BTW, if you’re tanking I think you should be wearing Tempered rather than Savage Saronite, at least for instances.
The other place to get gear aside from heroics (and don’t wait too long to go into heroics btw, you will start acquiring improved gear at a much faster rate once you start running them) are from the Quartermasters for the various factions - Ebon Blade, Argent Crusade, et cetera; in addition to questing for them, you can pick up reputation with them by wearing their tabards (available from the quartermaster) - especially once you hit Exalted with them, the items you can buy are about equivalent to the items that the final bosses in heroics drop.
Also, there are a few useful items that can be acquired by doing the Argent Tournament quests, notably a purple weapon that’s as good as anything that can be bought on the AH or found outside of the later instances & raids.
Will look into the Tempered thing. The Savage eq was showing as better than my existing eq using the tank points add on, so not a total wipe. A guildie was selling 5 pieces for 250, which seemed a good deal.
This is the problem with GS. It is not the sole indicator of effectiveness. If you’re tanking, you must have defense rating. If your gear does not have it, you will not be an effective tank, because the dungeon bosses will land critical hits on you, which will destroy your health faster than it can be healed.
You lucked out a bit in getting PVP gear which has some resilience which sort of does the same job as defense. But even a full set of Savage Saronite only gives you 360 resilience, and you need about 529 to be immune to critical hits. It’s better to look for armor with defense rating, and you’re going to need a lot of it; about 689, I believe.
They’re probably worth wearing while you’re out questing, since the amount of defense you get from Tempered gear is overkill for stuff out in the normal world.
At least you’re Prot! I’ve seen way too many “I have DPS gear but want to queue quickly for random heroics; I guess I’ll be a tank” people out there, but at least most of the time they dual-spec into a tank spec.
Just the night before last I popped into Heroic Forge of Souls and saw our “tank” - an Unholy-spec DK who had (on /GS review) a 300-some defense. I didn’t see this right away because immediately after everyone had zoned in, before buffing or anything, the guy charged around the corner and hit one of the giant skeletons there. The other one easily peeled off him as I was hitting buffs on my shadow priest, and I had to Fade to get it off. When I saw he had a permanent pet I checked him quick. He began running up to the next group as the healer said something like “great, a DPS pretending to be a tank” and dropped group, and I followed suit.
The problem with a crummy defense is that no matter how much stamina or armor you have, it makes you really freaking hard to heal. This makes for a very unhappy healer.
I have a DPS dual spec and a second set of gear for same. Even with the Savage Saronite my defence rating is 407, and I will bank that and get Tempered in the very near future. Just a shame the Tempered is a lower ilevel.
Wait, when I look at my defence stats is says Defence 407 defence rating 89. Which is it?
Yeah, but you need to use what works for the job, and I agree it sucks if it makes your GS look worse. On that topic, one non-heroic that you’re probably going to want to run over and over is ToC. The Black Knight (last boss) drops a tank trinket that my ICC-level druid is using as one of her tanking trinkets. No defense but still lovely and much sought-after.
Take a look at the wow-loot.com’s warrior gear list. (It used to load nice icons for the gear, but apparently Wowhead changed their format and the other site maintainer didn’t update.) They have gear separated by DPS vs. Prot, and it gives you a nice collection of what drops in what instance (regular vs. heroic) that you might want to check out for upgrading.
Edit: You’re interested in the raw Defense number, not the rating.
You want Defense to be 535 (or 540) - Defense is based on your Defense skill (which has a cap of 5/level, which you’ll reach fairly soon after levelling if you’re a tank, so 400 at level 80) plus any bonuses from talents or class unique abilities (not sure if there are any in Prot Warrior - my Death Knight has a rune that gives him +25 Defense) plus a bonus based on your Defense Rating, with every X points of Defense Rating giving you one point of Defense. Bosstone is probably right above that you need 600-some Defense Rating to get to 540 Defense.
Sigh…So I’m trying to get my Pally tank geared up well enough; so far I’ve been able to handle every single heroic EXCEPT Halls of Reflection. Stupid waves stay too spread out for me to aggro everything, healers wind up getting hit, wipe. I feel like I should be geared enough (look up Koldonar on Hellscream if you wish) at 31k and change unbuffed hps, and my average item level is somewhere around 224. Arg! Of course, I can’t run any raids as a pug, since I don’t have a 3k gearscore.
How are you approaching HoR? Are you going into one of the little niches on the side, and having your DPS and healer hide out in a corner of the niche?
The rating system is a big pain in the ass. It’s so easy to confuse. It’s a little easier with things like haste or critical hit chance; it’s easier to keep straight that X critical strike rating gives Y% critical hit chance. But with expertise and defense, X defense rating gives Y defense skill, and the numbers are pretty damn similar to each other. That 689 defense rating gets you 140 defense skill which you need on top of your natural 400 defense skill at 80 to be an effective tank.
Blizzard implemented the stats this way to allow for better scaling with level, but it’s resulted in a huge inaccessible mess which is why it’s going away in Cataclysm.
Yep, of course, this being random group finder, people are wont to wander wherever the hell they like…so if I sit back in the niche and try to line of site a hunter or mage, some ass DK or somethign wanders out to dps and gets the aggro. Then they yell at me :smack:
Strange. Every HOR group I’ve been in lately knows exactly where to go and what to do, and those that don’t follow the lead of those that do. If the DK is ignoring the tank and doing his own thing, he’s simply a bad player.
Man, what’s with Shirrak? Wiped at least once every time I’ve been in a group (well, okay, technically it wasn’t a wipe last night because I Feigned Death when I was the last one standing ). I’ve never seen a group have so much trouble as they do in the Crypts.
Dinged 67 last night.
Getting to the point in the game where gold becomes less relevant because you’re always picking up stuff like Spirit Shards and such for currency, which bugs the crap out of me. I know they were probably put in to counter gold farmers, but bleh.
Honestly, I would say you are still a bit undergeared to tank HoR-heroic. 31K unbuffed is low–it’s going to be hard to keep you alive unless you’ve got a very solid group (especially a healer) behind you. I’m surprised the random dungeon finder is giving you that one yet, and don’t feel bad because you’re having trouble with it. That place gives significantly better geared tanks trouble.
I could be wrong–I’ve seen some low-geared tanks do amazingly well on things that are technically too tough for their gear level–but my advice if you’re having trouble is to run the ICC heroics in your ret spec, and just tell the group you’re going to roll on any tank gear that the tanks don’t want. Since most of them are just there for their frost badges, they usually have as good/better gear anyway, so you’ll be able to gear up fast without the stress of trying to tank. That’s what I did with my paladin when I was trying to gear him up, and I ended up getting all sorts of goodies fairly quickly.
kushiel, were you in one of my groups last night? I’ve been getting Crypts a ton too (just dinged 67 too) and we had a double wipe in the first pulls. MC getting the best of us. After them it’s mostly cake.
So I dualed my Druid for dps/tank, but have yet to try to actually tank. I’m a little scared to actually do it, mostly because of drawing too many mobs to hold aggro. Plus I’m a little more used to pally tanking which is so easy with Consecration+Righteous Fury.
So maybe I should respec my dual to heals. That way at least I can still use my BoAs (+20%xp) I found a good resource on ‘how to druid tank’ the other day, I may re-read that and give it a go before I bail on it. I have picked up some random gear so 5-mans should be ok.
Hah um…my ret spec gear is abysmal. I’m talking 180ish average gear level. I do more dps as a tank right now :eek:
I’ve been assigned HoR randomly before, when I was unbuffed at 26k ish…no idea why it sends you there, really. And you would think HoR would be doable, when you can easily tank all of Pit of Saron without breaking a sweat. Ah well…I’m almost out of gear to get with Triumph badges.
Are you taking ret gear when it drops and nobody wants it? It’s funny–my paladin has a full ret set (decentish but not great), a full tank set (mostly 251 with a few 264 pieces–that’s his main spec) and very nearly a full (and rather good) Holy set–mostly from picking up strays that nobody wanted during ICC-5 instances and raids.
Well, PoS is quite a bit easier than HoR because you have more control over the pulls–there aren’t just waves and waves of things coming at you (except for the gauntlet in the cave, and those are easy-peasy for paladins to deal with).
That said, though, I did have a lot easier time tanking HoR (heroic and regular both) on my paladin, whose gear is considerably lower than my blood DK. Paladins are well equipped to deal with large groups of undead mobs. So maybe I’m overestimated what gear level is needed. I just assumed that around an average of 226-232 stuff was probably the minimum unless you’ve got an extremely good healer and overgeared DPS. I know as DPS (or a healer, if I had one) I would be pretty nervous to see a 26K unbuffed tank in H-HoR
). I’ve never seen a group have so much trouble as they do in the Crypts.