Oh god, don't ever look at maxdps.com. Just don't.

TG requiring 14% is almost a year old. That was back when it reduced the chance to hit by 5%. That's no longer the case. You now only need 8% including precision to never miss.

Str vs Arp: People like you asking this question is why Blizzard is doing away with the stat. Go download Landsoul's spreadsheet, and you can play around to see if gemming full armor pen is the way or not. I can tell you right now that if you don't have quite a bit of TOC25 and ICC gear, and don't have any of the armor pen proc trinkets, you're not going to want to gem for armor pen. If you do have one of those trinkets, the goal is to gem up to the point where when the trinket is procced, you'll be hard capped. I just recently was able to make the switch to 100% static armor penetration.

Alright, I'm new to this whole Warrior Tanking scene, so please, no hate.

Now, I know my gear won't be as good as ToC/ICC Gear from the start, I'm soon to hit 80. I have the rotations (Not quite) down with flawless aggro. Now, should I put mitigation gems into my gear until I get 232+ then stack Stamina? I see almost every single Protection Warrior doing so, but I ask why. Why are tanks just stacking Stamina. Wouldn't it be better to put some mitigation up such as +10 Def. +15 Stam. - +10 dodge +15 Stam. - +10 Parry +15 Stam.?

I know Parry is useless. I also understand that you get shield rating with Strength. How do I gem properly?

You should gem stamina in every slot, it's simply the best tanking stat by far. In any given fight stamina will improve your chances of survival the most. The only reason I would ever gem something else is if you had to fill metagem requirements or if you had a socket bonus with at least 12 stamina. If you are using rare gems I suppose it would make sense to get socket bonuses with 9 stamina also.

I'd be using rare until iLvl 232+ (Unless it's a weapon, those are rare drops). Thanks though, figured I'd ask because I was a MT in Naxx+Ulduar with my DK which I mainly used +30 Stam. and +10 Def. +15 Stam. in every socket I could. That will help a bit when gemming. I do have a question for shoulder enchants. I mean, picture me Def. capped (Will be higher with ToC & ICC Gear), would I choose +10 Dodge +15 Def. for my shoulders or something like +(Someodd) Stam +15 Resil.?

I see many Main Tanks in High-end raiding guilds doing either or, which is better? 200-300 More Health or more Dodge+Parry?

There isn't a one-size-fits-all answer.

I'll start by saying that if you're wearing the ilvl 264 crafted legplates and tier 10 chest as a warrior you're going to be hurting for defense rating eventually, so gemming a yellow socket with def/stam and netting 6-9 stamina from a socket bonus is usually worth it.

For the red sockets, it's really a matter of whether or not you think 0.15-0.18% avoidance is worth losing 6-9 net stamina (counting the socket bonus). For some fights that's a good bargain, in other fights it is not. I usually gem toward a piece's existing strengths or towards whatever my overall set requires (keeping in mind what the opportunity costs are).

There is actually a one-size-fits-all answer to the shoulder enchant question. As long as we exclude tanking Anub 25 Heroic adds, the stamina+resilience enchant is better for every fight in the game. Stamina is much better than dodge/defense even one for one, and you're actually getting more stamina. If you are having problems getting def capped, the resilience will actually help more than the defense.

About the sockets, could you give some examples in what fights the avoidance would be better?

The thing about Festergut Zynth is that even with CDs he can put out so much damage with in a short time frame avoidance is simply too risky and relys on RNG too much to focus on.

You're talking about 6 stamina here. When we've already got a pretty huge amount of HP (55k+ raid buffed?), that's barely even noticeable in terms of a survivability increase vs a mob that can hit for ~25-28k every second. When you have items that have a red socket and a blue socket with a +9 stamina socket bonus, I don't know why you'd think you get more of a return from a pure blue gem in that slot. You're basically getting 10 dodge rating for 6 stamina. Unless you're so far against the DR curve for dodge that you're not getting much from that, I really don't see how that's a bad trade-off.

Mana doesn't matter for healers, but gobbling up extra GCDs and cooldowns because you're a meatshield who doesn't mitigate or avoid anything is pretty noticeable. Avoidance matters for adds/trash tanking, it matters for Festergut, it matters for anything that swings faster than 2 seconds before debuffs. There's only so many heals you can realistically get in a set timeframe and it's not RNG if you're talking about compound probability of every hit landing before a heal does. If you're counting on it to save you from an individual hit? Yes, that's RNG. If you're counting on it to save you vs a series of hits? That's not RNG. That's simple probability. Edit: After doing Saurfang heroic in 10 man, I'd say avoidance is pretty important there too.


Sindragosa is more about frost resistance than total HP (close to 60% of the damage is pure frost damage by my logs, and all of the healer stress comes from frost effects). You want a lot of stamina for it, but you get much better returns from resistance on that fight than you do from any other stat after a certain point.

It's probably worth mentioning that revenge is no longer a part of the priority queue, and should only be used when you don't have the rage for anything else. As such the 'cookie cutter' prot spec probably shouldn't include imp. revenge.

I fully agree, but what I was referring to were the melee hits which are very weak. In such a case avoidance isn't as important as EH. In a similar fight where resistance gear isn't a viable option the same gearing strategy will stand.

Possible to add the Fury/Arms 4pc bonus?

Would the proc take precedence over using BT/WW even if their CD is under 2 sec left?

I personally prefer to keep Imp Revenge for a few reasons. First, I'm not really a fan of Imp Disciplines unless I'm glyphing Shield Wall/Last Stand and I never do. Also, I'm not worried about threat or doing a tiny bit more DPS with Cruelty (also I prefer Focused Rage). Another reason I take Imp Revenge is because there are still many boss adds in ICC that can be stunned. Fanatics and Adherents on Lady Deathwhisper and many of the adds on Valithria Dreamwalker (esp the Abom) as well as many of the adds on LK can all be stunned. These adds do a lot of damage so a 3 second stun is pretty useful. I also keep it because I'm the 3rd tank for my guild so I have to run with a Prot offspec for much of the week. Fury is awful in BGs w/o a healer so when I'm going solo I go prot, and imp revenge is op in PvP.

Resilience does work on raid bosses and reduces crit ADDITEVELY with defense.

One thing to note for sake of completeness (hardly useful, although sometimes handy when you solo old content etc).

Resilience is counted BEFORE defense. Which means that with resilience on your gear IF you spec blood craze it will proc regardless of your defense (converted crits still proc blood craze if they were subjected to reslience reduction).

This is especially true whenever there's a major raid damage component to the encounter. If you're expected to die in <3 hits worth of damage, and the healer can't always count on his heal landing before the next swing, then basically any time you're down any hp the next heal must go to you. You shouldn't count on avoidance to keep you alive one swing longer, but you CAN and SHOULD count on avoidance to give your healers a chance to heal other people. If you're at full health and you dodge, they can ship one elsewhere.

Tank death isn't the only cause of wipes. If you've never had a raid stutter out and get overwhelmed because the healers were mashing heals on you and raid damage ground down the dps, I don't know what game you're playing.

This is just plainly wrong. Bosses does so much damage these days that if a healer decides to throw a heal elsewhere the tank might very well die before his next heal can land. In the end it's pretty much irrelevant because Beacon of Light will keep hitting the tank no matter where the paladin aims his heal.

Avoidance isn't worthless, but that's because it can save you in those situations where healers make mistakes or other circumstances (such as raid needing heals) stops some heals from coming in. This is a randomness that you cannot depend on, but 20% chance to avoid a wipe is still better than 0%.

How is it "wrong" to say that between HoTs, shields, and intermittent heals, avoidance is more valuable than 330 more hp or a resillience enchant which you derive little to no value from? The whole problem with a lot of tank "theorycraft" these days is that all anyone is focused on is burst and a flawed EH model. The burst in most fights in WoTLK is almost always a known value on a known timer, you almost always deal with it using cooldowns in WoTLK, and it's completely unsurvivable with 2000 more hp (or less since that's what we're talking about with some of the gem and enchant choices).

I don't know how your healing assignments look, but there are people in our raid group who spam the tank all fight long and people who help out on the tank when needed (either because you're in period where there's an expected frenzy or because the tank dipped low when a healer had to interrupt a cast). There's maintenance healing and there's extra healing. I don't think anyone is saying you can survive long periods of time without heals. What I'm saying is that you will always have some, but if you don't need that swing healer to help out, that frees up other heals for other people. You can't just look at 100% to 0%, there's a lot of situations where you go 100% -> 45% -> 75% -> 20% -> 80%. Mitigating and avoiding damage in there makes it easier for them to get to a point where they can comfortably renew buffs, judgements, etc. because you just got topped off and they know it will take 2 hits to kill you.

Thank you. Consider especially the 100-45-75-20 part of the sequence here from the perspective of the spot healer. If he sees this, his heal goes to you. If you avoid the second hit, he sees 100-45-75-100 and that's +1 heal to the raid. These things do add up.

That being said I do prefer the stam/resil shoulder enchant (worth noting I'm actually using the resil). But the notion that avoidance doesn't do anything except when the heals fuck up is horribly misguided at best, and gearing without any regard for balanced survivability is just hurting your raid.

Revenge is now VERY viable again as of 3.3.3. Thanks Bliz for making me change my bars twice in 2 months :P

Revenge > Shield Slam > Shockwave > Devastate is now our new single target priority list.


P.S Imp Revenge talent is fantastic

Revenge and Shield Slam are actually very close, so I'm not sure I'd rank Revenge above SS in priority. For one, SS has a higher crit rate via talents, and secondly if shield block is up SS is going to hit much harder than revenge. Even assuming it's not up though, I'd argue the 15 percent higher crit chance definitely outweights Revenge, especially given a 2 piece t10 set bonus.

I'll admit I have actually run a TPS parser to test this though because I didn't think revenge had come quite far enough to outweigh the points I made above. I can try to do it and get back to this thread though.

For Shield Slam to have better threat than Revenge you must be at or very near a T10 gear level with 2pT10. The choice to put Revenge ahead of Shield Slam was made under the assumption that most Warriors using this guide would not have 2pT10. Shield Block does push Shield Slam above Revenge at all reasonable gear levels, though the difference is fairly small at the lower end.

That said, I've revised the threat rotation answer with those caveats.

You may want to add a couple of questions in the Protection section along the lines of "How important is demo shout?" (and maybe show a spec with imp. demo - also maybe a note how if you're going to lose Deep Wounds, you may as well get Commanding Presence if your raid needs it).

Could anybody try to explain why the suggestet spec uses anger management 1/1 (1 rage every 3 sec) instead of improved beserker rage 1/2 (effectively 1 rage every 2 seconds if used on cd + possibility to better bypass rage starving spikes) ?