My TankPoints Addon suggested that I'd be getting an additional 4798 tank points from it, mostly stemming from the nearly 5191 armor. /boggle. Here's the screenshot:
The prospect of 5191 more armor from a weapon was, needless to say, mind boggling, and I beckoned Miss Direction over to have a look at it. She did so, and with a pat on the shoulder, kindly reminded me that the 370% additional armor contribution from items that Druids in v3.0.9 gain from Survival of the Fittest doesn't count if the armor is on your weapon. Only from cloth and leather items.
Just exactly like it says on the talent text.
Head firmly reattached to my neck, I decided just then to make a short post about this minor TankPoints bug, along with another tip that I hope will save my fellow Feral Tanks some headaches later on:
Tip for TankPoints and RatingBuster users:
When you're using TankPoints to evaluate Bear gear, remember to switch into Bear or Dire Bear form. The addon calculates the effective health values based on your current form, so you might miss out on a good piece of tanking gear if you evaluate it while in Cat or Caster form. The same rule applies if you're shopping for gear at the auction house.
Here are a couple more screenshots evaluating the exact same staff while in cat and caster forms, to illustrate the point:
The moral of the story is to know your addons and keep alert--they're a useful and helpful metric, but are not infallible. Don't follow any metric off of a cliff. All of that aside, I absolutely love both TankPoints and RatingBuster, and use them every day.
To make myself feel better after this, I slunk over to Zul'Drak and, with the help of a guildmate, retrieved the Staff of the Sorrowful Chieftain.
Nice addon, but is it being updated at all? Since 3.0.8 which has been a long time it is so that the armor doesn't count.
ReplyDeleteI myself use rawr. I mostly know what items I want and I go and figure it out before hand. But it is always open when I am raiding. As soon as something possibly interesting drops I alt-tab and check out the value of the item compared to my current gear and then bid or not.
Use Pawn! Pawn lets you build your own weightings, and includes a differentiation for base armor (multiplied) and bonus armor (not multiplied) for bears. As a resto druid who is also assembling a cat and bear set, Pawn is essential for an at-a-glance view as to the desirability of an item, (Unfortunately, Pawn is unable to account for diminishing returns, so it's not perfect, but it's great 95% of the time).
ReplyDeleteThere are some pre-built Pawn profiles for bears floting around out there (check the Pawn forums, EJ, maybe Flyv's blog?) but everything will change shortly anyway, so it's best to learn how to build your own.
As CH says, use Pawn! You can set up whatever scales you want and instantly see the item evaluated in multiple ways. Soooooooooo slick.
ReplyDeleteI use Whitetooth's combat ratings, which are posted at http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t29453-combat_ratings_level_80_a/. He wrote both RatingBuster and TankPoints, and it looks like the former has consumed more of his attention lately.
ReplyDeleteI might crack open the lua files for TankPoints and fix it myself.
Needless to say, I never had to crack open the TankPoints files--the software draws its numeric data through other frameworks, which can sometimes give the impression that it hasn't been updated for a long time. As of 3.3.0, it's up-to-date and doing well.
ReplyDelete