Sunday, April 19, 2009

Ulduar cleared

Yogg down tonight.

Last night we downed general, FIRST KILL I CANNOT BELIEVE MY LUCK.

Main tanked 90% of the instance (yes as a druid.)

The gear I have on is the gear I wore (the gloves are the s6 gloves with an 18 stam enchant and a 24 stam gem, the idol is the one in the link above). The only fight were threat was even close to an issue was General Vezaxx and that is only because of the kiting mechanic. I never DID NOT HAVE vigilance cast on me (more on this later). On most fights I wore polar gear. There is no difference between 40% avoidance and 45% avoidance. In my polar gear I have ~35% dodge. I dodged 10 attacks in a row on XT adds. THERE IS DEFINITELY A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN 40K hp and 50K HP.

This is me getting glyph of Survival Instincts nerfed.

I am sorry but there is no debating this, the EH theory of progression tanking is by far the only way to do it. Yes I am egotistical, but I am also right. As a fellow blogger put it you simply need to compare the extreme cases of EH and avoidance gearing: if you gear for EH you can just throw more healers at the person, if you gear for avoidance if you take even a single hit you die. Yes those are extremes but they are also true.

Armory me, I did not use my dual spec a single time, and I have not changed my spec since I picked those 2 specs. The gear minus the polar gear that I wore on some fights where I just stood in a corner and did nothing (this more applies to 10 man).

The most noteable 25 man fight I used polar gear was Thorim. The main tank died at 50%, we had me alive, 2 DPS, and 5 healers. We took it from 50% till 10% when he finally got to many stacks and 1shot me. Why, because I took a 35K and a 20K crit back to back swings and lived.

TLDR:

Paladins, Druids, and DKs are all amazing tanks. Warriors are severally underpowered in the HP department. Blizzard, please give warriors a buff without nerfing the other 3 tanking classes.

The biggest problem with warriors is that they can cast vigilance on others. When I am main tanking and my warrior is offtanking I have 3% more mitigation than him from a buff. When it is the other way around, and since we do not have a prot paladin, this creates a massive disadvantadge for him. Any warrior tanking without a prot paladin offtank is severally underpowered.

Edit: 3% mitigation can also be gained from a disc priest, but I do not know how many progression guilds use disc priests. Mine does not so it was not an intentional omission just something my guild does not have access to I had forgotten about.

7 comments:

  1. First off, congrats on clearing everything!

    I am sorry but there is no debating this, the EH theory of progression tanking is by far the only way to do it. So why did Premonition beat you guys? I'm quite serious.

    If you believe that EH is king and that you'll always do better with an EH tank AND warriors are the worst of the lot, then how did Premonition do so well?

    Also, Vigilance and Grace overwrite each other. So yeah, if you don't have a disc priest or a prot paladin in your raid, you'll need to have the prot warrior use vigilance. Still - you have no prot pallies or disc priests? Wow.

    As a fellow blogger put it you simply need to compare the extreme cases of EH and avoidance gearing: if you gear for EH you can just throw more healers at the person, if you gear for avoidance if you take even a single hit you die. Yes those are extremes but they are also true.
    That's not the extremes. The extreme for EH is that you take so much damage that you can't have enough healers heal you. The extreme for avoidance is that you will be instantly killed. Both end up as a failed experience. The question, simply, is how much you balance.

    That being said, I did say that not nerfing the polar gear and not changing how druids scale with buffs would mean nothing really changed on the druid end. If tons of stamina helps, it'll still be a druid that does it. But I just don't see that it is making things that much easier; as stated, the top guilds didn't bother with having a feral druid do jack on tanking.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Time and members. We 21 manned freya and 24 manned thorim. We simply do not have as deep a roster as them. They also went till 8am or something stupid the 1st night. We 1-2 shot most of the bosses we were supposed to we just never had the right people online to learn the hard stuff.

    Furthermore, xav is an EH whore the same as I am.

    Forgot about grace, but again my guild uses 2 holy priests so we dont have that either, I will edit that into the main post.

    Premo's feral druid does not like tanking, he prefers DPS and with the buffs to cats can you blame him?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Furthermore, xav is an EH whore the same as I am.Right, but you also said that warriors need buffs. But they did just fine with their warrior tank. So...not sure I see the problem with warriors or druids.

    It's sad that at least in one case, polar gear is proving to be the best alternative. That being said - just make sure you know that it is indeed just one case.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Well grats on that! I tend to agree, based on my experience in Ulduar, the EH is the way to go. We've only done 5 bosses so far... but eg when I MTed Kol, our normal MT warrior would taunt off me for 30 secs while my 2 stacks of debuff expired. He's often just die from boss damage during this period. It was pretty hilarious. I can see a lot of upcoming fights where a druid with 47k health + decent avoidance is far preferable to a warrior. Yes glyph of SI & polar gear for 70k health is pretty OP, I think. I'd far rather finish off a new boss from 5% to 0 with 70k health + shitty avoidance, than 42k health + awesome avoidance. And in progression, when most of your raid is dead, the tank should be the last one standing. Mostly in my experience this last week, that has been the case. And every healer on every fight has told me I'm a breeze to healer. Our warriors/dks/pally OTs are dying to frequently its starting to get embarrassing.

    Tanks staying alive through massive damage matters most to me, and so far, by experience in actual Ulduar, actual actual 25 man live ulduar, its proved itself again and again.

    Xav use warriors because thats *who* their guild is. Xav is hardly going to sit himself because he feels he's a weaker progression tank according to the numbers. This just goes to show that in the end, all the theories in the world cant control and predict actual gameplay. Xav's guild runs with weaker MTs for progression and still do better than Darksend with his bear. Big deal. Give warriors buffs? Maybe. But they prove they dont need it.

    This is why class balance is so delicate, and something many forum posters do not understand: you can have something be mathematically true, and still not matter enough in actual gameplay that a change is required.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I`ve maintanked most of Ulduar as a warrior.
    I was geared in BiS pre 3.1 and speced deep prot with all mitigation in mind, close to non agrotalents, glyph of shieldwall and last stand.

    My tps and dps isnt great, but Ive made it clear that I focus on survival and not agro, and if I work hard I can build a sufficents agrolead even if my tps and dps is 1k below other tankingclasses in EH gear. Deep wounds spec on some encounters like Razor, Freya(adds).

    On bosses like Mimiron, Hodir and General, our paladins got torn to pieces, but by using cd`s and beeing extremely focused at all times, planning my gear sets ahead of each encounter, (talking to my priests about outside cd use)I`ve had no problem surviving those fights.

    My mitigation is way better than our paladins, my avoidance is better than our druids looking at different combatlogs.

    Warriors have great debuffs, mobility(intervene to get out of trouble like on Iron Council/General, charge to get back into the fight),stuns, interrupt, fearbreak(on Auriaya zerker rage+bash Senteniel blast is win).
    My only concern is that we have to sacrifice agro to survive and the +5% dmg to def stance didnt really do it for me. Fix that and Im pleased.

    ReplyDelete
  6. The way I see it paladins are by far the weakest tank in Ulduar. DK`s are just laughable OP.

    ReplyDelete
  7. ehm... what is the EH theory and what is EH?

    ReplyDelete