H: Lei Shi as Blood

[pallyballz]

So we will be working on H:Lei Shi for the first time tonight and I will be Tanking as Blood. Right now im Mastery based but have read/heard that Mastery is a horrible stat for this fight and that I should go Stamina/Spell Resist. But there were posts in like December.

So I guess my question is should I re-gem Stamina, use Rune of Spellshattering, the Stam/Spell resist meta. Just seems like a lot of changes and I don't really want to do them if they aren't necessary. But I want to make it easiest on myself and the healers so we can kill this quickly.

[Tojara]

I just changed my rune forge and ran double stamina trinket. You don't need to go too crazy with it.

[Cookie]

Depends on how much effort/gold you want to put in. You should definitely use two stamina trinkets, the spellshattering enchant and reforge into hit+exp caps and as much haste as possible after that (mastery and the avoidance stats are largely useless, the add should pmuch be stunned until it's dead). In addition to that you can swap all your gems to pure stamina (possibly sta+exp/sta+haste to get a cruical socket bonus), on my server gems are 10-20g, so it's a no brainer to change them depending on the encounter.

[Nillo]

I think even for general case, using stam>mastery for gems isn't bad at all. I learned it since Dragon Soul - -

Nope - it was only good in DS because some bosses required you to have high hp pools and Stamina gave a decent amount of DPS through vengeance.

---------- Post added 2013-03-01 at 01:32 AM ----------

mastery and the avoidance stats are largely useless, the add should pmuch be stunned until it's dead

Even without stunning the add it should usually take a while to break through the Blood Shield anyway.

[Reniat]

Gemming stam>mastery is completely viable. Just because you have enough health to survive the largest single hit in the encounter doesn't mean EH beyond that is worthless. As a DK tank, especially in heroic content, stability means EVERYTHING, and a healthy amount of EH is very important. Both stamina and mastery play a role in stability, so you can't just ignore one. That doesn't mean you automatically want to stack stam either though. How much EH you need depends on: your gear, your healers, your raid size, the encounter, your playstyle.

your gear: The more gear you have the less "synthetic EH" (EH gained from losing other stats like through gems) you need.

your healers: Different healers like different EH amounts. If you have a druid healer the extra EH could allow for better timing between direct heals and large dot ticks. if you have a Hpally you will probably need less EH since they can do a lot of quick direct heals, allowing for better spike healing.

your raid size: 25H does more spike damage than 10H, but 10H has less raidwide healer mana. Both of those affect EH, but they also don't make 25H or 10H strictly "EH" or "non-EH" content.

the encounter: while this has a lesser effect than the reasons listed above, it still matters. In addition being a large part of stability, EH also allows for more..liquid healer timing. This can definitely play a role in movement heavy fights, allowing your healer to move as the mechanic dictates and not make them heal as much spike damage with only insta casts.

your playstyle: Your "playstyle" is a nicely termed word for how well you play lol. IF you are timing your death strikes well and using your CDs intelligently, spike damage will be lessened. that is a HUGE part of hardmode progression DK tanking, and the idea of "stability" is something that needs to strived for above overall damage taken or overall healing taken or any other single unit of measure that some tanks like to use. However if you are doing less with DS and CDs to minimize/recover from spike damage, you are going to need a bit more EH to make sure your spike damage isn't an issue. Now, that does NOT NOT NOT mean that using a 100% stam build means your bad. You could play perfectly and still find a stam build optimal for you based on the other cases listed above.

Now, the VAST majority of people WILL find that the mastery>stam concept will work better for them as it jives with most "Standard models", but that doesn't mean it will be optimal for everyone, and even if you normally use mastery>stam there will always be at least one fight in a tier that potentially favors a high EH build.



My point is that it will be different for everyone. There is no right amount and full stam gems could be great for one DK/healer team, and it could be horrible for another. It all comes down to your healer's play style as well as your preferences as a tank and how your preferences jive with your healer. The reason most people assume stamina is bad is that they are viewing the tank's main objective as "least dmg taken" instead of being "easy to heal" for the healers, which involves how much time they have to spend healing you and how much mana you take to heal. You have to think about the healer's time healing you a resource you want to minimize without taking too much mana.

the math behind it:
DTPS = damage taken per second
%TPS = percentage of health taken per second

%TPS = DTPS x (1/HP)

The idea behind more mitigation is to decrease DTPS to reduce %TPS, while the idea behind more stamina is to increase HP to reduce %TPS. However, the higher the DTPS the higher the mana is required. So how you gem depends entirely on your healer and how they answer this question: "would you prefer to use more mana less often, or less mana more often?"
Generally the mitigation is the build of choice, because you really don't see a whole lot of use from the increased health until heroic content, more so in 25 than in 10.

"but if im not full, stamina does nothing!"
Not entirely true. Remember, were looking at our health from the healers point of view, so even though stam doesn't mitigate any damage, it still reduces the amount of time they need to focus on you instead of healing the raid by reducing the % of your health a given hit will do, regardless of if you are topped off or not.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XT6Q3...eature=related

[Sinzaram]

I was forced into tanking this recently.

I didn't do any regearing or regemming, i just changed my playstyle.
Since Blood Shield is physical only, Death Strike becomes only useful for the heal.
So when I wasn't tanking I'd store up 4 death runes and start spamming Death Siphon as soon as it was my turn to take the aggro. Since Death Siphon scales with Vengeance, each Death Siphon(1 rune) was roughly equal to the healing from Death Strike(2 runes!!), so had nearly no trouble staying alive like that.

[Cookie]

I have tried death siphon on Lei-shi and I admit that it's quite good, however I kinda felt like I was struggling to use up all my resources anyways with anti-magic shell basically capping me twice and me being reforged into full haste. Due to this (having to waste some runic power/blood runes) I'm a bit uncertain if it's a damage increase using it, but it should be more healing, at the cost of not having death pact for emergencies. Not really sure what's stronger, but having death siphon annoyed me:P

[Nillo]

Exactly. Every time I tried to suggest gemming stam is not evil, ppl just lecture me how mastery weights more than stam in damage taken. Same thing when I tried to suggest hit/exp is not evil either. I'm just so tired and give up explaining.

The thing is that stamina isn't really needed this tier at least for 10H and unlike back in Dragon Soul it doesn't really offer any additional benefits.

[jasonleekungfu]

OK I delete my post. I'm sorry I was wrong.

[Nillo]

I have tried death siphon on Lei-shi and I admit that it's quite good, however I kinda felt like I was struggling to use up all my resources anyways with anti-magic shell basically capping me twice and me being reforged into full haste. Due to this (having to waste some runic power/blood runes) I'm a bit uncertain if it's a damage increase using it, but it should be more healing, at the cost of not having death pact for emergencies. Not really sure what's stronger, but having death siphon annoyed me:P

I think Death Siphon is quite handy if you end up being too far from her when Get Away starts.
Agree with it being a questionable choice otherwise though due to AMS giving plenty of resources anyway and that you still need to do quite a few DS to get a Blood Shield that covers the add spawn.

[fangless]

Seems like a lot more advice than's really needed. You aren't tanking this boss for very long between swaps.

If you can get more stamina, obviously it's better on this fight than mastery. If you can't, this boss isn't really that hard anyhow, going in with regular gear, you should be able to do just fine.

[Reniat]

The thing is that stamina isn't really needed this tier at least for 10H and unlike back in Dragon Soul it doesn't really offer any additional benefits.

That doesn't mean it's not viable or better for some raid comps/healers. Also there is plenty of additional benefits with stamina, just maybe not benefits you'd use during progression. An extra 30-40k means you can stand in fire for vengeance that much longer

[Nillo]

An extra 30-40k means you can stand in fire for vengeance that much longer

I can do that with more mastery as well

[Mionelol]

Or you could just wear DPS gear if such was the goal...

And on topic, Lei Shi can be tanked in DPS gear with no issues. Don't worry too much about her, get anti-magic runeforge and stam trinkets if you're that worried.