Not only that but those items are again, not even close to best in slot. Impregnable and Mesh are not best in slot. Boundless Ambition is a toss up, t7 pants are hardly best. Whatever boots have 55 def aren't best in slot, etc.

Being able to put together a set that is over 540 is easy, but that doesn't make it best in slot.

In regards to SS vs SG... gargoyle can increase your avoidance over SS when you have both the 84 dodge trinket AND the parry trinket off 25 man sapph. It's not much of an increase, but you do have higher total avoidance - in addition to 2% stam.

Of course to use both avoidance trinkets, you have to give up your 84 defense trinket and any stam trinkets.

Take a look at my armory, raid buffed I have just over 40500 HP and about 66% or 68% total avoidance. I'm also essentially hit and expertise capped for threat generation.

I tried using my T7.25 chest, bracers of the unholy knight, and the naxx 10 helm which has higher avoidance... and the result was I could get like 75% total avoidance, but my threat generation was total crap. And since my guilds at the point where we're almost all in full 25 man gear, DPS is actually able to rip threat away from tanks if they're lazy.


I honestly can't think of anyway to improve my gear right now except for swapping out my defense trinket for sapph's trinket and using SG over SS once I do that.

So to sum up: You can drop your avoidance rune, and your defense/stam trinkets and replace them with a defense/stam rune and avoidance trinkets?

Now that I have time to post.

This is what I would consider best in slot(not a best gear set, just best in a vacuum) for pure survivability:

[Helm of Vital Protection]
[Nexus War Champion Beads]
[Valorous Scourgeborne Pauldrons]
[Cloak of the Shadowed Sun]
[Valorous Scourgeborne Chestguard]
[Bracers of the Unholy Knight]
[Inevitable Defeat]
[Sigil of the Unfaltering Knight]
[Valorous Scourgeborne Handguards]
[Ablative Chitin Girdle]
[Legplates of Sovereignty]
[Kyzoc's Ground Stompers]
[Sand-Worn Band]
[Keystone Great-Ring]
[Figurine - Monarch Crab]
[Essence of Gossamer]

Total is 544 defense rating counting sigil, if you add def socket bonuses, chest, cloak, helm, and shoulder enchants you get 625
(and in my opinion +275hp to chest is better and you shouldn't count the sigil because you cant swap to one for threat if your gear set requires it on, but lets ignore that.) which is 64 short of the uncritable. Even if you gem Stam/Def in every yellow socket you are still not uncritable. (As a side note the above set puts you exactly at 26 expertise with one of the 5 expertise talents)

So basically it is not possible to as was stated "No trinkets, gems, no socket bonuses, no enchants" defense cap in best in slot items.

Notable Gear Exceptions:

[Keystone Great-Ring] can be replaced by [Gatekeeper](gain 28 hit for a little loss in survivability)
[Helm of Vital Protection] can be replaced by [Valorous Scourgeborne Faceguard] for 4pc bonus and little loss
[Nexus War Champion Beads] while better could be hard to get(or you might choose the dps version) so [Boundless Ambition] and [Heritage] are pretty interchangeable depending on if you need hit or expertise.
3rd best trinket being [Valor Medal of the First War] if you aren't a JC, though [Indestructible Alchemist's Stone] is very good, I am just going to ignore it since the profession passive bonus is horrible

I have both the defense trinket and sapp's parry trinket and my testing has shown that due to parry's horrible conversion rating and parry's horrible DR's, the defense trinket is superior with my current gear setup. I am quite confident the same will apply in your case. From the non profession specific avoidance trinkets, I have found that after DR, the heroic embelm dodge trinket is the best choice. My combination of choice is the gossamer stam trinket and the dodge trinket. Especially considering how the gossamer trinket scales with buffs and frost presence and the DR's on the def stats.

Other than that, personally I would prefer Razuvious's Bracers to yours. Mainly because of parry's crapiness aswell. Seeing youre not expertise soft-capped you may also want to have a look at Kel'thuzad's Necklace, I think its fairly superior to yours, with your current gear setup.



EDIT:
Regarding the subject of best in slot items:

I think you have very well proven with that, how useless a "best in slot, in a vacuum" point of view really is and how futile it is talking about it.

Especially looking at how greatly diminishing returns affects us, and how certain stats scale with buffs in a raid environment and some don't, many of those items you linked, as you correctly ackknowledged indirectly with , are quite far behind other items when looked at in a complete gear set.

I think the most obvious case for this are the Malygos Legs. While good when looked at them independantly, completely geared parry takes such a hit that they become less and less useful, combine that with the situation that depending on your spec and rest of equipment you get enough expertise to be soft-capped, you will want the T7,5 Pants.

So instead of focussing on, whatever is best in slot if you were naked otherwisely, we should focus on what's the best "whole picture", since we rarely are completely naked except one piece :P

Regards

I'd like you to explain how you think t7 legs are better than the Malygos pants.

If you socketed dodge/stam and def/stam for socket bonus in t7 you get:

13 stam 43 armor 2str 28 def 57 parry 66 expertise

vs

72 dodge 35 hit

Even if you ignore the massive difference in threat stats(and damage reduction expertise actually provides) 13stam, 43 base armor, 28def and 57 parry is better than 72 dodge.

Please tell me what items are "far behind other items when looked at in a complete gear set". Looking at your armory you use t7 pants, Impregnable and Sabatons of Endurance however that does not compare favorably against what I have suggested even after dr.

Soverignity, Kyzoc, Keystone vs T7 pants, Impregnable, and Sabatons

2 Sta
580 Armor (after base on sovereignty is multiplied)
94 Parry

vs

33 Defense
41 Dodge

Plugged into tank points for my current gear that is
2stam and 0.38% reduction on physical vs 0.3% avoidance

Seems pretty clear to me that I have it right. Your set is far closer to a threat set (gains 62 hit vs 7 expertise and 14 strength).

The only reason I indicated that it was not a complete gear set is that in a perfect gear set I would rather use T7 helm over vital protection for set bonus, and gatekeeper over keystone for hit/stam instead of dodge/armor.

I'm not sure I agree with that assessment. I would like to see a bit more discussion on gear selection, as early in WotLK release DK tanks were talking about how their threat was suffering. Given that there aren't many fights that seriously challenge our abilities to take damage, I made sure to get my hit/expertise up, and never really saw any threat problems. There are actually several items I'm looking for, which simply aren't dropping, and I am using less optimal gear choices. In short, I'd like to see a few more gear trade-off discussions for the current content, so that we can make more informed choices on how we should be geared going into Ulduar.

For example, Flamingcloud's post above this one spells out the comparison pretty well. The maly legs certainly look to be better than Valorous. The avoidance provided by Valorous might be slightly better (need to math that out), but the extra expertise seals the deal there IMO.

I have the neck, the loss of stats from Heritage isn't worth it. I also drop under hit cap by a good amount. Same reason Im using the chest and bracers over high avoidance items.

The parry trinket is worth over 1% avoidance, dropping the defense trinket losses me 3k HP for 15 seconds every 3 minutes. This results in slightly higher avoidance using SG over SS, and a constant HP increase.

I tried using both the JC stam trinkets for a raid (with 41 stam gems), what I have now gives me 5% higher avoidance at the cost of about 5k HP.


The truth is I don't need 45000 HP for current raids. And when I do, there'll be better gear I can get anyway. 40k HP and over 65% avoidance is better overall, especially considering the benefit that avoidance gives in terms of RS and BS.

Well I am at around 73% avoidance(counting scorpid, night elf, and boss base miss) with 46500 fully buffed hp. Personally I was not pleased when before when I had around 80% avoidance and got parry gibbed and died in one second because I didn't dodge 4x in a row. Luck is basically gone now, can take two hatefuls, two Faerlina enraged hits without a heal and not die. That 6-7% avoidance for 8k+ hp is a pretty good trade off.

I am quite happy with the results, healers just spam us with overheals for the most part anyways. There really isn't a fight currently where we need to minimize our raw damage taken because heals are limited, but it is my intention to build an avoidance set for if one arises.


As an aside, why do people put their +41 stamina gems in the trinket all the time? One would think that is a slot you would want the flexibility to swap in and out.

I think the point is to have one heavy stam trinket just like gossamer, but yeah doesn't make much of a difference when you have everything equipped, but when you remove the trinket for something else it's a bit stupid because you don't have prismatics on your gear anymore. I use my prismatic gems to get the bonus off yellow sockets myself on my armor, even though in most cases 4parry rating or whatever isn't going to help much anyway. However, I never remove my JC trinket anyway, it's the best trinket in the game in my opinion, so even if I gemmed it with prismatics, it wouldn't make a difference.

Rawr doesn't work(like always). Bonus armor is not added at all, buffs don't work properly(try clicking devo aura for example). My health is about 800 lower than it is in game unbuffed, not sure if that is the same for you. It is no wonder you are using the wrong items, when bonus armor is given a value of 0. If they can't get that right who knows what else is screwed up.

I would avoid Rawr like the plague. Last year when I used it, it was just as bad.

Not only that but you gave yourself the +53 defense from the sigil but not me.

Edit: Oh and Rawr gives you tauren health bonus but doesn't give me 2% miss. Good job Rawr, you really are the king of simulators.