10% ICC buff is live

So Hellscream’s Warsong/Strength of The Chynn is now up to 10%. Putting aside any misgivings about the nerf to the instance, etc etc, the bigger question is what this means to us tanks?

With the free health this buff gives (potentially in the neighborhood of a free 5,000 hp), the issue arises of how much health is too much health? And, if we reach this hp plateau, should be start to gem or gear differently?

Wrathy thinks the time is now and proposes gemming beyond straight stamina again. Obviously, because he’s in the 25man hardmodes he’s dealing with a different animal, but nonetheless the lessons trickle down to us normal 10/25 raiders as well.

Does a tank really need to have 60k hp in 10man normal mode? At that point wouldn’t it make more sense to scale back and boost avoidance, to free up some mana for your healers?

Perhaps. I need to do some more thinking about this, and particularly see how the buff to the buff affects tonight’s raid.

Notes on HP and armor

Just a few random thoughts …

New stamina scaling math

With the nerf to Sacred Duty, to calculate how much hp we get per point of stamina multiply by 10 to get the base stam -> hp number, then by 1.10 for our modifier (as opposed to the old 1.14 modifier). With that, we get 11 hitpoints from every point of stamina.

Armor is the new hotness

Coupled with the nerf to stamina, armor deserves another look as a tanking stat. While back in the days before 3.3 stacking armor was something for druids primarily, the inclusion of +armor items to the Emblem of Frost vendor has created an armor renaissance. Coupling that with the pattern of ICC boss fights rewarding physical damage mitigation (I’ll give examples in a second), you’re going to get a lot more mileage out of armor right now than you would stacking stamina.

Here are a few times where armor stacking is recommended:

  • When tanking Saurfang, any damage you take is transferred to the people with Mark of the Fallen Champion. Any damage you can mitigate down or avoid completely makes the lives of the healers easier. The less damage you transfer, the longer the Marked folks will live.
  • On Festergut the majority of the damage you will be taking will be physical (with the magical portion, the breaths, generally negated by inoculations). Festergut hits hard and fast and rewards not just being able to survive his hits, but minimizing the damage as well.
  • If maintanking the Blood Queen, any damage you take is passed to the OT as shadow damage via the Blood Mirror. Therefore, the MT wants to have enough mitigation to minimize how much damage they pass through the Blood Mirror, while the OT (contrawise) wants to have lots of stamina to soak all the incoming shadow damage that they’ll be getting passed to them.

ICC is the first raid in a long time that rewards tanks for giving certain stats priority situationally. For Putricide you are rewarded for having enough avoidance to increase time between stacks of the P3 debuff, for Blood Queen each tank is basically assigned the mitigation role or the stamina role, and so on. We are encouraged not just to survive damage, but to prevent it. A welcome change of pace.

Right now, in my gear, I have around 29k armor and 65.83% physical damage reduction. Once I pick up the other three +armor offset pieces, I’m going to be rocking some pretty serious mitigation. I can’t wait.

Tankadin HP hotfix nerfed

No details yet, other than:

It’s an intentional change. Sorry that the fix went in before the announcement. The announcement should be up soon with more details.

And yes folks, this is justified, please don’t freak out. Probably a needed reduction in our superior stamina scaling. It sucks how they sprung this on us, but in the end it was justified. They were never going to buff other tanks to our level, this nerf was inevitable.

Last request: please don’t go forth and QQ, let’s be the bigger tank about this.

Update: Looks like Sacred Duty went from 8% stamina increase to 4%.