#0 - Feb. 20, 2009, 9:54 p.m.
This is a third post in a series of topics dealing with tanking issues. These posts are the distillation of those discussions, and are presented here formally for the community to debate in a peer-review manner. While the first two such discussions were mainly warrior concerns, this one and future topics are more broad in their scope.
In this topic, we closely analyze something that every single player has, that tanks have the most of: health. Currently, all of the different tanking classes have highly varying levels of health when in a raid, while wearing gear with a similar purpose. Within, we will address the implications this has on balancing both now and for future content in the game.
To start with, we are going to lay out some basic numbers that tanks can achieve currently, with explanations of how we can predict what we will see in the future.
The gearsets you will see here are tanking sets that maximize health within reason - that is, nothing like "Polar Gear" or greens "of stamina". Stacking stamina is simply something that is common for progression, for various reasons. We will elaborate, but the short answer is to survive the worst-case scenario.
The values derived in these tables are averages of what to expect for tanks in similar gear. It is possible to obtain more, but isn't necessary to illustrate the point.
What you must understand for the scaling is that currently gear scales at 13% per tier - meaning every tier of gear ahead of the last, is 13% more powerful in terms of itemization points. This is already known and accepted by the community. The actual stat distribution spent on stamina could vary anywhere from 10-15%, because not every stat has to scale equally (although due to itemization formulas, usually they all go up some amount regardless), as long as the entirety of the item's rating value goes up 13%.
