Ivanstone

Certainly. On the other hand if I'm at low health for an extended period of time and I use an alternative trinket such as a Scarab there is no guarantee of improvement. If I use the Scarab, it becomes unavailable to me for the next 2m45s and it provides only a little more avoidance then Evasive Maneuvers.

I'll admit I got a new toy and an evening with Mr Archimonde was the first chance to try it in a 25 man setting. On the other hand, Archimonde doesn't really play out in a cyclical manner like Az'galor does. If you put in a low situation its likely due more to randomly getting less heals due to healers being feared or running from fire. This is different then the 20+ sec silence timer Az'galor regularly enforces on the raid. I figured I'll give up 42 defense rating for 57 stamina and a chance to buff my avoidance not once per 3 minutes but 6 times per 3 minutes.

 

suicuique

I have a spare pair of T6 chest and legs gemmed with 10 dodge/5def+7 sta (to get the 6 sta set bonus on the chest), and after wearing these for some time on Brutallus I returned to using my all STA gemmed chest and legs, trading effectively about 2% avoidance for 600 HP. Though I do not trade in avoidance for STA at all cost (e.g. I do use the supremus shoulders over my sapphiron enchanted T6 shoulders, the T6 gloves over the enforcement).
Somehow there was always a worst case on a stomp when he would hit me 5-6 times in succession without me avoiding any hit. While these meager 600 HP are certainly no life saver ... they can help.
We do not taunt off the stomp, and are using a feral and me to tank with 4 MT healers. I just made it a habit to use some specials when a bad stomp is happening (e.g. when a MT healer got burn and HAS to move). And even lacking the scorpid sting (we had a serious DD draught last week, missing 3 top damage dealers so we had to maximise our DPS even at the cost of tank survivability) I found that we could reach enrage on every 2nd try if we had to.

On Kalecgos i use the avoidance gemmed T6 pieces. Though the demon certainly hurts when he stuns (or whatever he does what gets me stunned), so I'm not sure about that.

ADDENDUM: As for trinket selection e.g. on Archimonde I too prefer clicky trinkets for stress moments like fear/soul charge. Though I use Shadowmoon and Moroes which I find preferable to the Scarab.

 

Hythloday

I wrote something similar (http://wrong.nu/~james/files/ArdentDefenderTracker.zip if anyone's interested) to analyse how much mitigation a prot paladin talent provides - since the talent's triggered when health goes below 35%, it should be simple enough to extend it to keep an eye on the Commendation's health area. I'll try and find time this weekend.

 

szgeti

On our learning attempts and then our kill I wore my maximum avoidance stuff for Brutallus. T6 gloves, [Praetorian's Legguards] gemmed with 2 10 def/1 10 dodge, Al'ar cloak (with the new enchant), Teron gun, and Pocket Watch + Shadowmoon insignia. Basically I only died freakishly maybe three times over two long nights. Eventually I'd just sit waiting for the first stomp with my mouse over the Pocketwatch, and click it immediately when I saw the screen shake from Stomp. I didn't try using the Commendation because I don't have it, but frankly I prefer this approach in theory. The way I see it on that fight, during Stomp you can get hit for ~14k every 1.2 seconds. You really have to rely on luck if you're doing it with 2 tanks, and with 22k buffed health and ~47% avoidance (post-Radiance obviously) and rotating cooldowns on each Stomp (Watch then Insignia then Seed repeat) I always got lucky. I'll most likely continue gearing that way throughout Sunwell. The encounters definitely seem to favor avoidance luck. (Healer droughts on Kalecgos and then his decreasingly survivable Enrage hits, the sheer gib power of Brutallus, Felmyst's corrosion, and - I anticipate - the sheer crushing burst of the melee Twin)

 

Roobina

Szgeti, what you say somewhat contradict what I've read before regarding gearing for Brutallus but since it did work for you it does sound interesting. We killed Kalecgos at last weeks absolutely last attempt so we only got one fast wipe try at Brutallus thus I don't got any ingame experience of him at all. Right now I am gearing for top stamina, with avoidance being at sub 30% I don't find it reliable to gear for it and with healers constantly spamming it won't really help the mana either since they can never afford to cancel a heal.

Right now I am at (totally unbuffed) 18310hp, 18890armor, 26.37dodge and 21.72parry.

We are a fast progressing guild (5 Illidain kills so far) so I am lacking some BT gear, still using t5 helmet, Jungle Stompers and Shermaner Ring. The gear I intend to switch for Brutallus is :

Rifle of Stoic Watchman -> Gyro-Balanced with 15 sta gem.
Onslaught Legguards -> Praetorians with 3x15 sta gems.
Shadowmoon Insignia -> Darkmoon Vengence (usuall trinkets are Commendation + Insignia)

I haven't decided how to pot for him either, the flask do give me +250health but Fortitude + Agility gives better TPS. Anyone got input there?

 

PitiChatMignon

Regarding pots, I choose agility + 550 armor for any hard hitting boss.

If you have 24K hp and 24K armor buffed (2500 armor pot) :
- Flask = 24500 hp / 24K armor (66.74% damage reduction) => 73663 effective health
- 550 ac + 35 agility : 620 armor gain = 24000 hp / 24620 armor (67.30% damage reduction) => 73404 effective health
- 250 hp + 35 agility = 24250 hp / 24070 armor (66.81% reduction) => 73054

550 AC is always better than 250 hp for effective health.

If you really want to max out effective health the flask is better, but you lose some aggro (around 2% crit), and some dodge (10 def rating =0.5% avoidance, 35 agi (38 with bok) is more than 1%).

French cow.
Meuh !

 

Legh

Or, if you want a middle-placed solution, go for 550ac and Elixir of Mastery (+15 all stats - influenced by BoK, influenced by tauren's racial).

 

Roobina

Ok, gonna go with the elixir combination, good thing I got plenty.

How often does Brutallus stomp? Thinking about switching both trinkets to Moroes + Insignia and do like Szgeti did with a clock / insignia + seed rotation for the stomps.

 

Legh

I tank it with Insignia + Commendation of Kael'thas, it's very likely to go below 35% hp and proc the 8% dodge (and if it doesn't proc, it means you surive anyway - while if you die, it means you would have died anyway ), and the additional 570 hp are goodness to have overall the whole encounter.

My focus there is really going for the max hp/max armor possible combination - with close to infinite rage threat shouldn't be that much of an issue.

 

Roobina

Thanks for the input, prolly gonna try inbetween Insignia, Moroes and DMF card for that trinket spot and just get a feel of what's giving me the biggest edge. My guild is somewhat interested in just using two ferals so I want to make sure I prove to them that I am just as good for the job.

The fight seems very very relaxing for a tank to be honest, plenty of time to land perfect TPS rotations and attach HS to every strike.

 

• Jamor

I def. agree with you on the encounters favoring avoidance. I did some regemming for Brut, and it's made tanking Kalecgos more comfortable as well. But I was having trouble tanking Felmyst with full avoidance. Aside from Corrosion, she hits too soft for me not to run out of rage frequently. I ended up dropping a few of my new avoidance pieces and came up with a hybrid avoidance/threat set (Akama legs with 15stam X3, and Teron Gloves over avoidance gemmed T6 pieces for example). How are you dealing with that? I didn't give myself WF for the early attempts either, but ended up swapping myself in place of a hunter in the melee group and that went a long way.

I have been running Commendation and Pocket Watch for every fight in Sunwell so far. It really sucks not using Shadowmoon, but I find the use on the watch is just WAY better in relation to the Sunwell fights. Tanking up top on portal 4 for Kalec? Pop the watch. Kalec enraged? Pop the watch. Stomp on Brut? Dodge >>>> 1750 HP. Corrosion? Dodge seems to win again.

 

Legh

Guys, I would like to remind you that the Radiance of the Sunwell buff on every single mob/boss in the Plateau kinda nerfed avoidance by quite a lot. For further proof, this is my tab in our WWS report for yesterday's kill: WWS Loading... and this is my armory profile: The World of Warcraft Armory
Full buffed I am sitting around 30% dodge, and as you can see I have an average of 11% for the full raid and 9% on the kill. And I still feel like I have some lucky dodges.

Going armor mitigation/hp will give more breath to your healers @ brutallus far more than a few more attacks dodged will do, as the overall benefit on the additional mitigated/soaked damage due to your better armor/hp on every attack that will hit you will be far greater than those 2-3 more attacks you will dodge. Threat on Brutallus is not an issue, really, the only issue may be the one of dumping all the rage you generate while tanking, which is a welcome issue

On the other hand, I do use more avoidance on Kalecgos myself, as there the problem is that it may happen you don't have healers on yourself 100% of the time due to whatever reason (still commendation + insigna though, as trinkets). As for Felmyst, I simply go full threat gear there; as aggro doesn't reset between phases and you need to stay on top of your ranged dps for when she will land from her airborne phase.

We are however going kind of offtopic here, there are appropriate threads where to discuss about Kalecgos and Brutallus (and soon Felmyst, I guess) in the generic discussion forum

 

• Jamor

I disagree, we are talking about class specifcs, I'd say it has equal right to be in here. In any case, you are a Tauren, so your probably have a noticeable amount of HP than myself. Probably enough to where you can live through the worst case scenarios with about 200-600 HP. I die. So I have to gem, pot, buff, to lessen the chance for that scenario. Fully buffed, with GoA, I am sitting around 42% dodge, more with Goose procs. It seemed to even out healing a TON, vs. wearing my stamina and mitigation gear.

 

• Goatbert

Believe me, pre-Sunwell I was as big an advocate of stacking stam as anyone, until I got to Mother/Azgalor/Archimonde and realized that both ideas have their place. But for Brutallus, I geared under the "Enough HP to survive, then avoidance" benchmark. My reasoning is that I can survive a stomp/mh/oh if I get healed right away. There is no way I'm going to survive another MH/OH or a slash if I don't get healed, I'd have a really hard time stacking enough additional HP for that extra hit. So once I can survive a Stomp/MH/OH reliably, I feel I'm much better off trying to avoid what is coming and I think it is way easier on my healers if I avoid 10k swings as often as possible. As a cow, you have a much easier time stacking stam so, maybe it is different from your perspective but for my money, avoidance is where it is at on Brutallus.

 

szgeti

Even once I get a Commendation I really doubt I'll use it on Brutallus. It only really gives you a benefit if you are one step from being dead; if you're at full health when he stomps for 5k then mainhands for 9k then offhands for 4k that extra 8% dodge MIGHT save you from the next hit landing. Or you can hit the Watch with as precise timing as possible and have a 15.85% chance of not taking that 9k or 5k, and possibly keep yourself three increments from dead rather than possibly save yourself at one increment from dead.

Not that effective health should be ignored at all. I just personally feel like ~22k (cursed troll non-racials) buffed is "enough" for that fight, and it worked fine for me. As the healers get a shadowpriest and Tide and pots and are spamming nonstop anyway, gearing avoidance isn't about trying to save them from going OOM at all. Brutallus lands pairs of hits at about 7600 total non-stomp, and a round lands for about 12k-13k during stomp. Let's say you get stomped for 5600, mainhanded for 8700 and offhanded for 4000. You'd need about 27000 health to survive another MH hit at that point. If you don't avoid the mainhand hit, you will die. To take another offhand hit of the same strength, you'd need about 22,300 health total, a figure easily attainable in very high avoidance gear. By that reasoning I don't really see the point in going past about that much health, and find it much more reliable to tilt the odds in my favor. That's the other reason I'd rather have the watch over the Commendation. The passive dodge is nice.

It's nice to have streaks like this happen:
I came out at 47% of attacks avoided. I would not feel safe doing the fight with less avoidance gear, unless they lift Radiance at some point.

Threat on Kalecgos and Brutallus hasn't been an issue at all so far. Kalecgos hits just hard enough to give you enough rage (although I don't go balls-out avoidance for him). As for Brutallus, we had myself and our feral tanking, and I went first. I didn't give myself WF (took GoA instead), and no one had to hold back at any point, as pretty much from the first time he hit me I seemed to never go below 50 rage. Even if you avoid half of his round you get half to almost a full rage bar out of it. We only had some very tentative attempts on Felmyst so far, but I'm leaning towards a fair amount of avoidance there as well. Tank healing will probably be pretty restricted as we work out the gas nova/encapsulate healing, and hitting the Watch during a corrosion would be reassuring. However, I didn't really think about needing to stay ahead of the DPS they do in the air phase - with that in mind I'll probably wear my balanced threat/survival gear.

As a side note: Having a group of 3 BM hunters, your feral tank and a resto shaman is pretty nice for the druid's threat!

 

• Goatbert

Yeah it was the commendation or the Scarab of Displacement, I don't have a Shadowmoon Insignia yet. On our kill, my commendation proc'd 5 times so I'll take what I can get =)

What I need to do is write a mod that yells "HARD TO STARBOARD" when it procs (Buff is 'Evasive Maneuvers' )

 

Suesse

I'm pretty surprised to see [Fortitude of the Scourge] on Gnolie. Are others using this enchant? How do you go about convincing your guild to do Naxx?

 

• Goatbert

We only went back a couple times, during the complete lack of new content that was BT -> Sunwell. I wanted to go back more because I found it fun but people were pretty whiney. We did get Alliance first Kel'thuzad on Executus though! Better late than never? Was really excited when I saw the enchant drop.

 

galzohar

Remember being able to take an extra hit isn't the only benefit of stamina/armor, even if it doesn't let you take another hit it does let you not need as much healing to survive that hit.

Needing 27k HP to survive the burst, for example, means that with 22k HP you need >5k healing during the burst to survive, while with 23k you only need 4k healing. And by the time the next hit after that extra-long burst all the big heals in the raid will probably be landing on you. HP isn't only about having enough to take a certain amount of damage, it also helps you require less healing to bridge between the hits making it more likely that the consistent heals will be enough to keep you alive until the big reactive heals land.

 

madrussian

Forgive me if this has been asked before, can anyone point me to a discussion on the new meta gem(if there is a duscussion) Basically what Im trying to find out is at what point does the new Meta [Eternal Earthstorm Diamond] becomes better in terms of effective health than [Brutal Earthstorm Diamond]

 

Reliknom

Galzohar, while what you say is true, it is exacly where you have to consider the incoming heals. If the average inc heal on the tank is 5k, you can go with 22k HP. The healers will not change their spells based on your HP, they will use their highest sustainable heal. 23k HP is only superior in this case if the expected incoming heal is only 4k strong.

As to the meta gems, I think it was stated by someone that the new one won't be better for EH in T6, nor sunwell content, but I do not remember any detailed math to prove this. My opinion is that you should already use it on RoS if at that progression level and perhaps for all T6 fights, as they favor avoidance big time. For sunwell it's maybe a bit more complicated, I for one am waiting only on a yellow socket but all I'v got are blues and reds.

"Morituri Nolumus Mori!"

 

Amorpheus

That has been my line of thinking as well. If incoming HPS is greater than DPS of the boss anyway, avoidance is only going to influence overheal.

"You are better than I am," Inigo admitted.
"So it seems. But if that is true, then why are you smiling?"
"Because," Inigo answered, "I know something you don't know."
"And what is that?" asked the man in black.
"I'm not left-handed."

 

galzohar

Paladin FoL is at the sub-2k range, lifeblooms don't exactly tick for 5k either. So if you assume your luck is bad enough that no 2s heals (greater heals / healing waves / HLs) land during that 27k damage but will land after, then it can make or break the difference between surviving and dying if you get 2 FoLs and 2Xstacked lifebloom ticks on you. And not all healers spam 1 rank of heal for the whole fight. Especially paladins would generally FoL spam while keeping LG up so a max rank HL can be used when needed. Or even if they're HL fans for some reason they're not going to be spamming anything close to max rank HL. Even priests/shamans with GH/HW will spam some medium rank heal and when things go bad throw a max rank heal, and having more HP can help survive until that heal lands.

At the end this is just an example of many possible burst scenarios, and on each of them you can show in a similar fasion how extra HP would help you survive. While avoidance has its place for saving healer mana so they can use their big heals more sparingly (as no healer can spam his max rank heal for a full fight no matter how you look at it!), HP/armor is never wasted, you can't really have enough of it until you get to the point where even the biggest reasonable burst (by reasonable I mean one that happens often enough that you're not willing to accept a wipe every time it happens) is not difficult to heal through. And even once you reached so many HPs wether even more HPs or more avoidance will make healing easier is highly debateable.

 

• Jamor

To me, it is more of a threat type gem. I didn't look at your guilds progression, but for me, I have both T6 helm, and Illidan helm. The T6 is now part of my threat set, and has the new meta. The Illidan helm is keeping the 18 stam for now.

 

madrussian

We have been farming illidan for about 4 months now but I only recently went from DPS to MT position as our tanks quit so I only have the T6 tanking helm so far. Im not sure how accurate is the EH calculator on TankSpot but according to it the new meta is better for me EH wise if I have ~635 base block value. Just not sure how accurate that is.