It seems theres a gem feud going on lately.

Stacking +12 sta .VS Avoidance/hit/str/ect.

Discuss.

Why didn't you put this little gem(pun intended) in here:

[Warrior] MT itemization theory

Discuss.

Edit: to the post just below me, perhaps a better term for Armour/Stamina would be 'Soak' to match to the other two catagories.

Someone is actually putting strength in their tanking gear?

Let's talk about three categories a warrior could maximize:
Armor/Stamina (blue stamina gem) vs Avoidance (yellow defense, red dodge) vs Threat (yellow hit)

I've omitted parry in avoidance and agility in armor/stamina because they aren't so great.

Right now I'm going pure stamina, but that's just me.

Oh, my apologies I didn't see it. If someone wants to move it over there you have my blessing.

I wonder if Blizzard will do anything with regards to making set bonuses better. Right now, if you have your defense capped, there's not a standard gem or set bonus in the game that touches the benefits of simply throwing a Solid Star of Elune in every slot.

I dont think its as simple as just throwing 12 stam in every slot. If you have 6 slots available, and you slot them with 3 x Enduring Talasite and 3 x Solid Star of Elune vs 6 Stamina Gems, you're **that** much of a better tank?

Tank b has 180 more hitpoints, or 18 more stamina. x kings x prot spec = 20.79 ( assuming 21 with your other native stamina rounding issues ).

Tank A has 5 more Defense. .2% more dodge, parry, block and -.2% chance to be hit.

Full raid buffs B has 18,500 life, and tank A has 18,700. Values that will generally only be increasing while the same 6 slots will remain open for gems.

Having things enter the argument like "stack armor" is probably the dumbest aspect of the "how to build a warrior tank" to bring up since on the whole, we have a very very very fixed amount of gear to choose from so the variance from tank to tank is small enough its not even worth bringing up ever again.

I find it tough to justify just always stacking stamina, the one attribute that is either constantly buffed ( raid buffs ) or replenished ( healing ). Not to mention that it is my personal belief that blizzard has screwed around the with the crit cap stuff with bosses.

It depends on what you're tanking, I'd say. My gear for regular 5-mans does have a fair amount of strength/attack power on it, because that makes a measurable difference for your threat generation in an environment where rage is limited and DPS engages quickly.

I still put +stamina gems in sockets, though, and haven't even been tempted to go for different types of gems.

But the thing is that WHEN the boss hits 2x for 6500 insider half a second timeframe. (Magtheridon's normal attack + cleave for instance) and you are not completely topped, that 180hp is actually one hell of a lot of HP. And it's about WHEN it happens. Unless your dodge+parry is ~99 and fractions percents it will happen twice in a row often enough to cause wipes if not once a day, atleast sometimes. The thing with dodge is that even if you have 5% more change to dodge, you only gain 5% more change to survive any given hit that would otherwise kill you, but because bosses tend to hit for very quantized amounts of damage, a small change in HP can push you from "I can't take 2 hits in a row and live" tank to "I can take 2 hits in a row and live" tank. Latter is lightyears ahead of the former in almost every current encounter in wow. (Gruul with enough stacks + reverbs, new Magtheridon, Maulgar...)

Only 3 gems I've put into my tanking gear, +12 stamina, +6 Stamina/+4 def, +8 dodge.

Although I'm beginning to rethink this and just considering stamina stacking is the way to go. =/ Sad day for a former avoidance Warrior, I miss my 30%+ dodge rate. QQ

I tanked Magtheridon with 21k HP and 23% dodge. Maiden finally put out her neck tonight so I'm at 24% now. I'm not sure what the average Warrior has these days but the healers on me commented on how many times I went for long stretches of no damage during the fight.

Pretty much it. Stamina is lord of all things for most stuff. The socket bonuses for tank gear don't justify a loss in stamina from NOT using 12 stam gems.