Comments on: Gemming question: Stam or Agility?

By: Hellsdottir

Hellsdottir — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 19:43:21 +0000

I agree with your take on balancing the two. The way I see it is this; when you press your ‘I can haz tank naow’ button your Stamina is buffed by 25%, but your Agility is not buffed. This may cause a lot of people to stack Stamina since you get a bigger increase out of it, but I take it as an indication that raw Stamina is less important, since I’m getting 25% more for free. I try to keep my Agility as high as I can without gimping Stamina too much (below 35000 in bear) since I need every point of Agility I can get… none of that is coming for free, but Stamina is less important since I press my tanky button and *poof* get more of it.

By: Dalerian

Dalerian — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 15:00:11 +0000

BBB, thanks for the postings. My guild has long-standing tank & healers (without much interest in developing new ones) so my druid dropped the Tree offspec and solos instances as a bear, instead. (Currently working through soloing the Outland Dungeon Hero achieve. I’m sure it’s easy enough for a geared bear, but at ~4400GS, I’m still having to think about some of the pulls – and the trash turns out to be way harder than the bosses!)

It’s useful to get your perspective on bears – too many sites assume I’m going to be MT for ICC25, when at the moment, my bear’s not gone beyond normal Nexus!

Reading this post, I think I need to pick up a few socket bonuses (like the +8 AG 245 helm socket) that I’ve been missing by gemming Solid Majestics on the advice of “all stamina, all the time!”
I like the health pool, but as I never have a healer, it’d be nice to get more self-healing-love coming along.

Thanks for your thoughts – it helps my cub grow up!

By: Brewa

Brewa — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 12:17:15 +0000

I know you mentioned you go one way or the other, either healy or bear. For those dual ferals out there, I love doing heroics in kitty gear. Rawr for insane dodge and savage defense procs, that works all the way up to ToC 10 and my healers still say I’m boring to heal. With higher than that though, I need the extra health and right now, especially with Chill of the Throne, I haven’t gotten past the point where anything other than more stam is the way to go. Maybe if I get more of that ICC 25 gear…

By: bags99

bags99 — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 08:46:24 +0000

hahaha, yeah I only noticed the date after coming to the site. I assume its why the link to wind no longer works.

I have just switched to bear after realising how much tanking crap I had from off drops. Has been fun in the main, but in the day of GS & HP, its stam gems & trinks all the way. Trying to farm the needle in fos for H tanking, but starting to think they removed it from the loot table /cry

By: bigbearbutt

bigbearbutt — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 03:35:02 +0000

Holy post resurrection, batman! Where in the world did WoW find this one to link to? I thought it was dead dead dead.

Could be worse. They could have linked to posts about lot lizards.

By: Rob

Rob — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 01:57:01 +0000

Great article, makes me interested in going bear for cata (when they nerf trees – and no persistant TOL is a nerf in my book).

Another thing I’ve been told is that on raid bosses, you factor in things like effective health, and time until death. Like on fester, if you are at say 50k and he does 25k per second (not unreasonable, believe me), you will last exactly two seconds. If you have 51k health, you will last 3 seconds. If you have 74k health, 3 second. So, at some point you gotta say, okay, adding more health isn’t really going to help, the time till death is unchanged. Then go for mitigation. I think its easy to see that 80k buffed is reasonable in ICC or something, but 100k really isn’t, and that’s the crux (and just go with me on the numbers, of course i’ve seen ridiculous stuff about if A B C D E F G H I J all proc at once i get 200k health in ICC, and that is true, but not the point at all).

By: Judgeratt

Judgeratt — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 01:45:00 +0000

I’m a bit late to the discussion. :P

When it comes to tanking modern raiding content, Effective Health is king. The most efficient stat for EH is Armor (esp. with the ICC buff up to 20%!), and Bears get a nice amount of Armor from Agility. Shifting Dreadstones are thus fantastic for red slots that give you a bonus you want. As an example, say you have a piece of armor with one red slot that would give you +12 Stamina if you met the bonus. If you slot it with a Shifting Dreadstone, you’ll have 15 Agility and 27 Stamina, while slotting it with a +30 Stamina gem would just give you 30 Stamina. The Shifting is better for pretty much everybody, and it is even better for Bears than for other tanks.

By: Snican

Snican — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 01:40:22 +0000

Seems to be a general misunderstanding about the difference between ‘avoidance’ and ‘mitigation’

If you avoid a hit you take 0 damage. As a bear you avoid a hit by it either missing you ‘+defence’ or ‘dodging’ it

If you mitigate a hit you take full damage less the amount of mitigation. You mitigate a hit by either Bear Blocking it or by armor.

The reason that the dodge/stam issue has sort of died for ICC bears (and ICC is achieavable for a majority of the playerbase if they so choose is).

So in ICC – (not heroics which if you are tanking in easily obtainable 232 gear you could gem intellect).

1. Healers have infinite mana (there is a reason for the big change in Cata and this is it)

2. Blizz has accepted that healers have infinite mana and has designed encounters around a 10 man tank having 1 and half healers spamming him constantly

3. 20% buff makes Stam more valuable than agility as it scales better.

Breaks down to if you gear dodge you will get gimped occasionally (and we haven’t even started about talking about the DR effect that applies to dodge). If you gear stam your healers will have to spend mana on you which they will never run out of.

Btw I like the anecodetes, if I wanted pure info I’d read another blog.

By: Sarnith

Sarnith — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 00:48:59 +0000

I’ve never actually thought about gemming in Agil gems for tanking. Surprisingly I’ve never had a problem with my avoidance being low.
I’ve been tanking raids for about a year now, with a disc priest mostly tank healing.
I think possibly power word shield along with savage defense might be why I don’t notice myself taking big hits.
I only have 1 gem that isn’t 30 stam, it’s 10 agil/10 hit. I was under the hit cap, and I knew agility was helpful for bears. so I threw that onto my ashen band to also get the socket bonus from it and activate my meta

I have roughly 40k in caster form
53k in bear form
80k fully buffed in Icecrown with the current Raidwide 20% buff.

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Bronzebeard&cn=Sarnith

By: Vidyala

Vidyala — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:35:58 +0000

I absolutely missed the rest of this discussion – and don’t feel qualified to add anything further, except that I hope you can hang onto that good feeling. Some people keep blogs that are purely informational – very stat/strat focused. Other people keep blogs that are largely anecdotal and for entertainment. I think of this one as a mix of the two – you are a guy who knows a lot, sometimes you write about it, sometimes you write about going to Home Depot with your son and building a wagon. It’s why I didn’t stop reading even when I wasn’t bear tanking, and why I stayed beyond “OK, this is what you do as a bear tank,” because it’s interesting. I guess it’s easy for me to say, I have such a small readership that rarely do I get rude comments of any sort, but don’t let ‘em get you down – they’re the minority!
.-= Vidyala´s last blog ..Identity Crises =-.