Tools of the Tank: "Which piece of gear is better?"

Got the idea for this post from a conversation I had with a death knight friend of mine who's trying to build a tanking set. After discussing what bonuses he should be focusing on, I asked him what his combined mitigation/avoidance was just to get a feel for what it looked like compared to mine or Solannis'. He didn't know how to check that quickly, so I gave him a macro I found about a year ago in this article on Veneretio's blog. He seemed pretty happy about it, so I thought I'd share it again in case anybody missed Vene's post or the Tankspot article that he got the macro from (I'd link it, but the link he had doesn't appear to work for some reason).

To start with, here's the macro I'll be talking about:

/run local a,b=UnitDefense("player") a = (a+b-400)/25 ChatFrame1:AddMessage(format("Need 102.4%% combined (miss+dodge+parry+block). Currently at %.2f%%", 5+a+GetDodgeChance()+GetBlockChance()+GetParryChance()))

For those out there who aren't into macros, I'll summarize what this does. When you create this macro and hit it, it'll give you a little message that says "Need 102.4% combined (miss+dodge+parry+block). Currently at [your combined mitigation/avoidance]%." Originally this macro was used by tanks to find out whether or not we were uncrushable/unhittable. Essentially once you got enough gear that the sum of your miss/dodge/parry/block percentages was 102.4% or higher, no regular hits or crushing blows would be able to hit you - everything would either be avoided or blocked. For warriors, it wasn't as big of an issue because we would just use Shield Block whenever it was up; you only needed a minimal amount of combined avoidance/mitigation to go with that to be past the magic uncrushable/unhittable number whenever Shield Block was up. Paladins got more use out of it because they could actually maintain uncrushable/unhittable with Holy Shield. They would focus on getting their gear to 72.4% mitigation/avoidance, then as long as they were good about using Holy Shield, they were golden. Bears... well, they had miss and dodge, so this macro wasn't as useful for them.

Nowadays though we don't have to worry about crushing blows, but 102.4% is still the unhittable mark. For warriors, this is kind of an unrealistic goal with how our Shield Block techniques have changed. Paladins can still do it pretty easily with Holy Shield, so they still look for getting to 72.4%. Death knights and bears aren't getting to unhittable without some ridiculous gear and gems, but this macro does still serve a purpose regardless of your choice of class.

While most of us aren't concerned about being unhittable now, a high mitigation/avoidance is still useful. When you're swapping around gear, you'd prefer that your survivability go up. This isn't always easy though given that a lot of gearing up involves getting sidegrades that drop as many of those percentages as they increase. Some sidegrades are pretty obvious in nature because they'll make up for a shortcoming we've got (i.e. Hit Rating or specific Dodge/Block Rating in early tanking gear) and only take away from something we've got a surplus of (i.e. Defense Rating in early tanking gear). With others though, it's helpful to have a tool to help look at all of this info.

I'll use me for an example and swap around one piece of gear (rest of my equipment is in that armory link, so I won't show it here just to cut down on clutter). Let's start with the Titansteel Shield Wall, my first 80 shield with an 18 Stamina enchant on it. With that shield equipped, I'm at 543 Defense skill, 28047 HP unbuffed, and according to that macro I've got a combined 69.64% mitigation/avoidance. Now let's swap that out for my Skull of Ruin with a 20 Defense Rating enchant on it. Looking at the numbers now, I'm at 27927 HP unbuffed (down 120 health mostly from that enchant), 540 Defense skill (still uncrittable), and 70.75% combined mitigation/avoidance. So in this particular case, I'm down 12 Stamina and I know I lost some spread-out avoidance from the Defense Rating, but my combined mitigation/avoidance is higher. Here's where you would go into the individual numbers to see where you're increasing and decreasing; in this case I'm losing 0.09% Dodge and Parry with the Skull, but I'm gaining 1.41% Block and 60 Block Value. I can then apply that information to what I already know about my equipment to decide which shield I would rather use. For me it's the Skull due to how AoE heavy everything is now and the fact that my Block Value took a hit from some recent upgrades; depending on the state of your gear, you might have opted to stick with the Shield Wall.

All this macro talk does leave out one important detail: how do you know if something is an upgrade when it's still on the boss' corpse? The macro does you no good in this scenario since it only works with items that you're wearing. For this we need to turn to an outside source. You could try sites like Tankspot or TankingTips and look at their equipment lists. You could do your own research. These are definitely useful and I'd recommend them, but their information is sort of in a vacuum - whatever lists they have won't take the stuff you're wearing into consideration. For that we'll need another tool: RatingBuster. I found out about this from reading BigRedKitty's blog and it provides a lot of context to the numbers you get from the macro; the macro honestly becomes kind of secondary to RB's info, but it's still helpful to have a one-button "how squishy am I?" macro for quick reference. Once you open it up, it should be preconfigured with most of what you need, but you might make a few tweaks just to get the details you want. For that, just enter this and you'll get the configuration window:

/ratingbuster win

Once you're in here, you can make whatever changes you want. Rating will let you pick whether to break down ratings into their specific percentages. Stat Breakdown lets you choose what derivative values to show (i.e. Strength = Attack Power and Block Value for warriors). Finally, Stat Summary lets you change what sums you'll show (check off whatever individual values you want to see). Once all that's set up, every time you look at a piece of gear, it'll tell you what you're gaining or losing compared to your current equipment.

Hopefully these two tools will be of use to people out there. It's all stuff that involves quick math we could all do with the time, but when you've got quest rewards to choose from and a cranky raid leader that's yelling at you to roll or pass on the loot, it's nice to automate some of it.