You're close to defense cap, which is good, and also explains your low stam. The easiest way to fix a stam deficiency is through your trinket slots - frankly, your trinkets are terrible.

Essence of Gossamer plus either a Jewelcrafting or Engineering trinket would make up a ton of health.

You could also look at running heroic MGT since it's so easy mode at 80 to try to pick up a Commendation of Kael'thas. Mostly due to bad luck, can't get a Gossamer to drop, and since prot has become offspec to me I'm still using that.

I doubt the poster with 19k could solo MGT, and it would be tough to find other people to run it.

He could get Alchemy for the 75 stamina/50 dodge trinket. JC is the best method though, but pricey.


One could also run some PvP, while resilience isn't ideal it helps one reach the crit cap and the high stamina and armor is useful. The best piece is the belt (one socket + buyable socket) to get defense and/or stamina.

The poster should also have little trouble even with only 19k health running the regular level 78-80 instances, and replacing most of the level 74-77 items with 80 blues will help quite a bit. Then transition into the easier heroics, and before you know you'll be in the mid-25k range.

And what everyone else said about enchants, professions, etc.

There's also the titansteel helm, Daunting Legguards + Handguards, Sons of Hodir shoulder enchant, +20 defense shield enchant and a defense trinket from Normal Halls of Lightning that don't require setting foot in a heroic dungeon.

IMO, the chest and boots from Wyrmrest accord are pretty good - I'd make that my first priority, followed by finishing up Revered with Argent Crusade for the helm enchant.

Ring of Earthen Might and Titanium Earthguard ring will provide more stamina and avoidance than your green rings.

If you don't want JC, Alchemy or Engineering, your trinket options will be fairly limited until you hit heroics, but Seal of the Pantheon is from normal HoL, and Essence of Gossamer, Lavanthor's Talisman, and Offering of Sacrifice are available from heroics once you get to 21-22k hp.

I'm having a little trouble writing this, I was using the skeleton of a Hunter's /petattack macro for totem smashing but I wasn't able to get the results I was looking for (it actually did nothing sadly).

But basically, I'm looking for something that'll target and use HoR on: Grounding Totem, Earthbind Totem, Mana Tide/Spring, Flametongue, and Searing Totem.

I'm not sure if anything suggested will work, but given the following blue post found on MMO Champion today don't expect anything that works to last long...

Source: We don't like totem stomping macros. Destroying a totem should be a choice and require at least a modicum of player attention. That is one of the main differences between totems and other types of spells and we don't want everyone to just opt out of that difference.

It makes sense really. Mobs have to deliberately target totems to destroy them in PvE. It would only makes sense that Blizzard would do what they can to prevent "automation" of totem destruction in PvP as well.

Hello,

I just tried out Rawr for the first time in order to play around with the gear I have and attainable upgrades. However, I noticed that the avoidance values Rawr provides are different to the ones Tankpoints displays ingame. Particularly Rawr gives me quite lower dodge and slightly higher miss.

I assume both addons calculate diminishing returns differently? Which one is "right"? (I mostly ask because according to Rawr, my block-capped gear set is not block-capped afterall).

It plain stupid if they block macro for totem, with the introduction of the new target mechanics of some patch ago is insane hard to target something on screen because now you get too much hit box overlapping, and random behaviour, i want the old system back more fast and easy to target.
And still if they don't fix the health bars to distribute and move less on screen, this fix is only a complete buff for shaman, they can spam totem in a low area and they are completely impossible to target in a 1-2sec span, because health bar text and hit box overlap make it impossible to get the target you want fast !

Likely correct. Tankpoints does DR very well, and I have no idea if Rawr does. I decided Tankpoints works best for me to pick Prot gear.

From the Protection thread it appears that block rating does not suffer from diminishing returns in the way that dodge and parry do. Is there some value at which additional block value becomes useless? I assume it's at 40% block; at which point Redoubt + Holy Shield gives you a 100% chance to block, but it could be the case that with the way the combat table works this is overkill.

Loot Rank for WotLK

You should be able to simplify this to:

#showtooltip Hand of Reckoning
/tar Earthbind
/tar Disease Cleanse
/tar Searing
/tar Grounding
/tar Mana Tide
/cast [harm, exists] Hand of Reckoning
/targetlasttarget

allowing you to not have to lose your focus target.
Don't quote me on this, just remember it from our old entropius macros.

The standard answer is:

Betrayer > Jawbone > Cryptfiend > Death's Bite > Inevitable D. for the top 5, however I recommend you download Rawr and check against your own stats.

And a question of my own, I've noticed armor penetration isn't displaying properly on Armory. Is this a fault of armory, or is there some sort of bug with ArPen that I haven't heard of?

If two or more of those totems existed, wouldn't your macro destroy the last one it finds, then retarget the second-to-last one you targeted?

It would, but that sounds like a good thing in this case, since totems are evil and must be stomped.

Mrmmm, a lot of it comes down to what you're tanking. For bosses, redoubt will not have 100% uptime, and therefore cannot be relied upon. Holy shield will, however (assuming a single boss, hitting at normal speed). The whole point with block rating is reliability. You want to guarantee that you'll shave an extra 1.5-2k off every swing from the boss. The way to do that is to have 72.4% combined miss+parry+dodge+block, and maintain 100% holy shield uptime. Redoubt in these situations is effectively useless, apart from the extra BV it grants (which is significant).

If you're tanking large groups of adds (Sarth + drakes is one of the best examples of this), then holy shield will not have 100% uptime, and although redoubt's uptime will be increased, again it's very unlikely that you'll get to 100%. In these situations, block rating that goes beyond 72.4% is useful, especially in situations where you have a very large number of mobs hitting for a relatively low amount.

To answer your question, your standard "boss tank" gear should have no more than 72.4% combined miss+parry+dodge+block, or 102.4% with holy shield up. How much block rating this amounts to will of course depend on your defense / parry / dodge ratings. For tanking a single boss, there is no advantage to stacking block rating beyond this point. It is, however, worth keeping pieces with high block rating on them in order to use on fights where your holy shield is likely to be eaten before you can refresh it.

Looking at your gear, with some rough addition, it looks like you're at about ~73% combined miss/dodge/parry/block, which means that any additional block rating will likely be "wasted" on most fights. If you do decide to replace pieces of your gear (shoulders for 4 piece, for instance), then keep the old ones in the bank in case you need to tank large groups of small mobs!

At the moment, I maintain a defense of 531 instead of 540, due to the fact that I religiously, without fail, 100% of the time, eat an elixir of mighty defense and a guru elixir before entering battle in a raid. This naturally enough takes me to the 540 crit cap for all fights.

however i was recently made aware of Elixir of Protection and was wondering if it was better than an elixir of mighty defense.

Armor has always been a tricky thing for me to wrap my head around in terms of exactly how useful it is compared to other stats.

At the moment, i use the 45 defense rating that elixir of mighty defense gives me to gem an additional 67-68 stamina into my gear.

The question I suppose then is "Is 800 armor better than 78 stamina" [with pally talents, the previous 68 stamina turns into roughly 78 stamina]

Armour and stam are apples and oranges. They both contribute to effective health vs melee damage, but stamina also contributes to effective health vs magic damage. Armour mitigates damage, reducing the strain on your healers, while stamina simply gives them a higher health pool to top up. Their respective values will vary based on your other stats. If you're looking to increase your effective health vs melee damage then I'd recommend plugging your stats into an EH calc (TankSpot - Calculator) to see which will be more beneficial for you.

Which is "better" will depend on the fight. Armour is great vs Patchwerk but useless vs elementals on Sartharion, for instance. What you want to aim for is the flexibility to change your gear / consumables to suit the encounter. Ideally this would not include regemming, which could get expensive. If I were you I'd drop the stam gems, hit the def cap naturally, and if you're still looking for more health, use Stoneblood. On the other hand, if you want to max your avoidance you could use agi + def elixirs, or str + armour if you want to max your mitigation of physical damage. Trinkets are a great thing to have to swap in and out to tweak stats as well.

Ultimately I think it's worth going for 540 defense anyway, as a pure precaution. Who knows when you may die during a phase transition, be battle ressed, then realise you've run out of the elixirs? It's a long shot but it's not worth taking those risks as a tank.

Isn't stoneblood absolutely terrible though?
Guru + any guardian elixir i'm pretty sure is better than stoneblood. (Mainly because its Health instead of Stam so it doesnt get any bonuses from our talents (nor does our sp get increased by it))

Worst case scenario is what you describe with what I do of course, but I quite honestly never see it happening (i'm an engineer with a MOLEE and never enter battle without at least a back up guru and defense elixir. And if I die twice and need to be rezzed twice in a single battle, something is going terribly wrong to begin with and its probably a wipe

I was just curious as to what kind of ... numbers I suppose... an elixir of armor translates into.

1 Defense rating, for example, I can equate to 1.5 stamina, but when it comes to armor I'm just a little stumped. If it helps at all to see what gear I'm wearing (I'm reasonably sure it shouldn't make a difference, because i think the coefficient of mitigated damage stays the same no matter if you're increasing your armor from 20000 to 20800 or if you're increasing your armor from 28000 to28800. Again, not positive on that, but I vaguely remember reading it somewhere)

Also, on a side note, if i were to gem to defense cap 540 (replacing 67 stamina worth of gems into 45 defense rating) and then eat a stoneblood flask (650? hp), I would actually have less hp than if I were to have my current setup and have nothing but a mighty defense elixir on me. (Just because the Mighty Defense elixir is that OP)

This is probably a dumb question also, but...
Has anyone looked into how strong an elixir (or maybe its a flask) of resistance is in comparison to other elixirs?
Sarth 3d is heavy on magic damage I've noticed, and I wonder if perhaps instead of an armor pot I would be better off taking a resistance pot (since I 'believe' the main source of incoming damage I'm taking during that fight is fire damage off of the fire elementals [I'm the whelp/elemental tank]).

Thanks for replying though, I really appreciate the feedback!

Going by item budget equivalence, I believe 1 rating is equal to 14 armour.

Firstly, yes Stoneblood is pretty bad. But if you absolutely need as much health as possible, then it's the only option.

Secondly, you can't evaluate tanking stats based purely on item budget. There will be situations where armour is 100% useless. There will also be situations where health beyond a certain point is better spent elsewhere. You need to be able to evaluate the encounter and your current gear to decide what's best.

Thirdly, armour has a constant effect on time-to-live, but the % amount of damage mitigated will decrease as your armour value increases (ie 1000 armour will mitigate more damage for a clothie than a tank).

Regarding stoneblood + def gems vs stam gems + def elixir, yes you will have more health with the elixir, but you'll also lose the ability to stack avoidance. If you're tanking Sartharion with drakes up, then you'll have a special set of frost res gear anyway, otherwise there's no real "need" to go past a certain level of stamina. It's all completely subjective, and factor like the encounter mechanics and how strong your healers are will outweigh any general 'rules of thumb' that can given.

For add tanking on Sarth, personally I used defense + agi elixirs, to make avoidance to help keep holy shield up as long as possible. I don't really value resistance too highly on that fight.

Bottom line is you'll never be able to simply say "X is better than Y". It's better to have a thorough understanding of which you should focus on for a particular encounter. There are plenty of tools and tables and graphs and calcs which can help you figure out the exact values, if that's what you're looking for. I'd recommend perusing tankspot forums for that.