Prot gearing confusion.

[Nairobi]

My guess? Other str plate wearer in group...

Beat me to it.

Other than that....?

Haters

Gon

Hate

[Adelphos]

My guess? Other str plate wearer in group...

Now that you bring that up it is usually warriors/dks that throw the questions at me. I guess I'll just keep on going my current path and screw them. My que isnt 20min.

[Nairobi]

Thats what I said. Look at the forums they say haste/mastery. Are they all wrong and your right? To which I get no response but a vote kick. Not everytime but more than I feel is right.

Ignore them and move on. Seriously. Tank re-queue is like what, 17 milliseconds?

Either way, they're likely terrible players, or at the very least, terribly misinformed. I'd be surprised if you didn't end up carrying 60-70% of the damage if you stay in groups with people like that.

No worries, keep calm and haste on.

[Deleted]

I don't know how costly it is - there's a point at which, yeah, you would take that marginal DPS increase. Are we talking about randomly dying every 10 pulls? 100? 15,615?

FWIW, I agree with you about expertise, as does everyone else, even those arguing against you . Wanko hard caps expertise. Firefly does too. Bizarre thread here, where one side doesn't practice what it preaches and seems to be arguing for the sake of it.

First off, late reply because I accidently deleted the reply when I was finished writing it and was to lazy to rewrite it.

What you mention is pretty much the basis of the disagreement. Yes, we are talking about a very "minor" dps increase, the disagreement is at what cost. I have been under expertise cap for 1.5 tiers. I have died 0 times in what, 2-3000 pulls? I do not even know how many pulls. For me, that is a competely negliable amount. Either I am the luckiest person in the world that even when rocking 8-10 expertise in T14, I never had any issues with parries. I should probably buy a lottery ticket.

Nobody here is argueing that you should get aim for expertise hard cap. The only debate in here has been wether or not to do it at the cost of haste. Noone is saying that you should gem str or crit over expertise. Both me and Wanko practice exactly what we preach. I did not reach expertise cap until as I mentioned, very recently. The fact is that the item level is so high right now that we can reach exp hard cap with an haste/exp prio without issue.

Still, this brings us back to, this topic is kinda outdated. It is as Nairobi said, kinda moot in current tier, especially in the end of T15. Currently it only applies to players just starting to gear up or players with very badly itemized gear. I also realised that in this discussion, we are seeing a fairly heavy 25 man representation on the hard cap expertise side, and a 10 man favored representation on the haste>exp side. This seems to be a common occurance in most of the big disagreements on paladin forums, 10 vs 25 going completely different ways without thinking how much the tanking in 10 and 25 man differs. Now, I am no expert of 25 man tanking, but just with some simple thinking I can understand that expertise relatively have higher value compared to haste for 25 mans. It could be either way, but as I do not raid 25 man, I am not familiar with the 25 man damage pattern. I will not say anything definite in the matter, I trust the 25 man tanks to know 25 man tanking better than myself, just as I trust myself to know 10 man tanking better than the 25 man tanks.

I realised that the argumentation in this thread is also pointless. Not only it being a kind off outdated topic, this discussion would have been interesting back in 5.0-5.1, or well, we did have this discussion back then aswell. Thought it got settled then. Other than being a bit outdated, it is as I mentioned the 10v25 difference.
The last thing that makes any argumentation in this thread completely pointless, is that both sides of the argument have completely different viewpoints on the survivability loss from not hard capping expertise.

On one side of the coin, we have the exp>haste people, who are in the mindset that not hardcapping will cause several deaths. For example this

The problem is that it's a miniscule advantage in DPS at quite a costly advantage in survival. It's like asking a Hunter: Would you like to do 1% increased dps at the chance of dropping dead in the middle of a bossfight?

They assume that the chance of drop death actually exists. If you asked the same hunter, would you want a 1% damage increase. He would say yes. The entire base of the disagreement is that one side thinks that the chance of droppig dead exists and the other do not.

It is understandabe they stick to their conclusion that exp>haste as long as they believe the comparison is a small dps and absorb increase (and SotR uptime depending on your haste levels) vs several deaths. That is really a no-brainer. Tank deaths is never worth it.
We do the have the side that I am on, thinking haste>exp. We believe that the parries is completely irrelevant for your survivability. As is widely known from the books of origin, on the sixth day Ghostcrawler created the paladin, and on the seventh day he crafted the 5 HoPo cap for us, use it. As I myself have first hand experience with raiding below expertise cap for thousands and thousands of boss pulls (and we are not talking 14.95 expertise here, rather 8-11), and I have never ever had a death from it or stressed my healers from it, I draw the conclusion that for myself, not hard capping expertise have been a survivability loss of absolutely 0. There is only at one point since beta that expertise soft cap effected me negatively. That situation from my doing a mistake with my holy power control, something that I learned from and never repeated, which caused me to having to use an AD to save the situation. Though again, that was a matter of me myself failing. So now we have my side comparing a dps, absorb and SotR uptime increase compared to a loss of 0 survivability. Now that is an easy choice for us.
I would also argue that haste>exp is actually a survivability increase for 10 mans. In 10 man, in 90% of the cases the only dangerous part of boss fights is the big damage nuke. You can already cover that with sotr 100% regardess of gearing strategy, though with haste>exp, the probabiliy that you will get a SS proc right before or after that nuke is higher, which in my opinion yields a positive increase in survivability.
In which case, dps+absorbs+sotr uptime+survivavility, sounds good to me.

Hear so many people saying that getting parried is a huge deal, coming from a 10 man PoV. Already covering all boss specials with a back to back SotR. The only thing parries will do is sometimes give you slightly shorter downtime of SotR on regular boss melee hits between the special. As a 10 man raider, those boss melee hits are really insignificant. Take Horridon Heroic as a hypothetical example. Say I play like I do now, keeping high uptime on SotR and having it up for all TPs and Dire Calls, I still cover a lot of regular melee hits. If I would to stop using SotR for melee hits, I only used SotR 1.5 seconds before TP and DC, for the rest of the fight I just overcap HoPo and wait for those specials, my healers would not notice a difference. I am not even sure they would notice a difference in the burn phase. The damage taken outside the boss specials and the surrounding damage of that boss special are just that irrelevant for 10 mans, which is something that 25 man tanks do not really understand for 10 man, exactly how low the damage taken on the tank is surrounding the boss special hits.

As an example, I mentioned a few weeks ago that on twins heroic, I take all 3 beasts from Lu'Lin in P1, and do not kill them. I spec alabaster shield and focused shield to get away a ton of damage and I spec holy prism / ES depending on what I feel is needed. I then just tank those 3 beasts, completely ignoring them, and I tunnel the boss riding the vengeance wave. I do this 100% self substained, I do not require any external heals other than the passive heals I recieve. Doing so I reach far above 400k dps for the first phase, which for you 25 man tanks out there, is quite high for 10 mans, we do not have your vengeance levels. Now, I do kill off the beasts before the first inferno, I pick up Suen and tank here together with the 3 beasts, but I kill them off before the first inferno. This is not because I can not substain myself, but so the healers wont die on the inferno because they are aoe healing me. When I mentioned this tactic multiple 25 man tanks said "impossible", "cannot be done". So what I am trying to point out here is how fundamentally different 10 tanking and 25 tanking are, and how a lot of even the well known 25 man tanks, honestly have no clue how 10 man tanking works, just as my 25 man knowledge is limited at best.

In the end, we can keep beating this dead horse. I feel kinda tired of doing so. It is fairly obvious that the two sides wont see eye to eye as their viewpoint of the negative survivability effects of exp soft cap completely differs. The whole 10 tanks vs 25 tanks is also not getting anywhere. In the end, going into T16, who cares? It is not really the biggest topic to talk about. I know that I have and will continue to tell new paladins asking me for help to not mindlessly go for 15 expertise. I have given this advise to dozens of paladins in MoP, some of them already had 15 expertise, some of them barely had 10 expertise and 0 haste. Not once have I recieved a complaint from paladins actually trying this out. In the contrary, gotten many thanks, especially from tanks that were sitting at 15 expertise cap before at the cost of a lot of haste. It feels like most people that are hating on not blindly hard capping expertise are people that never even played with the soft cap. I have played with both and honestly, now that I got exp hard cap even with haste>expertise, I do not even notice a difference.

Wall of text, out!

[Deleted]

Taken out of context, I can understand your confusion. My statement implies that you should favor haste while working towards 15% expertise.

It is not taken out of context, and it isn't correct. Regardless of what gear levels you are at, if you need to choose between Haste and Expertise, Expertise is the better call.

Of course, that choice no longer matters once you can Hard Cap Expertise without giving so much as 1 Haste Rating up for it. That however doesn't change the best answer.

Let me give you an example:

You get shoulders with 1100 haste and 900 mastery, and a red socket (Str bonus). You're currently ~ 700 rating shy of expertise cap. Would you:
A) Reforge the 1100 haste into 440 expertise and stick a 320 exp gem in the socket
B) Reforge the 900 mastery into 360 expertise and stick a 160/160 exp/haste gem in socket

A will give you 660 haste, 900 mastery and 760 expertise. B will give you 1260 haste, 540 mastery and 520 haste. Basically picking up 600 haste for 240 expertise.

Personally, I'd choose B and then play with other pieces to get the remaining 160 expertise (like swapping in another orange gem). This would put you exactly at the exp cap, and with a leg up on haste over the setup listed in A. Obviously, this ficticious example is contrived for argument's sake only, but since that's what we're doing here, I thought I'd at least clarify my point.

... You're giving us option A and B, and then go do option C yourself. :P Either way, the example has no merit, as you're assuming you can expertise cap without reducing your haste. That of course is always the best option.

The discussion was about situations where you do need to choose between expertise and haste. (Low gear levels, or situations where you have several pieces without haste or expertise, perhaps because you're passing the Haste gear to the DPS.)

Ok I started this thread to help me with prot stats so I am well informed for raiding (currently 87) and while all of you have helped me alot and sometimes brain freeze on the math. I do have a problem that keeps popping up.

While doing dungeons and Im tanking my gear is 95% haste mastery. I have never had a problem with aggro other than dps zerging right when I pull and I don't feel as though I'm squishy I dont get huge spike damage.

But every 3 dungeon or so I get vote kicked cause I have dps gear on and not tank Im a noob and go roll ret. I talked to some of these people who supposedly play prot pallies saying avoidance stats are the best.

So are they wrong or am I gearing wrong too early?

They're idiots. First off, they're wrong, as we all know. (Once the next patch is out, you could actually link them the T16 helmet and gloves to prove them Haste is a tanking stat.)

Secondly, you're still leveling! Even if Haste would be a crappy stat, you haven't had much chances of gear yet, so a piece with say Haste/Crit on it would still have been an improvement, if you were wearing some random greenie that was lower ilvl before.

Thirdly, you're in a leveling dungeon, probably in between the questing. What's the best spec for questing? Ret. Naturally, you'll have some ret gear.

Vanilla -> TBC -> WotLK I always leveled ret, and tanked/dpsed/healed in instances depending on what the group needed. We didn't have any fancy dualspecs back in the day. Seeing someone tank/heal specced and/or geared in a leveling dungeon was a rare sight.

I have died 0 times in what, 2-3000 pulls?

You are also far, far behind on progression, and thus your gear is way better than when people first set foot into those instances (not to mention that bosses hit less hard in 10 man). You could probably be in full Stam/Int/Spirit/Crit gear, gem fully for Spirit, and still tank those bosses fine, if both you and your healers are somewhat adequate.

Nobody ever said it was impossible to tank without hardcapping expertise. You say that without capping expertise, you can still easily survive pretty much all raid encounters. I completely agree there, especially if you're running 10 man, and far behind on content, but also if you were up to date on progression and killed Ra-Den 25 within the first month of 5.2 release.

What we disagree with, is that since it worked for you, you're preaching it's the best thing to do, which is incorrect. You have zero math to back it up, and are just handwaiving "it feels good to me", while the opposition has plenty of math that proves Expertise hardcapping is quite beneficial for your survival.

If you want to play the not so smart way, by all means, go ahead, but don't go preaching it without having a good understanding what you're talking about.

[Deleted]

I don't really have much to add to what Thels wrote, besides that even on 10m hc a badly timed CS parry during progress on Horridon, Tortos or DA would of killed me and still would on Ra Den.

[Deleted]

You are also far, far behind on progression, and thus your gear is way better than when people first set foot into those instances (not to mention that bosses hit less hard in 10 man). You could probably be in full Stam/Int/Spirit/Crit gear, gem fully for Spirit, and still tank those bosses fine, if both you and your healers are somewhat adequate.

Nobody ever said it was impossible to tank without hardcapping expertise. You say that without capping expertise, you can still easily survive pretty much all raid encounters. I completely agree there, especially if you're running 10 man, and far behind on content, but also if you were up to date on progression and killed Ra-Den 25 within the first month of 5.2 release.

What we disagree with, is that since it worked for you, you're preaching it's the best thing to do, which is incorrect. You have zero math to back it up, and are just handwaiving "it feels good to me", while the opposition has plenty of math that proves Expertise hardcapping is quite beneficial for your survival.

If you want to play the not so smart way, by all means, go ahead, but don't go preaching it without having a good understanding what you're talking about.

Ah, the fallback of the progress card. You think we should base the general paladin gearing on the people pushig 25man Heroic content undergeared? The largest minority in world of warcraft? That seems fairly stupid to say the least. There is a reason why pretty much everyone say "Dont look at the top tanks gear, they gear the way they do because they are undergeared and have the healers they have". A general gearing strategy should work for the largest audience, guess what, that audience is not doing lei-shen hc in 520 ilvl.
Your standpoint seem to be, "Lets base what works for 10 tanks since they are underegeared for the 10000 other paladin tanks that are not undergeared".

I guess you competely disagree with Theck aswell since he is also far, far behind on the progress.
A majority of the raidig population are far, far behind on the progress. Bar the top 20 guilds, pretty much everone is far, far behind on progression. Being behind in progress is now always an easier thing, since your healers are also worse. I have raided with a bunch of guilds this tier, the worse progressed the guild the harder it was as a tank. Your own gear had very little factor in it.

I got all the maths in the world to back me up. Fairly easy to prove that not hard capping expertise yields higher dps (and absorbs but that extremely obvious), aswell as higher HoPo regeneration unless you take extremely unrealistic haste/expertise values. You seem to be very interested in straight up ignoring this.

I also have my 'evidence', though anecdotal, that not hard capping expertise does not prove a single dent in your survivability if you play around it, if anything an increase as I metioned due to the SS ticks. There is no math proving or disproving this. If there is any single piece of evidence I would like you to point to it. There is no math variable that shows extremely accurately how stats affect us in real world boss fights. The best source of information we got for that is different players anecdotal experiences, from which in this thread, out of which you got several from 10 man tanks, that not hard capping expertise does not mean any survivability loss

One thing also important in this discussion to notice, just as covering boss melee swings is more important in 25 man, the dps increase is also more significant in 10 man since the tank dps is a bigger part of the raids damage.

I mean, be the conservative religious believer by all means, but you do not need to stick with the world is flat just because you can not see it bend.
Argueing with peope like you is completely fruitess as you cant see any other situation than the situation you yourself are in, which by the way is an extreme minority. Please continue living in your bubble.

- - - Updated - - -

I don't really have much to add to what Thels wrote, besides that even on 10m hc a badly timed CS parry during progress on Horridon, Tortos or DA would of killed me and still would on Ra Den.

How would you have died on Tortos or Horridon from a parry? I am genuinly interested. I can buy Ra-Den with the way that fatal strike works, I can also understand Dark Animus if you were doing that in below 530 ilvl, but even if you were doing it in greens, I honestly fail to see how a parry on Tortos or Horridon would have mattered at all. That just seems like terrible HoPo management from your end.

[Deleted]

On our first couple of Horridon kills we where very tight on heals in last phase, we definitely lost some dps and maybe one of the healers. That ment I spent quite a lot of time at low health meaning I sometimes needed to WoG myself to have enough hp to take the next direcall or triple puncture, if my next CS had been parried I'd not of had SotR up for them thus dead tank.
All of that was compounded by the fact that the whole raid had dino's after them including us tanks leading to a less than perfect rotation and a very long final phase.

For Tortos it was less a risk of getting one shot and more a problem of loosing the shell, when I fist killed it regaining the shell if you lost it was a massive pain, due to lower raid dps so almost no gap between bats and a shell with anything less than 90% of my hp would have the bats casting life drain on me.
That's without even considering how much easier our ele sham would of pulled bats off me if my first HotR got parried.

[Deleted]

Were you solo or duo tanking Tortos?

[Deleted]

Solo tanking no kitting bs.

[Promdates]

I have died 0 times in what, 2-3000 pulls?

I actually checked out your guild on WoL and there was a few attempts where you got pooped on because of something. I've even watched you die in your logs to boss regular melee hits (something that actually happened on a horridon attempt) The other thing I noticed is you run with a brewmaster monk as your off tank, yet you take on a lot of the tanking responsibility. That could be perhaps because they are rank 5 or whatever in your guild (assuming this is trial rank), and you're an officer.

Since you brought up the Twins encounter later in this wall-o-text, I do see an attempt where you ended up dying because you got slept with having the boss and at least 2 beasts on you. While I understand your want/need to do these encounters the way you do, I'm also going to again say that they are not the safest way to do it. You're bringing 2 tanks, and yet you're basically just using one of the two as an "oh shit" person it seems like from your logs. So while your epeen dps is "high", you could be doing a lot better raid wise having your other tank actually do something useful. Perhaps if you two actually made sure to keep vengeance up for the both of you.

After looking over this stuff, and having actually done 10m content this tier on my other characters, I'm just going to call bullshit on a lot of your stuff at this point. On top of that the "progress" card, you so aptly named makes very much a difference. I'm going to prefer to listen to and take advice from someone who has actually cleared content or at the very least gotten to Lei Shen over someone who is 6/13 and wipes 5+ times to their farm bosses.

[Riemu2k3]

snipped

I actually did the twins encounter last week the way FF does it. I got WR 3 without really gaming p2 and playing it "safer".

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...&e=8825#Riemû

I used FS and FW glyph to not spread damage to my adds and put as much damage on the boss as possible. There where a few times where I certainly would have been killed if I had caught a sleeping puddle (damn is that tense right?). But then again, I would have never done that on a progression fight. I actually had to focus my beast down in order to survive when we started progressing on this fight in about 523 itemlevel. Nevertheless I think it's still more damage to solo tank this part of the fight in 10man, than two-tanking it. With your offtank being away every 30ish= seconds pulling the boss around the room, that vengeance seems wasted.

At least we opted to do it this way (even though my co-tank is a brewmaster monk) because everyone who had killed it at this point pretty much gave this advice.

So, I guess my point is - just as a educational benefit - does it even make sense to "vengeance-swap" here to optimize damage? Since thats pretty much the only reason we solo tanked the first phase, we needed to put more damage on the Boss in P1 to manage the enrage timer.

Vengeance-Swapping is something I thought about alot recently - especially on Leishen HC. Is that being done in top guilds? Is it adviceable? How would one do that efficiently?

On Leishen HC for instance, I take the first decap and let my co-tank tank until my vengeance is about to fall off and then taunt back the boss. But in the first phase (before the first decap), we usually don't switch (meaning: the tank that pulls the boss sticks with him till the first decap). Do you guys have another tank switch in between? And how does that intervene with not having the boss taunt immune for the pillar transitions?

Sorry to hjiack this thread...

For argument sake, only talking about 10 man pov.

[Promdates]

Right, you didn't do it on a "progression" fight, but he had only done the fight a handful of times and has probably used that strat every time. It's one thing if you're doing it on a farm fight because you want to try something totally different, but on your first or second kill? Not advisable.

Vengeance-Swapping is def. something people do. I learned about it from watching Slootbag's stream and then later talking to Daught.

edit: Actually, I'm honestly curious how close to enrage you guys would be doing 2 tank strat for twins... since it was the 25m version that got nerfed to match the 10m version a week or two into ToT.

[Deleted]

I actually checked out your guild on WoL and there was a few attempts where you got pooped on because of something. I've even watched you die in your logs to boss regular melee hits (something that actually happened on a horridon attempt) The other thing I noticed is you run with a brewmaster monk as your off tank, yet you take on a lot of the tanking responsibility. That could be perhaps because they are rank 5 or whatever in your guild (assuming this is trial rank), and you're an officer.

Since you brought up the Twins encounter later in this wall-o-text, I do see an attempt where you ended up dying because you got slept with having the boss and at least 2 beasts on you. While I understand your want/need to do these encounters the way you do, I'm also going to again say that they are not the safest way to do it. You're bringing 2 tanks, and yet you're basically just using one of the two as an "oh shit" person it seems like from your logs. So while your epeen dps is "high", you could be doing a lot better raid wise having your other tank actually do something useful. Perhaps if you two actually made sure to keep vengeance up for the both of you.

After looking over this stuff, and having actually done 10m content this tier on my other characters, I'm just going to call bullshit on a lot of your stuff at this point. On top of that the "progress" card, you so aptly named makes very much a difference. I'm going to prefer to listen to and take advice from someone who has actually cleared content or at the very least gotten to Lei Shen over someone who is 6/13 and wipes 5+ times to their farm bosses.

All of my late raids has been drunken raids for chill. They have involved a lot of mistakes as you mentioned. Something that I do not deny. I am fairly interested in what fight I died from a regular melee hit on Horridon.

You are probably looking at last weeks logs? We had a completely new raid team, we kicked 5 players from the raid team. We had 3 new healers, 2 of which was undegeared and had never done the content before, so yes we wiped. Our BRM is also a new player, he has never tanked before so naturally I am taking the tanking responsibility.

@twins yes I died from being sleeped this, that is a large fail from myself. But again, not playing at 100% really + could easily been saved with a dispell but our healers were also sleeped. Getting sleeped is nothing you would get on progressed, but while drunk, bored and distracted it easily happen. I do not know if you still raid 100% seriously after this many months of ToT but I dont.

But yeah, please look at my logs from a completely new raid team in content I am not even focused doing and judge me from it. I know you hate me PD, but that seems to be fetching straws a bit. I do not raid for progress, I raid for fun and the players I raid with. Anyone that played in a good guild knows there are bad people in good guilds and good people in bad guilds. I have been asked several times this tier to join one of the 13/13 25 man guilds as their tank, but I have declined because I prefer staying in a less progressed guild with people I like. Progress is not the endgame for me, having fun is. That is why I believe judging people simply on progress is very narrowmided. A lot of the best players I know do not have great progress now.
Would I be a better player if I joined that 13/13 guild? No I wouldnt. Would I be a more reliant source of information? No I wouldnt.
In my eyes, progress is irrelevant. Seen so many great tanks in low guilds and terrible tanks in good guilds.

Even in good guilds there are paladins that dont even have lay on hands keybinded. Paladins that dont know their basic rotation etc.

[trystero]

Right, you didn't do it on a "progression" fight, but he had only done the fight a handful of times and has probably used that strat every time. It's one thing if you're doing it on a farm fight because you want to try something totally different, but on your first or second kill? Not advisable.

Vengeance-Swapping is def. something people do. I learned about it from watching Slootbag's stream and then later talking to Daught.

edit: Actually, I'm honestly curious how close to enrage you guys would be doing 2 tank strat for twins... since it was the 25m version that got nerfed to match the 10m version a week or two into ToT.

Yea I can't believe I never thought about vengeance swapping before reading one of Daught's posts...try to do it all the time now.

[Riemu2k3]

I can't really tell you, we have never done 2-tanks (well we 2 tank the encounter, just not in p1). Nowadays it doesn't really matter because of the itemlevel.

Our logs have already expired :-(

But I remember that we had 2 enrage whipes. One time we lost 2 players to the 3rd tidal wave and the second time I think we didn't lose anyone that we couldn't brez. We had only a few percent left (i think it was sub 10%). That's mostly a DPS issue (our dps is not really the best :-))

We didn't do twins for like 2 or 3 weeks after that because it was just our "fallback" encounter when we had time left for progression. We killed it in 3 or 4 tries when we came back a few weeks later with 9:XX on the clock. Enrage is 10 minutes.

EDIT.

Can you gimme more info on that Daught post?

[Deleted]

edit: Actually, I'm honestly curious how close to enrage you guys would be doing 2 tank strat for twins... since it was the 25m version that got nerfed to match the 10m version a week or two into ToT.

With our new raid team with 5 people that had never done twins heroic before, a lot of undergeared dps without legendaries we actually hit the enrage this week. We went I believe 5-10 seconds over the enrage.

[Nairobi]

It is not taken out of context, and it isn't correct. Regardless of what gear levels you are at, if you need to choose between Haste and Expertise, Expertise is the better call.

Of course, that choice no longer matters once you can Hard Cap Expertise without giving so much as 1 Haste Rating up for it. That however doesn't change the best answer.

Sigh, you're missing the forest for the trees in what I'm saying. I am, and have been, capped on exp for pretty much the entirety of this expansion. However, I've done that without ever reforging away from haste. Regemming to hybrid (or sometimes straight exp) gems was my path in early content, but that's a bygone now. THAT was my point. That it doesn't have to be an "either or" scenario. I've stacked haste since MOP and managed to keep at 15 exp (+- 0.5). I'm sure you'll try and crucify me for that margin of error, but I'd rather be accurate/honest.

So, we're arguing the same point. YES, it is smart and recommended to cap expertise. But you're missing the caveat that NO, you do not now (nor really ever) had to give up haste to do so. I get that you're arguing for the math behind expertise (which nearly everyone agrees with), but it's causing you to view this as some binary option when it is not. You've recently opened up the notion that this entire argument is, indeed, pointless given the gear inflation we have, but are holding fast to the "EXPERTISE OR DIE!!1" mentality. There's a grey area, as we have a lot of freedom in how we get to 15% (or 14%, lolhuman). Haste is the LAST thing I'd give up (besides hit, of course) to get there.

... You're giving us option A and B, and then go do option C yourself. :P Either way, the example has no merit, as you're assuming you can expertise cap without reducing your haste. That of course is always the best option.

The discussion was about situations where you do need to choose between expertise and haste. (Low gear levels, or situations where you have several pieces without haste or expertise, perhaps because you're passing the Haste gear to the DPS.)

I feel that's a rather pedantic retort to what my actual argument was. If you want to ignore the "part C" as you've dubbed it, then go for it. I'd still stand by my part B suggestion. Perhaps I should have added a caveat (which I thought was rather obvious to readers of this) that you can and should make up those small gaps in capping via gem options, and I can edit my post if that makes you feel better about giving a "good answer" in this hypotetical situation. Either way, further discussion seems to be rather pointless, as [most] all sides have mentioned repeatedly that expertise capping is favorable, and that it's a nonissue in current tier+.

I actually did the twins encounter last week the way FF does it. I got WR 3 without really gaming p2 and playing it "safer".

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...&e=8825#Riemû

I used FS and FW glyph to not spread damage to my adds and put as much damage on the boss as possible. There where a few times where I certainly would have been killed if I had caught a sleeping puddle (damn is that tense right?). But then again, I would have never done that on a progression fight. I actually had to focus my beast down in order to survive when we started progressing on this fight in about 523 itemlevel. Nevertheless I think it's still more damage to solo tank this part of the fight in 10man, than two-tanking it. With your offtank being away every 30ish= seconds pulling the boss around the room, that vengeance seems wasted.

At least we opted to do it this way (even though my co-tank is a brewmaster monk) because everyone who had killed it at this point pretty much gave this advice.

So, I guess my point is - just as a educational benefit - does it even make sense to "vengeance-swap" here to optimize damage? Since thats pretty much the only reason we solo tanked the first phase, we needed to put more damage on the Boss in P1 to manage the enrage timer.

Vengeance-Swapping is something I thought about alot recently - especially on Leishen HC. Is that being done in top guilds? Is it adviceable? How would one do that efficiently?

On Leishen HC for instance, I take the first decap and let my co-tank tank until my vengeance is about to fall off and then taunt back the boss. But in the first phase (before the first decap), we usually don't switch (meaning: the tank that pulls the boss sticks with him till the first decap). Do you guys have another tank switch in between? And how does that intervene with not having the boss taunt immune for the pillar transitions?

Sorry to hjiack this thread...

For argument sake, only talking about 10 man pov.

Grats on the rank. I've also used this strat many times (though I usually work down the adds faster, as I don't re-glyph for FS/FocW) and have never felt scared/in danger. I've also got EMFH for any wandering sleep-clouds, which is nice

In terms of V-swapping, I think it's a great tool for early progression, but it quickly gets phased out with gear. We already have to hold DPS on some fights with meaningful transitions:
Horri, so as not to get Jalakk mid door 3.
Megaera, so that we don't push heads too fast and just sit in perma-rampage/have no CDs.
Twins, so that we don't kill LuLin before Suen pops.
LS, so that we don't push first transition in a weird place or push 2nd trans right after an add/ball spawn.

Of course, there are just as many (or more) examples of fights that get easier with more DPS, like Council or Durumu, or really most fights. But my point is that the net benefit to the raid relative to overall raid dps decreases as your actual DPS gear up. We'll probably return to V-swapping in progression in SoO, but I'm a bit skeptical of how well it will work with all of the V-nerfs anyhow.

[Wrathblood]

I actually did the twins encounter last week the way FF does it. I got WR 3 without really gaming p2 and playing it "safer".

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...&e=8825#Riemû

I used FS and FW glyph to not spread damage to my adds and put as much damage on the boss as possible. There where a few times where I certainly would have been killed if I had caught a sleeping puddle (damn is that tense right?). But then again, I would have never done that on a progression fight. I actually had to focus my beast down in order to survive when we started progressing on this fight in about 523 itemlevel. Nevertheless I think it's still more damage to solo tank this part of the fight in 10man, than two-tanking it. With your offtank being away every 30ish= seconds pulling the boss around the room, that vengeance seems wasted.

At least we opted to do it this way (even though my co-tank is a brewmaster monk) because everyone who had killed it at this point pretty much gave this advice.

So, I guess my point is - just as a educational benefit - does it even make sense to "vengeance-swap" here to optimize damage? Since thats pretty much the only reason we solo tanked the first phase, we needed to put more damage on the Boss in P1 to manage the enrage timer.

Vengeance-Swapping is something I thought about alot recently - especially on Leishen HC. Is that being done in top guilds? Is it adviceable? How would one do that efficiently?

On Leishen HC for instance, I take the first decap and let my co-tank tank until my vengeance is about to fall off and then taunt back the boss. But in the first phase (before the first decap), we usually don't switch (meaning: the tank that pulls the boss sticks with him till the first decap). Do you guys have another tank switch in between? And how does that intervene with not having the boss taunt immune for the pillar transitions?

Sorry to hjiack this thread...

For argument sake, only talking about 10 man pov.

One of the fun things about WoW is finding different ways to solve problems. When we were first working on Consorts we saw that the enrage timer was going to be an issue after the first couple wipes (we started out 3-healing it), but rather than maximizing tank damage we fiddled with our Crane positioning. On our first kill, we got over 35M in total damage from Cranes making the enrage timer a lot less of an issue (though on that kill our Monk still ended up tanking Lu'lin for 28 seconds past the enrage. Was pretty spectacular, especially considering the healers were all dead for the last 14 seconds. He finally exploded from a gigantic Shuffle tick just as Lu'lin died).

[Promdates]

Can you gimme more info on that Daught post?

It was either someone deep in the brewmaster or monk post/forum or somewhere in the raid forums.