My post has nothing to do with anything you've posted, and neither of your points are related to my post. I was responding to Kalbear's statement that taunt sets your threat to 110% of the person you're taunting from.

Now that you say, the way I did post seems a little strange even for me. Anyway, I just wanted to give further explanation of the mechanics, and took your post as baseline. Sorry for the mess up.

That is not true. Taunt (and Growl) sets your threat to match the top threat in the mob's threat list, regardless of if that person has aggro or not. In addition it forces the mob to attack you for the next 3 seconds. After those 3 seconds anyone can get aggro provided that they gain 110%/130% of your threat.

In your first scenario:

DPS has 105k threat.
Tank1 has 100k (and is being attacked).
Tank2 has 80k threat.

Tank3's Taunt goes off, now we have:
DPS has 105k threat.
Tank2 has 105k threat (and is now being attacked).
Tank1 has 100k threat(and is not being attacked anymore).

You can use taunt as a threat generating ability every time you are tanking and somebody has more threat than you do.

Taunt - wowwiki.com.

So is the Growl tooltip wrong (read carefully), or should that be amended to say:

@Gurrshael, about my examples, I could be wrong, but I'm almost sure I'm correct. I can't test it now, so if anyone could provide any tests on that, I would be grateful, otherwise I stand on my point.
My statement comes from the basics that if the mob is on you, taunt has no effect(doesn't change your threat or whatever), but thats because it just mirrors the threat of whoever the boss is attacking. So, if it really mirrors, my example is true, and you'll get just the 100k after taunting.
IF it worked the way you're describing, you would be able tobe tanking a boss and taunt from a ranged dps thats at 125% threat(didn't aggroed yet) and go to 125% threat, really making the tanks life way easier, because building threat won't be a real problem. Sadly, this is not the way it works.

Just so that no one is confused, this is how Taunt works:

General Taunt Mechanics Guide/Discussion - TankSpot

@Gurrshael:

This is a common misconception. If you are the current aggro target, regardless of threat numbers. Growl does not increase your threat in any way. The only effect which occurs when you taunt a target whilst you are the current aggro target is forcing them to attack you for x seconds.

As is stated by the tooltip, you gain no threat if the target is already attacking you.

Thanks for the link to tankspot. That makes sense now, and means that Negoveio's first post would actually work (but would be living quite dangerously for that lock heh).

Not really because we found Hodir is kinda slow, like, he turns to the lock, stops for 1-2 seconds, and then starts walking towards him. Hodir doesn't even get halfway to the lock if you're on GCD, and if you do it fast enough he won't even move from his position.
Yeah, the lock died sometimes, props to him stacking on the same spot as me for the flash freezee(and thus being on meelee range, with the 110% threat aggro), but thats not my fault at all.
Now even the DK and the Warrior tank on my guild started doing this, but yeah, you need to be sure your taunt will land(Glyph of Growling helps a lot).
Also, notice that this allows your raid DPS to go all out, we had to reeducate ours, because they didn't wanted to risk dieing.

Well Anub is open for discussion now. I've been main tanking him and we're very close to a kill now, consistently getting to low single figure %s. I didn't really change my gear for him. I have 55.5k hp raid buffed and it seems to do okay, but my gear isn’t great as I’ve missed a lot of non-anub raids recently. I die occasionally if the DPS war lets imp demo shout drop at a bad time and occasionally in P3 but that is usually due to other issues causing healers to have to over compensate elsewhere.

I’ve talked with other druids in high end guilds over the last few weeks, those that have killed it and those that have just started him. There seems to be 3 gearing choices people use:

1) Avoidance: I personally don’t think this is a viable method. He can burst pretty damn high if you get unlucky so losing a decent chunk of health for avoidance is always risky. Sure you take less damage from Locust Swarm ticks and heal him less but you’re a lot more susceptible to a nasty melee/iceslash/locust combo that will blow you up. I personally would stay away from this. If you’re running some tank priority and have near BiS you may be able to pull off a decent mix of avoidance/stam and be able to prevent the above combo, more power to you.
2) Stam/normal: This is the gearing I’ve been leaning towards, just going with your normal gear. I guess it depends how geared you are you could have almost 10k more hp than I run with in normal gear so it is tough to say, at that point it might be worth subbing out some stam for avoidance. But I’d say 55k at least max if not a little too much HP. Armor also deserves a shout here in that it is usually traded for Stam (keeping stam from creeping too high) and it will still reduce damage whilst Frozen. If I get more gear and that HP starts to creep up I’ll sup in more avoidance or possibly:
3) Nature res/stam: I’ve talked to a couple of guys that use this and they swear by it. The obvious idea is with a little effort you can get quite a hefty chunk of nature resistance on your gear. This really relies on you being a leatherworker though for the bracers enchant, but with Bracers Enchant + Ring of Binding 25 + Nature Res Helm enchant + Cloak + Flask + Totem you can get around 300 nature resistance. You are just below the level to knock off 20% resists but the vast majority of ticks will resist 30% of the damage.

The only thing that really stopped me doing this is I felt my gear wasn’t good enough to sustain the stat drop elsewhere, as well as not being a LW. I still may reroll LW this week if we’re still struggling with that last % or 2 because it is a significant amount of healing reduction. If you have everything you’re going to be doing around 200k-300k less healing to anub’arak, the variation depending on your guilds DPS time and your max HP. That is an insane amount as those who have tried it know. The other benefit of this is that it reduces the 1 shot factor in P3 in two ways. First by reducing your total HP, making each tick lower damage, and secondly by reliably reducing each tick from the resistance. These two factors more than compensate the drop in HP.

It really depends on your guilds method and tactics and more importantly what aspect you are failing on, but if you have a decent amount of ToC normal and hard gear and can sustain decent enough armour/HP to survive his normal attacks, I think the NR is the best method.

If you are tanking as a feral on Anub I can't see any reason not to gear for stamina + NR. Realistically the only way you can die is from getting hit by Swarm + melee + Freezing Slash all within 1 second. Two of those attacks can't be dodged, so avoidance is pretty weak. Nature resist aura/totem + cloak enchant + head enchant + [Lesser Flask of Resistance] provides enough resist to eliminate 10% resists without being LW. This also reduces your overall damage intake the most, since Leeching Swarm will be a larger source of damage than melee attacks and you can reduce it by ~12.5% on average while giving up only 22 agi, 20 defense, and about 2k hp. If you do happen to be LW the bracer enchant will reduce your average Leech damage by almost another 9%, in exchange for another 2k hp. This will drastically reduce the healing you do to Anub while also giving you more survivability.

The 2P Bonus tells me that Blizzard doesn't understand how Lacerate threat works. Currently it's good for damage and threat, with 2t10, swipe will beat it on single target in both respects.

I appreciate that they're giving all tanks another defensive cooldown, though warriors getting the weakest one, while paladins (unarguably the strongest tanks atm) get the best one (due to uptime, not effect)

This brings up some interesting threat calculations.

Imp Mangle (3/3) + KotJ (2/3) vs MS

I think some better people then me can work that one out.

If I'm reading the paladin 4p bonus correctly they only get the bonus for 10 seconds after activating Divine Plea, it is not active whenever Divine Plea is up. Which would make it the worst bonus by far. The warrior one isn't all that weak either - they'll be at about 55k hp, giving them a 11k shield. A druid or dk tank would need to take about 91.5k damage to reduce the same total amount of damage. It will be stronger for surviving whatever Plasma Blast/Big Bang/Fusion Punch abilities show up in ICC, but weaker as a general damage reducer. That's pretty balanced, with paladins likely getting a weaker ability intentionally since they are (or at least are perceived as) the strongest tanks right now.

As for our 2p bonus, a 5-stack of Lacerate will still be superior damage to pure Swiping. Threat may be another story, I'll have to do some math to figure that out.

Actually since they will already have more than 50% avoidance and then dodge 12% more, they will take 25% less damage for the duration. I do love the druid 4 piece bonus, but it is the worst of the 4 tanking classes tied with death knight.

Yes, but that only applies to melee swings while the tank is capable of dodging. If the tank is stunned or facing a non-dodgeable attack the bonus is completely worthless, while the warrior/druid/dk 4p bonuses will always work. Also, you can only say it reduces X% damage in the long term. Over the short term it has no guaranteed usefulness at all, since bad RNG will cause you to take exactly the same amount of damage as if you didn't have the bonus. I suppose I was a bit harsh in calling the paladin 4p the outright weakest of the lot, but it's the last one I would take.

for any of you tanks using nature resist for the anub arak fight, would there be any way of posting or pming me the reports of fights where you dont use nature resist vs fights where you used nature resist? I would like to see some actual numbers before i try something that could be quite expensive.....

thanks in advance, btw, this is for my druid tank Sonemen (Stonemaul, US)

I can't help you out here with any info on nature resist, but might I suggest trying to add in a little armor to your set? Equipping [Glyph of Indomitability] made Anub'arak a breeze the first time I killed him in ToGC-10. Best of luck to you.

It's not particularly expensive unless you're powerleveling leatherworking. The only NR gear I used was the cloak, helm, and bracer enchants along with a [Lesser Flask of Resistance]

At the very least the helm and cloak enchants are no-brainers given that they don't reduce your health more than a skosh and they're basically replacing avoidance for resistance.

I think all our logs are private unfortunately. It made a decent improvement anyway:

Before hand I used Glyph of Indomitably and Heart of Iron.

NR gear changes:
[Defender's Code] in for Juggernauts Vitality
[Scroll of Enchant Cloak - Superior Nature Resistance] 20
[Arcanum of Toxic Warding] 25
[Signified Ring of Binding] 30
[Runed Ring of Binding] 25
[Lesser Flask of Resistance] 50
Plus NR aura = 280 nature resistance.


Rough differences between best pre-NR and best post-NR (kill). The HP was about 56k before, and about 53k afterwards. The gap would have been greater but I got a couple of good upgrades on the run up to Anub which lessened it.

No NR / With NR
Avg damage:
Melee: 17589.6 / 15092.6 (due to massive armour increase from trinket + rings)
Leeching Swarm: 8645.9 / 7113.6
Freezing Slash: 11078.0 / 12233.0 (as I understand this is not reduced by armour/spell resist)
Leeching Swarm Healing: 11226.0 / 9418.3

Our kill lasted 9 minutes 15 seconds and our best try before NR I was comparing it too was 7:39. We use 3 tanks and 5 healers.

Any more info you think pertinent I can pull it off the reports, just let me know.

Dropping your health for NR is an immensely good thing on Anub. Assume a 50k HP tank with PotP and Grace, you're taking 12804 hits from Leeching Swarm NR Aura/Totem guarantees at least 10% resist so you're down to 11523. If you can get another 89 NR this drops to 10243 as the maximum tic, Cloak, Helm, and Flask total up to 95 NR at the cost of 20 Def 22 Agi and 1414 HP (assuming non-alchemist) Ironically, the HP drop reduces the damage you take as well, down to 9954 as the largest tic.

A side effect of the Flask is that you'll also take a bit less damage (7% on average, but you'll still see 10% resist hits) from the Freezing Slash Alchemists are fortunate in this regard, as they'll almost completely eliminate 10% resist and mostly see 20%-40% resists on the Slash because of the Flask, which gives them 82 resist all with Mixology. I am assuming the slash can be resisted, which I'm not absolutely certain of.

Leatherworkers and Alchemists can get even greater NR, at the cost of more HP. Without any specific Resist items, a LW/Alch could get 327 NR, and such a person lucky enough to get the [Signified Ring of Binding] would get 357 and break the 30% Minimum Resist threshold (340) While you're dropping a lot of HP to do this (3402), assuming you'd otherwise have 50k hp (thus 46598 now) the biggest tic you'll see is 8353, only 17.93% of your HP, compared to 23.05% without any NR except totem

I would also like to point out .that since the damage is constant and you aren't trying to prevent a 1-shot, every point of NR increases your average resistance, so even if you can't reach the 20% or 30% minimum thresholds, more NR will decrease the DPS you take from the Swarm, and thus will decrease the amount that Anub'arak heals (top healers on the meters are often the MT and OT, all from healing Anub).

Freezing Slash is listed as Froststrike damage, and cannot be resisted in any way in my experience. It's also unaffected by armor.