arthoriuss wrote:
Getting slightly off topic (dont mean to hijack rmehlar's thread) but I hope to see some more TotGC Anub add type tanking in IC raiding. Obviously not as hard as that for the normal raids but the same sort of idea that requires tanks to think about gearing instead of just going down the effective health path.
Maybe I'm just getting sentimental having seen what it was like in TBC!
There was a lot of talk in the first few months of WotLK about mediocre tanks stacking stamina over all else. (I still remember the warrior I came across in the first 4-6 weeks of the expansion standing outside the instance portal to AN with 30k HP back when tanks with 24-26kk HP were doing well for themselves).
I upgraded my belt tonight and it pushed me below 102.4% avoidance w/ Holy Shield, which was disappointing. I gained about 1% dodge with the upgrade but lost about 2.8% block. I'm still beyond the block cap as long as my Libram proc stays active but I'm noticing that the uptime on the Libram is not 100%.
I don't mind crazy add fights. Kel'Thuzad in Naxx25 with only one add tank was a boneheaded strategy but it was fun as that one tank rounding up all of the adds. (And almost fun watching them all scatter when I got MC'd XD). Sartharion was a bit much as a pally tank, but I see that the T10 2pc bonus is a 2 second reduction to Hand of Reckoning CD. Also, with the new achievements posted from the PTR we can see that the Lich King fight will feature adds in some capacity, though whether or not they'll be tankable is undetermined at this point.
More to the original point, I don't like gear swapping as part of a gimmick that exists until you overgear the content. It's just a pain in the ***. Tanks are stacking stamina for a reason...namely that avoidance only addresses incoming physical damage in content where so much damage is either magic or comes in the form of physical damage where avoidance doesn't apply (ie. Gormok's Impale in ToGC25 ate our tanks alive for...more progression attempts than I care to mention). Right now our guild's main warrior tank is talking about going back into Naxx to farm BV gear for Anub in ToGC25. The idea that progression is basically halted pending Naxx farming runs + RNG is a bit disheartening. What's worse is that even if he gets the recommended BV on his gear, his health pool is going to suffer substantially and...he's a warrior. He can't even be block capped 100% of the time. BV seems to scale fairly well, but at the end of the day he's farming old content for obsolete gear to offset demanding mechanics in current content.
In a way, it's incentive for the guild to get me involved on my pally and help me tweak my gear a bit. I believe it's the head and legs for T9 gear that have the block value baked right in. Take those, new shield, Conquest libram and any of my current gear with BV and I could probably hit 3k block value without too much difficulty. It's just those 100 EoT right now that are preventing me from contributing <.<
I guess that if we can take anything from this, it's that tanks are unwise to dispose of old gear without giving thought to what it might be useful for in the future. In my case, I'm lucky that my pally is still toting mostly T7.5 epics so I can actually hang on to the BV gear as I upgrade. If I had vendored it all on the way to ToGC, I'd be pissed lol