What to gem/wear/upgrade/glyph!

As I said in success thread I've got a lot of upgrades during last week for my tankadin*. I think my biggest problems are somewhat lowish avoidance and relatively low threat, though latter might come from non-optimal cycle as I often get interrupted by having to tell people to get out of fire. Of course better weapon would help quite a bit aswell.
*) http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet ... &n=Dractor forum doesn't seem to like having ' in URL.

First on gemming. As you see I have several agi/stam ones but I think I did a bit wrong by using so many of them. The gem in weapon is kind of retarded, I have no idea what I was thinking when I used it (lol @ 34 expertise \w glyph) and I'll probably put a pure stam one there as soon as I log in. With the resi enchant on shoulders I should be able to handle the drop in defense.

My current idea is to regem stuff like this:
chest - 30sta -> 10agi/15sta + 9 bonus = 6sta vs 10agi. Looks reasonable tradeoff.
gloves - 10agi/15sta+6sta bonus -> 30 stam = 10 agi vs 9 sta. Agi probably isn't worth that much.
belt - 10agi/15sta+9sta bonus vs 30stam = 10agi vs 9 stam. Same as gloves
pants - 10def/15sta+10agi/15sta+12sta bonus vs 2x30 sta = 10def+10agi vs 18 sta. Pretty much equal, I think I'll keep it for until I get higher avoidance somewhere else.
weapon - lulz, no questions stam is better for bonus but again, resi must make up for lost defense.
trinket - 10 def+15sta+9sta bonus -> 30sta = 10def vs 6 sta. Defense wins.

From the looks of it I'll regem my weapon and chest while leaving the rest as is. I'm not regemming pants, belt or gloves because I'll probably drop my avoidance a bit too much then. Anyone thinks I should do anything differently?


Now gear. In bags I also have these things that could be considered as sidegrade or upgrades over my current stuff:
Furnace Stone
Signet of the Earthshaker
Stoneguard
Archaedas' Lost Legplates
Repelling Charge

Furnace stone+repelling charge+lost legplates make for a decent avoidance set at a cost of TONS of stamina, I'm not sure if it's worth wearing any of them over the stuff I have atm. Stoneguard would be nice for some extra hit at a cost of stam from socket I guess. Ring I'll probably only use for easymode raids and heroics, for those I'm also gathering emblems for BV pants. Anyone has any suggestions on if it's worth replacing some of my currently worn items with those for U10/25 and TotC10? I think for U10 I can take the stam hit quite easily, for the rest I should probably keep my currently worn set. My champion emblems are not coming in at too high rate as I'm not doing 25-man TotC on this char (yet?) and I have missed a few dailys. I think I have around 30 of them atm and I'm thinking about getting either ring or libram. Only bad thing is my parry seems to be a bit lowish so libram might not be the best option.

For glyphps I have vengance (+10exp), RD (+8% hit on taunts) and DP. I think I might be able to change vengance one as I seem to be swimming in expertise but to what? Extra survivability cooldown through HoS might be nice but I rarely die to predictable burst, it's pretty much always burst damage that gets me. Though it migh be because I've not done fights like Mimi or Vezax yet.


[edit]
I'll post my Ulduar 25 up to Auraya + Ulduar 10 up to Freya reports just in case someone can read something useful out of them:
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-O ... 4M/fights/

I agree with your gem proposals.

If you can afford it, look to replace your cloak enchant as well. You're also losing avoidance by relying on the defense to cloak enchant instead of the agility enchant.

I think you might undervalue armor. I say that because you use the Platinum Mesh Cloak instead of the Cloak of the Shadowed Sun. You could improve your effective health by considering the armor enchant to hands and cloak as well. You also use the Figurine over the significantly better Furnace Stone, which should be considered not an avoidance trinket but an effective health trinket with that massive on-use effect.

For threat problems, the Signet of the Earthshaker would help a bit at a relatively low cost, at least for trash or high-threat-required fights.

I think that's it for my comments.

Thanks a lot for comments

Digren wrote:If you can afford it, look to replace your cloak enchant as well. You're also losing avoidance by relying on the defense to cloak enchant instead of the agility enchant.

True but isn't def on back still than gemming for defense? Thing is I just replaced my gem in weapon and am at 538 defense, luckily resilience allows me to be uncrittable but dropping +16 from back would put me to crittable range without some gear/gem changes elsewhere. Having dual-stam trinkets, weapon and ring without any def rating makes things a bit complicated. I could wear sand worm band or signet of eartshaker but I think it's not worth it, those two other rings seem to be just too good waaay better. Or then again maybe loosing ~500 hp from mark of the relentless -> sand worm band might be worth it considering I'd be loosing some useless expertise while gaining decent amount of defense and some str, I could then even replace the back enchant. Hm ...

Digren wrote:I think you might undervalue armor. I say that because you use the Platinum Mesh Cloak instead of the Cloak of the Shadowed Sun.

I don't use that back because I don't have it I guess I should start doing more naxx, there a re still a few upgrades there. Too bad pugs generally fail after 1-3 wings

Digren wrote:You could improve your effective health by considering the armor enchant to hands and cloak as well.

I though armor on gloves is engineer-only pleasure?

Digren wrote:You also use the Figurine over the significantly better Furnace Stone, which should be considered not an avoidance trinket but an effective health trinket with that massive on-use effect.

True, it's an awesome avoidance+triggered melee-EH trinket but loosing ~108 stam (when using JC gem somewhere else)+decent on-use avoidance on very short CD doesn't seem like a good idea, am I wrong? Changing the trinket puts me around 34.3k unbuff hp or ~1.3k difference with the crab. I think it would be more than enough for guildruns but I'm pretty much only pugging with my char so quality of other players is often questionable at best and higher healthpool might make healer's lives a bit easier on average.

Digren wrote:For threat problems, the Signet of the Earthshaker would help a bit at a relatively low cost, at least for trash or high-threat-required fights.

Yeah, that's a decent option. I guess I can't get all good at the same time, would be lovely to get high EH+threat all in one package

You can't directly compare the cloak enchant swap to gemming for defense. Well, if you do, then the direct comparison is X defense = X agility = 1.5X stamina, as those are the relative iPoint values.

Past that, you have to look at what you give up in any given circumstance, and how it affects the overall package. In your case, staying with the defense enchant to cloak and stacking stamina in gem sockets may make sense, but it makes most sense in the overall package where you try to wean yourself of dual stamina trinkets. As long as you're in the mindset that you can't give up any stamina anywhere, it will be difficult to ever replace your lower-grade trinket. I went through the same thing with my Sonic Booster but eventually decided that 4% mitigation on demand was better.

There's a 240 armor enchant to gloves. It's slightly better than the 18 stamina enchant when you consider 1 stamina approximately equal to 11 armor. It's not great and I usually don't recommend it (as I instead recommend the 20 agility enchant), but I've seen tanks trying to maximize effective health take it. The advantage of armor over stamina is that it makes the healing you receive more powerful, instead of just adding more health to be healed.