[Vindicator's Armor Kit] (aldor revered faction pattern)

One quick boost towards being uncrittable appears to be going with 2pieces of the Grand Marshal's set. With the resilience on each piece, coupled with the +35 resilience 2 piece set bonus. Any 2 pieces would provide almost around 1.8% or more of the 2.6% anti crit you need, with the rest easily being covered between rings/neck/cloak.

My inclination is to go with the shoulders+legs in the blue pvp set. Including the socket bonus on the shoulders (but not a gem) that's 73 resilience. The chest and helm are also other decent options (verdant gloves outclass the set gloves however)

This also has the advantage that all of your anti-crit is concentrated in a small number of places, so if you need to switch over a few pieces for additional threat, you can do so without sacrificing the crit immunity.

I was looking at something like:

Umberhowl's Collar
Manimal's Cinch
Grand Marshal's Dragonhide Spaulders
Grand Marshal's Dragonhide Legguards
Guise of the Devourer
Verdant Gloves
Supple Leather Boots
Nickwinkle's Harness Experiment
Thoriumweave Cloak
Earthwarden
Strength of the Untamed
Iron Band of the Unbreakable
Iron Band of the Unbreakable
Mark of Tyranny
Smoking Heart of the Mountain

Before enchants and the gems in the shoulders we get:
4036 AC from gear (24417 with 3/3 thick hide)
155 str, 115 Agi, 357 stam (441 talented, 5.5k HP in bear)
30 AP, 525 Feral AP
42 Dodge Rating
77 Defense Rating, 73 Resilience (-3.1% chance to be crit, well over the 2.6 target)

There is the obvious head (CoT) and shoulder (Aldor/Scryer) enchants to further reduce this rate (and allow room to move elsewhere)

The one part thing that I feel is missing from this setup is hit rating for threat purposes, with crit and AP able to be boosted by buffs if need be.

Some additional numbers regarding stacking AGI vs STA and the "exponential" scaling of avoidence



The STA/AGI numbers are a bit odd because i modelled based on my current gear

The first column shows the value STA or AGI, the second & third shows the extra "soak" generated by adding an extra point of either STA or AGI at that stat value

Unless explicitly shown the other values used in the model are:

Armor 3877
STA 317
AGI 263
Dodge R 24
Def R 66
Res R 14
Life 9365

Basically adding extra STA generates more "soak" up to around 750 sta or 675-700 Agi

They seem like unobtainable numbers

Considering a full set of generic "raid buffs" is 237 STA (or an equivilent of 353 with a flask of fortification), you would "only" need around 400-520 STA to start gaining more from AGI in a raid setting

Imp. Imp = 86
Imp. PWF = 102
Imp. MotW = 19
30 Sta Food = 30

I've played around with a somewhat optimal bear tanking profile, and even if ctprofiles seems to be completely borked I came up with this: (Some things are not the best due to lacking enchants/sockets)
http://ctprofiles.net/5054874

Nordrassil is awful!
Also, there is an ENG trinket with 45 stamina which is quite nice, ie : http://thottbot.com/?f=a;loc=Trinket...;e=;sort=level

Enchant rings would look nice too.


I wonder what the itemization team was thinking when the very best tanking items for druids are green silly quest items

Also, I am certain that with raidbuffs the profile I linked would sit above 75% mitigation, allowing more stamina, dodge rating etc to be obtained.

[Stylin' Purple Hat]
How about this helmet?
Wouldn't the agility and stamina on this hat be better than guise of the devourer?

[e] link doesn't seem to work.
Stylin' Purple Hat
Binds when equipped
Head Leather
232 Armor
+48 Agility
+45 Stamina
Requires Level 69

Sounds analogous to crit and attack power

I don't suppose anyone yet knows where to acquire this trinket from ? http://www.thottbot.com/?i=60198

36 Stam and a use function that reduces hits by 68 to a max of 1100 over 15 secs. Solidly outperforms Smoking Heart in my book.

Thott/Alla/Wowhead are all reporting it as having been seen in live so I don't believe it's been removed since beta, haven't been able to find any actual info on where it drops though. Hazarding a guess probably one of the heroic mode dungeons given it's a level 70 blue and pretty nice, confirmation and knowledge of which one would be great though.

Thanks for the link to this thread, Maratai.

> All that follows assumes:
> Level 70 vs Level 73 mob
> Base Bear form hp of 12000
> Tauren Druid
> 3/3 Thick Hide
> 5/5 Heart of the Wild
> 3/3 Survival of the Fittest

I used lvl 70 vs lvl 70. I haven't added the 5% health from Tauren
racial. I assumed 0/3 Survival of the Fittest.

The last can be modified easily in the current Excel. The two first
can't (requires some "technical" know-how to do it).

Additionally, the Armor table doesn't go as high as my base value goes.

Other than that, the models and the conclusions drawn from them seem
equivalent. I'll see at some point if I can make a calculation using
the same initial stats. It would indeed be interesting to verify my
model using their results.

There is cumulative gains on all attributes. However, it's important to consider the relative increase in value for each additional unit.

IIRC, it goes something like this:
Armor - linear increase, i.e. each point of Armor is as good as the previous one, regardless of initial attributes
Health, Stamina - decreasing value, i.e. the more Health you have, the less Stamina and Health is worth
Dodge, Defense, Agility - increasing value, i.e. the higher your avoidance, the greater the value of these attributes

The increasing value of Dodge (and Defense equally) was already shown in another post.

However, there has been some discussion on the real-life validity with the lifetime-expection model. It doesn't take healing into account, and that's a very important factor in actual game play (no one expects to tank a boss without healing, regardless of mitigation, right?). In order to give your healers some breathing room, you need to have some respectable amount of health (like 12k), but after that it's of much less value compared to the effect of Armor, which reduces the strain on healer's mana pool. Avoidance has a similar problem in the sense that while it allows you to totally avoid damage, high avoidance (especially if combined with reduced Armor) makes incoming damage very spiky and more difficult to heal.

As a result of that discussion, I'm considering updating my model to include healing in some form, or at least provide some definable preference multipliers for attribute values. This will certainly move the values more in favor of Armor. What would be your opinion of such a change?

I like the idea, but I am not sure how you could implement that.

I am still pondering what gear to pick. After all, it comes down to "Highest average effective life" (shown by Tankpoints, 1% Dodge is one 1% more mitigation on average) or "Highest guaranteed effective life" (downrank Avoidance here for guaranteed mitigation such as AC and Sta). I think I'll go for the latter because I just have no intention to play Dodge roulette with my raid and because mitigation from AC and HP is always there. If that doesn't work out, I can still change but that is what I intend to do for now anyway.

I have yet to mess with it, but I got http://wow.allakhazam.com/db/item.ht...US;source=live last night from Karazhan.

Moroes' Lucky Pocket Watch
Binds when picked up
Unique
Trinket Miscellaneous
Requires Level 70
Use: Increases dodge rating by 270 for 10 seconds.
Equip: Increases your dodge rating by 34.

It seems like a great trinket giving us a bit of an "oh shit incoming damage" option. I assume the cooldown is on 90 seconds like all the other use trinkets. I'll give a trip report once I get to use it all proper like.