Greetings Warmane,
i was looking for a Warrior Tank BiS List for WotLk Servers.
After consideration of Bugs on Warmane and deviations from Retail what would you consider BiS on WotLK Servers ?
I was working Towards https://mesorchoo.com/gearlist/warrior-tank/ (max Armor(4 t10 +Pillars).
But after checking some Warrior Tanks on this Server, i noticed no one was going for Armor on this Server and most of them get as much HP as possible (https://armory.warmane.com/character...ecrown/profile) for example.
Should i revaluate my Gear and go for Maxhp insted ?
-Cheers
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Member
WOTLK Warrior Tank BiS
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Loremaster
That site has a lot of errors regarding most sets so i'd take it with a grain of salt.And tanks carry a ton of pieces to fit the requirements for the encounters.
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Member
First and mostly the only thing people see is GS and HP. Only a few know enough about tanks to check gear and get the right infomation out of it. So tanks are mostly measured only by GS and HP.
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Member
4t10 and the crafted legs are always great. You basically just swap out Expertise and a small amount of other stats for a good amount more armor. Using the crafted legs always works out to the most EHP so you're on the right track.
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Member
What almost everyone forgets to mention is that best gear depends on fight. For lk yes, armor is very important. For Sindra not that much and for Kele not at all.
Optimal situation is to have several sets of gear (EHP = armor + hp set, hp set, balanced set, avoidance set, (at lest frost) resist set, threat set - EHP is the most important one though) and change them according to fight. Even changing weapon mid-fight is something that improves your performance (start with slow dps weapon to boost threat and switch to tanking one later).
Crafted legs are awesome when you start. When I got to bis (I mean those several sets I mentioned before - I even had shadow resist gear just for Kele) a loong time ago when this was still molten. I found out, that offset helmet + t10 hc legs give only a little less EHP, but a ton of extra threat - which I needet back than. Think about what does the fight need (mostly physical vs magic dmg), what do you need (do you have strong dps you tend to loose threat to?), what does the raid allow you to do/need you to do? (are you 25hc geared monster helping your guildies run through 10n with a good healer? - get some dps pieces to do it faster) - think, experiment, watch, learn and change your gear accordingly.
Anyways I wrote quite a bit about stats/gear in my guide: http://forum.warmane.com/showthread.php?t=271757
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Member
Greetings once again,
First of all thanks for all the replies!
I'll try to answer and or comment most of them.
Yes, I noticed you have a much easier time get invited to Raids if your Gs is higher even you got the BOE Heal Belt equipped and no gems or enchantments at all. But this is not a Thread where I want to discuss how I value skill over GS (because its self-explanatory imo.)
Really glad to hear that, I didn't invest my Gold into the abyss haha^^. Is Expertise a problem ? I mean you can't reach the Cap anyway so is it worth to try to get as much as possible anyways ? (Gemming?) Or go all the way for Sta instead?
Thank you for your detailed Answer !
And I think you're totally right on the fact I need multiple Armor Sets for different encounters.
I've read your guide multiple Times in the past and took multiple tips out of it (thank you therefor).
OTSpoiler:Show
Alcyruun mentioned multiple Gear sets in his guide as well (http://forum.warmane.com/showthread.php?t=296685) and I Think it's the exact same you mean and should be my next goal to reach.
One last thing - how much is Armor Gear outperforming EHP(avoid) Gear on a fight like LK in Numbers ? Is it like 1-5% or more ? Do I HP spike less with avoid or a bigger Life pool ?
-Cheers
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Member
@expertise in my experience it was worth it to get dodge cap (26 expertise) above that expertise looses half of its value 20 expertise gems are never worth it, purple 10 exp + 15 stam sometimes - when you can activate 6+ stam socket bonus and are below 26 exp. But best advise is to try it out if you have no problems with threat go for whatever. 10 agi (= 20 armor + a bit of dodge + a bit of crit) + 15 stam is a great gem as well.
@gear I don't like Alcyruun's sets. I relly like ldv 25 head + 4 t10 - since that way you get a ton of hit and expertise at the cost of a bit of EHP (<1%). He tryes to mix things that do not go well together - like avoidance and hp - you are better off getting only avoidance (there is a way to get block capped gear, which is really good vs one miniboss in RS or HP (+ resists) for fights like kele/sindra). And he suggests using Blade Ward - the worst "tank" enchant. It has very poor uptime. Blood Draining is best enchant for EHP and Mongoose (TBC) gives more avoidance + armor! with great uptime.
With more avoidance you will always take less dmg. That's not the only thing to consider however - how much dmg you can take at any given time is more important - that's what armor is for.
LK (25hc) hits for around 160k before armor mitigation. With 70% armor reduction you are going to take 48K dmg from each hit. With 75% (unreachable unless dwarf) 40K. 2 hits in a row will happen often, 3, 4 or even 5 hits in a row will happen as well (not that often, but still you wont to give your healers time to top you off).
Alcryuum's "avoidance" set has 68% armor reduction vs bosses with buffs (devo aura, king). In that gear you would take 51K hits. His armor set 72% - you would take +-45K hits with buffs.
Armor + HP work so well together, that it’s better to count them always together as EHP.
hint: You can get best EHP set with Onyxia ring.
Get yourself something that can count EHP for you (tankpoints is a great example - they have their own ratting, but count EHP + avoidance chance + hp as well, those give better overall image what can you survive.
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Member
Max avoidance makes it very unlikely up to nearly impossible to take 2 hit in a row. With 80% avoidance or above 100% if you count block to it, avoidance is the safest way to tank. Being able to take 2 hit in a row (with only a bit of heal) while "never" get hit 3 times in a row, is safer than a EHP tank that constanly has to fear to get 2 hits in a row plus one parry hit. However, as long as a tnak can not reach high avoidance numbers it is less effectiv than EHP, and you need healers who are used to avoidance.
For wotlk there is not a single end game encounter that favor avoidance tanks. In ICC the HP buff is a hugh EHP boost, while the dodge debuff is a nightmare for avoidance. Halion being a dragon is not working very well with avoidance tanks (unless you have a very skilled disc who shield and overheal you with every breath).
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Member
With 80% avoidance you have 4% chance to be hit 2 times in a row, 0.8% to be hit 3 times in a row. Its bound to happen several times on LK (you take a lot of hits). Relying entirely on this to never happen is a bad thing. Another problem is, that 2 times in a row can be lethal without enough EHP in a fight like LK hc. (like Alcyruun's avoid/hp gear - which is not as crazy avoidance focused to get to 80% even outside icc)
There is exactly 1 endgame encounter, that is best done with high avoidance. And that is middle miniboss in RS (since he reduces armor to 0): http://wowwiki.wikia.com/wiki/General_Zarithrian
Halion also ignores 20% dodge btw, making him in some aspects even harder to tank, than lk. Some shadow resist for shadow phase can be good (not as much as on kele, since you need Armor and hp for his meele hits as well)
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Banned
Avoidance is in fact the riskiest way to tank. I don't know what kind of logic you are using in order to claim the opposite. With avoidance, you are relying on % chance to not get hit. Just remind yourself how Gruul tanking at >10 stacks feels like ("will the boss hit me 2 times in a row and wipe the raid or will I be crowned 'the best tank on the server' for having RNG luck?") and now compare it to tanking anything on WotLK. With EHP, you rely on nothing - you have your HP and your armor to do the job. All defensive cooldowns you have are EHP cooldowns (Shield Block, Shield Wall, Last Stand).
The rest of your post I agree with.
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Member
Well if there was a way to get block-capped and still being able to survive 2 hits from LK... it would be extremely beneficial. Since block would behave similary to armor at that point and you would have armor reduction and then that reduced dmg further reduced by guaranteed blocks... Unfortunatelly it is not possible by a long shot.
But for lower content - it is fun seing all the hits getting fully blocked - or when you have ungeared heal, you can save him a ton of mana, just not at hardest hitting bosses.
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Banned
It's not really as beneficial as you might think. There's only one item in ICC/RS that gives you block value, which means you'll typically be blocking around 2k damage. If we assume that LK does in fact hit for 160k before mitigation then this is the equivalent of 1-2% armor, depending on crit block luck. It would be good if you could reliably stack block value and block rating without having to resort to inferior items but because of the way ICC gear is itemized, this isn't possible. Only time this would be good is if you're getting slapped by wet noodles from multiple sources like in a heroic dungeon or during trash pulls where you can just block 100% of the damage and take none.
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Member
1.2 and 2.4% versus toughest hitting boss, vs anything else it would be way better (offtank ph1 would be insane). Getting that last 1% of armor reduction requires a lot of armor (+ armor is capped). Still in this case its worth 6k hp... because in our hypothetical scenario you somehow manage to survive 2 hits and that third one can be lethal. That is more than 400 stamina. Getting block capped also leads to having a lot of other avoidance chance. (dodge/parry/miss) - so to do that you would have to reach 80% of those and around 23% block chance. As I already said this is sadly impossible, you can't get nowhere near block capped inside icc (you can get only a bit over 82% percent since dodge debuff) and it requires you to give up a lot of armor and hp -> you would not survive 2 hits in a row.
During trash this sux hard, because you have very low threat in this kind of gear. Its only good vs that miniboss in RS and maybe when doing some lowish instances with a friend (because you may be almost immortal, but you also do almost 0 dmg, so numbers and magic dmg will eventually overwhelm you). Soloing is better with partly dps gear to hit that balance between survivability and damage.Edited: November 23, 2017
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Member
With skilled healers, you survive as many hits in a row as EHP tanks do (2 hits), while having a very low chance to get one shot by a 3 hit in a row, which kills both avoidance and EHP tanks. Do the math for lk25hc without the 30% buff and debuff. Both EHP and avoidance are not going to survive 2 hits in a row without heal.
EHP tanks are only supirior because they can stand 2 hits without heal with the buff and healers have not problem to heal tons of hp because of the buff. But without the buff healers have to cap the tank at 100% after every hit and there is a very low chance that the tank will survive if healers get in trouble for only one second.
But as i already said, avoidance get to full use only with icc gear and at this point gets nerfed by the buff/debuff.
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Banned
While what you're saying is true, it is only so outside of ICC/RS. I think we all know that the debuff is the reason why avoidance tanks just don't work in ICC/RS. That's how Blizzard wanted it - because avoidance distorts the whole idea of tanking and at the same time stresses the healers through RNG. If the buff/debuff wasn't there, then the best tanks on WotLK end-game would be UDKs by a very long shot, followed by paladins (who can easily get block-capped with Holy Shield up). For all I care, the best tank possible for ToC is actually UDK because that is the point where they are the most geared and can benefit the most out of Bone Shield before suffering from the ICC debuff. The moment an UDK tank enters ICC, they fall at the very bottom of the chart because UDKs rely on avoidance to increase Bone Shield uptime, which is what makes them better than the other specs. No avoidance => they lose this one and only advantage they have from Bone Shield. The buff/debuff strongly favours EHP tanks - thus why BDKs > UDKs and why druids > all.
Edited: November 23, 2017
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