I’ve been working on the philosophy behind tank gear that I’m going to use for an eventual list of recommendations.
I don’t really want to do such a list just now. If I did, it wouldn’t be based off personal experience, it’s going to be based on math, past knowledge, gut feeling, and my own personal opinion of tanking stat priorities. And my foretelling of what the eventual armor changes in the upcoming patch will really end up being.
But the time to have a guide is when you’re faced with gear choices, not when the level climb is all said and done and you’re already in Naxx.
I don’t have a list, but what I will give you at this stage of the game are goals, limits, and suggestions. And some do-it-yourself help.
I’m not going to talk about talent specs. Bear tanks, if you’ve been reading this blog, by now you should be sick of hearing about Survival of the Fittest, Protector of the Pack, yadda yadda. You know what helps you in your Talent tree.
The goals for gear.
Your goal as a tank is to prioritize as follows; I live, I keep aggro.
Your first priority is to live. You do this by having Armor for Physical Damage Reduction. You must be able to Dodge incoming attacks. You must have enough Health to survive taking the damage that gets through.
Period.
At level 80, to reach the cap of 75% Damage Reduction against level 83 bosses in raids, you need 49905 armor.
In the upcoming patch, only our leather gear will provide armor multipliers. This needs to be taken into account when prioritizing armor value against other values. Armor on leather will be much more valuable, point for point, than armor on weapons and rings and trinkets and necklaces.
At level 80, 41.6667 Agility = 1% Dodge.
At level 80, 39.34798813 Dodge Rating = 1% Dodge.
At level 80, 122.962450975 (effectively 123) Defense Rating = 1% Dodge.
Agility provides additional defense help. You gain Armor equal to 2x your Agility score. So Agility is technically, when compared to Dodge Rating and Defense Rating above, worth a teeny bit more for survivability purposes. I put it at about parity with Dodge Rating… if you ignore Crit. I boost Agi even higher due to Crit ONLY because Crit equals bonus Rage when properly tank specced.
Stamina is Stamina. 100 health is 100 health. Deciding how much 1% Dodge is worth in comparison to Physical Damage Reduction on a sliding scale is hard enough, add weighting for how much Stamina is worth in comparison to the two, and it gets muddy. Because it really is a balancing act. Which is worth more to you? By how much?
For holding aggro, we have Hit Rating and Expertise. I have added them to the weighting chart way down below, at very low ranges, so that those stats would show up on the comparison tool and get weighed in, but I do not place them above raw survival.
Again, the goal. Survive. Then hold aggro.
So I’ve gotten to the point that, for leather gear in anticipation of the upcoming armor patch changes, I have the following weighting system you can use in Wowhead’s filter;
Dodge Rating 25.3
Agility 24.98
Armor 8
Stamina 14.6
Defense Rating 8.1
Expertise Rating 2
Hit Rating 1.5
The link to the Wowhead filter page with those values already entered for you is here.
Again, the link to the Wowhead page with those values already in the filter is HERE.
No, I’m not going to explain my math at this time. I’m still working on ratios. And I don’t need the second guessing.
This is a WORKABLE filter weighting for me. It’s in progress.
The important thing to remember is, our new Armor cap is 49905, the bulk of that armor must come from leather gear, we want to shoot for Dodge in the 35-40% range if at all possible, and get Stamina as high as it can possibly go.
That last point is extremely important. Work on Armor, aim for a set value of Dodge that you are comfortable with, and then push Stamina from hell.
Feel free to mix Hit Rating and Expertise, 443 Expertise is the effective Bear Tank cap, and 296 is the effective Bear Tank Hit Rating cap.
Stupidly high numbers, right? So yes, if you can get it, take it, if gemming it or a mix of it and Stam gets you socket bonuses, go for it, but don’t sacrifice your health, armor and dodge in a quest for the perfect Hit Rating/Expertise set. Accept that you will, at least in the beginning, be chancing having resisted Growls and missed Mangles and Swipes. Try to reduce the chances, but rely on your team to work with you through those misses.
Far better that you live during the onslaught, than that you get a bit more aggro. Worse case scenario, your Growl gets resisted. I hope not, but that’s when you need to be on your toes. Who ever promised you tanking was going to be easy?
So when you look at that gear that comes up in Wowhead, be smart. Use your judgment. When you see that a chest piece like the Polar Vest is ranked quite high on the list, understand why. With the armor multiplier, and the Stamina, it is very, very good… but it completely lacks Dodge, Hit Rating and Expertise. And the Dodge is the one of the three missing stats that should make you wince. If you choose it as a starting Bear Tank armor piece, that is an extremely wise choice; it’s easily available, the mat cost is reasonable… but you WILL have to compensate for the lack of Dodge and other desirable tanking stats with intelligent gemming.
You can use that filter above to search the various item categories yourself, looking for tanking gear from content that is accessible to you at your stage of progression. If something drops for you, you can run the filter and see where it falls into place on the list.
But you HAVE to understand that it’s a balance of stats, and no one piece stands alone. Everything is in balance with everything else you have equipped.
And if you hit one cap, like Hit Rating god forbid, (and if you do tell me how) or meet your personal Dodge goals, then by all means look at where gear with those stats is ranked, and mentally downgrade something that is super high on that unneeded stat.
I’m not going to hold your hand yet… I think you are all perfectly capable of going to Wowhead, running a filter search, and browsing the results. As I revise things in testing, I will let you know what I changed. When I have a weighting I like or that I think is usable… not perfect, but usuable… for the non-leather gear, rest assured I’ll let you know.
In time, I will have a list of things, in order of how easy to how hard they are to obtain, that you can get pre-Naxx. But I really, really want to wait until the PTR and the new patch stabilizes first.
I sure wish they had finished us BEFORE everyone got to raiding.
Okay.
NOW the flames from the mathematicians and theorycrafters can begin.
Great post, like you I’m keen to see the real numbers pan out before recommending anything too heavily but people gotta gear regardless…
Just thought I’d mention that your wowhead link is great but you have placed nothing in the gems option for weighting, effectively making them a waste of budget. For example, without gem slots given a value wowhead rank Exotic Leather Tunic well above Crystal-Infused Tunic. However CIT is pretty much accepted to be the best in slot pre Naxx. Simply allowing gems of any kind into the rankings and wowhead ranks it up hugely. If I was gearing a druid tank at the moment I’d be buying at least blue gems so I’d recommend anyone out there who want’s the numbers to be a bit more realistic to add the gem search to the filter.
Looking forwards to your jewelery post, 3.0.8 can’t be too far off :)
So noted AJ, the perils of rushing the link process… copying numbers and copy/pasting a link. I’ve fixed it.
Thanks for your post BBB, and taking the time to explain to people how to think for themselves about gear, rather than follow the definitive A list (that doesnt really exist)
My only commnet is watch out for too much stamina: you may not need as much of it as you may think – alot depends on the rest of your group – how skilled/geared they are.
I’ve had more fun stacking agility & hit/expertise, and taking up the stamina gem slot bonuses instead. And choosing for damage – because damage is fun! and because our healers are having no difficulty keeping me up.
I love wow head, and have zero idea about how to arrive at the numbers for the filters. One thing to mention, as noted on ThinkTank, Handwraps of Preserved History are going to get smashed with a nerf. Not that they aren’t still good, just druids should know that some Wednesday they aren’t going to be as good as they were just the day before.
I’ve been using Kalon’s list, even though they are a month old, because I had to have some kind of guide. Look forward to your further thoughts on gear as it changes. I do have a question, as asked many, many times on the forum: What stats do you think a bear needs to start tanking, or even off tanking Naxx?
I’d like to know when I can stop working on my “list”, and start learning the new raid.
Actually you need (depending on boss fight) to be able to take the worst case scenario’s worth of damage all at once and live. So it’s pretty important that you won’t be insta gibbed by a boss. Anything after than is just helping the healers out (which is still good to do on progression fights).
but you WILL have to compensate for the lack of Dodge and other desirable tanking stats with intelligent gemming.
This is true, but I think people are underestimating the value of Stamina now for bear tanks, specifically given Ghostcrawler’s statements about Stam as a tanking stat for bears…everyone is bypassing stam for dodge when given the choice, but the developers seem to be counting on us to have a huge pile of hit points (something that was hinted at during beta when Ghostcrawler said that we were likely to be the hit point tanks.) So people are going for avoidance that we are going to top out on and not taking enough stamina.
I think we’ll have to see how Stamina interacts with the healers’ choice of spell rotation. If we can improve their mana efficiency by letting them cast bigger heals less often, then that may offset the disadvantage of us taking slightly more damage.
As to the coefficients, I think you’ve underestimated defense by a factor of 2. Defense also adds an equal chance to your miss percentage as it does to dodge, so it is twice as good as you have listed. (I’ve read that with diminishing returns not applying as much on the lower miss percentage, it will get progressively more valuable as your dodge increases, but I’m not sure how to value that.)
My numbers tweaked from Rawr assuming Naxx gear are:
Dodge Rating: 23
Agility: 32
Armor: 17 (for leather gear)
2 (for bonus armor / non-leather gear before the patch)
Stamina: 21 (Rawr came up with 65, but I’d not rank above Agility)
Defense Rating: 19
Expertise: 11 (Rawr came up with 20.)
Hit Rating: 5 (Rawr came up with 10.)
Crit Rating: 3 (If you’re giving a bonus to Agility for crit, might as well give crit some points.)
Haste Rating: 7 (More damage / crits, is more rage.)
And it listed +4/attack power, +9 for strength.
Note that Armor on leather items is worth half as much as Agility. That’s really why they had to nerf the armor trinkets and bonus armor on leather in general. +500 armor is equal to +250 agility, after bear multipliers!
(And just for the record, I REALLY appreciate all the work you put into this game. I’m strictly trying to help out in some small way to give back something for all the help your blog has provided me. )
Hey, I just wanted to say that gemming entirely for Stamina is not necessary, and in fact I would heartily recommend against it. I’m in the second week of 10-man Naxx farming, and I already have about 37k health raid buffed. I rarely go below 10k health, so all that health is wasted. I gem entirely Agility. I enchant for Agility where possible, then Stamina.
When you get to the point where your health is enough for the encounter, the more mitigation (like dodge) you stack, the easier it will be on your healer’s mana.
It’s working quite well for me, I’m able to tank Faerlina enraged for nearly the entire fight (on two healers no less, something we didn’t discover on purpose.)
Thanks for the numbers. I’m not feral, but I do want to keep a tanking set available, so these kinds of numbers are very helpful.
For armor, I think the rating difference between leather and jewelry/enchants is about a factor of 8.6:
4.7 (bear form) * 1.1 (thick hide) * 1.66 (armor change) = 8.6
Is that correct, or am I missing something?
Thanks for the weighting scale! I love being able to consider gear from a numerical perspective, I’m very big on the research aspect of WoW, but I can never figure what point values to assign which stats.
It’s worth noting that there are two expertise caps. With 2/2 Primal Precision, it requires 123 expertise rating to be un-dodgeable, and 443 expertise to be un-parryable.
Thanks for the thoughtful posts and knowledge about being a bear tank. It’s a nice reminder that we aren’t alone and that Pallys and DKs haven’t taken over all the tanking in the game.
Thank you so much BBB. I have been searching everywhere for information like this. I find alot of Theorycraft information but unfortunately, I am just not smart enough to wrap my hands around that. All these value tables and percents makes my brain hurt after away. Its great to get some information on what I should be shooting for. Not I just need to figure out what numbers I should be aiming for to start heroics and raiding, cause I don’t think I will be 50k armor at the beginning of Naxx. :-)
Thanks so much!
Maybe I only think this way because I’m a noob who’s never run end game raiding. I’ve just got a group of local buddies who have been casually running instances for a few months now. As the group’s healer (resto-druid), I would actually prefer that my tank prioritize holding aggro first. With the caveat that he needs enough health and mitigation to survive the number of hits he’s going to take during the second or two between HoT ticks. Beyond that, making sure those HoT ticks are big enough and backing them up with appropriate spike healing, i.e. keeping him alive, is my job.
Obviously, correct me if I’m wrong. Maybe I’m vastly underestimating how much damage raid bosses are going to dish out in 2 seconds and/or overestimating my ability to heal better than that.
ARA, Myze, that’s the kind of perspective you can only learn from actually doing the content and discovering where the balance between Stamina and Agility is for your level of progression.
Neil, it is worth noting about Expertise… but that was covered in the post bookmarked on the sidebar called Hit Rating, Expertise and Dodge. FYI.
Yup, it’s easy to fall into the trap of stacking too much stamina. For leveling and early instances, I had Heavy Borean armor kits just about everywhere… and while those big numbers are fun, I’ve definitely noticed a marked performance improvement now that I’ve started to socket / enchant for a mix of agility and stamina, rather than pure stamina.
But, again it’s all a matter of balance. But, we did Heroic Nexus, Heroic UK, and Heroic Violet Hold last night (with voidwalker boss, eww), and my HPs weren’t even above 30k (29.9k, but still) because of my resocketing for Agility. The only death was when we had a boss aggro on a trash pull – so don’t feel like you just absolutely have to get that unbuffed stamina to ridiculous heights. Except in certain situations, you’re just going to have an excess buffer that really doesn’t help.
Also remember in any gear considerations – especially if you’re evaluating other players or an offspec for yourself: that stats tend to make up the smallest part of the equation: just because you have 35k stam starting naxx, it doesnt mean its “enough” or “too much” by some absolute standard. As people have said, it depends alot on your skill, knowledge of encounters, other people.
I found the heroic, badge & finally naxx gear to be very well designed for tanking progression, without needing to do a lot of theory. Do what seemed obvious and you’d be ok. This is pretty awesome: it means you can concentrate on playing the game, not worrying about numbers. I’ve found elitestjerks to be less of a help than in the past: they tell you after 20 pages that the sky is blue, and it gets warm when the sun is out. (No disrespect intended)
But that’s also coz I’ve been tanking for ages. Nowadays, I like to pick up gear that looks good (eg valorous is beautiful so I want the 4-piece) instead of the biggest upgrade for me personally. That’s how well designed the gear is – it’ll take care of you naturally if you know your class.
Thanks for doing this John! I stopped playing WoW while Blizzard figures out Druid tanking, but I’ll pick it up again soon and your contributions are the best resource on the net.
no flames, but can you point me in the right direction in placing our talent points as we level? We are either 13 or 14 now on our druids and have not place any.
never played a druid before, don’t know the first thing about them. Thank you BBB (or others) in advance.
Thanks for making me want to spec Feral Again…and Again….and Again…
Wiebitte,
It really depends on what you want to be when you are older. HAHA. The link below will give you different basic builds. Typically I just follow it as I level, putting in points that I see most useful at the time. My opinion is that Feral Cat is the fastest way to level and you should be putting points into the talents that increase your catlike abilities.
http://www.wowwiki.com/Druid_builds
Ooops sorry thought this was a PBeM post. My bad :)
One thing that seems to be true is it’s back to the BG’s to get Hateful PVP gear. Why does our best PVE bear gear always seem to be PVP gear?
Thank you BBB for your always interesting and informative posts. Quick question, where would you rank haste? Seems to me that haste can be useful for aggro and rage generation, as well as proccing abilities that rely on attacks. That Blizz has added so many new haste pieces in Wrath makes me think it is important somehow.
Bukki – Lightbringer EU
re pvp gear: you should eyeball the differences between the pve & pvp pieces you are considering. Back in the day, the merciless shoulders, for example, were way superior to any equivalent t5 shoulder. Resiliance was a useful stat back then for pve. Now it is not.
So when I look at the top pvp pieces compared to heroic t7, all I really see is a ton more stamina. And stamina is a useless stat beyond the ~41k I currently have for the guild I’m raiding with. I dont have a single piece of pvp gear.
The weighting algorithms will not take account you personally capping out on certain stats. So compare pieces side by side before you conclude you *have* to pvp. Ghostcrawler was never convinced by the argument during beta, which is why the pvp gear still comes out on top in some cases.
“I’m not going to talk about talent specs.”
I sure wish you would! Just logged by drood after leveling my shadow priest, only to remember – d’oh! They refunded all talent points! Help me, BBB, you’re my only hope!
Thanks BBB for great work and thinking again,
Without hijacking this thread, I just wanted to touch on the stam/dodge debate.
I run my bear at about 35K hp unbuffed, which puts me to 40-45K 25 man buffed, and which comes from primarily stacking stam. Before 2.08 Thinigs like defender’s code put me at 40K armor too with only about 38% buffed dodge. Obviously, I get flack from more classical tank thinkers for that. Here is my thinking
1) The difference in dodge is around 5-8% when stacking enchants/gems/gear for dodge. I keep basically 2 full sets since we’ve had naxx on farm for a while and I’ve got extra gear hanging around so I’ve been able to really compare the two gearing alternatives. When I compare the statistics for healers when I’m using each set, I find that running with the massive pool of HP is actually not forcing the healers to do anymore healing as hps stays about the same; however my overheals are dramatically reduced. I.E. healers can more than take care of the damage in all 10 and 25 man content right now; lower hp pool means I simply get overheald more.
2) in “I’ve got to live situations” for example Maexna on a webwrapped enrage when I go into the webwrap with half health the massive HP pool is EXTREMELY valuable. Just the ability to trip last stand and get close to 60K hp, a 15K bonus is amazing. Remember, last stand scales with Stam. With barksin, Monarch’s crab and 60K hp, I’m basically unkillable for a good 10s. This has saved wipes.
3) For 25 mans when we’re running with 7 healers, oom is almost never a question and in cases that are a real gear check for tanks like patchwerk, again the hp pool outweighs avoidance since I can take 2 hateful strikes without a heal as opposed to every other tank which can only take 1. Even though other tanks MAY avoid some, over the course of a fight EVERY tank gets unlucky and will get consecutive hits, again, benefit of stam over avoidance.
Through BC I used this philosophy and it worked great for me. The difference of 3.08 has yet to be fully explored since my armor has dropped my mitigation of damage from 73% to 67% so I’m taking 22% more damage since this patch.
My point here is that in real tanking situations, I find the extra dodge is little more than a convenience to healers on most fights and a bit of pride as the tank watches his hp pool drop less frequently but really isn’t useful when survival is an issue with any of the current content, of course if I come across fights where healers are going oom I’ll adjust that. Our primary goal in gearing is to LIVE, not make life easy on healers.
Stam>>Dodge>Agility
So… Where the hell is armor you idiot?!! it’s actually almost worthless imo after patch… All the leather gear we get is the same base armor and anything not multplied is essentially valueless. Take defenders code for example, 850 armor at around 30,000 armor is worth .595% mitigation on an incoming blow. Let’s use a 30K model since that’s about where many stand right now; this matters because of PoTP scaling. To reach .595% mitigation of an incoming blow would also only take 25.4 Agility…. When gearing, espcially none multiplied items, I don’t even look at armor.
Despite my rambling, I feel I should finish with what I use. I know no one wants to hear this but I do NOT think there is such a thing as a single ranked gear list since when you do a model of a fight, the dynamics of the fight, specifcally how hard the boss hits and how frequently dramatically change the relative value of stamina to mitigation. Patchwerk is a very different fight than loetheb. Any gearing list that absolutley defines stamina in a relative value to mitigation isn’t being honest imo. BBB said this clearly and I wholeheartedly agree with. However the mitigation statistics can be compared because, over time, they each reduce incoming damage to the same end. The realtive values I use are:
Armor = 1
Agility = 15.57
Dodge = 16.90
Def = 5.409
I use this for NON-leather gear, as in gear that recieves no bonus. Armor that IS recieving bonus is ranked by me as
Armor = 8.75
Agility = 15.57
Dodge = 16.90
Def = 5.41
In terms of stams place in this, I place it the highest and generally put it at about 18. Of course none of this includes procs/threat so I look carefully at things like Darkmoon Card: Greatness, and once you’re past 40K hp buffed, I would suggest gearing to be slightly easier on your healers, by dropping the stam value to say 12.
Didn’t intend on such a large post, hopefully my two cents is useful to someone,
Shehe, Cairne.