Well, Ulduar's out and the 25-man is quite an experience. For one thing, everything hits like trucks - big trucks, with arms. In some ways I worry a little bit. Our big strength as a tank is our ability to convert block value into effective health by blocking every hit. No other tank can do this. However, the harder stuff hits, the less value block value actually has.In Naxx, stuff hit for seven or eight thousand, which hurt, but couldn't come close to killing me unless the healer was asleep or dead. Last night, I was tanking Runemaster Molgeim, and he was hitting me for 11-16k. Coupled with the damage aura that Brundir was dishing out, I died for the first time in quite a while. My healer, a holy paladin, said "what happened", and I had to check my logs. Sure enough, I took two big hits and coupled with the damage aura and some damage I had already taken, I went splat.
The other ability affected by the huge hits is Ardent Defender. The more hits it takes to kill us, the more likely Ardent Defender is to kick in and the sooner. I don't think I'd actually seen AD leapfrogged since Black Temple, but it happened last night. Ow.
So, two of our big strengths have been greatly weakened. Our blocks are worth less and our AD is less reliable. This is where avoidance comes in: stuff needs to hit me in order to kill me, and a truck can't kill me if I can dodge it.
So, I'm regemming all of my gear and making some different gear choices. Basically, I'm going back to the strategy I used back in Black Temple, which is to dodge as many things as I possibly can, so that the healers rarely have to heal, and the chances of my taking two big hits in a row go down.
After swapping out my rare gems for the new dodge gems, I was put around 30.3k health. The question now is: do I bite the bullet and drop under 30k in order to bring my dodge up? I'm sitting at about 26.4% dodge, 19.9% parry now. I'm going to do my usual strategy when I have a tough decision: do it incrementally, and see when I become uncomfortable. So, next Ulduar raid, I'm going to walk in there with my newly minted gear and see how many times I am reduced to just a couple thousand health. If it never happens, I'll add more avoidance. If it does, then I'll stick with a mixed set. Time will tell.
2 comments:
Bit late to the party finding your blog and this post, but since I didn't see an email link I thought I'd comment publicly and hope you find it...
Going into Ulduar, our guild had a serious flakiness issue with tanks. We lost our primary paladin tank since the T5 content, which meant I had to charge incredibly fast to gear up my (then-alt) paladin tank. Our DK tank is... bad, and flakey, and our druid tank, who is excellent, was sad panda after the serious nerfs he received with 3.1 and wants to play his warlock. We trialed 3 warrior tanks and none have been at all reliable and good. So in a month, I went from being my guild's token shadow priest to being its main tank. Fuck.
In my previous experience/readings, especially with the magic damage being thrown out by nasty bosses like sarth and malygos, it had become clear to me that for progression, health (and EH) is king. I stacked stam and armor like an absolute beast. It's disturbing that my healthpool is almost 4k ahead of our DK tank, and almost caught up to our druid tank, despite the fact that they were both gearing for months before me. But it's come at the cost of avoidence.... lots of it. I'm wearing the monarch crab with the heart of iron, for like 300 stam and 2 dodge clickies out of my trinket slots; no passive dodge though. I'm wearing stam on my gloves instead of parry, blood draining instead of agility (bladeward isn't an option on my server yet, and it's been panned on maintankadin), basically ANYTHING that gives me stam to work with. And I die way too often because... it appears my healers are not as good as I thought they were.
TL;DR version - I wasn't expecting to get 2-shot in ulduar with 45k buffed health... I still am. Have you found big advantages to going with avoidance? I don't like trusting the random number generator.
My experience currently is that avoidance makes me much less squishy than adding EH in Ulduar. I still have an EH set, which I use for Razorscale, but that's it. Otherwise, whenever I put my EH set on, I find I die more easily and my healers have more trouble. On Malygos and Sarth, EH was everything. In Ulduar, it's gone the other way.
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