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This is actually exactly what I meant, but I guess I didn't make myself clear. Blocks for over 8000 happen when Shield Block is up and Critical Block procs.

Personally I don't believe that tank damage is relevant assuming that the tank can hold the aggro. The only suggestion i would have to that is just make sure ur expertise is capped, and a decent amount of hit rating. Other than that u would have to start gemmin/chanting for dps and that is unacceptable.

I can see other tanks pulling higher dps numbers but i know that as a prot warrior no boss will be pulled off of me and will allow the dps classes to really open up, more than once i have a non warrior tank be worried about his personal dps and lose aggro to the warlock with a 60% crit chance.

I know that i won't lose agg to that warlock so that warlock can open up and really let loose that is the warrior dps contribution the lack of fear from other classes to dps like they can.

You got it completely backwards. A tank has to survive first, then hold aggro (all in the frame of current tank capabilities so please noone mention a hypothetical tank that does 100 TPS but has 90% armor reduction or whatever). If you have any Rogues or Hunters in your raid then threat should be pretty much trivial and the only thing you need to care about is staying alive.

For what it's worth, I consider Survivability more important than Threat because it's just no issue right now. Utility would come as third but we already know that Blizzard does not balance tanks around this (and for good reason) so Paladins and Druids that are smart enough to know when to CR lucked out big time.

What does CR stand for in your post? Is that short-hand for re-roll?


The whole purpose of "icecrown radiance" was to stretch out the number of hits it takes to kill you. That means you'll probably see the average damage per hit go down to a lower level (ie probably in the range of 3 hits to kill instead of 2 like we have today). A well-geared bear has a maximum of 60K(?) hp after ToC 25 heroic is done? I think I'll be at around 54.5k hp when my wishlist is completed from ToC25 heroic. It seems unlikely that they'd tune a 3-hit-kill boss to the bear level of HP without having most of the wow tanking forums full of people screaming that warrior and DK EH are too low. That means you're probably looking at somewhere between 25-30k per hit for most bosses (maybe north of 30k if they're assuming you're upgrading to normal mode drops before you start doing the heroic encounters, you can only count on shields every 15 seconds and HoTs ticking every 3. Even with a paladin bombing holy lights on you, that's a lot of HP to replace).

Without even really trying to stack block value, I'll be at about 2.4k block value to start ICC. For 1/3 of the fight, I will block every hit. 60% of those blocks will be critical blocks for 8.2k, the other 40% will be regular blocks for 4.1k. For the other 2/3 of the fight I have a 43% chance to avoid an incoming attack and a 10% chance to block 4.8k and a 6% chance to block for 2.4k. There's a 6% chance 3 hits in a row will be unavoided or unblocked. That's higher than I'd like, but it's not quite as bad as the paladin's situation. They'll never double or quadruple their block value and they're counting on redoubt or stacking block rating on lower ilvl pieces to cover the hit table. Ardent defender is still really good, but paladins are going to have weaknesses elsewhere that they didn't have in ToC25.

Shaving that much damage off lower damage value attacks dramatically increases the value of the shieldblock ability, critical block, and our 4pcT9 bonus. There could be good reasons to be using the 258 version of T9 for the harder physical fights in that zone.

I actually think warriors will stack up pretty well. Druids will probably be the strongest for a harder hitting physical boss, but I don't think the marginal differences between us will be that bad.

Combat Rez (Rebirth). :P

And yeah, Paladins are getting hit quite a bit with the radiance since it eliminates Holy Shield as EH but that's pretty much it. They still have a lower chance to take multiple unblocked hits than Warriors and in the end critical block is never guaranteed so it cannot be counted as EH either. That said, Shield Block turned out alot more awesome in ToC than I would have given it credit for, partly because of the critical block buff and because it's always ready when you need it (tank switches at Gormok, Twins starting to dual wield, etc). I think 40 seconds is a good place to be as far as CD goes but it might even be better if it tripled block value instead of just doubling it (prevent crit blocks to happen during Shield Block to balance it out). But that's just something I'd say is nice to have - if it doesn't happen, no worries, Shield Block is still great.

Druids are still going to rule ICC and I am quite surprised they haven't been nerfed yet. It's not that they have alot more health than Warriors but what most people forget is that they have alot more armor as well so on some bosses they should be able to get into 3 shot range where other tanks hover in the 2 shot range which is quite significant no matter what.

In conclusion, Druids and Paladins will still have more EH than us, especially when they start getting more and more upgrades and it puzzles me why Blizz hasn't even started yet to reign them in. Shield Block is great and all, but not that great that it makes up for the EH differences unless bosses are tailor made for it like Twins (Shield Block absolutely rocks when they dual wield for obvious reasons). And keep in mind, you will probably replace most of your BV gear if the crafted pants are any indication of what's to come.

I still wonder why the concept of EH can keep its prevalent position in the minds of a majority of posts on this forum or tankspot.

Yes, it is important if not the single most important aspect.
No, it should not be that dominant that all reasoning is reduced to EH every time tank classes or gear is discussed.

In my opinion, there are as much tank deaths in raid setting which are caused by healer strain as they are caused by unavoidable/worst-case burst. While the latter has everything to do with EH, the former does not.

Where are you getting that from? Of those items shown on MMO-Champ, only the emblem chest had block value, which apparently is a bug. Instead all of them have bonus armor, but it remains to be seen if some of the ICC items will have that as well. It would definitely be interesting to have bonus armor on a bunch of items, even though it comes at the expense of other stats.

I also hope we are not going back to endless amounts of +hit on gear as quite a few of the known pieces have that, including the Ashen Verdict ring. I assume the heroic items will once again just be upgraded versions. That is all speculation though, only a few items are known so far and any of that could still change.

As liar suggested, I can only assume that by "healer strain", you mean the tank is taking long strings of unavoided blows. Suppose you have a 65% chance to avoid a blow completely, and you're fighting a boss with a fight length of around 3 minutes (a very short fight). Let's examine how many strings of 4 consecutive hits you should expect to take:

E = np
p = (1-.65)^4
n = 72 (number of strings of length 4 in 3 minutes)

E = 1.08045

So, with your 65% avoidance, you still expect to take one string of unavoided hits for almost 10 seconds of the fight. If you up your avoidance to 66%, you should still expect to take one string of 4 hits most (96.2% to be exact) of the time.

I'm just saying, avoidance makes a great stat when you are avoiding blows, and a terrible stat when you aren't. The latter case seems, to me, to be the situation I'd want to gear to guard against most - since probability states that it's likely to occur unless your avoidance is higher than is really possible in the current game, such as if you were looking to have 85% avoidance before Icecrown's 20% dodge penalty, as I've laid out in the example above.

If you're saying in your last statement that you see just as many tank deaths from a boss shortly after an avoided blow(i.e. non-worst case scenarios) as you see from a boss where none of the blows are avoided, I'd be interested in seeing your data.

Shame about the chest. Apparently only the ilvl 219 gear from the 5 man normal has BV without BR, meh. I should have checked the ilvl more closely I guess.

Pity, would have liked to collect a set with good pieces that have BV on them instead of parry, dodge or defense but I guess that is not going to happen.

The offset pieces we've seen so far make me hopeful that they'll continue the bonus armor trend for the tier pieces. What's your opinion of the set bonus though? Based off past scaling, we ought to be upwards of 60k buffed hp pretty quickly once the 25man gear starts rolling out, and a 12k+ shield every minute is pretty appealing as long as the gear that grants it isn't horribly itemized.

I'm generally suspicious that there'll be at least one gimmick fight which will rely on a massive periodic hit that might require this bonus to survive. Obviously the T9 bonus is substantially higher melee damage mitigation, and will undoubtedly be useful for some time to come in ICC, but the appeal of an on-demand medium cooldown shield is not lost on me.

Since it's sibling blade is EXCLUSIVELY a tank sword, I wouldn't be shocked if we don't see a tanking Quel'Delar. That's not to say there shouldn't be (or won't be) better tanking weapons, since there obviously will be, but don't hold your breath for a tanking Quel other than the one we already have.