Survivability is raw damage that you can take without getting healed. How much raw damage do you want to be able to survive? As someone posted just a few posts up, Stomps are ~20k damage, MHs are ~20k, OHs are ~10k. So if you want to be able to survive Stomp+MH+OH with no heals, you want 20k+2*(20k+10k) = 80k. There's some variance in the damage, and I want to have a bit of buffer in case I'm not totally topped off before a stomp, so I do 82k (now, anyway, after we've been farming him a while. I did 84k for a long time too).

Except Survivability > 74k could also return a result of 27k health and 63.5% (20810 armor) mitigation, (a nearly impossible result with BT gear I realize) but the resulting 10405 armor on stomp would be instantly deadly if followed by MH/OH hits immediately after

Reduction for 73s = Armor / (Armor + 11960)

20810 Armor = ~63.5% reduction, 36.5% taken
10504 Armor = ~46.5% reduction, 53.5% taken

Pre-mitigation, Stomp = 20k, MH = 20k, OH = 10k.
Post-mitigation, Stomp = 7.3k, MH = 10.7k, OH = 5.35k
Total, post-mitigation: 23.35k. No, you won't be instantly dead.

EDIT: Also don't forget, Stomp is the major danger point in tanking Brut, and you can turn the Stomp debuff on in Rawr, to see how you'll be hit with it up.

Ever since I got my [Stanchion of Primal Instinct] several weeks ago, I've been itching to use it on more than just trash and M'uru adds. My guild DPSers are getting ever better gear, and they're really starting to ride my threat. The lack of armor, as well as the low stam, really makes me shy away from using it on sunwell bosses, though.

I've recently started experimenting with stanchion on Felmyst. I still end up with 74% mitigation due to a pally with imp devo in my group (I'm usually in the 3x hunter + Restosham group), and it immensely helps my threat compared to [Wildfury Greatstaff]. I am almost always in that 3xhunter + restosham group, though, so imp devo is a luxury born only of the grouping requirements for felmyst.

So, I wanted to ask you guys who are experienced with tanking Brut and Twins (both are on farm status for my guild, and I definitely won't be using Stanchion for Kalecgos due to the stun)... do you think it's safe to use Stanchion on those fights? If so, how do you make up for the loss of armor? I'm still using ironshields for brut, in addition to Wildfury, and while I've very rarely ever seen myself get low on HP, I'm sure my healers really appreciate the ease of keeping me up through stomp with 20k+ armor (I love being able to finally benefit from Inspiration!).

As for twins, we kill Sacrolash first with me holding the offtank roll (the prot warrior holds aggro about 60-70% of the time with our strat). When I'm holding aggro, she crushes me HARD, and confounding blow hits like a ton of bricks. However, I often have threat troubles, especially near the beginning of the fight if I don't get an early flame sear for rage. I've been using Pillar for Twins, but I'd love to use Stanchion instead.

I guess I'm just asking for confirmation that I can finally dump my damn Wildfury. It pisses me off so much that there isn't a strictly "better" tanking weapon anywhere in TBC, and I'm sitting there wearing a piece of SSC gear to tank bosses two tiers above it.

The rest of my gear is linked in my signature. I have every piece of feral gear from pre-muru bosses except the twins shoulders, all gemmed for agi.

The armor on Wildfury combined with it's other stats mean for me that it's not replaceable on Brutallus. Stomp is the only dangerous part of the fight and 500 armor in Wildfury is a huge amount of mitigation under Stomp.

Twins is less clear cut I suppose. We never have threat issues on the fight therefore I use Wildfury simply to make the healer's job easier.

Would it not be possible to use Wildfury (or even Pillar, as it has more stam and armour) during Stomp and switch it out for the Stanchion in between?

I've often swapped out Wildfury for even [Staff of the Forest Lord] since i don't have Stanchion yet (and guild stopped raiding). With ironshields I was still armor capped pre-stomp on Brut. I'd probably never remove Stanchion.

I'd love to be able to do that, but I'm not sure that I could trust myself to remember to do the switch back and forth. Thanx for the suggestion, though. I'll experiment with it for next week's kill to see if I can remember.

Dukes already mentioned swapping on brut. You can do this for Kalecgos too if you really want to. I went throught he same sort of phase but the decision was pretty clear (especially since I gem almost exclusively for agility with a few spare pieces socketed with stam / different trinkets etc.). You realize pretty fast especially if you pick up some tanking 6.5 pieces that using stanchion is a major boost to avoidance (increasing returns) and a major boost to threat (high ap + stacking APen). Only time it gets swaped is for Kalecgos demon, Brut stomps, and Twins just because they are still broken (melee attack after stun = 0 avoidance ).

For now I remain a strong believer in geming near pure agi / wearing the A-Pen gear, I find it quite amazing for pretty much every aspect of tanking, although this will probably change with 3.0 as both sides are getting nerfs I dread going back to going stam after seeing what this side has to offer.

With defensive buffs like Commanding Shout, Tree of Life, and Devotion Aura going raid wide, I don't see us needing to stack stam. We'll be getting all the benefits of both a dps group and a tank group now. In addition it looks like our bonus armor items will be converted to more agility in most cases, but more stamina in a few as well.

Btw, I love trading 70 armor and 78 ArP for 1 strength on T6 bracers.

Some interesting results from playing around using Rawr as a simulator for 3.0, for bear form. I couldn't obviously simulate what the new items were going to end up being across the board, so take this with a grain of salt, but this assumes that all leather gear has had every bit of extra armor removed from it. Including the pvp gear.

- More often than not, pvp gear is better than T6 gear. In the case of the head, for example, the Vengeful Gladiator is better than T6. Same for the shoulders - and these turn out to be better than anything in sunwell as well. (this very much depends on whether agility is extra nerfed or not and what the avoidance rate is. Demontooth may still remain the best) The T6 chest wins out against vengeful but not brutal. The T6 gloves win against vengeful but not brutal. Tameless breeches handily beat T6 and Vengeful and Brutal.
- because of the higher stamina and strength, the feral versions of Sunwell gear tend to be better than the rogue versions. This is true for the leggings of the immortal beast, mask of the fury hunter, harness of carnal instinct, gloves of the forest drifter.
- some rogue gear is best in slot (depending on buffs, of course). Don Alejandro's Money Belt is better than Thunderheart Waistguard simply because of the two sockets.
- Thunderheart wristguards and treads remain the best.
- Mark of Tyranny becomes far better
- As does Pillar of Ferocity

This changes a bit if we get better than expected avoidance from agility. If that's the case, more rogue gear is best in slot. Quad Deathblow goggles become far better than any other option, for example. Belt of 100 deaths is stellar. However, given the nerfs to agility's coefficient at 70, I believe that this gear will largely be suboptimal.

So, similar to what we're seeing with the same iLvl items compared between pvp and pve, the PvP gear is winning out - largely because of how good stamina is.

Blue posted a few days ago saying that the reitemization for patch 3.02 has not been completed, they have only made a partial pass that was put into the newest build. It is therefore still possible for them to remove the bonus armor from our PvP gear. However then they would have to do that with every class, and hardcore PvP people might complain seeing as s4 is still in progress. I wouldn't mind if they skipped removing the bonus armor from s4 since I unfortunately I never got t6 helm/chest and have to use s4 anyways.

I suppose WoltK/the partial live patch changes are certainly more useful than yet another rehash of armor vs agi on brutallus.

I would be very interested to know (lacking any interest in beta myself) what changes I'll have to be dealing with before I quit at the expansion.

It is changed because the whole system is changing from a subtraction off base (like how FF works) to a % of total remaining armor. Buff against high armor targets, nerf against low armor targets.

To get Armor penetration rating values divide by 7 (350 flat rate on Stanchion goes to 50 rating).

At 80, 1 armor pen rating = 0.065 % (50 rating gives 3.25%, 3.25 / 50 = 0.065)

May be slightly rough work if they change stats (know they did a little on t6 but I'm guessing thats only from the bonus armor???)

I'm sorry if this has been asked before, but I couldn't find an answer with the search function. Does Primal Tenacity or the 5% stun resistance meta gem help with Sathrovarr the Corruptor's corrupting strike stun? I was wondering if the talent would be worth getting for Kalecgos.

In regards to the Thunderheart Harness nerfs, there needs to be more compensation for the loss of tanking stats. I for one have passed a lot of sunwell dps gear to the full time dpsers, and have been content with my t6 for tanking. But we're getting a severe feral t6 armor nerf with no bonus to agility, and then also getting a agi/dodge nerf too?? How is this acceptable? Warhammer is looking better and better imo.

I, also, have never resisted the Corrupting Strike stun even with Primal Tenacity and the metagem--I don't think it can be resisted--which is why I have a macro to barkskin and pop a free action pot before I taunt the demon.

Rawr Beta 16.1 posted!

DOWNLOAD: Rawr b16.1

This beta contains one new model, Rawr.Rogue! Let us know how it works. Additionally, this is expected to be our last version of Rawr aimed at WoW 2.x; all future Rawr development will focus on WoW 3.0, and WotLK. If you have any suggestions/requests for features/fixes in the new version of Rawr, now is the time to let us know! Post on our development site, Rawr - Home.

Beta 16.1:
- The beginnings of user-controlled item filtering is in. Let me stress that this is just the beginning. Currently it's hidden away in a menu item (Tools>Refine Relevant Items...), and only supports the most basic filtering by item type (Leather vs Mail, Maces vs Swords, etc.). In the future, we expect to expand upon this greatly, by allowing all kinds of filters (such as by source, by item level, etc), and will be making the UI to control this more intuitive. Please post on our development site, let us know what sort of filters you'd like to be able to create
- More improvements to the performance and accuracy of the Optimizer
- The Add Item dialog now accepts whole links to wowhead or thottbot
- Added Flame Armor Kits, Arcane Armor Kits, and Lesser Arcanums of Resilience to the default enchant list

I've been using the Stanchion Kalecgos up to K'J reflections (Yes, I tank them all) and seems to work fine, haven't had any issues with 30k armor raid buffed, but I do switch to BoT armor trinket once in a while if the healers are failing.

You may not agree with me, but I feel pretty safe with 30k armor and not to mention I run high amount of dodge and my raid group is always resto shaman (GoA) + 3x hunters every night. Yes, I am not armor capped but I've been running 30k armor over the last 2-3 months in BT/SWP and haven't had any issues. I do sit around 37k armor with Inspiration for most part while main tanking bosses, which is pretty much all I need and my threat's amazing to begin with. Also, I love stacking the expertise, it's awesome not missing a single mangle on a boss fight.

My goal's to push over 50-51% dodge unbuffed, hopefully I get the shoulders (Twins), legs (Felmyst), and chest (M'uru) from SWP since those three items will bump my dodge by a lot and I am mostly gemmed out with agi.


Also, if any one wants to compare Brutallus WWS - Wow Web Stats
You can see my current tanking gear in the armory.

Has anyone suggested converting extra armor to dodge, expertise, hit or crit depending on the piece instead of tacking the stats onto an already expensively itemized stat? 70 armor may only translate to 7 dodge rating, but that's still better than only getting 1 str. Heck, they might as well do away with the intellect on the pve gear while the're at it and spread those freed up itemization points across the aforementioned stats.

"The report #oxxsd4nakxpig has been deleted by its owner."

Agreeing with you though - I've started running with Stanchion for every fight (that I tank - which means Kalec, Brut and M'uru mainly) in Sunwell. For Brutallus I switch to Wildfury before Stomps. My mitigation is pretty good considering Sunwell Radiance - WWS from yesterday shows 49.2% dodge. If you compare it to the prot warriors' avoidance, the healers were happy when I tanked. (My Armory probably shows healing gear right now, but I have agi gems everywhere possible, and full T6 with Felmyst pants and Twins shoulders)

Question for Astrylian - figured this would be as good a place as any to ask it - any chance of implementing the JC BoP gems into Rawr? The difference isn't much, but there is a difference.

After a few months break from WoW I came back to my feral and have discovered that the whole UI / control system that i used to use for tanking feels really clunky and horrible to me now...

It seems like an oppurtunity to review the way I do things to learn and improve. I stopped raiding after we killed Illidan so what i'm talking about is primarily for 10man / heroic type tanking with multi-mob packs e.g. Lynx packs in ZA - 4+ pulls anywhere...

What I used to use:
- Floating nameplaces (modified with aloft to get rid of the fussy borders etc.)
- Macros on my hotbar for Mangle, Lacerate and Swipe - that used [target=mouseover] to allow me to drop abilities on off-target mobs as needed.
- the routine being pretty much - pull, swipe a couple of time to get initial agro - target the DPSed mob and spam maul - use the mouse over stuff to spread swipes, lacerates and mangles around to the off-targets.

Problems that i find with it now...
- the floating health bars jump around a fair bit in largeish groups and its hard to keep track of what you have hit and what you haven't generated threat on for a while.
- movement - the above works pretty well once things have settled down but when moving a pack or chasing down "loose" mobs its often more of a pain than a help

I talked to a couple of the best warrior tanks I know about this, their methods primarily being - tab, cleave+devastate, tab etc. Most also noted that TAB targeting is pretty annoying as it has a tendancy to wander off onto distant mobs, especially in paces with multiple levels. This works pretty well for them due to the fact that most tank with a 1.5(ish) speed weapon that sync's their "on next attack" with the GCD of devastate. I know how to applicable that is to druid as you can't really wait for 2.5 sec for maul to "fire" on a target before moving on to the next.

Is it just a question of getting used to it again or am i missing any tricks here? (no 4pcT6 for 15% extra swipe damage btw).