80 DK Gear Decision

Aelobin

DK Twink (80 / 85 / 101)
I'm gearing up a DK to do some WotLK raids with a few guildies, and I've decided on all my tanking items except the gloves.



The choice is between: [item]Stormforged Gauntlets[/item] and [item]Hardened Obsidium Gauntlets[/item].



Yes I know the first one has intellect on, but hear me out. Those gloves are ilvl 308 which means they can take the 65 mastery enchant (along with having a lot of mastery already). The Obsidium ones can only take the 36 stamina enchant (which still puts them at 3 stamina less than the Stormforged).



Even after converting a quarter of the Obsidium strength into parry rating, the Stormforged still has more tank ratings on them (after the enchant is added). I'd lose out on 264ap (or more) but I'd still gain 63 crit.



Mastery is the best for DK tanks at lvl 80, followed by dodge and finally parry. Any opinions/advice on this choice?



Edit: Here's a link to a comparison of the 2 items (enchanted + reforged)
 
id take the str gloves
 
For the added AP or just because walking around with int gloves is silly? :p

You would get lots of whispers going " YOU FAGGOT WHY ARE U USING INTELLECT YOUR DK MMMMKK"

And personally I would go for the strength gloves.
 
well looking at the comparison...

by wearing the str ones you get a ton of str and a decent chunk of parry & still have mastery

if you wear the others its basically just for the mastery since 7 dodge is barely anything, the crit is just a threat stat and 3 stam isnt gonna make or break you
 
Well, technically the more strength you have, the more parry you have and thus less melee attacks hitting you, and since intel does nothing for dks (havent thought of an intel build like some random people did in wrath...which was interesting haha) the strength will help you out more imo that is, unless you have amazing amounts of parry already



*even though it is a small amount of parry of course, but its also only like 1% extra mastery at 80, I just would rather have the strength :p*
 
The reason for mastery being best is because it isn't RNG based and isn't subject to diminishing returns (right now I have 42 mastery which is 261% of death strike heal as physical absorb).



With nearly 25% parry already, I'm trying to stay away from it as much as possible when other ratings are available. The int gloves have 82 more mastery rating = 1.79 mastery = 11.17% extra absorb.



The strength will of course be useful for threat/enrage timers :p Here's a link to my 80 DK
 
The reason for mastery being best is because it isn't RNG based and isn't subject to diminishing returns (right now I have 42 mastery which is 261% of death strike heal as physical absorb).



With nearly 25% parry already, I'm trying to stay away from it as much as possible when other ratings are available. The int gloves have 82 more mastery rating = 1.79 mastery = 11.17% extra absorb.



The strength will of course be useful for threat/enrage timers

The intellect gloves are probably more of a thing you would equip right before a boss, and the strength gloves are pretty much all round.

Also i would hate to be walking around Stormwind then get countless troll whispers from people.
 
that 11.17% extra absorb sounds nice...but lets be real, a boss is still gonna take that and more away in one swing, rite? so imo take the str gloves to improve threat ceiling and parry, while also having a bit of mastery. your healers will hardly notice a +/- 11% absorb difference on your shield imo. but the parry is a wholly avoided hit which saves mana etc
 
Hmm yeh I guess you're right. In order to really compare mastery to avoidance I'd have to find out the average damage that 80 bosses deal per hit.

If I always used FU runes for deathstrikes and had no haste, that would leave me with... (((deathStrikeHeal * 0.112)/4)*bossSwingTimer)/bossSwingDamage >= 0.0175 ...to make the mastery more valuable than the parry on the str gloves.



Just went into EoE10 and Malygos was hitting me for between 7.6k and 12.2k (although he may have had a power spark buff at the max end) resulting in an average hit of 9.9k. Usual boss swing timer is 2 seconds and my DS is healing for 3.9k. That leaves the equation as 0.0221 >= 0.0175, which is true (thus on Malygos, mastery is more valuable than avoidance). Can't get the damage values for ICC atm as I cba to clear the trash lol.



That equation doesnt take into account using FU runes for diseases etc, but it also only uses the minimum DS heal. I also have a little bit of haste left over on some items after reforging.



Edit: Guesswork here, but if an ICC boss hit for 15-20k, that would be 1.46-1.09% "equivalent avoidance", meaning Mastery could quickly become less valuable than avoidance in higher tiers. Although... the ICC buff = more healing + more absorbs so I dunno.
 
I honestly had never thought of using the Dark Succor glyph for off tanking :O



Omw to ICC to test if the buff increases the absorb (as well as heal). Will edit this post when I've checked.



Edit: Ok that's really strange. My Death Strike was healing for 6.6k in ICC (I assume that will include the 30% extra healing from the buff). That means with 261% mastery I should be getting... 17.2k absorbs. I was only getting 13.3k absorbs. So I'm not getting the amount of absorb I should be, before even trying to figure out if the absorb part of the ICC buff adds to it.



Edit2: My Death Strike heal is taking into account the 30% ICC health buff and 30% healing buff... ((55741hp * 1.3 hp bonus) * 0.07 min DS) * 1.3 healing bonus = 6.6k. The only thing I can think of is that they are "removing" the 30% absorb buff even though it isn't applied, which would be (6.6k*2.61)/1.3 = 13.3k
 
Yea, its amazing but I think its being changed next patch (the glyph that is)



Anndddd that would make some sense, because an extra 30% on that would be amazing XD haha because then that would pretty much be op times 100000...even though it doesnt matter that much anymore with cata gear/old content haha



Soooo I am not sure, I posted a gm ticket and will be hoping for an answer...and a gm that actually knows what they are talking about of course, because I would like to see how it works also, if the ticket takes too long I will just go in there on my 85 and test it out
 
here is the wowhead comparison page.





click me




we are looking at



132 Str

88 Parry (1.94%)



vs



3 Sta

82 Mastery (1.79)

132 Armor

105 Crit (2.29%)



it's pretty clear that if you don't care too much about Str, if Mastery is "that" important, and if money isn't an issue, then Stormforged Gauntlets (the blue one) is a better choice.



i also stack mastery on my 80 rogue. my evis hits like a truck. because mastery scales so good at 80.



http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/azshara/tacticss/simple
 
@Powerwordhug: I think the mastery absorb must be based on the usual Death Strike heal. That would mean healing debuffs (on bosses like Halfus) don't effect our block-equivalent mechanic. I'm not sure if that is actually the case, but I also vaguely remember reading somewhere that Vampiric Blood doesn't effect Blood Shield. That would explain why, even after the ICC buff to DS's healing, it still only provides the same absorb as without it.



@glancealot: Mastery is so awesome at 80, especially as a blood DK (yesterday I managed to solo Magtheridon with ease, and also the first 3 trash packs in Stonecore... with a lot of dying). As for the wowhead item comparison, I posted one in my original post which had the items reforged too.
 
i have never played a DK so...



why do you reforge dodge? do you have some ability that lights up when you dodge instead of parry?
 
We often have more parry due to the rating on gear and str->parry conversion, which means it's more subject to diminishing returns. For me I have 20% diminished parry but only about 18% diminished dodge (I would get the actual ratings but I'm not logged in my 80 DK atm).
 

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