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On my protection warrior I'm getting to the status where all my gear are either from heroic instances or are crafted epics. I'd like to begin raiding, but I'm not sure how to gem/enchant/reforge for that.

The options I can see:

  • get hit and expertise (soft) capped then focus on survivability
  • get hit and expertise to decent levels (with 1-2% miss/boss parry/boss dodge chance) then focus on survivability
  • focus solely on survivability.

In heroics I basically use the second option as I haven't reforged my gear yet. I have no problems threat-wise when the group is clever enough to give me 1 GCD worth of time before attacking.

So my question is: does it worth to get hit/expertise capped in Cataclysm for raiding?

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4

Cataclysm raids are tough. The bosses hit like trains. And Realistically, after a few seconds, Vengeance makes threat pretty trivial.

Don't worry about hit/expertise. Focus on stacking Mastery to improve your survivability. In a raid setting, you'll have Tricks/MD's that can cover the first few seconds of threat for you while you get Vengeance stacked if you get a string of parries or misses.

Hold onto any Hit or Expertise gear you come across though. There are some niche/gimmick uses where you may want to stack those stats, and of course, as you begin to outgear the content, shifting stats from survival to threat always makes sense for improving your DPS and shortening encounters.

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There's no straight-forward answer to this question. Obviously, more hit and expertise will increase your overall DPS/ability to generate threat, but if you're well-enough geared with other primary stats, it matters less.

To be honest, I would use Wowhead's Stat Weight functionality or review posts on Elitist Jerks to find good items for your class/spec to get a good idea of the priority you should be building your stats. In the meantime, run Heroics. Once you feel that they have become pretty trivial, read up on the strategies/fights for one of the 10-man instances and join a group.

In addition, a tool like WoW-Heroes will give you a good idea of where you'll be successful with your current gear.

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After a few weeks of actually raiding, I think it is best to reforge the gear to be hit/expertise capped.

The 4-5% difference in avoidance that one lose to get solid threat stats does worth in my opinion, especially if we count on the DPS increase as well. It helps a lot to end the fights earlier.

Spike damage is not that much of a concern in Cataclysm as it was in the previous expansions.

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  • I have to completely disagree. I'm not a tank, but I do raid lead on occasion. I havent really felt that threat is a tanks responsibility since BC. In cata, thanks to a variety of mechanics you'll be given a lot of threat. Any class with threat issues has mechanics to dump threat, so it isnt even much of a dps loss. – semi Feb 18 '11 at 18:18

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