Tank like a girl

Time for another reference guide, mostly for myself, hopefully of interest for others too. A new expansion means new consumables, from buff foods to elixirs to flasks. Let’s see what’s out there.

Potion:

• The Health pot du jour is called Runic Healing Potion this time around. Due to potion sickness, chain-chugging is a thing of the past, so time your potion use carefully.
• As alternative to using a health potion, you could try an Indestructible Potion instead. That’s a lot of armor that might help in encounters with Enrages or very heavy melee damage.

Battle Elixir:

• Guru’s Elixir raises all stats by 20, so is quite the excellent choice.
• Elixir of Expertise does exactly what the name suggests, raising expertise. Strong stat for tanks, so it’s a very good consumable to use, if you’re not using a flask.
• In a similar vein, you could also use Elixir of Accuracy for hit rating for threat.
• If you can’t get either of those battle elixirs, I would use either Elixir of Lightning Speed, Elixir of Deadly Strikes or Elixir of Armor Piercing, but I personally don’t think they’re as strong as the other two.
• You want to use something that scales with Blessing of Kings? How about Elixir of Mighty Strength for bigger Shield Slams?
• If you’re of the druidic persuasion, Elixir of Mighty Agility is probably the best option.

Guardian Elixir:

• Elixir of Mighty Fortitude is very nifty, and offers tons of extra health plus regen.
• Defense is a very strong avoidance stat nowadays and still worth stacking beyond the crit cap, so I highly endorse Elixir of Mighty Defense.
• Elixir of Protection offers extra armor, I will have to test if I get more mileage out of extra armor than any of the others.

Flasks:

• Flask of Stoneblood is the tanking flask, I suppose. It’s a shame that it’s just health now, no longer any extra defense.
• If health is no concern and you want to increase your personal DPS and threat, there’s Flask of Endless Rage.

Food:

All the new buff food brings back all the stats that show up on gear these days. You get to choose between strength, agility, expertise, hit, haste, armor penetration, crit rating plus 40 stamina. Which one you want to use is really up to you. Used an expertise battle elixir? Combine it with buff food that gives you extra strength, e.g.

• Strength:  Dragonfin Filet
• Agility: Blackened Dragonfin
• Expertise: Rhinolicious Wyrmsteak
• Hit: Snapper Extreme
• Haste: Imperial Manta Steak or Very Burnt Worg
• Armor Penetration: Hearty Rhino
• Crit: Spiced Wyrm Burger or Spicy Blue Nettlefish

Lots of options. Think I missed anything? Leave a comment.

Maybe you’ve come here to look at pre-heroic tanking gear, so why not get some links to pimp up the gear you’ll be going into raids and heroics with? I was going to look at enhancements next, but others already did the work, so here’s some gems I’ve been able to find.

• Anglachel over at The Meatshield Diaries has written a two part guide to enchantments for tanks
• Durnic at Orlyfactor has looked at gems for tanks in WotLK
• Bizzam at Tank Hard is also looking at tanking gems and enchants
  
• Rochelle at Tank Hard is looking at the glyph changes coming with 3.0.8

Thanks to those bloggers for some excellent guides.