Wrath Heroic Tank Stats Guide

First of all please accept my apologies for the lack of posts over the last few days.  I’ve been way to busy playing WoW to actually write about it.  However I want to speak about my experiences in heroic dungeons.

Think of this as one Orcs mission to become Heroic crit immune!  I’ll speak about a few instances in particular but mostly I’ll focus on my own individual ride to gear up.

After the break.

I can’t remember the exact stats I hit level 80 with, but with some AH buying I gained a decent amount of defense/armor/hp to be going on with.  Now as you know me and Kirioth play together pretty much exclusively which means we are prone to doing stupid crap!  We decided to junk normal instances altogether and jump directly into heroic dungeons.

I was not crit immune, in fact my def was below 490!  As I say, I can’t remember the exact amount I had, but it was low, way to low.  This hardly made any difference to us though….’gamble and win’ is what we say!

Hang on a sec, lets look at the ‘recommended’ stats for a Heroic Warrior tank.

Defense

First of all lets speak about defense, this is taken from TankSpot (one awesome tanking resourse site)

540 Defense Skill is the necessary minimum for entering 10-man and 25-man raiding content. At this point, we consider our characters to be “uncrittable” by most mobs, and we can begin to focus on other stats. Please note that, when handling Heroic 5-man instances, you will only need 535.

So for heroics we want this magical number 535.  Why is this lower than 10-25 man content? It relates to mob level, mobs are lower level in Heroic dungeons when compared to raid instances.  To make 540 def for raid content you need to get together a total of 689 defense rating on your items.  Its a lot harder to get your defense capped for Heroics this time around in WoW, instead of me linking god knows how many items I’ll refer you again toTankSpot for Cider’s Easy 540 Defense Gear Guide

Health Points

There are a lot of people out there who will tell you what you need for this stat.  Take it from me you only need 20k to start with.  You should be very close to this figure after completing the grind to level 80, however you can still raid the AH for the last few items you need to bring you hp up to the 20k standard, these items being:

Waistguard of the Risen Knight Drak’Tharon Keep random zone drop

Tattered Castle Drape Utgarde Keep random drop

Crusaders Square Pauldrons Culling of Stratholme random drop

You need to basically look for items with high hp/defense on them.

Armor

Again going from personal experience (which is always best right? ) I say your looking at 19-20k here to get started with.  With good AH buying along with completing the right quests and taking the best tank rewards you should be close if not over this amount.  If for some reason your not at this amount but are very close, then don’t worry you should be ok.

So going back to me and Kirioth.  I do not for one moment condone going into Heroic dungeons under geared as the tank, that’s just stupid.  But with Kiri backing me up (the world class healer he is) we could afford to take the gamble!  We completed the Culling of Stratholme, both Utgarde instances and The Nexus before I eventually went over the defense cap.  It was by no means easy, in fact it was damn hard.  Shield Wall , Enraged Regeneration and Last Stand became very close friends indeed!

For hit rating see:

Kusasi Hit Rating Guide (look for the melee hit link)

I hope this post helps all my Warrior homies out there, its a basic guide of baseline stats, not including dodge parry etc….But as I say this is more than enough to start your Heroic tanking career.

God bless and good luck fellow tanks.