BlockCap or Stamina?

I'll firmly agree on the fact that block that any avoidance that gets you over that block cap is firmly and easily far superior to more stamina.

I finally got a helm, and I shot from 100.2 to 104-105% with proper gemming.

The difference is astounding to say the least. You really do not appreciate just how huge of a difference it is till you see it in reality. Your chances of survival don't go up by a small amount, they really do go up exponentially because no longer will you talk a full blunt hit to your dome, you will mitigate at least some of every attack as long as you're rotating your HS CD correctly.

If you've done the quests in Icecrown that require you to kill like 3-4 80 elites, well I just click yes, accepted quests and went out and tanked all 4 of them. I didn't realize I had a "helper" for each one till I saw someone else do it, and I was like, shit, I don't have to tank and DPS them all for 230-250k dmg? I did 3/4 that way, and then used the trinket item on the last one.

That, to me is the equivalent of knowing that you're disgustingly OP. Going against a melee mob for 5-7 minutes to DPS it down, and losing literally about 500 hp over that entire duration.
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Block cap is definetly not to be underestimated. I'll take a steady damage intake over a huge pool of health anyday.
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I'll take the counterpart of what has been, as we saw, massively stated.

I'm, as I was before WOTLK, handling 2 different and complementary points of viex atm, hence building 2 tank stuffs.

the rule : block cap > sta is not applicable in some, few atm, boss tanking cases. the more obvious example is OT patchwerk. It doesnt really matters if you always block 2K out of the 25K hits from patch while having 28K HP buffed. On that fight, I'm tossing away all my loved BR/BV stuff, and equipping max sta/armor stuff, and it makes a lot of difference.

As I was saying, at the moment, this is the only (known to me) fight were you don't really care about BR/BV, it's contribution being heavily outweighted by pure armor and plain Sta.

I'm not saying that what was stated in the previous posts is wrong, I'm just saying that nax's a joke, and maybe the real PVEHL will soon come, with challenging fight were bosses are hitting without boxing gloves. all the BR/BV stuff may suddenly become limited to trash packs, and being obsolete on boss hitting for 20K.

we can always say that yes, BR/BV's still useful, turning those huge 20K hit into little less huge 18K hits. what I'm thinking is the stats points you'll spare on BV/BR will be much more useful in these circumstances invested in armor, sta, and real avoidance (last due to those **** DR...)

my 2 cp.
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Akadurgrim (Ysondre EU) <Wild>
Tankadin/healadin/retadin

First of what's your point? Second of sources matter and at least citing the name of the speaker helps, and third of I did make a mathematical mistake. Worst case senario is a 1.44 swing when you were prefectly double parried while wielding a 1.4 speed weapon within a 1.4 second window with .04 seconds room for error. Unless you get the the expertise hard cap that senario still exists however remote or nonlethal it is.

Expertise is a mitigation stat in the same way parry is a threat stat, barely and never worth gearing for over stats that major in the minor effect.
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I made a port to exodar. My friend proceeds to MD Alar onto the AFK tank, and we both run. People ran with us, until the port, and realised it was to exodar. Only three of us went through. Turns out people would rather die than go to exodar. -Infurnus

If you want to play the "most hp" epeen game... roll a drood.

I lean towards gearing for uncrushability over straight stam because most damage in the game come from melee attacks and less spikey damage makes for happy healers. *

However, it must be pointed out that there will be times when you get knocked back, feared, silenced or even just lagged out and you will an unmitigated hit, and stam helps with that. And the other argument in favour of stam is that you can't block, parry or dodge spell damage.

My personal plan of attack, having already achieved uncrit, is to get a couple of % above uncrush (account for DR) and then stack stam.


* This is, I feel, a sadly neglected point. There are four classes which can tank so there's a question of what we can bring to the table that the other 3 can't. I think that "more consistent incoming damage" is a rather more compelling argument than most.

See, I'm not block capped though am trying to get a set together to be such. A few of the central pieces, however, are drops from heroics that I'm just not getting. However, as I upgrade the rest of my gear from Naxx10, 25, and Emblems of Valor, I'm gaining significant amounts towards the block cap every time I upgrade a piece. I'll get there eventually and can't reliably until I get some heroic drops or bigger upgrades from 25mans/badges.
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