Stages

The tank stages on Maintankadin may vary a bit in implementation, but they're based on the same assumption. The differences are mainly a matter of granularity and viewpoint concerning the breaking points.

I'll give my view of the different stages, based on a higher granularity than I use myself.

1) Newly dinged 85. This happens the moment you become 85. Theoreticaly all the best gear in the game are available for you from this point on. In reality you are clad in a hopeless mix of gear suitable for questing and levelling. Most of what you have should be a wild mix of 312 greens to 325 blues.


2) Prepared to start your career as a max level tank. This ought to take you a day or two. If you've levelled an alt it could also be a matter of a few hours. You'll run the initial Molten Front quests to unlock the vendor Zen'Vorka and gain access to a couple of ilevel 365 taking items. You also do the Thrall quest chain to get the tanking cloak. Depending on your stash of gold you should visit the AH to shop a few upgrades.

You are now ready to tackle all level 85 five man dungeons on normal difficulty.


3) Prepared to tank hc. This really means that you have amassed the gear needed to tank the first Cataclysm five man heroics, no matter which one chance gives you when you try your luck in the LFD. You have spent a few more days, maybe a week, doing daily quests and tanking normal difficulty dungeons. During this time you should have gained a few ilevel 333 blue items as well as ranking up your reputation with the zone-factions by means of tanking dungeons with a faction tabard.

You are now mainly geared in ilevel 325 and 333 blue items. This set is boosted by three or four 365 items. In all likelyhood you have also bought a couple of ilevel 353 items on the AH as these costs only a few hundred golds. Almost all your gear ought to be properly gemmed and enchanted, albeit with second best in slot gems and enchants unless it's the 365 slots.


4) Prepared to tank the Troll instances. You have spent a week or two learning how to tank when things make a serious attempt att killing you. Running Cataclysm first tier heroics should see you having access to the best shoulder and head enchants in the game as well as getting you the reputation needed to collect a few ilevel 359 gear. While you might still be saddled with a single green quality item you should prepare to get your head smashed in by the trolls.

You are now mainly geared in 346 blue quality items, but your gear is boosted by six or seven slots of ilevel 353 or better quality.


5) Prepared to pug Cataclysm first tier raids. Basically this was true the moment you were ready to take on the troll heroics, but verbal abuse when you tried your hand at the previous tier of raiding content should have forced you to clear up some more slots. This, in all likely hood, is the result of gaining a few drops from the trolls as well as unlocking the vendors from the Molten Front. You shouldn't have to spend more than a few days at this stage.

You are now mainly geared in 353 and 365 epic quality gear. You also have access to one, or possibly two, ilevel 378 items due to collecting valor points. By now you are in reality hysterically overgeared for pugging the initial raids, but at the other hand it's a way to learn the ropes.


6) Prepared to raid. Unless you joined a raiding guild, the previous stage sunk you into a quagmire, and you have easily spent a month pugging for little gain. The problem here is that albeit you are geared for raiding the current content you're unlikely to do so without a guild. Still, 980 valor points weekly and quite a few pugged easy mode raids should have you prepared for harder content.

You are now mainly geared in 359 and 365 epic quality gear. Four slots are of ilevel 378 epic quality, and you are in reality well overdue to tank the Firelands raids at normal difficulty. This is most likely your end-game.


7) Hard mode raider. You got yourself into a guild and have had your arse handed to you in the Firelands raids. However, reputation gained there as well as maybe a drop or two should have you geared to fail miserably when one of the usual tanks don't show up at raiding time. You'll either revert back to a stage 6) tank, or you'll spend most of your free time developing the skills needed to handle content that truly is out to get you.

You're now mainly geared in 365 and 378 epic quality gear. The ilevel 391 gear beckons.


8) Trailblazer. You've killed it all. WoW starts again when the next content is available on the Public Test Realms. Everything is farm.

You're balancing your 391 gear against the lower ilevel slots which in reality are an upgrade depending on which boss you're planning to pull. You're not reading this blog, because 'casual' is about the least proper word to describe you.



Now, we can't have eight tanking stages when we make gear lists. We have settled for five, and that is likely one too many. However, settling for a lower granularity means cutting corners, and that's the reason you see different numbers sharing the same piece of gear. Also, totally unaccounted for is the knowledge among us gear-list makers that a simple rank is very seldom entirely true.

Some fights require extra health, some that you take as little damage as possible when it counts, and some that you simply take as little damage as possible. Where one fight has you scrambling to get that magic 102.4, another might see you stacking stamina like there was no tomorrow. In reality we can't afford, mostly as a result of time (the raid won't wait for us to regem and re-enchant), to be perfectly configured for each fight. So we make gear sets, and those gear sets have no stage ranking. They're simply an assortment of gear available to us to do the best job at the moment.

Some terminology

102.4:

The holy grail of shield tanks. A boss level opponent (during this expansion usually level 88) has you needing 102.4% CTC (see below) to remove unmodified hits from the possible outcomes of a physical attack.


Avoidance:

It's the sum of miss, dodge and parry. In percent. There's an inherent 5% miss built into the game, and you can find your dodge and parry percentage by looking at your own character interface. Very often players tend to add block into this number.

How do you know? Well, if they quote an avoidance number above 50%, then they have added block.


CTC:

Combat Table Coverage. It's simply avoidance plus block. Again in percentage.


MDR:

Mean Damage Reduction. You won't encounter this acronym as often as CTC (or a wrongly used use of the term avoidance for that matter). It stands for how much physical damage you'll avoid taking statistically. Maximizing MDR is not the same as maximizing CTC.


Pull:

Casually means the very moment when you (or someone else) activates the opponent, usually by attacking.
In raids the term pull very often includes the first thirty second of the fight. The reason is that this is the period where a tank risks losing aggro to someone else.


DD:

Damage Dealer. Often called DPS. Any member of the raid/party who's not a healer or  a tank.


RDPS:

Raid Damage Per Second. The total sum of all dps. If a boss has an enrage timer, then you can easily calculate the RDPS needed to down it in time. From that number you can estimate the dps needed for every DD involved. Observe that ths number may not be sufficient in reality. There might be parts of the fight where hammering away at the boss is impossible for one reason or another.

Diminishing returns explained

So, you've been told that DR, or diminishing returns, means that you get less when you get more, and that didn't make a whole lot of sense to you.

For those of you who don't run the number crunshing naturally, but still want to really understand what DR is all about.

Picture an airgun. One where we can pump in different amount of air to decide exactly with what speed the bullet leaves the barrel.

Pump in some air. Fire the gun straight up in the air. After a specific number of meters the bullet will turn and start falling back to the earth.

Pump in more air. Enough air to make the bullet leave the barrel at exactly double the speed as your last attempt. Fire it up into the air again.

How far up did it go? Double? No.

Gravity pulls at the bullet. You'll need to fire it at far higher speed than double to reach double height.

Now look at your gear. 1500 dodge rating. Will 3000 dodge rating give you double the dodge percentage? No.

DR pulls at your dodge. You'll need a lot more than double dodge rating to reach double dodge percentage.