Druid tanking.

[Daez]

Please say that this was truly for a friend and you aren't this clueless. Druids have absolutely no need to use defense and the fact that they only get dodge and chance to be missed from it means they should be gemming for agility. All slots should be agility/stam. Agility is better than dodge because it also increases threat.

[Daez]

if you ever have a really good set bonus on a yellow slot, then gem def+dodge there.

This is where you use your dragon eyes. If you don't have dragon eyes because you do not have jewel crafting then you fail as a tank.

Overall, the best gem for any slot really is 8 agi/12 stam for a general non specialized tank, but thats not really in game yet...

7 agility 11 stam is in the game though and its a best in slot gem at the moment.

[Daez]

^-- this

here goes a good example of a bad druid and no thats not his sarth tank set, his guilds to fail to even do 2 drakes last time i check
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-s...7Thos&n=Savdag

This dude is a funny joke. The sad thing is he has some nice gear although he makes really crappy gearing decisions. I wouldn't mind having some of his gear if I still tanked on my druid, but I simply can't bring myself to tank on my druid now that I have a level 80 paladin tank. Spamming abilities constantly just stopped being fun after awhile. I like actual rotations.

[Daez]

I'd say the Glinting Monarch Topaz - Orange (+8 Agility / +8 Hit rating) is the best tank gem for yellow slots.
EDIT: or Timeless Forest Emerald - Green (+8 Hit rating / +12 Stamina) depending if you want to go for Stamina or Agility.

Off-topic; doesn't MMO-Champion allow hovering links to wowhead?

Don't gem for hit as a tank unless you are under 100 hit rating and you shouldn't be under 100 hit rating as a druid because almost all that leather has hit and expertise on it.

[Daez]

To get uncrittable in raids you have to have about 415 def which is roughly 75 defense rating..
This is with survival of the fittest but according to what i've heard you don't need any defense rating to get uncrittable against 80 mobs.
I did the testing in heroics by equiping and un-equiping my rings and i found out that mobs of your same lvl don't crit on you but the bosses can if you don't have these 415 in defense..
Some heroic gear and you will pretty much be uncrittable

Note: Recount is a great addon, it registers every hit you take and you can see how many times you've been critted.

Did you bother to keep up with Wrath AT ALL? SotF was changed to 6% chance to avoid crits in Wrath and the raid bosses only ever had a 5% chance to crit to begin with. The extra 1% was just because Blizzard likes even numbers.

[Daez]

415 Def was the magic number we needed to get up to with Defence to avoid being critted IN BURNING CRUSADE, which we are no longer in. People are reading posts dating back to BC and thinking it's current information. The rest about Survival of the Fittest being completely necessary for tanking has already been covered.

In TBC, SotF was only 3% so you had to cover the other 3% in another way. Towards the end people stopped using defense and started stacking resilience in order to do so though. Then they stacked stamina and dodge.

[Daez]

Agility is great up to the point where you reach 50% dodge raid buffed, at that point start going for defense. Diminishing returns on dodge make defense better for avoidance since it grants a miss chance aswell.

Once you hit 50% dodge you really don't need to worry about stacking avoidance any farther. Agility is still better because it gives threat and armor. It will be even better in 3.1 when you damage shield yourself through crits. Agility is ALWAYS the way to go as a druid tank. Agil > Stamina > Expertise (to the cap) > Hit is the way to gear a druid tank.

[Daez]

If you have too much dodge, or reach a point that you don't really need anymore dodge you rather go for Hp gems.. you want to few hits no matter what, and if you have around 34 k hp and 60% dodge , your pretty damn unstabile tank.

One fight you never take dmg, other fight your taking insane amount of burst dmg and almost geting oneshot due the dodge issue. it's very very random, i rather add more health so it's easiere for healers. it isnt always best to stack agi nor dodge rating, def gems?... -_-

You are wrong because with 60% dodge you are not suddenly going to take huge spikes. Not to mention, with all that agility also comes a crap load of armor. Armor is still the best stat when you can get it, but few items are worth taking for actual armor value anymore. Stacking stamina to "help the healers" is stupid because unless your healers suck they are going to heal you rather you are full or not if they know you have damage coming and you aren't going to die in one hit at 34k health unless you have no armor.

[Daez]

Another post on these forums suggested that the frost resist gear is a brilliant way to get large amounts of stamina nice and easily. On top of that, get 40 wintergrasp marks and that'll give enough honour for a nice piece of high stam PvP off set gear. Also sneak to VoA when you can.

Simple tricks to boost abit.

The pvp gear from honor (the hateful stuff not the deadly stuff) is actually some of the best in slot for a druid right now and pretty easy to get. Also, the items from WG are very nice.

[Vanesa]

I wanted to ask a question for a friend. Does a druid need to gem for def? or just go for stam and dodge? thanks.

Well, if they're stamina and dodge are high enough and they know the fights, I say they're fine

[Daez]

Alski sorry about the confusion i guess i should have made it more clear. the bare minimum for end game tanking in TBC was 51.2 avoidance more was always better.

Damn someone should have told my druid that. Then again I only tanked up to t6 content, but I was told by everyone back then to cap armor first. People aimed for the armor cap first then stacked their dodge as high as possible, but 51% avoidance was not the bare minimum for tanking. Hell, I don't think 51% dodge was even obtainable before you go to SWP.

i personally have always went with more avoidance. and 102.4 avoidance was possible in TBC i had a friend that spec and geared just for that. but he did give up some stats for it.

It was impossible to get on a druid. It wasn't that hard to get on a warrior/paladin. You could get there with badge gear. It is impossible to get to right now for every class besides the protection paladin.

[Daez]

well i hate to use 50% like everyone else since they are rounding down. i rather round up to play safe. even with that i gave 51% some lack personally i think it 52% is better but then that will bring up an up roar of idiots.

How about you just don't talk about topics you know nothing about?

In TBC the gearing went like this:

Uncrittable (normally by resilience not defense after gladiator gear became easily gotten)
Armor Cap (or as close as you could get because 75% less damage was much better than dodge at the time)
Avoidance (stack as much as you can)
Stamina (stack as much as you can)

The druid mechanics were very different then, and nothing in TBC can really be related to Wrath. The druid class was basically completely redesigned for Wrath.

[Daez]

Honestly, its best to ask your healers what they want from a tank, because your life is in their hands anyway. I gemmed for straight Agility, but after I tanked Patchwerk in a stam set I sat down with my healers and asked them on normal fights if they would rather I dodged 7% more attacks or had 7k more hp. The answer I got was they would rather I take more damage, if it was consistant, and have a higher HP pool to play with than have me take less damage.

Your argument is that your healers are just as clueless as you? That is not very reassuring.

we have cleared all content.

A trained chimp could clear all of this content. That is not really an argument.

Not sure why all the hate on Stam druids. If your healers prefer you to gear a certain way gear / specc for them. If your dps are pulling aggro (which they should never do at this point) gear / specc for them.

No amount of healer suckage will ever explain away the newbiness of being a stamina stacking tank. Stamina tanks are attacked because they are just plain bad. It doesn't matter if the healer thinks that taking more damage is better or not in this content. Wait until after healer mana is changed in 3.1 and ask your healer if they would rather spam out their mana bar healing you or they would rather have you take less damage and I'm willing to guarantee you they will beg you to do whatever it takes to take less damage.

[bawkbawkboom]

its been bugging me, 5.68% is the actual crit cap for raid bosses lol im just being picky:P.
right, now thats off my chest...

a stam set is only advisable for the sarth 3 drakes fight...but if your guild is there, then you should already be hitting th 47 - 50k health pool mark with atleast 45 - 50% dodge....as far as i have seen (correct me if im wrong, please).


Added, correct me if im wrong, but i thought the agi:dodge ratio was still imbalanced........isnt it still 14 agi - 1% dodge and 18.7 dodge rating to 1% dodge (or the same ratio, just scaled for lvl 80...like the rest of the stats). Agility also scales with kings, so agility=winwinwinFTW!!! all the time.

[Alski]

@Daez can you stop it with the spam posts please, just make 1 big post instead of making a seperate post for each. 1 thing that stood out in your posts as i flicked over them was that you think it wasnt possible to make a complete avoidance set,. Why was sunwell radiance put in, it was to stop those said druids with more than 101.2% advoiance raid buffed/boss debuffed from making a joke out of sunwell. it was full possible with sunwell gear and full buffs/mob debuffs it was possible to get to about 107% avoidance

To Alski
just wondering where did you get your avoidance numbers especially 101.2 that is new to me. with the current diminishing returns i know that is next to impossible but it seems you like to crunch numbers too. i might have to hook up with you some time to throw some numbers back and forth with out flamers or newb stepping in.

Im sure your aware that 3 levels differnce reduces or dodge/miss/parry/block chance by .6% each (same theory behind the 5.6% boss crit chance) and since a druid only has 2 of those stats we only need an overall +1.2% more instead of the other values

during TBC we were very limited on what we could chose gear wish, All of our good gear already had bonus armor on it so we didnt struggle to get to the armor cap, and more often that not it had plenty of stam on it so we could just straight up socket it for agi


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a stam set is only advisable for the sarth 3 drakes fight...but if your guild is there, then you should already be hitting th 47 - 50k health pool mark with atleast 45 - 50% dodge....as far as i have seen (correct me if im wrong, please).


Added, correct me if im wrong, but i thought the agi:dodge ratio was still imbalanced........isnt it still 14 agi - 1% dodge and 18.7 dodge rating to 1% dodge (or the same ratio, just scaled for lvl 80...like the rest of the stats). Agility also scales with kings, so agility=winwinwinFTW!!! all the time.

i sit at about 43k raid buffed and im in full 25man gear, but thats only because i use 1 stam trinket and agi gems

as for the agi/dodge values the ones you listed are for lvl 70

At level 80; 41.6667 Agility = 1% Dodge.
At level 80; 39.3480 Dodge Rating = 1% Dodge.

Of course that value for agi is before SoTF/kings is taken into account

At level 80 + SoTF; 39.31 Agility ~ 1% Dodge.
At level 80 + SoTF+ kings; 35.92 Agility ~ 1% Dodge.

[Beasty]

Off-topic but post properly please Daez, and lose the inflated ego while you're at it.

Stacking stam is also fine up to the survival soft cap, after that it doesn't really do much to help anymore unless your healers are brain dead or it's a special encounter, still this is talking about farmed, easy as hell content and optimizing yourself for it while having no idea about ulduar may be considered by some as irrelevant and that stam may be the safest way to go.

You won't be "attacked" for stacking unless you play with some real arseholes.

[kayabey]

Just to add some info to the truthiness of it all. Next patch druids can DUAL WIELD SHIELDS. Everyone go tell your F-tard friends so they post this on every thread as truth.

is it true we gonna Dual wield ?

[Ntrails]

It was impossible to get on a druid. It wasn't that hard to get on a warrior/paladin. You could get there with badge gear. It is impossible to get to right now for every class besides the protection paladin.

A rogue could hit total 102.4 avoidence in BC, I think a druid could too - logically.

[Alski]

A rogue could hit total 102.4 avoidence in BC, I think a druid could too - logically.

it was easier for a druid because our agi-dodge conversion was better iirc

[kayabey]

what is the best talent for tankin spec ?