The "Stam is all that matters" tanks

[Deleted]

The thing is that there aren't many sources of extra armor before 251/564 gear (with some exeptions and the cloak enchant). Of course armor matters, but the armor difference on gear is so low that it's hardly the thing to take into consideration while choosing an upgrade (again before t10/frost emblem gear with extra armor on it). And if the tank is raiding anything apropriate to his gear level then stamina clearly is in most cases the best thing to gem. An believe it or not, no tank is going to regem his gear with avoidance to do the weekly raid. FWY brewfest trinket is the second best ilevel 200 tank trinket.

[Deleted]

So both I and the holy paladin spamming him and barely keeping him up means I'm a bad healer? u iz smrat i kan tel. Read my post. PURE STAM. Not just gems, PURE stam trinkets even though they had no useful proc whatsoever etc.

With todays gear, if it was hard your tank is doing it wrong with more than just his trinkets.

[Minia]

Harky and Cira, I wish these boards had thumbs up, so I could give both of you one. The tank in question was actually a paladin, which I found incredibly odd. =/ I've never healed a paladin who was actually hard to heal. Here's -my- armory btw. I wont post his. Got in trouble for that before =p

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-s...wmoon&cn=minia

[fezz]

you can only get some more armor from enchants so far i know and 1 meta gem but i myself only started stacking stam gems when my passive avoidance was at what it should be wich most higher geared tanks are doing at the moment

[hoot80]

Stam stacking matters (especially for druid tanks) on fights where magic damage is high. A druid has nothing to help mitigate magic damage aside from the 12% damage reduction that all tanks get. We don't get the extra 6%, we don't have any magic diffusing bubbles that can form around us, we can't spell reflect. Even tanks that can do those things still benefit more from extra stam on those fights than anything else.

Sindragosa is a good example where if my off tank can't get to me in time and I have to take a breath with 11 or 12 stacks I can pop Survival Instincts and go up over 100k health, take a 75k hit and still have enough health left to take another melee shot and a tick of frost aura before I get a heal.

As has been stated above though, many tanks that have item level 200 - 232 gear should not be stam stacking as they will probably benefit more from avoidance/mitigation. Put agi/stam or dodge/stam in your red, stam in blue, and def/stam or defense in your yellow slots til you get 245+ geared. Then maybe look at stam stacking. Also consider your threat output (hit rating/expertise). If you are low geared and running heroics you want to try to get close to the expertise dodge cap (26) and close to hit cap so people aren't constantly pulling off of you.

[harky]

Harky and Cira, I wish these boards had thumbs up, so I could give both of you one. The tank in question was actually a paladin, which I found incredibly odd. =/ I've never healed a paladin who was actually hard to heal.

He was bad then. Just horribly bad. It's common, but yeah, it sucks. Those adds hit pretty weakly so any even half-decent Paladin should have no problem. Lots of hits for low damage turns Paladins into invincible juggernauts who seem to never get hit. Probably a lot more to it then stam stacking.

[draticus]

. Sockets on gear are for increasing stats that you are low in, which includes, but is not limited to, armor, stamina, dodge, parry, hit, expertise, and strength, which are ALL quite useful for tanking (parry usually a bit less so, but still is).

You can't gem armor though agility gives you a little armor, dodge, and threat via crit so its a good all around choice, especially for bears. However, Its still good advice to gem stam > all if you're talking about raids.

If you're talking about heroics then its a complicated situation. A new tank can't really tank heroics anymore because if they aren't overgeared for the instance they wont be "tanking" anything anyway because they wont be able to pull aggro off of the hunters and fury warriors who are pulling for them. If you can hold threat in a random group then your gear is obviously good enough that you could be gemming int and it wouldn't matter.

[Deleted]

I'm sorry if I offended you, I just have a hard time grasping the idea of tanks that think stamina is ALL that matters. Sure, just about everyone gem and enchant for stam and get trinkets with stam or armor + panic button but to actually wear sub-par gear just because it has a higher stamina is stupid. I apologize for calling you bad and may the FSM be with you.

[pyrodot]

The problem I have with tanks is they forget about the aggro part. Im not talking about multiple mobs but single target raid bosses. Just today I was in a voa and the tanks could not keep aggro at all even after soulshatter and standing there twiddling my thumbs. It wasnt just me either as 2 other people pulled aggro. Its almost to the point where I just assume not do damage at all sometimes. Anywho I went to wowarmory and searched these tanks and there hit and expertise is very low yet they have nothing but stam gems in every slot. All that stam for nothing because the boss is not even hitting you and instead hitting others that are not the tanks.
As far as avoidance vs. stam it really depends on the fight. Alot of fights have alot of magic damage which avoidance does nothing for you while a melee heavy fight is the opposite.

[WoWGoneBad]

lol i've never met a tank who thought that stam was all that mattered, dps/healers maybe, but never a tank, also included, did you ever stop to think that these tanks only stacked pure stam because of all the people who say "35k hp tank? noob" etc. etc.?

This is the prob i get on my dk. I have mid-range tank gear and I have 31k hp in frost and when i qued for tank I got blasted for not having 40k. I like the Idea of going for avoidance/stam but not too many ppl agree with this. So most tank options are to gem stam until they can get a higher ilvl gear for the slot.

[blupp]

The challenge is, a lot of newbie tanks, stack stam because they went to the Armory and the "best geared" tank on their server stacks stam.

What they dont realize is that same tank probably has higher mitigation/avoidance stats just from gear then they do if they were stacking gems, enchants, trinkets and prayers. A tank with the 2 brewfest mugs is probably also wearing similar item level gear, which means squish fest (even more fun if they dont hit the defense cap. Yes this is sad, but random heroics bring out the best in people).

this. people dont understand that you cant say stam > all, it depends on the situation.

but thats the case with other classes and speccs too. there are not only tanks who look at progress MTs who basically have to stack stam, i remember blue/green geard 0/20/41 specced destro locks in tbc that did slim to none dmg.

if a tank hasnt really good equip and sockets stamina he has no clue about what he is doing. but with cata that wont matter because tanks will stack stam and dont even need to look for defense.

[Keosen]

- Most tanks knows that HP pool is not what really matters
- Most non-tanks think that HP pool is the only thing that matter

- When a tank who knows that HP pool is not what really matters dies is getting kicked from the non-tanks that think HP pool is the only thing that matters
- When a tank who don't know that HP pool is not what really matters healers getting kicked

[Dairystyle]

I see a lot of tanks who copy better-geared tanks with the stam stacking. They absolutely cannot take a hit. It doesn't matter if youhave 50k health, a couple of 15-20k hits in a row and no amount of healing is going to save you. It's a point of contention I have with some tanks when I'm healing. I've healed tanks who stam stack and are fine, because their gear covers their avoidance enough to make it work. I've tried healing tanks whose gear doesn't and it's much more mana intensive and annoying to keep them up and the dps depending on the situation.

[eErike]

Pro rules:

1. Get deff caped (woho druidz!)
2. Get some expertice and hit
3. Get round 40% avoid
4. Gogogo stam, we want's it *Droools*

The reason that many forget about stacking stam is that avoid can get RNG'd, gg surviving as a avoid tank when RGN gives a boss 7 hits in a row, stam can take those hits and be spamhealed back to max by a healer. High stam= less pressure on tankhealers as noone likes the "wooops, rng just killed the tank"

Btw, never been anything but Druid when tanking, so I have no idea about the "get some Armor" thingy as bears get alot from agi and bear form :P

[Zka]

What's your view on these tanks? I healed one the other day wearing brewfest trinkets (Said they were good) and he was like butter. It was hard to keep him alive!

Stam tanks are good. Avoidance is there on almost all tank gear, so stam tanks have a couple of % less avoidance than tanks who somewhat focus on avoidance. So either:
1) you just imagined that it was harder to heal, because of your misconception that stam tanks are hard to heal
2) he was stupid: turning back to mobs, not speccing into avoidance/armor talents, etc
3) if it was a paladin, he was not using holy shield, that makes 5x bigger difference than gemming

When and why was this "lol stam tank" idiocy started? Back in BC everyone was fond of stam tanks.
Stam and armor are and always were the best tank stats against phyisical damage (which is most of the damage in most encounters). Stam is the only defense against magic (unless it's a gimmick resist fight with resist gear). Gemming for avoidance is plain stupid most of the time.
So what's wrong with stam tanks?

[luthe]

Due to the way stamina stacks in gems compared to the way avoidance does (For me, 73 dodge rating is 1% dodge, that's 3 and a half gem slots for 1% dodge, with those gem slots i could be getting like over 1k health) stamina is just far better for gemming, couple that with the fact that avoidance comes out of your ears on higher end tanking gear, 60% avoidance (not counting CotT) is so easy to get it's unbelievable.

Until blizzard gives tanks a reason to gem avoidance, tanks will gem stam.

[Myth]

From a Druid perspective there really isn't wrong way to gem. It really boils down to personal preference and feedback from your healers. I've tested multiple different gem styles in raids and for me I use Shifting Dreadstones in every slot. It makes for a nice balance in both my health and my dodge and in ICC 25 with buffs I am already back up to 37% dodge with Icecrown Radiance on. We have an equally geared Paladin tank and DK tank and pretty much every healer prefers to heal me because they feel its easier. However, when I tried going all stam gems they said I was about the same as the Paladin as far as difficulty to keep up. Not saying he was hard to keep up, just that they prefer me to have some more dodge. As long I maintain enough health so I'm not a 2 shot liability, then stacking more stam just doesn't do anything. My healers don't afk during raids and they communicate in vent when a boss mechanic is taking them out of the loop for a moment.



EDIT: Also, the extra agility is amazing for threat. Well over 50% crit in raids which keeps savage defense up pretty much 100% and I've pulled a few top 20s in TPS.

[Needonboots]

What's your view on these tanks? I healed one the other day wearing brewfest trinkets (Said they were good) and he was like butter. It was hard to keep him alive!

To be honest, it depends on gear levels, and the reasoning behind it.

"Stamina is all that matters" - wrong

"I gear for effective health because it is more important in the content I'm progressing through" - more likely to be right.


Currently I have no problem in content. I only have 26% dodge, and 20% parry, due to things like the Cataclysmic Chestguard. I only have 1 gem that isn't pure stamina.

But I also have a crapton of armour. My avoidance is lower than when I was Ulduar geared, but am having no issues. effective Health gearing IS the way forward, because it doesn't rely on a random number generator.

[InbredPsychosis]

Stam isn't all that matters, but it's all you should gem for. At later gear levels, you get more than enough avoidance from your gear, that you shouldn't even need to have an avoidance trinket, but it's not bad if you do.

Gemming avoidance is usually a bad idea because it suffers so much from DR now. A 20 dodge rating gem will likely only get you dodge equivalent to a 10 dodge rating gem. 30 stam however, is always 30 stam. Back in BC, before avoidance had DR, gemming and gearing pure avoidance was good. However, because enemies hit for a 3rd of your health pool, you gotta have the stamina to stay alive, cause that dodge or parry isn't going to be there all the time. Especially in ICC.

[Needalight]

I was trying to write a wall of text here but I give up.
To my point.

245 Gear+++ All stam GEMS. and you will be fine. I had 31+ (minus buffs and mongoose proc) percent dodge as a prot pally in full 245/and some 258 gear from TOTGC. For warrios and paladins, that is way over the DR cap. (not counting in chill of the winter debuff from ICC)

Anything below 245 gear should have hybrid gems IMO. like stam+dodge gems. Warrior/Paladins should not ever gem PURE DODGE OR PARRY. or you're bad.