The meta scales through on gear block value only (not talents, not strength). You need to see how many hits you take (assuming all blocked) before dying. At 635 block fully talented you will get around 50 block value from the meta. Stamina meta is worth 208 HP fully raid buffed. From an effective health standpoint the block meta is the best in game for T5 and early T6, by far the best for anyone currently in ZA. In those cases you will normally take 4 hits or over without dying (assuming all blocked).

This quickly changes for Mother onwards and Archimonde. Once you progress in Sunwell this meta is really not very good from a EH standpoint as your block value will drop to around 300-350 when you're fully geared, aswell as mobs hitting harder once again shortening your TTL.

Couple of things.

I gear heavily for Avoidance on Brutallus, but not the other two bosses. I'll explain my reasonings.

On Kalecgos, the damage output of the bosses isn't particularly high, but there can be some serious unavoidable burst on the demon. This is completely because of the ~9k magic damage stun that forces you to eat the next few attacks, and a possible Shadow Bolt Volley during that. Paired with healing being somewhat whimsical due to the porting nature of the fight, you may not always have several dedicated healers on you at a time, instead being just one sometimes. So, I gear for maximum stamina (without making stupid choices. I get up to 24k raid buffed HP on the fight), that way I can eat an entire volley of attacks from the demon while stunned and still come out of it alive, even if I didn't get heals during it.

Brutallus is a different story. I have a heavy avoidance set, this was a picture of my stats while tanking him the first week: ImageShack - Hosting :: avoidanceby6.jpg
You can also see I use Agi / Defense elixirs over a flask there, because I prefer to reduce the burst possibilities, which is consistent with my gearing, rather than just a bit more HP. I use a flask on Kalec/Felmyst, though.

It's a lot of avoidace/defense gems, and puts me at 21k hp raid buffed (I didn't have Kael'thas commendation trinket first week cause it didn't drop, but now I wear it over the Shadowmoon Insignia).
I gear that way because I've always known that avoidance is at its strongest when you're facing a fast-attacking mob, since the likelihood you avoid an attack is averaged out more evenly when you're taking more swings, rather than a slow-attacking boss prone to avoidance streakiness.


Now, Brutallus can also put out serious individual damage while attacking fast, pushing out 15k damage each second if you aren't avoiding attacks, during a Stomp. Noone reaches enough health to survive two attacks without heals (unless you LS), however, you can survive two seconds of no avoidance, with some heals. More health means you'll possibly need less healing during it to survive. Unfortunately, the likelihood that you'll receive the 13-15k of healing a second, for several seconds, to keep yourself alive through a bad streak of Stomp, gets less and less likely the longer it goes on. (What I mean is, it's easy for healers to all precast big heals right before a Stomp, so you get 20k of healing as soon as it hits, then when they spam recast you'll get another 15k+ 2 seconds later, but then the heals inbetween that you'd still need wont necessarily be enough. It's just not realistic to heal through 4-5+ seconds of Stomp if the tank didn't avoid anything)

Likely scenario:
1 Stomp 5500
2 MH 10k OH 5k
2.5 *heals*
3 MH 10k OH 5k
3.5 *heals, timer*
4 MH 10k OH 5k
4.5 *re-casted heals*
5 MH 10k OH 5k
5 *dead*

So, I give myself enough health to survive the normal worst-case-scenarios (stomp+2 unavoided hits, ~20k damage), and then hope my avoidance saves me the rest of the time. With Commendation, if I get hit twice in a row during stomp, I'm proccing another 8% avoidance, bringing my raid buffed avoidance up to ~62%. (This is already taking into account Sunwell Radiance) Naturally it's still very possible that I won't avoid attacks even with such high avoidance, and die. Luckily, that doesn't ever really happen, because we're getting spam healed all the same and have some type of trick to use nearly every stomp to help ease living through it. (Moroes, Seed, Last Stand)

Felmyst has standard damage and attack speed, so it's nothing special. His burst that can kill a tank comes from Corrosion (~9k), and then the +100% damage debuff you have, so then his melee hits/cleaves can hit you for 9-10k. Paired with the aura/gas nova, you can take ~33k damage in 2 seconds or so. We use an "offtank" (sometimes a DPS warrior) that intervenes me when Corrosion is cast, cutting out a potentially lethal attack that follows the Corrosion. That leaves only ~23k damage potential, and having enough HP to live through it EVERY time via higher HP is a nice threshhold to break. (I know you can easily kill Felmyst without using such things as Intervene on the tank, however, it's one of the only threats the fight poses, and the DPS loss isn't significant or fight-changing, so we do it anyway)

It's a bit silly to include "mitigation" in your description of how you gear for Brutallus, because warriors have almost no choices for more mitigation (Pretty sure everyone is using Slikk's cloak), so the choices you have are Avoidance, or Stamina. Stamina does little for "Breathing room" because you require massive healing *regardless* of whatever potential health you can get up to, Breathing room is only granted via absurd avoidance strings - which aren't reliable either, but they are the only thing that would grant breathing room. And shield wall.

I find the ideas of gearing for Avoidance on Kalecgos to be ironic when they come from the same people who heavily prefer Stamina on Brutallus, and generally just completely inconsistent.

My avoidance on our recent Brutallus, didn't have WWS logged the first week, was 54% - which was actually on the low end, should have been 6-8% higher but that's what RNG does to you.

Finally, I use the Meta gem just because it's a fair amount of bonus block for me - 60ish I believe in my current gear, and paired with the defense rating, it's just a significant mitigation/avoidance upgrade over just 18 stamina.

I cant follow you.
On Brutallus I get spam healed all the time, none of the heals are cancelled and bar any stress situation (when MT healers get burn and have to move e.g., for these I hace SW/LS) I do know that all assigned MT healers WILL spam heal me no matter what.

The only benefit avoidance brings, is that in case of synchronised incoming heals dodging one or two attacks shortly after stomp might save me from death. This was my reasoning when I gemmed spare T6 part for avoidance.
Problem is, in the two to three days we were working on Brutallus there was always a stomp where I was not lucky enough to get that one lucky dodge. This worst case was just happening over and over.
Equipping 2% less dodge and increasing 600 HP worked wonders *for me*. Obviously YMMV

Contrary to this Kallecgos. Because of portals I can get quite unlucky with numbers of heals I get (I take the last portal) on the demon. So I went the avoidance route there. But the demon stun makes me question this decision. I'll try maximising HP next time there.

On Felmyst I did have aggro issues because of rage draught periods, so going all out avoidance is no option there IMHO.

Chance to avoid maximum attacks (out of 8 total, meaning the rest hit):
Calculated using the chance to succeed exactly K times out of N tries then adding the chance to get lower K values:
P(k)= [n! / (k-n)!] * chance^n *(1-chance)^2

61% avoidance
0 : 0.054%
1 : 0.670+0.054=0.72%
2 : 3.66+0.72=4.4%

60% avoidance
0 : 0.065%
1 : 0.786+0.065=0.85%
2 : 4.13+0.85=5.0%

55% avoidance
0 : 0.17%
1 : 1.64+.17=1.8%
2 : 7.03+1.8=8.8%

50% avoidance
0 : 0.39%
1 : 3.125+.39=3.5%
2 : 10.9+3.5=14.4%

45% avoidance
0 : 0.84%
1 : 5.48+0.84=6.3%
2 : 15.7+6.3=22.0%


This doesn't tell anything we didn't already know - if the burst you're worried about includes having absolutely no chance of surviving no matter how much stamina you stack unless you avoid a certain amount of hits, especially if it's a large amount of hits during a much longer burst, avoidance will be a good reduction of your chance to get killed.

If for example you assume you just have to avoid 2 of those attacks to survive and otherwise you die, you have to really see wether that 0.6% less chance for you to die on a stomp is reducing your chance to die in the fight by more than the increased stamina you could've gotten instead of that 1% extra avoidance.


This is just an example of course, you'd have to actually take much more specific burst scenarios, model healing properly and consider avoiding MH hits vs avoiding OH hits in order to really tell wether stamina will increase your survivability better than avoidance or not.

I'd sum it up by saying the level of complication is beyond anything theorycraftable at the moment to really tell, as for fast attacking hard hitting bosses both avoidance and stamina have clear benefits and depending on a lot of factors one may still greatly out-perform the other.

Eww, 300 BV? even in my stam set i block for ~450 raid buffed. With my threat set im currently at 700 BV with 22k hp raid buffed.

I really don't think the purpose of wearing an avoidance set on Brutallus is to theorycraft the possibility of damage reduction, but instead of acknowledge the futility of stacking stamina. In a standard stam tanking set that you may have worn all through BT/Hyjal, it is simply not possible to survive consecutive attacks with the stomp debuff regardless of gear level. Even with 4 MT heals and an inspiration buff there is a good chance that consecutive attacks will cause your healers to fall behind.

Thanks to the Sunwell buff on everything, 25% of avoidance magically disappears, blocking less than 10% of an enemies attack seems somewhat fruitless and the removal of crushing blows from the combat table appear to favor avoidance even more than it has in the past.

I don't think I am alone in saying I had to dig my Ring of Sundered Souls, Eternium Shell Bracers and a few other avoidance items out of my bank and throw away the idea of a passively uncrushable/threat set which works phenomenally well in BT/Hyjal. Saccing my Expertise gear in favor of avoidance (especially on a threat-centric fight) is also a tough pill to swallow.

edited for clarity.

I not sure if someone else has mentioned these, but I like to keep some Greater Wards of Shielding and Greater Runes of Warding handy.

A Greater Ward of Shielding is nice to have during the start of a boss fight. It will absorb to first hit or two from the boss, easing the burden on my healers. Especially if my healers have to move far to get into their positions.

And the Greater Rune of Warding is nice because it is an additional 400 points of mitigation everyone 90 seconds or so. And every little bit helps.

Rossignal

I don't believe +hit has anything to do with the low resist chance on Brutallus. It was changed since PTR, where he had the standard boss resist rate. Now, on live, people are reporting very, very low resist chances - all wearing the same 37 ( I believe) hit rating, or close to it. (20 from Pendant of Titans, 17 from Myrmidons). That's all I've worn, with my offtank, and we've seen 1 taunt resist ever in all our attempts since PTR, and I think that's just the standard 1% (might even be lower than 1%), that you can never get rid of with spells.

Well, last night, I've got resisted having 90 hit rating and as you can imagine ... wiped just right after it.
As we're getting used to the fight, well, doesn't bother me too much.
Anyway, I guess that a resist in a "bad" moment, and it's surely a wipe.

So, could be as Xav sais, that the percentage is someway "hardcoded" to this specific boss.

There was a question on elixir selection a few days ago, and no one mentioned [Elixir of Brute Force]
It's an old world item and often overlooked.

I combine those with [Elixir of Major Defense] for a combination of threat, health, and mitigation.

For some reason, thought those didn't stack with Fort. Maybe it was just a bug back in the day. I haven't even thought about those since Naxx.

As with anything, it can help you fit some situations. I thought it was worth mentioning because it's a high level of effective health / mitigation when paired with the Major Defense.

In my gear I only lose 32 Effective Health with Block going from Flask to Brute/Defense, and gain 40 AP.

Preface: I don't MT as a warrior, I only have one as my alt.

I recently respecced to snag improved Expose Armor for the times when we have a bear tank (probably at least 40% of the time these days). I know you're not 'supposed' to use it with a warrior tank because of how sunder works, but I got to thinking about it and wanted to look up actual threat values, so correct me if I'm wrong but allowing your sunder stack to drop from a mob would actually increase your TPS via devastate (It costs you ~23 tps if you don't have the sunders up and are still using a standard 1-1-2 cycle, yet every time you 'rebuild' the stack you gain 1505 threat from the static sunder aggro), obviously this isn't typically an option because that means not devastating for 15 second stretches at a time with not much of anything to fill the gap in the cycle.

What I'm wondering is if my math is correct, that using Imp EA to overwrite sunder for 30 seconds, and then letting the MT rebuild the stack afterwards, is actually a fairly decent threat gain for the tank, and obviously a pretty nice armor reduction boost for the raid. The only real downside I see is the threat becomes a little less front-loaded, but only by an extremely marginal amount. Basically the way I see it, the tank loses 700 threat during the 30 seconds EA is up (70x10), but gains 1505 aggro from restacking the sunder, and the raid gains the 500 armor reduction most of the time?

These potions do indeed stack with Fort, and both ways: applied first or second.

I'm looking for some specific suggestions for gear choices. (I run full BT and I'm gearing up for my turns on Kalecgos and eventually Brutallus) I'm torn on my weapon and my neck. I've calculated the avoidance and percentages out to save anyone willing to help time. I'm an Orc Warrior, and if it'll make a difference, my armory is: The World of Warcraft Armory
(Note: If it shows me with the artifact I also have Commendation of Kael'thas and have started to prefer it for all intensive purposes)

Now, the items in question for me are: Weapon

Brutalizer ([The Brutalizer])
5.32 Expertise, 33 Stamina, ~9.3 Defense = ~1.08 Avoidance and 100.3 DPS

vs.

Cleaver of the Unforgiving ([Cleaver of the Unforgiving])
.76% Hit, .89 Parry, 31 Stamina (Socket making it 46), 98.4 DPS

I like the added health of the Cleaver, I like the hit because I'm slowly approaching hit cap with what I have, but a lot of people suggest Brutalizer. I'm just not sure. I have Orc Racial so either gives me 5 expertise as well.

My other uncertainty is my neck.

Barbed Choker of Discipline ([Barbed Choker of Discipline])
39 Stamina, .812 Avoidance, 1.11% Dodge

vs.

Brooch of Deftness ([Brooch of Deftness])
48 Stamina, 1.395% Hit, 5.32 Expertise

vs.

Shattered Sun Pendant of Resolve ([Shattered Sun Pendant of Resolve]) As an Aldor
48 Stamina, .824% Hit, 4.566 Expertise, and a Proc increasing dodge rating by 100 (5.285% Dodge, and from what I've gathered a 45 second internal cooldown with a 10 second duration.)

This, again has me torn. I like the proc from the Pendant of Resolve but I don't know how it stacks up against the base stats of either other weapon. Any input is appreciated, thanks.

EDIT: Sorry misread this. I wouldn't do this for DPS reasons, as it takes a bit of time to rebuild the sunder stack.

It's really not. Take the average hits, add them up, gear accordingly.
Brutallus IS an avoidance fight, and at this point in time I can't understand the arguments to the contrary.

I'm curious as to what a current block value heavy threat set is like - I focused more on hit rating in my threat set, though I certainly have a good amount of block value I'm interested in seeing what a heavy (700+) block value set looks like.

*deleted*

The stun is really where the burst comes in and you get 0 benefit from avoidance during the worst "spike damage" event. You would only benefit from avoidance during the enrage while tanking the dragon (and even then, a good portion of your incoming damage is from magic attacks like frost breath and arcane buffet). I wear a very different gear set for Kalecgos than I wear for Brutallus or Illidan.

I never thought I'd ever actually use the [Ancient Aqir Artifact], but it is actually pretty useful for the demon phase (another 2500 armor for 20 seconds of my 40-50 second tanking window). The commendation is also somewhat useful as it has a lot of stamina on it and it will proc after you dip low on a stun, reducing the odds you'll get hit for ~5 seconds after the stun. That should buy your healers time to get you topped off after the stun ends. It also has a pretty high probability of proc'ing during the later stages of the enrage.

You really do want to make sure you have a decent amount of stamina on Kalecgos since you're not only eating a ton from Sathrovarr, but if you're the first Kalecgos tank, a significant amount of Arcane damage as well.

For this encounter I ended up digging out my Violet Badge with the Commendation - resisting a Buffet didn't seem like a bad deal to me since I was the first dragon tank.

Brutallus is rather wierd. I noticed anecdotally that my opening thunderclap *never* gets resisted on him. I thought this was rather odd - any prot tank can tell you of the frustration of trying to get the first TC up with resist, resist, etc.

I went back and looked over all our attempts on brutallus and out of 359 thunderclaps, 8 total have been resisted. That's a 2.2% miss rate.

Over a standard BT run, I'm used to seeing closer to 8% resist rate - and that's with wearing much more +hit and such than I do for Brutallus.

I think Brut in particular has an artificially lowered chance to resist certain spells - thunderclap, demo and taunt being among them.