Friday, May 04, 2007

Tanking Itemization




For warriors:

  2. Mitigation (armor/block value)
  3. Stamina
  4. Threat (strength/block value)

For paladins:
  2. Mitigation (armor/block value)
  3. Stamina
  4. Threat (spell dmg)
  5. Mana (intellect/mp5)



  1. Avoidance - equal to warrior gear
  2. Mitigation - higher armor, less block value
  3. Stamina - equal to warrior gear
  4. Threat - about half the budget allocated to warrior threat
  5. Mana - about half the budget allocated to warrior threat




Kaziel said...

Threat (spell dmg)

Actually you missed one. Block Rating also works as a form of threat generation for Paladins, when combined with Holy Shield and Blessing of Sanctuary. In fact I would say that it's the most important of the three secondary avoidance rating for Paladins, since it pulls a major amount of double duty.

Mitigation - higher armor, less block value

Less block value? Care to elaborate?

GSH said...

You are right. Block rating raises the expected value of damage from Holy Shield and BoSanc.

But against that, it's not pure avoidance like dodge and parry. It's avoidance only for the purpose of pushing crushes off the table.

As for higher armor, less block value, I figured that paladin armor needs to be a little different than warrior armor. Though if block rating is threat as well, may as well make them the same.

Steven said...

Don’t underestimate block rating as you can’t parry or dodge a crushing blow so it is incredibly useful when Tanking bosses. Our post likely wipe on Prince in Kara is when the Warrior gets two crushing blows because shield block is on cool down.

I agree our tanking itemisation is a little broken since our item budget points are spend to thinly but Warriors don’t really have any ‘threat’ generation on there gear as it is built into the class and grows the more they get hit. While strength theoretically will increase agro generation many of the early kara gear is just straight stamina and avoidance. So splitting the warrior gears threat generation over spell damage and int doesn’t really fix our gear when it is such a low % of the budget points anyway. In a raiding environment I think Paladins and Warriors need to be able to use the same exact gear as it is bad enough seeing the Sharman Totem drop of Maiden weekly than alone having Tanking gear that isn’t useful because the MT is a Warrior or Paladin for that matter.

I haven’t really fleshed it out but what about a talent similar to the holy tree that converts a % of the Paladins Stamina into Spell Damage so Warrior plate is more viable and then Paladin specific tanking gear can have the previous spell damage budget spent on Int. This would however break non protection tanking so as a Holy Paladin with Trash Tanking responsibilities I wouldn’t be overjoyed at losing most of my +Spell Damage Tanking gear but then I shouldn’t need as much anways.

Kaziel said...


Are you sure about this? I looked around and I couldn't find it one way or another. I ask, only because how do you know you can't parry or dodge a crushing blow? What if the mob's chance to make a crushing blow is calculated after the chance to parry or dodge is figured out. If that's the case, you, technically, are using those stats to avoid crushing blows, since if the hit doesn't land, it can't be crushing.

GSH said...

kaziel, the hit table doesn't quite work like that. I wrote a post on a forum thread explaining how it works, and I'll try and dig that up.