A while ago I did a post on tanking blues from Northrend instances. I got a surprising amount of use out of that list. I’d take a peek at it before running with some PUG to make sure that I have quests whose rewards are actually useful.
I started running heroics yesterday — two Violet Hold clears so far with very little trouble! — so I thought I’d build a similar post for heroic drops. I made it through a few screens of heroic drops, picking out pally tanking pieces by hand, before I got tired of it.
Let’s be honest. Those posts, without analysis, are just static snapshots of WoWHead searches. Let’s learn to go straight to the source.
I sat down to come up with a set of filters which would let us narrow in on tanking items. I had been putting this off because I thought it would be pretty tedious but, you know, it wasn’t all that bad. I’m still surprised by the number of people I find in-game who haven’t heard of WoWHead. I figure more exposure for them translates indirectly to more effective pugs for all of us ;).
The search we’ll be analyzing is linked as ‘tanking heroic drops‘ over on the sidebar.
We want to see all items. It’s tempting to zoom in on plate items, but then we miss rings, amulets, cloaks, weapons, etc.
This is a great way to filter out a lot of items that we can’t use. Staffs, relics, idols, daggers, ranged weapons — all that nonsense. This is a lot easier than trying to filter those all out individually.
This is how we limit to five-man heroic drops. We’ll see later that we have a filter for items that drop from heroics, but that includes “Heroic” versions of 10-mans, what the rest of us call 25-mans. We just have to know that ilevel 200 is used for Heroic drops. One way to see this is to look at a given item slot and sort by ilevel. You’ll can correlate the source column with the ilevel column.
These are our very broad searches. Searching for strength and stamina here is for the benefit of the non-plate slots. This stops us from seeing all those int and spirit rings, for example.
Honestly, I’m not quite sure why we need this. It seems that PvP items are sneaking in past the heroic drop filter, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I continue my fine tradition of pretending that PvP doesn’t exist by filtering these items right out.
If you take a look at the results now you’ll see that we’re getting really close. There are still lots of drops for our DPS plate brethren in amongst our nice tanking pieces, though.
This is where our specific filters come in. If you flip through the results you’ll notice that haste, armor pen, and crit are never combined with tanking stats. At least, as far as I could tell. We filter almost all of the DPS items by only seeing items that don’t have these stats. There are still some DPS pieces left that only have hit or expertise, though, because those two stats are definitely found along-side tanking stats. That’s OK, it’s only a few.
We have to be careful with these specific searches. They reflect how Blizzard is currently spending an item’s budget on stats for a given role. It could change at any time, and it might not even be valid for higher level items which might start to spend their increased budget on more stats. It’s very situational. But this set of searches seems to work pretty well for heroic drops for now.
Et viola. In the end we’re left with a nice comfortable list of about 40 tanking items that drop from heroic 5-mans in wrath. Instead of a static blog post, though, you have an interactive WoWHead search page to browse through! You can zoom in on item slots by refining the search with subcategories. You can sort by a given stat that happens to be a priority. You can search amongst the results for bosses and zones. Good times.
So go, search your brains out. Don’t let WoW blog authors do it for you.