Tank gear questions for firelands

[sifuedition]

Am I off...or are most of the rep/quest items from Firelands not better than the T11 stuff? So much of it is missing mastery, such as the boots from the "Through the Gates of Hell" and some of the rings, trinkets, etc, that my gear is definitely going up much slower than the rest of the raid.

At work and can't really link my toon but Sifupally of Jaedenar.

Are there rep items I should be getting as upgrades? I have the moonwell phial but there is a lot of movement so far in Firelands (we've downed Shannox a couple of times and worked Beth'tilak once) so I don't see much chance to really use the use effect on it vs. the niftey mastery proc of Symbiotic Wrym.

I made the choice (haven't raided with it yet) of equiping the T12 leg as it has mastery and if there is a damage phase that I seem to need it, I'll switch back to 4 piece T11.

What are the thoughts on getting the crafted tanking sword? I only have about 13k gold across 9 level 85s and don't seem to get above that. The sword would probably cost me about 6k and doesn't seem to be much of an upgrade over the 359 maloriak mace. Looks smexy though so I keep thinking about it =).

Given the rep boots lack mastery and the sword isn't much of an upgrade, I have considered getting the crafted boots but I don't know anyone with the pattern yet to help reduce the costs.

Thanks for all advice.

[Fetzie]

To be honest there is enough mastery on everything else to make the cape, at least, worth getting. Beth'tilak (can) drop a sword, you get a belt with over 300 mastery rating on it from shannox...

I would stick with a mastery trinket + symbiotic worm until you have enough block that your Worm procc puts you way over 102.4%. Then either take the moonwell phial (I don't like it because you can't move more than 10 yards for 20 seconds if you don't want to lose the dodge boost), the scales of life (not a big fan of the /use but I guess 19k heal (it scales with divinity) every 60 seconds isn't too bad, or the trinket from V&T (n-hc or hc).

Mastery is awesome, but if you reforge the correct stat (i.e. not always the hit or expertise) you can get an item with 55 stamina, 25 strength, more avoidance and nearly as much mastery. Look at this item comparison:
http://www.wowhead.com/compare?items...0.4090&focus=1

I would use the 378 unless the 37 mastery rating was the difference between block cap or not. You gain 55 stamina (about 800 hp), 70 armor, 137 parry rating (about 0.6%) and 115 hit rating (~1%). You lose 17 strength (~3 parry rating), 37 mastery(0.4% block) and 127 dodge rating(about 0.5%). Just because mastery is out best stat doesn't mean it exists in a vacuum and and item without it is crap.

How likely are you to get the beth'tilak sword? I replaced the weapon I got back in december with it :/

The crafted boots are best in slot, and are an upgrade to the your boots (basically a stat+n upgrade). You can probably get the embers from boss kills to make them cheaper.

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...etzie/advanced is my armory, maybe you want to see how I went about upgrading stuff.

I think my take home message is: Don't let your guild disenchant tank loot just because it has no mastery on it, and don't dismiss an item out of hand because it has no mastery on it. You can buy a 378 belt and cloak for about 400g, gem them, reforge them, enchant them, will cost maybe 800g in total. See how they change your stats, you may be pleasantly surprised.

[Lumines]

See how they change your stats, you may be pleasantly surprised.

This is such an important point. Don't become blinkered by the line of thinking that because Mastery is our best stat, that items without Mastery are useless. Going from a 359 Dodge/Mastery belt to a 378 Dodge/Parry belt was a definite upgrade for me - in CTC (after appropriate reforging), in total damage reduction, and stamina.

[sifuedition]

Thanks for the looks at the gear.

As to the cloak, I have the mastery one from the quest where you rescue Thrall which was nice and since it is 365 is much closer in stats to the rep one but with mastery, so I feel like that was one of the few good upgrades. The wrists are also nice. One of the two tank rings was nice. Looking to eventually get the VP one to pair with it but going for 2 piece T12 first.

I did go through all the vendors and bought the tank gear. I went from 90.61 CTC down to about 83.9 CTC. After some reforging (and putting the 359 rep boots back on), I was able to get that back to about 87.2 CTC. It also added about 10k hp, a fair amount of attack power and bumped my expertise (with glyph) up to 25. Can't remember the fight off the top of my head (Baelerok?), but I figure this will be a good setup for the fight that requires high tank dps. Other tank is a bear so he might get that job, not sure.

As to the drops, I am sorry if I wasn't clear what I meant. We don't have much Firelands progression yet. I don't like the shield but I would keep it to play around with stats and specific fight setups. I probably wouldn't use it most of the time, however. A lot of the other drops, I do like. The random ring might be good later (according to askmrrobot) but it doesn't work well with my current stats. The belt hasn't dropped yet and the chest, etc do look nice but aren't accessable for my guild yet.

I was referring mostly to the firelands dailies, random trash drops and rep vendors. Most of the guild is gearing up quite a bit from those without downing bosses. As a block tank...I am just not seeing the ability to keep pace with their gearing the same way. Hasn't been an issue yet, but I am just concerned that there may come a time when threat or survivability is an issue due to my upgrades lagging.

Edit:
As to the Beth'tilak sword and trink...everything I see indicates this fight should be the easiest one to learn and down and we can down Shannox, so that has also gone into my consideration of crafting the sword. I WOULD say that this is a likely drop for me soon, but...the co-gm and RL is a priest, who wants to work Ryolith because the drops he prefers come from that fight =/

[Fetzie]

I must admit I haven't really looked at the daily zone vendor loot because

1. I can't be bothered doing them
2. I get 378 stuff from raids

[Theotherone]

Edit:
As to the Beth'tilak sword and trink...everything I see indicates this fight should be the easiest one to learn and down and we can down Shannox, so that has also gone into my consideration of crafting the sword. I WOULD say that this is a likely drop for me soon, but...the co-gm and RL is a priest, who wants to work Ryolith because the drops he prefers come from that fight =/

Yeah, that's what we thought (two lock outs later still trying to get it) - it's a gear/dps and don't stand in the fire check. The mechanics are acutally pretty easy to get down, but it does test your dps and healers.

[sifuedition]

Yeah, item levels should be fine...in practice on this fight, however, our bear keeps dying going up or staying down. Dps looks like:
16k
15k
14k
9k
9k
7k tank
7k tank

Funny thing is, the dps keep rotating who is in which spot on that list. If we get some consistency there and figure out why our bear keeps dying...

I hate IFs

[Fetzie]

If the bear keeps dying upstairs, why not go up yourself, paladins have all sorts of cooldowns to survive up there even if the healer misses his strand or falls through a totally avoidable hole.

[sifuedition]

That was what we did for our last several attempts...but the bear died downstairs =\

[Tengenstein]

And the healers aren't rotating? you have the same one staying upstairs? the bear has to be doing something.

on the original question: i did get the tanking 1h crafted, my thinking was that if i splurged on it Fate will conspire to give me the beth sword next reset.

[sifuedition]

Well, we have a number of things going on. Previously, we healed with holy pally, disc, shaman. Last week, the holy pally quit the game and the shaman couldn't log on (ISP line break - almost a week to fix 0.o).

We healed with disc, holy pr., Druid. I was constantly concerned about survival while I was downstairs but wiping so many times to the bear dying going up we swapped. Then the bear started dying downstairs. Not sure about his cd usage. I know that he will at times turn his back rather than straffing but he already calls himself out if/when he dies to something like that, so to some degree, that's self correcting.

I intend to WoL this weeks attempts and start seeing if I can dig more info out. I suspect we just aren't dps'ing the adds well enough which causes more strain on the healers.

As to the crafted sword, I lol'ed irl. It's funny because it's true.

[Tengenstein]

But that wouldn't explain why he's dying upstairs too.

[Fetzie]

Are you taunting all of the spinners down? When left to their own devices they spam that 40k damage spit, when taunted onto the ground they melee for about 1000.

[sifuedition]

When we focus, spinners come down well...and spiderlings are even less controled. With distracting shot, dps warrior, dowstairs tank and a bookie who can bear/growl when absolutely needed, we have managed that perfectly. Those attempts were some our worst as to spiderlings though so we usually try for "good enough". It seems our dps is much lower than our gear dictates so hopefully the dd's get more comfortable with the fight this week and we see a kill. Not sure about my WoL skills so we'll see.