World of Warcraft®

Here is the story with me: I have leveled up my tank here to the point that he is pretty much ready to begin raids. Maybe a few trinket items and rep for shoulder/head enchants. My guild has not yet formed up a raid group and if they do, not sure if they will have room for me. I am looking for a group that I can run with on a regular basis. Here are my self-buffed stats below:

STATS
135K HP;
Avg iLevel: 347;
+4.55% Hit;
20 Expertise;
1225 Mastery;
28777 AC;
11.77% Dodge;
17.59% Parry

In the mean time I will be finishing off my Disc Priest and then perhaps a DPS type. Contact me either here or in game. Thanks!

Happy Raiding!
Necroixx

Self buffed I would guess you'd want to be more around 150k HP if not higher to begin raiding. 135K is easily heroic-capable though.

Just means you gotta buy Stam and Stam/Other gems (since you'll want socket bonuses), and enchants and whatnot. I didn't look at your gear, so I don't know if you've done that yet, but being that your ilvl is about on par with mine, and my self-buffed HP is like 152.2K or something (I just know it's 150K+) without any non-rep epic gear, you might need to work a bit more on gearing this character than leveling another character (unless it's a JC or enchanter and you like making your own stuff for your tank).

I decided to stack more avoidance gems than pure stamina gems in what slots I felt appropriate. I've heard that avoidance is more important than stamina in these new raids.

However, I do freely admit that I am lacking both the head/shoulder enchant due to rep and am working on that quickly.

Well, I am not so much saying to stack stamina, since I've never really been the kind of guy to do without socket bonuses (even when people said it's best to just stack one stat) as far as tanking goes. You definitely want to do the hybrid gems for the non-blue sockets, especially since the socket bonuses themselves are very nice to have now.

I did however, remember that you are not a Warrior, so you wouldn't have access to the Commanding Shout/Fortitude buff, so you'd naturally end up with less than I would "self-buffed".

I might have a spot for you in our 10 man raid, which we've only just started this week. We managed to get Magmaw down our first night of attempts.

We're an (almost) level 8 Guild, with raid times on Thursday and Sunday @ 630 server. Those times are still up for debate though.

I'd like to get you in a heroic or two to see how you handle things, if you're interested. Just get a hold of me with in-game mail or I'll check back here.

I think avoidance sounds pretty good to me, since it's no longer "tank got hit twice in a row, he died". More testing and analysis should probably be done, however.

Gaps in coverage may occur while your healers are running out of fire.

It's not really a question of one being better than the other now, it's having a good mix of both.

From what I'm seeing, for Blood Tanks, Stamina and Mastery are the stats you're looking for, keeping your dodge + parry around 20% (not including swordshattering which doesn't have diminishing returns on it).

That's only my opinion though. There's an article here with some links back to pwnwear. They suggest gemming avoidance after 150k hp.

http://wow.joystiq.com/2011/01/04/lichborne-the-great-death-knight-cataclysm-tanking-stat-weight/

[e] Satori mentioned in one thread that the Stamina link to minimum death strike heal doesn't apply to raids because if you're worried about the minimum heal then you're not really in a high risk survival situation. So Stamina shouldn't be connected to DS/Mastery. I can agree to that.

http://www.tankspot.com/showthread.php?71144-Cataclysm-Death-Knight-Tanking-Satorri-s-Guide-to-the-Bloody-Future/page14

that's just a general view of it. I can't comment raiding-wise since we only started raiding yesterday.

Good luck! I hope you find a raid you enjoy grouping with. :)

@Collapser

I might have a spot for you in our 10 man raid, which we've only just started this week. We managed to get Magmaw down our first night of attempts.

We're an (almost) level 8 Guild, with raid times on Thursday and Sunday @ 630 server. Those times are still up for debate though.

I'd like to get you in a heroic or two to see how you handle things, if you're interested. Just get a hold of me with in-game mail or I'll check back here.

Thanks for your reply. I should be in game here tonight as well as the rest of the week. I will try to look you up for a couple of Heroics.