When should I gear for avoidance

[holyforce]

So I've talked to some guildies and they said I should be gearing for avoidance, below is my armoury link. Do I have high enough gear to start gearing for avoidance?

armory: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...mmann/advanced

So any tips or suggestions would be nice!! Thanks guys

[Deleted]

Avoidance, haven't heard that word since.. tbc? wotlk?

[Lessthanzer0]

Avoidance, haven't heard that word since.. tbc? wotlk?

i guess you don't tank very much then cause avoidance (dodge/parry) builds have been popular for dks and warriors all of 5.4.

For the OP, i can't really tell you when to gear for avoidance. If you are gunna go full avoidance then you are gunna drop your mastery way down. due to the RNG nature of that build some people like to do a mastery/parry build. for instance, i have about 135% mastery unbuffed with a full avoidance build. there are times where i don't get hit at all for awhile and then other times i just get wrecked due to RNG. A full dodge/parry build is great and works fine but you need to be a little better at managing your CDs. The whole point of an avoidance build is stack parry which translates into crit thanks to riposte. Dodge is purely a defensive stat just like mastery, the only difference is mastery doesn't have RNG tied to it. With dodge/parry either you get hit or you don't. Its completely random. With mastery you build bigger blood shields to absorb more hits.

So depending on the build you go with, its up to you when you start gearing for it. If you decide to go full avoidance then you can do that whenever you want. If you wanna do the mastery/parry build then when you are comfortable surviving with your mastery level then start putting the rest of your stats into parry. Some say 180-200% unbuffed is a good place to start and then you can drop down from there. You don't want too little mastery that you are straining your healers but you dont want too much that you are constantly capping blood shields.

On a side note, you still have quite a bit of timeless gear still. Those are obviously not the best due to the lack of gem sockets. Whatever build you decide to go with make sure you are getting 7.5% expertise and hit before anything else.

[Evilsbane]

The post before me goes pretty well with info on what you need.
I've tanked since Uld as a DK, love it, won't quit, but i did take about a 2 year break from MoP, i came back about 2 weeks ago and a few of my mates were giving me the update for 5.4

Mastery, it's shit. Used to be the bomb, still can be a little bomb, but it's no where near as good as avoidance.
My friends suggested going the full avoidance build around 560 ilvl or more, you can go lower ilvl but theres a chance it just won't work as well for you.
I consider myself a fairly good tank so i've done it early at 540ilvl and so far, i love it, so much better than mastery build.
I gem full parry/stam/hit.
Preference on the stat priority of Hit/exp 7.5% > parry > dodge > crit > haste > mastery
As well as doing high damage, your parry should be around 30%+ and dodge at 10%, with your gear you should have around 900-1m hp so that's also good.
The idea behind this build is that seeing as you're hit/exp capped your white hits always hit and stacks your Scent of blood to 5 stacks really fast increasing your healing by DS, also with the haste you have and damage if you take some, you'll be capping your blood shield without having an obscene amount of mastery, so that's why this build is preferred.
My current stats are 33% parry, 12% dodge, 89% mastery and hit/exp capped.

On the other side to this build is dps, the crit along with riposte, gives you a good chunk of crits throughout fights, if you have the trinket of garrosh (crit) stacking those with DRW, then outbreak and going ham on your keyboard, you can do a fair amount of damage, if you want to do a nice burst at the start of a fight, try and take damage to build vengence fast, then open with DRW/trinket/outbreak and then deathstrike/runestrike, i've bursted 300k so far with 540ilvl, im sure you can do more.

A lot of the full herioc 585+ ilvl tanks have gone full crit for the riposte build, but still prefer avoidance over mastery.

HOPE ALL THIS HELPS.

[chibichibiko]

You're fine to make the switch now. I like around 10-11k mastery as my personal 'balance' point, after which I put everything in avoidance (or crit, a privilege of outgearing content). I had already swapped out to that priority in lower ilvl than you, but I did have the legendary meta by then (it makes a pretty big difference if you play smartly around it to reduce your incoming spikes, which is what mastery does too).

To clear up some of what Evil was reporting: heroic tanks don't go full crit for avoidance--it doesn't give us any avoidance yet (it will in 6.0). We do it because you only need to be enough of a brick to reliably not die on encounters, after which you may as well just do more damage. Crit just happens to be our best dps stat due to amplification it has on the enormous vengeance pool.

Haste is currently a null-stat for many blood deathknights, as parry/dodge flood us with runic power to spend due to scent of blood. We are generally GCD locked, and haste is a far worse dps/survivability increase than other stats.

My priority would be hit/exp 7.5 > comfy mastery (you pick the right number... for some it's 5k, for others 14, etc) > parry > dodge >> strength = crit > mastery >>>haste.

[Evilsbane]

I didn't say crit was for avoidance, I said Riposte build, which is the crit build, they have enough avoidance through gear so they gem crit, purely for dps, not tanking.

But everything else chibi mentioned is correct, it's really just personal preference, I was always mastery build, during first tier mop I was at 240% mastery, but now, after all of it, I find the parry build smoother and feel more of a tank than a sponge.