Hey I was just kind of messing around with this. I have a kind of bad question though, why is the The Black Heart rated so above everything else? I mean the sheet seems to assign it even more value than the Heroic 25 man Sindragosa drop. I was just kind of curious about this. Is there some in depth trinket analysis I'm missing?

"Boots of Kingly Upheaval" are missing the 51 hit rating in wotlk_war_prot_2010_01_26b.ods

Is there still a chance you will update the spreadsheet? Would be great.

Cataclysm is different enough that I'm doubtless going to be getting into tank modeling again. Like Zorba, my feeling is that the spreadsheet format has come about as far as it can, and it butts up against some serious limitations and usability issues. I wanted to turn this into a web application long ago (I write them for a living), but every time I got started I allowed myself to bloat the scope of the project until it wasn't feasible anymore.

It's the usability issues that I think can be improved by Rawr or a web application - balancing average time-to-live against burst and both of those against threat capability is always going to be problematic. The only way to really solve that is to very accurately model the mechanics of a boss fight, which is next to impossible in a spreadsheet, but still quite hard in a programming language.

It's sounding like Cataclysm will simplify things a little, with the developers stating their intention for tank health pools to be typically larger than 2 or 3 hits from a boss. That will allow us to focus on average damage intake, and then adjust threat up to match the dps with whom we raid.

One last note - my considered opinion on "on use" trinkets is that it is best to use them whenever the cooldown is up. I find that in situations where I know I am going to take a lot of damage, I hit Shield Wall, Last Stand, or even Enraged Regen before I use a trinket. They just aren't powerful enough to save your life in one of those situations. A DPS trinket with an "on use" is a very different thing, because they get MORE powerful when combined with your other cooldowns. A tank trinket is utterly wasted when used in combination with Shield Wall.

There are also many situations where the dangerous burst could come at any moment, faster than you could react, so using the trinket on cooldown provides a chance to prevent one of those deadly bursts.

Additionally, if you DO decide to use them at crucial moments, their uptime is going to be greatly reduced - the advantage of correct timing is counterbalanced by reduced uptime. So modeling them based on maximum uptime is still roughly appropriate.

The PvP shoulder enchant is missing.

Edit: I also think it would be great if there was a row under stats that calculates your effective health.