Funny you should mention this now, I was just grumbling to Jiv earlier that I wasn't happy with my threat on A'lar add-tanking. Going to re-gem my old Chestguard of the Stoic Guardian for spell damage, and I'm going to regem and Runic Spellthread my old Unwavering Legguards. Should put me up to around 450 spell damage
hock:
I always love being a step behind everyones the need
Makes me feel like maybe the concerns are actually coming up somewhere hehe. But yes, from my best guess, getting around 400-450 is good up through t5 and into t6. Thats about the average of what I have seen so far at least. I know I am about around that, 450ish in my trash tanking gear and about 391 when I go for all my mitigation stuff. But I am not as high with the stam or mitigations as most of them. Then, not much higher I can go when restricted to t4 ZA and badge loots
As for regemming, if you can spare the health might be worth it. I would just save up for some of the other badge stuff before hand, or heck, waste the weighted rolls and pick up the t5 tanking pants. Thats really what crystalforge is there for anyways, all that excess block rating and spell damage is for all those crazy tanking fights up through there. I know what I did was go for the actual pally tanking pants from 2.4, those things WILL seriously last you the whole way to WotLK. They are pretty much on par with our t6.
For comparison purposes
[item]Lightbringer Legguards[/item]
[item]Crystalforge Legguards[/item]
[item]Inscribed Legplates of the Aldor[/item]
PS: Can not believe I actually suggested getting crystalforge gear -barf-
Yeah, I think I've been too slow on getting a threat set together. Mine's decent, but not great. I was the first tank on VR last night, and just couldn't keep threat up after the first knockback, even with a few misdirects. He doesn't seem to hit terribly hard, so probably just going to load up on as much threat as I can and still remain uncrushable.
T5 pants actually are quite popular for threat-pants. It's likely what I'll get to replace the old badge ones, once I've got my t5 helm for healing (yay double-gearing :p).
I went with the [item]Sunguard Legplates[/item] over the Aldor pants. It's just over half a percent more mitigation (dodge/parry/miss), and the Expertise is awesome. Expertise is actually our second best threat stat (after spell damage). The t5 pants are actually higher threat anyways, and I really like stacking block value when I can for AoE sets, it just cuts damage down so much.
As for regemming, my new love is [item]Regal Nightseye[/item]. Gives you something useful for those red sockets, and I've actually used a few in place of Solid Stars, to get over the hump of a % for dodge value. One thing tanks need to keep in mind is that it doesn't matter if the dodge % on your paperdoll is 23.99% or 23.01%, it's still 23% to the game. The -ONLY- value that gets counted past two significant digits is the "Increases chance to miss" (viewable from the mouseover on defense skill, in the defenses portion of your paperdoll).