Warrior Tank Needs Advice

[pkninja]

Just started playing again and I'm damn squishy.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...ow/Mike/simple

Obviously using a pvp helm/chest isn't helping but it's the best option I have atm

Could someone inspect me and give me some guidance? thanks

edit: also, am I geared enough for troll heroics? I did them a few times but more often than not the group kicks me or we wipe forever

[Tengenstein]

Yes you are geared fro troll heroic but you won't be roflstomping them, you will need CC and people who can play properly. If you're getting kicked its' probably down to play style more than gear, so how do you play?

Get yourself fully enchanted, it doesn't have to be a tiptop enchant but a cheap cata one will do while you gear up. The mentality should be that since gear isn't great it needs improving as best as possible to make up for that deficit, not my gear isn't great so I won't bother until I get a decent piece.

Gems, red gems sockets should be parry/mastery, not parry stam, Fine ember topaz's I believe they're called. Get you professions maxed.

You're spec could use some tweaking. 8/2/31 is the generall all purpose damage spec, ang generally you want too take the minor glyph of demo shout.

[Theotherone]

Try to get your hands on a tank weapon; if I recall correctly Agility is now useless to the plate tanks.

[Tengenstein]

Indeed sir, you are most correct

[pkninja]

Yes you are geared fro troll heroic but you won't be roflstomping them,
you will need CC and people who can play properly. If you're getting
kicked its' probably down to play style more than gear, so how do you
play?

Well, I tend to wait for people to CC, which is fine. But everyone wants a bear run, people will inspect me, see pvp gear and vote kick me, Or the healer will leave because I don't have 200k health and he has to actually try.

And thanks for the info, could someone post the correct spec I should be using?

[Tengenstein]

http://www.wowhead.com/talent#LG0cZ0bZIfGzRRozbu:

you have two floater point in the prot tree (i've put them in Imp.Rev) which could be put in Thunderstruck(higher DPS, harder rage management), safeguard(if you want an external CD), or gag order (as a crutch).


EDIT: you could always get some JP gear to replace the Resilience gear, think there's a 359 from chest, and i think dragonmaw do a 346 hat.

[Theotherone]

Are you running the Molten Front dailies? I know they're a grind, but you can get two nice 365 tank rings and 365 tank bracers. Also, do the Thrall quest line and get a nice 365 tanking cloak, good chuck on mastery on it.

[pkninja]

Are you running the Molten Front dailies? I know they're a grind, but you can get two nice 365 tank rings and 365 tank bracers. Also, do the Thrall quest line and get a nice 365 tanking cloak, good chuck on mastery on it.

I'll check it out now, thanks

[tiaxson]

Hey mike,

there are loats of great upgrades quite easy optained

Feet: Pyrelord Graves or Dragonmaw boots. some say these are better.
Head: Spiritshield Mask
Rings: there are 3 choises here tbh. 1st choise (spend your first valor points here) Daily reward & justice point one. If you havent started the Molten front dailies. pick up JP ring together with Valor ring.
Neckleace: IF the one from Troll heroics wont drop for you, it wouldnt for me, Lustrous eye is always a cheap option.
Back: Thrall quest line (as other have already said here). dont get tempted by the Hyjal defenders friendly one, more Ctc on this due to mastery.
Chest: Tier 11 chest ofc.
Wrists: Pick up the Valor point bracers, if possible find someone who sells them. they go for around 3,5-4k gold on my server.
Belt: Start doing Molten front Trash, if you aint geared for tanking it. go as dps if possible. the Rep Belt is amazing. and will last you for a long time.
Trinket: Start doing Tol Barad, every fight if possible & every daily you can get near. Mirror of Broken Images is amazing, any you will use it for a long time.

The thing to remember is that your optimal tanking piece have Mastery +Dodge/parry stats.
Secondary items have: parry + dodge. <-- reforge higest to mastery.
secondary items have Parry/dodge + exp/hit/crit <-- if parry/dodge is more then 2x the exp/hit/crit reforge avoidance to mastery.

when reforgeing try to keep parry about 1% over dodge (with buffs, battle shout & kings/motw)

Spec i would probably run 7/2/32 and start doing quests in it aswell if you dont already, since its a a great way to practise masterying big pulls. Molten front dalies was a walk in the park for me with aoe tanking as prot warr.

Hope this helped

-Tiaxson

[Gregasaurous]

when reforgeing try to keep parry about 1% over dodge (with buffs, battle shout & kings/motw)

This may be personal preferance and very debateable but I believe that (Parry=2~3%>Dodge) gives the best results out of Hold the Line without killing yourself over deminishing returns. Other than that, Very good list of gear to grab, though he's quite a ways away from stepping foot in a raid of any kind. The 359 DPS rep belt (can't remember who from, guardians of Hyjal i believe) was a well recieved teporary tank peice in T11 due to ti's high amount of mastery. I know that's a lot of factions to get rep with, don't worry about it.

Now, i know the Tankard O' Terror has that nice 365 iLvL but you would be SO much better off ditching it for ANY tank weapon IDC if you have to farm ICC to get one, capiche?

[pkninja]

I didn't think it was THAT bad. I do have a couple ICC tanking weapons from wotlk left over, should I just throw on one of those?

[Tengenstein]

No, Greg's just using hyperbole irresponsibly. The main thing is that it has mastery or parry & dodge on it and then base weapon damage, yeah sure we get AP and parry rating from strength but it's at such a a small rate it doesn't matter much its about 30 odd parry rating your missing for not having a strength weapon and maybe 300AP.

Weapon damage defines how hard your Dev hits for and you're rend Ticks for both are fairly important as a tank.

However i wouldn't use that as it doesn't have mastery or parry or dodge on it and is agility. Get crafted 365.

[Gregasaurous]

Yeah, sorry, it was a bad joke. My bad for not specifying. The point I was trying to emphasise was not to worry aobut the iLvl so much, just get something that will do you some good staying alive. There's nothing that bothers me more than seeing players sacrifice good itemization for a peice with a better iLvL simply for the sake of the iLvL. It almost makes me miss the days of GearScore. I'm not saying you should only gear perfect peices, but some thing just shouldn't even be considered a option. So, yeah, as Teng said, the crafted 365 would be a excellent replacement, do try your best to get one. In the mean time though I would even pick up a 353 if a tank weapon drops in a Zan.

I just notice you're JC, as soon as you can get yourself some Fractured Chimera's Eyes.

[Charon]

The tank weapons in wrath were WAY too fast to be effective now. From everything I've seen, the better tank weapons in cata have weapon speeds similar to those preferred by the dw classes in wrath: About 2.6 weapon speed, and the bigger the damage, the better so long as it itemizes well. Now that that's out of the way...

I like where your head's at with the trinkets. The mastery will give you block, and the strength pop will give you a bit of burst DPS.

Your chest (Duh..) and weapon still need replacing, but I trust you're working on that.

Your parry rating is a bit high, and reforging a bit into dodge should actually see some visibly-by-percentage results.

As for spec/glyphs, I can't comment since I don't know warrior specs too well.

[pkninja]

Really? I read parry>dodge due to hold the line, so I've been respeccing dodge into parry

[Charon]

Parry > Dodge is true for that exact reason. There's a graph floating around with dots and strange stuff that makes no sense at all to me, but you have like double the parry rating compared to dodge. Likely due to the contribution from strength. However, if I'm not entirely retarded, 5% difference (last I checked) is still pretty out of line and putting a bit back into dodge might actually give you an increase in overall avoidance.

Also, if anyone can correct me (assuming I'm wrong) or explain what the hell the dot graph actually means instead of just "Click that. Know all!" That would be greatly appreciated.

[Gregasaurous]

Parry>Dodge, correct, but dodge and parry are also subject to deminishing returns. (If you would like a full explanation of what that is i'm sure somebody else would be happy to give you one that makes coherent sense. I myself understand it but never took the time to comit to memory the detailed technical mechanics or the explanation thereof.) Anyway, Deminishing returns, if you have a LOT more of parry than dodge, you are actually losing total avoidance (14.25 parry + 14.25 dodge = 28.5 total avoidance VS 15.73 parry + 11.14 dodge = 27.85 total avoindance). The equation i put in as an example. It is not exactly what your Parry/Dodge would look like if you had them even, just a very rough estimate. I'm a little short on time writting this and didn't have time to look up the equation for DR and crunch the numbers. Anyway, the point is that for a a certain value of (parry%=dodge%+X) you will still be able to take less damage form Hold the Line procs. Above that and you're taking more damage to lost avoidance than you are preventing from having 10% extra block for a short time every now and then while in combat.

Confused? I would be too if I had to read that "as brief as possible, yet trying to have some depth" explanation. I'm sure somebody will follow up with some more exact numbers and hopefully fill in some gaps where i decided to be brief. So in conclusion: Yes, you want your parry higher than dodge, but nothing drastic. You may ask yourself, "Do i care about these smallest percentages of difference that will probably get blown to hell due to RNG anyway?" For tanking 5 man dungeons, probably not, in a raid, you'll want all the help you can get. And once again I deeply apolagize if that explanation was far from helpful.

[Charon]

For Diminish Returns, basically your first point of dodge is a full point. Your second is like .9 of a point. These avoidance stats actually SHARE the pool but to a barely related, Arkansas baby mama sort of degree. As you can tell by looking at your armory, your parry percentage (was) at like 16%, with double the rating of dodge which was at almost 12%. Shifting enough parry into dodge to normalize the percentages (like 14/12% parryodge) shouldn't actually take that much reforging at all due to DR. Basically, just look at your gear and if it has parry/mastery, give it some dodge. If it has parry/dodge, give it some mastery. Reforging to Mastery won't give you dramatic results, but reforging to dodge should look pretty shiny, pretty quick.

[pkninja]

I know what diminishing returns are, thanks.

Is there DR for mastery? At what point do I stop going for mastery, if at all? and what about stamina?

[Tengenstein]

Mastery has no Dimishing returns a la Parry and dodge. However there are 2 (well 3 points) where it loses value as a warrior, the first is where you have a combined dodge parry Block chance of 72.4% at this point your unhittable with Shield Block up at this point Mastery Drops from being frikking awesome to plain awesome. the next point comes when you achieve 102.4% combat table coverage and are unhittable all the time, at this point Mastery is only going to be increasing your chance to critically block and so isn't quite so awesome anymore. Either start swapping out Block for avoidance while maintaining 102.4% CTC for minimising damage taken or you can start getting more stam in increase the your Burst time. which one is best is highly dependant on the encounter and the compentecies of your healers.