Topic
Advice for gearing up requested
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Edited by Aemannare on 09/05/12 17:36 (BST)
Hello!
This may sound like a weird question, but which stats after armor rating and stamina are the most important ones for a death knight tank? Is it a good idea to stack mastery just because of the increase of shielding received from blood shield? If I have enough stamina, can hold aggro and am not too much trouble for any healers that are keeping me up, is it really that important that I'm still wearing a lot of dps gear (trying to get as much tanking gear as possible though). Parry and dodge seem to be found on most tanking gear (with the other stats being the same as the stats on dps items, which often feature crit, haste and/or mastery), and that's just about the only difference - am I really in that much danger of dying if my parry and dodge ratings are a few percent lower? What should I gem for (as you can see, I'm gemming for pure stamina at the moment). And no, I can not afford any of the purple (epic) cata gems. |
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Gem for mastery, reforge to mastery, try to even out your parry and dodge. While you are gearing, having dps gear pieces with mastery is not that bad, just reforge the other stat to parry or dodge.
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Edited by Tofu on 09/05/12 17:55 (BST)
The theory goes that once you have the minimum hit points required for an instance (you have them for looking for raid) you want to concentrate on damage mitigation. The minimum hitpoints is based around a time to death, if at any point you are dying too quickly for your healers to react (and using appropriate cooldowns) then more health (or stronger defensive cooldowns) is a requirement. Otherwise the intention is to lessen the need for healers to focus on keeping you alive. Mastery > dodge = parry is the generally accepted ranking for those choices. Parry is at the end because you will innately have more of it (due to strength and itemisation), ideally your parry and dodge ratings should be reforged towards each other, but always after you have reforged and gemmed towards mastery. This is where your dps kit will let you down and force healers to dedicate themselves to keeping you alive.
There are exceptions where experienced raiders will intentionally sacrifice dodge, parry or even stamina/armor to gain extra mastery. This is generally because they consider themselves better able to "flatten" damage and ensure they do not take spikes, or it may simply be encounter specific. Frankly, you are not an experienced deathknight tank, and are not in situations where min-maxing like this will provide you with significantly better survival than simply taking tanking gear by itemlevel improvement and reforging/gemming/enchanting appropriately. |
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Hey!
I know it's not much, but you have to start somewhere; I reforged the crit, haste and the other stuff on the dps gear into parry, dodge and mastery, bought the 378 tank legs and 397 ring and managed to successfully complete my first Madness of Deathwing today =) Thanks for the advice, guys. A big /hug for all of you! |
