Time to (re-)build your gear set. But how?
So you know what gear sets you want to build. You know the stats and you got the items. A whole inventory full of helmets, chestpieces and trinkets. But what now? How to start? Here’s my approach.
When we started our first attempts in Ulduar I dropped all my sets and went for effective health, effective health, effective health. Over the last couple weeks I got myself a lot of up- and sidegrades, and with all those gems and enchants things got very, very confusing. So yesterday it was time again to get naked.
Start off naked
Everything goes into your inventory. Switch to your tanking spec. Sort your gear, I did it top to bottom slot-wise, so all helmets, then neckpieces, shoulders – and so forth. Put them side by side in your bags, then create your sets – empty. I always carry four, in order of importance:
- Effective Health (max. Stamina & Armor)
- Avoidance (max. Parry, Dodge & Miss)
- Threat (max. Exp, Hit & Str (for SBV + AP))
- Block (max. Block & SBV)
Just for the record: I use Outfitter.
Forget Enchants & Gems
This is the really painful part. Most of your pieces are very likely fully gemmed and enchanted, and for a lot of money so. But if you want to build the most effective sets you’ll have to use the item’s plain raw stats. Forget the gems in there. Forget the enchants. The socket bonuses, on the other hand, I took into account.
It’s really annoying, there should be an option like “ignore gems & enchants” on the character sheet (is there an addon that does this?), but when min/maxing you’ll have to go through with it.
Switcheroo
Now open your character sheet, activate your most important set and add to it the best suited helmet. Don’t forget: Ignore sockets & enchants, the raw stats + socket bonuses and socket potentials are important (two blue sockets? calculuate 48 stamina, two yellow sockets? calculate 24 stamina + bonus, or 48 stamina and dropping the bonus. I told you this is gonna be painful!). We’ll get to the gems & enchants later in the process.
If you’ve got your best helmet save it to the set, and activate the next set (in order of importance). Find the best helmet for that set, and so on, until all your sets have their helmet assigned. Continue this little switcheroo for every single slot, and you’re halfway done.
Pen & Paper time
We ignored all current & potential enchants & gems because we want to min/max the sets in order of importance. So, with all your sets complete, equip your most imporant set and write down (or, if you’re fully stocked with the supplies, apply) the enchants, gems and other item enhancements that most benefit the current set, for every single piece.
If there’s multiple choices get the one that suits any other sets this piece is part of (a red socket in your EH helmet may be used with an orange or violet gem of any kind with +12 stamina – if that helmet is part of your EH and your Avoidance set you’ll want to go with +12 stamina and +8 defense rating, if it’s part of EH and Threat you will want +12 stamina +8 expertise, you get the idea). You’ll soon realize why pen & paper are helpful little fellows here :)
Rejoice over the results
Repeat this step for every single piece of equipment, always top-down in priority of your sets, and chances are you’ll find yourself surprised with how much more efficient the results are.
I, for example, had my EH set at 31k health and roughly 40% avoidance + 15% block. Now it sits at 31.5k healt, 45% avoidance and 20% block. And I even took my tempered titansteel pieces out because of their horribly weak defense stats, so if really maxing out health alone I’d be at 32.5-ish k.
Side effects
After you’ve done this once you’ll automatically find yourself with items gemmed & enchanted to the item’s strength. A basic piece of advice which is often being put aside when a fresh upgrade comes in, because there’s this one stat you could improve and the one the item is really strong at is strong anyways. In the end, enhancing strengths will give you way more efficiency and flexibility than balancing out itemization.
Beware, this process is time-consuming (took me a whole gaming evening, 3 hours straight) and expensive, but the results are worth every single invested second and copper.
Does this count pieces that can be used for multiple sets when you change out the gem/enchant? I’m still relatively new to the tank role and I have troubles recognizing some pieces as blk/eva/EH. I have started to collect multiple items and gem/enchant them differently if I think they can be used in multiple sets but that is really starting to fill up my bags. I’ve just started to collect tank pieces from Naxx gear and I have just about every piece of heroic instance/badge gear but have a hard time cataloging some pieces.
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