• Snowy

I'm able to reach cap with:

[Inferno Tempered Chestguard] -- note, you could put 15 resil on this, I have 150 hp on mine
[Inferno Tempered Leggings]
[Inferno Tempered Boots] with a 8 defense patch
[Flamebane Helm] with 3 +8 def gems and the 20 FR glyph -- just realized I could use my unique JC +12 def one here!
[Flamebane Bracers] with a +8 def gem
[Phoenix-fire Band]

and drumroll....

[Onyxia Blood Talisman]!

That's 293 FR + 5 for the BE racial which hits 298 for me. I use the bracers instead of the gloves because I much prefer keeping T6 gloves on, being an exceptionally strong piece in terms of avoidance, stam and threat. In reality, some of your choices may be dictated by the gear you have available to you in other slots, but there's many ways you can reach it.

Benefactors' Bar, where you get free English lessons:

 

• goss

Not being crit immune / resist capped for tanking flames is just dumb, sorry. Doable with some luck to be sure, but who cares? Its easy enough to meet these requirements, and there are literally no drawbacks. Bag space is not a good argument for suggesting a gear path for endgame encounters.

 

◊ Bryne

If you're actually advocating not hitting the defense cap on a resist fight, get bigger bags or just stop trolling. I have room for a full tanking and healing set as well as 20+ slots of consumables (including flasks and food) and my FR/SR sets, all at once. Here's a hint: you don't actually need to bring five librams and three non-combat pets to a BT clear.

I'd equate your stance to someone saying "Oh, I didn't bring my PvP trinket for Hyjal, I usually don't ever use it and I just didn't have room in my bags". It's a retarded excuse - I wouldn't even bring an OT to a resist fight with 441 defense, that simply smacks of laziness.

 

• Chicken

That's close to my personal setup, I assume an Onyxia Blood Talisman isn't available for most people, so my set might be more interesting:

[Inferno Tempered Leggings]
[Inferno Tempered Gauntlets] (With a [Flame Armor Kit])
[Inferno Tempered Boots]
[Inferno Tempered Chestguard] (This one has +15 Resilience enchanted)
[Flamebane Bracers] (With +12 Stamina enchanted, and a JC +12 defense gem)
[Phoenix-fire Band] (Shame on you if you're a Prot Pally in a guild that's killed Magtheridon that doesn't have this)
[Amulet of the Torn-heart]

This'll cover for the needed FR for a Blood Elf. It might be better if you swap out the bracers and amulet for a Flamebane Helm with FR enchant though, that'll also cover the extra FR you need if you aren't a Blood Elf (Or lets you replace the FR armor kit with a more conventional enchant on the gloves if you are a Blood Elf), and would mean that your FR set takes up one less piece of your gear.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

Borsch

Ermm one small and simple question:

Crushing immunity means
a) immun
b) 99% immun

Thanks

 

Anedris

Being crush immune means you cannot be crushed with holy shield active. You can only be crushed in the latency gap between the expiry and reapplication of holy shield (or if you screw up and don't have holy shield active for some other reason).

(Or in the highly unlikely scenario that all holy shield charges are used up in 10 seconds when you have a boss-level mob aggroed on you.)

 

Borsch

The same for Warriors too?

 

◊ Bryne

Yes, with Shield Block instead of Holy Shield. See section VI.d. of http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t18771-protection_warrior/ thread for more information.

That's exactly what my FR set looks like - it made more sense to cover it all in one item with the FR enchant available. Threat on gloves is probably optimal.

 

Sartorial

My numbers I run show for 1000DPS, I would reflect 15 damage (5% crit reduction, 30% chance of damage reflected) per second. That equates to 29.07 TPS per 1000dps (righteous fury + 2% threat to gloves). I remember reading ret aura talent added 15tps, is that accurate?

I havent made many attempts on Illidan, and my WWS reports arent very accurate given enrages and such. It seems to point though that 1000DPS is significantly lower than their actual numbers. Can anyone point me to what I can expect on a proper kill?

EDIT: What of course would blow a hole in thie argument entirely is if the reflected damage isnt holy all the time.

 

Cathela

Since Shield Block adds 75% block as opposed to 30% for Holy Shield, warriors are uncrushable "out of the box" with pretty much any moderately sensible tanking gear.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

• Chicken

The 1000 DPS was indeed a low estimate on my part, remember however that the Flames their melee and their Flame Blast is the only damage done by the actual Flames themselves, so that's also the only part eligible for reflection through Eye for an Eye. Blazes despite being dropped by the Flames don't count as damage done by the Flame itself, and are typically responsible for a fairly large amount of the damage a Flame tank takes (Extremely skilled/practiced tanks aside).

A more reasonable estimate perhaps would be perhaps 1500 DPS pre-avoidance, with the Flames standardly attacking every 2 seconds and dealing an average of 3000 damage per hit. Probably even slightly higher than 1500 DPS because I'm not taking into account Flame Blast now.

I think assuming 5% crit reduction from Resilience is a bit high though, as I said in my earlier post on the subject, that amount of Resilience is probably going to increase the amount of damage you take due to your lower avoidance by quite a bit. While that certainly means more chances for Eye for an Eye to proc, it'd also make you a lot more vulnerable. And I'm also entirely certain such effects can't proc from crit reduction through Defense, so it's important to take into account.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

Sartorial

I run 4% crit redux from resilience. At the end of the day, I am still a post-T5 respec Holy -> Prot and some of the trappings of a full-time tank through T5 I havent got.

Rings and trinkets most especially.

That leaves ~ 23tps. Even with the much lower spell damage in FR gear, that is still a better TPS upgrade than 1 hand specialization.

 

• Chicken

There's still the question of whether it even works, which is something I haven't been able to verify. But that should be fairly easy to test without doing the encounter itself, if you have the talent just find any random elemental that does elemental-based melee damage and then let it beat on you for a while.

For me it'd actually still be a threat downgrade, I do ~800 TPS on the Flames with One-Handed Weapon Specialization, about 70 of which can be attrituted to Spiritual Attunement (Technically less actual threat from this, but I'm going by the numbers from Omen which as far as I know doesn't divide the Spiritual Attunement threat in between multiple mobs normally), making One-Handed Weapon Specialization 34 TPS, but I still maintain 360 spell damage in my FR gear, which is most likely a good deal more than what you've got. and of course at the same time I have a good deal less Resilience.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

Prinsesa

I suppose it should be clarified for the Illidan Flame situation that since they do not crush and their attacks cannot be blocked, Warriors do not have a particular advantage when considering Shield Block vs. Holy Shield.

http://armory.mmo-champion.com.nyud....63815BffMm.png

 

Fruffy

With the changes made to latency and how wow processes a button "click" in 2.3.2 (I think it was that patch, the "stopcasting" changes) can't you simply spam a shield block/holy shield button as the cooldown nears its end to ensure minimal downtime due to lag? Or perhaps with the use of a latency mod to tell you when you SHOULD be pushing your button? I know on my rogue, when I've had a nasty 4-5 second lag spike, I'll be spamming sinister strike and come back from my lag with 4 extra combo points so it should work.

 

◊ Shalas

Even with zero latency, it's impossible to manually push the button at exactly the require time to have no gap in holy shield uptime. The changes in 2.3 also only addressed chaincasting spells, not cooldowns. The client won't let you cast holy shield until it's been 10 seconds since you last cast it, and if it takes 100 ms for that cast to make it to the server, you have 100 ms with no holy shield.

 

Yenadar

Goss and Bryne:

I am posting this in the interest of valued discussion, and hope that it will be received as such.

After your post earlier regarding my comment about being critable by flames for Illidian, I was quite frankly, pissed off. However I sat back for the past couple days to cool off and re-think things, and research the numbers to find a basis for, or against, my comment.

First, I apologize for not thinking my post through. I knew there was other reasons for being critable, but did not investigate those reasons before posting just 1 reason, that I admit does come off as sounding incredibly retarded. I will attempt to never repeat those mistakes.

On to the research results:

I found the following:
1: I can not reach uncritable with any arrangement of any of my 60+ pieces of tanking gear, while still getting to 365 FR.
1a: This may directly be a by-product of our clearing speed through BT, in that the night we first killed Illidian was also the 4th Teron kill, 3rd Bloodboil, kill, and 2nd RoS, Mother, and Council kills, so we reached Illidian with somewhat lower gear level than most guilds
1b: The closest I could come to uncritable with 365 FR was defense at 481, but was at the cost over ~1,100 health (when already down about 3,000 health from FR gear itself) and a large chunk of my threat.

2: In 3 different WWS parses (1 night of full attempts, 2 nights that included kills), I was crit a total of 6 times by flames.
2a: The critical hits (assuming x2 damage) added an average of1,960 damage per crit.
2b: I had 1 interesting crit that, by itself, might be a reason for reaching uncritability, but I can not determine if it was a bug or a more predictable issue. I received 1 crit for 12.7k (2.3k resisted).
2b1: First, the base damage pre-resist was 15,000, rather than 10,000 of the other crits, which implies that the crit was at x3 damage rather than x2
2b2: Second, the resist rate of ~16% was an incredibly unfortunate roll, as my average hovers around 70% resist on average.
2b3: Third, no other crit had a base of x3 damage
2b4: This hit did not kill me, and was during the course of our last Illidian kill (2nd total), in which only 2 people died, both DPS in phase 3.
2c: My averaged melee(fire) damage received from the flames was fairly consistently ~1,800 damage.
2d: I can retain threat and aggro against the DPS on my flame fairly consistently, and is the reason for my flame being DPSed first, though how much I can not say, due to Omen never showing threat on Flames accurately.

3: Our other flame tank (a druid), is also critable by flames, but has a much narrower gap due to resilience values.
3a: His average damage per hit from the flames ranged from 1,600 to 2,300.
3b: His threat suffers more than mine, and if his Flame is DPSed first, he nearly always loses aggro.

I imagine as we continue to clear BT, I will increase my gear's average ilvl enough that eventually I will reach uncritable in FR gear, but I don't think that means that I should completely stop tanking flames until that happens. I do find it somewhat ironic that T6 level resist gear is available for the 3rd to last boss of current BC, but for tanking a phase of the last boss in current content, we must resort to one or more blues and 4 T4 level pieces. If they don't plan on overhauling the whole resist mechanic, they should at least make resist gear of each type available for each effective Tier level of gear.

My total incoming damage rate is somewhat lower than my damage rate in Hyjal trash waves, and the healers are having no issues keeping me alive.

In light of this information, what path would you suggest I take? How much should I value uncritability over the threat and health loss? (In this particular fight/role. I know the importance in other fights, and am always uncritable)

Doesn't the fight determines the stats needed, not the other way around?
(For example Ony crushes me for ~900 damage... which obviously is a massive amount of damage and should be avoided at all costs.)

Am I still doing something horribly wrong?

 

• Chicken

I personally lose ~4k health to my FR gear set, as well as 200 spell damage. The spike damage you take tanking the Flames isn't particularly large, so you also don't need as large a health pool as you'd need for most fights, specifically the only serious spike damage you can expect to take is if you stand in multiple Blazes at once. I'd estimate that with crit immunity you should generally be fine with 18k or so health in this fight, based on my own experience, and I'm not particularly good at moving out of Blaze fast.

The way the combat log records partial resists on critical hits is also misleading; the order of calculation appears to put partial resists before crits, so the amount that shows as being resisted in the combat log is before the critical damage multiplier. Resists only come in 25/50/75%. Your particular example crit was actually a 25% resist.

I'll add that our healing team setup is extremely good for this phase of the fight however, the damage done by Illidan's Fireballs is fairly trivial when you usually have 2 CoH Priests and 2 Resto Shamans on raid healing, which also means that I don't try too hard on my threat (Our DPS knows to be somewhat careful).

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

• goss

Couple things to answer your questions. A number of gear paths have been layed out in the last few pages, try futzing with your gear on a profiler (I like warcrafter.net) and seeing if you can come up with something via enchants or gemming (don't discount blue resist gear as noted above, the crafted blue FR has the benefit of sockets, which can be either resil or defense gems).

Spike damage kills tanks, and that has been true since TBC came out, on every fight. That is why on a physical damage based encounter, uncrushability is more important than stamina for paladins (and warriors, obv. not a big deal). In the case of elemental damage, it is even more important to eliminate drastic spikes, because the nature of resistible damage is inherently spiky (you resist in 25% increments, so a bad roll means an inherent spike - so it follows that a crit + bad resist roll is a recipe for disaster). So yes, meeting resist and crit cap is really worth dropping some stamina and threat gen. You getting hit for 12.7k (even once- think melee + blaze tick) may well be unrecoverable, despite you having 19k hp. But if you only get hit for a maximum of half that every time, but only have 17k, its considerably easier for your healers.

Obviously you've already beaten the encounter, and I agree its doable (we've had an unprepared druid sub in who was FR capped by not critcapped before and managed), but its absolutely not a good recommendation. Also, there really isn't any reason why your druid should be behind you in threat gen, that seems very odd to me.

 

Gunn

*delete*

 

Nobbynob Littlun

Still looking forward to this... ^_^

If you need anything to make it happen, don't be shy!