[top] 65 * 2.4 defense rating / defense skill

Boevis · 03/19/07, 11:26 PM

Originally Posted by osirisunnefer

Everything is relative: there is no one be-and-end all set.

The idea is to mix and match gear for balance. Each encounter is slightly different and having a mixture of pieces to select from allows you to tune to it. Have a selection of gear that allows for threat generation (hit, crit, attack power), mitigation (armour, defence, resiliance), avoidance(dodge, miss) and survivability (stamina).

Some important factors about level 73 mobs you will be tanking:
- Their crits do 200% their normal damage to you. Its important to get 3/3 Survival of the Fittest + 415 Defence (or equivilent Resiliance as a placeholder) in order to have maximum chance to not be crit.
- Their crushing blows do 150% their normal damge and are not mitigated by defence or resiliance. Its important to have enough armour to mitigate the damage and stamina to be able to take multiple crushing blows in a row.

I completely disagree, I believe there is a definite 'best set'. Personal preference always weighs heavily with people, but it's rather undeniable that in every encounter* a specific set of gear will maximize your survivability. As you said, negate crit and figure out how to negate failure mode (max burst damage over 2.5 seconds) Availability is always an issue, and the multitude of various items/gems complicates things, but given the desire and availability level I could write up a list of the best set for tanking.

* - Heavy Magic fights excluded, as they alter the values of Armor, Avoidance, and Sta.

dukes · 03/20/07, 12:23 AM

Originally Posted by Boevis

I completely disagree, I believe there is a definite 'best set'. Personal preference always weighs heavily with people, but it's rather undeniable that in every encounter* a specific set of gear will maximize your survivability. As you said, negate crit and figure out how to negate failure mode (max burst damage over 2.5 seconds) Availability is always an issue, and the multitude of various items/gems complicates things, but given the desire and availability level I could write up a list of the best set for tanking.

* - Heavy Magic fights excluded, as they alter the values of Armor, Avoidance, and Sta.

Just to clarify: I judge mitigation to be reduction in damage through armour, and avoidance to be avoiding a hit through dodge/parry/miss.

Although I agree to a point, in that pure mitigation/avoidance in percentage terms can be maximised to give you the biggest amount of damage avoided over a prolonged period of time, I disagree that the set outlined by that criteria will actually be the one I would choose to wear in every given situation, magic fights excluded. I always found the trouble healing people in fights would mostly extend from heavy periods of avoidance - getting 4 parrys/dodges/misses in a row and then 2 crushings would most likely result in a tank with very little healing incoming, and without a proper cooldown-response, or very very alert healers, a tank-death situation occuring.

Part of the problem extends from the roll-table system. If you dodge or get a miss on you, then that hit couldn't have possibly been a crushing iirc. If you increase your avoidance chance to a point where you have around 50% avoidance, you then increase the crushing likelyhood on you to a 30% chance (assuming 15% base chance from a raid boss) on the hits that hit you. Although in overall damage terms this is a good thing, as you're reducing the amount of damage incoming, reducing the amount of mana spent by healers, in sensitive fights it can be a problem imo. I'd rather take a set of gear (for the majority of fights where the boss doesn't have MS/sunder/insert shitty ability here) that gives me 20k health, 22k armour and 30% dodge buffed, than one that gives say 17k health, 40% dodge and 20k armour. Although the mitigation change works out to be around 3%, and the avoidance change works out as around 12% change (10% of a total of 107.5 because crushings are 15% @ 1.5 times), so there's a reduction of incoming damage over a sustained period of ~9%. This merely means that you spike more - the hits that do hit you are hitting for more and the hits that don't will probably end up with a small amount of overheal anyway.

If you go to the extreme situation of 75% mitigation, 0% avoidance against 0% mitigation and 85% avoidance, I know who I'd rather be healing.

Boevis · 03/20/07, 2:16 AM

Of course ... but I'm talking about the difference between 20k health, 25k armor, 30% dodge buffed and my pre-karazhan stats of 18k health, 22k armor, 50% dodge.

The sacrifices some people make for 15 more stamina or 50 more armor in caster astound me. I saw a druid in AV with over 900 sta in caster self buffed, raid buffed he'd have had 1700 stamina, he also would have had 20% dodge and only 18k armor. High HP, High Armor just translates as "Mana Sink" to healers. Those 10 seconds I'm not taking damage, they're getting 3 tics of full mana regen (~250 more mana than when casting)

Crowbite · 03/20/07, 1:18 PM

Originally Posted by Boevis

Of course ... but I'm talking about the difference between 20k health, 25k armor, 30% dodge buffed and my pre-karazhan stats of 18k health, 22k armor, 50% dodge.

The sacrifices some people make for 15 more stamina or 50 more armor in caster astound me. I saw a druid in AV with over 900 sta in caster self buffed, raid buffed he'd have had 1700 stamina, he also would have had 20% dodge and only 18k armor. High HP, High Armor just translates as "Mana Sink" to healers. Those 10 seconds I'm not taking damage, they're getting 3 tics of full mana regen (~250 more mana than when casting)

The only problem with those 10 seconds is your threat. In ten seconds, I can do 1 mangle, 5 lacerates and 4 mauls for a total of 132 rage minus ~15 rage assuming a 30% crit return. I don't know about you but ever since I could spam lacerate for good threat, I'm never at a full rage bar. Do you just warn your dps when it's happening?

Boevis · 03/20/07, 7:15 PM

Simply put, threat is still not an issue for me. Of course, my TPS is such that I could probably handle tanking for a guild like Illumination where ranged do well over 1k DPS while my guild's DPS are currently at the 800-900 in ideal situations.

Kazanir · 03/21/07, 2:16 PM

Here's a funny question. If bears are supposed to be viable choices for tanking, where are our equivalents to the Frostguard and Wildguard sets that warriors get to help with Hydross?

• Bad Luck · 03/21/07, 2:21 PM

Of Frost Protection and Of Nature Protection. Start browsing that AH!

Exewut · 03/21/07, 3:22 PM

Originally Posted by Bad Luck

Of Frost Protection and Of Nature Protection. Start browsing that AH!

I started looking on wowhead for Frost protection items and all I could find was the nax epics. Makes me pretty sad. At least those craftables are pretty nice.
Also, you can dodge melee attacks which do elemental damage (as I believe hydros works?) so going in in a full green set might not be the most optimal choice.

Melthar · 03/21/07, 11:14 PM

You have to kill the animal bosses, and all world rare spawns..

Over, and over, and over... (in over 500 incendius kills, I never found a leather pair "of fire protection")

Get farming!

Solstice · 03/23/07, 2:59 AM

It saddens me that there is no level 70 non-plate itemisation with frost or nature resist as this can only mean one of two things; Either the dev's just "forgot" that there's more than 1 class capable of OFF tanking endgame raid encounters, or the dev's only ever intended there to be 1 class capable of doing ANY endgame raid tanking whatsoever. I'm nonplussed as to which theory is more plausible, but there's a hint somewhere... something to do with other endgame leather tanking itemisation...

I'm also in the process of gearing up with mixed resistance gear to get one shotted by Hydross' adds. Apart from the craftable neck's and rings, and the substandard cloak (Syrannis' Mystic Sheen) there's zero leather frost\nature resistance items available, apart from the okish frost res gear from Naxx (hf finding 20 ppl willing to help farm frozen runes) and a couple of random NR items from TAQ. Aside from this, as the previous poster mentioned there's the blue "of x resistance" items that drop from rare spawns, but the chances of getting what you need are next to nothing.

So I've been reduced to scouring the AH for random green leather\cloth resistance items, trying to get as high level stuff as possible. Once I get armor kits on everything i'll be hovering around +200 Frost and +200 Nature resistance ub, with pitiful AC although this hardly matters I guess, and roughly 14k HP unbuffed. My main concerns are lack of agility I (suppose I can counter this a bit with GoA, BoK and consumables) and lack of AP and + Hit. Will laceracte spam alone be enough to keep aggro off dps or even healers I wonder.

Would be good to hear from any druids who've offtanked this encounter and can share some tips

Exewut · 03/23/07, 12:57 PM

I just found this post on the official forums, the maths seem to be correct.

While the choice between resilience and defence isn't really there at the moment (the good items with resilience on it waste so much item budget to +healing/int/spirit that they still end up being inferior for tanking), it might be nice to remember this if you stumble on a great +resilience ring.

I posted this previously as a remark on Qina's "Math: defense vs. resilience" thread, but I don't think anyone had a chance to comment on it before it fell off the face of the forums. You can find her thread here: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...75339916&sid=1

Summary: Using Qina's approach, I will demonstrate that resilience is actually a better method for reaching -2.6% chance to be crit than defense, at least for bears.

I will assume 3 things:
i) you have 3/3 SotF,
ii) you are level 70
iii) your defense skill is maxed.

At level 70 a boss (level 73) will have 5.6% chance to crit you.
With 3/3 SotF the chance to crit you becomes 2.6%.

To reduce the chance to be crit by 2.6% using defense skill, we need:
2.6 * 25 = 65 defense skill

[top] 65 * 2.4 defense rating / defense skill

156 defense rating

This amount of defense rating also provides 2.6% chance to dodge and 2.6% chance to be missed resulting in an additional 5.2% avoidance.

To reduce the chance to be crit by 2.6% using resilience, we need:
2.6 * 39.4 = 103 resilience rating

Now this is where the two examples diverge. Since we require less resilience than defense in this scenario we can afford to stock up on other stats. While the *base* item cost of 10 armor = 1.5 sta = 1 defense rating = 1 resilience rating = 1 any stat, according to WoWWiki ( http://www.wowwiki.com/Formulas:Item_Values ) the item cost is calculated as

itemcost = (stat1^1.5 + stat2^1.5 + ...)^(1/1.5)

which roughly translated means it costs more to focus on one stat than it does to split your focus on two stats, which is why "of Intellect" and "of Defense" don't sell very well.

So for our example:
The item cost of 154 defense is:
(154 defense^1.5)^1/1.5 = 154 item points

Achieving the same item cost, but with 103 resilience:
((103 resil)^1.5 + x^1.5)^1/1.5 = 154 item points

x = (154^1.5 - 103^1.5)^1/1.5

x = 90.83

This means that we can get ~90 extra agility = 90/14 = 6.43% dodge and 180 armor + crit if we go the resilience route. This is already more than the combined 5.2% avoidance offered by defense.

Alternatively, we can get 90 * 1.5 = 135 more stamina (169 in bear), or 90 * 10 = 900 armor (900 * 5.5 with thick hide = 4950 armor in bear).

Comments?

from: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...86840656&sid=1
Credit goes to, Matsuri.

Boevis · 03/23/07, 6:04 PM

This springs back to the way Blizzard itemizes us. There's a very small handful of items with Resilience that are actually worth considering for tanking in the long run. The PvP gear is chocked full of useless stats that degrade it's PvE value for "main-anything" And once you move into Heroics/Raiding the blue resilience items can't compare with the epic defense ones. There's a couple exceptions, but not enough to make resilience more than a supplementary stat.

There's also No +armor on gems at all or +resilience gems outside of a couple unique epics.

oldmandennis · 03/23/07, 7:05 PM

Originally Posted by Boevis

There's a very small handful of items with Resilience that are actually worth considering for tanking in the long run. The PvP gear is chocked full of useless stats that degrade it's PvE value for "main-anything"

I'm not sure I agree. What do you think about resist fights? My current thought is to get the gladiator chest and shoulders, along with Earthwarden I can be crit immune in 3 slots.

As far as the long term viability of PvP gear, it's anybody's guess when the gladiator set will be updated, and weather that is before or after the average guild is getting a lot of T5.

The T4 armor bonus doesn't get the multiplier, does it? That would change things a whole bunch.

Tyriah · 03/23/07, 9:16 PM

Sorry, I may have missed it in an earlier post, but how do you have wastewalker gloves twice on the chart? Is that enchanted and unenchanted, or is that a typo?

edit: the same with shoulders of assassination

Cryect · 03/23/07, 9:44 PM

Originally Posted by Tyriah

Sorry, I may have missed it in an earlier post, but how do you have wastewalker gloves twice on the chart? Is that enchanted and unenchanted, or is that a typo?

edit: the same with shoulders of assassination

Different set of gems?