What's your HP?

One of the most irritating questions ever devised by mainkind, is "What's your HP?"

I always seemed to get asked this question when PuGging (thankfully, I don't PuG much anymore), although less now that 3.2 and 3.2.2 has hit the live servers, and I'm sure that many of you tanks out there have been asked this countless times too.

Let me reiterate again: HP is NOT everything. It is a good estimate of the tank's level of gear, but it is not the be-all end-all solution to every instance and raid. Avoidance, armour, and HP all go hand-in-hand, and to speak of one without mentioning the rest, is to be ignorant. This goes to show how many other people out there are so ignorant so uninformed about the way tanking works, that they have to ask this everytime they want to find a tank.

To illustrate, let me cite an extreme example:

Assume you have two tanks, A and B. They both have the same amount of avoidance and armour, but tank A is 44k HP fully buffed, while tank B is 50k HP fully buffed. Let's assume they are both tanking Anub'arak in normal ToC-10. Anub'arak hits hard, roughly 17k-19k on a well-geared tank. Now, as we all know, avoidance can, and will, fail sometimes. Suppose the healers are incapacitated, and tank A takes 3 consecutive hits in a row without healing (no cooldowns involved). No question about it, the tank dies, right?

Let's put tank B in the same situation. He also takes 3 consecutive hits without healing. The result? Tank B also dies.

The point I'm trying to make here, is that you could have 1 million HP, but if you don't know how to reduce incoming damage, then you're screwed.

Tanking is not about how much damage you can take. It is about taking as little damage as possible and still keep ticking.

Air ganking

The title says it all. I came across this while searching for some gear-related stuff. A must watch!
http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=115589

Number theory

No, I'm not a math major, and this is just a little tidbit about warriors.

Based on my own calculations, the changes to Str and block in 3.2 effectively means that 1.5 Str is approximately required to gain 1 block value with a Protection spec. Should be a handy enough tidbit for those of you still scratching your heads over which pieces of gear to choose. Note that threat stats will never be as important as survival stats. More is always good, but it is not your primary concern. Remember: A dead tank can't tank.

On the DPS side, people have been asking me whether hit is better or crit is better. As always, I will refer them to the spreadsheet that has already been updated for 3.2.2, simply because stat weights change with different sets of gear. However, if you are that lazy, the short general answer is that yellow hit>crit>white hit.

Remember when I said that Execute spam wouldn't be viable again? I'm going to eat my words now, and tell you that for all intents and purposes, a 30 rage Execute (glyphed) every cooldown can provide for some very impressive numbers if there's enough rage to fuel the warrior. All you have to do, is to queue Heroic Strike along with Executing every global cooldown, and watch the numbers fly. Throw in a few Whirlwinds, and you're all set for sub-20% boss DPS.

Recent developments

Breezing through 3.2 and 3.2.2, it just occured to me that all three of my warriors now have their Red Proto-Drake. And to think that I swore I would never again do those achievements after my first warrior got them all. To cap it all off, my rogue is up-and-coming and is only 9 achievements away from her own drake.

Also, my shaman is 80 already (finally!)

Remember I said some time ago that I would be gearing my rogue? Well, I don't mind revealing the reason now. At that time, B and I had this huge discussion about combat dagger rogues. Having already known that the spec was effectively dead, I tried to convince him otherwise, without much success. He believed in using Shiv as a combo point generator, with a fast dagger in the main hand and a fast dagger in the off hand, with the use of Instant Poison instead of Wound Poison, and in just stacking hit to the white cap and ignoring expertise totally. Despite my efforts telling him that getting to the white hit cap (27%) was illogical, as was ignoring expertise, he went ahead and proceeded with his plan. So, says me, I'll gear up my rogue and prove you wrong.

Needless to say, his rogue's gear now has a slow (2.6) non-dagger (fist) main hand, has reasonable amounts of expertise, and is nowhere near the white hit cap. I believe he still uses Shiv though :D

Still, I have been wanting to gear up a pure DPS class, and thought that my rogue was as good a place to start as any :)

Warriors in 3.2.2

OK, I didn't mean this to sound like reminiscing, but as you'll all agree that this update is long overdue, I shall make this a long good one :D

As you might have already realised, patch 3.2.2 brought with it very few changes to warriors, notably, Sword Specialization in the Arms tree and Critical Block in the Protection tree have both been buffed. That notwithstanding, Sword Specialization is still far inferior to Axe Specialization, as previously mentioned. The Critical Block buff is nice though, bringing it more in line with the intent of Blizzard to make block a more useful stat.

Having now had more time to do more testing on my various tanks, I am forced to conclude that I was, am, and always will be a Warrior at heart. The plethora of snap aggro abilities, along with the wide range of various situational single-target and AoE tanking abilities make this class my first and foremost favourite. Anyone can play a warrior; but it takes skill to truly master the warrior.

3.2.2 also brought along with it a new and revamped Onyxia encounter, that unfortunately, unlike the encounter in vanilla WoW, precludes melee DPS from hitting her in phase 2, the air phase with Deep Breath. Evaluation of the drops are still in progress by various higher authorities (read: Elitistjerks), so we shall wait and see what they have to say. The gear is ilvl 245, but a quick scan of the loot table tells me that some of the item budget is wasted in the fire and shadow resistance, so their true value may lie somewhere around 232 or so only. Still, it is an easy encounter for loot, providing you have enough ranged DPS.

The new fire boss in VoA, however, is a whole new ballgame. Not only do his abilities hit really hard, they hit even harder as his HP drops lower and lower. An unmitigated Meteor Fists attack is roughly 50,000 fire damage in 10-man mode, split between two targets (the tanks, naturally). After factoring in resistances, that should be roughly 10k-15k damage per tank. Armour wont do much here, so bring HP (and fire resistance, if possible). Lots of it. He is rather easy to kill with a seasoned raid, though.