I was interested in knowing other warriors opinions on the best glove enchant for [Gauntlets of Enforcement]. I just received them last night and have been on the fence as to whether I should go with an 8 stamina enchant or 2% threat.

I spent a bit of time today browsing through different armory profiles of MTs from various Illidan killing guilds, and was actually quite surprised to find such diversity among the enchants used. There was no clear cut winner it seemed, with an equal amount of tanks using 15 agil, 8 stam or 2% threat.

Personally, I upgraded from the T5 gloves to Enforcement, and I had 15 agility on those. However, with gear improvements I've felt the need to start to drop avoidance in place of stamina, armor or threat generation.

If you are interested in further information for which to give me a better opinion, I am the MT of a 3/5 Hyjal 4/9 BT guild. Right now I have 8 Stamina on my gloves since it's dirt cheap, but I wanted to get a feel for how important the 2% threat enchant is from other warriors that use it.

Also, I apologize if this is off-topic, but I wasn't sure of the most appropriate place to post this question and didn't want to start a new thread just for it. If this has been discussed in depth in another thread, please redirect me and I'll read up there.

Thanks.

Stick to 8 stamina while you still use them as your general tanking gloves. If you get T6 gloves, you can replace it with 2% threat and use them as threat gear. The enchant on T6 gloves depends on the rest of your gear. I prefer 15 agility, especially when you already have a lot of stamina, but it's a close call.

The awnser to the OP's question is very simple: you don't stack one stat you need a healty mix. Having too little avoidance will make incomming damage of raid bosses unhealable (regardless of your health pool) and having too little stamina will make your healh buffer so small you'll die if you are unlucky enough to take several consecutive hits. The good thing is though you don't really need to make any tough gear choices because there aren't really any choices to make. If you just take whatever tank loot from raids you can get you'll do just fine.

Basicly the base avoidance your gear gives you will be enough. For enchants and gems, just go for stamina. What you want is to make your damage intake as steady as possible. This makes healing your easier and it also makes your threat output much more stable.

This is what i would suggest. I haven't look at any armor profiles so I'm assuming a lot of stuff.

This is what I'm planing on doing with regards to my gloves.

1) Going to persuade my GM to give me 2 15 stamina gems to put on my Royal Gloves of Silvermoon and I'll put 8 stamina on that and leave them as "Stamina Gloves"

2) Once i get ahold of the gloves from Teron Gorefiend i will put 2% threat on them and probably use them with mallet of the tides.

3) As far as T6 go, i havent decided with 2% threat or 15 Agility.

I'd suggest 2% threat even if your dps isn't getting threat capped. You never know if the boss is gonna decide to dodge 4 times in a row or you would miss like 4 times in a row. Also, having extra threat allows your dps to push it even more. I never believe dps is going all out and not getting threat capped.

Speaking from the perspective of a healer I always find it much easier to heal through consistent damage. Dodges and Parry's I find I overheal them. Usually timing a heal to land *just* as one of the bosses specials lands results in not having enough time to cancel.

As a general rule Mitigation (that is block value, Armour, and stamina) tend to prevent deaths much more than avoidance (being Dodge, and Parry).

It terms of efficiency: In my mind what a tank takes has much more to due with what his healers prefer. Some healers may prefer to stack +healing and less regeneration. This healer type would likely benefit from healing through fewer larger damage spikes. While a healer who stacks regeneration, or in my case, prefers to down rank and "spam heal" would prefer to heal through consistent, constant lower damage spikes.

To clarify what I mean by "damage spikes" - I am referring to the percentage of health that a tank loses throughout a given period of time. Hence why a tank with stamina is in effect reducing the spikes.

Reducing the chance of getting hit by a hit is always nice. Let's simply assume that over time an equal amount of mitigation matches an equal amount of avoidance in terms of the amount of damage a tank takes. In my eyes I would much prefer to heal a tank who takes consistent hits every swing timer, over a tank that takes spikes of dodges, parry's and misses. Not to mention the inconsistencies in threat generation.

Bear in mind that the glove enchant is far and away the best sta-vs-threat tradeoff you can make. It's value in pure threat is roughly 70 block value or 30 hit rating, at a cost of -8 sta. Compare with the sta cost of gemming a +hit gem anywhere.

I would agree once you're fully in SSC/TK/above tank gear. Below that level though you can end up with imbalances in your gear - either with too little stam, or with too little avoidance. It may be required to make adjustments when your tank gear is 'underdeveloped' in this situations. In general, the better your gear gets the more stam/armor/block orientated you should become.

Typically, socketing/enchanting stamina (if the item values are close) is the right thing to do.

One thing that wasn't brought up already is that while avoidance does reduce the raw healing needed, even after you have HPs for what you would define as "needed to survive", additional HPs should generally reduce overhealing due to the bigger buffer, and that's without even mentioning all the heals that were casted assuming you will be taking a hit that you ended up not taking - in those cases your mitigation didn't really do much other than making you lose rage.

I made some armory script for myself, but maybe some of you are interested in it too:
Imba Guilds

The link will lead to this page
TDMOG Armory - Get Tank Data

The data shown comes live from armory and I like to take a look on what other tanks are wearing. The script searches the guild data for warriors with tank stats.

RE: to Liar again.

"As long as you don't get bursted down" were the first lines of my post

I don't say that stamina is not important, but note that for every point of avoidance / mitigation that you have (and all avoidance is mitigation, but not all mitigation is avoidance - I would favor armor and block value, were the end-game itemization to permit me to do so) each point of stamina becomes more valuable. Similarly, for each point of stamina you have, each point of avoidance/mitigation becomes more valuable. So if a tank like Kungen, for example, were to take out two 15 stam gems and put in 10 dodge gems instead, I guarantee that 1% dodge would offer better net protection than 300 health. For someone with as much avoidance as I have, losing a small portion for stamina is not a bad move, and so I favor stamina enchants.

The benefit of a stamina enchant is greater, anyway, than the benefit of an avoidance enchant. Assuming all gems are distributing item points the same way (as they should be..), 12 stam = 10 dodge. There is currently no 10 dodge enchant to bracers or I would consider getting it. =)

Again, I'm not claiming that stacking stamina doesn't work, but it certainly offers a different style of raiding. I've had guilds on our server claim that it is a statistical impossibility to do Anetheron with 5 healers, but that's how out guild did it when we two-shot him our first night in there.

Due to the healing debuff and vampiric aura, I don't think that would have been possible had I not had so much avoidance.

Just my 2¢, and my experience with my guild. My healers love my style and I love their healing style, and since we're plowing through BT now I'd say it's got to be worth something.

Just because one guild uses one method to great success doesn't mean it's necessarily the best method, just a successful one.

--Vorsgald

Edit: Similarly this is a rebuttal to Galazhor, as clearly if you have less stamina the biggest benefit is that fewer healers are required in a raid, thus permitting the use of more dps and faster fights. Bringing 8-9 healers for an avoidance stacked tank is obviously a complete waste of raid spots, as the overhealing will far outweigh the benefits.

Not necessarily true, depending on what level of progress you're at. The Violet Eye and Maggie's head reward rings are both +armour, as are several notable weapons (King's Defender, The Unbreakable Will) and cloaks (Gilded Thorium, two different Badge of Justice cloaks in 2.3). At the Magtheridon level of equipment the difference between gearsets due to bonus armour can be upwards of 1400.

As for how signififcant that is, looking purely at effective health I personally get roughly as much benefit from 18 armour as from 1 stamina. This calculated using raid buffed values of around ~22k health and ~25k armour. I'm a Tauren so my gain from stamina is greater than most tanks' and having more of one obviously enhances the effect of the other, meaning that the specific ratio will vary for different people. It's still a very notble stat for purely acchieving maximum effective health: in fact for that specific quality the Violet Signet of the Great Protector and A'dal's Signet of Defense are currently the two strongest rings in the game.

One can certainly question for what situations if any these +armour items are worth using over other options for the same slots and if you're at the very end-game they're all pretty outdated save for picking between The Unbreakable Will & The Brutaliser depending on the fight. Still, additional armour is a decently well-itemised equipment option for most of T4 & T5.