Damage Mitigation and Tanking

Critical hit immunity at level 80 for a heroic dungeon is 535 Defense.
Critical hit immunity at level 80 for a raid boss occurs at 540 Defense.

According to WoWWiki, as of patch 3.0, crushing blows cannot happen to max-level tanks. They changed crushing blows from 4 levels below the boss level (83) to 3 levels below the boss level. This change was to improve the validity of the druid and death knight tanks.

Damage Mitigation:
Block - Additional chance to mitigate damage when wearing a shield.
Defense - Helps prevent physical damage by reducing the chance to be hit or critically hit. It also increases block, dodge and parry.
Dodge - Ability to avoid an entire attack.
Miss - A failed attack. (Defense Skill vs Weapon Skill)
Parry - Chance to nullify an attack.
Resilience - Reduces chance to be critically hit. Reduces the damage from melee and spell critical strikes that do hit. Reduces normal damage taken.
Resistance - Reduces, or entirely blocks a particular shcool of magic.

Warrior
Warriors are best for tanking melee bosses with a lot of attack speed and low damage per hit.
They don't do well against spell damage.
They are able to use all the damage mitigation abilities.

Paladin
Paladins are best for tanking bosses with multiple adds.
They can also use all the damage mitigation abilities, but are more reliant on reaching the block cap for shields.

Druid
Druids are best at tanking burst damage bosses because they have huge health pools.
Cannot wear shields = Cannot block.
Weapons do not deal damage when in bear form = Cannot parry.
Depend heavily on high amounts of dodge from agility.

Death Knight
Death Knights are best for tanking spell-casting bosses. They have several abilities that enable them to avoid spell damage all together.
Receives 25% of strength as parry rating!
Cannot wear shields = Cannot block.

It Takes One To Know One

It's hard to understand the intricisies of the game, especially the tank-healer relationship without having first played the other person's role. This is difficult because it requires having leveled a second character to 80.

I lucked out because my wife happens to have a druid and has been building up it's tanking gear. I occasionally play her druid to help her get those pieces that just seem never to drop. I decided that I would run her character as a feral tank instead of boomkin dps which I usually do.

I learned a few tidbits about tanking that will help me be a better healer in the future. Mainly, that the hp required to tank a regular lvl-80 instance is much lower than that required to tank a heroic instance. That seems obvious, but you don't realize exactly how much the difference is until you're the tank.

We tried to have her druid tank Heroic ToC with 25k hp. We're a pretty skilled group of players, but it was still too hard. However, her druid can tank normal dungeons without any problems, even when being healed by a lower level character.

So, how much hp does a tank really need?

"If you ask the tank forums - Any HP is fine
If you ask the healer forums - You can't step into H UK until you have 32k unbuffed
If you ask the DPS forums - It will get lost in the PvP QQ"

-Greymare on Shattered Hand

I find that quote to be right on target. Most tanks think that they need a decent amount of hp, but after that, it doesn't matter -- that the healer will make up for less hp simply by healing faster. They think that the solution to low hp is to get a better healer with more mana and more +spell power. However, this is just not the case. A healer recognizes that there is a limit to how fast one can heal, and that if the tank takes more damage than that, there is no amount of hp that will suffice.

We pulled in a paladin tank with aproximately the same amount of hp, and he managed to tank through it with only small problems. What was the difference? It wasn't the amount of hp. It was the additional avoidance mechanics of the pally tank. He wore a shield and could parry in addition to dodge. I alluded to this fact in a previous post (WoW's Not What It Used To Be) regarding death knight and druid tanks. I'll be posting again on this topic discussing each tank's avoidance mechanisms and which tanking class to select for the job... yes, there is a difference.


However, you must consider some factors while tanking other than just yourself:

Can your healer keep up with the amount of damage you take, even if you don't die instantly?

Will pulling more mobs cause additional AOE or other combined effects that will wipe the group, even though you can take the damage?

Can you see anything once you pull a group of mobs?

Can you chase after a mob if one gets loose?

How good is your group? Can the DPS pull mobs off you? Are they attacking the mob you're directly attacking, or one that you're only hitting occasionally?

Is your group going to AOE, or single target each mob?

10-man Ulduar, Take 2

So we attempted 10-Ulduar for the second time.

Ingis the Furnace Master
We took down the two sentinels on our way in by taking them at the corners of the walls where the healer could be out of LOS. This helped us stay out of the earthquake considerably. We also tanked them at opposite corners of the courtyard which helped us avoid getting hit by two earthquakes consecutively.

Once past the two sentinels, we cleared the other trash mobs quite easily. Just stay away from those tornadoes.

Our first attempt on the boss went pretty miserably. We only got him down to about 80%. We were all dying pretty quickly from the flame jets, and we got too many of us in the scorched ground area. We decided to make some changes to fix that:

The flame jets only get about a 2-second notice, so you have to stop casting immediately. This only prevents the 8-second global cooldown if you get hit, not any of the actual damage from flame jets.

We also had the tank pull the boss into the four quadrants of the room -- but a much larger square while doing it. Since the boss's scorched area he leaves on the ground is quite large, this allowed us a little bit more space in the middle for the DPS / heals so we didn't end up in it as easily.

With those two modifications, we still only got the boss down to about 60%. After a few more attempts, we noticed that our PUG's weren't putting out enough DPS. We were missing our regular OT, so we had picked up a pally who was pretty decent. However, the hunter and warlock were not good at all. The warlock was only putting out 800 dps. I didn't know that you could do that low of dps at level 80. Anyhow, I'm sure that was a little bit of our problem, but not the entire problem.

Intellect or Spirit?

Five Second Rule (FSR)
"Whenever mana is expended for any purpose, mana regeneration is interrupted for five seconds. This is most often caused by casting spells, but diseases that drain mana will also interrupt mana regeneration. During this time, no spirit-based mana regeneration takes place unless the character has certain talents; there is also the fixed regeneration from mana/5 items, which is never interrupted for any reason." (www.wowwiki.com)

Due to the FSR, spirit will only help you regenerate mana if you spend a considerable amount of time doing nothing.

Mana regen is a difficult thing to gear for since it depends wildly on the tank you're healing. If the tank has low HP, you will most likely be needing to heal him constantly, and therefore receive very little regeneration. However, the opposite is also true. A well geared tank that takes less damage will allow the healer to rest between heals and therefore get some regen.

The actual mana regeneration from spirit equation is as follows for level 80 characters:

mp5 = 5 * (0.001 + sqrt(Intellect) * Spirit * 0.005575 ) * 0.60

I took this equation and graphed the results in excel with varying intellect and spirit values. I assume here that stacking intellect means that you have 500 spirit + varried intellect, and that stacking spirit means that you have 1000 int + varied spirit. Those are realistic values at level 80.

These graphs make sense. Since the mp5 varries with the square root of total intellect, the player receives diminishing returns for regen when stacking intellect. However, mp5 varies proportionally with spirit as to create a linear trend. Initially, this looks like it's obvious that stacking spirit is the wise choice.

However, this is not the entire picture. Sure, you'll end up with more regenerated mana, but what about your total mana pool?

Woah, not what you would have expected, eh? It looks like from this graph that stacking spirit actually ended up with far less mana than did stacking intellect. Well, that's because the graph was only for a 60-second fight, allowing only for 20 regen ticks at most. Furthermore, I assumed a FSR of 50%, meaning that you were casting half the time. Realistically, most boss fights are longer than that. While fighting Kael'Thelzud, the last boss in 10-Naxxramas, the fight lasted 15 minutes. Let's re-examine these graphs when a longer fight is assumed.

Now there's a drastic change. Even with a low amount of spirit, the regneration based on spirit scenario ended up with more total mana in the end because of the base amount of intellect that you'll have anyway. It compounds as spirit is stacked, resulting in a difference of 49k mana. That's a lot... more than 3 full mana bars than the stacked intellect case.

Ok, so you still don't think that's realistic. You don't think you'll reach 50% FSR. Yeah, that's probably not realistic. So let's look at 20%FSR. That's 12 seconds out of every minute, you don't cast. (Well, actually 17 because you have to wait 5 seconds before regen starts)

Here, we see that the two trends are almost parallel. So at every amount stacked in either case, the total mana availiable increases proportionally. However, the spirit case still ends up with the large of the two by about 10k mana. That's for a 15 minute fight, the less time, the worse the spirit case appears.

So the break even point is 13% FSR for 15 minutes while stacked at 2100 spirit 1000 int. Remember that the x-Axis is not time. The x-Axis is amount stacked. It's also important to realize that priests in the best guilds on my server only have 1300 intellect and 1100 spirit. They're not stacking one over the other, and it's highly unlikely that any priest would be able to stack 2100 intellect or 2100 spirit.

10-man Ulduar

We started 10-Ulduar on Saturday evening. We did 2 bosses, both of which were fairly painless.

Flame Leviathan
This one took us 2 attempts. On the first attempt we got him down to 8%. We just had a few people that didn't understand they needed to start running away from him immediately. That's really all there is to it. Once we corrected that, we easily took him down. The vehicles make things a little tricky if you're not used to doing Wintergrasp.

Razorscale
We 1-shotted this one. It was a long, tough fight, but we made it through. The only thing that killed people was standing in the blue flames too long.

Ignis the Furnace Master
We started heading to this one, and one of our healers had to go afk for a considerable amount of time. In the meantime, we lost one of our DPS paladins. With 2 of the guildies missing, we decided to call it. No sense going further without gearing up our own people. We're planning on continuing tonight.

10-man Naxxramas

My guild recently downed 10-man Naxxramas. You have to know that there's only about 8 of us in our guild. We're all family, and have a laid-back attitude about the game. After running heroics as much as we could stand, we finally got everyone geared enough to go. (And some of us were way over-geared by that point too.) But without raiding, there was nothing else for us to do except quit WoW... and really, who wants to do that? So, we decided that we'd start running 10-mans.

We have 2 tanks, and 2 healers, and the rest are DPS. This was perfect because then we only have to PUG 2 dps each time we go, which is pretty easy to do.

We downed 10-Naxx in three runs. The third run was only the last boss, KT. It's a fairly long instance, considering none of us had stepped in the door before that night. We read a Naxx guide that explained each of the bosses before we did the fights. That helped quite a bit. We didn't really have that much trouble.

We're skipping EoE for the time being and heading to 10-Ulduar. EoE only has one boss, and it sounded like rather complex for just that.

The Ideal 5-Man group Make-up

I love this group make-up for 5-man instnaces and here's why:

Warrior Tank
Warriors were made to tank. It was an afterthought that possibly paladins and druids should be able to tank too. If you had to swap someone, you could change out the warrior for a paladin tank, if they were awesome. That way, the pally could hand out Kings or Wisdom to the party which would all benifit immensely.

Priest Heals
The priest is the only true-blood healer in the game. There are very few things that a resto shaman, resto druid, or holy paladin can offer that a priest can't. While druid heals offer more HoT's, the priest's Prayer of mending and renew are usually a much more efficient use of mana. Throw in Fortitude and Spirit which would be immensely useful for all other players in the party.

Mage
Not to mention the heavy DPS, polymorph is probably the best CC in the game. Arcane intellect would be beneficial to every other person in the party. The mage has the most consistant AOE damage of any class.

Shaman
Totems are freaking awesome. Tremmor totem to mass-dispel fear, mana regen, windfury, and a fire nova totem for AOE. I'd prefer enhancement here as the DPS is just amazing.

Druid Moonkin
Throw in a battle rez, innervate, and a 5% crit aura. Very nice spike damage and AOE capability here as well.

It also helps that having a pally, priest, shaman and a druid means that you have 4 people who can throw out an extra heal / rez if needed. If you consider their common off-spec, this is a pretty versitile group if things needed to be switched around in a pinch.

You could easily have:

Druid Tank
Pally DPS
Shammy Healer
Mage DPS
Priest DPS