The Process of Upgrading Gear

Published by Alinden under Druid, Tank, World of Warcraft on January 18, 2008

Seeing as I’ve just done this recently, I thought I’d go through process I use when upgrading my gear. This is more related to tank gear, but the same principles could be applied to DPS or healing gear.

When it comes time to look at my gear I take a holistic approach, the goal being a tank with well rounded stats. Generally it’s no good to excessively favour any particular stat. It’s not going to do anybody any good if you avoid 90% of the physical hits but die like a clothie when the 10th one connects (or the mob uses a non-physical ability). The exception to this would be specific encounters where you would likely maintain a purpose-build set of gear (e.g. Hydross the Unstable). Ideally I like to run a majority of any instance with one set of tanking gear, so I guess I’m really talking about my “standard” tanking set.

I usually set some goal for various stats as being the next level of achievement. When I first started gearing up for tanking I wanted to reach the point where I had 20K armour, 20% dodge and, of course, at the same time maintain uncritability (if there is such a word). I left stamina (HP) as a by-product at the start. This progressed to 25K armour, 25% dodge and 12K HP, then 28K armour, 28% dodge and 14K HP, and so on. The current goal is 32K armour, 40-odd% dodge, 16K HP, and 800 sustained threat per second (TPS). Read the rest of this entry »

Updated Links

Published by Alinden under Druid, World of Warcraft on January 18, 2008

BigBearButt over at (you guessed it) Big Bear Butt Blogger, recently updated his blogroll and has basically shamed me into doing the same thing. After checking various blogs it appears that the New Year is a popular time to do so.

As part of the process I checked my web stats to see who has been visiting, and from where, and I was surprised to find a larger list that expected. As a matter of etiquette, I avoid pimping my blog on other sites without invitation, but it seems that through various means (probably Google) I’ve ended up in a web ring of sorts, which is awesome. Thanks to all those that have included me on their site in some way.

As a result of all this, please note the links I have included so far and expect more to be added shortly. Most of you probably already read at least some of these blogs, however some were new to me, and I can’t say I’ve found one that isn’t worth reading.

Druid Points Calculator Issues

Published by Alinden under Druid, Tank, World of Warcraft on January 18, 2008

I’ve received some reports from people that the Druid Points Calculator is not working, so here’s the skinny on what’s happening:

The Druid Points Calculator uses a combination of the WoW Armory and Wowhead for various functions. The actual item stats come from the WoW Armory in a nice XML format, and the tooltips are supplied by Wowhead.

Unfortunately, the Armory has been borked beyond recognition on and off since before Christmas, and of course it’s offline often during maintenance. This is what’s causing the Druid Points Calculator to be … less than inspiring … at various times. Sometimes a simple page refresh will fix it, other times not.

I’m working on moving everything across to use Wowhead exclusively because it’s a far more reliable source, but it will be a way off yet, so please bear with me (no pun intended).

So, What’s on the Shopping List?

Published by Alinden under Druid, Tank, World of Warcraft on January 17, 2008

Over the Christmas break I spent a fair bit of time improving my DPS gear. Primarily I’m a tank, but I had neglected DPS gear for a while and wanted to increase my versatility. Having done that with items like [Shadowprowler's Chestguard], [Swiftstrike Shoulders] (OMG, how expensive were these) and [Skyguard Silver Cross], I’m currently on the hunt for the following:

[Waistguard of the Great Beast] to replace [Tree-Mender's Belt] – I picked up the remaining [Badge of Justice] I needed in Zul’Aman last night, so I’m going to grab this tonight. It will mean dropping some armour for stamina and a bit of +hit. The hit rating will replace the +hit I will lose when I replace the [Boots of Natural Grace].

[Vengeful Gladiator's Dragonhide Tunic] to replace [Merciless Gladiator's Dragonhide Tunic], which should provide a reasonable upgrade to armour, dodge and stamina.

[Footwraps of Wild Encroachment] to replace [Boots of Natural Grace], which means dropping some armour in order to pick up a small amount of dodge and a reasonable boost to stamina.

I’m not entirely sure how these changes will turn out in practice, but on paper they are fairly good upgrades. In the end, it comes down to the entire package, rather than any individual item, so I will be checking the combat logs to gauge the impact. If things don’t turn out so well with the belt, I’ll swap the gems and use it to replace the [Girdle of Treachery] in my DPS set.

Druid Points Calculator Updated

Published by Alinden under Druid, Tank, World of Warcraft on January 2, 2008

I have updated the Druid Points Calculator over the Christmas break to correctly calculate the bonus from Haste Rating and Ignore Armor, which weren’t included previously. The results are now pretty much in line with Emmerald’s draft results, in most cases.

The next step is to bring it in line with Emmerald’s recently released beta list, which is available HERE.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do about the hybrid use of the armory and wowhead. The armory is often unreliable and is generally the reason why results aren’t returned by the calculator. I’ll give it some thought and try and sort something out.