I was struggling today to think up something to write about. I did want to write something, but nothing particularly interesting was forthcoming. And then Meloree rescued me by pointing out this thread on the official forums Paladin board. In it someone asks if Ask Mr. Robot is correct in how it optimized their gear. Hilarity ensures.

There is a dwarf with a particular bone to pick with AMR, for some reason, and he relishes in trashing the tool to the face of Zoopercat, AMR’s proprietor. The dwarf’s argument (to use the term lightly) is that additional, non-gear stamina added has no value for tanks outside of those on the cutting edge of progression. Which is a rubbish sentiment. As he asserts,

Unless you are on heroics week two, the stam you get from gear, blue gemslots (hybrid gems of cours, never solid), and he few enchants that have stam on them is more than enough for you.

Blatantly untrue, but I’ll get to that in a moment. For the sake of entertainment, I simply must point out that best part of the thread, which is clearly this post from the angry dwarf. Glorious. I could be trapped under 7 feet of heavy snow after an avalanche on some remote mountain and sate myself for days on that post alone until the St. Bernards showed up.

But, I digress. Later on the cavalry arrived and brought some much-needed sanity to the thread.

There is a seldom discussed aspect of the stat that is rarely if ever taken into consideration by the vast and teeming multitudes of tanks, except by the EJ smart-set and Theck/Meloree alike, and that is how stamina interacts with healing.

Boss hits do not scale with how much health you have (outside of special circumstances, of course). As such, the more stamina you have, the more health you have, and the smaller percent of your total health a delivered hit will remove. If incoming damage removes too much of your health in a small window (a spike), your healers have to respond with their fastest, most expensive heals to get you back on two stable feet. The less stamina you have, the more dangerous spikes can be, and the faster healer mana will have to be spent to compensate.

Wrathblood delivers what should essentially be the end of the thread on this point.

There is, however, one other stat that helps against spikes of all sizes, making them hit for a smaller % of the tank’s health pool, making it kind of the universal defensive stat. That stat is, obviously, Stamina. If you are concerned about tank death due to spikes, and don’t have a perspective on gearing strategy, stacking Stam (after capping Hit/Exp) is a good all-around way of addressing the issue.

This is not to say that you should only gem stamina — it’s not that black and white, and gearing can be very subjective to a tank depending on what content they are tanking. But, nonetheless, there is definite value to the stat beyond what is on your gear by default and you should not let anyone, no matter how spittle-flecked, divert you from that fact.

Incidentally, I’m waiting to see if and when (and mostly if) the dwarf ever responds. Popcorn will be required, I hope.

I typed out a minor opus talking about how elusive block cap was being for me and then the thunderstorm currently leveling the Boston area to ground decided to knock the power out  from my building. Lost to history now. I really don’t know why I type things into my email client here. No, wait, I do. Makes it look like work.

But, um, yes. The one thing that wasn’t eaten by the power flash was the update to the CTC spreadsheet. It’s now up to version 1.3.3, with the additional gain of a function that converts overflow mastery (more than needed to reach block cap) to stamina at a rate of 1:1.5 mastery to stamina.

The stamina number is then converted out to hitpoints with all the requisite bonuses: Touched by the Light, Plate Specialization, and Kings/Mark if selected in the buffs section previously.

Suffice it say when I finally hit the blockcap after the first raid night next week, that number will be deliciously pertinent as I start regemming mastery to stamina.

I’ll try to take another crack at the post — under better weather — on Monday.

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.

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%.

My colleagues Honors and Wrathy have already written about this, but I wanted to throw my two cents in.

The conventional wisdom for a while now has been that 11 armor is equivalent to 1 stamina. Theck, however, has turned this assumption on its head by plotting out the value of armor based on how much of a fight is magical damage. In this post he has a graph basically showing various armor/stamina values–with this as the money quote:

So for a purely physical fight, armor seems like a pretty good deal. But for even a fight with 20% magical damage, Armor becomes devalued by 20%. This will generally be enough to make a Stamina trinket provide more EH than an armor trinket.

For an example, let’s look at the Glyph of Indomitability, since that’s what started this thread. It gives 1792 armor, which is equivalent to 153 stamina. However, for a fight with Y=20%, we get only (1-Y)=80% of that, or 123 stamina. For a fight with 30% magical damage, it’s only worth 107 stamina, and so forth.

It’s interesting because just about every fight has *some* magical component to them which means that the old 11:1 figure is just about worthless. This kind of throws out the window the ancient understanding of EH as a figure of armor and stamina, with no vacillating in between. Now, serious vacillation is needed.

What this means is that if you’re evaluating two pieces of gear, one with lots of armor and one with lots of stamina, you should choose the piece with more stamina (assuming the excess armor doesn’t exceed the value of excess stamina for the amount of magical damage in that fight). All that means, ultimately, is this is another point in the column of “stamina > all”. Stamina remains the safest bet, sadly.

Well, not totally, armor does have some worth. Just not as much worth as we assumed it had before.

I wrote in my post yesterday that I hit the 40k unbuffed mark on Wednesday, which is a milestone in many ways, and a sad commentary in others. Think about it: I have eight times more health than I did at level 60, and that’s only twenty levels ago. That’s how out of control stat inflation has gotten.

Tanks running around with this much health does not lend itself to balanced boss design. To make up for such vivacious tanks, raid bosses need to hit that much harder to actually create any sense of danger for the healers (hence most Uld25 bosses and folks like Gormok the Impaler).

So then tanks can get two- or three-shot in progression raids and suddenly healing has ramped up to constantly healing the tank (even if they don’t need the heals at the moment) lest the boss fires off too many hits in a row and gib them.

And then this boss design cascades down into an arms race of sorts. Because tanks have too much health bosses hit harder, so tanks stack even more health. Instead of Pershing Missles, we’ve got dual stam trinks in our arsenal.

So avoidance be damned, full speed ahead on EH. Which then, of course, cascades down into the worth of a tank being solely determined by their effective health. Any EH advantage is perceived by the roiling, screeching masses as a huge disparity because in this brave new world of raid buffed tanks with 50k+ hitpoints all that matters is your raw effective health number. Utility is thrown out the window, avoidance ignored, and cooldowns discounted. All we care about is how many hits can you take before finally dying.

This is a huge fault in the design process right now because there are so many different flavors to each of the different tanks–strengths and weaknesses that makes each class unique. And each and every one of those differences is being discounted completely save for EH. It’s a huge betrayal of the concept of BTPNTC when a specific class might not be deliberately favored, but a particular aspect of boss design is, which then ipso facto divides the tanking classes into those that can compete on the sole basis of this one criterion, and those that have fallen behind.

To be fair, I don’t think Blizz anticipated how bad it was going to get. GC already admitted they hadn’t even dreamt of hard modes when designing Wrath, and because eventually hard modes had to provide better loot, the designers were forced into cranking out gear with iLevels that weren’t expected until much later into Wrath’s patch cycle. Maybe even not until Cataclysm. They now publicly regret that some dps is running around 70%+ crit chances and tanks are boasting 50%+ avoidance, though obviously not much can be done about that now.

But how will they approach this in the next xpac? Well, same thing they did at the stat of Wrath. Ratings diminishing returns will be jacked up so as soon as you ding lvl 81 you’ll suddenly have much less crit/dodge/etc. than you did at 80. That’s all well and good, but you know what else they expect to do? Jack up everyone’s health pools. That’s right: more stamina.

What do you think the upper level of raid-buffed tank health is going to be at Patch 4.3? 75,000? 100,000? Who knows–the sky is the limit!

… and that’s the problem. Blizz needs to take the opportunity of Cataclysm to tear the system down and rebuild it anew. Tone down the iLevels across the board, removing the huge jumps from vanilla greens to TBC greens to Wrath greens which are no longer necessary. Smooth it out so rather than wearing iLevel 200 gear after dinging level 80, you’re wearing gear that has an iLevel of 80. Then, of course, tone down mobs across the board so you can survive a level 80 mob in iLevel 80 gear.

Moreover, rather than letting the arms race continue, redirect tanking towards a more balanced experience where avoidance is more than just a necessary and random evil that would actually be worth gemming for. Make it so EH is no longer the only criterion for a successful progression tank.

Stat inflation is only beginning to get out of hand. Imagine how much worse it will be at the beginning of the next expansion when we’re all in iLevel 400 gear and rocking health bars that would make a vanilla instance boss jealous.

Aha, so Better Late Than Never Friday has returned, if only because I sat on three weeks worth of search terms. Again, I question the longevity of this column, but like the saying goes: post, quaff, and be productive, because tomorrow you’ll run out of easy material to make weekly columns out of. So true.

paladin stamina spellpower conversion

The talent Touched by the Light converts 30% of your stamina into spellpower with three ranks. The best way to determine how much spellpower you’re getting is to either check your character sheet or take your stamina number and multiply it by .30. The result you get is your spellpower.

tankadin reckoning or conviction

Conviction will point for point give you more tps than Reckoning. Check out this post for more.

seal of righteousness better than seal of corruption

No, SoC (or V, if you swing the light that way) is our best threat seal while tanking. Even glyphed, SoR is inferior.

paladin wow rhyme bubble hearth

If my memory serves me correctly it’s something like:

I’m a little pally short and stout
This is my hammer, that’s my free mount
When I get in trouble watch me shout
Pop me bubble and hearth right out

how much hp does +24 stam give to paladins

Assuming you have both stamina increasing talents you should be getting a 14% increase to health over the normal stam > hp conversion rate, use this formula: hp = (stam*10) * 1.14. Works out to 274hp.

does conqueror tokens drop in naxx

Yes, just in my experience very rarely. RNG > all.

+16 dodge gem

Thankfully the design for the Subtle Scarlet Ruby will be added into the game in patch 3.1. I can’t find if it’ll be sold by the vendor for tokens, or if it’s a world drop. My money however is on it being a drop, like all the patterns that were added in the last patch.

Thanks to the new profession benefits introduced in WotLK, your two sidejobs have been that much more integral for min-maxing your character. Certain professions have some amazing boosts (we’re talking about self-only buffs or BOP items) for the common tankadin. Others… not so much.

A breakdown and my recommendations ahead.

Alchemy

• Mixology, which gives you increased duration/benefit from any flask or elixir you can make. This means that–to use the most common tanking flask–the Flask of Stoneblood will give you 970hp instead of the usual 650. Not bad!
• Indestructible Alchemist’s Stone, which gives +75 stam, 50 dodge rating (1.27% avoidance at 80), and boosts the effect of healing/mana pots by 40%.

Blacksmithing

• Two free gem slots, one for gloves and one for bracers. Assuming you add Solid Sky Sapphires, that’s an additional 48 stamina (or 547hp). When epic gems are released, you’re looking at an additional 60 stamina (or 684hp).

Enchanting

• Enchant Ring – Stamina will give you an additional 48 stamina/547hp when used on both rings. Comparable to BSing right now.

Engineering

• Reticulated Armor Webbing adds +800 armor to your gloves, and is the best enchant you can get for that slot.
• The tank goggles are nice, and were definitely what made Engineering godly in later TBC, but nowadays you’ll be replacing the highest iteration with Naxx10 gear. Hopefully this will change in later patches.

Herbalism

• Lifeblood, a HoT that eventually heals for 2000hp. But that’s what healers are for, or yourself while soloing.
• You also have the chance of finding certain items that can be consumed for boosts to AP or SP… at the cost of physical or magical damage vulnerability. Clearly a no-go for a tank.

Inscription

• Master’s Inscription of the Pinnacle is the best possible shoulder enchant for tanks right now. Much better than the exalted Hodir one.
• I have a warm place in my heart for Scrolls of Recall. Alas, cannot be used in combat, so no Bubblerecalling.

Jewelcrafting

• Dragon’s Eye Gems are an amazing boost, for two reasons: because they’re prismatic you can cut three Solid Dragon’s Eyes and put them in any bothersome red or yellow slots, and the net benefit of using three Solid DEs is 51 stamina, or 581hp. Best hp boost from any profession right now.
• The Monarch Crab is also an awesome trinket. If gemmed right (aka Solid Sky Sapphire and Solid Dragon’s Eye) you’re looking at 137 stamina from one trinket alone. There’s no comparison in pre-Ulduar trinkets as I type this.

Leatherworking

• Fur Lining – Stamina looks awesome at first glance (90 stamina/1024hp!) but consider that you can’t also pick up Enchant Bracer – Major Stamina for 40 stamina. So you’re only looking at a net gain of 50 stamina (seeing a pattern here? …pardon the pun).

Mining

• Toughness, which gives 50 stamina. With talents that comes out to an extra 570hp. Pretty nice EH boost, although, unlike the extra health from Blacksmithing or Jewelcrafting, this number will remain static as further patches come out (unless a Rank 7 is introduced).

Skinning

• Master of Anatomy, +25 to your crit rating (or .54% crit chance). Nice for threat I guess, but overall you want to be focusing on EH or avoidance/mitigation for buffs.

Tailoring

• There’s really nothing here for tankadins, as you would imagine. The one slightly interesting thing was the Lightweave cloak embroidery that would proc sometimes for an additional 1000 to 1200 Holy damage. Great for threat I suppose, but it’s being changed in 3.1 to proc for additional spellpower instead.

Overall, looking at all the benefits above, the best profession combination for a tankadin is Jewelcrafting/Blacksmithing. Right now Mining would be marginally better by 2 stamina, but eventually when epic gems are released, BSing will become better by 10 stamina. So it’d be better to hang onto Blacksmithing and reap the benefits in a future patch.

What professions do you deck out your tankadin with?