At first I wanted to say: "where are offensive stats like hit and expertise?", seeing as it appears on only one item each. But when you said that bosses hit very hard, I miss offensive stats a bit less. Here's hoping that non-tier pieces will have some more offensive stats on them.
Blizzard has this tendency of going into extremes. Sunwell gear had only rudimentary amounts of hit and overwhelming amounts of expertise, which led me to swapping a lot of gear for e.g. Felmyst to be able to keep aggro properly. Naxxramas gear had a lot of hit on everything, but much less expertise. Ulduar was somehow balanced, while The coliseum repeats the Sunwell curse. BiS (assuming ilevel and defensive stats) items from there terribly lack hit, but expertise is abundant again. That further reinforces the point I made a lot of times before: warrior tanks have too many stats to take care of, even item designers can't really balance the distribution of our stats

You linked the Pally gloves. I believe you meant:
Sanctified Ymirjar Lord's Handguards - Items - Sigrie

They are the same anyway (if you compare the heroic version with each other). T10 is looking pretty underwhelming so far but it might just be placeholders still. If not, I'll probably just grab 2/5 T10 for the set bonus depending on AoE threat requirements in ICC or if the 2 pieces of T10 are just BiS overall. Apart from that, I'd rather go for the offset pieces with bonus armor - unless there is a way to cheese bosses with our 4 set bonus, of course.

Fixed initial link.


@Arghoslent--We're definitely going to be focused on surviving over our offensive stats. In our raids, we generally have 3 rogues and 1-2 hunters. With the changes to misdirect, hunters will be able to contribute better to threat as well. Rogues are most likely going to be dropping their Killing Spree glyphs for TotT glyphs when they pick up their two piece and will be using it on cooldown, so if there are any threat issues, you can expect TotT to help you out a bit. Like anything this should change a bit as we gear up, however like in SWP, we're still going to take a beating. We'll be doing some heroic testing this week, I'll try to get some parses up.


I expected a homogenization of non-set pieces, with tier more specialized for stats that pertain to the specific class, which would make a lot of sense in mix/matching tier and non-tier gear.

This was probably inevitable, really. They already have an emblem chest and craftable legs with bonus armor on them, so unless they pretty much replicated the bonus armor pieces in our set, it probably wouldn't have been worth chasing the 4-set bonus anyway. But hey, maybe there will be some big once-per-minute hit that our combination of a 4-set absorption and 2 2-minute cooldowns will make the gear valuable for tanking it. It's hard to say at this point.

Why are people comparing heroic 25 t9 to reg 25 t10?

Didn't blizzard say that T10.0 would be purchasable with frost emblems and upgradeable to T10.25/10.5 with tokens or something?


Also was wondering how you people think you're gonna gear up and gem when ICC comes out. I've been thinking for a while about this and whether people will gem for pure avoidance or not - frankly i doubt i will. Prolly gonna hit yellow/red sockets with avoidance + stam gems and try to reach ~30% avoidance so i can give my healers enough breathing space in most common situations, given that i'll (hopefully) have enough HP to give them time to react should a bad stream of non-avoided hits occurr.

The real question is how people will gear up between avoidance and mitigation - since there's a ton of stuff i've seen in ICC that has extra armor on it and i doubt people will be going out of their way to stack avoidance, what do you think you'll focus more on? With the tier bonuses being more than decent for us (and for all the classes from what i've seen) and none of the tier gear having extra armor on it, that's gonna be a lot of mitigation given up in favour of more avoidance + set bonuses. Do you see yourselves swapping +armor gear with tier gear on non-spikey damage fights (where the absorbtion from 4p isn't that great due to how constant damage received is)?

I think it's far too early to say as to how people will gem until it's clearer what the burst damage requirements are. Provided there are no additional reasons beyond solid TotC25-H gearing to stack Stamina for early progression, I would say that a "normal"/balanced approach to gemming is appropriate--simply matching colors with Stamina, Stamina/Dodge, and Stamina/Defense gems.

The only factor which will have a significant impact on gearing considerations beyond what we currently experience for survival will be if the burst damage from bosses increases significantly on specific encounters. Chill of the Throne doesn't change a whole lot in terms of general survival increases.

Nothing is really particularly different in terms of evaluating Armor vs. Avoidance per unit stat before and after ICC. Armor is already very strong and will continue to be very strong until we cap out. I wouldn't be surprised to see people prioritizing items with bonus armor as much as possible as it's a very efficient stat.

Concerning gemming, someone posted a while back that the damage reduction gained from avoidance rating has dropped significantly. To put some numbers to this, I constructed a table which lists the normal damage reduction from 1% dodge and the damage reduction from 1% dodge in ICC. Then, I converted 1% dodge currently to what it would need to be to attain the same level of damage reduction in the same gear for each increment of 1% avoidance.

Now, if someone has a single socket with no socket bonus attached to it outside of ICC, most people would socket it with 30 Stamina, right? Not 10 dodge/15 stam?

Yet, the above implies that 10 dodge rating outside ICC is approximately some 16 dodge rating inside ICC.

So, my question is: Why socket a 10 dodge/15 stamina gem in a red socket if the socket bonus is 6 dodge rating? 16 dodge rating and 15 stamina in ICC is worth about the same as 10 dodge rating/ 15 stamina gem is outside ICC with no socket bonus - so why not just socket 30 stamina, since we mostly agree that in sockets without a socket bonus, you gem for pure stam?

Basically, the way I see it:

16 dodge/15 stam in ICC ~ 10 dodge/15 stam now < 30 stamina

Maybe I'm converting things incorrectly here, but I'm having some trouble justifying gemming anything other than stamina unless the socket bonuses provide enough avoidance to cover for the nerf, or provide enough stamina that the stamina loss is minor. Am I doing something wrong here?

Looking at relative gains before and after doesn't really tell the whole picture. You aren't tanking both inside and outside. ICC is a bubble, and you simply have to increase your survival within the context of ICC.

Of course if your avoidance goes down the relative gain of a arbitrary "1% avoidance" will go down--pure avoidance has increasing returns. That is a given. That doesn't mean that avoidance is something to no longer get.

This has been gone through many times in the past when the same thing happened with Sunwell. Within ICC avoidance is still good. The relative damage reduction is not the important factor--the raw damage reduction is. 1% dodge still contributes a DPS intake reduction of X DPS. Yes, it may be a lower percentage compared to outside ICC, but it's still a reduction of X DPS, relative to the incoming DPS and your EH pool.

The mistake here is thinking that the damage intake is the same. It isn't. Avoidance is reducing specifically so the damage per hit can also be reduced. Since these will be balanced for eachother, the relative gains will likely be identical. If you run the numbers you will see that when incoming hit size is adjusted for the loss of avoidance the relative value of avoidance towards survival time in both scenarios is virtually identical.

If you take any survival time model and plug in the two scenarios:
a) 80k base hits (TotC) with current avoidance
b) 50k base hits with -20% avoidance (to result in the same damage intake per second)
...you will see that your survival time scale factors hardly change at all--they are within +-3% of eachother, even in the largest case change.

There are a lot of various interactions with the math of health vs. damage hit size vs. avoidance impact vs. armor reduction which fluctuate via the rebalancing process, but given the current known data they almost all cancel eachother out in such a way that the relative value of each unit stat is largely unchanged in terms of survival time.

True enough, i was just wondering whether people will choose to go mitigation/armor ALL the way while giving up the extra avoidance and the 2/4 tier bonuses and i was trying to figure out whether it would be worth it or not. Given that i've seen a version of pretty much every item with extra armor on it i'm starting to think reaching damage reduction cap from armor (75%) might actually be possible.

Paired up with the fact that there seems to be a trinket which has a % change to give you stam when hit (something like 25, stacks to 10) there may be tanks who will try to focus on getting that + max possible mitigation and come up on top of the tier users.

I mean sure you get more threat off the 2p one, but all that massive ammount of armor will give you plenty of AP anyway, and a minor cooldown can be countered with massive overall mitigation + glyphed last stand/shield wall used when situation requires it.

At least my 2 cents :P Was wondering what people thought of that

When we stepped into Sunwell there wasn't a DR curve on avoidance and we didn't have the alternative of armor over avoidance, so we still stacked dodge for some fights. Now that there is a DR function, you have to take that into account when appraising one piece of gear vs the other. Gaining 1% more avoidance at this point requires a pretty hefty amount of dodge or parry rating for most people in ToC gear.

The real question here is what tanking piece should I wear (or how should I prioritize my badge expenditures)? The question wasn't is avoidance still ok as a tanking stat. There's multiple examples of 1 piece with both avoidance stats and 1 piece with +armor and one avoidance stat in T10. Armor nets you more relative and absolute damage reduction on average for the itemization cost in ICC. That's not really an academic argument like some of the tables people throw around, it's a "real-world" comparison of one alternative piece vs the other.

Gemming decisions remain what they were in every other zone because we don't have a +armor gem, so the opportunity cost is usually avoidance vs offensive stats. Stamina is pretty much a given for most people. Almost every single socket bonus is a stamina bonus this tier, there's maybe 2 pieces I've seen that don't provide stamina for gemming yellow or red sockets. When you get 9 stamina from the socket bonus for gemming a def/stam or dodge/stam gem, the opportunity cost of that additional avoidance is extremely small and you need some non-blue gems for your metagem bonus anyway.


I also think that it's possible that the 4pcT9 bonus works out to more net damage reduction over time than the 4pcT10 bonus (assuming the damage is primarily physical). It will vary based on a number of different factors, but those ilvl 258 pieces may last quite a while if you get them.

In order to armor cap vs a boss you need ~50k armor, vs level 80 mobs you need ~45.8k. There aren't too many situations where we'd hit the hard cap for armor, even with procs and indestructible pots.

The DR curve doesn't really make any difference. In Sunwell, +X Dodge was +X Dodge inside and outside Sunwell. In ICC, +X Dodge Rating is +X Dodge inside and outside ICC. The relative increases in Sunwell were lower than the relative increases in Black Temple, yet the math always supported that the value of avoidance never changed despite Sunwell Radiance. It honestly doesn't change anything.

The value of armor will also decrease in a raw unit swing sense as the size of swings is also reduced. It doesn't change the fact that +X% Dodge will reduce your incoming damage by a specific amount of DPS and +Y armor will reduce your incoming damage by a specific amount of DPS. As the relative values of dodge and armor are unlikely to change (as the damage per swing is being adjusted based on the reduction in avoidance through Chill of the Throne) the relative value of Armor vs. Avoidance is almost exactly the same as it is now.

Armor right now is an exceptionally strong stat, though, and will continue to be. Pretty much all the +Armor items are awesome in 3.3 based on the numbers I've looked at.

Very uncertain about our 4-set T10, simply because a lot of the set pieces seem a bit weak, especially without being fully upgraded. The Helm and Shoulders look alright, though... but the Chest, Gloves, and Legs are nothing too fantastic, especially compared to the +Bonus Armor alternatives. So you'd have to weigh the value of the bonus against the fact that a lot of the pieces aren't very outstanding based on what we know so far.

Armor reduces damage taken by a fixed percentage, regardless of hit size. Avoidance reduces damage by a fixed percentage, regardless of hit size. Based on the chart I posted above, avoidance now does about 35-40% less damage reduction (as a percentage) while armor continues to do the same. Unless I'm missing a change, or looking at the wrong numbers, I see little to support avoidance staying the same (in terms of affect on average survival time) while armor actually becomes less attractive.

If you weigh them both against stam, certainly hit size can be scaled down as to make stam a less attractive stat, but I don't see how you can say the same about armor.

Suppose that in ToC, 500 armor gave 1% damage reduction and 50 dodge rating gave 1% damage reduction (made up figures). Now in ICC, 500 armor still gives 1% damage reduction but suddenly 80 dodge rating is required to attain that same 1% damage reduction. I don't see that as a wash. Am I missing something?

I think the argument for damage intake is mostly irrelevant - GC stated that the point of this is so that tanks take more damage. However, he did mention that avoidance would be better in ICC than it is now, and that confused me. So I ran some quick math on consecutive hits with expected ICC avoidance versus current. Spike damage is what really matters, assuming your healers are not running out of mana.

That's what I think GC was referring to. Currently, most tanks are in the range of 60% avoidance, and adding 1% more avoidance reduces the chance to be 2 shot by about .79%. With IC Radiance, an addition of 1% avoidance reduces it by more than 1%.

However, I think a better comparison is 3 hits with IC Radiance vs 2 hits in current, hypothetically assuming that 3 hits in ICC is approximately equal to 2 hits now. We'll be about 5% more likely to receive 3 consecutive hits, but we'll have about twice as long to react (~2s vs ~4s) since swing timers aren't being sped up. Also, avoidance is about .27% better in ICC with regard to spike damage than it is now.

Again, it doesn't have much to do with the relative increase or decrease compared to outside of ICC. X points of Avoidance will decrease your damage taken per swing by Y per swing, on average, regardless of Chill of the Throne. X points of Armor will decrease your damage taken per swing by Y per swing. Nothing really changes in that regard.

The main factor is that, yes, if the swing sizes were the same then armor would become more valuable in relative terms than other stats due to its increased contribution to mitigation. However, since the size of hits is being adjusted relative to the loss of avoidance, the value of armor in terms of damage reduced per swing is also reducing.

That's why it does no good to look at relative values of TotC vs. ICC. You have to look at ICC in its own context and run the numbers when you know the correct base swing sizes and such. There is also the issue Bryn just mentioned, which adds some more dynamics to consider. (Honestly, I was quite surprised when I ran the full numbers on scale factors for burst time/survival/etc. types of models with Chill of the Throne, since I was expecting a larger shift in stat weighting...yet almost everything stayed virtually identical.)

However, I will point out that the DR curves on avoidance are fairly aggressive and as such Armor may become more attractive simply due to its more linear increase to survival. Armor is already a very strong stat in current content, so I would not be surprised at all to see all the items with Bonus Armor used, especially as we cannot gem Armor.

I'm not sure I follow your argument about the size of the hit mattering at all with armor vs avoidance. Both of them are a percentage-based reduction to expected damage taken on every attack. They both scale with the size of the incoming hits. Compound probability of having multiple hits connect in a row starts to become a consideration as the hit size goes down, but that's about it.

You also need to consider the value of blocking smaller overall hit sizes. Just looking at armor and avoidance side by side in a vacuum and not also factoring in block and critical block probably isn't right. Abilities like shieldblock throw a monkeywrench into any calculations you're doing to determine the overall mitigation value for each stat. Armor will apply to blocked hits (possibly reducing the damage taken to 0), while the value of avoidance when shieldblock is up is lower, especially with critical block. That's roughly a quarter or a third of the fight where you can count on filling the hit table and at least blocking every hit.

Yes, with the change in hit sizes Block is the only stat which has a particular value change--although it's unlikely it will still be a 'good' stat for progression raiding with the numbers we're seeing so far.

Hit sizes have gone down, but probably not down enough that Block is a super-attractive stat.

If what we're seeing as far as boss abilities on the PTR holds true, it looks like there may be some additional value to avoidance outside of damage reduction. A couple of encounters (I'm thinking of Deathbringer Saurfang and Gunship Captains in particular) have mechanics that cause the fights to get progressively more difficult the more a tank (or anyone else, I suppose) gets hit. This implies that 1% avoidance moves from, "X% damage reduction" to, "X% damage reduction and an additional Y seconds before the fight spirals out of control." I think it's an interesting take on soft-enrage mechanics, and makes me wonder if this is perhaps what the devs are referencing when they say, "Avoidance will be more important in ICC."

It's not my intention to start a, "This type of gear will be better for this particular ICC boss," discussion. Rather, as the final chapter in the expansion, I think ICC's giving avoidance a slightly different role to play in the finalized design for all tanks. Rather than just being a different means to achieve a similar end as armor and stamina, avoidance can now potentially have a more interesting role than just, "This boss will high you moderately hard very quickly...so better stack avoidance so your healers can keep up!"

But on a fight like Dreamwalker, are we going to favor Stam/Avoidance/or DR? Atleast what we did on 10 man as you had a tank. for each side.

When you are tanking the add that applys corrosion (Corrosion - Spells - Sigrie) stamina is probably going to be greater because of this being percentage based, but again the debuff has relatively short uptime, and these mobs can be kited by mages/hunters.

When it comes to the aboms, which are the mobs that really require tanking, they apply the nasty inc damage taken (Gut Spray - Spells - Sigrie) which at a glance, would mean you want to get more DR. However this also applies to lay waste/frostbolt. So this fight could really go either way.

I understand that block won't be an attractive stat, but one question that I can't seem to answer is when should I drop my 4 piece bonus from t9 for pieces with slightly more stam and avoidance from ICC? For example, Ghoul Commander's Cuirass - Items - Sigrie is an all around upgrade over t9 chest (Conquest, not Triumph) with the exception that it has .1% less dodge but one more socket. 10s off of Shield Block is pretty good based on what I have read throughout various posts, so I'm kind of lost on when to drop 4 piece for some of the new ICC stuff. (Obviously I know that if I were to get multiple ICC upgrades such as the chest, legs, and other items, the stam would outweigh the 4 piece)

TLDR version: How soon should I give up 4p t9?

Considering the majority of prot warriors went 4 piece t9(245/232) with Shoulder, Chest, Glove, Pants. Then picked up badge helm for an offset piece. I would suggest saving emblems of frost for the t10 helm, equipping that piece. Holding on to any tank gear you pick up along the way. When you pick up the second piece of t10(imo pants because exp is very lacking in ICC, yay ulduar type gear) you can drop 4 piece because the shield slam/sw buff is going to be nice right away so you can keep up with threat as dps will soon be getting their 2 piece bonus. And by that time your healers/you will have pieces to drop the 10 sec CD from 4piece t9.


Of course a lot of has to do with your own personal judgment, that is just the plan I feel most comfortable with at the time being.