The Lich King Makes Me Aware Of Something

Lich King is getting there. My team has put in some good time on him by now and I can smell blood in the water. People are eager and discussing the fight in GChat without any prompting from me and that's always a good sign.

Incidentally, I've been thinking about my gear since facing up to the King, and I think I need to reevaluate a lot of my normal tanking set and tweak it for Lich King (and eventually, hard modes) which requires a lot more survivability than I was anticipating. Part of this was also inspired by Rhidach's post on Righteous Defense, about the stats revealing from the latest Armory Data Mining efforts.

I'm going to scale back on my threat a bit and start going for a bit more armor, a bit more Stamina, and a tiny bit less mitigation.

What does that mean?

It means getting rid of all of my DefenseRating+Stam gems and replacing them with pure Stam unless I have a huge Stam socket bonus.

It means getting rid of all my Strength+Stam gems and replacing them with Agility+Stam gems for the bonus armor.

It means replacing my Armsman enchant with Stamina.

It means replacing my +10 stats with stamina.

I might also finally cave and get the Pillars of Might crafted. And I might also buy the off-set hands, even though that's going to kill my Hit Rating.

But if I do that, my threat will go in the toilet and I don't always have a rogue or a hunter to Tricks/MD me, so unless in 25s, where I can always depend on those, I think I have to stick with SOME level of threat.

I guess I've been so heavily invested in my Retribution set lately that I've sort of neglected my Protection set for a while. I've even taking to having the other Paladin Tank and a Death Knight who's also spec'd for tanking but usually goes DPS tank so I can go Ret on farm kills (which is, essentially, all content but the King). So, while doing 10k DPS as Ret is fun and all, I need to focus on my real passion and make sure my gear is as good as it can get for Lich King.

Nothing major, but these minor little things might let me stay alive an extra second through a cooldown less Soul Reaper if I absolutely need to tank him through it while the other tank is running away to drop a defile or something.

Anyway. It's interesting how harder encounter make you reevaluate your gear set that you've been comfortable in for ages. Lich King has been the most fun in raids I've had in a while. And I'm proud of my team for sticking with it without complaints or issues.

I hope to report back tomorrow with a kill shot. Wish us luck. :-)