◊ Quigon

I would encourage you to try Archimonde, Azgalor, Illidan, perhaps Shahraz in your HP gear, and then your avoidance gear next week.

Then, ask your healers which week was easier.

We did this blind with our healers for 4 weeks on morogrim back in april or march. Within 5% of the fight they could tell me immediately which gear I was wearing - and it was only trinkets that I swapped out. (Maybe a ring too? But you can certainly ask about this "test." It isn't something I'm just making up.)

Avoidance makes it easier on the healers, not stamina.
Stamina has its place - again, I'm a huge stamina whore, I have even more unbuffed HP than you in stamina gear, and have for almost the entirety of the time since I dinged 70 in January, but once we worked on Morogrim, and especially after we defeated Kael it became readily apparent that always using it isn't the best solution.

Leotheras is a good example of stamina being very effective.
Morogrim would not be a good example of this - in fact it is really an issue of healing. Most tanks that constantly die on Morogrim might notice that they don't die in the first 30%.
Vashj and Kael would be another good example of a stamina fight.
In fact most things before Tier 6 are simply easier in stamina... In tier 6 bosses crush for 10-12k, hit for 6-9k, while causing raid damage - and armor and avoidance really change things there for the MT.

You say that you shouldn't wipe unless....
Well come on, if you never wiped, we'd have all kicked nihilum's asses and be done with the entire content sometime around mid-January 07. One of your roles as a tank is to provide the mathematically optimal gear load-out for a given situation.
And simply saying Praetorian's are better is not correct - as in some situations, they are not... I would even hesitate to say in most situations you should not require the extra stamina.

There is another thread showing just how much avoidance is out there now.
One of the reasons avoidance becomes so powerful in Tier 6 is because there is so damn much of it. You get exponential returns, and "Stacking it" in T6 usually comes along with "Good" stamina, and usually the best armor to boot.

In this situation you're not sacrificing much for truly exponential returns.
Also, about shield block rating - passive shield blocks do reduce your damage a significant amount, even if the boss doesn't crush... and if he does, it gets some of the blocks that you can, and will let (or simply have) slip by.

 

Ihmes

"Over the period of a month" Don't you think it was the experience with the encounter that kept you better alive than the gear?

And no, I've never tried avoidance-tanking, as my purpose in t5 instances was to be able to soak kael's pyro. Therefore I stacked stamina and let other tanks take t5 loot etc. so we had more viable MTs. Btw, we tried "avoidance" tank on shaman-add on karathress. He died. Not undergeared or anything, t5.

But my point is: if you don't *need* the upgrade right now, as it's for alternative gear, why not pass the pieces for a) less-geared tanks b) healers and dps. You can take those t6 tokens when they actually are going to rot or going for enhancement gear for restoshamans etc.

I got couple of amazing healers in our guild, and they always spam me <3<3<3<3 when I ask about if my choice of stamina was right =)

 

◊ Quigon

You can choose to ignore me then, that is fine. I think you have made up your mind, to your guild's disservice.

As to improvement, Morogrim was one of the hardest SSC bosses to repeat, especially back then. I'm sure many readers of this forum, including Elitist Jerks themselves can attest to this. I mixed up gear changes over time, meaning some of the later kills were harder due to a lack of avoidance.
Edit: I should add, we had a fiasco about a month ago while on a key run, where an offtank straight up died for 3 or 4 pulls straight while tanking Morogrim because he was wearing raw Kael'thas stamina gear (He is our Kael'thas tank, and I was gone that night). This is around 7-8 months after we had first killed Morogrim! He changed his gear up after a discussion with the healers and warriors on at the time and it became a solid kill. I could, as a raid leader, blame the healers on this one. Healers take the blame too often for a tank's mistake, and it is really disappointing.

Stamina is also fine for FLK - there was a discussion on this in another thread (I think about FLK in fact), and the consensus by most tanks was avoidance gear led to fewer deaths. However, I personally use stamina gear here.
But tier 4 and tier 5 are not tier 6... and not all fights are the same.

As a tank you do not gear for 1 type of fight. That is partly the point of this guide. Some fights are aggro sensitive (or were, now it is easier to retain aggro, but that gets harder during farm mode). Some fights benefit from stamina (few hard ones), some fights benefit from avoidance and mitigation. Why would you only gear one way, when you can honestly gear all of these ways without dramatically stealing gear from other members. You don't need the best - but you can pickup tanking trinkets, wear that avoidance ring, and cut your damage down 20%.

Using Kael as an example is fine: Kael IS the best stamina fight out there. But earing stamina gear for kael is not mutually exclusive to wearing the BEST gear as you progress onto different fights, especially those with a higher level of sustained MT damage output.

I'd still encourage you to test avoidance gear - you can come up with what you need from blues.
Trinkets and rings, trinkets and rings... those are the best way to itemrack around initially, until the better items like T6 are rotting. I absolutely agree with not taking big upgrades to others for T6 leggings or gloves until they're rotting, but I think in this discussion it has gone past that to raw stamina trinkets/rings and overall gear.

I was the biggest stamina junky of these forums, and I am endorsing to other tanks to get avoidance gear in Tier 6 and use it on some fights. You only have to search my posts to see what a stamina whore I was at one point... It was enough of an obsession that I came up with the "tank Hydross at 250% strategy" - and that was only viable because of my absurd stamina gear. I remember Jager and a few other old-timers chimed in on absolutely min/maxing stamina at the time - and it was superb for ssc/tk25 (minus morogrim).

Perhaps I will revert to the sta bible if avoidance stacking becomes not so overpowered in the near future. For now: use it for all it is worth (just check the avoidance thread of 99.7% avoidance obtained... remember, hit 102.4% and you're immune to everything but spells... that is a pretty bold statement - invincible). I'm not condoning that for normal everyday use, but once 102.4%.. but use it within means till it becomes multiplicative.

 

Ihmes

Once I get the chance for that loot, I could try.
I used block value+hit gear on leo to be able to kill my demon, as the bosses dmg wasn't a problem. Vashj and kael do unavoidable burst, so yes, stamina is way better there. I don't know what kind of healercomposition you usually run with, but we got 2-3 paladins, who concentrate on the MT. They excel in singletarget nukeheal, and we let them do the backbone of main tank healing. Shamans and coh-priests excel at raid healing, so they do that. So even if the tank need more healing over the course of the fight, it isn't "away" for the rest of the raid.

Cube is known for it's "clean kills". And we wipe, ofcourse. It's just that usually it's not me who dies first.
I'm sporting so little block value atm, around 400, so it doesn't really matter against 9-12k hits imo. And it wouldn't even if i had 800. Ofcourse it helps more against bosses like illidan who don't hit so hard but often, but as we killed him for the first time last night (2nd raid on him), I used my regular stamina-heavy tanking gear to be on the safe side.

"Exponential gains on avoidance" sounds terribly like "rage starved" :P

I think we're arguing over different things. You are talking about the absolute best gear setups for each fight, i'm talking about taking as little loot as possible. When you are limited with the loot, aka everyone is not in full t6 or similar, you need to share the tokens with other classes and other tanks. I rather take what I need, pass loot to those who need it too, and then start collecting loot that "would be nice for fight x".

 

◊ Quigon

A few things, and this is more just a discussion of concepts brought up - not a direct reply to Ihmes.

Even if the tank does not die first, poor blocking, or even poor gear choice can still lead to the other issues that do lead to a wipe - namely taking too much damage on fights that require a lot of other-target-healing. It is just something to consider when dissecting what went wrong - so many things are related.

Rage starved is certainly an issue - but that is what aggro gear sets are for... balanced gear sets for trash or aggro sensitive fights - but again not to the exclusion of raw avoidance sets! (or your current stamina set). Even though it was already discussed in this thread that tier 6/avoidance gear is adequate for aggro, I personally hate tanking in it when aggro might be a concern. A true aggro set is tanking bliss for these situations.

As to leo, yeah, aggro gear really is tops there - I think it is definitely smart to value stamina over avoidance once you've exhausted reasonable shield block value and expertise/hit.

But as to the loot situation - yes, hugely important. Your healers are very very important, as are your DPS. But, you CAN in fact make a great avoidance set without having to take any major purples that would otherwise go to someone's main spec. Tanking trinkets, rings, neck/etc.

One last thing about healing (and this really should go in the guide):
Many guilds put paladins on their MT, and this is usually due to feeling forced into this situation due to raid healing.
Shamans truly are one of the best MT healers because of their ability to get a high crit rate (or simply many have a decent crit rate to begin with) and one ability: ancestral healing.
AH is big - really big. Having a single shaman spam HW1 with high crit will provide a noticeable improvement to mana to all other healers on difficult bosses. It was one of those things raids liked to keep up on say, patchwerk and shahraz.
Also, paladins can still make decent raid healers! Hard to beat a shaman in either catagory, but I just wanted to make that point about the value of AH on the MT (the spam strategy was nerfed a bit in hps in 2.3 if i'm not mistaken... but AH is still really solid.)

Sometimes a guild can get better raid healing by taking one of the many shamans off raid healing, placing them on the MT, and putting the paladin they replaced back on the raid. Sounds ridiculous, but try it out! Although there aren't many bosses left where survival of the MT is a top concern - but when progressing it might help.

 

Ihmes

Usually wipes are caused by simple lack of concentration. But it's true, it's complicated, and rather hard to tell which causes what and would the player in aoe die if tank avoided a bit more dmg.
Stamina+hit+expertise with swiftsteel bludgeon and rather low avoidance=win. For example teron is such a fight.
Don't forget druids. They are really after the defense trinkets since they don't really get it that much on other gear.
You're completely forgetting priests. They have inspiration, which does basically the same thing as AH. And both skills proc on chain heal+circle of healing, which are used to heal melee etc, so the tank gets enough "splash" healing to keep the buffs up. Dedicating one shaman to gimp healing gear and spamming HW sounds... odd :P But anyway, we know those buffs and we try to keep them up on tanks as often as possible.

But you can't really compare paladins to priests in raid healing, it's like telling warlock to aoe with shadowbolts :P

 

◊ Quigon

A priest is not going to get the same level of crit as a shaman. That is why I didn't include them. You typically would not spam CoH on a tank for that purpose - unless again, it WAS patchwerk (and it was often PoH back then for this purpose for alliance).

I don't agree that Teron is a good example of a stamina fight, since he crushes for 10-12k. In fact, Teron is a raid healing situation where healing becomes worse over time. You can reduce the damage you take by absurd amounts with avoidance gear during progression mode. Burst is definitely important on Teron. You can lead with your own school of thought in either case, but my own suggestion to guilds progressing here would be avoidance gear first.
In farm mode, even pressing block - much less wearing whatever type of gear - is probably optional. But min/maxing does make a difference to a near-wipe, and a near-kill.

 

Ihmes

True, not so much CoH, but Ghealr1 works just the same. And I looked up some holypriest vs restoshaman crit rates, there was close to no difference in normal healgear, about 8% on all I did look up, both your guild and mine. (Damn armory is a pain in the ass to browse...) I'd like to know how gimped manaregen and healing would higher-crit restoshaman have.
True, I was referring to teron as aggro-race. He's on farm now and dps go all out, I really need everything I can get to keep ahead, unlimited rage etc. Might be different for first-kills.

 

• Whiteknight

I first truly appreciated my avoidance trinkets and rings when we started working on Gurtogg and Archimonde (for us at approximately the same time).

For Gurtogg, avoidance really cuts down on damage taken - improper tank gearing and buffing really strains the healers, especially when you end up with more stacks of the debuff than you otherwise could have had going into fel-rage with bloodboils up and a cloth class targetted.
Archimonde I found that cutting down incoming damage really really helped with the healers because their attention is so diffused paying attention to situational issues, curses and raid damage, and periodically being 'on-your-own' when a couple of healers get airbursted or feared badly.

There are definitely many more fights where I put on better avoidance, but these are the two that I really first noticed a fundumental difference in the raid confidence just by swapping in different gear.

I'm not sure I'd go as far as to say Morogrim was the hardest repeatable fight in SSC, but it's certainly the one where tank gear matters the most. In my current tanking suit, I'm not in any danger on any fight in SSC or TK - except for Morogrim - even in full T6 he can still burst your tank for 20k+. When we go back for keying runs, I still flask + ironshield and fully buff for him - because fuck dying. (well, I flask for the whole run for the same reason - but he's definitely the one fight where the risk is apparent).


If you want a practical analysis of the effectiveness of shaman MT healing, I looked at our Council fight from last week. The fight took 9 minutes, and we use 2 shamans on the Gathios tank. There are 31 'gains Ancestral Fortitude' in the combat log for the fight. That's a minimum of 7min 45sec of armor buff in a 9min fight. (refreshing the buff doesn't count in the log afaik, so it's almost definitely significantly longer uptime).


On the topic of block value, I'm not entirely sure I'd dismiss the mitigation value of blocking. Take as an example Archimonde - he hits for approx 9k. With proper debuffs this number comes down to approx 6k. Blocking for 800 - and using shield block even though he can't crush represents approximately 12% mitigation. That's a better reduction than defensive stance.

 

Ihmes

Bloodboil would be a fight where i'd put on avoidance too. Less tank switching -> less fuss in fel rage.

I've always considered block value as threat stat, but it's true that when you can make the hits smaller with armor and debuffs, it becomes significant. Problem is that there's quite little block value gear in hyjal/bt. No chest, boots or shoulders with block value for example. Some nice pieces in ZA though. I got over 700 block in my block-gear, but it gimps 1k, 700 armor hp and ~6% of avoidance (and hit rating for threat). Now that I think of it, not so bad for ZA or similar, that's around 1/3 mitigation through blocking. :O

 

◊ Xerophyte

Re: FLK gear, although he's typically not a boss where tank gear limits you much I'd rather recommend at least avoidance trinkets if not a full avoidance set. This for the simple reason that he's only remotely dangerous when using Bestial Wrath and being able to turn on an extra 10%-25% avoidance (depending on trinket selection) for the duration of the effect can be very, very useful. Especially if you go for killing shaman first and kiting between totems, you'll typically have to deal with one Bestial Wrath with limited healing as the raid kills Caribdis and using Pocket Watch + Scarab when it comes makes it very unlikely to hurt much.

More generally, any trinket with a significant avoidance or mitigation on use effect becomes considerably more desireable on any boss that is only dangerous for a short period (like FLK) or that you only tank for limited periods (say, bearfrom Nalorakk).


Re: Morogrim, I've always prefered my stamina & armour set, although paying attention to graves and trinketing when your healers are in them is certainly an option. The fight isn't as stamina-biased as Kael, but what fight is?

 

Obould

Block Value

I played / experimented with it alot in TBC start (Kara/SSC/TK) and atm i am trying to get all the available block items out there. Let me get something straight first, i do not tank bosses with this gear, i use it for trash clears.

I sit at 910 Block Value / 36.6% Block now, only really missing Signet of the Last Defender so i will end up approximatly at around 950 Block Value and 40% Block, 20% Dodge, 17% Parry.

Now let me get some numbers to you:

A mob hits you for 18.000, in defensive stance 16.200:

with 17.000AR (61,69% reduction) = 6206dmg
with 18.000AR (63,03% reduction) = 5989dmg

so the difference between 1.000AR (in the range from 17k-18k) on such an average hit is ~ 217dmg.
Note, gaining armor from like 21.000 -> 22.000 nets you less.

Lets model those 950 Block Value and 40% Chance to block ~ 392dmg less / hit. Actually it is even higher if you use skill Shield Block all the time but lets just take this number.

If you can maintain your complete percentage of avoidance to be the same in your higher stamina / AC gear compared to the block gear then its only a question about how hard a mob is hitting / spiking on you in regards of what you should wear.

Anyway its really fun to go with this set into ZA, pop ShieldBlock (2 x T5) and the Gnomeregan Auto-Blocker 600 slamming(crit) mobs for 2.5-3k dmg, i encourage every tank trying it out because its really fun to see 1200Blocks on the ZA Bosses with just like 1.000 to 2.000dmg left to be outhealed =).

 

Mem

Regarding the avoid vs stam discussion:

First of all I totally agree on the assessment regarding AH/Inspiration. If I'm on fight where the hits are borderline critical for my survival the first thing I check is whether I got enough healer with an armor buff on me. Its much much better than having an imp for example.

I also started to use my avoid kit more often than I did before (might try it on mother this week, where I run rather a stam oriented gear till now). One of my handicaps might be that my HP pool doesn't get to the insane levels my tauren colleages are able to reach. And I agree, once your stamina level reaches a certain plateau avoidance gets very very interesting for tanking mobs like Archimonde. My only problem with my avoid stuff is that I loose a little bit of armor as well which I don't really like because I have to recourse to T5 level loots.

On Gorefiend we had only very few tank death wipes, most often coming from miscommunications between the healers (didn't realize that tank healers were ghosted) otherwise it was a DPS race from the beginning on, at least for us. I think I used some mix of avoid/stam stuff on him for the first two kills (and chained Ironshields of course) but soon afterwards I went for a pure aggro setup.

Bloodboil is definitely an avoid fight. Fewer tank transitions coupled with less stacks of acidic wounds is certainly perferable to getting slowly grinded down by 15+ stacks.

Regarding Morogrimm: did him in my progression tank stuff just yesterday with a pretty mixed bag of raiders (some of our mainraiders with about 10 folks who aren't raiding with us that often and partially were the first time in SSC). Even though bombing was a little bit rough I only dropped once to a little bit dangerous level (and last standing this one was probably not necessary). I don't think he is a real threat for a T6 tank unless your healers are asleep. The basic avoidance T6 level gear provides (even in stam gear) is more than sufficient.

Another gripe I still have is how to get more blockvalue without sacrificing other stats like armor and avoid too much. ZA stuff looks nice but is not viable if you want to improve your overall ability to tank damage on a T6 level. T6 itself is not a sporting a lot of BV. In terms of aggro gain I still prefer to go for expertise/hit/crit.

 

Tys

I was under the impression that the 2 - T5 - Bonus doesn't affect shield slam damage, just the blocked dmg? Also, the tooltip would suggest that, but I'm not really sure about it.
Edit: nevermind, it does.

 

Mem

It does. Which is why this bonus is one of the best there are on the tanking sets availible imho.

 

◊ Kasi

AH is really that good. One thing that has stabilized our Archi kills since we moved from a druid tank pre 2.3 to a warrior tank is myself (as an elemental shaman) putting the AH/Inspiration up on the grid and if it wasn't up from someone else making sure that I got it up there. Since I run with 40% or so spell crit raid buffed, it works very well to stabilize damage on the tank due to healers being oor from doomfire or air burst. Heck on our first mother kill the other night one of our paladin tanks went down so I spammed CH on the mt and the other pally to get AF up to mitigate saber lash damage.

 

• Tauftamir

Regarding the Avoidance vs Stamina discussion, one of the most important points in this discussion is the following quote by Quigon.

When you have cleared the current content, irrespective of the gear you are wearing you are likely to have at least 20,000 HP when raid buffed, even when wearing a mitigation set of gear. With consumables this amount of stamina will allow you to survive the highest max hit of any of the current bosses.

If stacking more stamina works great for you and your healers at this point then thats great for you and your guild.
At this level if gear, I've found that wearing more Tier 6 Pieces, such as the Leggings over the Praetorians ones, is preferable, because they provide me with extra avoidance/damage reduction. As stated in a number of posts above, a number of Tier 6 bosses favor stacking more avoidance at this point, once you reach the point in stamina where you will no longer be killed by "bad luck" or Max Hits.

Where this point is will depend on you and your healers - I don't think it's fair or accurate to dismiss gear choices based on the fact that stacking some extra hit points happens to gel with your method of healing.

Personally, I've always seen Tanking as "Keeping aggro, while taking the least damage possible". If I'm taking more damage than I need to so that I can have 1000 more HP or be twice as far ahead as the DPS on Threat then I would consider myself to have failed as a tank in that scenario.
It's the responsibility of each Tank to have a range of gear to change as the encounter demands to maximize their Threat, Mitigation or Stamina depending on what "stat" works best for their raid group in that situation.

 

• Jamor

In regards to Archimonde and what type of gear to use:

What I have found is that, while avoidance gear is probably more helpful for incoming damage, I really suffer on threat in that fight if I avoid too much. For me, that fight is the perfect example of how too much avoidance can hurt. Hell, even in my general use tanking set, which is high on expertise, stam, armor, there are still many times in the fight where I just don't have rage.

Do most guilds give tanks WF for Arch? That is a fight where I don't get it. In reality the only classes that push threat are DPS warriors due to the fact that, unless there is fight on all angles in his back half, they can DPS almost 100% of the time. Although if rogues got lucky with airbursts and I was wearing all avoidance gear, I could see that being a problem too.

Just trying to get an idea of what mosts tanks get in regards to shaman, and wear in regards to gear.

 

• Tauftamir