I know Card bought the non-set gloves this week, though he rarely gets excited about set bonuses..

The best, chest and gloves are the biggest upgrades I could get - excluding heroic Tier 10, which is rather lovely. I've focused on frost emblem loot first. (Only 155 badges to go!)

Personally, I never focus on getting set bonuses. I hate becoming attached to them only to lose them when I swap out gear/the next tier set arrives. But that's just me.

I was about to post something along the lines of - "great, at least my thinking isn't way off". But then I spotted upcoming changes to tier 10 tanking gear. I'll still likely not go for the tier 10, but I'd love to know just what exactly these changes are.

Figured i'd add some tanking wievs on the last two wings of ICC as well. In addition i'd just offically update my status in regards to availability. As it is now i've been able to sign for a average of 2 raids per week. In the coming months that's probably how it will remain as well, so we're definetly dependant on having at least a third or even fourth tank who's capable of handeling ICC in the future as well.

But now for the tactics.

---

Sucky-sucky-blood Wing

Blood Princes

Maintanking: Need Card to fill me in here, never main tanked them. But it's mostly about staying alive and avoiding some kinetic explosion?


Offtanking: When you're offtanking you're responsible for the prince named Keleseth. He does 70k melee swings so he have to be ranged tanked, this makes offtanking him somewhat hard for most tanking classes, but here's how it goes:

1. Build aggro: The raid will start attacking another mob, and it changes at random who's the next one, but you basically want to build close to 200k threat before it's your mob that's about to be attacked. A good idea for most classes is to pop your Divine Shield/Shield Wall/etc and spend 10 secs just going all out, this gives you about half of it if you're doing ok. From there on there's different ways to do it:

- As a paladin you can spam Hammer of Wrath, as he's techincally below 25% hp when not having a HP bar.

- Warriors can use shockwave, and various trowhs

- We dont really have other tanks then that so wont bother with the others.

2. Staying alive

Erm... Since... When?

All he does is spam shadow lance, melee range or no. The melee swings was a bug they fixed, iirc.

Basicly, what I did was:
1: Tank like normal.
2: Herd up orbs.
3: Make sure you have 3 or more orbs when he gets empowered.
4: ????
5: Profit

Since before they hotfixed him. First time we downed Blood Princes this was happening to Gimi but since they've hotfixed it there hasn't been a problem.

Gimi's slow. Gotcha.

Just did a pass on my tank gear. Thought I'd post some numbers!

unbuffed (frost presence), using a DPS spec (unholy) (mostly missing 5% decreased damage taken, +10% armor value, 5% dodge and some glyphs):

armor: 24772
def: 579
dodge: 22.11%
parry: 22.40%
health: 40336

(again, DPS-spec stats)
(updated June 5th)


http://www.wowhead.com/profile=21316388 - Current gear, with some tank spec
(does not take Frost Presence into account @ stamina/health)

edit: uh... the wowhead profiler doesn't seem very accurate, has different values on several stats than I have ingame. meh.

Assuming Gimi is willing to come on Dalbert and get saved for 1 boss, go get a tank spec.

Your gear looks all right, cloak and belt (excluding that Naxx trinket, you still need that?) seem to be the oldest items you've got, but you can easily afford the frost emblem upgrades, which are as good as it gets pre-Cata. If you still have the relic that gives you 200 strength, bring it in case threat is an issue.

Frost gear will need fixing, but the bank will pay for that. Or we'll get you another set if this becomes the regular way to do Sindy.

Maybe you and Gimi/Dalbert can do a full-time swap?

The trinket: mostly a case of few trinkets dropping,nothing to replace it with.

Cloak and belt: agreed, but afaik they have hit rating - didn't want to go too far below 8%, but might be able to balance that with enchantments and gems.

As for swapping, not really something I've even thought about, besides, last time I ranked was Vezax :p

You tanked Vezax well and you've got old-school tank practice at least.

We should definitely try an ICC raid sometime with you tanking and Gimi on his mage, if you're up for it.

From an overall class-balance perspective, a regular mage and a DK tank would be great move for WMD.

Updated http://www.wowhead.com/profile=21316388

Have picked up that tank spec.

I still have 190 Emblems of Frost I can use.
I'm torn between putting them on offset pieces and set-pieces... I think it's probably a better idea to upgrade the non-tier pieces first.
But I guess the cloak and belt are prime candidates for upgrading.

Anyway...

I replaced [Repelling Charge] with [Furnace Stone] (Have had for ages, just not used as I keep reading that I need to stay over 540 def before Glyph of the Stone Gargoyle for it to be worth it.)

I might replace [Mark of the Relentless] with [Clutch of Fortification], but then I'll I'll lose another 3 Expertise (would be at 8 expertise then...) (30 triumph emblems)
Could replace [Furnace Stone] with [Glyph of Indomitability] (50 triumph emblems)


I could replace [Saronite Animus Cloak] with [Sentinel's Winter Cloak]
and [Stormtempered Girdle] with [Verdigris Chain Belt], though both items would be a large hit-rating loss.

And of course there are the tier pieces.

Thoughts?

Do you currently have the [Corroded Skeleton Key] allready? If not that and [The Black Heart] would be my suggested combo. The effective health far outweighs the dodge.

As for cloack there's a allmost exactly like that one dropping from heroic rot/or fester, cant remember which one, so i'd save those emblems. I'd also save the emblems for the belt and hope for the Valithira heroic belt (dont think me nor Cardinal wants it, and i think the same goes for the cloack).

Instead i'd spend the emblems on tier. As you DK's and Druid soon are free to roll on offspec on those.

As for rings stick with [Mark of the Relentless]

why get hysteria or DRW?

Gimi: yes, I have the Corroded Skeleton Key.

I'll get Tier, then, thanks.

Actually, I didn't get DRW? Not sure where you got that from... (edit: though I did just read claims that it actually does increase tank threat, though it's apparently not modified by frost presence)

I picked up Hysteria because I felt I had pretty much run out of other talents to pickup, and it's something I can put on one of the melee.
I suppose I could've put that one point into Scent of Blood, Subversion Sudden Doom... but it appears to be an not entirely unpopular choice for Blood tanks to get, so I went for it.
... not that much thought put into it, really.

edit2: That said, I might drop Rune Tap and get Subversion and Scent of Blood instead, in which case I will probably drop Hysteria.
I'll swap out the Rune tap glyph for Runestrike, either way.

edit3: Turns out I have [Bubbling Brightbrew Charm] as well, so I guess I'll use that for a bit :p

edit4: consolidated my tripple-post into one.

Righteous Fury / Threat
We recently made a change, that I suspect you don't have yet, to make Righteous Fury improve all threat and not just Holy threat. It's also possible attacks like Judgement, Crusader Strike and Hammer of the Righteous just don't hit hard enough yet. You lost a lot of passive Strength and damage in the talent trees and we haven't baked all of that back in yet

Interesting post. This makes tanking more attractive to me. Making threat a lot easier to generate over all.

D