When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Thursday, January 17, 2008

What Not to Wear- Tankadin Edition

Well I was planning on talking about Loot, but I Tivo'd this great episode of my most favorite program, What Not to Wear.

What Not To Wear - Tankadin Edition

I’m Coristad McStacy-Clinton, and welcome to What Not to Wear – Tankadin edition, the show where we take Paladins who are still dressing like noobs and give them a FABULOUS makeover, courtesy of Warcrafter.Net. Unlike our sister show, we don’t have a $5000 Visa™ card for people to go shopping with, but we do have URLs! Now let’s meet our first fashion victim.

Meet Bradford. Bradford is a level 70 Protection-spec Paladin and an up-and-coming member of the Watchmen Tanking Team. Unfortunately, Bradford’s professional wardrobe is not quite up to the job, and his talent selection still screams “I’m a new level 70 ROFLMAOBBQ!!1!”. I’m going to help Bradford dress for success.

SPEC

As it turns out, attitude ISN’T everything—talent(s) count, too. Bradford has some points that could be reallocated to give him a little more bang for his tanking buck. First, Improved Devotion Aura has GOT to go. This is a poor choice for a Tankadin as the armor bonus is flat and does not scale. The real reason why this is a poor choice, however, is that the talent we really want is Shield Specialization, and to get there we have to go through Redoubt. It’s not that Redoubt is a bad talent, it just gets less useful as you get better gear. Anything that requires you to be hit to proc is going to suffer this problem. It will still have a reasonable proc rate, and when it does proc your healers will thank you. So Bradford, the first thing is to take the 5 points and move them over from Improved Devotion Aura and in to Redoubt.

Shield Spec is a 30% buff to Block value. This is crucial for two key reasons. First, it scales with gear. As you get better shields, you block proportionally more incoming damage. The second reason is that, first and foremost, a tankadin is expected to hold down as many mobs as their health will allow, and the key to doing that is effective blocking. So we need 3 points from somewhere. The rest of the spec is solid, and the Prot tree is pretty bloated, so pulling those points from somewhere is tough. The simplest answer is to drop Reckoning.

We all love Reckoning, and it’s a fine talent, but there’s not room for it in a Raid tanking spec. Now that Combat Expertise is required, Reckoning falls victim to not having enough points to go around. The good news is that you won’t miss it—you are hitting more because of the Expertise changes, and so your threat is actually quite solid. Burst threat that you cannot control is not going to help you in a raid situation. Drop reckoning and put 3 points into Shield Spec. Now you have 2 leftover points.

The most optimal choice is to drop those points into Precision. Not only are you getting +3% melee hit, which affects Taunt and Avenging Shield, but +3% spell hit, which affects Judgments and Seals. 3 points is effectively giving you +6% to hit—you are not going to find a better value for 2 points. You could potentially put them in to Spell Warding, which is a viable choice, but most tankadins just opt to stack stamina to give the healers more breathing room, rather than attempt to mitigate a small amount of spell damage.

GEAR


Now that talents are in order, let’s talk about Gear. A well-dressed Tankadin is looking for 3 things in a boss gear set: Uncrushability, Stamina, and Spell Damage, in that order. There are fights that will favor Spell Damage over Stamina (Void Reaver, for example), but no matter what, if it’s level 73 it’s going to crush you (with a few exceptions). Warcrafter does not take into account the 5.33% block from the Libram of Repentence, so the real number that we’re going for to reach uncrushable is 102.4 (Dodge+Parry+Block+Miss required against a L73 mob) – 30 (Holy Shield) – 5.33 (Libram of Repentence) = 67.07. Right now, Bradford is showing 66.55, leaving a difference of 0.52%. The good news is that Bradford is only one gem or enchant away from uncrushability, which means we can get to the fun stuff quickly- stacking Stamina. Let’s take a look at Bradford’s closet and see what fashion rules he had broken.

First, Bradford has too much defense. A tank only needs 490 Defense to avoid a critical hit from a level 73 mob. Bradford has 526- that is a lot of wasted defense. The next fashion faux-pax is too much attention is being paid to socket bonuses. By and large, none of the socket bonuses are worth the trade off in Stamina. There are some exceptions, but generally speaking, Blue is the new Black: It goes with everything.

Second, some of the pieces are just inappropriate for Brad’s place in life right now. The biggest immediate change Bradford can do is to get very friendly with the Dragons in the Caverns of Time and grab himself a nice pair of their Timewarden Legs. They have less armor and less defense, but much more Stamina and Dodge, both of which are sorely needed.

The Slikk’s Cloak is very “In” right now, but the accessorizing is all wrong. Agility is not a Paladin stat, and you get more pure avoidance from the Dodge Enchant.

The single biggest change that Bradford could get that would get him well over the avoidance cap is picking up the Faceguard of Determination. This is one of the best avoidance pieces in the game, and for only 50 Heroic Badges it’s a bargain. If we add this piece we get to 68.89 Avoidance, which is actually over what we need. That means… more Stamina! Time to take out the remaining Parry gems (which are really not for us, either—again you get more pure avoidance from Dodge)


Here’s what Bradford looks like fully-dressed:

http://www.warcrafter.net/sandbox/18535




Presto, an uncrushable, high Stamina tank that is ready to hold down the room with his charm, good looks, and a well placed Consecration. So there you have it! Tune in next week when we talk about how to dress for Serpent Shrine Cavern.

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