you wiating until you make them for leveling enchanting?


***

How are you doing on threat? There's a lot of... situational choices in your talent points that may better suited for threat.

[conanobrian]

Ty. your post has already been quite helpful although i don't have the gold to do alot of the changes righ tnow.

As for the enchants I am leveling enchanting and that is the only reason anything is enchanted.

And yes threat has been a bit of an issue.

[Loganisis]

I thought threat would be an issue, you've skipped a lot of threat talents for marginal utilty talents.

First though, gems - it's not ideal, but you can usually find most +30 or +15/+15 gems for ~8/9g. So it's a fairly cheap way to get 75% of the value of the gems you should be using.

Gold - make sure you run the dailies. You can make 500g a day easily by running the 25 dailies (Tol Barad + Deepholm is a great concentration of dailies) through the rewards and selling the grays and DE-ing the greens and auctioning the mats if you don't need them for leveling anymore. I'd do the dailies in your fury set though. I never liked prot for soloing, takes too long to kill things.

***

Talents - take all 3 points out of blood craze. Put 2 in Cruelty.

Take all points out of arms and redistribute them as such:
3/3 War Academy
2/2 Field Dressing
3/3 Deep Wounds

Getting to 3/3 in deep wounds is the best use of talent points from a TPS standpoint outside of the prot tree. So you'll still have 10 points outside prot, but they'll be in more TPS-centric.

You don't need war drums to make sure you have rage for interrupts, you should have plenty and second wind is too situational. There are a few packs that do stun a fair bit, but not enough to make this useful across the board. It's really a PvP talent.

take the 2 points out of Impending victory which is nice, but only useful for the last 20% of a fight and put them in Heavy repercussions. Especially if threat is an issue, you should be keeping shield block on CD and then using SS while it's active. HR will cause extra damage (threat). Later, as you get used to your rotation, you might end up saving SB for special situations, but right now it's going to more useful for you to use it for threat.

This next part is personal preference and I'm sure there will be some who disagree with me. But I'd take the 2 points out of Gag Order and the 2 points out of Thunderstruck and put them in Incite and get Sheild Mastery up to 3/3.

The reasoning is this - I run heroics with guildies. We overgear the encounters, but I still mark kill order for the smoothest runs. 3/3 Incite will make Deep Wounds even better for threat and if you mark Skull then X, your rend + blood and thunder reapplication should keep all other mobs well aggro'd on you.

Then after skull and X are dead, you can tab-cycle to make sure no one gets too high on the others before they die. Shield mastery maxed will just help generate more rage. Maybe it isn't needed, but I like to be swimming in threat as a tank.

For thunderstruck, the extra damage is nice, but really not needed, even in heroics, because so little of it is on the target that matters most - skull. Skull will usually be dead before you can get 3 TCs on him, so you're never really getting the full benefit and with TC reapplying rend to the other mobs, cleave and revenge usage, you'll have plenty of threat on the other mobs once you get to them. So, while nice, I'm not a big fan of Thunderstruck.

Gag order really only gives you a 3 second silence, which is really all you're getting for the 2 talent points. With shield bash, shockwave, and concussive blow (and if you're at distance, charge), and also intimidating shout, I've never found myself really wishing I had a silence.

[conanobrian]

Can i ask. Y should parry be higher than dodge? I thought dodge avoided damage completely while parry only prevented some.

[Sky]

Gemming

[Loganisis]

Dodge and parry are avoidance. If you dodge OR parry, you avoid 100% of damage.

Block, at this point, is RNG mitigation (if sheild block is not active). You have a ~50% chance of blocking 30% of the incoming damage or 60% if it is a crit block.

While it would seem that dodge and parry would be better to go for... They aren't. The reason is your healers would rather 100% of incoming attacks are only at 70% (40% with crit) of their potential damage so they can use smaller, more mana efficient heals. Unless they are pallies.

if you were to go full dodge/parry over mastery, you would receive less total damage, but you would have more 100% of possible damage strikes which would be the type that would require healers to use bigger, less efficient heals, which, in a worst case scenario, would cause the healer to OOM.


***

Now, as to why Parry should be ~2.5% higher than dodge, that is because of hold the line. http://www.wowhead.com/spell=84621

Hold the Line works well with large amounts of mastery, so because parry gives more than just avoidance, it also gives an increased chance of crit block for attacks in the next 10 seconds, parry is slightly more valuable than dodge.

Without Hold the Line you would want dodge = parry because they have the same rate of diminishing returns.

So if hold the line didn't exist and you had 2500 dodge and 2000 parry, you would have less total avoidance, due to diminishing returns than if you had 2250 dodge and 2250 parry since those 500 points of dodge that you have more of than parry would be subject to higher diminishing returns (giving you less actual dodge per point).

But because of Hold the Line and it's interaction with block, you have better overall survivability than in you had dodge = parry.



This is the (hopefully) layman's version of it. Koji or someone else that better understands the math involved would have to explain the details in depth if you want that... and I think they have, there's probably a few threads floating around explaining the math involved.

[Kerchunk]

Can i ask. Y should parry be higher than dodge? I thought dodge avoided damage completely while parry only prevented some.

I keep hearing this misinformation. I argued with a Prot Warrior in my raid the other night for 20 minutes about this. Where did this rumor start? Why do people believe it? Can't they look at combat logs like everyone else?

So strange...

[Kazeyonoma]

There was a period during cataclysm beta, where they changed parry to instead of avoiding an attack 100% and hastening your next attack (like it's always been and is even now) to reduce the next 2 attacks by 50%. So you'd have dodge = 100% avoidance, parry = 2x 50% mitigation, and block = 30% mitigation without DRs (60% critical if you're a warrior). They ended up removing this change to parry on the beta because they just didn't like how it worked out especially with potentially overriding parry "charges". It's old info, and people just never got up to date on it.

[needamazing]

Great thread! Really helped me out. I have one question

Do I need minimum hit rating and expertise before reforging and gemming everything to Mastery? Or do I need to concentrate on survivability first. I am just now getting through all the normal dungeons and have yet to get to Heroics. I'm decently geared for normals with an ilevel of 347 but I am learning the fights. I have yet to get into 3 or 4 of the dungeons

My armory
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...enoll/advanced

[MellvarTank]

You won't want to totally trash all of your hit/expertise while running dungeons, but you can move some of it around to mastery.

[needamazing]

My hit is at 2.5% and my expertise is 12 after I gemmed and reforged for mastery. Did I go too far? I seemed to do OK last night but as I want to do Heroics what hit / expertise would you recommend you at least need

[Kazeyonoma]

you're fine, just execute your rotation well, and be fast on taunting if you get a few dodge/parry/misses early on pulls.

[Deathwish238]

What Meta are you all using? I'm using +1% SB now but am considering the Effulgent -2% Spell Damage Taken. The Warrior's biggest weakness is Spell Damage after all.

My hit is at 2.5% and my expertise is 12 after I gemmed and reforged for mastery. Did I go too far? I seemed to do OK last night but as I want to do Heroics what hit / expertise would you recommend you at least need

Tanking is more than just reducing damage you take. Tanking is preventing damage from hitting your allies and if you're not holding threat you won't be doing that well.

My mins are 5% for Hit and 23 for Expertise. I hate having my specials not land, especially during the beginning of fights or when my DPS don't give me much time(which is often these days).

Stack Mastery after you have 5% Hit and 23 Expertise. Don't gem Stam, way better to more mitigation/avoidance than a little more stam. We already have a lot of HP, unlike when we did ICC and everyone stacked Stam.

[Loganisis]

My hit right now is 0.64% and expertise is 3, all racial, and I have no threat problems (though I'm not doing heroic raids either). Dungeons, raids, it's the same. If DPS wants to rip of me at the beginning of a fight by not giving me 3 GCDs (HT/Charge + Rend + TC to grab packs and HT/CHarge + SS + Shockwave for guaranteed threat for bosses) before popping in, they can tank. If they want to pop all their CDs in the first 5 seconds, they can tank. Hit + Expertise won't let me keep threat on over-eager DPS.

Sub heroic raiding, even with a 346 weapon, you shouldn't lose threat if you have a good rotation, good threat talents (and really, the utility talents are very meh to me) and DPS that understands how threat works in Cata. My GL's ret pally that rides my ass into a fight ends up tanking a lot.

5% hit and 23 expertise is 1290 rating. 1290 rating is equal to:
7.3% dodge/parry (before diminishing returns)
7.2 mastery which is = 10.8% block + 10.8% crit block.

You're giving up a lot of damage reduction for something you don't need (interrupt duty excluded until 4.1) unless you're running heroics and need every ounce of DPS.


The meta I use is the 2% armor increase. Magic damage is unmitigatable without a CD, but 2% reduction for a fairly limited number of attacks doesn't excite me as much as 2% armor increase that is almost always useful. I've got LS+ER or SW or the TB Faction trinket for magic damage.

*****

Educate DPS about the way threat works in cata (vengence), mark kill priorities, and things work pretty well.

[trueX]

Another method vs going all out mastery in each slot yellow and blue is one I follow, comes down to personal preference.

Meta - +81 Stam / 2% Increased Armor from items - Austere Shadowspirit Diamond
Red - +20 Parry / +30 Stam - Defender's Demonseye
Yellow - +20 Mastery / +30 Stam - Puissant Dream Emerald
Blue - +60 Stam - Solid Ocean Sapphire

You could go for +40 mastery in yellows but I just dont like giving up 20 mastery for 30 stam, you lose a net gain of 10 stats. Call me crazy but thats why I do it, my avoidance is not an issue atm nor is stam, but stam is 100% and have always been a stam whore. And seeing as how Vengeance = gaining 5% of the dmg taken as attack power, up to a maximum of 10% of your health, the more health you have the more attack power you can gain. And since all our powers for the most part are based off attack power, more health = more attack power = higher threat, allowing less hit and expertise and more avoidance in a roundabout way.

Hope that makes some sense.

[Katzazi]

trueX:
Stamina is and was only as important for survive in progression content to help you not get 2 or 3 shot. Before entering heroic raids, you will not be in such a situations. On the contrary, your gear will already have high stamina. The changes you can add with stamina gems are not as big as they were in Wrath. (It will affect less than 10% - more like 5% - of your stamina). At the same time mastery will save tons of mana, because healers can switch over to cheaper heals. Sure, it's also only some percentages there, but those help you all the time.

If you don't need more stamina, because the healer does not heal all the stamina you have, "10 more stats" stamina are not worth it. Btw just because one says 30 and another stat says 40 does not mean anything. Blizz balances the stats against each other. And stamina is treated differently than secondary stats, anyway.

The first time one should wory about HP is when entering heroic raids. And even then people may be fine with the mastery they have.

[Loganisis]

Another method vs going all out mastery in each slot yellow and blue is one I follow, comes down to personal preference.

Meta - +81 Stam / 2% Increased Armor from items - Austere Shadowspirit Diamond
Red - +20 Parry / +30 Stam - Defender's Demonseye
Yellow - +20 Mastery / +30 Stam - Puissant Dream Emerald
Blue - +60 Stam - Solid Ocean Sapphire

You could go for +40 mastery in yellows but I just dont like giving up 20 mastery for 30 stam, you lose a net gain of 10 stats. Call me crazy but thats why I do it, my avoidance is not an issue atm nor is stam, but stam is 100% and have always been a stam whore. And seeing as how Vengeance = gaining 5% of the dmg taken as attack power, up to a maximum of 10% of your health, the more health you have the more attack power you can gain. And since all our powers for the most part are based off attack power, more health = more attack power = higher threat, allowing less hit and expertise and more avoidance in a roundabout way.

Hope that makes some sense.

This is more the thinking of heroic raid tanks. Normal raids, gemming for stamina over mastery (parry/stam over parry/mastery --- pure stam over mastery/stam --- mastery/stam over pure mastery) will make you harder to heal. As you get the gear for heroic raids, then you're close to 85% dodge/parry/bock even when pushing stamina to survive the bigger hits.

Entry level tanks should gem mastery and then cycle to stamina-oriented as they proceed into heroics until heroic gear gives them enough stamina they can go back to maxing mastery.

[Kahmal]

Shouldn't we only use Parry/Stam only if the socket bonus is really worth it? I mean 20 parry really isn't much is it even before considering DR

[klausi]

20 parry rating are 20 parry rating. I get from socket boni mastery, dodge, parry and stamina.. unless you're wearing dps pieces i can't see a reason not to socket for the bonus.