Defender's Code vs. Furnace Stone

I prefer the Furance Stone due to the passive avoidance and the use which lately seems to always benefit from the uptime of armor buffs from the healers.

I'll be definatly going with the 2 stam trinkets, I got the one from Yogg 10 and it's sitting me at 35.2 K unbuffed, if Ignis would stop being so greedy and drop his the next window should be the 36 K mark unbuffed.

As well....
Our guild is still not full at the moment and we do pug 10 or more slots to do Ulduar 25, and I must also say there is a psychological advantage of the dual stam trinkets as many pugs will judge weather to stay or not based on a tanks health pool, should it be that way...no but it is. (were downing 8 bosses in one night in our pug ulduar 25 runs, could be better, could be worse).

I have a 'thing' I dislike the use of double stam trinkets, it seems too much EH/Stam stacking for my liking, I like to go one stam, one avoidance, promotes the balance we should look for. (There is no EH vs Avoidance debate, there is only a 'where is the balance I can find of EH and avoidance at my/my guilds gear level).

Can I side track this a little?
Furnace Stone vs. General's Heart. Gernal's Heart dropped and I jumped for joy and got it, only seen Furnance stone drop once and let our MT have it. I love the use effect on the Furnace stone, a nice chunk of armour I see coming in handy and honestly after using General's heart for near 2 weeks now, I never notice when the proc is up. I feel like I got screwed out of DKP just because I saw a pretty shiny =(

I think the main thing that will lead me to dual stam trinkets is when I'm not getting enough bonus from the 105 dodge on Furnace Stone. When I have enough dodge on my gear that it's giving me a less significant amount of dodge (right now it gives 1.8% on vs. off: 26.77% dodge vs. 24.97% dodge; I'll probably replace it when it's under 1.5 or closer to 1) then I'll use EoG or ultimately Royal Seal/Heart of Iron if I can get them both. I really like the Dodge/Stam combo but that may just be nostalgia for my BC days of Moroes' Lucky Pocket Watch/Commendation of Kael'thas.

Inimicus wrote:I have a 'thing' I dislike the use of double stam trinkets, it seems too much EH/Stam stacking for my liking, I like to go one stam, one avoidance, promotes the balance we should look for.

This was very true in the past -- there were quite a few adherents to the "double stam is never the answer" school. This is less relevant with 3.1 itemization, since there are a number of stam trinkets that have very, very nice on-use avoidance.

Specifically,
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=45158
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=46021

Having powerfull enough "clickies" that you can get an extra CD is pretty good I think.

A combo such as Rune of Repulsion + Defender's code while weak seperatly, work very well together as dodge and parry ratings don't DR each other.

Using double dodge rating clickies is suboptimal when you want to use both at once.

The best clicky is armour or health related though, since they don't suffer from DR in the same way.

Passive dodge with on use armour > passive armour with on use dodge, imho.

Moroes' Lucky Pocket Watch/Commendation of Kael'thas

- Word!

imo:

/use is the primary part of the trinket to consider, the /equip a secondary consideration

/use dodge/parry = "oh shit.... I better get lucky and dodge the next hit else it's curtains"

/use armor/health = "uh oh..... big damage incoming, wtb more mitigation"


Of course both of those categorys overlap a bit, depending on how hard the hit will be & on how many heals you're likely to recieve etc, but trinkets are lifesavers, the passive benefits are just a secondary consideration. Since when it comes down to it, it's only in that "oh shit" or "uh oh" moment that all of your defensive stats are really put to the test, and so look at them in respect to surviving the next 5s or the next 10s


In that respect, I would use either Defenders Code, Heart of Iron or King Laine's as my 2x preferred trinkets and macro them to both go off together (I haven't analysed which of these 3x trinkets would be best, would depend alot on your existing gear to gauge diminishing returns, since with 2x /use dodge up + high existing dodge I'd imagine the diminishing returns would shaft you, but not sure by how much). Then would sub in heart of iron when I knew I was going to go into a fight with large predictable damage e.g. General if you're not kiting.

In reference to stam > armor.

Majiben wrote:No it's not.

By any reasonable calculation, 111stam > 850 armor.
It isn't even close. 111 stam is nearly twice as good as both EH and tankpoints than 850armor.

For now, I run stam + Furnace Stone. As my gear improves, I may very well move to 2xstam trinket once I can reach 102.4 buffed without resorting to wearing inferior Block rating gear.

Inimicus wrote:Can I side track this a little?
Furnace Stone vs. General's Heart. Gernal's Heart dropped and I jumped for joy and got it, only seen Furnance stone drop once and let our MT have it. I love the use effect on the Furnace stone, a nice chunk of armour I see coming in handy and honestly after using General's heart for near 2 weeks now, I never notice when the proc is up. I feel like I got screwed out of DKP just because I saw a pretty shiny =(

Contributing to the side track here. I picked up General's Heart for my ilevel set because I run Monarch Crab/Furnace Stone and farm U10 and U25 for the trinkets that have yet to drop (*rage*.) I got curious and went out in front of Org with an Enhance shaman friend of mine and had him beat on me with General's Heart on.

Few things I noticed that led me to believe it is garbage in every form of the word: All of zero scaling, <1 PPM (although the testing wasn't very extensive as I got disgusted with it very quickly), it only applies to hits AFTER it procs, and it can not proc off a dodge/parry/miss and *maybe* blocks. I didn't check the blocks out too much as I was killing my enhancement shaman, but it never proc'd when I had holy shield up. I would've tested more extensively but I realized that knowing whether it's a $20 hooker or a $1 hooker doesn't changed the fact that you're getting screwed using it.

Note: If you ever use this over Furnace Stone you better be getting hit for exactly 105 damage many times in a 10s window or you should be taken out back and put down.

/h8 this trinket

gibborim wrote:In reference to stam > armor.

Majiben wrote:No it's not.

By any reasonable calculation, 111stam > 850 armor.
It isn't even close. 111 stam is nearly twice as good as both EH and tankpoints than 850armor.

For now, I run stam + Furnace Stone. As my gear improves, I may very well move to 2xstam trinket once I can reach 102.4 buffed without resorting to wearing inferior Block rating gear.

The reason why their statement is wrong is that it's misleading and only skin deep. It would be like saying that gas is more important than brakes in a car. You can't make a blanket statement like that especially when it doesn't consider various situations including those where you can't afford to be a mana sponge and those where armor is not a factor. They are both absolutely important to your preformance as a tank and if you neglect either one for the other exclusively then you are doing yourself and your raid a disservice.

Majiben wrote:The reason why their statement is wrong is that it's misleading and only skin deep. It would be like saying that gas is more important than brakes in a car. You can't make a blanket statement like that especially when it doesn't consider various situations including those where you can't afford to be a mana sponge and those where armor is not a factor. They are both absolutely important to your preformance as a tank and if you neglect either one for the other exclusively then you are doing yourself and your raid a disservice.

Re: Blanket Statements
Like your blanket statement?

Re: Neglecting Armor
Since the base armor that comes on every piece of plate is rather large in comparison to what little armor you can stack, it is rather hard to "neglect" it.

My point is that the value of stamina in the selected examples 111stam vs 850 armor is a vastly superior allocation of tanking stats. Losing 1300hps is not an equitable trade for 850 armor. Not having that extra 850 armor hardly makes one a mana sponge.

Pardon me, but what false blanket statements did I make in regards to armor and stamina?

You seem to be under the impression that there is little armor to be gained through seeking it out. Now from a pure upgrade/sidegrade view you can gain 2k armor before inspiration. 5-10% increase in armor is not small.

As far is it being hard to neglect stamina, it isn't If you direect people to take the item with higher stamina then you will frequently have slots where there are optons of a lower ilvl but higher stamina, Ignoring armor in this case will cause them to loose hunderds of armor and a significant increase in average hit size. Poor advice like stamina>armor is what cases people not to realize that http://www.wowhead.com/?item=45313 is such a great EH CD.

And you never addressed that both stamina and armor are siuational. You better bet that there are situations where armor is better than stamina and there are situations where stamina is better than armor. Neglecting to recognize this can only hurt you.

Here's how I decided my choice.

First come first serve.

There are plenty of tank trinkets to choose from and we all know any combination of any of them is not a wrong choice. However as we progress we may just end up with them all in first place. Meaning we'll have them all and use them in certain combos to best benefit the fight we're on.

I then thought about it, 2 stamina trinkets imo help with newer content because bosses hit harder and harder and with this new gear our BV is crap with good MT gear So more EH via stam trinkets is a good makeup for the hurt in BV.

In this whole fight of armor vs stamina... how come no one is addressing the AD boosts here? The more sta you can stack the greater the AD threshhold. Before Maji jumps all over this, I am not saying you should neglect armor when choosing other gear... we are talking about trinkets here. IMHO double sta trinkets would be hands down better for a paladin tank. You can go back and forth all day about the relative benefit of armor or avoidance in the trinket slot (and only in the trinket slot, that is what we are discussing here right?) but at the end of the day how is an extra roughly 320 sta not superior for a paladin tank? More threat, more EH, boost to AD threshhold, and to top it all off a couple nice on use abilities, versus what? 1-2% dodge and an armor on use, or a measely 850 armor in comparison. No thank you, double sta for me please.

Edit: I reread this after posting and realized I was being vague in my reasoning here let me explain just a tidbit further.

I prefer getting more bang for my buck. So stats like agi vs dodge in red gem slots appeals to me, or in the area of trinkets where you can really customize your gear.

Obviously you will be switching trinkets out for certain encounters, but everyone has a general tanking set. To me the sta trinkets would simply be better for most encounters seeing as how you will be getting hit by magic possibly or what have you that cannot be mitigated by armor. In this sense armor is lackluster. I like stamina because (and especially for us paladins like stated above) it is more flexible in what sort of damage you can take and survive.

Again, and I really hate that I have to stress this because of a few die hards, we are talking about trinkets here, in no way would I take a mail piece (to use an extreme) or a clearly inferior plate piece (ilvl or otherwise) that has more sta simply because it has sta, don't be silly.