For you warriors tanking ToT

[Ragebar 0]

Currently just joined a 10 man guild and they're doing ToT progression. My item level isn't quite on par to where it should be, but I'm able to do things just fine. Our healers are awesome.

My question is on my gems and going with hit/mastery or hit/exp build.

I know mastery is what I should be rolling with last I knew. Here is a link to my armory. http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/lightbringer/R%C3%A0gebar/advanced

Could anybody give me some advice on anything they see I should change around?

[Estarriol 167]

498 ilvl is actually completely fine for just starting out in ToT.

Alright, going to start off with your gear now.

Currently you're wearing the Battleplate of Resounding Rings and Helmet of Resounding Rings. My first thought was that you had accidentally left some DPS pieces on. That happens. But then I noticed you've stam gemmed and enchanted them! You should not be tanking in these pieces at all! Ever! These are from the t14 DPS set and since they're tier, you were the one to pick out the pieces. You have to be careful when selecting your gear. Pay attention to stats and the set bonuses. Currently your tier is giving you bonus damage to abilities you don't even have and you're missing out on the strong t14 2-set bonus that gives you a 2min CD on Last Stand instead of a 3min CD. This is a serious issue that you need to address as soon as possible. Going into t14 LFRs and getting their tier for the actual tanking pieces would be far better than what you have.

The other pieces that need to be changed immediately: Stonetoe Shoulders. Klaxxi Lash of the Rescinder, Leggards of the Unscathed, Jade Charioteer Figurine.

Doing a little counting and that is 6 total pieces of gear that are completely inappropriate for you. These need to be addressed immediately.

How can you do that? Run your LFRs, always have your coins. Farm up a bunch of elder charms and spam t14 LFRs. Your ilvl will drop with LFR tanking gear replacing your t14 normal DPS gear, but your survivability WILL increase.

Onto your enchants:

Overall, your enchants look fine. I would highly recommend you save up and replace Colossus with Dancing Steel (yes, the strength enchant- it gives you parry AND increases SBar by a tiny bit AND increases your DPS output). If you can't afford the enchant, see if your guild will help out.

Your gems:

I'm a bit confused by the way you're gemming. On the surface, you seem to be prioritizing stam, but taking a closer look at slot colors reveals that you aren't.

If you were hard-gemming stam, you would have stam in every prismatic slot, yet I'm seeing a stam/exp gem in the prismatic slot in your belt. Additionally, you'd have all stam gems in your blue slots, but you have puissant (stam/mastery) in 2 of your 3 blue slots. I see that you're trying to get the set bonus from every piece and that's generally something I like to do too; however, getting the crit stat bonuses from your chest and your belt is actually hampering you. If you feel that you need to be hard-gemming stam, then you don't want to preserve set bonuses that are not giving you stam or a high amount of tanking stats.

Onto reforges:

For your reforges, you should be aiming for 7.5% hit>7.5% expertise>mastery>dodge=parry.

This should sound a bit odd if you've read my guide, if not, it probably sounds a bit odd. Normally, you should aim for 15% expertise, but at your gear level and with the DPS pieces you have, you simply cannot make 15% expertise. Don't go halfway with 10%, take your 7.5% and get more mastery our of the deal.

Your hit is spot-on. Bravo!

Your expertise, not so much. Yet, you could so easily have it right where you want it. Replacing your dodge->master reforge on your shield with a dodge->expertise would put you just barely over expertise, if I estimate correctly. However, your dodge and parry are completely out of whack. You should reforge out of parry on your shield for expertise and you'll likely be right on the softcap.

For your boots, again trade the reforge out of dodge for a reforge out of parry. If you fix the exp/stam gem in the prismatic slot, you'll need to get another 180exp out of reforges. The parry reforge on the boots into expertise will probably be spot-on. Other than that, your reforges look alright.

Hope this helped. Once you get your gear sorted out, you'll take massively less damage than you are now. Good luck!

[ragebarr 153]

I think Estarriol's got you covered. But I still had to drop in to say...

There's only room for one Ragebarr on these forums!

lol, awesome name man! *fistbump*

-Rage (the real one :P )

[Ragebar 0]

Thanks Estarriol! I know some of the items are dps because I was fury. I have horribly unlucky drops in lfr or I'll get the same items over and over again. I'll swap some enchants around. As far as living steel goes that's covered by the guild, just don't want to waste the shards on an lfr weapon.

I've regemmed completely and boosted my mastery up by over 10%. I was hoping for some gear tonight, but all mail and leather dropped along with one piece of cloth. Hopefully tortos will be more gracious to me.

Ragebarr, sorry! Was a name I used in vanilla. *fist bump back*

[Decision 7]

Now, I dont want to disagree with Estariol and Ragebarr to much but I would actually say it's worth to get the 15% exp hard cap even if it means you will loose out on mastery.

First of all if you get parried with your attacks you will generate less threat, wich warriors are really terrible at atm so they need all the help they can get.

Second reason is that Shield Slam hits extremely hard so getting parried with that one is a rib cracker to your dps/threat.

Third and last reason is that active mitigation in ToT is more important than ever. Almost all the bosses have some sort of huge 1 time attack, Horridon got triple puncture, Tortos got snapping bite, Ji-Kun got talon rake etc etc. With this I mean that you really do need that rage coming from your attacks.

HOWEVER.

These are all mostly my opinions and since I'm raiding on heroic, might be a bit more mandatory than for you(worth noting though).

So as a conclusion to this I really only got one thing to say. Do what you are comfortable with.

Edited May 8, 2013 by Decision

[Estarriol 167]

Naturally, getting to 15% is extremely important; however, you have to keep in mind his ilvl, which is very low. At this point, it would be nearly impossible to get to 15%. Once he gets to 510+ he should start trying for that magic number. Right now it just isn't practical and from my experience at roughly that ilvl in normal ToT, having the hard cap isn't entirely necesary. For NORMALS, having the hardcap is more a quality of life improvement than a life or death necesity. That changes quickly in heroics, though.

So, in summation, get to the hard cap as soon as possible. Roughly 510 ilvl is what you'll need, but try for it earlier if you get a bunch of exp items, particularly if you get a Fabled Feather of Ji-kun Ji-kun's Rising Winds.

Edit: confused the trinket names. I can't brain in the morning.

Edited May 9, 2013 by Estarriol

[Ragebar 0]

First of all if you get parried with your attacks you will generate less threat, which warriors are really terrible at atm so they need all the help they can get.

I never have had an issue with generating threat whatsoever.

I doubt I see my self farming the earlier raids for a few pieces of gear to replace my dps pieces. As of right now, my damage incoming isn't too bad, and the healers are not complaining about having to throw burst healing on me for that matter. The other plate wearers have most of the gear they can get from the bosses we have down so far, so as soon as I can see some plate drops, I should be good on that front.

[Fillingi 0]

To the OP,

I see that you said you regemmed to completely shift your focus to mastery. In Cataclysm, mastery provided the best results in damage mitigation (in general). As far as I've researched, stamina has become priority over mastery when it comes to gemming. Obviously yellow gems will provide at least a small amount of mastery along with stamina, but mastery should be gained through reforging. Stamina doesn't scale as well with warriors as it does with most/all other tanking specializations, so it becomes very important.

I will keep in mind that your guild may have asked you to gem for mastery for whatever reason, like if you're facing a boss with quicker-than-usual hits. But I recommend to -again- completely regem, but this time aim for stamina... At least until you reach around six hundred thousand health. You can correct me if I'm wrong - and that goes for all of you posters. I am not meaning to condescend, I'm just trying to help you.

[Estarriol 167]

There's not really one foolproof way to gem now, it entirely depends on gear level and what you're working on. From what I've seen on Ragebar the second's (Ragebarr shall be known as Ragebarr the first) armory, he's pretty much beyond the need for large health pools to soak large hits UNTIL he starts up on heroics. I'd stick with mastery for now, but make sure to stam flask/food. Once you get to Horridon heroic (or if you're on Massive Anima Golems and having issues), you may want to reassess your gem scheme.

[Fillingi 0]

That is a good point. After posting there were some additional criteria I wanted to consider. There is a point where stamina's benefits reaches a limit. Stamina > Mastery may decrease the total damage taken relatively, tanks that prioritize stamina require higher use of mana from the healers. It makes sense that one would stack stamina in advanced heroics because, chances are, the healers can handle mana economy very successfully. They also probably want a hard-hitting boss attack to deplete no more than 50% health - and probably even aim for 55%-60% for more "wiggle" room. But, yeah, I suppose once a tank can handle such hits, anymore stamina wouldn't be nearly as beneficial as mastery.

But I have a question, Estarriol :

Well, first of all, I guess I'll point out that Ragebar (OP, not the real Ragebor lol) has a pretty decent item level, but considered more or less a required item level to handle the raids he/she is tanking. I'm also asking for the sake of my own pre 500-iLevel warrior,

Do you think ~500K health unbuffed is enough to handle the raid?

Sure, improving shield block improves damage mitigation by great amounts. But I feel that stacking mastery and having a mediocre health pool would leave little room for error. I think even at this level (before heroic Horridon) at least more than mid-upper 500K health should be aimed for before mastery. I don't know. I don't know everything, and that's why I'm asking. Especially since there is no clear threshold where stam becomes greater than mastery and vise versa, since many factors and variables can sway the weights.

[Estarriol 167]

Stam as a stat really only serves one purpose, which is to keep you alive through damage you cannot mitigate reliably otherwise. Essentially, the only reason you want extra stamina is to ensure that you can live through the hits you are taking long enough for your healers to get you back up. The less you can mitigate, the more you need stam. This comes into play mostly through magic-heavy fights such as Lei Shi and fights with very heavy hits. If those hits are very infrequent (1-2 minutes in between), you'll be able to stack enough CDs to not really need more stam. When they start to come more frequently than every one minute, you will need a larger health pool in order to soak the damage that SBar cannot absorb. Whereas with the infrequent hard hits, the combination of CDs and SBar allows you to have a lower health pool and overall better mitigation.

Alright, so that is my background/bookkeeping on stamina's usefulness in general. Into the numbers:

For Horridon's Triple Puncture, the dungeon journal says 370000-430000 per hit, plus an extra 10% per stack. That sounds like a ton of damage, but that is pre-static mitigation. Between defensive stance's 25% damage reduction and armor, 200k is a good estimate of how hard a TP will hit. That fits very well into the idea that you should have enough stam not to get hit to half health. Between passive reduction and SBar, this means you can take a multitude of stacks and still be just fine even with roughly 500k unbuffed. The important thing to keep in mind is that proper usage of SBar is essential for soaking these stacks and any other hard-hitting ability. Mastery comes into play between Punctures, when you have plenty of rage and the next TP is still several GCDs away (same goes for Tortos on normal, but not on heroic). Through proper rotation of your rage-generating abilities and your active mitigation, 500k is easily manageable. I started out in ToT with a 499-500 ilvl and about 490-500k health and that was very comfortable in normals.

TL;DR: 500k unbuffed is just fine, but you'll need more for heroics.

[Fillingi 0]

Well said. Thanks for explaining and answering me so thoroughly, I appreciate the time.

[Estarriol 167]

Glad I could help. Let me know if you have any more questions.