“Good thing Da ain’t seein’ this.”

"Ain't natural."

“Right, lad, I hear what yer sayin’.  It’s a nice bow, ain’t denyin’ it.  I know it’s better’n me old gun.  But it’s a bow, lad.  Dwarves, we don’t use ‘ese here things, aye?  Bent sticks’o'wood w’strings onna back, ‘em’s fer poncy elves prancin’ round th’forest.  A dwarf needs th’ feel o’a boomstick in ‘is hand, boy.  ‘Sides, last time I tried t’go on campaign w’a bow, ’bout damn threw m’shoulder outta joint fer a week.”

(EDIT AFTER THE FACT):  OK, the quick story behind this, and why Beltar is the Wildfire Riders’ resident loot trashcan extraordinaire.  While on last night, the call went out for a ranged DPS to help in Ulduar because Yva’s connection crapped itself and she couldn’t get back on.  So I volunteered.  Despite his somewhat marginal gear compared to the rest of the 10-man, we got Hodir hardmode…and he got a nice cloak when the guy who won the roll saw that Beltar was still wearing a blue Cloak of Holy Extermination.  (Vent:  “BELTAR, GODDAMMIT, YOU ARE TAKING THIS CLOAK NOW.”)  Then we cleared Vezax trash…and the Golemheart Longbow dropped.  At that point, Yva got back on and I headed back out so she could take her spot back and they went on to get hardmode Vezax.

Hit rating: How much is too little?

If you’re reading this expecting an answer to the question above…sorry, folks, I don’t have one.  Because, see, it’s my question.

As I posted in my latest installment of So You Want to Be a Prot Warrior on endgame gearing, there’s certain magic numbers that you strive to hit when you first move up to tanking heroics or raids.  One of those numbers is 263 hit rating, otherwise known as the magic rating number that gives you +8% chance to hit–needed to push misses out of the picture completely.

If you’ve had a chance to run through Ulduar a bit, or have looked at some of the items that come out of there, you may notice that it seems like almost everything’s got +hit on it.  I know many melee DPS, despite their best gearing efforts, who came out of Titan Disneyworld way, way over the hit cap.  My wife, a feral druid who Knows What She’s Doing, is stuck with 313 hit rating–and that’s after replacing some Ulduar pieces with Trial of the Crusader stuff.  Our raid’s Chief Cat Herder was pushing nearly four hundred hit rating–11 or 12 percent +hit–at one point.  Even Lin’s arms gear, a grab-whatever-I-can-find hashup of badge, Naxx-25, Ulduar-10, Ulduar-25, and a couple of ToC pieces, sticks him with 300 hit rating and not nearly enough expertise to balance it.

Lin in tank mode was no exception through Ulduar.  Recently, I finally got his hit rating to about 265, with his expertise in the low 20s–not quite dodge-capped, but close.

Enter Trial of the Crusader and other Tier 9 content.

Suddenly, +hit is gonzo.  Last night, I got a nice upgrade from Faction Champions in ToC-25…the very tasty ilevel 245 version of the Belt of Bloodied Scars, to replace his Shieldwarder Girdle.  The BoBS is great for his “boss” avoidance set.  More strength, more stamina, lots of dodge, parry, and defense.  But…no +hit.  The Shieldwarder’s Girdle had a lot of +hit.

And so, I, der Panzercow, the guy who just told you aspiring nubwarriors last week that you need 263 hit rating…is running around with 159.  Three full percent below what you are supposed to have.  At least I have 28 expertise.

I almost didn’t take that BoBS because of what it’d do to my hit rating.  A couple of my fellow tanks had to smack some sense into me before I went ahead.  But now, here I sit, with a 3.07% chance to miss on every swing.  Every taunt.  Every…well…everything.

Now here’s the weird part.  I’ve spoken to two people, one in my raid, one in another raid that’s slightly ahead of us in progression.  And they’re saying that from what they’ve seen, it’s now no big deal for tanks to be running around at 5% or even lower +hit.  Because, apparently, just as it seemed like everything in Ulduar had +hit, stuff in ToC and Onyxia’s Lair 2.0 doesn’t.  So tanks are having to adapt.

That brings me back to the question at the title of this post.  If you’re tanking a raid at this level–hardmode Ulduar, normal or heroic ToC–are you doing it with less than 8% +hit?  If so, how is it working out?  What are you doing to mitigate the chance of misses, especially on taunt-sensitive fights like Gormok?  Am I being a nubsauce for worrying about this?  Why does it burn when I pee?  And, of course, are we there yet?

Latisha: putting the “tank” in “tankini”

"Take the damned picture already so I can put some clothes back on!"

Because protecting the femoral arteries is totally not important at all, right Blizz?

(BTW, the items in question?  Mail Combat Armor and Mail Combat Leggings, which obviously should be named Male Combat Armor and Male Combat Leggings.)

I’ll have a real update on the Latisha Experiment coming soon.

Vanity, for once, thy name is Linedan

I normally don’t care much about fashion on Linedan.  Some of my characters do care about how they look; I admit, somewhat grudgingly, that I picked one of my hunter Illithanis’ pets because it was red and most of her armor was matching red mail at the time.  But Lin?  Nah.  He’s a function-over-form kind of cow.  Besides, so much armor just looks strange on the weird proportions of the male Tauren–bracers disappear completely under the gloves, the legs are so small that pants are hard to even see much less admire, stuff like that.

So it is a rare moment indeed when I have a squee like this.  The Anvil did Flame Leviathan with one tower up for our first hard mode attempt in Ulduar last night.  (It really should be called “sorta kinda hard” mode…even with a tower up, Loot Leviathan still isn’t too bad.)  And he gave us a little something for our extra effort…the Anvil’s first ilevel 232 epic loot.

A Titanguard.

You can't see it, but there's a big stupid grin under that helmet.

HOLY SWEET ZOMBIE JESUS DOES THAT THING LOOK INCREDIBLE OR WHAT.

Forget that it’s an epic.  Forget that unlike my old Broken Promise, it actually looks like a fecking sword you use to stab people with instead of a railroad signal.  Forget that I’m enjoying actually tanking with a fast weapon (1.6) again instead of a slow Broken Promise (2.5).  Just look at it, man.  It’s bacon-wrapped badass.  It screams, “hi, I’m Linedan, and I’m going to gut you like a fish and then hit you in the face with my shield until you stop moving.”

I have not been this stupid giddy gleeful happy about an upgrade in a long time.  And it’s not even because it’s a good weapon.  It’s just because of how it looks.  Crikey, next thing you know, I’ll be taking Linedan to the barber shop.

…nah.

(FYI, question for you cutting-edge tank types–what enchant should I put on this beast?  Right now I have a self-made Titanium Weapon Chain on it, which hit-caps me in my block gear and over-hit-caps me in my boss tank gear.  Is Blade Ward worth the ridiculous prices it commands, considering nobody in our raid can apparently do it yet (we’ve had lousy luck on drops)?  What about our old BC friend Mongoose?  You can see his Armory from the link at the top of the page if you’re curious.  Thank you!)

So you want to be a prot warrior: What do all those stats do?

Prepare for the Great Wall of Text!

Up until about level 50 or so, gearing up your protection warrior is pretty straightforward.  You want gear with as much stamina and strength as you can stack.  Agility, crit, hit, and defense are good secondary stats, but not as important–at first–as strength and stamina.

But as you start heading toward being able to tank the high-end “vanilla” instances–Scholomance, Stratholme, Dire Maul, anything with “Blackrock” in the name–or to head to Outland, your gearing requirements begin to subtly change.  You have to start looking at more than just raw strength and stamina.  You have, in fact, a metric bleepton of stuff to take into consideration as you get closer and closer to level 80, and not all of the stats are as important as others.  You need to know what’s indispensable and what you can live without.

If your prot warrior isn’t your first character, you should already be familiar with Blizzard’s sliding-scale “rating” system.  Instead of increasing your abilities like Dodge, Parry, Block, Defense, etc. by a fixed amount, these “ratings” are variable.  If you get a piece of armor that has +20 Dodge rating, that increases your percentage chance to dodge more at level 50 than it does at level 60.  It’s designed to keep you constantly grinding for replacement gear, because your current gear becomes less and less effective as you level.

Now, for this part of SYWTBAPW, I’m not going to get too much into the math behind the numbers to tell you how much a point of Dodge rating gives you at level 60 versus level 69, for example.  Why?  Because until you reach the endgame, it really doesn’t matter that much.  With your newfound warrior abilities and some practice, at level 60 you can walk into any old-world instance and tank the place in any reasonable mixture of easily-obtained items.  You don’t have to start really pushing the min-max on your gear until you’re closing in on level 80.  That doesn’t mean that you won’t make choices and need to keep your items as updated as possible, but in general, you’re not going to be worrying about squeezing every single point out of what you wear.  At this intermediate stage of your career, the concepts are more important than the actual numbers.

(My suggestion, if you’re a number-cruncher like I am, is to go snag a wicked nice little add-on called Rating Buster.  This slick piece of work will convert ratings to percentages and put them right into your item tooltips.  You can see it in action on most of the tooltip pictures here on Achtung Panzercow.  I find it indispensable when I’ve got to make quick decisions about whether or not I’m going to ask for loot during our raids.)

So let’s talk about what each of these various ratings do, why we need them, and their relative importance for a tank…

Defensive Stats

Dodge. It’s pretty self-explanatory.  You dodge an attack entirely, taking no damage.  Since druids don’t have shields and can’t Parry, this is their primary method of avoidance, but it’s also quite important for warriors.

Parry. You parry the attack entirely, taking no damage.  Note that being parried, however, speeds up the mob’s swing timer so that it can hit you again faster.  Back in Burning Crusade, many tanks facing Prince Malchezzar in Karazhan fell victim to “parry gibbing” during phase 2 of the fight when repeated parries caused him and his axes to hit that much faster and spike a ton of damage. It’s still a good stat to have, though.  (EDIT:  Your Panzercow is a moron.  I got this completely backwards.  When you parry, your swing timer is decreased by up to 40%.  When a mob parries you, their swing timer is decreased.  So tanks got parry-gibbed on Prince Malchezzar not because they were stacking too much parry, but because they didn’t have sufficient expertise, and Malchezzar was parrying them or other melee stacked in front of them. This is one big reason for melee DPS to do their attacking from behind.  Thanks to Zippy in the comments for pointing this out!)

Block. Block is your chance to passively shield-block an attack, removing part of the damage.  Don’t confuse your block rating or block percentage with block value.  Your block percentage is how often you block; your block value is how much you block.

Defense. Defense is an interesting stat.  It does multiple things.  Its primary function is to reduce your chance to be critically hit.  Its secondary function is to provide small increases to dodge, parry, and block per point.  It can be a confusing stat to track, because it’s actually a skill, same as a weapon skill, and thus levels up from 1 to 400 as you level.  Additions to Defense from items use the same sliding-scale rating system as everything else; an item that says it’s got “+40 defense rating” might actually only improve the Defense score on your character sheet by, say, 12 points.  Defense is a vital stat for a tank to stack.  To give you an example of how important, at level 80, in order to reduce your chance to get critted by a raid boss to zero, you need 540 defense skill on your character sheet; that means +683 +689 defense rating from your items, gems, and enchants, assuming your Defense skill is maxed at 400.  That’s a lot. You can, of course, tank with less, but that leaves you risking getting critted for OMGWTF damage and making your healers cry.  (Thanks to ribby47 in the comments for catching my error on the needed +defense rating.)

Stamina. Hey, look, it’s your good old friend stamina.  Stamina is NEVER a bad thing.  Why?  Because you get hit in the face for a living, you doofus, and the bigger that pool of health is, the better.

Agility. Agility is both a defensive and an offensive stat; it provides a tiny increase per point to your dodge and your crit percentages.  That having been said, it’s not worth intentionally stacking it.  The returns are far too limited and you can get more from other things like stamina, or dodge rating.

Offensive Stats

Hit. Hit rating is good for tanks because, let’s face it guys, whiffing does not impress the ladies.  That, and whiffs give you no rage and generate no threat.  Fortunately, figuring out how much +hit you need is pretty easy.  You have a base 5% chance to miss an attack on a mob that’s the same level as you, and that number goes up by 1% for each level the mob is higher than you–since raid bosses are always treated as three levels higher than you, that means you need 8% extra hit at level 80 to never miss a boss.  The tooltip for hit rating tells you what percentage of +hit your current numeric hit rating translates into.  (At level 80, you need 262 hit rating to reach the magic 8%.)  If you’re a Draenei, or have one for a Siamese twin and are always grouped with them, the handy-dandy Heroic Presence racial means you only need 7% hit.  By the way, +hit does not affect whether a mob dodges or parries you.  That’s controlled by…

Expertise. Expertise reduces your chance to be parried or dodged by an opponent.  It’s a good stat to have, because you get no rage (and generate no threat) if you’re parried or dodged.  In order to not be parried or dodged at all, you need enough expertise to get 6% worth; at level 80, that’s 26 expertise points, or about 140 rating.  If you’re a human using maces or swords, or an orc using axes, of course, you need less due to your racial abilities.

Crit. Not so important.  You get +15% bonus crit to many of your best abilities from your talents, so unlike many other classes, you don’t need huge amounts of +crit to still deliver pain.  That having been said, if you’re building a set for daily grinding or other DPS use and not for boss tanking, crit can be useful.  (Full disclosure:  Linedan uses two crit trinkets in his “trash” tanking set for extra damage output.  Handy for powering through dailies or smashing instances he overgears, but when it’s time to head to Ulduar, he puts them away.)

Strength. Still very important, because as you know by now, 1 strength = 2 AP.  More AP directly translates to more damage dealt and more threat generated.  Strength also gives tiny increases to your parry chance, and to your shield block value.

Putting It All Together

So.  Now that you’ve got all this knowledge, how do you actually apply it?  I’m going to talk more about that when we get into endgame gearing for the 70s and 80s, but there’s a few principles that hold true through the 50s and 60s as well.

- Stamina and strength are, and will forever be, your friends.  More of those is always good.

- Defense is probably the best bang-for-the-buck tank stat there is.  It reduces your chance to take painful crits, and boosts all three of your avoidance/mitigation stats (dodge, parry, block).  Even in the 60s, good +defense pieces are worth their weight in gold.

- Stamina, dodge and parry are better if you are building a set designed to keep you alive fighting a big boss, because they remove all damage–if you dodge or parry, you don’t get hit at all, but you gain no rage from it.  Strength, block rating and block value are better if you’re building a set designed to generate high threat and high damage at the expense of taking more damage yourself; you only mitigate part of the incoming damage on a hit, but you get rage, and the extra strength and block value boost your Shield Slam damage and overall threat generated.  You will almost certainly end up building at least two sets of gear, one for avoidance/mitigation and one for threat/damage…but that’s a subject for another post, later on toward endgame.

- Don’t gem for +hit and +expertise if you can possibly avoid it.  The “bang-for-the-buck” on hit and expertise gems isn’t generally worth it.  You can pick up hit and expertise rating off your gear and save the gem slots for stamina, or defense if you’re approaching 80 and need to reach the defense “magic number” of 540.  You can also gem for strength if you need red slots to activate a meta.

Is this a pretty generic post?  Yep.  Because as with a lot of the other topics in SYWTBAPW, I want to give you the information and then let you use your own brainmeats to figure out how to apply it!  There is, for the most part, no One True Way to Tanky Enlightenment.  If you’re smart and take time to understand what the various stats do and how they interrelate, you should be able to see how your gearing choices will affect your abilities going forward.  And honestly, the game really is much more forgiving than it used to be when it comes to warrior itemization…until you get up to level 80 and the endgame.  But that’s a ways off yet.

Next time, we’ll talk about levels 61 through 70 and your fun vacation in scenic, fragmenting Outland.  You’ll come for our friendly fel orcs, but you’ll stay for our disintegrating magic-ravaged deserts!

Of unicorns and other imaginary things

See that right there?  That, my friends, is the Commendation of Kael’thas.  Back during the last part of Burning Crusade, this little trinket was the shizzle if you were a tank that, like me, had no real hope of seeing Sunwell or even much of Black Temple.  +57 stamina?  Awesome.  And look at all that automatic emergency ass-saving dodge!  I literally can’t count how many times this thing kept me alive when things went pear-shaped.

I got that on my first run into heroic Magister’s Terrace, believe it or not.  (Yes, that’s it, drink the tasty Haterade, peeps.)  And it was my constant tanky companion through Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep.  It was awesome to be rocking one of these back then.

When you’re offtanking Ulduar 25-man?  Not.  So.  Freaking.  Much.

My wife knows that if she wants to hear me rant, all she’s got to do is mention the words “tank trinket” and then dive behind the sofa.  Trinkets for raid-geared plate tanks are hard as hell to find.  There’s the Seal of the Pantheon from Halls of Lightning, of course, which is generally considered to be a necessary “entry-level” trinket just because of the massive +65 defense rating (Lin’s still wearing one, because stacking +defense is actually quite effective).  But getting into Naxx, well, there isn’t much.  There’s the Repelling Charge from Thaddius on 10-man…assuming you’re in a 10-man that can get to Thaddius, which I wasn’t for quite a while, and that it drops, which I’ve only seen once in 4+ months.  There’s the Defender’s Code, which is more of a druid trinket with the static +850 armor and the on-demand hefty +dodge, but doesn’t have any +stamina.  The badge trinket, the Valor Medal of the First War…again, all +dodge, and no stamina.

Which is why, weeks into Ulduar 25, with every other piece of Linedan’s gear at ilevel 200 or higher, he was running around with a damned item level 115 level 70 trinket still firmly glued into his first trinket slot.  Because tank trinket upgrades, like unicorns, leprechauns, and politicians that actually want to cut government spending, don’t really exist.  They’re just imaginary figures.

Until last night.

I’d like to thank Captain Crotchpocket, aka Ignis the Furnace Master, for supplying me with this lovely little item, the Heart of Iron.  Yep, that’s right, kids, that’s not a misprint…one hundred and sixty-two points of tasty, tasty stamina.  1717 health off one trinket, and some emergency dodge thrown in. 

Linedan now has almost 32,000 unbuffed health, and with full 25-man raid buffs is up over 41,000, competitive with our other two raid tanks.  And y’know, it still doesn’t feel like enough on some fights.  I’m beginning to wonder if Ulduar is harkening back to the Burning Crusade days where if you were a warrior, there was only one gem you ever put in your gem slots unless you had to activate a meta–stamina uber alles.  It seems that Ulduar is all about BIG NUMBERS…even the trash routinely spanks a pimped-out tank for well into five digits per hit.

Lin’s now one belt away from the Epic achievement.

It felt good to see the Anvil get back out of the ditch and put the hammer down last night.  Loot Leviathan, Razorscale, Ignis, XT, and Kologarn all went down without too much fuss.  Now we’re working on Auriaya, the Crazy Cat Lady.  And all I have to say about that fight is, now I think I know what a yarn ball feels like.

Needz moar skullz, IMO

Every raid, sooner or later, is going to have One of Those Nights.  Ours was last night.  Our MT was sick and our usual pally OT was ret-spec to provide extra DPS, because our #1 DPS fury warrior was out of town for his birthday.  We were down a couple of other regulars and couldn’t find enough subs, so when it came time to see the Four Horsemen, Sapphiron, and KT, we had 23 or 24 people, with a couple of lineup changes as we went along.

It was one of those nights were we were just having weird stuff happen.  I know I was way off peak performance, with several silly deaths and some flub-ups here and there.  In the end, after several wipes, we persevered, and finished clearing Naxxramas.  Dessert was a ragged, but ultimately successful, one-shot of Sarth +1 with 22 people.

After we were done celebrating killing Kel’Thuzad, I walked over into what turned out to be KT’s bathroom.  Having a bright idea, I managed to pry one of the doors off his medicine cabinet and use it as a shield (see above).  Thus, I give you Linedan’s first ilevel 226 epic:

So yes, Linedan is a walking, talking, skull billboard.  And if you think that medicine cabinet door is scary, you should see what his toilet seat lid looked like.  DO NOT WANT.

Not a bad night’s work

Despite a late start into Naxxramas tonight, everybody but the Horsemen are dead downstairs (thus continuing our odd pattern of dropping exactly one boss more each week on Thursdays, no more, no less).  So Friday gives the Anvil plenty of time to work on Sarth +2 after saying hi to Korthazz, Rivendare, Ziggy, and Blammo, and then going upstairs to give Sapphy and Kel’Thuzad some noogies.  And, we pulled off two things we’ve been after for a while, as seen above–Arachnophobia, and The Safety Dance.

The “Superior” achievement seems a bit odd, though.  It says “equip a superior item in every slot with a minimum item level of 187.”  Well, apparently that doesn’t mean that all my items have to have a minimum of 187.  I’m still carrying around a craptacular ilevel 174 blue in my ranged slot (Weighted Throwing Axe) because I’ve been slack about getting an Armor-Plated Combat Shotgun made.  And one of my trinkets is the most overinflated and still-useful ilevel 115 purple ever–the Commendation of Kael’thas from Magister’s Terrace.  (I actually have two BC purple trinkets…as part of my shield block set, I swap in Coren’s Lucky Coin from last year’s Brewfest.)

What put me over the top on the achievement was replacing the last of my crafted gear–Tempered Saronite Bracers–with the 60-Valor-badge tanking bracers, the Bracers of Dalaran’s Parapets.  I’ve had terrible luck even seeing tank bracers, much less getting them, so the badge bracers are perfect.  I also picked up two more pieces of DPS plate that nobody else wanted.  Slowly, I’m building at least part of an epic-level deeps set, with 3.1 dual specs in mind.  I don’t really know what I’m doing in terms of itemization, and I’m not bothering to get it enchanted right now, but I figure, hey, if the name’s purple and it’s got +strength, +stamina, and +pwn, and I’m at the bottom of the Suicide Kings list anyway, and nobody else wants it…why not?

I experimented with Grid as a raidframe tonight and it worked out well.  It’s small enough that I could block it out and ignore it when I needed to, and still glance over and keep track of peoples’ statuses on the few occasions I had to know them.  My new UI configuration still needs some tweaking, but it’s already showing improvements, and should show more when I break some old habits (like looking up for my target frames instead of looking down!).  Once I get it more presentable, there will no doubt be a long and involved post on the UI and the components thereof…maybe next weekend.

Admit it, fellas…

…wouldn’t you want to wake up after a night of partying and see this hotness in the bed next to you?

Just, y’know.  Never mind the blue glowy eyes.  Or the lank purple hair.  Or the bits falling off because she’s a dead orc death knight.  Or the really snecking big rune-covered sword.

(The armor, if you’re curious, is the Murkblood Avenger’s Chestplate and Murkblood Avenger’s Legplates from quests in Nagrand.)

Dual specs, or the loneliness of the long-distance offtank

So Blizzard has put out a Q&A with Ghostcrawler about how the Dual Spec feature planned for the 3.1 release is going to work.  You’ve probably already seen the information, if you’re hooked into the WoW blogosphere at all.

I am really looking forward to this feature because of where I sit with my current 25-man raid.  I am in a raid that’s, basically, a side of pwnage stuffed with spectacular, drizzled in awesomesauce, and wrapped in bacon.  I’ve been part of it off and on for three years now, from the days when I was a badly-undergeared level 60 31/5/15 hybrid and got dragged to Molten Core, all the way up to being a regular offtank on Tier 5 and Tier 6 content in Burning Crusade.  Now, we’re in 25-man Naxx, with everything but Kel’Thuzad dead.

We do things a little differently–instead of a “standard” 3 tank/6 healer/16 DPS setup, we usually run with 4 tanks and either 5 healers/16 DPS or 6 healers/15 DPS.  And by “tank” I mean dedicated tanks–a prot warrior MT, a prot paladin, a frost DK, and me, the other prot warrior.  We also have one or two feral druids that are quite capable of stepping up if needed–trust me, we’re not hurting for an offensive line on this team.  All four of us dedicated tanks buff out over 35,000 health–I’m the squishiest at about 35.5k, with the warrior and paladin closer to 37k and the DK at an astonishing 40k fully pimped.

But as the #4 tank, generally, I don’t really tank all that much.  I MT every so often, but mostly, I tank trash where I can, grab and hold adds (slimes on Grobbulus, worshippers on Faerlina, etc.), work the back of the room on Four Horsemen sometimes, stuff like that–the kind of lunchpail down-in-the-trenches work that offtanks do while the MT gets to dance with Big Nasty.  With a great MT and two very strong AOE tanks, though, and with the design of Naxx encounters not really needing four dedicated high-health, high-avoidance tanks all that often, a lot of the time, I’m left DPSing, while still keeping my tank suit on in the event that things go to hell in a bucket and I have to step in and take some hits.  And while it isn’t the total effort in futility that it was pre-3.0, DPSing as a prot warrior who’s not getting beaned in the head is never going to produce a lot of deeps.  Rage generation of a 1H + shield is, and will always be, very low, even with a good weapon like Lin’s Split Greathammer.  Low rage = low damage output.

Dual specs offers a ray of hope.  It may give me the chance to make Linedan what I have wanted him to be for a very long time…a true hybrid combination of tank capability and painbringing, a DPS/offtank hybrid.  Hybrid specs for warriors right now simply do not work.  You’ve got to be 51+ in some tree or other, and 51+ in either of the DPS trees is generally not going to leave you capable of main tanking even a 10-man raid, possibly even a harder heroic (depending on gear of course).  I’ve chosen to take him Prot, 15/5/51 currently, because that’s what I have the gear for, and that’s the spec I generally like playing.  He’s a good tank, geared and ready for anything up through 25-man content.  I’ve worked hard to make him a good tank and make myself a good tank player.  But there are situations where another tank isn’t what’s needed…and maybe I can help.

So my long-term plan, at this point, is to start using heroics and 10-mans to build him an offspec DPS set with an eye toward a raid Arms build–54/17/0, or whatever a similar raid-support Arms build looks like after Blizzard tweaks Arms for 3.1.  (Build courtesy of the folks over at Big Hit Box.)  Why Arms?  Because while I don’t like being dead last on the Deeps Parade, I’m not in it to blow the top off the meters.  I’m in it to help the raid succeed.  And Arms brings a lot of toys to help a raid that’s heavy on physical damage, as ours sometimes is, kill stuff faster.  Trauma giving +30% to bleed damage for 15 seconds after a crit?  Hell, my wife the feral druid will love me for that alone.  Then throw in the extra +2% (maybe +4% in 3.1) physical damage from Blood Frenzy whenever Rend or Deep Wounds is up.  I won’t do the insane DPS that a TG Fury warrior can do.  But I can do more than I can as Prot, and jack up everybody else’s too.

I’m not going to go Arms full-time, no way.  I like Prot.  I like tanking.  I’m not going to change from primarily being a Prot warrior.  Arms would be my secondary build, to be dragged out in situations where I know I won’t have to MT anything and I’ll only be occasionally offtanking.  If the materials for the “portable Lexicon” Ghostcrawler mentions aren’t too expensive, maybe I can even switch mid-raid if it proves necessary.

I sure hope Blizzard doesn’t bork this feature up, because it’s one of the cooler concepts that’s come along in WoW for a while.