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.
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I have noticed a trend recently, and this is obviously the pre-expansion slump, where no one is logging in for anything. Raiding has ground to a halt, no one is doing dailies (which has been especially nice since I was grinding out Skyguard reputation until just yesterday) and in nearly every other way the game seems almost completely dead.
With that in mind, I figured I would revisit a topic from about a month ago about what I wanted to get done before the expansion. Here’s an update:
Major Goals
- (DONE) Tighten up our Zul’Aman speed run group and get a War Bear. This was already done when I first made the post, but it was something I really, really, really wanted to accomplish. After I got my bear, we succeeded in getting another three for other members of our group, which I felt really good about. These guys have been busting their asses for months trying to get things tightened up enough and voila, we did it.
- (DONE) Kill Illidan. Kill him dead. Illidan has been vanquished by Starfish Lovesong and it was amazing seeing him die. Unforutneatly we have no kill shot because his body despawned right as we were about to finish up, but Polgera got her healing T6 chestpiece which she was stoked about. Good job to all of you Starfish!
Minor Goals
- (DONE) Drop Mining and pick up Blacksmithing, then level it to 375. I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t really get it all of the way to 375, just 360. I stopped leveling when I learned that it would be possible to level all profressions from 350+ using Wrath mats, not to mention I didn’t want to shell out the gold for 70 Primal Waters, 60 Primal Fires and 500-ish Fel Iron Bars. Even with the pre-expansion auction house crash, I wasn’t interested in investing that much gold into 15 points.
- Expand the ‘blog. I’m not exactly sure if I’ve accomplish this or not, I’ll leave it up to you guys to decide.
Overall, I think I’ve been doing really well. Have you accomplished everything you wanted to get done?
Popularity: 8% [?]
I was looking through the gem list over on WoWHead today and I have to say that I’m very, very impressed with what Blizzard is bringing to the table. While the standard gemming practice in the Burning Crusade, is (at least until late-T6) to stack stamina, stamina, and some more stamina while forsaking all socket bonuses, I do not foresee this being the case in Wrath of the Lich King.
Why do I think this, you ask?
Tons of Stamina is on Everything
Every single piece of tank-like gear I have found is loaded with stamina, for instance:
- Tempered Titansteel Helm (crafted): 168 stamina
- Tempered Titansteel Treads (crafted): 120 stamina
- Titansteel Shield Wall (crafted): 69 stamina
- Armored Titanium Goggles (crafted): 111 stamina
- Slayer of the Lifeless (Naxx 10-man): 57 stamina
That’s a ton of stamina, and all of those items are able to be obtained very early in the Wrath of the Lich King raiding game.
But most importantly, we will not longer need to have massive stamina pools because…
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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% [?]
It appears as this topic has already been hit on by Veneretio and Kadomi, but I’ll give you my own thoughts on the subject anyway. 
When the release date of Wrath of the Lich King was announced the first thing I thought was “awesome, so much new content!” and the second thing I thought was “oh crap I have so much to do”. Goals are important for all facets of life, but let me share with you my own goals that I want to get done before the expansion hits.
Major Goals
- (DONE) Tighten up our Zul’Aman speed run group and get a War Bear. This has already been accomplished and it was an amazing feeling when we got it done. The fact that I won the Need roll was awesome, I won’t lie, but finally completing the run was worth more than the mount. We have about two more resets of ZA before half of our speed run group leaves for BlizzCon and we’re going to make full use of that to get another two mounts in our guild.
- (DONE) Kill Illidan. Kill him dead. I, along with all of the other raiders in my guild, want to see this guy laying on the ground. We are so close and with the changes coming in 3.0 this really is a possibility for us! We have come such a long way and I know we can do this.
Minor Goals
- (DONE) Drop Mining and pick up Blacksmithing, then level it to 375. I have spent the good part of the last three months using my mining skill simply as way to make money. Engineering has been maxed for nearly as long as I can remember so I’d make multiple passes of Nagrand a day for mote clouds and mining nodes. No longer! WIth everything I’ve seen of Blacksmithing in the expansion, this is definately a bandwagon I was to jump on. I have a more comprehensive post on Blacksmithing coming up, stay tuned!
- Expand the ‘blog. This has numerous sub-goals within it including: not slowing down in posting, getting my link out there to more sites, getting Polgera to post more often and keeping up with the new content. I really hope people enjoy reading my blog as much as I enjoy writing it.
What are your goals for Wrath of the Lich King?
Popularity: 4% [?]
I finally got a chance last night to jump on the Beta and check out the changes to Thunder Clap. After grinding a couple of groups I figured I’d make it into a movie for you. I apologize for the poor quality and lack of music, I’m new to the video-making scene.
All of the little numbers you see are Damage Shield, Thunder Clap and Shockwave. On top of being very very impressed with those three abilities, the buff to Revenge’s damage had me hitting for 900 – 1100 non-crit. This is amazing!
Popularity: 6% [?]
There has been a lot of hubbub on the internet about the changes that were reported with the Burning Crusade raiding instances being nerfed. The rumor stated that all trash mobs and bosses were getting their health nerfed by 30% which is, obviously, pretty substantial. I’m here to tell you that the proposed change has been confirmed.
To coincide with the upcoming new talents and mechanic changes for classes in the next patch, we are making some adjustments in existing raid content to provide a smooth transition when the upcoming patch is released. The creatures and bosses in raid dungeons that were introduced in The Burning Crusade will have their health reduced, and most will have their standard melee damage output reduced as well, but their spell and ability damage are not being changed. These changes are being made in all raid dungeons from Karazhan to Sunwell Plateau as well as the outdoor encounters of Doom Lord Kazzak and Doomwalker. On top of this Illidan is also doing his part and will stop casting Shear on players.
On one hand, I’m happy to see this change but on the other I’m a little miffed.
Why I’m Happy
- Faster progression. I must say that since my guild really started knuckling down and getting into the raiding scene we’ve made some incredible progress in a very short time, raising from the 22nd most progressed guild (Horde-side) on our server to the 7th in the span of about three months. This change would undoubtedly speed things up for us.
- I’ll see more content that I otherwise might not have been able to before 3.0. This is probably the number one reason that Blizzard is making this change. Like Naxx of the old world, the developers spent thousands of man-hours making these instances that less than 10% of the playing population ever get to see, let alone go all of the way through. This is the chance for people to see the stuff that Blizzard worked so hard on.
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If you’ve read my previous posts about the wild speculation revolving around Revenge and Thunder Clap, look no further for the rumors have been confirmed as fact!
Ghostwalker’s latest post leaves us sad at the change to Armored to the Teeth but oh so excited over the changes to Shield Slam, Revenge and, especially, Thunder Clap. Tanking in the expansion just keeps getting better and better than ever before.
Armored to the Teeth — Changed to AP, but amount reduced to 1 per 360 armor (to compensate for the loss of Blessings of Kings etc.). We implemented this talent for dps warriors and didn’t want it to feel like the ultimate Shield Block Value talent. It’s still good for Protection, just not as good. Death Knights will get the same treatment.
EDIT: I meant 2 AP : 360 per talent point. My point was that we understand 1 Str > 2 AP for warriors.
Farewell Armored to the Teeth, we barely knew you. Still great for the added AP for threat but falling way behind the golden talent it was before since it will no longer help us absorb more damage or raise our SBV.
Thunder Clap — Increase in threat generation. No target limit. Swipe gets the same treatment. With these changes, all 4 tank classes should be able to generate very respectable AE threat. Consecration is still a little higher in threat to account for Thunder Clap’s debuff.
You read that right: the target limit has been removed from Thunder Clap. I can almost hear the rejoicing of all tanking warriors around the globe. My macro for Challenging Shout that screams “I’M A PALADIN!” seems so ironic now.
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I said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s a good day to be a Protection-specced Warrior. Blizzard is giving us so much love that I hardly even notice the nerf to Vigilance.
This was a post about the Glyph of Resonating Power which in past builds was going to double the amount of targets Thunder Clap would hit from four to eight and I was excited but this is something else:
It’s not mandatory, and actually it only increases your radius. Thunder Clap will do what you want it to do, but that’s another topic.
Ghostcrawler here is telling us that it’s been changed to increase the radius of Thunder Clap and seems to be eluding to the fact that they are going to be removing the target limit from Thunder Clap. This is amazing news!
This next post is about the fact that no one seems to be using Revenge anymore in tanking rotations on the Beta servers. Apparently Devastate procs Sword and Board so much (and Revenge’s damage hasn’t been buff enough) that Revenge, previously our best threat-to-rage ability, is sitting around not being used. Blizzard solution:
We will probably add Revenge to S+B to make sure it gets used more (and might buff it’s AP coefficient a tad).
Revenge possibly proccing Sword and Board for even more Shield Slams!? Finally we’re going to be bashing stuff with our shield continually. I love it!
All of these changes are really making me excited to stay Protection-specced in the expansion.
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