After making my first post in this series about tank gemming nearly two months ago entitled, “Tank Gemming in Wrath, my experiences“, I’ve decided it’s time for a little follow-up.
It all started when I got a whisper from a level one Tauren Warrior while I was getting ready for a three-drake Sartharion attempt. This person was a tank from another server who is a reader of this blog and wanted to chat with me for a bit about tank gemming. We finally met up a couple of days later on AIM and had a nice little discussion about that infamous yellow socket and he brought up an excellent point.
If you remember my first post I said that you should use +8 Defense +12 Stamina gems in yellow sockets since defense is so good for avoidance and mitigation. This is well and good if you’re still looking for a little extra survivability when you’re first hitting T7 raid content in this wonderful expansion.
But…
What if you’re like some of us that are all epic’d out and have nearly all of the best-in-slot items? Pick up some of these: Accurate Monarch Topaz. That’s right, I just suggested a Hit and Expertise gem. Why is this, you ask? Well, just like how at the moment the cookie-cutter spec is all about damage and threat versus mitigation and Effective Health, why not gem that way too? If you’re at the gear-level where I’m suggesting you do something like this you have almost all, if not all, of the raid content in this expansion on farm so why not do more damage and get through it faster?
I was looking through my WWS parses for Patchwerk and noticed that even with 158 hit raiting and 41 expertise, I have a 3.3% parry rate on Revenge, 3.8% miss rate on Heroic Strike, 3.3% parry on Shield Slam and a whopping 7% parry rate on Devastate. That’s a lot of threat and damage that I could have added back into the mix at the loss of a tiny bit of stamina and a tiny bit of defense raiting.
Now, of course, I’m not saying that adding a couple of gems will complete negate all of those misses and parries but the added expertise and hit will certainly help. If you’re like me you have one (maybe two) yellow slots in all of your gear so this won’t break your bank if you follow this advice, but you just might find yourself doing a little more damage and making a little more threat then your fellow tanks.
The Bottom Line
Remember: the more damage you do, the more threat you put out and the faster a boss dies. It would behoove you to do all that you can to assist your raid in downing your content.
As an aside, while we are on the subject of Hit and Expertise, check out Vene’s post “Expertise is always better than Hit“. It’s an excellent read and I highly recommend it.
Popularity: 68% [?]
Old and Busted: Powerful Earthstorm Diamond
New Hotness: Eternal Earthstorm Diamond
It’s no secret that with patch 3.0, a lot of tanking warriors are going to have some problems getting back to the defense softcap. We’ll be swapping in some trinkets with high defense rating (read: Scarab of Displacement) permanently, the problem with this is that it’s going to drastically cut down on our ability to freely swap out items for added versatility depending on the situation we find ourselves in.
Enter the new Lord of the Warrior Tanking Meta Gems, the Eternal Earthstorm Diamond! She’s quite the beauty, no? With the +12 defense raiting it’ll help you get back up to 490 defense and the 10% bonus to Shield Block Value will be absolutely amazing for our our future threat and survivability. The best part is that it’s a percentage so it’ll just keep getting better as your gear improves.
Popularity: 6% [?]