Breaking down Theck’s newest headache

I briefly touched on Theck’s new formula  a few posts ago, and Rhidach and Honors have done the same, but I wanted to discuss its benefits in the near future a bit more. Currently there is probably only one encounter that you would use this on, and that is the encounter you are wiping on. The problem with this current situation is that there are plenty of smart tanks that are easily available who have cleared the content and can help you with your gear questions. There are no fewer than 5 to 10 posts a day in the Gear Questions and Advice forum on MainTankadin, and these do not include the daily whispers that most top Tankadins get on a daily basis regarding strategy, gearing, and philosophy.

The formula courtesy of Theck, bringer of numbers and pounding headaches…

I don’t know about the rest of you, but just looking at that formula gives me a headache, so why have we been giving this so much attention over the past few days? The values of X and Y in that formula are very easy to obtain via World of Logs or WWS or what ever parse application you use, and they provide for some very powerful information. What we can do with this formula is calculate our effective health for any given death situation. Some of the variables are defined below by Theck, and these account for our specific gear sets, making this formula universal.

The formula uses the following mitigation factors:
Ma is the mitigation due to armor, defined as M is in section I.
Mt is the mitigation applied to physical damage due to talents
Mg is the mitigation applied to magical damage due to talents
Mr is the mitigation applied to magical damage due to resistances

Here X is the percentage of our damage intake that’s from bleed effects, Y is the amount of damage taken from magical sources, and 1-X-Y is the “leftover” amount due to regular physical damage.

Why do you ask is this an important thing to understand? Well as you very well know, I am a fanatic when it comes to gear discussion and theory, and It is where most of my expertise lies when it comes to theorycraft. And, this formula gives us a direct insight into our gearing choices and whether we should be altering our progression gear set for a specific encounter. For those of you who have the same level of math savvy that I do, the following breakdown clears somethings up for us:

The take-home message of these formulas is that armor loses effectiveness linearly with the percentage of “regular” physical damage intake for a given fight. In other words, for a fight with only 50% non-bleed physical damage, armor is reduced in effectiveness by 50%. If an armor trinket is worth 100 stamina on a purely “regular” physical fight, it will only be worth 60 stamina on a fight with 15% bleed damage and 25% magic damage (60% “regular” physical). – Theck

This gives us some insight into whether or not we should be wearing those juicy bonus armor pieces from Icecrown Citadel when fighting progression encounters with in that instance. We have all come to the consensus that bonus armor is a great weapon, and even more over, the armor trinkets that most tanks refuse to wear will have their day in the sun, however, they will be few and far between. The armor trinkets that we have access to through the badge vendors in this tier, and even the upgraded armor trinket with a stamina stacking proc in the next tier, will have specific times to shine, as our block rating gear has on Anub’arak.

It is important to understand though, that the use of these trinkets will be purely situational and most likely in a gimmick set, and not as part of our progression main tanking set. For that set, we will have the Scarab/Juggernaut trinket and the 228 stamina from the badge vendor in ICC. Once again, I give you Theck:

Stam is better in general, because it works everywhere. It’s the VISA of EH.

Armor is American Express. More exclusive, but very powerful in the few places it should be used.

This wasn’t intended to imply that Armor needs to be reworked. I think that Blizz is better off leaving armor as-is. But we need to be able to make intelligent gearing decisions as tanks, and knowing when to use or not use armor trinkets helps us do that.

Is this going to benefit the Greater community, or just the number crunchers?

The true power of this equation is that it will help both sides of the community. First and foremost, this is a better evaluation of the formula and theory of Effective Health. This does not, in any way, change our view on effective health, or how it is achieved. What this does is show us the tipping points in certain encounters where the magic damage or bleed damage has become great enough that armor is no longer as powerful as stamina at a 11.7:1 ratio.

For the number crunchers, we can analyze our death logs and evaluate our X and Y values to see if we need to modify our gear set to include more or less armor versus stamina, and we can do so in real time with irrefutable data. For those of you that do not do that, but still want to be prepared for the fights to come, The gear gurus of the community are beginning to work together to compile a list of damage sources which result in “spike” damage. What I mean by this is, we are starting to comb through our parses and get the damage numbers for our spike damage events for each applicable fight, and we will, when confident that we have a large enough sample size, publish the X and Y values for each encounter.

This will provide a great wealth of information which will empirically define what gear sets you should wear for your progression encounter. If you are dying on Northrend Beasts to Gormok’s impale, then you can come look at those relative X an Y values and see if you need to shed or gain some armor for stamina. What is important to understand though, is that this formula is used to provide insight into those burst damage situations, not overall damage mitigation throughout the fight. Meloree and Brekkie brought this up half way through our discussion and they were spot on with their assessment, it is important to understand the following:

People hear the term EH and they think “that number = my survivability”. In the way you are modeling EH, that is not strictly the case. Tanks gear for EH-contributing stats for progression, this is true, but the ultimate goal is not to maximize your absolute EH. It is to maximize your chance of survival against the primary “tank-killer” scenario of the current fight.- Brekkie

Conclusions and a path forward?

The formula gives us a very logical source of theorycraft from which we can make gearing decisions. It requires a bit of manipulation and data gathering, however when that is complete, we can effectively make on the fly decisions during progression encounters about our gearing choices. Where most great tanks do this already using the trial and error method, coupled with a vast amount of knowledge and gut feeling, we can empirically answer the question with a mathematical formula that should be fairly easy to do in between wipes.

For now, We can go back to Trial of the Grand Crusader and analyze the parses for values of X and Y. As a community we will more than likely come up with an acceptable sample size and get some great values for effective health with respect to the gear we wear. Going forward, I would like to create a spreadsheet for dummies (read myself when I say dummies), which uses simple excel formulas to mimick Theck’s equation and allow anyone to plug in their values to give you your outputs. If the work is on the back end, you can easily create a format where you can plug in your mitigation factors, values for X and Y, and you will have your effective health. Tweaking those mitigation factors will give you a good idea on whether or not you want to stack more armor, more stamina, or even consider a resistance flask.

Epiphany and Dilemma

A Digression from the plan

I know that I said that I was going to go over each of the options for our tier pieces and the off set gear so that we can better understand how we want to spend our emblems of frost, but I came to the realization this morning that I have indirectly had a hand in something that I am not happy about. I will have to admit somethings that you may or may not care to hear in order to tell this story, so I apologize in advance if you get any bad images in your head.

Morning Reading…

As I said yesterday, I have had quite a few emails and blogs to read over the past few days, since my return home, and I just finished catching up this morning. I was spending some leisure time at work in the john reading everyones blogs over the past week, when I came across one by Tengen. He was outlining the proper etiquette one should hold themselves to when leaving their guild for “greener pastures.” It initially got me to thinking about my guild and the times that I have wanted to move on so that I would not have to deal with the poor attendance.

To be honest, I am pretty sure that I would quit the game before I would leave my guild, however there are always unforeseen forces in the future which can change things. However, I digress. When I was reading Tengen’s blog, he mentioned another fellow blogger, which was the source of inspiration for his blog topic. Dämmerung of The Children of Wrath had a post on the subject that I must of originally skipped over in my reader, because if I would have read it, this would have been my topic of discussion yesterday. Tengen was talking about the methods and stories of different people as the leave their guilds.

After I finished reading Tengen’s blog, I had to get back to work and I didn’t give it another thought for a few hours. Then, out of no where, I realized that the blog was about people defecting and going to another guild. I also realized that Dämmerung is the GM of a guild called Legacy. Like dominoes, all the pieces started falling together, and I stopped working on what ever it was that I was working on and opened up Children of Wrath to find this topic that Tengen spoke of, and found what I was hoping was not the story.

From the epiphany comes a dilemma

As I read the opening line of the blog, I already knew the story, with out needing to see my guilds name half way down the page.

We recently lost a group of five players to faction transfer.

As you may remember, I was talking about some attendance issues that our guild was having. Really in the long run, we were doing fine, we cleared all available content save Anub 25 man Hard mode in one and a half raid nights, but the progression fights were hurting. Well, while I was on vacation over the past week and a half, my guild picked up five faction transfers from a guild called…Legacy.

I normally don’t give a second thought to the previous places that our new recruits came from, and I only focus on the future of working them into a raid, understanding their needs and their motivations, and over all seeing if they are a good fit for our guild. However, today I am faced with both sides of the story. I feel as though our blogging community is a small guild of its own. We share similar interests and we talk amongst ourselves regularly. Knowing that I am the result of some unwanted stress and pain is not how I wanted to end my day. Even more so, the question has crept into my mind, do I really want people like that in my guild?

Apologies and Considerations…

Mr. Renaissance Man, I feel for the first time, regret and empathy for the guild and the leader which some of our applicants left to join us. It is an interesting coincidence that the source of your frustration and my own guild and raiding team are one and the same tangled web. With that being said, I have to figure out what I should do about these new recruits. Originally, I was going to treat them as I do any other member of our guild, but I feel that I should be wary of their actions prior to leaving their previous guild.

I guess with every end, there is a new beginning…

What a difference a week makes

I’m Back!

After around 550 emails from work and 75 blog entries to read, not to mention guild and MainTankadin forums, I am no where near caught up from my trip. It seems as though the Icecrown Citadel has fueled most blogs in the past few weeks, and I am ready to jump into the fray so to speak. As I began to peruse the MainTankadin forums, I already felt out of place. When you have a forum community that is that massive, if you do not keep up on a daily basis, you fall behind and have to start all over again. I was always thankful that MT was better than EJ in the sense that there was more than one 100 page long thread to find your information, but it is still a vast amount of information and once you are more than a few pages behind, its a daunting task to catch back up.

Theck strikes again…

Theck has a very interesting and insightful post up on MT which mathematically outlines the effectiveness of armor in fights where magical damage is a percentage of your total damage taken. As we all know there are very few fights where you are sure that you will only take physical damage. The encounters now a days are throwing both boss melee swings in with aoe magic damage, and special physical or magic damage. The real game application of armor’s contribution to effective health is less than what we see on the tooltip. Theck sums it up…

So for a purely physical fight, armor seems like a pretty good deal. But for even a fight with 20% magical damage, Armor becomes devalued by 20%. This will generally be enough to make a Stamina trinket provide more EH than an armor trinket.

For an example, let’s look at the Glyph of Indomitability, since that’s what started this thread. It gives 1792 armor, which is equivalent to 153 stamina. However, for a fight with Y=20%, we get only (1-Y)=80% of that, or 123 stamina. For a fight with 30% magical damage, it’s only worth 107 stamina, and so forth. – Theck

Icecrown Gear and You…

Icecrown gear has a lot of bonus armor on it, and while it is never something you should pass up on, the question remains: With theck’s analysis under our belts, do we want to use off set pieces over four piece T10?

I had every intention when I was on vacation to start writing about icecrown gear and encounters, as I have beaten Anub’arak and ToTGC to death on this blog. The data mining has provided us with more juicy pixilated morsels on MMO-champion, and we can start to gain a better understanding of our gearing options going forward. Now while we are being subjected to Chill of the Throne as well as our red headed step child of a four piece bonus, Theck’s work has thrown us a curveball when it comes to deciding what type of gear we should select going forward in ICC. It is important to remember that all of Theck’s conclusions were comparing stamina to armor, so that is the only thing that matters when comparing gear based on his assessments, I will weigh in on the other stats myself.

While we will all walk into ICC with the same general ratio of statistics with respect to Stamina, Armor, and Avoidance, where your guild is in progression will dictate what exact pieces you are wearing. For some of us, that will be full 258. For most of the people it will be a mix of gear. Either way, every piece that drops from ICC is an item level upgrade. So, how do you chose what you should be gearing towards and when you should equip it.

An initial look at our Tier Gear versus Off Set Gear

This is going to be a long journey for us when it comes to gear selection. We have three chests to choose from in the iLevel 264 category, our T10 chest, the Blightborne Warplate, and the Cataclysmic Chestguard. All three of these have unique strengths and weaknesses which make them powerful pieces for compiling full sets, but as individual pieces, we can compare the relative gains and losses of wearing each piece. Each off set piece has a net gain of 23 defense from the tier piece, while there is some room for debate on whether or not stacking defense is still of benefit to us, it is still raw avoidance that you are gaining. Let’s take a look at each of these pieces and analyze their strengths and weaknesses…

This beauty looks great from a holistic point of view. all of the chest pieces have over 200 stamina on them, this one has three sockets, defense, dodge and hit! While I am currently very excited about this hit rating, I don’t want to get ahead of myself. Part of the reason that hit seems so attractive to me is the fact that I have less than 50 hit rating currently. What this piece offers us are sound defensive stats and hit rating for threat. To me, this is the perfect chest for our threat set.

This chest SCREAMS effective health, but then again I did just read Thecks post about armor and it’s reality in boss encounters that offer up more than 20% of their total damage as magical damage. This chest has the same base stamina, same number of sockets for 30 stam gems, and it has a 1176 bonus armor. With the expertise trade off for hit rating and the same amount of defense, you are trading 108 dodge rating for A LOT of armor. On the surface that seems like a pretty good trade off if you are not a hit junkie.

Finally, Tier 10…. While the base stamina is 12 more than the off set pieces, you lose a socket bonus in the process, netting you a negative 18 in stamina. You are also losing 23 defense rating. While this is not a huge loss, as we will be well above the defense minimum of 540, defense is still pure avoidance, which I have always liked. This chest is the pure balance that I dreamed of until the day that Ghostcrawler came along and crushed my dreams with a zone wide debuf called Chill of the Throne. With out Chill, this is my favorite piece, because you can get more overall avoidance out of it, however with the advent of a 20% reduction in dodge, this piece has earned the bottom of the list. The only way I will wear this chest is if the Helm, Legs, Shoulders, or Gloves are worse.

Conclusions?

I will be picking up all three chest pieces for the sake of my gear sets, however as long as I am not threat capping my dps, I will be wearing the Cataclysmic Chestguard for progression. While I do not know where these things drop, my best bet is that they are off some of the latter bosses. If I have to pick up the Tier gear to get my stats up, I will, however if not, I will be spending my badges on other gear prior to picking up the T10 chest. Over the next few days, I will be looking at some more of the pieces, namely gloves, legs, shoulders, and helm, to compare what they have to offer us. From the pattern I am seeing, Icecrown will offer us three pieces for each slot, and each of those pieces is specifically tooled for a job. The itemization is a soggy wet dream come true for a gear set lover like myself. There is something for each of my gear sets, EH, Threat, and Balance.

Out of the Office

I know it’s been some time since I have posted, so I wanted to drop by and let everyone know that I am alive, kicking, and on vacation. I’ll be out of the office, so to speak, until next week. I have gotten a chance, in the small amount of unrestricted internet I have had, to check out some of the Icecrown loot, and I have a good deal of writing material when I get home. Until then, keep on tankin’

Quality over Quantity, a theory on Raid Management

…and another one bites the dust

I am going to purposely neglect reading the previous posts that I have had on this subject ahead of time to see if my point of view has changed over the past few months on this subject. Over the course of the weekend, in addition to getting a nasty virus that kept me in bed for a few days (but not away from raiding, psh lets be honest, you can raid when you are sick), another guild bit the dust, and then another one (and another one). Well not the third one, but it seemed to fit the song title well. When I logged back into wow a few days ago, one of our main raiders whispered me and asked if we could talk in vent. After the pleasantries were exchanged, he got down to what he wanted to talk about.

One of his friends was looking for a new guild, as his was on the rocks and in the process of imploding. When we first started to talk about this, I was unaware that the guild that was imploding was one of our main competitors on the horde side for progression firsts. Shortly after that, another one of my guildies approached me with a similar request. This time it was a bit more devastating to the previously not to be mentioned guild. He was in contact with some of their officers, and a large portion of the guilds officer corps was looking for a new home with our guild. This would vacate not only the vast majority of the guilds leadership, but one of their main tanks, main healers, and their best dps.

While some guild politics prohibited the immediate acquisition of any of these players, It got me to thinking about stability, our server, and why so many guilds are failing. While some guilds were set up to fail, based on leadership inadequacies, player base, mass recruitment, or the end all of some high end progression guilds, the Attempts Remaining counter, Crypt Friends has endured. Now I ask myself, as we are running into raiding attendance problems of our own (take three), what do we do differently, and how do we set ourselves up for success over failure.

Two guilds, one result

In addition to our main competition guild having attendance issues to the point where they are looking elsewhere to get their shiny purples, the best alliance guild on the server imploded due to a handful of officers server transferring. While I don’t understand the logistics of why they would do such a thing, both from the perspective that they just got 25 man Mad Skill, an the fact that it was the officers that left, I have to ask myself what we do differently. With two more guilds down, we have unofficially moved into the ranks of number one guild on the server for 25 man progression, a few days after our guilds fourth birthday.

Since I was not a member of either of these guilds, I am left to speculate some of the reasons behind their demise. For the horde guild, I have run pugs with their members, and from the perspective of a main tank, their strategies, execution, and abilities are not up to the caliber of the progression they have achieved. This tells me that they are a brute force guild. What I mean by brute force is the fact that in Ulduar, they raided 5 nights a week to achieve the same level of progression as our guild achieves in two nights. I believe that the Attempts Remaining counter has devastated a lot of top tier guilds who were all about quantity over quality of time spent in an instance.

I can understand that their people who have seen nothing but 5 day raiding schedules would have a hard time with the paradigm shift of quality over quantity. It is just the way that things are. If you want to progress fast and hard, you have to put a LOT of time in. I am confident in my opinion that this is a complete fallacy. While I am not a member of a top 100 guild, we are pretty close, and we are doing it on a little over 1 night of raiding progression a week. We have been a guild that has always had something on farm once it was killed the first time. From my early days of raiding in SSC/TK, to the difficult encounters of Sunwell, up through the Hard Modes in ToTGC, once something is dead, It dies with out more than 1 wipe every week after. We are consistently getting to Anub’arak with 48-50 attempts remaining and have been since the week after we killed Twins. Once again, Quality over Quantity is the paradigm shift in top end guilds right now.

Should we change our Raid Management

I called a guild meeting last night to discuss with our raiders the possibility of open recruitment and stricter competition between our members to earn their raid spots. Even though we are a quality over quantity guild, we are still having attendance issues on our second and third raid nights. Tuesday is always bright with possibilities, and we kill everything in ToTC and ToTGC save anub’arak hard mode. We are basically done with raiding for the week. Our second raid night brings promise of a great night of learning and progress on Anub’arak, for which we have made a lot of in the past few weeks, however we do not have the numbers to do such an encounter.

How is it that a guild with such a relaxed raiding schedule and such success in killing bosses cannot get 25 people together two nights in a row? We are plagued with the casual hardcore raiders, and as a result, the brick wall progression fights are very difficult to fill. Our dilemma as officers and leaders of our guild is as follows:

Do we alter our dkp and attendance policies to better reflect the issues that we are having, rewarding our “SUP sunday raiders” as one of our warlocks loves to say to the 15 of us that show up 100% of the time, or do we recruit to fill those spots and alienate the people that have built this guild into the quality over quantity powerhouse that it has been for as long as I have been privileged to be a member.

As an individual in the guild, and a main tank with 100% attendance, I would love to invite 10 new top end raiders and make our current raiders fight for their raid spots once again, as we did in sunwell. I want to see bosses drop dead, and I want to know that when I log on during the week, that I will have the opportunity to push progression. However, as a leader and an officer, I feel that it is my duty to preserve what we have created in our guild; tolerance for sub par attendance, settling for less raiding days because we get to keep the quality and caliber of raider that we have built over the years, and ensure that our guild makes it to it’s fifth birthday.

Solutions are not black and white

I believe that in the end, the solution to our problem will be a mixture of both options. We will have to recruit if we want to continue to progress. We are going to lose people to real life, or the next spawn of top end raiding guild that appears out of the ashes of the two guilds that are dissolving before our eyes. However, we are, as officers, obligated to keep the environment and tolerance that we have built and which our raiders enjoy so much. To maintain the balance is the true challenge that our officers are faced with on a daily basis. There are some people in our raid that should be replaced, and if we can entice some newly guildless players with the talent to join our guild, then we will be better off than we were. However, we must balance new recruitment with tradition and a mindful understanding of the core of our guild, the players that define us and ensure that we do not go the way of the last four guilds which died.

Why is Chill of the Throne Dodge reduction?

I just got finished responding to some questions on Maintankadin regarding the mechanics of Chill of the Throne and why exactly blizzard chose dodge as their target reduction. While I understand some of the mechanics of our tanking brethern, this explaination will be specifically tailored to Paladin Tanks, as that is what this blog is about. If we take a closer look at the debuf that we will recieve, we must ask ourselves, why would you select one over the other? What follows is a detailed hypothetical situation of the effects of our gearing philosophy if Chill of the Throne was a 20% flat reduction in parry…

The benefits of Dodge and Parry

If we want to understand what we will be losing based on a flat 20% reduction in either parry or dodge, we first must understand what these mechanics give us, and their diminishing returns in general. Dodge is plain and simple. You completely avoid an attack. Dodge’s diminishing returns are less stringent when compared to parry, and as such, we as tanks always have more of it. A fully unbuffed paladin with best in slot gear will have more than 20% (Typically 26-28%) dodge standing in Dalaran regardless of gemming and enchanting philosophy.

Parry on the other hand, has two components to it which factor into its value and reasoning behind the steeper diminishing returns. Parry gives us the same flat avoidance that dodge does, if the attack table deems that we are to parry an attack, the attack completely misses us and we have suffered no damage. In addition to the built in avoidance that parry provides, it also speeds up our swing timer, creating an additional threat component. The hasting that we are granted following a parried attack is one of the reasons that parry is on a much steeper diminishing returns curve. Going back to that fully unbuffed paladin I mentioned above, That same tank can, based on gear selection modify his or her parry percentage to be anywhere between 17% and 23% parry regardless of gemming and enchanting philosophy.

This disparity between parry and dodge gives us some insight into why the developers would choose dodge over parry. This is completely forsaking the threat component of parry that all tanks use. I will provide you with some raw numbers that a tank will have based on their selection of “Best In Slot” gear to minimize parry while maximizing stamina and armor. There are only four pieces of gear that will need to have substitutes in order to go from all 258 gear Best in Slot to a minimum parry gear set.

The gear set

The following gear is what I used to calculate the relative values of dodge, parry and stamina. Also keep in mind that, because we are talking about theoretical situations with in Icecrown Citadel, all gems save one are stamina, all enchants are stamina.

258 T9 Helm, Shoulders, Gloves, and Legs, 258 Legionnaire’s Gorget, 258 Pride of the Demon Lord, 258 Hauberk of the Towering Monstrosity, 245 Saronite Swordbreakers, 245 Heroic Belt of the Nether Champion, 258 Dawnbreaker Greaves, Band of the twin Val’kyr, Clutch of Fortification, 258 Juggernaut’s Vitality, 245 Juggernaut’s Vitality.

Here is the Chardev Link for this set…

As you can see, unbuffed, you have 28.31% dodge, 17.5% parry, and 45.1k HP. The gear that you had to trade out to get to this point is a net loss of 1k stamina from pure best in slot items, and 2% avoidance. Clearly the set linked above would be in response to the environment, as best in slot gear gives you a much better bang for your buck in all areas. By switching out the cloak to the Tribute Chest cloak from 10 man Hard Mode Insanity, the Bracers to the Bracers of the Shiledmaiden, the belt to the Belt of the Bloodied Scars, and the Ring to the Band of the Traitor King, you have lost a good deal of avoidance and stamina, but you have gained your four piece set bonus.

The trade offs are fairly even when it comes to the grand scheme of things, however the effect on chill of the throne is quite noticeable.

What if Chill of the Throne effected parry?

As you can see from the chardev link from above, you would be sitting at 17.5% parry. Your total avoidance in that set is 61.07%. If Chill of the throne was a 20% reduction in parry, your parry percentage would drop down to 0, and you would receive a net GAIN of 2.5% avoidance because you were below the 20% mark. This gives you effectively 44.2% total avoidance. Conversely, if you chose to use all best in slot items, your gear would be giving you a total avoidance of 63.4% total avoidance, before you step into Icecrown Citadel. Post Chill of the throne would place you at 43.4% avoidance. This is a swing of 3.2% lost avoidance, so the relative benefit is quite significant.

Empirically speaking, while 1% avoidance for 1000 hp does not see like a reasonable trade off with what is looming ahead in Icecrown Citadel, you have to remember that as we start to get into the 264 item level gear, you can pick and chose even more and extend that discrepancy between your parry and dodge. Your parry will still suffer steep diminishing returns, while your dodge percentage will continue to climb. In order to push past that Chill of the Throne reduction in avoidance, it would require more parry than dodge per point of avoidance. Now I must clarify that Chill of the Throne does not change the diminishing return formula, so the previous statement holds true no matter where you stand, however if you chose to eliminate parry from your gear sets, then it would take you more parry to start seeing an avoidance benefit than if it were dodge.

Conclusions?

In the end, these differences are as small as the gearing differences between the Stamina tanks an my own gear sets. When we have discussions based on stamina versus avoidance, it was for that last few percent after you ensured your survival. To me, and I may once again be alone on this, the trade off of 1k hp is more than worth get net gain you would get if you had a parry reduction from the Chill of the Throne mechanic. While I don’t believe that the developers were strictly looking at this as a justification to select dodge, I believe that with their current knowledge of the gear stats coming on the T10 items (which we currently do not know), this gearing philosophy could be achieved and chill of the throne could be partially avoided, thus the underlying motivations behind reducing dodge by 20%.

Icecrown Pallies will have Skirts and Skulls

Tier 10 makes me happy!

I am more than likely a little slow on this, but I wanted to wait for blizzard to officially post the paladin skins for Tier 10 before I jinxed myself. I will have to say that I am quiet pleased with the decision to have two skirts in one expansion. I loved my T8, it always covered up the nasty boots that always matched the warrior tier over our pally gear. Moreover, I love me some blue with flames on it. When I first saw the datamined gear, I was not pleased with the fact that they were trying to gear out the “bringers of light” with skulls, but as time has passed, it has grown on me. It is still not as awe inspiring as T2 or T6, but I will take it! Now show me a Female Belf version…

In response to Survey Link Love

For Rhidach and Honors –

I have seen these questionnaire throughout the blogging network over the past few weeks, and I am ashamed to say that I have half heartedly skimmed over the healing ones. Now that there is a tanking one, I actually read the whole thing, however as I expect most people to skim this one as well, this is for Rhidach and Honors…

What is the name, class, and spec of your primary tank?

Wrathy, Paladin, Protection dual spec (0/53/18 and 0/54/17). Yeah I know, I am a tank-a-holic. The secondary spec has always been saved for gimmick fights. It was originally my general spec with Benediction and a few other tricks up the sleeve, now it is for Anub’arak hard mode, with imp hammer, imp hands, and my Holy Wrath and HoTR glyphs.

What is your usual tanking environment?

25 man Trial of the Grand Crusade, however I run 10 man Ony, ToTC, and ToTGC, and 25 man Ony, and ToTC as well.

What is your favorite encounter to tank, and why?

This is a very tough question, and I am probably going to deviate from the true intention of this question, seeing as the question was written in the time of Wrath of the Lich King, however my favorite encounter of all time to tank was Huhuran. Call me Old School, and even call me a warrior at the time, but there was something about a non tauntable mob that you had to ping pong between two tanks that just screams pure professional execution. This was one of the most satisfying encounters to tank of all time when we were 60. I know that this is kind of cheating, and at the time, the Horde did not have paladins, so I was doing it all with Heroic Strike and Shield Slam, but it will always stick out in my mind.

If I am not allowed to cheat, then I would have to say add tank on sarth 3d. Really it came down to running around like a chicken with your head cut off, picking up adds. I did it better than any other tank we had, and I was proud of that.

What is your least favorite encounter to tank, and why?

Anub’arak 25 man Hard Mode, until he is dead. But in all honesty, something like main tanking XT, where all you do is stand there, and threat isn’t really an issue at all. Boring, not challenging, and overall underwhelming.

What do you think is the biggest strength of your class, and why?

“We’re pretty hard to kill. Between AD, our Guardian Spirit effect, LoH, DP, etc., I tend to be the last one standing during any wipe.” – Rhidach.

Yeah I cheated, but I did not get the rule book. I have to say that our ability to be unhittable with holy shield, combined with the ardent defender mechanics make us a very powerful effective health tank that can take one hell of a beating.

What do you think is the biggest weakness of your class, and why?

Lack of closure. The one thing that I do not like about our class is our lack of interrupt and ability to close the gap. Charge, Intercept, and Intervene are a very potent combination. Death Grip is similarly convenient when trying to close the gap on a mob that is running away or casting something nasty. The combination of some sort of interrupt or gap closure would make us complete in my eyes. I know that we have our Avenger’s Shield, but I don’t trust that nearly as much as I trust charge.

In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel is the best tanking assignment for you?

I feel that I can do anything in a 25 man raiding environment, and I actually have served as both main tank and off tank for all of the current encounters. If I had to chose one role, I truly enjoy being the main tank. The knowledge of the encounter coupled with a mastery of the abilities at hand are powerful tools, and the puzzle that you have to put together when it comes to what cool down for what ability is one of the most enjoyable experiences in the game for me.

What tanking class do you enjoy tanking with the most?

Really I don’t think this question can be properly answered. I have preferences on the people that I would like to tank with, but what class they play is really irrelevant to my enjoyment. I have tanked progression fights next to all of the other three classes and enjoyed the experience equally. If I had to pick, I like having a warrior there for commanding shout, sunders, and demo shout on the adds as necessary, however those are more conveniences from a raid leader perspective.

What tanking class do you enjoy tanking with the least?

See previous question.

What is your worst habit as a tank?

Clicking to pick up adds. I have always been a tank or a healer, and have never mastered the art of tab targeting. I use enemy face plates and I click them to pick them up. Two adds, no problem, three getting tough, four or more, not gonna happen, good luck with the mob in your face…

What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while tanking?

This one is going to go back to the good old days once again. I am a pretty laid back guy on my paladin, and with respect to tanking, I don’t get frustrated easily, however when I was a warrior, I could not stand people thinking that they could tank something for me, or that a threat meter was simply a suggestion. When I was level 66 on my warrior, I was in a Setthek Halls, and there were two rogues that were pulling off me constantly. Their response to me requesting that they wait until I was done establishing aggro was: “Don’t worry dude, I can tank this one by myself.” Needless to say, the next day I had a level one Paladin Alt named Wrathy, and I was going to be a healer.

Do you feel your class/spec is balanced with respect to the other tanking classes?

Yes and No. Yes in the case that we each have our day in the sun, and we each bring a different strength to the table. If theses strengths are leveraged correctly, your tanking corps will be extremely powerful. I think that we are fairly well balanced, and we mitigate damage very well. No in the respect that we are not given enough control over our own cool downs. Ardent Defender is a passive effect that is considered a survival cool down. We do not have a last stand or a health regeneration talent like the other tanks. In the same respect, we have Ardent defender, and Lay on Hands, two very powerful but extremely situational tools. P.S. Blizzard, leave me the way I am, I like it here…

What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a tank?

World of Logs, Eavesdrop, and Recount. I use recount on a fight by fight basis to evaluate what is going on, as well as Eavsedrop (which is a modified combat log). I spend quite a bit of time analyzing World of Logs the day after a raid to see what I can do differently, and even modify gear sets based on the numbers.

What do you think is the biggest misconception that people have with your tanking class?

“It’s easy mode. While Paladins in general tend to require less effort (we have no equivalent of Revenge/Rune Strike, like I mentioned) to tank successfully, any form of tanking is still pretty hard. With Paladin tanking it may be easy to be mediocre, but the spec is difficult to master.” – Rhidach

I can’t say it any better. However, I feel that as long as an excellent tank can understand the mechanics of another class, they can tank just as well on any of the four. Tanking is more about situational or environmental awareness and not how to optimally use the 969 rotation. And with respect to Revenge and Runestrike, a DK or warrior is lying to you if they tell you that it is hard to use this ability. They should be bound  in macros to their most common ability. All the classes have pretty easy rotations when it comes to tanking, but the rotation is only a very small part of the whole picture of being a main tank.

What do you think is the toughest thing for new players of your class to learn about tanking?

The utility. Any tank can sit there and pound out a 969 rotation, any tank can hold threat with out even using that, however it takes a while to get used to your utility spells, hands, cleanse, etc. Holding aggro is not difficult, preventing damage, mitigating damage, and using your utility takes a lot of practice.

If someone were to evaluate your tanking ability via tools like fraps, recount, and World of Logs, what tendencies would they notice?

If they watched a fraps video of my tanking, they would probably get sick. I move the camera around A LOT to see what is going on in the encounter. They would also barely be able to see my toon, as I use a macro to zoom out a long distance to see more. I am a visual guy, and I love to know what is going on around me so that I can react to it. Recount would show them that even though i have 53 hit, sometimes even 25 (LOL accuracy enchant), I am still giving the dps a run for their money. And, World of Logs would show them I am an avoidance and mitigation junkie.

Stamina or Avoidance, and why?

Is this question even necessary? I would hope that everyone that this reaches knows my stance on the Great Debate of 2009. When the dust settled and Meloree walked away with a glistening trophy of victory called Chill of the Throne, I conceded. So the answer to this question is most definitely YES. Avoidance outside of ICC, Stamina on my progression set. I am going to spare everyone the long winded debate on the subject, but if you are craving more, and when I mean more, I mean you just got to work and want to kill 8 hours before you go home, then scroll down the blog and read away.

Which tanking class do you understand the least?

I am going to have to go with the Bear. As much as I wold like to think that I understand enough about all of the different tanking classes to be a good Tank leader in our guild, I am a bit fuzzy when it comes to the nuts and bolts of druid tanks. I believe that the reasoning behind this is two fold. I had a roommate that was one of our main tanks from SSC/TK days through Mu’ru, and I lean on him any time that we need to make decisions regarding the bear.

I currently play a paladin and consider myself fairly up to speed on the theory and practical application of our abilities and role, so that one is taken care of. I tanked on a warrior for all of pre-BC. Now while I know that most of you will say that warrior tanking has drastically changed since then, well you are right. And, when it came time to light a fire under one of our tanks that was, shall we politely say, less than qualified to be a MT, I hopped back on my warrior, beat on a target dummy for an hour and a half, and then tought our Warrior MT how to play his class. DK’s are half and half. I have a dk that I leveled to a whopping 77, however my best friend plays a DK tank and his computer screen is a solid 2 feet away from mine, so I see a lot and we discuss even more.

What addons or macros do you currently use to aid you in tanking?

I have recently switched from DBM to DXE, due to the shadow strike timers on P3 of Anub’arak being off on DBM, and I have liked what I see, so I use DXE. I also use recount, Eavesdrop (modified combat log), Satrina Buff Frames so that my debuffs are nice and central to my viewing pane, Power Auras, Class Timers, Omni CoolDown Count, Pitbull for focus and debuff clarifications, and most importantly now a blizzard staple, the equipment manager. If you ever raid with me, you can see me swap out gear for almost every pull. In Ulduar I probably switched gear sets no less that 15 to 20 times, now in ToTC, it is a bit different, but you will see me going back to acting like a girl trying to figure out what to wear on her first date when we hit Icecrown Citadel.

Do you strive for a balance in tanking stats, or do you stack some higher than others, and why?

Please reference the Stamina versus Avoidance debate once again. I am one of the most vocal supporters of balance over stamina. I love the fact that I can sit with a little less health and more mitigation and avoidance than the others. Once again, I will not beat a dead horse, balance over stacking any day of the week (minus ICC patch day).

What is a Main Tank?

As most of the Paladin community is up in arms about the Lay on Hands changes that have been announced by the devs, I want to take some time to discuss something a bit different today. However, I will add a short blurb on my opinions on the change, and even though I have my reservations I agree with adgamorix over at Divine Plea, here is my take on the issue of the week:

…Exo and LoH are icing on the cake for us, they are not core talents that we need to survive. They are not getting rid of holy shield because rogues cant kill us in BGs, they are taking a utility spell away from us. Where I do agree with the voice of the community is that i feel it is unfair for a holy paladin to be able to tamper with our use of cool downs. Healers do not manage our cool downs for us, we do that on our own, and if LoH gives us Forbearance, we are not able to manage our incoming damage any more.

Definition of a Main Tank

Clarification: After a few of you posted your thoughts on this, I waned to provide a clarification to the definition of Main Tank. This is a philosophy and not a specific person. Our guild has two main tanks, two off tanks (dps with full 245 tank gear), and a few more casual main spec tanks with 245/258 gear. Although I think that my perspective comes from a progression guild, I believe that a true “main tank” can have these qualities while being casual and just neglecting the attendance factor.

I’m stealin your pic Rhidach

There is an interesting discussion up on the MainTankadin forums regarding tanking instances and content that you don’t want to do. The break down of the initial post, that has sparked quite a debate regarding the duties of a main tank, is that a tank was asked to do an Ulduar 10 to go do Algalon, and he did not want to do it. The short and sweet of his complaint is that he does not want to have to do old content on a non raid night, and as such refused to go. The more difficult part of his initial post was the fact that he said that he was willing to bring his alt in to do it, as his main did not need any gear.

While I agree and disagree with his initial statement regarding raiding on an off night, I also see the underlying issue with his offer to bring an alt to the Algalon encounter. By refusing to bring your main, who happens to be the main tank of the guild, and instead bringing your alt, you are forfeiting your right to the title of main tank. A few pages into the thread, there was an interesting post regarding the definition of main tank, and all of the lovely things that come along with it. I thought that I would provide my own insight into what it takes to be a main tank, and why only certain people have the attitude, personality and propensity to pull it off.

Main tanks are the focal point of a raid, and as such they are scrutinized under a magnifying glass from first pull to the end of the raid. We are responsible for the welfare of each and every person in the raid, and we are the type of person that must step up and take accountability for any and all actions. The main tank uses more consumables, flasks, elixirs, and personal food than any one else in the raid. Main tanks know more about each encounter and each ability with in that encounter than anyone else in the raid, because they are expected to learn the details of encounters ahead of time, so that they can react to the dynamic environment of a progression encounter. They are expected to have 100% raid attendance, and nothing less is acceptable.

While some of you may disagree with this statement, the opportunity to receive gear ahead of everyone else in the guild means that your toon is not your own, its the guilds, and they have the right to use it when ever they want. Main tanks should be the first person in the raid, and the last to leave, the first to pull and the last to die, and you need to do it with out ever complaining to the masses.

Zothor summed it up very eloquently as such:

…I read an excellent guide (that I wish i could find right now) that had the following advice for people thinking about becoming tanks: Don’t. Simply put, tanks have by far the most pressure on them of any raid role because they’re always pivotal to the action. A tank has more ways to screw up than any other role. A tank cannot, under any circumstances, be cheap about enchants, gems, or even the slightest upgrade if he wishes to get respect from his guild and not be replaced by someone who’s hungrier. To be a quality tank, you have to want to be the best. You have to have that bloodlust.

More will be expected of you as a tank than any other raider. Whether or not this is fair is entirely irrelevant; it is a fact of tanking…. If the tank dies, it will be assumed it is because he’s not geared enough, even if he went 10 seconds without a heal. It simply doesn’t matter. You will be blamed.

My personal motivation and last nights observations

I wanted to talk about this because I noticed some problems with our raid last night, and it dawned on me that even though I am in an excellent guild, I still do not raid with 25 people that share this mentality (sure the vast majority of our core raid does, but there are still outliers in any guild, save the best of the best). Our guild decided to skip out on everything but ToTGC last night. We set the raid to 25 man Heroic and that was the only thing we did for 4 hours last night. Through out the course of the raid, people were going afk, having quiet, and not so quiet breakdowns, and we were generally not the cohesive and elite guild that we usual were.

Northrend Beasts through Twins was business as usual, and save a very very unlucky mass disconnect of 6 dps right when the opposite color shield popped up at 25% on twins, we one shot everything. Smooth, easy, and predictable. One of our priests posted a suggestion to change up our positioning strategy on Anub’arak last night, and after some deliberation on the guild forums, I was convinced that the idea had merit. Honestly, we were not re-inventing the wheel, we were just using what most three tanks strats do, and moving form one permafrost to two.

This change was met with much resistance from our dps and the other off tank, and while it solved most of the problems we have been encountering it was not embraced by the other add tank or some of our top dps. In the end, after a few attempts, we reverted back to our old strat and we saw p3 consistently. However, as those of you who have seen p3 or killed Anub know, the fight is nothing until p3. Our problems were never the same, and as a result, peoples frustrations started rising to the top. I feel that as one of the off tanks and interrupters of shadow strike, I shoulder a great deal of the responsibility of this encounter. I was more than willing to take accountability for any wipe that was even remotely my fault, and I did so with a fair amount of restraint and honesty.

While the guild as a whole is progressing, and Anub’arak’s health is dropping lower and lower with each week of attempts, I feel that some people do not share the same sense of accountability. What it comes down to for us is as follows: people needed to step up, and most of them did. But for Anub’arak, it is not sufficient for most people to step up, everyone has to. I feel that I have the correct balance of confidence, accountability, and a bit of cockiness when it comes to my tanking, and it serves me well. I don’t, however, have the tools that are necessary to bring others to my level, and that is really what was missing last night. We are, close to the end of the road when it comes to this encounter, however all the pieces have not fallen into place, and as a main tank, it is my repsonsibilty to make up for others short comings. As of today, I have not made up enough for what is lacking. But every day I work to do more, and eventually we will succeed

Insight and Contradictions in reagards to Icecrown Citadel damage

More blue feedback on the fate of our gearing strategies…

Over the past few days the blue tracker on mmo has picked up a few more posts on the official forum that give us more clarity with respect to the Chill of the Throne. Essentially, the developers are starting to paint a clear picture of the purpose of the Chill of the Throne, and it’s part in how we as a tanking community will handle the damage that will be pumping out of Icecrown Citadel. I wanted to take some time to discuss the significance of some of these posts, and include some of my thoughts regarding the ramifications of these words. As I have already spent a few days talking about this, I want to make sure that I provide some fresh perspective while stressing that the following is also true:

The way that we geared in Trial of the Grand Crusade will not change with the introduction of Chill of the Throne. Any esoteric debates that the theory crafting community has had over the past few months regarding avoidance versus effective health is strictly with regards to min/maxing. The first duty of any tank is to ensure that they can survive the encounter, once you are confident that your mitigation and health are sufficient for any given situation, you can then apply your personal perspectives on item customization. Progression tanks will stack stamina until they are confident that they can survive the encounter.

A glimpse into Icecrown Citadel

Chill of the Throne

1. Can we expect more unavoidable, devastating melee-based attacks in ICC? If so, what point do they serve from a design stand point?
1. Probably. They serve as challenges that your group needs to overcome by making sure enough healers are focused on the big damage spike and cooldowns (the tank’s or external ones) are used appropriately. If you could avoid those attacks they would need to hit for even harder to compensate. If you could avoid those hits, then sometimes you would just let lucky and make it through the encounter unscathed and other times you’d get gibbed. Believe me; you want those to be unavoidable.

2. Are we finally going to get away from the 2 hits back to back will gib the tank situation we are in now?
2. The idea behind the Chill is to lower boss damage per hit but keep damage per time the same overall. The reason I caveat that statement so much is I know that we’re going to see lots of tanks that die in Icecrown and then ask us to nerf the encounters or buff their tanks. The purpose of these changes is not to prevent tank deaths. You will die. Probably a lot. You are going into the Lich King’s home after all.

These statements give us quite a bit of insight into the reason for the specific avoidance pentaly that they are enforcing upon us, as well as the fact that we can glean some insight into our gearing philosophy debates. It is very interesting to see the thought process that blizzard is using for implementing boss damage during encounters in Icecrown Citadel; and the most important part of all of the above statement lies with in the answer to the second question.

By creating the smoke and mirrors that is the faster, and smaller hits, they have sparked a debate over block value as a potent statistic for our gearing philosophies going forward. If you continue on, you can see that this may be a half truth. Block will be a powerful mitigation talent, however we should not gear towards it by downgrading our gear to previous tiers. Since T9 did not offer much in the realm of block value, we are stuck with what we have. My reasoning behind this is derived from the answer to the second question.

The response included the information that the bosses will deal the exact same damage over time. This means that regardless of avoidance or stamina we will be taking a significant amount of damage. This, at least from my perception, is contrary to the picture that most of the blue posts have painted in the past. They have tried to tell us that the bosses are going to hit for less, so don’t worry about losing 20% avoidance. From this very simple sentence, we can see that we will still be taking a significant amount of damage over time, whether or not this will be avoidable melee damage is yet to be seen.

The mechanics of our gearing philosophy

Effective Health
Well, to be fair most theorycrafting tanks on Tankspot and other places who really understand the concept of EH won’t tell you it’s the only thing that matters, just that it is very important. The problem is that some players who perhaps don’t understand the theorycrafting as well try to take the notion to illogical extremes….

…The discussion got distracted a little with the “GC says avoidance is better than stamina” nonsense, but the above was my original intent. (Source)

This is the essence of our gearing philosophy, and something that every tank should engrain in their minds as the most important thing to remember when it comes to selecting your gear set. A lot of tanks will stop by our site and look for the simplest answer to their gearing question. I will admit that when I first started tanking again, I just went into the old google machine and typed in Paladin Tank Rotation. It took me a while, but I found an easy answer that was not completely correct. If an ill informed tank is looking for the quick and dirty way of gearing, he or she will find many posts saying stack stamina, and nothing else.

This philosophy does not embrace the actual balance that all of the stamina stackers are still striving for. When we as a community talk about the great stamina versus avoidance debate, we are, as I love to reiterate, talking about min/maxing. Some tanks will see this philosophy as an absolute truth, and not a tweak to your gear sets. All of the theory crafters are well aware that there are inherent avoidance stats that come with gear, and that these stats make the gear more or less desirable based on the balance of their gear set. A properly geared stamina heavy tank will still sit at 60% avoidance.

Contradictions…

Bosses in Icecrown Citadel and effects of Chill of the Throne
1) Bosses won’t swing faster. More of their swings will hit.
2) Tanks that avoid less are generally easier for healers to heal (provided the numbers aren’t just too great).
3) Tank healing was fun in Sunwell, IMO. Sunwell was challenging. That’s what a lot of players are looking for in the final raid tier. If you don’t like the challenge of healing a tank then I’m not sure why you’d want to be a healer. Now as I’ve said, we’re not saying Icecrown is only for the Sunwell crowd. But I am pretty convinced there are going to be a lot of “Icecrown is too hard because my tank died” posts here when it goes live. (Source)

A quick aside: Point three is painting a pretty picture for the tanks of the community. Sunwell was EXTREMELY difficult and stressful to heal, and was not exactly fun by any means. The challenge that it presented was fun, and the end result of a kill was rewarding, but even after a boss was on farm, your blood pressure was through the roof on any given fight.

This is an interesting counter to the first quote that I posted. They originally said that the bosses will hit for less but the damage over time will stay constant. Now they are telling us that the bosses will not swing any faster, however more hits will land. This statement really does not align with their original communications. This tells me that we still don’t fully understand the mechanics of the fights that they will be throwing at us in Icecrown Citadel, and neither do the developers. I take this to mean that they are still tweaking the fights and making decisions on how to sculpt the encounters.

One thing is for sure though, mmo-champion has posted a few of the skills sets that the bosses have at their disposal during the encounters, and avoidance would not have helped too much if we had it. There is a great deal of magic damage flying around this instance, and it seems that most of what we have been delegating about is physical damage. Below is some information from Maintankadin regarding the incoming damage on a main tank, I believe that this is in alignment with my statements above.

A true look at Icecrown Citadel Damage

Thanks to bluedeep for some of this information regarding the PTR and the bosses current abilities:

Sindragosa:
Average unblocked melee hit: 15k, slow attack speed.
Average Frost Breath: 30k (occurs every 22 seconds)

Melee damage on this encounter can be considered somewhat trivial. The tank stress test occurs at sub-35% HP where Sindragosa begins stacking a debuff called “Mystic Buffet” every 5 seconds. This increases your magic damage taken by 10% with every stack. Clearly in this case Frost EH stacking will provide the largest increase in survivability.

Festergut, Lord Marrowgar:
Festergut average unblocked melee hit: 16.7k; fast attack speed.
Lord Marrowgar average unblocked cleave: 26k; moderate attack speed.

There are no significant sources of unavoidable damage in these two encounters. The tank stress point of Festergut occurs when he receives a buff that increases attack speed and damage dealt by 90% every ~1.5 minutes. The hard mode of Festergut will probably be the focus of an EH vs avoidance debate. Even though Lord Marrowgar’s cleave is avoidable, my guess is that this encounter will err more on the side of EH given that the hits are so large.

In closing, it comes as no surprise that blizzard is coupling a decrease in avoidance with an increase in magical damage debuffs to increase the difficulty of our next tier of raiding.