Picking best stats for tanking in WoW Classic

Classes Warrior
1

So as a warrior tank in WoW Classic I know which stats I should be looking at, but I don’t always know which should take priority. I’ll give some examples further down.

So I know as a tank I need the following for damage mitigation:

  • Defense
  • Stamina
  • Armor
  • Elemental Resistance

Then for actual threat generation:

  • Strength
  • Agility
  • Crit Chance
  • Attack Power
  • Hit Chance

And then for just leveling/soloing I know there’s some value in Spirit just for reducing your downtime between fights.

The problem I run into is when I have two pieces of gear with different stats and deciding which one is better. For end-game I think it’s a little easier as I realize I need to reach a defense cap but beyond that it’s not so obvious.

Here I’ll compare two pieces of gear that made me scratch my head:

Icemetal Barbute

  • 383 Armor
  • +15 Strength
  • +10 Stamina
  • +7 Spirit
  • +10 Frost Resistance

vs.

Southsea Head Bucket

  • 355 Armor
  • +6 Strength
  • +15 Stamina
  • +4 Defense

On the surface, the Icemetal Barbute seems so much better, but while it has 28 more armor and +9 more strength, it also has 5 less Stamina and no Defense. Similarly I’ve had issues trying to decide between +10 Stamina Rings or +120 Armor Rings.

So to break this all down into questions:

  1. How do I decide between Armor vs. Stamina?
  2. Is +Defense worth stacking at lower levels or only for capped warriors?
  3. At what point should I prioritize threat generating skills (Strength/Agility) over defensive ones (Armor/Stam/Defense)?
  4. For threat is it better to stack Strength/AP or Agility/Crit Chance?
2

Gear is more situational in Classic. A few things though:

Armor is very good (against physical damage). It increases the value of the stamina you already have. I always look for armor if I’m tanking melee trash or hard hitting boss. It’s also the only tank stat that still works when you’re stunned (can’t avoid any hits).

Stamina is always good against all kinds of damage, but against magic damage armor is useless so it’s all about stamina/resistance there.

Defense is good and you want it but I don’t think you can reach the cap in pre-raid BIS so just do what you can. I wouldn’t sacrifice a lot of armor/stam for a bit of defense.

Defense is avoidance and helps to push critical strikes off the combat table. The more you have, the less likely you get crit. However, you can always use shield block for a big chunk of block % and that’s mostly enough.

Hit is your most important threat stat. Reaching the cap is hard. Just wear some and try to get some nice tank pieces with hit.

Agi is good but it’s not something you’ll stack over other stats. Gives a bit of crit armor and dodge, all good stats.

If you were making a max threat set you would have hit cap and some str/agi pieces in there (and maybe even straight crit %)

As for sacrificing survivability for threat. You need to live to do threat, so in the early days, just live. As you get experienced and the raid gears up, work towards increasing threat gen. You’ll get a feel for each encounter and how to adjust your gear.

As for the 2 helms you posted, I’d wear the icemetal. You’re low level, a scrap of defense is not going to mean much. Armor tanks the melee damage you’ll take a lot of from dungeon trash and strength is threat.

Later on your choices will be clearer between 200armor and 10 defense perhaps, or hit vs dodge, and you can make a choice based on the encounter and the rest of your gear. Keep good tank pieces in your bag. Sometimes you want avoidance (dual wield boss, lots of adds, or just hard hitter), sometimes you want armor/stam (surviving really big hits), sometimes you want threat (living is fine, dps are pushing), sometimes fire resistance (heavy fire damage).