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.

25 Man Raiding - Are we ready?

Now I know my guildmates are going to read this, and some may agree or disagree, that's fine. This is just my opinion. The question I am trying to answer today is:

When is a guild ready for the 25-man raids?

I am going to use Gruul's as an example 25-man raid since it is the first intended 25-man encounter from what I understand. I am going to split this up into two sections. First we'll go over the group makeup and then gear requirements.

Check out the full post to read my complete ramblings on this topic



Group Makeup

In general you are going to need something close to the following group makeup:

3 - 4 Tanks
6 - 7 Healers
15 DPS

Just a note on tanks... Warrior, Pallies, and Druids are all viable tanks for 25 man raids. In some cases, such as the High King Mulgar fight other people will be tanking other than the usual tanking classes. A Mage will need to be tanking the caster, and 2 Hunters will be tanking the Shaman. Plan ahead and put together a set of high Stamina gear for tanking these fights and you will be doing your guild a big favor. It is the tanks responsibility to be aware of the encounters the guild is planning on tackling and gearing accordingly.

Having a good healing team for 25 man raids is imperative. Ideally you will have a healing team consisting of Druid, Shaman, 2 Pallies, and 2 Priests. If you feel you need a 7th healer shoot for a 2nd Resto Druid. More importantly than what classes you bring is how well your healers can coordinate their healing. There is a major difference in healing in 25 man raids. Its a switch between reactive healing and preemptive healing. When the bosses hit hard enough to one shot a tank who is at 75% health you need to make sure they always have a heal incoming that will top him off before the next attack. There are all kinds of addons that can facilitate this kind of coordination.


Now as far as the DPS goes you will want both melee and ranged DPS. Although I would lean heavilly on more ranged DPS. Maybe 4 or 5 melee DPS to 10 Ranged DPS. The important thing for the DPSers is to learn to maximize your DPS. Do some research, tweak your spec, try different DPS cycles, whatever it is you need to do to increase your DPS. If your attempts are failing due to Healers running out of mana (given sufficient gear), or you are hitting the Enrage timer, then those are big indicators that your DPS is lacking.

Gear Requirements

So what are the gear requirements for beginning 25-man raiding? I don't think there is any hard and fast answer to this question because I have seen under geared players far outperform people who were geared to the teeth. There are some guidelines though for tanks to make sure you are able to sufficiently handle the punishment you will take. The following is what I would consider minimum for doing Gruul for a Warrior, I don't know much about Pally or Druid tanks but I imagine the stats are not that far off (note these are all unbuffed stats):

14,000 Health
15,000 Armor
17% Dodge
17% Parry
25% Block
490+ Defense

For a Warrior fully raid buffed this will land you over 19,000 Health which is plenty for Gruul's. These stats are easily hit with gear out of Kara + Badge reward gear.

As for Healers I think you will be wanting to shoot for a +healing of 1300+ and 100+ MP/5. This should give you enough healing power and mana regen to last the duration of these fights.

Your measure for weather or not your DPS is sufficient or not will be if you can bring down the boss before you healers run out of mana. If your healers have sufficient gear and you are struggling to complete the encounter before they run out of mana then your DPS needs to go and get some better gear or improve their DPS through respecs, changing their DPS cycle, etc...


How do we progress into the 25 man content?

If you look at the group breakdown for a 25-man raid it is basically 2 well balanced 10 man raids + extra DPS classes and a healer or two. What this means to me is that if you guild can field 2 Karazhan groups each week that can both clear to at least the Prince in Karazhan then you are ready to make the jump to 25 man raiding.

IMO a guild that is trying to make the transition to 25 man raids should have two Raid Leaders, each responsible for leading their own Kara group each week. IMO the 10 man raid teams should be static, no switching of rosters each week. This way you can tailor each 10 man raid's schedules to be optimal for those on that team. Maybe an early crew and a late crew, or a T, Th, F team and a W, F, Sat. team. In any case the Guild Leadership should take steps to set it up so that both teams will prosper in Karazhan. Another good reason for having static teams is that it doesn't hurt to have a little friendly competition within the guild. Which team cleared it the fastest this week? Fewest amount of wipes? Most amount of loot awarded to a single person? It's all in fun after all...

It is difficult to gear up 25 people in one 10-man raid a week and it will leave a lot of people on the sidelines, by having 2 teams you keep everyone involved and gearing up each week. If your guild is short a few people and are having trouble fielding a second team for Karazhan don't be afraid to recruit some new players to help close the gap. There are a lot of great people our there in small guilds looking to move ahead in the game and would be willing to make a move into a fun and friendly guild trying to make the switch into 25 man content.

Some Item Analysis

So here I am trying to gear up for tanking past Karazhan. My biggest weakpoint currently is my chest piece. I am still wearing Jade-Skull Breastplate and I could not decide if I should be saving badges for the Chestguard of the Stoic Guardian or waiting for a Panzar'Thar Breastplate drop off of Nightbane. It seemed like an easy decision at first since the Chestguard of the Stoic Guardian looked more like Paladin loot than Warrior loot. Read on for the full comparison...



Panzar'Thar Breastplate
1450 Armor
+51 Stamina
Yellow Socket
Blue Socket
Blue Socket
Socket Bonus: +4 Block Rating

Equip: Increases defense rating by 26 (10.99 @ L70).
Equip: Increases your shield block rating by 24 (3.04% @ L70).
Equip: Increases the block value of your shield by 39.

Now with 3 +12 Stamina gems in it you are looking at +87 stamina on this piece along with the other stats. You could go for the socket bonus if you need the block rating I guess and lose some stamina but in general I thing the extra Stamina is worth the +4 Block Rating socket bonus.

Chestguard of the Stoic Guardian
1607 Armor
+60 Stamina
Red Socket
Yellow Socket
Blue Socket
Socket Bonus: +6 Stamina

Equip: Increases defense rating by 22 (9.3 @ L70).
Equip: Increases your dodge rating by 38 (2.01% @ L70).
Equip: Increases damage and healing done by magical spells and effects by up to 35.

At first glance you think, bah Tankadin loot with a wasted on equip bonus. But looking again you see a nice socket bonus of +6 stamina. Lets see what we can gem in there to get it. Obviously a +12 Stamina in the Blue socket, maybe a Shifting Nightseye in the Red Socket for a +4 Agility and +6 Stamina, then in the Yellow socket throw in a Thick Dawnstone for 8 Defense (if you need it) otherwise maybe go for a Glinting Noble Topaz for the +4 Agility +4 Hit Rating maybe.

That will net you the +6 stamina socket bonus for a total of 84 Stamina, 4 agility, and 30 Defense (if you went with the Thick Dawnstone otherwise 8 agility, 4 hit, and 22 Defense). If you want to forgo the socket bonus and go for pure stamina you end up with +96 Stamina on this piece.

As you can easily see the Tankadin intended chest piece is far superior due to higher Armor, higher Avoidance, higher +Stamina potential, and far easier to obtain at 75 Badges vs. a low percentage drop off of Nightbane that you will have 1 shot at each week. Time for me to get going on my heroics and farming badges in Karazhan. I should have it in no time.


Karazhan Clear

My guild on Vek'Nilash (Sarcophagus) vanquished Netherspite last night! That marks our first full clear of Karazhan. One thing I learned from a tanking perspective it is important for your tanks to know how to jump in and out of the red beam to be able to tank Netherspite for a full portal phase without getting much more than 30 stacks of the debuff.

So for you Warriors that are new to the technique what you want to do is take two or three ticks of the red beam then jump out of it for a few seconds and then get back into the red beam before you end up with the Nether Exhaustion debuff. Doing this allows you to simplify the fight greatly. The way we did it involved the tank who was not in the red beam to just take the green beam at all times during his non-red phase. Healers can still pop into the green beam for a second to get back to full mana, but they have to be careful to get back out of the green beam before the tank who is supposed to be absorbing the green beam gets Nether Exhaustion.

Once you get the hang of it I think the fight is pretty straight-forward.






Because It Is Hilarious

This was too funny to pass up linking too. So without any further ado I bring you:

Karazhan Bingo

Enjoy!




Persistence Pays Off

After what I counted to be 30 runs the Sun Eater finally dropped off of Pantheon the Calculator in Heroic Mechanar. I've been in sore need of a tanking weapon upgrade for a long time and it was great to see it finally drop.



I'd like to thank all of my guild mates that have been helping me run Heroic Mech lately to farm it out. In particular my wife Evandiya for staying up later than usual to complete these runs, Morok and Romulan for almost always being there in one form or another, Profchaos for pwning the demon pulls, as well as Kam and Zor for filling in on some of the later runs we did. I swore that last night would be my last run of Heroic Mech regardless if the sword dropped or not. I'm sure I'll go back if people REALLY need me to go, but I'd like a change of scenery for a while.