One thing I’ve been meaning to ask, as a Prot Warr, how does better gear help me generate & maintain threat? I get where better gear makes me easier to heal, but not the other part.
Couple reasons, both stemming from damage. Threat is typically a multiplier of the damage you do; therefore, the more damage you put out, the more raw threat you put out. Secondly, the more damage you do, the more rage you generate, which means you can use your abilities more often, which means you can hold threat more easily.
I’ve been using 40 all the time, same as I did last year. I’m not the only one who noticed the increase in difficulty, the Blizzard forums are full of complaints about it.
Though it was a bit easier when I did it on another char today, so maybe they’ve hotfixed it.
Anyway, yesterday it went something like this:
‘This is easy’
Starts tossing at a relaxed pace.
‘20 torches, better up the pace’
Starts tossing faster but not insanely so.
‘30 torches’ O_o
Starts tossing even faster.
‘35 torches’
Shifts grip so the index finger on my left hand hovers over torch tossing key and the other over the left mouse button, and then start vibrating both hands.
‘37 torches’
‘38 torches’
‘39 torches’
‘38 torches’
Repeat this for a while, until I finally succeed.
Last year, I got on my first try, so yes, they changed something this year.
Whoa, yeah, I didn’t even think about Frost tanks! Especially blows for you guys, eh?
That’s where you’ll find your tier gear. Those are armor sets where the pieces are designed to be worn together. In Wrath, every tier is made up of helm, chest, legs, hand, and shoulders, with a bonus for wearing at least two pieces of it and another bonus for wearing at least four. Most people will wear 2-4 pieces of tier gear, and then fill in the rest from non-tier items. Sometimes the bonus is worth “downgrading” from an item for the same slot that might otherwise have better stats.
T9 is what you can buy with Triumph badges. T10 is what you can buy with Frost. Both of these will be slightly lower-level than the gear you can buy with other badges of the same kind, because they’re designed to be upgraded with other tokens that only drop out of 25-man raids of that level (or 10-man hardmodes of that level). The difference is that for T10, you directly upgrade the initial piece, whereas with T9, you have to buy your upgrade with more badges *and *the token. So if you’re thinking about running ToC25 at all, you’re probably better off waiting to buy your T9 gear until you can start saving up trophies to buy the T9.33 (ilvl245) pieces.
It’s a balancing act between “what can I get the soonest” and “what will be the biggest upgrade.” Like **BT **pointed out, a piece you can buy for 50 badges and wear right now is better than a piece that costs 75 and you have to wait a while still to buy. However, if the 75-badge piece is a much bigger upgrade than the 50-badge one, it might be worth the wait.
There’s also the consideration of the alternatives. Trinkets can be a good first purchase, because they’re such a hard slot to fill through drops. The tanking Frost trinket (Corroded Skeleton Key, I think it’s called) is still currently one of the best tanking trinkets in the game, and definitely the best one you’ll see outside of ICC. Some people like to focus on picking up items that are especially good in comparison to what’s available out of the raids they’ll be running, in the hopes that the raids will drop what they need. (For instance, part of the reason I bought my T10 pants last is that I was hoping to have them drop out of VoA10 or 25.)
**BT **hit the nail pretty well on the head. Better gear will have more Strength, which gives you more Attack Power (various attacks do more damage) and Block Value (your Damage Shield causes more damage with every hit, and your Shield Slam hits harder). It will also, overall, have more Hit (decreases the chance that you will miss–a missed attack can’t create any threat) and Expertise (decreases the chance that you will be blocked, parried, or dodged–again, none of those will create any threat).
Something less obvious would be the speed of your weapon. Prot Wars love fast weapons. A slow weapon will do more damage on each Devastate, which is nice, but much more important for us is how often we can use Heroic Strike (for single targets) or Cleave (for two or more); those abilties are based on our base swing timer, which is determined by weapon speed.
There’s also a talent you can (and should) take that will cause you to gain Rage every time you Block, Dodge, or Parry an attack. So the more often you do those things, the more extra Rage you gain–and Rage = threat.
Ick. Hope they fix it or people manage to spam their way to victory. It really was easy last year. 
Well aside from my main single target threat generator, my #2 aoe threat generator, and my main always-on damage mitigator, there’s really nothing I lose against a frost-immune opponent.
Oh, *well *then. :rolleyes:
(Would it affect your mitigation, though? I mean, do you need to be doing Frost damage to the boss in order to get the mitigation? That just seems weird.)
Luckily there isn’t anything that really needs tanking on Ahune, everything dies so fast the mobs don’t have time to kill anyone.
I’m happy Blizzard has finally realized that elemental immunities really suck even if they makes sense from a lore pov, and in Wotlk they are pretty rare.
I’m questing in Nagrand on my rogue right now, all the damn elementals there are immune to Nature, fun fun fun for a mutilate rogue.
Must have been pretty bad to be a raiding mage in BC too, where you had Hydross in SSC who was immune to Frost(and Nature, poor elemental shamans) and Al’ar in TK who was immune to Fire, and both of these instances were T5 content, so no matter if you specced Fire or Frost you would be useless on one boss.
At least these days most of the immunities are on more or less trivial mobs.
It looks like a tough fight to tank anyway. Because of the constant stream of non-elites popping out, the healer’s always taking aggro. When I ran it with my Pally on Ret spec, I wound up just throwing down Consecrate and Hand of Reckoning whenever I could to keep the little guys off the healers while the tank held the one elite’s attention. It’s chaotic, but there’s little real danger in it.
Y’see, my friend, this is why you get a mechanostrider, a motorcycle, and a helicopter! No fatigue problems whatsoever!
(Yeah, I loves me some gnome engineers!) 
Everything I hit with the frost plague thingy loses N% haste. One of the must-have talents for any DK tank is a first-round Frost tree talent that ups the haste drain from M to N. (And yeah I haven’t looked at the actual numbers in a while).
tokens? Directly upgrade vs buying an upgrade? Is this improving the same piece or replacing the piece with a better piece?
For T9, there are three levels. The first one you buy with badges. The second one you have to get a token from normal 25-man ToC, and use that and more badges to buy. The third one requires a token from heroic 25-man ToC (is it the end boss only, or all the bosses? I can’t remember) and possibly more tokens.
For T10, you buy the first level (which costs more Frost badges than the T9 version cost Triumph) but you upgrade to the second level with a token from normal 25 man ICC (no additional badges) and the third level is upgraded with a token from heroic 25 man ICC (again, no additional badges). All you have to have for the upgrade is a token and your previous-level piece (which means you lose the piece, the gems, and the enchant–so don’t do this in the middle of a raid unless you’ve got your gems and enchant mats ready!)
Not exactly. I ran Ahune with one of our DK tanks last night, I think we’d forgotten about the frost damage. Poor guy. But nevertheless, I was continually hopping to keep away from the elites while keeping people alive, even used Psychic Scream.
That said, last night was lolworthy. 10 of us figured we’d go do the Thief of the Fires achievement together. We had no problems until we got to IF… well.
A certain unnamed person decided they’d pop the gnome king with their Red Rider Air Rifle while we were running from the tram to the fire. For those of you who don’t know, the rifle does up to 9 pts damage. 
Fortunately nearly all of us had gotten the fire by the time Mekkatorque found us. It took us a bit (including me popping everything I had to keep people alive while the others ran all the way back from Kharanos) but we downed him plus the few Alliance who showed up, and even made it out the door afterward. Now that was fun, and pretty much everyone got the achievement.
And of course, the day I’m off (to let the plumber in) is maintenance day…
Can it still apply the debuff even if it doesn’t do the damage, I wonder?
To summarize what winterhawk said:
T9 = You could potentially have all three versions of a piece at once (T9, T9.33, T9.66). You do not need to have a lower-ranked version in order to have a higher-ranked one. You buy T9 with badges. You buy T9.33 with more badges, plus tokens that drop off of the end boss of ToGC10 and all bosses in ToC25. You buy T9.66 with tokens that drop off of the end boss of ToGC25.
T10 = You start with the lowest version and then upgrade it with tokens. You buy T10 with badges, upgrade an existing T10 piece to T10.33 with a token out of H-ICC10 or ICC25, and upgrade an existing T10.33 piece to T10.66 with a token out of H-ICC25. To have all three versions of a piece, you’d have to re-purchase the lower-level versions after upgrading them.
In all cases, higher-level versions of a tier are identical in terms of what stats they include; they’ll just have larger numbers on each stat. (I.e., it scales up directly–for example, you’ll never see a T10 piece with Hit and Dodge while the T10.33 piece for the same slot has Expertise and Dodge.)
T9.66 tokens only come off of ToGC25 Anub. IIRC, you don’t need any additional badges–just the token.
Never fails. Ever.
(the DK frost fever debuff, that is)
Fighting water elemental type nonelites out in the world, the direct zaps don’t infect them with frost fever, just give me a big yellow IMMUNE; I’m not 100% sure but I don’t think they can pick it up from Pestilence, either.
And, of course, now it’s extended maintenance. They’re probably not coming back up until at least 6 EDT.
Okay, that explains why we have very few pieces of 3rd-tier T9 in our guild. I’ve only killed heroic Anub twice on 25-man (once when it was relevant–barely–and once a couple of weeks ago when we got bored and went back to ToGC25. I think the guild has only killed him 3 times total). By the time the Vanquisher token dropped, I was already in 4 piece T10 (including three of the highest level) so it didn’t matter anymore. I think I forgot how it worked because back when I cared, we didn’t have a prayer of killing heroic Anub25. 
Man, they really didn’t think this one through, did they? (Keeping Ahune Frost-immune, I mean.)
All to give us the joys of this retarded-ass, poorly designed “RealID” system that no one is going to use (or that people will use out of desperation, only to end up with massive security holes).
The preview looks a lot better than the SC2 implementation.