How much avoidance?

[Guthorm]

Hello,

I am a protection warrior tank. I have been working on gearing up from heroics and emblems (not frost) because I just recently started playing again and I have not done any of the raids in WotLK.

Now, I am really close to getting what I would consider BiS items from heroics and emblems, still missing 5 items. http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Ysera&cn=Guthorm
I am still planning to replace my neck, cloak, finger, trinket and shield when I get them (drops).

I have 33896 Health, 556 Defense, and 79.40% avoidance.

So I was wondering, I noticed most raid tanks stack stamina, but I was wondering how much avoidance and defense do you want before stacking stamina? I.E. should I start now?, or wait until my avoidance gets higher or...?

Oh, and I also want to continue to do heroic dungeons, so I don't know if that changes anything.

Thanks for any advice.

[Liar]

540 Defense, stack Stamina from there on. Gear will provide all the avoidance you need (also you don't have 79.40% avoidance, don't count block :P). Epic gems in 232 would also help alot.

[Guthorm]

Yea, I just put in a second or third best gem, because I wasnt exactly sure how long I would be having this items.

And I had gotten an avoidance calculator macro a while ago, did the calculations change or what? Because it says my avoidance is 79.397-----

Anyway, thanks for the reply. So does avoidance not do as much, I remember in BC when I was starting to raid everyone kept saying to get my avoidance up.

[sifuedition]

BC can't be flatly compared to WOLK. The damage and healing patterns were different then and now there are no crushing blows. The size of the hits you will take in the current tiers of raiding mean you need to be able to survive the hits and give your healers as much cushion as possible.

Avoidance is always nice to have but the simple fact is the hits are so large there is an incoming heal whether you are hit or not. Healers can't stop cast to save mana and mana regen is at the point they don't need to. Avoidance then does not actually conserve any mana and if avoiding the hit is the difference between living or dying, RNG will kill you as often as it will save you. Also, many tank-killing abilities now are completely unavoidable.

Stamina and armor are always there. Make sure you activate your meta and from there, you should only deviate from pure stamina if you are having threat issues. If you have threat issues, look first to your spec and "rotation" and if they are right, then you can use hybid gems to increase hit or expertise as needed.

Edit:

As to upgrades, it sounds like you are already working on those. I would recommend:

The neck from H HoR
Ring from H ToC (5 man)
Have the Saronite Swordbreakers crafted. The price on these has significantly dropped.
The cloak and shield you already mentioned.

[Dreador]

The strategy was exactly the same in BC...if they told you to stack avoidance, they were either A) stupid, or B) you were in Sunwell, and already had enough effective health. The difference is in WOTLK there is no magic effective health threshold, blizzard made it better to just stack more stamina and armor and only take the avoidance on your gear.