acx

Some bosses have very large hitboxes and TC will not hit them even if you are within melee range. You have to move closer to the center of the boss' hitbox.

 

Bfamredux

I appreciate the guide, and had an AddOn suggestion that I didn't see in the original post. It is called 'Power Auras'.

In action:
http://i510.photobucket.com/albums/s...308_195925.jpg

I have boss debuffs on the left; Blue is Thunder Clap, Green = Demo. Shout; Brown = Sunder and each have a timer that sits right in the middle of the circle. My buffs are on the right (you can see I have a Battle Shout aura up in the screenshot).

It's nice to have the info right inside the ArcHUD which is where I spend a lot of my time looking anyways.

Addon homepage:
Power Auras | World of Warcraft Addons | World of Warcraft @ Curse.com

 

Nightmusic

We are currently having some tanking woes that I think could be addressed by our tanks doing some research and reading here on your forums. The catch is one of them is a native french speaker and other is a native spanish speaker. I'd really like to find some information for them that is easier to digest but I'm not sure where to look.

Does anyone know of links to places where your guides have been translated?

Thanks

 

Skyhoof

Hi, the resto shaman wiki could use a little more info on how much dodge our Grace of Air provides for tanks. I was wondering if you see any problem with the warrior numbers below.

Regular GOA = 77 agility
Talented GOA = 88 agility

	Druid	Paladin	Warrior
Regular GOA	5.39%	3.08%	2.56%
Talented GOA	5.99%	3.52%	2.93%
Talented GOA + Kings*	6.77%	3.88%	3.22%

* And Survival of the Fittest for Druids

Here are the conversions I used to make checking my numbers easier:

Druid
14.7 agility =1% dodge
13 agility = 1% dodge with Kings and SotF

Paladin
25 agility = 1% dodge
22.7 agility = 1% dodge with Kings

Warrior
30 agility = 1% dodge
27.3 agility = 1% dodge with Kings

 

Handyhoof

The 77 and 88 Agility are correct. I'm not certain on the Kings however.
96 Agility gives 3.19% dodge, and 97 agility gives 3.23% dodge.

Blizzard rounds to the nearest whole number attribute before calculating gains/buffs, so it would depend on the truncation or rounding of the value. I believe Blizzard rounds, so you should see 3.23% more dodge.

 

Xav

At least some tanking guides/information have been translated into spanish over on Tankspot. You may want to ask there and then see if someone can point you in a direction for french-translated information.

Tyds: The TC issue has nothing to do with the size of the boss' hitbox or your distance. Sometimes you just get awkward, buggy positioning between yourself and the boss and you just have to move around, or move the boss around, in order for it to start registering. It happens rarely on bosses I've done dozens of times and know quite well their hitboxes. There doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason why, however, I also play a human female warrior and so does my offtank, and have no idea if it occurs with other combinations as well.

 

Dulak

I've had this issue numerous times on Supremus and Archimonde especially. I'm a human male.

EDIT: Seems this post has been deemed useless and there is a need here to spell things out. Yes, the issue seems to be related to mobs with extra large hitboxes and yes, this issue occurs also with other race/gender combinations than human females.

EDIT2: Now that I think of it, could this be an issue with sloping terrain and the game not registering the vertical distance between you and the boss properly. Seems to me like it only happens in these kinds of situations where I am tanking a large hitbox mob and I'm standing downhill from the mob.

 

JamesVZ

It happens to me as well, but as I understand it it is based completely around your center versus mob center, not hitbox edge. I could be wrong, though. As far as it happening to non-large creatures, it's pretty easy to trick the server into thinking you're somewhere else completely on accident. I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that's what's happening, and to get tclap to land again you have to snap things back in place.

Official Slackie Fanclub. The dude gets ALL the ladies.

In regards to Icecrown Radiance:

 

AnonWarrior

I apologize if this comes off as a QQ post, I am merely trying to justify my raid spot in a sunwell guild. Basically I was the "MT" of my guild in BT. Not that I main tanked everything, I gladly shared the duty with all the other tanks. However, my guild is now slowly working its way through sunwell (now 2/6) and I have noticed that I, nor our raid leader, can justify me ever tanking anymore. For example, on brutallus feral druids seems to simply take less damage, and the healers fully agree having 2 feral druids tank him is optimal. Therefore I either sit out or go MS being there just to be a debuff bot. Similarly its easier to heal a feral druid through corrosion on Felmyst. Again a fight where I just go MS as debuff bot and intervene during it. All our healers agree and fully prefer feral druids now as they take less damage. Similarly on the other side of it, I can not seem to match the threat of a feral druid on a single boss. I don't think my threat is bad or anything, maybe 1200-1400 range, but our feral druid can average 1500 or more.

I'm not saying warriors cant tank all these fights, obviously they can and have in numerous other guilds. But I am saying for the sake of efficiency, why would you use a warrior anymore? What am I suppose to tell my raid leader to ever be able to go prot again? My personal understanding, throughout BT, was that the tanks more or less equalized since druids would take crushing blows that the warriors and pallies would not. Since there are no longer crushing bosses in sunwell (at least thus far?) then what does a warrior have that can compensate for the huge gap in armor, I mean the 10% from defensive stance helps but the feral druids we have clearly still take significantly less damage than me. It just does not make any sense to burden both the healers and dps with me tanking.

I believe all tanks should have equal share of main tank time, based on fights catering to each class' strengths. But from our raid leader's point of view, warriors no longer have any strengths (other than being debuff bot) other than gimmicky fights (Kael, Illidan, RoS phase2). Do I just suck or is there something I am missing?

Thanks for the help, and sorry for the QQ rant. I just want to tank again.

 

ioguolo

Anonwarrior now you see why they put the sunwell radiance buff in there. Using your arguments, without the radiance could you imagine how easier it would be?

My guild is just getting into Sunwell, and due to dumb luck haven't seen the shield off Kaz'rogal ever (since February) and haven't had a Illidan shield yet in the 5-6 kills. So I only tank Illidan and Phase 2 RoS + Bloodboil. Other than that I go back to as you say "debuff bot".

On a side note: I'm working on a web based dps/tps tool for WoW. I'm starting with warrior tanks. It's sorta like other calculation sites out there, but I'm doing it a little different. Feedback would be cool, and I could start another thread when I get it finished (I'm at 80%). Essientially I'm using this thread + wowwiki as the math behind, and what people can do is put the gear they have on w/ enchants + sockets, and here is a cool part, choose your rotation (given what situation you want to do), add raid buffs/debuffs, choose what boss (based on EJ forum armor values), hit the GO button and it will spit out your dps/tps in an unlimited threat situation based on how long you want to calculate for.

Endstate: Make a web based app so you don't need excel spreedsheets. Change a piece of gear, and see how it effects your threat.

 

Liar

I don't know if my raid is less hardcore about things than yours but we have tanked Brutallus in a Warrior/Warrior and Warrior/Feral combo and there was pretty much zero difference for us healing or threatwise (atleast none that was worth menioning because noone complains about it).
With enough Expertise gear, you will also be able to get good TPS numbers and ease up healing on yourself. I am mostly talking Felmyst here because Warriors are definitely not worse choices for MTing her for two reasons: Corrosion burst damage consists of two parts: the natura damage cast which is mitigated by Def Stance and the increased physical damage taken thereafter.
Now we obviously take less damage from the cast itself and it may appear that Druids take less damage from the melee swings (they do, if you compare them on a swing by swing basis), Warriors got the big advantage of taking more predictable damage. I already use Expertise on Felmyst for threat and I can get up to 13.5% reduction there (with 13.75% being the cap) without problems which also means that I won't die during Corrosion unless healers are asleep. Why is this? Because the only reason you should die on Corrosion is via parry haste. She has no instant attacks so unless you parry her, she won't be able to gib you. Druids, by design of their gear, have less Expertise. That means they are also more suspectable to parry haste gibs than Warriors which - I guess - is the balancing factor for them taking less damage per swing on Felmyst.

Oh, there is a crushing boss I have seen so far in SW and that's Twins. But, as irony wants it, they dual wield so you will crushed anyway which may or may not make Druids better tanks there but we are still going to do her with a Warrior/Warrior setup because that is what works for us and because we have 2 high attendance and skilled Warriors to work with.

EDIT:

This makes no sense to me. Illidan is one of the hardest hitting bosses there is and you can tank him. So exactly what is your/your guild's reasoning to not let you tank the other BT/SW fights? It sounds like something in the lines of "Oh, you see, you did manage to tank the hardest hitting boss in the zone but because you lack a good shield, I am afraid we can't let you tank the weaker hitting bosses".
You got it completey backwards here (and I'd really like to know who tanks the Paladin at Council for you).

Unexpected TankPoints error Clearly someone doesn't understand how EH works. That, or upgrading from T8 to T9 is optional in beating Arthas. Clearly.

 

JamesVZ

Yeah, the difference between [Bulwark of the Amani Empire] and [Bulwark of Azzinoth] is less than 1k armor, some stamina, a little avoidance, and an inconsequential random proc, which can all be made up by switching a few things around (go for armor rings rather than straight sta/threat/avoidance rings, always use Slikk's, etc, etc). I tanked all of Mount Hyjal and the first six of BT in basically nothing but T5 gear, most of the stuff in there doesn't hit that hard, and anything that does just use Ironshields more than you would otherwise.

Official Slackie Fanclub. The dude gets ALL the ladies.

In regards to Icecrown Radiance:

 

ioguolo

Tyds tank setup for our runs is Pally, 2 druids, me. And currently I can tank the whole instance yes, however 2-3 months ago we've (through asking healers) found it easier to heal our druid tank (who was 4/5 T6 way before I had 3) on a lot of bosses, mainly Teron. I think one day I was just getting nailed to the wall for 9700 hits and I can't remember what our druid was getting hit for on the next attempt. It was kinda "hey let's just have the duid MT until ioguola gets some more armor".

Hell I didn't even get the ZA shield to drop until after we downed Archimonde (Which we did w/ druid tank + fear ward rotation) due to my lack of armor. In our case it's because protector/plate gear just flat out was not dropping. Warrior plate specifically. 7 Archimonde kills before 1 Protector token

Oh and our druid always does the pally so i can help bash heals. I know spell reflect judgement yadda yadda, it's what worked when we learned it, so we stick with what made it work. When I was tanking it, I reflected the judgements and was dying from physical. Was it attributed to learning the fight? Probably. It's just the change we did and it worked at the time.

 

AnonWarrior

Liar, I have successfully tanked brutallus a couple times. But it was always out of necessity (one of the feral druids didnt show up), and I always get this "ohhh i guess we'll have to have a warrior tank" sorta thing on vent, like they all groan as if its going to be that much harder now, which really gets under my skin.

As far as felmyst goes, I was the initial MT on him, since the corrosion was magic damage like you said. Without going into all the numbers of it, I guess our raid leader determined it worked out in the druids favor as, all the reduced damage taken in the hits over those 10 seconds was better than the reduced damage on the initial corrosion cast. As far as parry gib, I was not personally aware of any bosses in SW gaining parry haste (atleast so far) although I could be wrong. Either way I was stacking expertise on that fight already for the sake of giving more room for casters to nuke during phase 2, although I never got to 13.75%. All I know is, the healers fully agreed it was easier to heal the druid during corrosion, especially if as the debuff bot and can intervene him. And thats okay? Maybe felmyst is just *that* fight that caters towards druids Mting (although that would be ironic since its the rare fight with magic damage). I'm just trying to figure out what fights warriors in fact are productive to MT.


I notice you go pretty extreme with the dodge stacking in your gear. I know that is the "thing" now but I have not done it yet, to that extent at least. How is that working out for you on brutallus or felmyst? Are you not having issues with that low health at all?

 

Eyegore

As has been mentioned the mele twin can crush, and we did find that our feral druid who has tanked Brut with me fine could get unexpectedly dropped by a few crushes in a row (albeit rarely, and we have only killed them twice so far, so maybe with practice the healing could be smoothed out more to compensate or something) while I have not had that happen. Additionally I have found that on Kalec having shield wall available for an enraged dragon when some of your healers may still be off in the demon realm can be invaluable, not to mention that as people cycle around you can be sure of always having a thunder clap and demo shout for the mob you are tanking while a feral can not.

Those two fights I would say favor warrior tanks, and Brut and Felmyst should be tankable by either a feral or warrior. For felmyst however we do use a feral tank, with myself just debuffing in tank gear, keeping up sunders, and intervening when corrosion is cast to smooth out the initial burst of the debuff application (and helping round up stray skeletons of course). Our healers report that the intervene really does seem to help (I used to do it in dps gear as prot, but an unexpected crit after intervene made me rethink that as my dps gear is not stellar anyway, just having me in tank gear has worked fine for us and saves the healers from ever having to stress over me and keep the real dps up). Either way tank deaths should not be the primary problem in this fight anyway, our feral's threat gen seems to be more constant than mine, not necessarily higher on average but less likely to get screwed by the RNG, so we found that it was safer to use him on this as people tend to be riding omen pretty tight here.

Two ferals on brutallus may be a net gain if you are having a rogue use impEA, but you also lose the ability to cycle in a last stand and a shield wall for stomps.

muru and KJ I can not speak on from first hand experience yet.

So barring gear or skill discrepancies, based on my experience, I do not see how it is not at least a toss up between warriors and ferals in SW, and some fights seem to outright favor prot warriors.

 

Sotallytober

Long time lurker here but I just wanted to post my input on the warrior vs druid on Brutallus discussion...
I take less damage by about 15-20% (WWS Loading..., I tank first so you have to look at the damage taken per second, he's usually around 4k and I'm around 3400 iirc) than the other feral druid that tanks with me. My damage input is a bit more spikey than his and we are similarly geared but overall I take less damage. Warrior tanks just have to gear for all out avoidance and pop trinkets every stomp, nightmare seed if its up and chain chug ironshields. Unless my tanking partner druid is doing something weird with his gear (which I highly doubt) warriors can definitely compete for tanking on Brutallus, which is probably the extreme for sunwell in terms of druid favorability.

 

Fellwraith

We're in the same ballpark as a feral druid for tanking, even in Sunwell. It's a common misconception that druids take less damage, when that isn't the case. It's easier to gear up a feral druid, but they aren't necessarily better once you're both geared up. If you don't believe me, here's a WWS of Brut through the twins (felmyst is a bit borked because the guy recording it got DC'd but you get the general idea).

On average, I mitigate about 9% of all incoming damage via block on a fight like Brutallus. Between ironshields, inspiration, defensive stance, and temporary armor buffs, my net mitigation is similar to a druid or better. My spikes are no worse than a feral druid for any fight in the zone except for twins (and I partially compensate on twins by taking far less magic damage throughout the fight). I can see why you'd use a feral druid for Felmyst (we don't), but the two main reasons are to get a warrior to intervene during corrosion to mitigate the spike and to get the most threat you can during a ground phase when corrosion isn't up.

The place where ferals shine is when they aren't getting hit. They make phenomenal OTs on the twins for this reason. I don't think there's a noticeable difference in their total threat output vs ours in any unlimited rage environment (fights like Brutallus), particularly when you compare how quickly we can HS (you can HS a WF attack too) to their static 2.5 speed maul.

If you're having serious problems with threat or mitigation then you should take a look at your healing strategies and your group buffs. Using all paladins to heal the tank is going to favor a feral druid over a warrior. Bouncing chainheal off the tank on fight like Brut is going to close the gap considerably. Similarly, not giving WF to your tank is going to seriously hamstring his threat output.


Sunwell radiance hurts druids and warriors the same. Without it, you'd never make the dps requirements for most of the fights in the zone or you'd be swapping to T5 pieces so that you can generate enough threat. It's a red-herring argument to say that we're hamstrung by it, both classes need it to function properly. The zone would be much harder without it.

 

Liar

Isn't this more a case of your guild not wanting to change the status quo because they don't want to change things that work for them now? For example, there is no way a Druid is better at Paladin tanking on council. SR reduces burst. Burst kills tanks. If your RL insists that it's not burst that kills tanks but taking slightly higher physical dmg in predictable intervals, then I am not sure what to say apart from: He is wrong.

It works pretty well on Brutallus. I don't remember dying to Stomp at all after we learned the fight. Aggro is not an issue either because I got some nice expertise even in my mitigation set (plus I use [Nightstrike]/[Kaz'rogal's Hardened Heart] with a Hit gem the first few mins to start off (I don't even have to though, it works without too, but I am making sure that TPS won't be an issue)). Heck, I can even get away with using high avoidance on Council because of his Judgements. The DoT provides a steady flow of incoming rage and the direct damage Judgement is free threat when you reflect it. I usually start with the same weapon setup mentioned above and just swap in mitigation gear later if it's needed. On top of all this, you win 10 rage every 5 seconds because you become passively crush immune in your avoidance set, so every unavoided hit will be blocked on it's own (no need for SB and such).

On Felmyst, I use a different tanking set with 54 Expertise and 3-4% hit and run lower avoidance. It works well so far and I don't get complaints from my casters concerning threat.

Unexpected TankPoints error Clearly someone doesn't understand how EH works. That, or upgrading from T8 to T9 is optional in beating Arthas. Clearly.

 

ioguolo

Yes it is the case now (not back when I was undergeared compared to the druid). Could I switch? Sure. I was just answering the above post.

 

Kavtor

My feral's probably up a couple pieces of gear on me, and I'm rocking Kaz'rogal's shield still.
I looked over a few of my combat logs, and they're pretty similar to Felwraith's and Sotallytober's above

Over our last 4 Brut kills, I'm averaging 3200 DPS in, and he's at 3980. I'll take bigger hits, but have more tricks for stomps, and much better avoidance. I'm not sure how much he pushes for avoidance gems / enchants though. A small sample, from just one set of tanks, but a warrior's damage mitigation is just fine.

 

Xav

I do not think we should encourage responding to people who wish to post anonymously, and whine. "Anon"'s posts (and to a lesser extent Ioguola's) are simply: "I'm not very good at my class and so I take more damage than is necessary and my guild sits me because of it". I suggest you read the thread and understand debuffing properly, gearing, and raid synergy in order to best accommodate the tanks, if damage taken is ever an issue.

Druid vs Warrior argument doesn't really need to be here. Warriors are not gimp at all in Sunwell compared to druids, if anything, warriors still have several advantages on some fights and are apparently designed to tank them. Mulack addressed some of the points; that druids excel at threat generation in low-rage environments, etc.

It should be well known by now though if you've been in Sunwell at all and understand game mechanics (and have read this thread), that Avoidance scales execptionally well, and that druids have the edge over other classes currently in that department. However, that still doesn't cause druids to phase out warriors in any way.

 

Spoonman

What are people's thoughts on shoulder enchants (specifically: [Fortitude of the Scourge] vs [Greater Inscription of Warding])? I'm hoping to pick up the [Pauldrons of Perseverance] soon, and I'm agonising over what to put on them. As Xaviera posts earlier in this thread, avoidance scales exceptionally well, and in terms of item levels, the Aldor enchant wins out.

A comparison - tank A has Fortitude of the Scourge, has a 10 dodge gem in socket X, and 12 dodge rating on his cloak.Tank B has Greater Inscription of Warding, a 15 stamina gem, and 120 armor on cloak.

Tank A - 16 stamina, 22 dodge rating (1.166% avoidance), 100 armor.
Tank B - 15 stamina, 15 dodge rating and 10 defense rating (total ~1.3% avoidance), 120 armor.

Tank B gains 0.134% avoidance (about 2.5 dodge rating) and 20 armor for the loss of only 1 stamina. The only real use for the Naxx enchant, it seems, is for stacking maximum armor (while sacrificing other stats). As a Tauren I feel that my stamina is the least of my worries (currently I sit at around 18.7k HP unbuffed), and I see many Sunwell tanks stacking avoidance gems. Is there any reason for me to use the classic enchant rather than the TBC one?

 

chuglur

Spoonman:

In my experience there are 2 ways of gemming and enchanting gear which is to gem/enchant toward their innate strengths or attempt to balance it with gems/enchants in the opposite direction. In my opinion the better course is to gem toward strengths and switch specific pieces of gear when a desired effect is required as a balanced set will be weaker in maximum potential than a set optimized toward a specific strength.

As for stacking avoidance gems, I`m not sure what you mean. It makes sense mathematically to gem for socket bonuses such as yellow sockets for defense and red for dodge because of the increasing returns to avoidance but I wouldn`t put a dodge gem in a blue socket over a stamina gem in most cases.

Ultimately in this enchant`s case it comes down to preference but the TBC enchant will get better and better as your avoidance gets better so in a sense it scales with gear but the effect is minuscule enough it really doesn`t matter. According to my gemming philosophy, I would put the scourge enchant on it but in this because of the increasing returns to avoidance and the difficulty relatively of obtaining the vanilla enchant, I would stick the Aldor enchant on it.

 

Xav

Fortitude of the Scourge is a pure "EH" (effective health) enchant. Health, armor. Thus, it's an enchant that goes best in an "EH" gearset, where you don't particularly value avoidance as strongly as you do health and armor. It's on my Pauldrons of Perseverance because those are not an avoidance piece - they've got high stamina and block value, a form of mitigation (like armor). Perseverance have less avoidance than the T6 shoulders too, which I have a pair of with avoidance gems in it should I ever want to purely stack avoidance.

I use Fortitude on my Perseverance because it emphasizes them as a strong "EH" piece, and they're a great threat piece as well due to the high block value (and we don't have any other alternatives in that slot, really). In a threat set you want stable rage and high chance to hit via expertise/hit, and Armor/Health achieves that over avoidance - you can reduce the damage you take via Armor, while still taking damage to keep your threat high, and so on.

 

◊ Quigon

First of all getting a fortitude of the scourge is no simple task. I got one well before TBC and never saw another.

Secondly, the shoulder enchant you should use depends entirely on the boss you're fighting, and your current level of avoidance.

Odds are the avoidance enchant will sadly be superior.