Part 1/3:Tanking and You
| 25 February 2010
Screenshot provided by Xtimeose
This was a great post that was made by Reavear on the forums. I'm going to add it to the Raid Assist section of the website once I have it set-up. I hope you guys enjoy :)
First things first, is what gear you’re getting. Tanks have 3 main things that make them able to tank. We have mitigation, which reduces incoming damage, avoidance, which blocks it completely, and our health pool.
Mitigation typically comes from spell resistance, i.e. frost, fire, shadow, and armor. Armor is the other component to mitigation. Armor is nice, it's every tanks best friend for 75% of the fights you'll ever be in. If you scroll over your armor amount listed under your characters stats, it'll give a percentage of damage reduced, i.e. 50%. This amount is how much PHYSICAL damage is taken off of every swing any mob throws out you. For example, in bear form [Reavear] is sitting about 68% damage reduction, this means that if a bosses attack hits for 100, [Reavear] will only take 32 damage from it. Armor does nothing for magical attacks or any kind of DoT. For most fights anymore, stacking resistance isn't necessary, and hasn't been since Naxx was released in Vanilla WoW. So your focus as a tank in terms of mitigation should be armor (note, block is getting reworked and is switching from avoidance to mitigation. it adds into armor in a way, where you block a percentage of incoming damage. i don't believe this has taken effect yet)
Avoidance is the other key component to staying alive for a tank. Avoidance comes from parry, (block), and dodge. DK's, pally's and warriors can all parry, pally's and warriors can block, and all tank classes can dodge. Avoidance is a great stat, because it eliminates incoming damage. If a boss swings at Reavear and should hit for 100, but Reavear dodges it, Reavear takes no damage. The issue with avoidance is that it's not a guarantee. Reavear's dodge is sitting at 48% right now. In generic terms, that means that 48% of the time, Reavear will dodge an incoming attack (this can be ranged, melee, or spells in most cases). In reality, it means that each attack has a 48% chance of missing. The difference is in slight number variations, some of you stats people can understand it better, but what it boils down to is that nothing is 100% in terms of avoidance.
The last component to how tanks do their job of taking damage and not letting the raid get beat on is health. Your health pool acts as a buffer for your healers to keep you alive. Small buffers=tighter tolerances=more stress for heals. Tanks will always have the most health in a raid, both because we stack stamina and because we have talents that increase the returns on stamina.
Now, thats the generics of how tanks absorb the damage we do and keep from dieing so that the dps can do their thing. So next up is how to get all that handy avoidance and mitigation, which brings us to, GEAR! Woo...
First off, i'm not going to mention gearscore. Or item level. Or tier pieces. I’m keeping this both generic and straightforward so everyone can get an idea of where to go. So, let’s get started...
Defense is the most mentioned stats for tanks. The reason for this is because defense reduces a mobs chance to critically hit the tank by a certain percentage. As it stands, your defense value needs to reduce a mobs chance to crit you by 6% for the game mechanics to render you 'uncrittable'. As a value, this is 540 rating for the 3 plate classes. Druids don't worry about defense because we get ours through talents.
Defense is the most important stat a tank can aim for when starting out the gearing process at 80. A tank who isn't at the defense cap is, for all intents and purposes, useless. Not because you're a bad tank, but rather your incoming damage will often be unhealable.
So you've gotten to the defense cap, you've got some play room in some of your gear and want to know what to go for next? Well there's a couple paths to decide on. You can be an avoidance tank (you stack parry, dodge, block) you can be a stamina stacker (put +30 stam gems in all your gear), you can be well rounded (balance your avoidance and stamina), or you can be a threat fiend (you maintain defense cap but focus most other gear on putting out as much damage as possible). The choice you take is mostly going to depend on who you raid with and what role you'll take in raids. It also depends on what boss you're going to be tackling. For the most part, newly minted, defense capped tanks should focus on being well rounded. Once you get farther in raids and pick up better gear, you'll want to keep a couple different sets of gear around, so that you can switch out on the fly.
As a recap, and summary, your focus is first and foremost on hitting the defense cap. Once you hit the defense cap, you want to focus on your avoidance and stamina. As a general rule of thumb, you shouldn't enchant/gem for avoidance or defense unless absolutely necessary.
Now getting up into later gearsets, once you start raiding you're going to need less dedicated tank pieces to reach the defense cap and be happy with your health pool. So apart from avoidance, what do you pick up? What's important to a tank? Once you'ev hit the def cap and get some breathing room, you'll want to start focusing on picking up gear that has hit and expertise on it. Hit is important because it's REALLY hard to hold aggro on a target that you miss half the time. Expertise is important because it reduces your targets chances to dodge AND parry, which means you hit it more often.
Hit may sound like a pretty option, because it's easier and seems to be a better choice, but that's 100% the wrong tact to take. Hit is important for sure, however, you want to pick up expertise well before you pick up hit (note to any melee dps that might read this, this next part is *really* important to you). There's two caps for expertise. The first is the soft cap, or the dodge cap. The second is the hard cap, or the parry cap. The soft cap is important for all melee classes to reach, because eliminating dodge from a mob means that he won't ever elude your attacks (i.e. YOU can hit the target, but HE dodges your attack). The hard cap, however, is more important for a tank. When a mob parries in WoW, it's next attack occurs faster. So lets say a boss has an attack speed of 2. He just attacked, and immediateley afterward parries your attack. This eliminates any more downtime for him and makes him attack IMMEDIATELY. Which means that the amount of incoming damage is increased A LOT for parries, because the mob's attacks are coming that much faster. If you can hit the hard expertise cap (which is 12% expertise) you eliminate the chance to parry and thus make life on your heals that much easier. Melee should take note that this is the reason you NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER stand in front of a boss to attack it. Behind or to the side of a target they can only dodge, in front of they can dodge and parry, and if the boss parries 4 attacks from 4 melee guys, that's 4 more attacks incoming on the tank.
If you've read this far, congrats! You know a bit about gearing a tank, and why stuff's important. Below will be a quick summary of numbers to be aiming for, and in the next post will be tanking etiquette, or how to make pulls and fights happen and be easier on your party. Wootage!
Some important numbers:
Defense Cap (Or becomming uncrittable) - 540 (aim for 540, even in heroics)
Expertise caps - Soft Cap = 214 Expertise Rating = 26 Expertise = 6.5%
Hard Cap = 492 Expertise Rating = 60 Expertise = 15%
Generic hit cap (excluding talents/racials) = 263 rating = 8%
Gear priorities:
defense>stamina>dodge>avoidance>expertise>hit
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