Woo, I’m a veritable posting machine today, aren’t I? Here we go, with another Q&A post based on search results that led people to my site. I take ten of them that I KNOW my site doesn’t adequately answer (or that I find really serious enough to answer) and post the search terms and my responses here.
I am absolutely not going to delve into Toravon stuff, because I’ve already answered a lot of that.
1) death knight tank stack all strength gems
Uh. No. Please don’t do this. Please stack stamina (traditionally) or things like parry and dodge if your avoidance is particularly low, or defense, if you’re not at 540 yet. Strength gems, particularly the +20 epic strength gems, are DPS only. Got it? Good.
2) grid dreamwalker
I know, right?! Seriously, make a focus macro and put it on a really easy to mash keybind and hit it whenever you zone out of the portals. I spent Dreamwalker healing my focus frame, meaning I could still target other mobs and judge them as well as spam cast Holy Light at the dragon.
3) lvl 74 druid tank gear 3.3
I’m probably not the best person to ask for this, but honestly, I felt that the BOA leather stuff worked really nicely for me as I tanked through the lower 70s. That’s the Stained Shadowcraft Spaulders and Stained Shadowcraft Tunic. Good stam, good agility (which are really your primary stats for health, dodge and armor). For everything else, I went for anything that had dodge on it, followed by stamina and agility. No joke, I tanked with Writhing Longstaff (with 35 agi on it) forever. ETA: Read the comment below by “gnome of zurich”, who really has a great breakdown of what bears should go for!
4) rhok delar bow without black dragon sinew pre tbc
Not sure what you’re trying to say here, but regardless, you cannot make Rhok’delar without the Mature Black Dragon Sinew. You can’t. That’s the string of your bow. But never fear, if you’re on the quest after getting the Ancient Petrified Leaf you can farm Burning Steppes black dragons for the sinew.
5) slime spray tremor totem
No reason to drop Tremor Totem at all on Rotface. There’s no fear or charm attached to his Slime Spray.
6) valithria dreamwalker gaining buff
I’ll presume you mean you gaining Emerald Vigor. I basically suck at getting and keeping the buff, but here’s what you should theoretically do. Zone in to the portal as soon as you can. Hit jump to fly directly up. You should have some green orb thingies right above you. Hang out in them for a bit, they’ll eventually burst as you move across them. Keep moving into the orbs and watch your timer for the end of the portals. Do your very best to hit an orb with like, 2-3 seconds left. That should afford you enough time to keep the debuff (it’s a debuff, not a buff, go figure) stacking between portal phases.
Pain in my ass. :P
7) valithria dreamwalker vigilance
Okay, I don’t have proof for this, but I would imagine this would be silly. First, she’s not generating any threat. Secondly, she’s not taking any damage. The suppressors channel to make her take less healing, but I’m pretty sure she’s not being damaged at all.
Buffs that DO work and are useful include, but are not limited to: Guardian Spirit, Sacred Shield, Power Word: Shield (for disc priest buffing purposes)
Good thinking outside the box, though. I’d recommend dropping Vigilance on any healer who stays outside of the portals.
8) glyph of holy wrath citadel
I don’t think that Glyph of Holy Wrath is ever better than any other major glyph you can use, as a paladin. Certainly not for a holy paladin. But ultimately, there are WAY too many boss fights that don’t have any undead adds to justify that glyph for a DPS rotation or as part of a tanking rotation, IMHO.
9) name of gem purple +ap/mp5 cut
You’re looking for an Infused Dreadstone or Twilight Opal. Having said that, if you’re a hunter or an enhancement shaman with mana issues… there may be bigger issues than you looking for mp5 on your gear.
10) sindragosa los in corner
I haven’t done Sindragosa yet, but this sounds suspiciously like a sort of an exploit. Exploiting is bad. Don’t do it.
I got lots of Rotface search terms too, but I’ve already addressed most of those. I should really get going on that ICC raid guide, one of these days.
So, I forgot to ask you this before:
If your goal for Valithria Dreamwalker is to simply drop massive tonnes of Holy Light on her, why not simply do:
/cast [target=Valithria Dreamwalker] Holy Light
Then just spam the heck out of that?
There’s a couple of reasons why I didn’t go that direction:
1) I didn’t think of it at the time. ;)
2) I wanted to be able to use my regular clicks to cast things like Sacred Shield, Flash of Light (for the hot) and Beacon of Light and Lay on Hands, as well as Holy Light.
I find the focus works quite nicely, particularly once I got my focus frame accepting Clique-enabled commands. :)
Ah, still not really familiar with Holy Paladins (getting damn good at my prot pally, but still). I agree, if you want to do more than one spell, and want to track stuff like hots you want a focus frame.
“For everything else, I went for anything that had dodge on it, followed by stamina and agility.”
This isn’t really right. Agility is better than dodge for bears. It gives slightly less dodge than dodge, but the 2 points of armor is worth more than the difference, plus it’s a mediocre threat stat. Agility is the best stat to stack for mitigation. Stam is the best stat to stack for expected time to live up until around 40k health (where agi becomes better), and the best stat for worst case TTL (i.e. when the rng hates you) up until some ridiculous health threshold like 70-80k where armor takes over.
Basically you want to gem stam until you are over 40k health and over whatever wcTTL makes your healers comfortable, then gem agi. There is no reason ever to gem dodge as a bear. Agi is close enough to stam generally that it always goes in red slots where you care about the bonus (and to activate your meta) unless you are undergeared for your current progression content and need the stam to avoid one-shots. If your dodge gets too high (60%+ after DR) then defense becomes better than agility, but agility is always better than dodge.
This is not to say you won’t often take a str/dodge item over an agi item, but the reason you do that is usually because the str/dodge item is designed for tanks and has bonus armor or extra stam where the agi item has arpen, crit or some other dps nonsense, and because str being our best threat stat is not useless. It’s not because dodge is better than agility. In the rare cases where you can get a tank specific item that has agility instead of dodge, it’s always excellent for bears.
Gnome of Zurich: Thanks so much for the detailed analysis! Now that my little bear/tree combo is 80, I’ve been enchanting/gemming stam where possible and agility where it’s not. I have not gemmed dodge or anything silly like that. ;D The reason I went for dodge when I was levelling, around 72-75 or so, was that there seemed to be a lot “of Eluding” (dodge/agi) greens that were either dropping for me randomly or very cheap on the AH. That’s not to say I didn’t replace those items ASAP with actual decent gear. ;)
But thank you so much for the breakdown. I know I really appreciate knowing more about what a bear desires, even if I’m mostly relegated to being a tree these days. :)