Category Archives: Tanking

Modeling Seal of Insight

Seal of Insight is the last major paladin mechanic that has yet to be added to the simulation.  The last piece of the puzzle, as it were.  There are a number of reasons I’ve put off adding SoI, some of … Continue reading

Posted in Simulation, Tanking, Theck's Pounding Headaches, Theorycrafting | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 13 Comments

On Measuring Survivability

The last few posts have garnered a lot of comments, and some of them have indicated that there’s some misunderstandings about the simulations we’re performing.  This set of simulations started back in September, and has been evolving ever since.  And … Continue reading

Posted in Design, Simulation, Tanking, Theck's Pounding Headaches, Theorycrafting | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 33 Comments

Stamina: Updated Smoothness Data

In the last post, I mentioned in passing that there was an odd thing happening when a gear set dropped from 7k to 6k haste.  I elaborated a little on what I thought was the cause: we were crossing the … Continue reading

Posted in Tanking, Theck's Pounding Headaches, Theorycrafting | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 54 Comments

Stamina Addendum: Socket Stuffer?

Earlier this week, I made a pretty lengthy post discussing the merits of stamina as a smoothing stat.  One of the common (and expected) criticisms was that I used the usual itemization ratio of 1 haste : 1.5 stamina for … Continue reading

Posted in Tanking, Theck's Pounding Headaches, Theorycrafting | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

Stamina: Keeping You Up Longer

What’s the most misunderstood element of tanking?  There are a myriad of topics you could offer as guesses.  But the question I field more often than any others isn’t about rotations, talents, glyphs, or cooldowns.  It’s not even about which … Continue reading

Posted in Tanking, Theck's Pounding Headaches, Theorycrafting | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 93 Comments

Sacréd bleu!

The comments section of last Friday’s post hosted some interesting discussions. Wrathblood pointed out that some of the avoidance gear sets were performing about as well as the Control/Haste set, and Kihra cautioned against counting out Control/Mastery entirely. There was … Continue reading

Posted in Tanking, Theck's Pounding Headaches, Theorycrafting | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 33 Comments

Is Nothing Sacred?

I’ve been hinting all week that there was some big news coming up regarding our gearing choices.  If you’ve followed the last two rounds of smoothness simulations, it looks an awful lot like Control/Mastery is the solid winner.  To put … Continue reading

Posted in Tanking, Theck's Pounding Headaches, Theorycrafting, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 60 Comments

Control Shift En-tier

About a week ago, Wrathblood asked me to take a more thorough look at the Tier 15 2-piece bonus. The earlier simulations I ran were based on a lower-ilvl gear set (496) which was more constrained in its itemization, and … Continue reading

Posted in Tanking, Theck's Pounding Headaches, Theorycrafting, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 27 Comments

I can go make a blog in 2 minutes

Last week, a few people alerted me to a thread on the official WoW forums in which some players were arguing about the usefulness of AskMrRobot, and in particular its default stat weights.  As loyal readers, you probably already know … Continue reading

Posted in Tanking, Theck's Pounding Headaches, Theorycrafting | Tagged , , , , , , , | 55 Comments

Patch 5.2 WeakAuras Configurations

It’s been a few months since I last posted about my WeakAuras strings for tanking.  Nothing seems to have broken in 5.2, so if you’re still using the old ones from 5.1 they should continue to function just fine.  However, … Continue reading

Posted in Tanking, Theck's Pounding Headaches, UI | Tagged , , , , , | 30 Comments