Yenadar

Goss and Bryne:

I am posting this in the interest of valued discussion, and hope that it will be received as such.

After your post earlier regarding my comment about being critable by flames for Illidian, I was quite frankly, pissed off. However I sat back for the past couple days to cool off and re-think things, and research the numbers to find a basis for, or against, my comment.

First, I apologize for not thinking my post through. I knew there was other reasons for being critable, but did not investigate those reasons before posting just 1 reason, that I admit does come off as sounding incredibly retarded. I will attempt to never repeat those mistakes.

On to the research results:

I found the following:
1: I can not reach uncritable with any arrangement of any of my 60+ pieces of tanking gear, while still getting to 365 FR.
1a: This may directly be a by-product of our clearing speed through BT, in that the night we first killed Illidian was also the 4th Teron kill, 3rd Bloodboil, kill, and 2nd RoS, Mother, and Council kills, so we reached Illidian with somewhat lower gear level than most guilds
1b: The closest I could come to uncritable with 365 FR was defense at 481, but was at the cost over ~1,100 health (when already down about 3,000 health from FR gear itself) and a large chunk of my threat.

2: In 3 different WWS parses (1 night of full attempts, 2 nights that included kills), I was crit a total of 6 times by flames.
2a: The critical hits (assuming x2 damage) added an average of1,960 damage per crit.
2b: I had 1 interesting crit that, by itself, might be a reason for reaching uncritability, but I can not determine if it was a bug or a more predictable issue. I received 1 crit for 12.7k (2.3k resisted).
2b1: First, the base damage pre-resist was 15,000, rather than 10,000 of the other crits, which implies that the crit was at x3 damage rather than x2
2b2: Second, the resist rate of ~16% was an incredibly unfortunate roll, as my average hovers around 70% resist on average.
2b3: Third, no other crit had a base of x3 damage
2b4: This hit did not kill me, and was during the course of our last Illidian kill (2nd total), in which only 2 people died, both DPS in phase 3.
2c: My averaged melee(fire) damage received from the flames was fairly consistently ~1,800 damage.
2d: I can retain threat and aggro against the DPS on my flame fairly consistently, and is the reason for my flame being DPSed first, though how much I can not say, due to Omen never showing threat on Flames accurately.

3: Our other flame tank (a druid), is also critable by flames, but has a much narrower gap due to resilience values.
3a: His average damage per hit from the flames ranged from 1,600 to 2,300.
3b: His threat suffers more than mine, and if his Flame is DPSed first, he nearly always loses aggro.

I imagine as we continue to clear BT, I will increase my gear's average ilvl enough that eventually I will reach uncritable in FR gear, but I don't think that means that I should completely stop tanking flames until that happens. I do find it somewhat ironic that T6 level resist gear is available for the 3rd to last boss of current BC, but for tanking a phase of the last boss in current content, we must resort to one or more blues and 4 T4 level pieces. If they don't plan on overhauling the whole resist mechanic, they should at least make resist gear of each type available for each effective Tier level of gear.

My total incoming damage rate is somewhat lower than my damage rate in Hyjal trash waves, and the healers are having no issues keeping me alive.

In light of this information, what path would you suggest I take? How much should I value uncritability over the threat and health loss? (In this particular fight/role. I know the importance in other fights, and am always uncritable)

Doesn't the fight determines the stats needed, not the other way around?
(For example Ony crushes me for ~900 damage... which obviously is a massive amount of damage and should be avoided at all costs.)

Am I still doing something horribly wrong?