The "Stam is all that matters" tanks

[Minia]

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!

[Zilas]

Most of these tanks are bad, but I've noticed that a lot of people shun me for raiding on my pally when I only have 40k buffed. I guess health is a gearscore for tanks. ???

[Karnadas]

It's ok if their gear allows it. (aka higher level gear = stam/armor is better)

However a tank who goes purely for stam, but ignores armor, is weak! :P

also

Most of these tanks are bad, but I've noticed that a lot of people shun me for raiding on my pally when I only have 40k buffed. I guess health is a gearscore for tanks. ???

I had 39k buffed before Ulduar came out, people may be looking at that I suppose.

[xebtria]

a tank who goes purely for stam, but ignores armor, is weak! :P

qft

[weshallarise]

if you are referring to tanks who take lesser quality trinkets because they have stam no that sucks. but if you are talking about tanks who socket nothing but stam thats fine. if hes running a brewfest trinket he either A) didnt have anything better because its an alt or someone who doesnt play or raid much or B)probably doest realize how important avoidance can be an probably needs to be explained the value of those stats.

but ive seen druid tanks socketing nothing but agility since the ICC radiance went in and i cant help but laugh at them.

[Srsbznss]

no.


Stam means a tank get eat more then one swing from a raid boss while your healer picks his nose or has to move.

From a bear druids PoV, Stam > Agi

if they made an Armor gem, then i'd agree stacking stam is not the best.

[Ace23323]

Well, first of all, what instance are you referring to? If it was a heroic, who cares?

Stamina is always going to be a desirable tanking stat because it grants effective health, with the same being true of armor. TBH, the black heart is probably a better trinket choice than a brewfest trinket for ICC content, but it might not be for ToC content.

As for tanks that think "stamina is all that matters", most have never read the theorycrafting or forums about why stamina should or should not be preferred in a given situation. But some have, and still prefer it, and as long as they can justify their gear/gemming choices, that's fine with me.

[Deleted]

Or you could stop being a bad healer.
Until there're armor sockets, tanks should and will gem stam.

[Minia]

You might laugh, but it was ulduar 10. Razorscale adds were ripping him apart. The holy paladin had to LOH him and I had to use pain supp early on. We did end up keeping him up, but it was fairly terrifying. We were doing the achievement and taking 4 adds at a time.

He says armor is useless over stamina because it doesn't make much of a difference. However we have a warrior tank in my guild, who gems mostly stam, but enchants his cloak / chest etc with armor.

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.

[Robyn]

Nerf armor. Stam is fine.
BTW, i was joking.

[draticus]

No, Stamina is not all that matters, but EH (stamina + armor) is the highest priority. In the current design where healers have nearly infinite mana so bosses hit really hard the healing style consists of proactive healing by spamming heals on the tank as opposed to waiting to see if the tank takes damage and then healing it which would be reactive healing. Since we're constantly spamming heals, avoidance just ends up being overheal. Sure, avoidance can occasionally save you by causing you to avoid being hit twice in a row by an attack that does more than half your health but if getting hit twice in a row will kill you then avoidance wont be consistent enough to prevent death. Even with 75% avoidance you will get hit 3, 4, even 5 times in a row over the course of a boss fight. Its better to increase the odds of getting hit by 5-10% and add enough stamina so that you KNOW you can survive getting hit twice in a row and dont have to hope for good rng from avoidance.

Stamina is the best thing to gem for. And btw, when is it ever a choice between armor and stamina?

[boseguy22]

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).

A high level or raiding tank is a different story. In end game content, especially raiding guilds working on things like Herioc ICC, avoidance/mitigation stats:

First: Are going to suffer diminishing returns, stam never does, so it is more effective.
Second: At some point you are not going to block, dodge or parry, and your health pool/armor are going to seriously matter. This may happen mulitple times in a row.

Healers love it when you dont take the hit, but the numbers say it is coming. That is when the damage reduction from armor and a health pool big enough to take that hit matters. If if you get down to 1 health, as long as you are still alive the healers have a chance to get you back. If you dont dodge and you are dead, there is all that drama...

[Leemon]

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.?

[Minia]

Eh I made a comment on him being squishy and said maybe he needed more armor and he said armor didn't mean anything compared to stam. That's all.

[Citaxis]

This is what happens when mainspec DPS play tanks. Stacking a single stat drops your overall ability significantly. Sure, the bear may have 60k health, but he can't hold threat because every ability gets parried or misses, and his attack power is 3. Sure, he has 60k health, but he goes down in 5 seconds in a Heroic because he has less dodge than an NPC and less armor than a naked mage.

There are so many important factors to tanking that simply stacking one stat and ignoring everything else, even using PvP gear and enchants because they have higher stamina, will ultimately drop your overall tanking ability. After all, if all you wanted was stamina and nothing else mattered, why not use full PvP gear and cap through resilience? People use the excuse, "Well, I get enough of that other stuff on gear." Well, you get enough stamina on gear as well. 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). Until you get full 25-man Heroic ICC gear, you cannot cap hit, expertise, or armor at the same time simply through gear (although you can't gem for armor, unless you want to use agility :'( ). Sockets are for balancing stats on gear. Traded T9 gloves for T10 tanking gloves? Gem some avoidance to make up for the loss, take out some hit gems. Got the 264 vendor chest? Drop some expertise gems and go for a little strength. Healers having problems reacting quickly enough to your dropping health? Grab some stamina.

Everything has its use. Literally anything that even looks like it could be used by a class who could tank is better than Brewfest trinkets, unless you happen to be trying to tank raids with 20k raw health. Although, if your health is that low from gear, you'll probably have bigger problems than stamina.

[harky]

What class is the tank in question? I'm assuming Death Knight? Those adds are laughable as a Warrior/Paladin who stacks stamina, but pretty mean to DKs who ignore other stats. Druids to somewhat, but much fewer of them have the issue since Agi is so nice for them.

Here's what you need to know: Effective health is a combination of health and armor. They both scale with each other, so the more health you have the more armor is worth and the more armor you have the more health is worth. So depending on the balance of health and armor, one or the other will be more important. At low gear levels in particular stamina is much better than armor because of the base armor already floating around combined with the low'ish stamina. Also, since armor wasn't really a gear choice before T10 (in Wrath anyway, it was in BC/Vanilla), except on rings/etc stamina was the way to go. Now Armor is an option in several cases and is a very high priority.

Oh and if it is a DK, make him go Frost. Frost is much, much easier to heal nowadays.

[Khano]

It's also rl who are bad.

I joined a pug voa on my prot pala 40k unbuffed and the rl put a druid as mt because he had 43k unbuffed. Are you kidding me ?!? Druids and dks are stamina tanks. A druid with just 3k hp more than a prot pala is a BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD tank.

[eErike]

Just to be the one who sais it, deff and expertice capped?

[Harith]

any good tank has many diffrent sets of gear for every fight i currently have 1 max EH set witch i use for most fights, then i have a avoudens set, a block set and a threat set and they all have there nich boss where they become better.

i know on my paladin healer i rather have a high health tank on random than one that avoudes alot sens i still need to spam heal the one with low health sens one hit the drops so much but if you have a disc priest avoudens is really nice

[MrPistachio]

On my paladin I went 100% stamina (well, with armor chants here and there, and an armor trinket that I keep in my bag for certain fights), and had absolutely no problems. I always survived way longer than the other tanks. I could always do heroics and such within 10 minutes and the healer would never have to stop to drink, let alone get below half mana (I've checked, even the lowbie healer with bad gear). I could always do HoR reg and heroic without any wipes, only problems I ever have there is when idiots go wherever they want and get smashed. AND, even if I felt the NEED to give the healer some break, I can go from my lovely Seal of Command and my 4k DPS, to Seal of Light and my 1k self heals every time I hit something (cough4khealthfromhammeroftherighteousontrash).

Then again, I'm just a pally afterall. ;]