Prot gemming/gearing and RAWR

[Tyrrandion]

Heya. I'm trying to glean the most out of my tank atm, and Rawr seems to be telling me contradictory advice to most players. The general concensus i've heard was unless the socket bonus was +9 Stam, go with a straight +30 Stam gem.

I've used Rawr quite a bit and I love it, but the gemming its telling me to go with seems weird.

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

For instance, in my shoulder slot, I gemmed away from the +10agi +15 stam to a straight +30 stam and RAWR is giving me +294.79 survival, and a loss of 416.66 Mitigations.

Cape slot dropped +10 def and +15 stam for +30 stam and i get a loss of 480.22 mitigation for a gain of 348.68 survival.

For the frost belt im looking at getting soon its giving me something ridiculous like +20 agi, +10 agi/+15 stam, +30 stam

Beyond that, It's telling me the Glyph of Indom. Is a substantial increase from something like the frost trinket (+228 stam and a 9000 soak i believe) which seems to be, well, weird
.
Are these sacrifices in mitigation worth the gain in survival. Is Rawr biasing toward one thing or another? Looking at it now, it looks like a net loss.

Any advice is much appreciated. Thanks much.

[luthe]

Rawr's Prot Module is a little wonky unless you set your survivability threshold higher. I only use rawr on my paladin to see what the max health i can get is, lol. It's a great tool for DPS, but less so, imo, for tanks and healers.

[Greatd]

My main is paladin tank and I get the same advice as you. I believe the problem is that it values avoidance, especially armor, way too high.

[Quehn]

There's an option called "Edit Gemming Template" go there and remove the gem types you do not wish for the program to suggest.

If you feel that you prefer stamina then tell it to not gem defense / parry.


Rawr is a program that suggests you to gem or enchant or wield certain things, it doesn't tell you that stamina is bad, it merely tells you that theoretically you should gem or enchant or wield certain things.

The program does not have an exponential stat calculater. (Atleast not a very good one on default)
In other words; it doesn't tell you when your stamina is high enough to take a couple of blows in a row, and therefore gem or enchant or wield avoidance things.


Consider Rawr as a guideline, nothing else.

EDIT: spelling

[bawkbawkboom]

In all honesty....I would ignore Rawr for that matter. It's pretty lack luster for tanking guidlines.
The general rule of gemmin tends to be:

Need defense?
Blue: 30 stam
Red: 10agi/15stam
Yellow 20def or 10def/15stam (depending on how much you need)

Above the def lvl of 540?
Blue: 30 stam
Red: 10agi/15 stam (providing the socket bonus is +9 stam or +12 stam), else its 30 stam
Yellow: 10def/15 stam (again, providing the socket bonus is +9 stam or +12 stam), else its 30 stam.

As you can see, the only socket bonuses worth gemming for are +9, or +12.

The only JC gems you should be using are the 51 stam gems, dont bother with any other...its a bit of a waste tbh.


Gemming agility is the way to go...this is because it provides a slight armour aswell, and with kings, I think its said to be about 103% as effective as dodge. Also, on the chance you dont dodge/parry the attack, atleast you have a slight mitigation of the attack (physical only, ofc).

[bawkbawkboom]

This, 100%. The inherent downside of theorycrafting and sims is that they show you the potential, not actual. By default, this isn't always good or optimal. The key is to test things out yourself.

As a tankadin, the general thing is to gem Stamina, Strength and/or Agi. This combo gives you AP, SP, BV, Crit, Dodge, and Armor. For EH, gem Stamina and Agi dependant on gem slot color. For TPS, gem Strength and Agi. For Avoidance, Gem Agi. For "TPS-Per-Avoidance", gem Parry.

But don't ever gem parry. No, really. It's still not a great enough stat to do anything but gem for either pure EH, or TPS.

Gemming str is ish ok for lower geared tanks, that may have threat troubles. However, if you have threat troubles in ToC/ICC, your doing something wrong. Period. With the typical 0/53/18 build (using 3/3 crusade, 2/2 imp judge (to justify, its better in here than in BoM or Benediction) and 2/2 Vindication, you should have a point to put in either Convition, or SoC. Threat troubles on AoE trash? spec Soc....it is just epic LOL tanking with SoC. Most other tanks in ICC 10 dont tank the trash, because of the threat and dps i can kick out with SoC tanking, they cant hold it off of me.

Other than that, if the socket bonus permits a +9/12 stam, then gem agi/stam. It provides the best protection, albeit marginally - but we are here to min/max, arent we? :P, to mitigate/avoid incoming dmg.

Bawk

[Offhand]

In other words; it doesn't tell you when your stamina is high enough to take a couple of blows in a row, and therefore gem or enchant or wield avoidance things.


Consider Rawr as a guideline, nothing else.

The fluid nature of tanking prevents you from ever designing one true BiS because we can only assume certain things to be true (when in honesty they aren't the majority of the time). I'm mainly talking about tank damage here. There are settings in rawr for boss swing damage, boss swing time, and percent magic damage in the fight. But that doesn't start to correctly model different kinds of damage. A magic damage aura is different from an elemental strike. The damage Festergut puts out changes three times during the fight (although you should honestly be gearing around third inhale obviously).

In short, rawr in it's current form is incapable of creating something like a BiS list. I don't believe it's capable of accurately portraying individual fights at this point. Tanking is a mixture of three largely unrelated things, threat, EH, avoidance. Trying to balance those using a program that effectively specializes in maxing one number (dps) isn't doable.

[KingCrab]

The fluid nature of tanking prevents you from ever designing one true BiS because we can only assume certain things to be true (when in honesty they aren't the majority of the time). I'm mainly talking about tank damage here. There are settings in rawr for boss swing damage, boss swing time, and percent magic damage in the fight. But that doesn't start to correctly model different kinds of damage. A magic damage aura is different from an elemental strike. The damage Festergut puts out changes three times during the fight (although you should honestly be gearing around third inhale obviously).

In short, rawr in it's current form is incapable of creating something like a BiS list. I don't believe it's capable of accurately portraying individual fights at this point. Tanking is a mixture of three largely unrelated things, threat, EH, avoidance. Trying to balance those using a program that effectively specializes in maxing one number (dps) isn't doable.

You can always make an intelligent assumption on max/min gear in tanking based on experience.

At least for me in my avoidance gear, I never have threat issues. In fact, I never had any threat issues since the first day I started tanking as a pally. I'm those avoidance whores, and I never gem strength, so I always put threat issue off my gearing concern.

that leaves EH and avoidance to play around, and I personally see avoidance as a power modifier to the EH you have that contribute to your overall survivability to a boss.

YOu can increase your EH and keep your avoidance to improve your survivability,
or
you can keep your EH and increase your avoidance to do the same.

sounds stupidly easy but everything comes at a cost. avoidance is more expensive and it hits diminishing return much faster than stam and armor.

So it is easier to keep your avoidance unchanged and improve your EH through stam and AC.
(but you have to keep your avoidance, not giving it up for EH)

[Castel]

It's been a long time since I've used Rawr for one of my tanks, but it looks like it might just be a terminology issue. As I recall you could sort by Survival, Mitigation and Threat. If it calls avoidance (dodge & parry) mitigation, then the info it gave you makes sense, the misuse of the word 'mitigation' notwithstanding. If you sort by Survival you should get better results.

Having said that, I agree with the other posters that you can probably make better decisions on your own using the many tank gearing guides that are available - it is a relatively straight forward process.