Prot gemming for heroic raiding

[Lichdom 18]

Hi folks,

 

Since my schedule is not reliable, I've not been able to get into any raiding guilds and I've been patiently waiting for the random pug community to catch up and start making headway into heroic. Its finally started to materialize and I've gotten a few heroic kills over the last few weeks.

 

In preparation for heroic raiding, I've changed some of my gemming around and I wonder if its really justified to break from the norm of protection warrior avoidance gemming. Essentially, I've switched approximately 25% of my gems over to Stamina, while keeping the 75% remaining as normal.

 

My reasoning was that I felt I had a comfortable level of avoidance and rage generation, but it seemed that the really dangerous sources of damage in heroic are usually unavoidable. Corrosive blasts, Swirls, Sha pool, Sha void zones, Corruption stacks, etc. cannot be dodged nor parried. The same can be said of Protectors with Calamity, Vengeful Strikes, Defiled Ground, Shadow Word: Bane, the list goes on.

 

It seemed reasonable to switch to some pure stamina gems to help soak up some of that damage. Currently my health pool is at 1090k raid buffed. Do you think the reasoning is sound? Should I keep my current gemming? Should I reduce the amount of Stamina gems? Or increase it?

 

Comments and advice would be appreciated.

 

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/ahnqiraj/Cowtaclysm/simple

Edited August 14, 2014 by Lichdom

[Zilthy 36]

I have not done a lot of heroic tanking yet (That will likely be coming up for me) but I think a lot of what you are mentioning there could be handled with active mitigation/cooldowns/mechanics better than by pure life pool.

 

For example:

Corrosive blast: active mitigation/cds

Swirl: leap through it

pool: don't stand in them :)

 

Personally, I don't gem pure stamina at all.   Although, if I were a JC those 480 stam gems do make sense.

 

But, at your ilvl and health pool, you really should not need to be gemming stam for these bosses.

[Estarriol 167]

I have never gemmed for stam this tier. There simply aren't mechanics that require it. The point of avoidance gemming isn't necesarily to avoid damage, though that's a perk, it is to boost your rage generation so you have more rage to pump into SBar/SBlk which will be your primary methods of dealing with damage. Many of the abilities you mentioned can be avoided by positioning or moving, the ones that can't will be dealt with by your active mitigation.