Better Late Than Never Friday, 2/26

Better Late Than Never Friday is a random monthly feature where I pull a bunch of search terms from Google Analytics that landed folks here and try to answer questions that may not be directly answered at this site, as gleaned from their keywords used.

Apologies for not posting yesterday, I got swamped and I didn’t really have anything good to write about. I mean, not much has happened this week in the world of tanking other than the warrior and DK buffs. There’s a Dev Chat tonight on Twitter and I’m eagerly hoping some interesting revelations about design philosophy or Cataclysm will be revealed. I have a question banked, but if any of you non-Tweeters have a good one share it in the comments and I’ll steal it if it’s better than my standby.

Anyway, the column!

if icehowl charges you what do you do

Gotta go when the volcano blows. Hold down your left or right strafe key as soon as you hit the wall and run off as soon as you unfreeze.

amplify magic festergut

There are a lot of fights in ICC that Amplify Magic wouldn’t be a bad idea for, at least for the tanks. Marrowgar the tanks should only be taking physical damage and skittering out of the coldflame post haste. On Saurfang literally all the damage is physical, even his “spells”, so everyone could have Amp Magic. Festergut the tanks are going to take mostly physical damage (with only trivial nature damage from the gas in the room) but there is still some magic damage to be had, so it’s a risk.

On the flip side of the coin, for offtanking Blood Queen and tanking Sindragosa, Amp Magic is a terrible idea. Way too much spell damage to split the difference.

how hard does festergut hit

During his three-stack major-pain phase (in 25man), he was hitting me for 25k a swing. Humorously–or maybe not–in heroic mode he melees for an average of 37.5k according to this thread. I like the way one guy described it, “like Brutallus dual-wielding Algalons.”

can you fight sindragosa without downing dreamwalker

No. The door to Sindra opens after Dreamwalker is rescued.

drinking game ulduar

Every time someone asks where to port to you take a drink.

best professions for a tankadin

I like my combo of Jewelcrafting (+63 stamina) with Engineering (+885 armor). You can’t go wrong with JC/Blacksmithing (+60 stamina) for an all-purpose combination, though.

1 tanking festergut

I suppose it’s possible, with a Paladin tanking him up to nine stacks, Hand of Recking, popping Divine Shield and cancelling it immediately to drop the stack. I’ve seen Festergut dropped in 10man before the second tank switch, and an additional dps would facilitate that. Not sure about 25man with the crazy dps requirements needed to kill him there before a second tank switch.

best mobs to level weapon skill on

I’ve been trying for weeks to get my 400th point in Unarmed for the achievement, but to no avail. I’ve been just putting up Seal of Light and afking while punching those giant elite skeletons. I suppose it would be easier to try those unkillable ogres in Dire Maul… but, meh, Feralas is so far away.

conviction or socomm

If you’re choosing one over the other I’d say SoComm. That seal has been pretty handy for snap aggro in ICC, particularly tanking Defense on the Gunship or when Rotworms spawn on Dreamwalker. Plus makes the daily heroic a breeze.

does judgement of justice work on rotface ooze?

JoJ works by preventing a player or mob from speeding up past run speed (ie, faster than 100%), not slow them down, like the popular misconception seems to be. Big Oozes never speed up, so JoJ doesn’t really work.

does seal of command proc off avenger shield?

No. Only single attacks.

parry haste icc

Gravity has a great post compiling which bosses parry haste in Icecrown. Short answer is only Deathwhisper and Sindragosa, which pretty much kills expertise as a survival stat if you’re tanking in ICC. Just consider it for threat now.

so sick of elemental shamans knocking me off take your face off the keyborde and watch where your going

I know! Those ele shammies are the worstest!

The farm night cocktail

With Frost Lotus prices through the roof you probably don’t want (or can’t afford) to burn flasks on anything less than progression. For those less than important boss encounter though, you should have some degree of extra consumable survivability up. For those easy going nights I recommend the one-two punch of the farm night cocktail: Elixir of Protection coupled with the delicate, earthy tones of a Guru’s Elixir.

With a Stoneblood Flask you get a flat 1300 health for 1 hour, deaths or no deaths.

Elixir of Protection gives 800 armor (which is awesome especially at higher armor levels), and Guru’s Elixir gives 20 stamina along with other stats that works out to 220 hp (or 242 with Kings/Sanc).

Instead of the Elixir of Protection, if you’re more comfortable with straight health, you can use the Elixir of Mighty Fortitude for 350 hp, for 592 hp total. The hp5 is negligible. Overall though, the armor though is definitely better for most fights, especially once your armor pile starts getting massive.

On farm nights I probably go through a fair share of elixirs (less with no wipes, a’course) and they provide just what I need: a cheap alternative to flasking that provides comfortable survivability in exchange for not having to bum flasks off of Ildara every raid night.

Raid repair step 1: new invites policy

You know, I never saw this as an issue before this post by Cranky Healer opened my eyes, but my guild’s raid invites system sucks. We’re in the second grouping, the “show up and maybe you’ll get an invite” sort of guild. Which worked for a while, but there are several structural deficiencies with such a system that I think have been partly causing our attendance troubles.

For one, we have no idea if a raid will be good to go until about 10 minutes before start time when everyone is logged on. Moreover, while people who come to every raid can reasonably assume they’ll have an invite, those that seldom get taken along tend to just assume they won’t be invited and don’t bother to show up and be available for raid. Lastly, the “surprise” nature of invites makes it hard to reasonably rotate people so that we have an ideal distribution of folks seeing the content and getting the gear.

The new system that we’re adopting next week is based on Cranky Healer’s guild’s system. It’ll work like this:

1. All 25man raids go up on the calendar one month ahead of time
2. Everyone is to go through and sign up for every raid they can make.
3. The Sunday before the first night of the raid week (ie, Tuesday), Demo and I will go through the sign up list and mark 25 people as confirmed and 5 as standby.
4. Both “Confirmed” and “Stand By” are expected to show up, with the folks on stand by getting 100% of the dkp earned that night as compensation for being on and available for the duration of the raid.

Ideally no one will be on stand by for two weeks in a row. There’ll be some rotation to get some new faces in every week so we have a larger core of geared people ready to fill spots.

I think this new system will do a lot of good in encouraging wider participation and attendance.

Tonight is farm night so I’m sure attendance will be fine. The real test will be how progression night looks next week after I implement this.

The epic weekend

Over the last two months I’ve been steadily accumulating various pieces of Holy gear. Some spellpower plate offspec drops from ICC-10/25 (gotta love guild only having one raiding Holy paladin), ToGC-10, and the new heroics. Altogether I have a pretty decent set with (pardon the GS reference, I do it just to help you imagine the iLevel) about 5250 gearscore. The one glaring issue with my gear is my offhand. It rates a 10 for RP value, but I can enchant or block with it, so one could say it’s lacking a bit.

Nonetheless, I gemmed everything with int, more of less, then enchanted it and Saturday afternoon I was off to the races to heal my first heroic.

And… I don’t know how you Healadins do it. I mean, it’s generally pretty straightforward: Sacred Shield and Beacon the tank, Flash of Light for the little, steady damage intakes, Holy Light for bigger hits. Beacon is doubly awesome because I can generally ignore the tank and just heal the rest of the party. I find myself consistently forgetting to pop cooldowns or remembering to occasionally judge to keep Judgements of the Pure up. Stuff to work on.

All in all I healed four or so heroics this weekend: UK, OK, ToC, and HoS. Each was pretty easy (I didn’t have any of the hard ones, thank god) and no crazy wipes except for in Old Kingdom when the tank pulled a huge pack of spell flingers and everyone died in about 3 seconds. I barely had time to urinate myself. (Sorry, gross joke.)

It was interesting seeing heroics from a different point of view. In Halls of Stone we zoned in and I started blessings and the tank just up and took off. I’m sitting there blinking and yelled “hey wait for meeeeee!!” while running far behind without even Pursuit of Justice to help me catch up. Damn inconsiderate tanks. The Brann event was a little more lively than any of the boss encounters I did before, just had the aforementioned tank Beacon up and kept HLing anyone who stood in the beam.

Tons of fun overall and has definitely shaken up heroics for me. I’m tempted to start doing my daily random as heals, but I’d like to get an actual shield first before I expose myself to the piercing gazes of full pug groups.

More Uld10 hardmodes

Partly spurred on Tijeras’ recent scoring of a Rusted Protodrake, and thus my incessant nagging to do so, a group from my guild got together again to start work once more on Uld10 achievements.

We started with Orbituary for those that didn’t have it, which was a total breeze. I completely wrecked the dps chart on that fight with my Demolisher tricked out by my 264 gear. Flame Lev never had a chance.

Razorscale’s dwarf cooking wasn’t really seriously attempted. Although funny enough, all this time I assumed the counter reset every week or something because my total was always zero. Just turns out I’ve never managed to roast any dwarves before. I got three last night.

For Stokin’ the Furnace I single tanked Ignis and we got him down about two minutes into the fight. Heartbreaker went similarly well. Ditto I Choose You, Steelbreaker, who we killed before I even got to explode. I just DI’d a healer to defuse myself.

At that point we started racking up sigils from the wing bosses. Hodir was pretty straightforward. Thorim was interesting to say the least. With two healers, one in the arena and one in the gauntlet, right at the end a chunk of the gauntlet team bit it but two of the survivors (just dps) managed to make it back to the arena with Sif. Poor Ildara then went on the single-heal the second phase while I single tanked it, Unbalancing Strike and all. I think she nearly had a stroke by the time Thorim dropped.

Freya was a bit more tricky, with a couple of missteps thanks to your truly starting to feel the effects of my chain chugging drinks during the raid. At this point I was about half way through a bottle of gin (I like to drink like I raid–with class–ok?) and getting a little sloppy. The first attempt I got too close to the shore trying to kill a tree and managed to pull the adds on the opposite side. The second try we had to reset because a few people died during phase two. The third try we knocked her over easily and scored all three versions of Knock on Wood.

After Freya we dug in for Firefighter, which eluded us the last time we tried Ulduar hardmodes. The good news is, last time we failed miserably to fires, and this time we got Mim to 10% on our best attempt, which was also our last attempt. That was also the attempt, I’m told, where during P4 I yelled out “he’s spinning up!” ran directly away from the boss, banged a 360, and then ran right back into his Laser Barrage. I have no recollection of this.

We had to call it after Mim because one of the dps had to go, but it was then drunkenly decided in officer chat that we’d go try Undying with whoever was left… because why the hell not? And we did a lot better on that than I expected, managing to get all the way to the second boss before someone died.

No reason to continue we left Naxx and the soused express rolled on to Wyrmrest to do Sarth+3. I barely remember the fight (my gin-life-force nearly extinguished) but apparently we killed him.

And then, because dammit, we were drunk and the world was our oyster, we should go do ToGC-10. So we did, and by some alcohol-fueled miracle we completed the place with 43 attempts to go. No mad skill unfortunately, but we did it nonetheless. I think this was also the first time we’ve done it with three straight healers (rather than making a healer go dps, or switch out for one, like we did when learning the place months ago).

I passed out sometime after that, though truth be told I barely remember anything after Naxxramas. It was a good night.

Some honest-to-goodness ICC progression!

After shaking off my hangover, Sunday night was spent rerolling the Wednesday crew back into Icecrown Citadel to finally bring down Dreamwalker and get some cracks at Sindragosa. We experimented a bit with group make-up, initially trying two tanks, five dps, three heals but that wasn’t working as well. We then swapped some specs around and went two tanks, four dps, four heals, which was getting the dragon up a lot faster, but the adds were taking a lot longer to die. After a few more close attempts (with one at 92%) we then tried me single tanking, five dps, four heals.

Single tanking Dreamwalker wasn’t so bad, the only thing that really needed to be tanked were the Aboms. We settled on a kill order where dps would burnt Blazing Skeletons when they appeared, then Aboms, then Suppressors, then anything else still up. A hunter was in charge of kiting any Zombies. Towards the end it was getting really hairy, we had two Aboms, a Zombie, and a few casters on me. It looked like we were about to wipe. I had no idea what the dragon’s health was at but imagine my surprise when in my darkest hour suddenly Dreamwalker stood up, bellowed, and nuked every add. It was pure awesomeness.

Great encounter. I enjoy it more now that we can actually kill it.

It was a fun surprise after Dreamwalker when we got into that weird hallway with the giant circle room and cobwebs everywhere. It was obvious what was going to happen. I still feel like I wasn’t prepared for all that trash though!

Only downside to our inevitable victory was the healers that kept running back into the room to skin the spiders. Bad healers.

Finally, it was time for Sindragosa… and what a fight that was. We didn’t have enough time to get some serious attempts in, but honestly, it didn’t seem that bad. The only hard part seemed to be dealing with the awful, intense, bellowing, Scottish woman that was apparently trapped inside her. That voice was terrifying.

I’m half tempted to extend the lockout next week and just jump right back to her. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get people to go for that, though.

The die is cast

And so it was, my guild is recruiting.

This has been a long time coming for sure. Reading my raid recaps (when I’ve been in a good enough mood to do one) you could see how poor attendance has been lately. In the last month we’ve been on the razor’s edge in terms of whether or not our 25mans were going to go off. Despite having about 30 geared raiders, from night to night 6-8 decide to take the night off. If one or two were doing this, that’d be fine, but that huge a number makes raid unpredictable. Moreover, would it kill people to give some heads up that “hey, I can’t make raids next week”?

Two weeks ago when this problem first cost us a raid night it was obvious that the only real solution was to recruit, but I held off because I knew we had the people, they just were taking nights off en masse. So we shortened the raid week to two nights, though a bit longer, to make raiding less onerous on everyone’s schedules. That seemed to help a little, but now it’s plain to see we can’t ignore the root of the problem anymore. It’s time to shut up and do the hard thing and bring more dps into the fold and acclimate them into the raid core.

I’m currently attempting to find five or so new dps for the guild, qualified folks requiring minimal gearing so we can get back on track and get the progression train rolling again. We’ve been stuck at 7/12 for a while, giving Putricide the stink eye, and we really need to make good on our threats.

Wednesday was the straw that broke the camel’s back. We spent all Tuesday night literally mopping up all farm content as quickly and efficiently as possible: first four bosses, Festergut, Rotface, Blood Council, all one shots. Hell, we even killed Svalna in the Dreamwalker hallway for the free Emblem of Frost. Then we went and did Toravon and the raid weekly for good measure.

And then Wednesday only 23 people showed up for progression.

30 minutes past raid start it was becoming obvious that ICC-25 wasn’t happening, and as a back up plan I told everyone to hang tight and I’d carve out two 10man groups so we could at least get something done in ICC-10. I spent a good ten minutes huddled over a pad of paper and a pen, sweating profusely, and trying to expertly craft two balanced groups that could equally complete ICC-10 content. I thought I did pretty well, passed off the group two list to an officer for him to invite for and lead, and then went to Icecrown to start mine.

A few minutes and it occurred to me (by way of healer complaints in /o) that group two didn’t have Replenishment. Total facepalm, didn’t even enter into the equation for me.

I’m doing my best, dammit

Apologies in advance if this reeks of QQ.

On a side note, the common denominator over every moment I’ve spent raiding over the course of the last month has been unmitigated stress. Demogar, the guild leader and my brother tank, has been spotty in attendance since he got his new job, for good or ill. It’s fallen on me to pick up the pieces when he isn’t there; this normally isn’t so bad, but I’m not cut out to be the leading type, I just kind of keep getting stuck with it.

I like to think of my situation in very “Charge of the Light Brigade”/Cincinnatus-esque terms–I hate raid leading but I will shoulder the burden to that the raids can actual happen. I take the tank gear, I bear the “Co-Guild Lead” rank, it’s my job.

I was mulling around these feelings in my head when two posts popped up on twitter. One at The Hunter’s Mark, which then spawned one by Wrathy. Both touched on raid leading and the philosophies and difficulties there of.

The common thread between these two are “you rank and file don’t know how good you have it, do your job and stop making mine so hard.” Money quote from Lass’ post:

My point is, raid leaders have to do everything the average player has to do… for 25+ other people and themselves. They also have to work out the logistics of scheduling and populating raids, which doesn’t sound difficult on the surface, but if you’ve ever tried throwing a PuG raid together, you sort of get a feel for what it can be like to do that every week. You get about a dozen people whispering you back and forth constantly, asking what gear set to bring, what spec they should use, who else is going, what bosses they’ll be focusing on, what the strategies are, what loot will drop, etc etc ad infinitum.

I completely agree. For that spotty 30 minute period on Wednesday when the night’s events looked in doubt I fielded a slew of whispers from various people asking when invites were going out, why weren’t they out yet, what were we going to do, and boy does it suck that we aren’t raiding.

Yeah, no kidding guys, believe me, I feel the same way.

If you’re not one of the lucky few that have taken it upon themselves to shoulder all this torture on your behalf, then please be kind to your raid leaders. All you have to do is come to raid and worry about if some piece of gear will drop that you want, and whether you personally are having fun.

I, and my many self-medicating cohorts, must worry about a panorama of things: is everyone having fun, why hasn’t that boss died yet, does anyone need go soon, who do I have to replace them, are we spending too much time between pulls, is the dkp addon working, is anyone afk, how are we going to do CC on this Blood Wing pull, what made us wipe on that boss, why is that hunter doing so little dps, what can I do to make people stack better, and so on and so forth.

I’m doing my best, dammit, to make sure the raids happen and the bosses die and the purples flow like wine. All I request in return is that everyone shows up. Is that so much to ask for?

10>25

The ten man I put together, however, was awesome. 10s as a rule tend to be more fun due to fewer personalities clashing, the ability to be more selective with whom you take, and a more casual atmosphere. Less seems to be at stake in ICC-10 when you’re a 25man guild.

My run was neck and neck with the other group up until Putricide when they had issues downing him while we wiped a few times at 1%. On the third try we smoked the Professor and continued on to eventually down Blood Council and the Blood Queen (a very messy one shot as you could see above).

We’re continuing the run Sunday night at Dreamwalker. I’ve got high hopes to see the LK fight, I think we can do it.

As for the other run, they killed Putricide on the fifth or so attempt, which is a bit rough, but on the bright side now 20 people in guild have killed Putricide in some format, as opposed to 10. This is knowledge we can parlay into the 25man encounter.

You know, if we can ever get the group together.

“Should I gem with a nightmare tear?”

So you’ve got a non-blue gem slot, and you’re starting to think of options. You could just put a Solid Majestic Zircon in there, or perhaps the socket bonus is worth it? Well, for yellow sockets, the only survivability choice is an Enduring, but the piddling avoidance that you get from the defense hardly makes up for any stamina lost from not just slapping a Solid in there. For red slots, I concur with Honors, you want a Shifting in there.

But, you might ask, what about a Nightmare Tear? It’s +10 to all stats, how does that stack up?

Against an Enduring you’d lose .08% parry, block, and miss and 5 stamina and gain 22 armor, a nominal amount of crit, .1% dodge, some block value and dps from the strength, and a wide smattering of stats that don’t really enter into the equation (intellect, spirit, etc.).

Worth it? Using the commonly accepted armor:stam ratio of 11:1, you’re losing out on survivability ultimately equipping a Nightmare Tear instead of an Enduring.

Against a Shifting you’d lose 5 stamina, and gain the block value and dps of the 10 strength, plus all the useless stats. Derivatives of agility stay the same. Again, this is not a worthwhile trade off.

So, ultimately, no you should not gem anything with a Nightmare Tear unless it’s purely a threat pieces and you really want the extra damage that that strength can give you. In all possibilities you’re sacrificing effective health for threat stats.

I don’t think I’ve yet to see a tank with a Nightmare Tear socketed, but this was interesting to work out as a thought exercise.

“Stances” coming in Cataclysm?

Spoketh the crab:

It’s too early for us to have a ton of confidence in how this will play out, but I suspect it will more likely be something like [defensive stance, bear form, frost presence reduce crit chance by 6%] than talents or mastery.

Paladins would use Righteous Fury.

This works even better if resilience does not reduce crit chance. :)

So, how would this work exactly? There’s a lot of churning in that thread, because many are assuming that RF would stay as is and just have the crit chance reduction tacked on. Obviously that’s not how it’ll play out in Cataclysm because then Holy or Ret could use it as well.

Rather I expect to see RF get a damage and healing penalty added on to it if this is true and just the simple application of RF makes one crit immune. Which in turn would make a rudimentary stance system for Paladins.

Let’s not do half-measures though, GC, let’s go whole hog. Cataclysm is the perfect opportunity.

What do you all think about this development?

Smell your best for the raid tonight!

I saw this tip mentioned on the blog Hunters Rhok, and wanted to spread it to you, my tanky brethren. The buff-giving items of the Love is in the Air event apply independently of flasks, food, etc., and can be used to give you and your fellow raiders an edge in ICC tonight and for the rest of the week.

Here’s what you can nab and from what

Lovely Thunder Bluff/Ironforge Card — Reward from the eponymous quests. Gives +30 stamina for one hour.

“STALWART” Cologne — Purchased for 5 tokens. Gives +20 defense rating (+.16% dodge, parry, block, and miss) for one hour.
“Forever” Perfume — Same as “STALWART”.

But wait, there’s more! (… a bug)

When you’re wearing perfume/cologne and stand next to someone with the opposite, you’ll both receive the Love is in the Air buff, giving +3% crit change. Sound good, right? In principle, but when Paladins (and some other classes) have this buff, you will not be able to auto-attack of use certain melee abilities.

Best way to prevent this is coordinate with your raiders and make sure everyone in melee is wearing either perfume or cologne, and don’t mix. If you notice you can’t auto-attack or use some spells, that’s why.

Do your dailies and grab these items. The cards at least are like having a free extra epic gem in your gear. Take advantage of it while you can!

Revised Emblem of Frost pick order

I originally wrote a list two months ago when ICC first opened up that, I can now say, was pretty much worthless. At the time we didn’t understand the potency of armor to the degree we do now, nor the overall poorness of our various set bonuses (I mean the hints we there, but now it’s confirmed). Below I have revised my list and (per the suggestion of Honors and Ricardo) split it into a 10man and 25man list.

Saying the list is split, though, is a bit misleading. Because the offset +armor gear is so amazing (it’s BiS for 10man raiders, and generally BiS for non-heroic 25man raiders), both groups will want to prioritize snatching up those four pieces first. So, the list is less “split” and more diverges at one point.

Sidenote re: the Corroded Skeleton Key – I feel for this trap too, the “zomg so much stam!” feelings overtook me and I splurged 60 badges on this trinket. Generally it’s a good trinket, but there are better things you can buy with the 60 badges. If you already have Juggernauts Vitality/Satrina’s Impending Scarab, you should skip this trinket.

This is the order I wish I went in (and yes, this applies to both 10man and 25man raiders, these pieces are that good):

The near-BiS “freebies”

1. Cataclysmic Chestguard (95) — getting this will by itself cover the expertise softcap for you, and give you the peace of mind needed to maybe stop using that lesser iLevel +expertise item because you’re worried about threat
2. Gauntlets of the Kraken (60)
3. Verdigris Chain Belt (60)
4. Sentinel’s Winter Cloak (50)

Alright, so at this point we have our Chest, Hands, Waist, and Back slots covered. We still need Head, Shoulders, Legs, etc.

From here the list splits

Because the shoulders that drop in ICC-10 have hit rating, go for:

5.10. Lightsworn Shoulderguards (60)
6.10. Lightsworn Faceguard (95)

And because ICC-25 has some decent offset shoulders, go for:

5.25. Lightsworn Faceguard (95)
6.25 Lightsworn Shoulderguards (60) — this is assuming you have no yet picked up the Boneguard Commander’s Pauldrons by now

Then, the two lists merge again

7. Corroded Skeleton Key (60) — I’d made this 8th on the list, but gathering Primordial Saronites is going to take a while and you’ll be better served in the short term grabbing this. The choice is up to you though, if you skip this trinket and jump ahead to #8 I will not begrudge your decision.
8. Start buying Primordial Saronite (23 per, 181 EoFs total) to get the Pillars of Might made
9. Libram of the Eternal Tower — I guess.

3 impenetrable facts about Armor

A a quick, light-hearted Friday post I wanted to share some factoids about armor that aren’t widely known or understood. Hopefully you’ll join me in falling in love with this stat as much as I have this week.

Armor has a cap

This isn’t widely known, because previously reaching the armor cap was just about impossible. Now however, with sky-high iLevels and offset pieces loaded up with +armor, it might be attainable (with the help of pots and procs).

The physical reduction provided by armor is 75%. There is a diminishing returns curve to reach that number once you stack enough armor–for example, at 30k armor I have around 65% damage reduction, and to get to the magical 75% number (versus a level 83 raid boss) I’d need 45k armor. That’s 30k to go up 65%, and an additional 15k to gain another 10%. Diminishing returns indeed.

The armor you have is worth more as your total armor increases

But! that doesn’t mean armor is worthless once you get to the 30k level. Far from it. As you add more armor onto the pile, the pile you already have is worth more than it was before in terms of how much damage it reduces. This is a confusing idea so I’ll demonstrate it with a quick example:

Say a raid boss hits for 60000 against a naked character. If you adopt 30k armor for 65% damage reduction, suddenly that raid boss is hitting you for 21000. Add more armor and get up to the 70% DR (damage reduction) mark, and that raid boss is now hitting you for 18000. Increasing your DR percentage by 5% reduced the damage you were taking by 15% per swing.

Let’s go further–so we know going from 65% to 70% DR reduces overall physical damage taken by 15%, how about going from 50% to 55% DR? Same raid boss that hits for 60k on a naked character, with 50% DR, hits for 30k. With 55% DR he hits for 27k, a 10% reduction in physical damage taken per swing.

As you can see, not only does adding armor reduce physical damage taken, but the more armor you add, the amount of damage you reduce each swing by gets even higher. The value of armor shoots up the more armor you have.

ICC is the perfect storm of armor

Raid damage previous to ICC was fast, varied, and often avoided. With the Chill of the Throne dodge nerf, Blizz changed gears and made raid damage slower, more predictable, and more consistent. This switch (along with the addition of +armor plate) has given armor the second life to armor as a stat.

In the early days of ICC the common expectation was that post-Saurfang most damage would be magical and stamina would continue to be king. Time has not borne this conclusion out, instead rewarding damage mitigation (once you reach the not-getting-two-shot threshold) above all else. Coupled with boss mechanics involving damage transfers and you’re seeing a perfect storm of encounters favoring armor.

Just looking at logs from this raid week, the amount of my damage taken that was physical per boss (excluding Deathwhisper for obvious reasons and Rotface cause I was kiting) was:

• Marrowgar: 100%
• Saurfang: 91% (would be 100% if we were faster about switching on Rune of Blood)
• Festergut: 70% overall, but during the 3-stack burst portions 95.8% of damage taken was physical.
• Blood Council: ~95%
• Putricide: 88%, and more importantly during P3, 91% of the damage I was taking was from melee attacks. Each swing was doing about 20k damage each, which is a huge opportunity for damage reduction.

In ICC-25 normal, aside from Sindragosa perhaps, there just isn’t some magical damage boogey man that necessitates stamina stacking to the degree we have been doing so. This doesn’t mean you should be gemming agility for the pittance armor you would gain (continue to gem stamina), but you should definitely enchant your cloak with Mighty Armor and prioritize getting the +armor Emblem of Frost pieces.