A Warrior and his Gear

One of the best things a Warrior can do is put together multiple Armor sets tailored to the current progress of his/her guild. I've been called a loot whore by many a guild mate, I prefer the term Gear Maximizer. The way I look at it, it is up to me to make sure that whatever I am doing, be it Tanking as protection or DPSing as Fury, that I am maximizing my contribution to the raid. My wife sometimes tells me I am obsessed with it, and I just try and tell her that it's my hobby. Some people knit or collect stamps, I collect gear for my Warrior.

Now the one common thing in all of these gear sets is hitting the minimum 490 Defense so you can stay uncrushable with Shield Block up against bosses. Read on for more about different sets of gear you can expect to collect.



Max Armor/Stamina Set

This will be your bread and butter set of gear and your main priority in gearing for. Having the largest health pool and greatest amount of Armor you can get will give your healers an easier time when learning new encounters and help pull you through some of the high damage spikes of certain bosses (Gruul) and even allow you to last long enough to keep yourself alive when your healers get incapacitated (like in the Maiden fight with Repentance).


Max Avoidance Set

As your guild progresses into higher level content and your healers become more proficient at keeping you topped off, you can start to sacrifice some of your health pool to maximize your Avoidance. A good article about this topic can be read over at TankSpot. This set of gear is all about maximizing your ability to avoid damage all together. Great for bosses that hit fast but not exceptionally hard. Avoidance tanking gear will stack Dodge, Parry, and Block Rating to try and minimize the amount of Damage Taken during the fight. Using this type of tanking gear is situational depending on the damage output of the boss you are tanking.

Resistance Sets

As the guild progresses you will run into encounters that may require certain resistance types to make the encounter much easier. During encounters where the majority of damage taken is not Physical all of your Mitigation and Avoidance stats are rendered useless against those attacks. Your only recourse is to put together Resistance sets. The best guide I have found on resistance sets for TBC is located over at TankingTips.com. Head on over there and take a look at some of the gear that is available and start collecting depending on what encounters are up an coming in your guilds future.


Wrap Up

Those are the major categories of gear sets you should be collecting as a tank. Obviously for your DPS set should be geared for your Spec. Stack Str/AP/Hit for Fury and Str/AP/Crit for Arms. If I ever go back to DPS I'll probably post about gearing up for that. I guess the main point I am trying to get across here is that as a Warrior you need analyze your performance after a wipe and make some gear adjustments if necessary. get yourself a good gear management addon like Outfitter and let it do a lot of the work for you. I have pre-defined gear sets for certain encounters, dungeons, PvP/Arena, Fury PvE DPS, Fire Suit, etc... it makes it a lot easier to stop by your bank and drop a whole set into the bank and pull another one out.