I want to build a tank heavy with agility to dodge and strength to block. So I'll be going more for the Strength/Agi items over the Stam/Defense items.


So, frankly, am I wasting my time?


Thanks

Yes, especially with the strength. There is plenty of written info on tanking gear/info/priorities, the evil empire warrior guide being one of the better ones.

Strength adds only a very, very slight amount to block (20 Str = 1(?) block value). Agility is a bit better since it directly affects your AC as well as your dodge rate (20 Agi = 1% dodge, roughly 2 AC per 1 Agi).

It really comes down to your current gear- If you feel comfortable with your current Defense (440 Defense means you cannot be crit by mobs level 63 or lower I believe) and HP (honestly, you can never have enough), it may be feasable to persue Agility (though Strength doesn't seem wholly worth it).

Though, I personally would put Stamina above Defense above Agility for most of the encounters I've done so far.

Edit- For fights with heavy non-physical damage, Stamina always seems to be the preferred tanking stat.

You are wasting your time. Things like chance to dodge and block value are the icing on the cake. The key stats to focus on are defense (at 440 or something you cannot be crit by level 63 mobs, i.e. bosses and a lot of raid trash), chance to block (because those same level 63's have a 15% chance to hit you with a crushing blow even at 440 defense, yet you can wipe crushing blows off the combat table when using the shield block skill with a chance to block of at least 25%), and, of course, stamina (no explanation necessary).

It is definitely a waste of time to try to stack up on strength for blocking. Getting 9 STR on bracers, for instance, is only .45 block value added, which is horrible compared to 90 health.

Agility is very nice for tanking, but relying heavily on the randomness of dodge while having very low HP, armor, and defense is not very reasonable.

Stamina and Defense are the two most important tanking stats.

I recommend reading the stickies on the WoW warrior forum or Evil Empire's site.

+Stamina is always useful, block is situational.

I have seen quite a few tanks use block over stam (still stam is more common), personally I would go for stam, since it always helps.

I have +block% on my Aegis of the Blood God since it's an amazing pyshical mitigation shield. I tend to use that on trash (2% from shield, 2% from enchant, 2% from Rage of Mugamba and 2% Vindicator's Set bonus with Grilek's Charm of Might or Vidicator's BP) since it'll give me a lot of Revenge procs. I also tend to use it on very melee heavy fights (Ossirian, Hakkar, Garr, etc.).

I use an Earthen Guard with +sta for everything else usually.

Your best bet is to just follow the best bang for the buck. There is a point where one stat is better then another stat, but it depends on the amounts.

A Stamina = B Agility = C Defense etc

Certain encounters require a certain stat cut-off, but after that you want the best bang for the buck. There is a point where stamina has diminishing returns, so if you focus primarily on stamina, you will gimp yourself. The same holds true for basically any stat that isn't limited in quantity.

For example, the Wrath Breastplate has more stamina and defense then the Conqueror's Breastplate, so most tanks think it is better, when the Conqueror's Breastplate is vastly superior for tanking. Arguably the biggest upgrade a tank could get in AQ 40. It comes down to the fact that the levels of stamina / defense are relatively similar, only slightly better for Wrath, but the Conqueror's Breastplate has tons of additional stats that more then make-up the difference.

Your best bet is to just compare every tanking item, and get the overall best quality out of each and every item.

Again, depending on the fight. Conq BP is awesome, once you have a couple of Dreadnaught in other slots (bracers are great for this) so that you can swap in Conq BP without becoming crittable. If Maexxna or Patchwerk crits you at a bad time, you're dead.

In my view, you want Defense until 440, first off.
Then, you want a combination of Stamina and mitigation, setting aside avoidance entirely, that will maximize your effective HP pool.
Finally, you want avoidance to increase the chances of lucky escapes and to conserve healer mana, but not at the expensive of stamina/armor.

With consumables, healer mana is very, very rarely the limiting factor. Even on Patchwerk. When tanks die it's due to a spike that catches healers off-guard. Give me a 14000hp tank with 10k base armor, 0% parry and 0% dodge, and he'll never die.

Because of shield block mechanics 440 def is not that significant Gurgthock. (Except Maexxna) I'm not sure Hateful Strike can crit either.

Of course it can't. I'm talking about the MT, not OTs, on Patchwerk. And you can't have shield block up all the time against a mob with an 0.8sec attack speed (Patchwerk). Patchwerk cannot do crushing autoattacks in order to keep the DPS on the MT relatively constant (albeit high). If he could throw a 4600pt crit or two into his rapid series of attacks, the MT would be in serious trouble.

I'm obviously focusing on fights where the MT's survival is a major component to the fight. You don't need 440 defense to tank Heigan or whatever, but on just about every fight where I'm seriously concerned with maximizing the tanks survivability, 440 defense is a given.

How does block rate interact with the hit table? If block does in fact replace (or push off?) crit on the table, then would 440 defense be redundant (and I *think* this is what Rambar may be implying, but I could be way off) even without having Shield Block up (and simply factoring in your innate blocking rate without Shield Block)?

Edit- I promise to use less parenthesis next time..

No. You need 25% base shield block AND then shield block up, on top of that, to be uncrittable/crushable. Presumably if you could get 100% block from gear, you'd be uncrittable/crushable too, but you can't, so it's irrelevant. A combination of block+parry+dodge that doesn't involve 100% block will not cut it.

I thought patch couldn't crit with his auto attack either.

Random log excerpt from a wipe:
Patchwerk never crushes because he has, presumably, 310 instead of 315 "weapon" skill.

He doesn't crit tanks because everyone who tanks him has 440 defense.

435, then?

This is actually important, as we've lost some well-geared tanks.

To tank a mob successfully, you need enough hitpoints to reliably survive a round (including spike damage). Anything additional is a bonus, and gives more room for error but is included in the category of diminishing returns because it is not required to tank the mob.

The amount of hitpoints needed obviously depends on the mob. The melee damage of a mob, which critical hits are based off of, is generally well below the hitpoints of the tank. What actually determines the amount needed is normally the spike damage built into the encounter, in addition to the normal melee damage. Basically, the maximum amount of damage a boss can do in one round of damage.

You need to be above the maximum as well as have some hitpoints as a buffer. The amount you go over depends on the quality of your healers and diminishing returns comes in after the point in which your healers can reliably keep you alive. If a round of damage does 8k damage, and you have 10k hitpoints, then the bottom 2k is your buffer. If healing is done correctly, the bottom 2k never gets used so increasing that number to say 4k(12k hp), has diminishing returns. How many hitpoints you need to go over, and how much of an impact the additional stamina will have is generally dependent on the quality of your healers.

The next number is armor, which reduces the amount you get hit for and in terms of importance, should be the second thing you go for when equipping your tank. Most items don't have points spent on armor and the armor is based off of the Ilvl of the item so most of the time armor isn't considered a factor since it's built in. When it is a factor, it comes in secondary. Why? Increasing your armor decreases the amount you get hit for and lowers the Healing per Second required to keep you alive. Since it reliably decreases the damage you take, you can adjust the healing required to account for it and thus, the importance of armor.

If you look at it like a heart monitor, we can now introduce the upward(Crushing / Critical hits) and downward (dodge / parry) spikes. Dodge and Parry are obviously important because they allow you to avoid an entire attack, but it’s also not reliable so you can’t adjust your healing assuming that you will dodge an attack. Critical hits provide spikes upward, which would depend on the tanks stats. If a critical hit occurs, will it potentially kill the tank in one round, ie impossible to heal? If the answer is yes, then defense becomes an extremely important statistic to have.

There really aren’t any mobs in game that you can’t heal through a critical hit. The melee damage of mobs is specifically designed so that it is well below what the tanks hitpoints should be to tank that particular mob to the point where a critical hit will cause a bit more damage, but it should not cause the tank to die if healing is done properly. All high damage special attacks in game can’t critical hit by design.

If a mob does 2k damage per second, and you have 2k healing per second on that tank and the tank has 10k hitpoints, it would take multiple critical hits at an extremely low crit rate without any avoidance for the critical hits to actually result in the tanks death. The first critical hit would take him down 2k to the 6-8k range where he would stay until he either dodged / parried an attack allowing the heals to catch back up to full or he takes another critical hit which pushes him down another 2k to the 4-6k range. Considering tanks have dodge / parry rates around 20%, and with decent defense the chance to be critically hit is extremely low, the odds are extremely good that you will avoid an attack and the healing will get back to full long before you get another critical hit that will kill you. This assumes that you are actually healing on a per round basis as opposed to the tank not getting any heals for several rounds which is usually why critical hits lead to a tanks death which has way more to do with healing then it has to do with the tanks lack of defense.

Basically your best bet is simply to go after the best bang for the buck and if the upgrades are equivalent, then upgrade the more important statistic.

I know for a fact Patchwerk can and will crit you if you don't have 440def. On our first tries, I was going for a higher avoidance set of gear, but I was down to like 428defense. He crit me about 4times in 3hours. I then gave up the whole idea of higher avoidance, cause crits=instantdeath with his attack speed. On the night of our kill, I didn't get critted once. I had 444defense. Because of the attack speed, it's impossible to keep blocking every incoming hit, I totally avoid about 50% of it(counting misses) and block 35% more, which means there's still 15% of normal attacks, which is way more than what usually lands on me(I'd give you precise numbers but I somehow lost all my tanking info due to misclking the reset button on my addon ^^).

Defense > anything for MTing patchwerk or maexna imo. Other fights there's plenty of room for higher dodge/parry builds tho, but well keeping a decent level of armor/stamina, you'll still pretty much have the same gear as everyone else. It's not like there's lots of choices for tanking gear ^^

pyros makes alot of sense although a key concern is what gear you have and what your trading. if you get cri 4 times in 3 hours by loosing 12 defense but you picked up say 5% to dodge, then i would argue the trade off was probably worth it. The main beauty of dreadnaught is the wacko defense means you can really spike your skill up with minimal gear swaps.

oh, and to be honest i am not sure a heavy agi build for tanking is really that doable till you can do AQ/BWL. If your going dodge heavy the key factor is getting your dodge number high enough that your avoidance is reasonably steady so your healers won't get caught with thier pants down. I really can't see that as doable until AQ gear is available.

This is my first post here, be gentle!

I've always looked at it this way.

HP is a pool. Two things control what happens to that pool - the rate at which it gets filled up (ie HPS from your healers) and the rate at which it drains away (ie the DPS you're taking from the mob).

So it seems to me that stamina is useful, but only up to a point - namely, when you have enough stamina that a boss cannot one-shot you, or kill you in mere seconds with spike damage, its usefulness dramatically decreases and you should focus on straight-up mitigation instead.

Each percentage point of mitigation saves that much healer mana, whereas having a deeper health pool does not (and actually, if you simply rely on a vast health pool to soak damage, you actually make the healers' lives difficult, since they have to fill up 10,000 hit points instead of 8,000 or whatever.)

Have I missed something here?

*memories of the druid tanks vs Patchwerk discussion*