Najtrok

While I am just a 2nd Spec-Tank, I am also Raid-Leader and Ex-Healer and in my opinion such things as DC:G would suck on this encounter. It is something you can not rely on. Your healers will be spamming heals any way. And it is just: Does it heal oder does it overheal. What is needed is constant mitigation and nature resist (for this fight).
Anub is one of the perfect examples: You can't stop healing anyway, so if you dodge its just overheal. Surely you want dodge, because by a decent amount you reduce the chance of unlucky streaks, which combined with healers unlucky streaks or mini lags, may lead so death.
But I really am not a fan of those dodge trinkets just for such bosses where they never stop healing anyway. Take some good Armor procs (this is, while up, guaranteed reduction). Keep in mind, that a "dodge proc" just means: "Your chance to dodge increased" but you may still get hit, while armor guarantees this redcution.
This is what I learned from Algalon 10, back when we first killed him. I find the thoughts on this topic are somewhat handled like dodge=direct mitigation.

 

Negoveio

@ MooJuicy
For trinkets, go with Indomitability + Greatness. It's probably the best mitigation combo and it also helps with threat.

Some things I noticed:
Since you get frozen after the slash, your threat will be a mess, and depending on the strat you're using and on your setup(not enough MDs and Tricks) you'll have problems. 2T9 will help you with that, since it gives you 5% more damage on Lacerate, and it's the only threat you're generating while frozen.

5 points in Feral Agression help a lot if you don't have someone to provide this for you. If you're taking this, you're better of leaving ferocity alone and getting master shapeshifter, you'll have plenty of rage to spend.

Imp Lotp is too random to account for on phase 3, and will prolly just give worthless/bad timed heals to your meelee, making the boss leech more.

Stamina is a non-issue. I think the "insta-gib" point is around 45k. I'm running with 49k(after I take Commanding and Fortitude out for phase 3) and didn't had any problems yet.

Nature Resistance > Armor > Avoidance Stats > Threat Stats > Stamina. Mitigate whatever you can.

You have 3 things to do once phase 3 begins:
->Take out Fortitude and Commanding Shout. (If you don't get into the insta-gib area, this will help you with the incoming damage).
->Use barkskin and trinkets.
->Pop an armor potion.
This will smooth the transition for your healers.

@Najtrok
Remeber Greatness is giving you a fixed amount of Armor + Dodge + Threat + More savage defense procs, and a proc of all those too. Saying it's just dodge is overlooking it.
Sure, another armor trinket(Defender's Code) can be better depending on the rest of your gear, but it won't beat it by far.

 

Inaiwae

I dont think DC:G is a good choice for Anub. The most risky part (or maybe, the only risky part) is freezing slash + melee hit + leeching swarm tick, and DC:G does nothing against this.

My choice would be Glyph of Indomitability and either Defender's Code or The Black Heart.

 

Negoveio

After some calcs, I have to agree with you guys.
For mitigation, Indomitability is a no brainer, and Defenders Code would fit the second slot better than anything else.
The Black Heart, for me, has too much unwanted stamina, but would be the choice for those who doesn't have Defenders Code.

In the end, it's all about knowing what you lack, and what would be better. I'll still use Greatness, since I'm not getting close to death on P3, and since my main problem right now is the threat(lack of rogues and hunters).

 

• Daboran

@Moojuicy


Seriously, I don't know any current encounter that requires you to put sta gems in every slot you have - it seems to me you are trying to compensate for bad healers or something?

I'd advise to start using agi and agi/sta gems - it's not just dodge, its also armor and crit which procs Savage Defense for you and adds threat. Using them in a smart way will open up a lot of the socket bonuses for you giving you a net gain in stats.


Having that amount of stamina will definitely hurt you in Anub P3. Trade it for armor and nature resistance. We have our best try at 10% and hoping for a kill this week - I'm still looking for ways to reduce my buffed stamina in favour of mitigation. At present I start the fight with about 48k.

 

MooJuicy

You are right in saying that their is no current encounter that requires you to have that much raw stamina and to be honest probably no encounter in icecrown either... I hope.

The reason why I started stacking stamina in favour of any other stat is that when i joined my current guild we were on Beasts 25hm as our current progress encounter. At the time we were having DPS issues and experimenting with 2 tank and 3 tank tactics to find which worked best for us. As you know Gormock is an RNG monster and with a 2 tank tactic he can RNG hit 55k.

Why i continue to stack stamina. Until recently we've been having problems with getting a stable core of tanks and healers for hard modes and one of the issues was healers which have either been new, inexperienced or under geared. So i continued to stack stamina to create the the largest pool of effective health as i can while taking predictable as predictable an amount of damage possible. as for armor and dodge, i currently have ~40% dodge and ~30k armor unbuffed, i view this as being enough for most current content. Bliz really didn't plan for the current amount of raw stats available on gear and fighting DR is an up hill battle.

What stats I'll go for when ICC comes out. Well I'll probably regem/enchant and balance my gear for 50% dodge unbuffed, giving 30% with ICR while still maintaining a certain minimum HP threshold.

 

Rannasha

There is nothing RNG about Gormok. Impale hits are on a fixed timer, Impale DoT ticks as well. Both are unavoidable. The third component to Gormoks burst damage is an auto-attack and it has a high enough chance to hit that you have to plan for it coinciding with Impale + DoT tick. Since Gormok doesn't parry-haste anymore, it's all very predictable and completely non-random.

 

MooJuicy

I'm sorry but taking but when 2 high damage things on independant "swing timers," for lack of a better term, hit you at the same time thats what i understand to be an RNG hit. Yes, you are right it is all very predictable now that he doesn't get parry-haste, but the time period i was reffering to was prenerf. i will try to be more specific in future.

 

Mielikinna

My group has found with 2 tanks on gormok, you of course stack to 4 impales, a couple of seconds before the 4th impale, blow your defensive cooldown - barkskin, shield wall, whatever. Makes it surviveable with space and gives your other tank some time to taunt off you.

Tanks in my group run about 52-53k raid buffed HP, more than that is too much in my opinion.

 

Blazefire

The spikes come from impale plus melee at roughly the same time and thats very easy to counter with cooldowns. Since impales are on a fixed timer, the second tank in the rotation can/should start using cooldowns proactively as impales land, to counteract worstcase scenario of impale/melee hits.

 

kalbear

Having more stamina allows for less that perfect play to be viable. For instance, having 55-58k health allows a druid to survive a 5th impale, which is common when taunts resist or a tank is dumb.

Whereas the agility that you get does almost nothing there for you; it doesn't help with perfect play or the worst case scenario, only affects threat to a minor level, and in general will not be noticeable by the majority of your healers.

Furthermore, bears get more out of stamina than any other tanking class. They get a bit more than 16 points of health per point of stamina. This is a huge advantage; why not exploit it?

 

• Daboran

So, you're saying that putting stamina gems in EVERY slot is sensible? Why would you need 58-60k HP only to never drop below 20k for the vast majority of encounters? It's way over what you need to avoid a 2-shot scenario on all but one boss in the game.

Naturally, for some gear sets I use odd gem combinations, but gemming sensibly with agi/stam and agi/crit/hit gems opens up socket bonuses for a net gain in stats and also in some cases lets the Druid use a piece of armor for both dps and tank spec. Why wouldn't that be a good thing?

If I need more stamina there are a plethora of trinkets available - I can add 4k HP just with 2 trinket slots. Ymmv of course, I just think "Stick 30sta in every slot" is lazy gemming.

 

Negoveio

*Double post*

 

Negoveio

@Daboran
Since druids started to be "worth to have" tanks, I always gemmed full agility, didn't care about slot bonuses or anything.
Right now I'm going full stamina, and I can say I'm really happy with this. (There are exceptions like Anub, where having more stamina is not usefull)

Sure, this varies from one person to another, but at the same time you say "I have enough stamina, I'm going avoidance and threat", people may think(like me) "I have enough avoidance and threat, I'll just go stamina to save me from worst-case scenarios". I don't know, but I feel like iLvl 258 gear already gives pretty much all you need avoidance/threat-wise these days.

If you look around these forums and others, you'll notice we're already taking way less damage than other classes on normal bosses(slow, big hits) even when gemming full stamina. We already have enough threat, even gemming full stamina. So, why not just stack more stamina and give your healers more room to breath.

More stamina can also save you from unexpected things like a healer disconnect(sometimes you're focused on another things and won't notice the lack of incoming heals until the "xxxxx is offline" message, thus being unable to use a cooldown or call out for some help), and this could be saving yot life AND your Insanity/Immortality.

As for your last argument:
"If I need more stamina there are a plethora of trinkets available - I can add 4k HP just with 2 trinket slots". I also could say "If I need more threat I can just put dps trinkets on both slots, maybe even rings, neck and cloak".

Druids will work both ways, there isn't a "perfect gearing and gemming pattern". We have way different visions on what to gem and gear for, and we still do our jobs pretty well. Thats what makes me love this class.

 

Kashir

Daboran: From the perspective of healer (with a bear alt);

In 25 man raids, we don't really care all that much how much damage you take. When you have two Holy Pallies spamming Beacon + HL, you're looking at a cool 20k HPS being thrown at the tanks. It's all but impossible for tanks to die because incoming DPS > incoming HPS. (10 mans can be a different story if you don't have a Holy Pally, and where burst damage is also considerably lower)

What does kill tanks is burst damage, or healers being interrupted or making mistakes. Bears generally have enough raw EH to prevent RNG burst deaths, but you can never have too much EH to compensate for healer errors. If all goes well, you can have "enough" health. Unfortunately things don't always go well, and stamina makes for a much better mistake buffer than avoidance.

It's kinda the same argument for healer mana pools. If I have more than 0% mana left at the end of the fight, that mana was "wasted". However, since I can never accurately predict how much mana I will consume during the fight, I must always gear in anticipation of having a large reserve of mana left at the end of the encounter.

More stamina isn't always the best answer, but it's also never a bad answer, Anub'arak weird Leeching Swarm mechanics aside.

With that said, obviously your gemming is working just fine for you and your guild (wish I could say the same). It's somewhat of a testament to how flexible bears currently are.

 

Falling

With the current high-end bear tanking gear I'm sitting on 65% pure avoid raidbuffed and that's a value where dodge-streaks really start to kill your tps due to rage starvation. I gemmed entirely sta, hit/sta or exp/sta and still have problems with missing rage sometimes. I don't even want to think about what would happen if I started gemming avoid.

 

Wulfmanjack

Since some time now resilence also reduces the incoming damadge not only the incoming crit damadge or crit chance.
Does this also apply in PVE? In BC i used much resilence items for tanking to reduce critchance against me, now if the damadge reduction also works in PVE i can swap some itemsin my gear.

 

Negoveio

No, it doesn't work in PvE. If you mouseover resilience on the character panel, it will say something in the lines of "Reduces the damage you take from players by ..."

 

Hakana4155

I attempted my first 10 man H ToC last night and we weren't able to get past Gormak. Some people in the raid felt that the problem was my gear. I think the problem was actually two fold; my gear might be a little low and we were trying to two heal it. I logged out in my DPS gear last night so checking my armory will not help, but I was sitting at around 42k health, 40% dodge. Not sure what my armor was at but it is definitely over 32k. I know for a fact I need to upgrade a couple of pieces in my tank set. What would be the minimum values to run 10 man H ToC ?

 

jeydax

42k health buffed? That sounds a bit low, especially when two healing like you said (unless one of the healers is insanely geared.) When I did 10m TOTGC last week I was sitting at 51k I believe, I have no idea what my armor or dodge were at. My group was a pug as well, so take that for what is worth.

 

MiniSolomon

I'm a LW and I'm trying to decide if I should make another pair of bracers so I can have a set with whatever resist I need. Does anyone know if there's a northrend gem that does all resists like the void sphere from BC? I'm also wondering if anyone else is planning to change to their spec with the T10 set bonuses that'll turn enrage into another defensive CD.

 

Daenerys

42k sounds extremely low for ToGC10. Especially on Beasts, you're going to open yourself up to a lot of two-shot deaths. I wouldn't feel comfortable doing NRB with less than about 48k (and that's including a good base of dodge - say 40-42% unbuffed). It sounds like you're just simply undergeared for the encounter currently.

What spec change would you make based on the T10 set bonus?

 

Takryn

Unless its going to change with the patch, he's probably talking about adding King of the Jungle back in to a bear spec.

 

Silverstorm

When I started tanking ToGC 10, I was running about 47k health, not sure on the dodge. We have never two healed, always three healers, except for Anub'arak. Two healing ToGC is troublesome because of the threat snobolds pose to the healing output with only two healers, even if one is a resto druid that can't get snobolds due to forms.

80 Silvertotem - 80 Silverstorm

 

kalbear

On stamina: I'm saying that stamina gives bears an advantage other tanks do not have. If you have the option to have a bullpen of tanks, it makes sense to maximize what each tank does best and emphasize it, and then utilize those tanks on that specific emphasized fight. Since bears get so much health per stamina point relative to other tanks, it's not a bad idea at all to emphasize that.

It won't work for every fight, but it certainly helps for many.

That being said, I'm getting to the point where I'm starting to emphasize expertise over stamina in my gear simply because it's so rare in ToC gear.

On why that might not be a good thing: because a lot of times an agi/crit gem really doesn't do that much for you. If you're going to get 16 agi/10 crit (via a 6 agi bonus) vs 30 stam, you have to understand that you're trading 500 health for that extra crit - and crit isn't even that great of a threat stat. Sometimes that might be worth it - but I can't think of that many fights where I'd consider it more valuable.

Assuming the T10 gear is reasonably competitive with offtier pieces, I'd swap the points from imp mangle to KotJ. It should be a similar amount of threat on most fights with considerably more damage potential. The drawback here is that if you need to use the enrage for the mitigation, chances are you will not be using it every minute.