Off Off Off Off Off Tanking For Dummies

Howdy,

Well, I'm finally close enough on my main spec gear list (with some modifications for quickness) that I can start trying to see about what to do for my tank gear. Tank gear is harder for me, because it's my off spec, so in order to roll on decent gear, either (a) all the tanks in the raid need to have that item or better, or (b) I need to be tanking that night with the understanding that I'm rolling on tank gear only.

With that in mind, several things have to take a back seat to my main spec, so my tank gear has to be primarily drops, since I don't know how long it will be until I can afford to purchase any of the tier gear for it (not until I've bought 4 pieces of my main spec's tier 10 gear), so I have to temper my dreams for my tank gear a little more than usual.

However, I find that tanking gear is a little bizarre for me at this point. If I upgrade pretty much everything, I actually end up trading defense and some expertise for armor and health. That's pretty much the tradeoff. I'm just baffled, as my dodge stays about the same, my parry about the same, my hit about the same, It makes me wonder what exactly they've itemized around. After all is said and done, I think I gain about 200 strength, and about 400 stamina, which is certainly good, but I'm losing about 24.5 defense skill for it (which isn't a lot, admittedly, but it does increase block, parry, dodge, and attacking miss chance by about 1/5 of a percent each.) It ends up being a tradeoff of about 300 ish defense rating for those 200 strength and 400 stamina (which I'm willing to admit is a great trade up) but I'm also increasing my iLevel quite a ways on most of those pieces (in some cases from 200-219 up to 251-264) so I almost find myself wondering why nothing else is improving any more than that.

Regardless, here is a beginning wowhead comparison of my current gear to an "eventual" gear set (which won't be any time soon, but it's somewhere to start).

Tanking Gear Comparison

Hammering the Armor Pen discussion into the ground

Ok,

Last comment regarding the Armor Pen situation.

Let's discuss a value/cost estimate of Armor Penetration vs. Critical Strike rating.

Recall that each percentage point of Critical Strike costs 46 crit rating points, while one percentage dps increase from Armor Pen costs 25.45 percentage points (based on our model earlier which shows that for bosses 100% armor pen is equivalent to a 55.6% dps increase, so on average it requires about 1.8 percent armor pen to achieve a 1% dps increase.

It is clear just from looking at these, that if we're trying to decide on gems or attribute values to allocate, Armor Pen is "more valuable" than crit rating.

Since these each have essentially a cap, the overall "best" we can do with them is to get the 55.6% increase from Armor Pen and, let's say, a 60% increase from crit rating.

So the product of these two shows that this would be effectively a dps increase of 149%

How much does this "cost"? Well, 1400 armor pen + 2760 crit = 4160 total rating points. Since in most cases (e.g. gemming) these have the same value, so they can basically be added directly without needing conversion rates.

Clearly, if you have to choose one to go with, you go with Armor Pen first, and then add critical strike in afterwards, since your metric from 0 will always be minimized taking that route.

What about Strength? Well, it depends on your current dps, and many other factors, but since strength is linear, the cost in strength rating to accomplish the same task depends on your dps.

At 100 dps, the 149 additional dps you're getting from 100% ArP and 60% crit is equivalent to 1049 Strengh points. Clearly you have a huge advantage going with Strength over ArP + Crit in this case. Then again, if you're doing 100 dps, you're doing something wrong.

As you increase your own dps, the value of your higher ArP + Crit also increases, for example, at 5K, the resulting increase of 7450 dps would require 52,150 strength rating. Clearly less cost effective than the 4160 from earlier.

In fact, what is the "break even" base dps? Well, according to a chart, the cheapest way to get each percentage increase from 2% up to this "cap" of 149% shows that the break even dps numbers are between 300 and 400.

Now, this is all theory crafting, and is not based on actual abilities that take this into account in different ways. For example, some abilities use weapon damage and also add a fraction of attack power. In those cases, strength is playing double duty, as well as the 10% raid buff from kings which affects strength and nothing else.

However, Even if we are very generous and say that we'll double the value of strength (effectively buying our dps at half off), the break even point never deviates much above about 800 after you get up to a 10% or more dps increase. And I know very few fury warriors that can't get more than 800 dps even using vendor white weapons and no armor or trinkets.

I'd like to run some simulations on some numbers with training dummies, although this can be difficult, but basically it should be that the amount of armor penetration and crit rating can affect how valuable your strength is, but strength alone will not be able to do the kind of dps increase that crit and armor pen can accomplish.

Is Armor Pen Worth it? What about Sunders? Haste? Strength? What do I gem?

Ok, so I did a little calculation, and here's what I can say about these things.

First the part that you can find many other places.

It is widely accepted that bosses in LK have been adjusted to all have 13083 armor value. GC also announced exactly how armor penetration is calculated, and I gave a few statements toward that earlier.

So, here's the skinny:

BASE:

Boss level = 83, boss armor = 13083, boss physical damage mitigation = 46.2%.

this means that out of every 100 points of damage you do, 53.8 points "get through" armor.

Before we look at armor penetration, let's look at sunders/faerie fire.

a 5 stack of sunders and FF give 25% reduction to armor value, which gives:

Boss level = 83, boss armor (minus Sx5/FF) = 9812, boss physical damage mitigation = 39.18%.

this means that out of every 100 points of damage you do, 60.82 get through. So, for classes with all physical damage output, that's a flat 13% dps increase. Sure, it takes some maintenance during the fight, but it stay's up pretty much the whole time, and it's raidwide.

Ok, now what does 100% armor penetration do for us?

Well, calculating the value using GC's formulas shows that for bosses

C = 400 + 85*(Lvl) + 4.5*85*(Lvl - 59)

or

C = 16635.

So, summing this with the armor value and dividing by 3 gives us the armor pen "effective armor" value of

(16635+13083)/3 = 9906

So, 100% armor penetration (no sunders) gives us:

Boss level = 83, Effective Armor (minus 100% ArP)=3177, Phys Damage mitigation = 17.26%.

so now, out of every 100 points of physical damage dealt, 82.74 get through, or an increase over the base of 55.6%.

I.e. for us, this means a flat out 55.6% dps increase without changing anything about our rotation.

Now, with sunders.

The calculation above is taken based on boss armor value, which is decreased by sunders and FF, so if we take these into account, remember the boss's armor value is reduced to 9812. So now the ArP cap becomes

(16635+9812)/3 = 8815.

So,

Boss Level = 83, Effective Armor = 997 (yep, that's all), Phys. Damage Mit. = 6.14%.

So, now, out of every 100 points of damage dealt, 93.86 get through. That's an increase over the baseline of 74.4%, and an increase of 13.4% over 100% armor penetration alone.

Now, as to whether or not this is worth going for is difficult to determine. Percentage increases for armor penetration are just as confusing as percentage increases, say, in critical strike. However, it's fair to say that a 1% increase in dps is the same either way. Especially if they stack, as these do. Notice, however, that a 1% increase in critical strike costs 46 crit rating points, while a 1% increase in armor pen costs 14. Admittedly, 1% armor penetration is really only about a half a point dps increase, but even looking at the scenario above, the price is still only about 25 armor pen for a 1% dps increase.

Strength, the other popular choice for gems, is a linear increase, and as such, benefits more the person who doesn't already have high dps. Each 20 points of Strength yield 40 Attack power, which add 2.86 dps onto your weapon stats, and if those scale with abilities, it adds to there too. However, many of our abilities use weapon damage and only use portions of our Attack Power to calculate damage dealt. Notice that if you're doing, let's say a respectable 5K dps in raids, 3 dps is adding a tiny fractional increase to your overall dps.

However, the combination of all of these seems to be the most effective. High strength/crit when possible, ArP until you hit cap, then your doing the following:

(DPS + Str)*Crit*Arp

That way you're getting the most out of all three.

If, for example, you have a 40% crit rating along with the 100% ArP and sunders, you're looking at a calculation like:

(DPS + Str)*(1.4)*(1.74) = 2.436*(DPS + Str)

Which should be doing an awful lot for your dps, I would think.

Compare that to either of the other possibilities:

(DPS + LOTS_Str) = DPS + Str + Extra Str

or

(DPS + Str)*(1.6) = 1.6*(DPS + Str)

around the point of crit diminishing returns

or even

(DPS + LOTS_Str)*(1.6) = 1.6*(DPS + Str) + 1.6*(Extra Str)

You can see that the higher your baseline DPS, the better benefit you get from using multiplicative stats over linear stats. If Haste actually affected your dps similarly, I'd end up going with a ArP + Crit + Haste model, but Haste only affects your swing speed, and your melee white damage typically hits about 12% of your overall dps, so if Haste speeds up your white swings by 100% (3279 haste rating, by the way) it would mean a 12% increase to your total dps, this is why warriors typically frown on haste in general. Supposedly in Cataclysm they're modifying how haste works for melee in some way to try to make it more attractive, but I'll have to wait to see. Since our attacks are primarily either instant, or (like Slam) on a specific swing timer that doesn't adjust (and this is not something that would really benefit a lot from needing massive amounts of haste rating) I'm not sure how they're planning on monkeying with our haste<-> rage conversions, but I'm keeping an open mind.

So, at the moment, my advice (take it for whatever it's worth) is to consider your stat priorities as follows:

Hit rating (minimum 164) try for 230-"ish"

Expertise soft cap at 214 rating.

Armor Penetration hard cap at 1400.

And whatever else you can afford, dump into some combination of critical strike and Strength.

Since Crit seems to hit a wall at about 60% (with raid buffs), I suspect that if your crit is already in the 45-50% range, you probably want to do more Strength.

And it is possible to do all of these, see my earlier post for examples.

So, how can I get 100% passive armor pen as fury?

Well, you'd need a phenomenal and well designed gear set. Now, this is VERY high end, I realize, but if you'll notice there are actually a few "throwaway" gems that are being used for Strength/Crit, or other types of gems that aren't really needed. If you happen to be a JC/BS as many people are, then rejoice, because you can get 82 more armor penetration than anyone else can, which makes this even easier to get.

The goal is to shoot for the 1400 rating, and that's going to involve filling every available slot with the best item you can find that has armor penetration.

However, notice that I could have gone a little differently, because I used one trinket for hit rating, instead of getting the other armor pen trinket, and you can also substitute in something like the Scorpion until your gear is up there, since even though it won't work 100% of the time, 15-20% up time is better than no uptime at all.

I'm also not happy that this gear set has so much expertise (you need about 26, 32 is a little overkill) and I'd love to be able to trade some of that for a little hit rating (I think, and most people agree, that your minimum needed is 164 (with Precision), but since you don't cap out until 820, and your white strikes generate rage as well as about 12% of your dps, I think I'd like to have somewhere in the mid 200's, like 263 or so, but I could definitely make do with the 178 that this gear set has, and I could always use up those other yellow gem slots on more hit gems, but in this case I chose not to.

Here is a second possibility done by swapping around ranged weapons, rings etc. that has more hit rating, still goes just over the 1400 cap (and really, you could stop at 1397 and be fine, I think but I wanted to demonstrate that the 1400 cap could be achieved). It still has a little more expertise than I would like, but I'd rather have 27 expertise than 25 since you don't get fractions, so if you can't get 214 rating, go to 223.

And last, but not least, you might say, well, Gurggy, I don't have a guild that's pwning ICC 25 heroic every week yet, how can I get this 1400 cap? Well, admittedly, it requires a little bit of patience and creativity, but here's a comparison of the last choice with a gear set that's attainable, pretty much, by lots of frost emblems, and a few 25 man runs, no heroic gear, and it doesn't even count on the drops to upgrade the tier gear.

It does, admittedly, take into account completing the initial quest for Shadow's Edge, which I've already mentioned, but even taking that into account, if you're a serious raider in a serious raiding guild, this should be very doable.

Don't forget, as long as you can keep your expertise at around 214, and your hit rating at about 240-260 (minimum 164, remember) you can feel free to gem as much as possible to the 1400 armor pen cap.

In almost any set of gear you'll have, you should be looking at at least 200-300 armor pen possible just from sockets alone (or 15 gem sockets all together), maybe more. If you'll notice, this lower set of gear holds the equivalent of 19 total Fractured Cardinal Rubies, or 380 armor pen rating just in gems. Again, if you're a BS/JC as many are, you can notch this number up another 82. So even in this set of gear there is still some play to move things around. You'll notice a couple of what I call throwaway gems that are Str/Crit gems.

Also notice that in each case, I've satisfied the metagem conditions with two puissant dreadstones, and also fulfilled the 4 piece tier 10 bonus, even though this was entirely optional (some of the tier pieces could have been traded for higher armor pen pieces that didn't budget in the set bonus, but eh, why not?).

Fourth version, even easier, uses a better + hit rating trinket that isn't as cool, but can be bought for emblems of triumph.

Fifth version, trades low drop rate Flame Leviathon thrown weapon for badge one.

Last one. I think this one may be my starter Armor Pen set. I already have many of these pieces, and most of the rest I can do as I acquire more frost emblems, and I only have 4 drops that I have to hope for in ICC 25. The catch here is that the hit rating is lower than I'd like and the expertise is way too high, but without doing 25 Ulduar or some other raids that will be difficult if not impossible to get people to go for, this may be my best bet for now (of course, it still hinges on getting down more bosses in ICC 25, but I have faith in my guild. Even when we struggled at things before, we eventually overcome.

Here is my transition chart so I can follow along.

The quest for Shadowmourne

About 3 months ago (maybe a couple weeks more) I started saving up primordial saronite for the turn in to gain Shadow's Edge The rest of the materials, I felt, would probably be available by the time I finished. And I was right. The solo quest item (the hammer) really wasn't that tough to obtain, but our guild is at the point where we're trying to down Festergut and Rotface in ICC 25 right now, and that's exactly where we were when I bought my 25th primordial saronite.

Let me just say, if anyone out there is interested in this quest chain, be aware that it is neither short, nor cheap, nor easily obtainable.

So, for a quick recap, if you want to start this quest chain, the first quest you have to turn in requires you to be friendly with the Ashen Verdict. If you're grinding your way to the 25 Primordial Saronites, don't worry about this, as you'll probably hit exalted long before you get enough frost emblems to buy them all anyway. Once you hit friendly, you're given the quest The Sacred and the Corrupt which requires you to return to the forge with:

1) 25 Primordial Saronite which can be bought by frost emblems (23 each, total: 475 frost emblems), off other people and the Auction house (for about 1800 each total: 45,000), dropped off ICC 25 bosses (at about a 10% chance, possibly more for heroic) or any combination of the above. Obviously the speediest way is the most expensive, and I estimate that you can easily obtain about 49 frost emblems each week if you can do one heroic each day, the raid weekly each week, the first four bosses of ICC 10 and 25, the frost watcher in VoA on 10 and 25, and complete the ICC weekly quest on 10 and 25. Of course, you may not have time for all that, so scale that back accordingly.

2) Light's Vengeance the hammer of Arthas. It's really not that tough to get this item. Several strats are available, but if you're like me, and you have a tank off spec, just use that. Go into the cave, start the guy going by touching the hammer, then make your way to the hammer (where he threw it), use Demo Shout until everyone is in close, then Shockwave, grab the hammer. Now, you have to go try to pick it up again, and you'll have to fight the boss, but he's fairly simple. If you can solo Threat From Above, you'll laugh at how easy this guy is to take down. Quest done.

3) Rotface's Acidic Blood and Festergut's Acidic Blood are the last two things I need. These only drop in 25 man ICC, and only one per boss downed. So, if you're one of 10 warriors/dk's/paladins that want this axe, be prepared to have to wait through them unless you've done the leg work to get everything else up to this point. Note that getting this ready could take up to 30 weeks or so, but if you have a ton of gold, could be done in a day.

Once these are turned in you have Shadow's Edge, a really amazing axe in and of itself. But the best part is, that you then can pick up the quest A Feast of Souls which will take you a few raids to complete (1,000 souls actually goes faster than you'd think, but it's still not 'quick').

Once that quest is turned in, you get three new quests to infuse your axe with Unholy, Blood, and Frost powers and then slay Putricide, Lana'thel, and Sindragosa respectively.

Once these quests are all completed, you will need to obtain 50 Shadowfrost Shards, which have a 25-50% drop rate off each boss in ICC 25, and about a 50-100% drop rate off each boss done in heroic mode in ICC 25. Note that this means on an average raid week period (12 bosses including Arthas) you could see between 3 and 6 drop in normal mode, and between 6 and 12 drop in heroic. At most, then you'd expect to be able to complete this phase in 2-4 months on regular mode, assuming you're the only one in your guild collecting them.

Once this is complete, you'll be given the might of Shadowmourne and Darion will ask one final task of you, take down Arthas.

As you can see, this is a fairly epic questline, but the end result is definitely worthwhile if you have a guild that is intent on clearing ICC 25, and you're interested, good luck to you.

Hello again.

Wow, I needed a break apparently. I've still been gaming, but I just didn't have the time to write about it much.

Well, I'm back and excited. Some things have happened since last I typed:

- A) I don't remember if I mentioned that I went Fury. I can't help it, Blizzard made Fury the clear winner in the pve dps race. I tried it one night just to see and my dps went up nearly 50-70% immediately. A no brainer, then.

- B) So, now I've got some ICC gear (10 and 25), I've built up my 25 Primordial Saronite, and done the side quest, so I'm anxiously awaiting the chance to grab the two acidic blood drops from Festergut and Rotface so I can have my very own Shadow's Edge (and who knows, maybe eventually my own Shadowmourne). I'm also excited to be able to spend frost emblems on tier gear finally.

Our guild recently returned to 25 mans after a long hiatus. The truth was we just didn't have anyone that interested in doing them. We did at one time, but our numbers thinned out for various reasons (which we won't go into), and we were left with only about 10-15 people that were even interested in running 25 mans on a regular basis.

I'm especially excited about our 10 man raid, though. We started with some very new people who were dedicated and very interested, and last night we one shot the new VoA boss and the first six bosses of ICC (FG and RF being the 5th and 6th, since they're not in linear order) and cleared trash to Valithria, all well within our 3 hour time limit, even with breaks. It was also the first time we'd gotten the quest to get infected with the orange and green poison thing, and we spent longer trying to decide whether to try to glitch the encounter to ensure getting it, or to just go normally. In the end we decided on a normal approach (which was quite brave, I think, since we've only downed him one time (last week)). One shot. Us -1 Rotface - 0.

Anyway, I'm very proud.

Tonight our 25 man meets again, and I'm hoping that we modify our order some before we get too far in tonight.

I did some calculations, and the Festergut 25 man encounter is quite literally (as far as boss damage goes) the steepest dps requirement in 25 man ICC. Almost all other encounters can be accomplished with dps averaging a minimum of 4K, but Festergut 25 requires a minimum of about 6.7K+ on average. I'm sure this would be no issue if we were decked out in 25 man heroic gear from ToC, but we've only just done Northrend Beasts in ToGC 10 man this last Tuesday (and many many clears of 10 and 25 ToC) and it was anything but easy.

The totals ran something like total dps requirements for all fights in ICC about 67K - 72K, but Festergut requires 134K.

Holy crud!

That's quite a step up to force people to make in the same instance. Compare that to Rotface that has no enrage timer, and just requires the coordination to get through it before mana runs out, it seems a little extreme. Festergut in 10 man is noticeably less of a steep bump in the road. I think our 10 man is meeting two more times this week to try Putricide again, and the blood and frost wings. From what I've read, the other wings sound significantly less complicated than the Putricide fight, so we'll have to see how it goes.