[Doormat]

Effective Avoidance would be the percent of the remaining chance you have to be hit (not avoiding) that you are reducing. In example form:

I have 50% avoidance so the chance I get hit is 50%. Lets say I can get 5% more avoidance. This gives me 45% chance to be hit, which is a 10% reduction on the previous 50% hit. This 10% is the Effective Avoidance measured.

This is what motivates the need for diminishing returns because 10% avoidance is better when you have more avoidance. This is offset by the diminishing returns making dodge rating (or parry) give less avoidance. So the interesting thing to compare is dodge rating (or parry) versus effective avoidance and we see that it is roughly constant.

[shez]

thanks, it makes sense to me now

[Satorri]

Very well said, Doormat, that's exactly the thing that more people need to understand so we can stop hearing, "avoidance has diminishing returns!! It's just not worth investing in!"

[GravityDK]

Source: CKaz 50% -> 2 hits 25% -> 3 hits (.5)^3 = 12.5% 60% -> 2 hits 16% -> 3 hits (.4)^3 = 6.4% Comparing the two the guy at 60% will take 2 hits in a row and 3 hits in a row almost half as much as the 50% guy. This is actually just picking up steam.

That is a good way of expressing the benefit: measuring the reduction of chain hits.

Makes me think I'll go back to Regals or similar to maintain the good JC socket bonuses.

[Satorri]

Shifting fuh tuh wuh!

<3 Agility. Armor (=AP), Dodge, Crit

Action packed stat right there.

[Forklift]

I skimmed this thread, but reading this has really reminded me of this great thread that never got updated for 3.x:

The power of avoidance (preliminary results)

I guess this is partly because most of what is relevant from that thread applies to when you could get 70%+ avoidance, making each additional % reduce the chance of an X-long strings of hits by a significant amount.

Now with dim returns, you're never going to get enough avoidance to rely on being safe from a string of even 4 hits in a row. Because of this, EH gearing really has taken over. Although avoidance is not bad specifically because of DR, the fact that you can't realistically reach 70% avoidance, coupled with the fact that many bosses will two-shot you in the absence of heals, means you can't gear that way.

[Satorri]

>.> skim doesn't equal read apparently.

At 60% avoidance (which is not terribly hard to reach), your chance of being hit 3 times in a row is only 6%.

I think that's the point here, effective health always has its stalwart proponents, though some of them think it's because avoidance is a poor investment.

[GravityDK]

Source: Satorri At 60% avoidance (which is not terribly hard to reach), your chance of being hit 3 times in a row is only 6%.

Update.
I was curious how much HP you gain in % from a gem relative to how much you HP you already have. Same for how much dodge you gain relative to what you already have.

Here's the spreadsheet showing workings (you can put your own figures in), and check my workings.

For me, a 24 stam gem gains me 0.79% health (using 3.2 DK mechanics).
A 16 dodge gem provides a relative gain of 1.07% dodge (ie. I go from 26.17 to 26.45, which is a 1.07% gain).

BUT how much benefit does that give me to avoiding three hits in a row, if I swapped 3 stam gems for 3 dodge gems?
Only 0.55% less likely to have three hits (I'd get 9.94% chance with dodge gems, compared to 10.49%).

Pretty crap really. Does make avoidance talents even more worthwhile though, since gemming for dodge still doesn't look great to me.

[Forklift]

Satorri, 60% avoidance is more than I have raid buffed (Rawr says 58.5%), and a 6.4% chance of something really bad happening is completely unacceptable. Would you like to have a 6.4% chance of being crit?

Even if you gear/gem for avoidance, you can't get past about 67% and still have respectable EH stats. You start to drop below 40k raid buffed if you want to get higher--even sacrificing all that EH, you still get a 3.6% chance of a string of 3 hits. Now that you've reduced your stam from 48k to 40k, you're probably going to die in those 3 hits, which will still happen unacceptably often.

Like I said, in TBC you could stack avoidance to like 80% pre-Radiance, and even on Brutallus, the hardest hitting boss, he'd only hit for 7k MH and 3.5k OH, when tanks had 22k+ life. You didn't have Vezax hitting you for 60% of your life each swing. You didn't have Patchwerk hatefulling for 70% of your OTs' life bars every second. Even Hodir's individual hits hit really hard, over 20k apiece. You simply can't rely on avoidance preventing X-hit long strings--because the X required to survive has decreased, yet actual reachable levels of avoidance makes those Xs impossible to prevent.

[Tarigar]

Source: GravityDK For me, a 24 stam gem gains me 0.79% health (using 3.2 DK mechanics). A 16 dodge gem gains me 1.07% dodge (ie. I go from 26.17 to 26.45, which is a 1.07% gain).

I am curious what you mean by this phrase. How does 16 dodge conver to 1.07% dodge.

Are you talking about referring your time to live?

[GravityDK]

I'm talking about the relative gain "(ie. I go from 26.17 to 26.45, which is a 1.07% gain)."
I slightly updated my post to make that more clear.

[Kazeyonoma]

he's talking about % before / % after gains.

so like he had 26.17 dodge, then he gemmed 16 dodge, and his dodge went to 26.45 that's a .28% increase

.28 / 26.17 = .010699 or 1.07% gain.

[Tarigar]

I guess my confusion began where he went from comparing a health gem to a dodge gem with no tie from what it can see... but it could be my brain is hurting since I worked till 3:30 am and was back at 9 am.

[Nadir_]

A downside to avoidance stacking that we don't always talk about is the nature of main tank healing in WoW. Basically, it's a preemptive spam fest. Healers almost constantly have a heal in the pipe for a tank at 100% HP, especially in fights where 2-3 shots are guaranteed to happen. I believe you're going to get far more out EH until healers have to conserve their mana and heal reactively. More fights need to be like Vezax hard mode when it comes to how healers manage their mana.

[Splug]

Source: Magnuss Just out of curiosity, does this change our line of thinking in terms of gearing/geming at this point? Or is it still Effective Health is king until you are farming Algalon kind of stuff?

I doubt it. Nadir's post on page two sums it up well:

Source: Nadir_ A downside to avoidance stacking that we don't always talk about is the nature of main tank healing in WoW. Basically, it's a preemptive spam fest. Healers almost constantly have a heal in the pipe for a tank at 100% HP, especially in fights where 2-3 shots are guaranteed to happen. I believe you're going to get far more out EH until healers have to conserve their mana and heal reactively. More fights need to be like Vezax hard mode when it comes to how healers manage their mana.

Until holy paladins can be run dry of mana, or at least damage is dealt in finer levels of granularity, avoidance is subpar. As long as tank healing can sustain maximum throughput, and said throughput is high enough to counter the income damage throughput, the goal is simply to make the event window large enough that the coarse granularity of damage and heals do not exceed the breadth of the window. The changeover to avoidance preference is not going to come from a new viewpoint or realization of avoidance mechanics, but from a paradigm shift in the way boss damage and tank healing are administered. The Illumination and replenishment changes in 3.2, as well as new raid content, may provide that; we shall see.

-Splug

[Kerg]

Source: Magnuss Just out of curiosity, does this change our line of thinking in terms of gearing/geming at this point? Or is it still Effective Health is king until you are farming Algalon kind of stuff?

Source: Nadir_ A downside to avoidance stacking that we don't always talk about is the nature of main tank healing in WoW. Basically, it's a preemptive spam fest. Healers almost constantly have a heal in the pipe for a tank at 100% HP, especially in fights where 2-3 shots are guaranteed to happen. I believe you're going to get far more out EH until healers have to conserve their mana and heal reactively. More fights need to be like Vezax hard mode when it comes to how healers manage their mana.

Source: Forklift Like I said, in TBC you could stack avoidance to like 80% pre-Radiance, and even on Brutallus, the hardest hitting boss, he'd only hit for 7k MH and 3.5k OH, when tanks had 22k+ life. You didn't have Vezax hitting you for 60% of your life each swing. You didn't have Patchwerk hatefulling for 70% of your OTs' life bars every second. Even Hodir's individual hits hit really hard, over 20k apiece. You simply can't rely on avoidance preventing X-hit long strings--because the X required to survive has decreased, yet actual reachable levels of avoidance makes those Xs impossible to prevent.

When I posted this thread, I was in no way saying people should start stacking avoidance instead of EH. EH is still king. I would never consider using a 16 Dodge gem, unless we come across another fight like Bloodboil where a max avoidance set is optimal (because of the avoidable stacking debuff), and then those gems would be for a special set just for that encounter.

But I see a LOT of comments going around the forums, all the time, on the WoW forums and on here, that are just plain wrong. Comments like, "After 20%, adding more dodge is really bad because of diminishing returns." Like avoidance is okay at low levels, but then diminishing returns make it less and less useful because you get less % per rating.

No.

It's almost as bad as the old "... must get 25% Block so Shield Block will push Crushes off the table." I know you remember those.

My calculations and graphs were done to show that avoidance essentially DOES NOT diminish in terms of the benefit you get per rating point. More avoidance is always useful, no matter how much you currently have.

But I swear there are a lot of people out there that think that gaining 1 Stamina at the expense of 30 Dodge Rating is a good tradeoff. Haha.

The person above showed two good examples, Vezax and Hodir. They hit hard. The healers are healing pre-emptively, maybe canceling at the last minute if a hit is avoided, maybe not if mana is not an issue.

But in both of those fights, there are also bad things hitting the healers and forcing them to move. Shadow Crashes and Mark of the Faceless in the Vezax fight. Blue runes on the ground in the Hodir fight. Maybe 2-3 healers assigned to you have to move at the same time. If so, there may be a delay in healing reaching you. You get hit for 20,000, then 20,000, then 20,000 again... if all your healers are moving at once or are slow reacting, or whatever... if you avoid one of those 3 hits, you live, if not, you die. That's where avoidance is still beneficial.

So continue stacking EH. It's more reliable. It's necessary for hard-hitting bosses if you want to reliably beat the encounter.

But don't entirely ignore avoidance. Maybe use some 8Dodge/12Stam or 8Def/12Stam gems to pick up some socket bonuses.

Besides, most of the time when you are making a decision on gear, you're not trading avoidance for stamina or armor anyway. You're usually deciding between avoidance or threat stats, Expertise, Block Value, or Hit vs. Defense, Dodge or Parry. If you're not having trouble holding threat, go for more avoidance, IMO. The Ulduar crafted belt and boots are good examples. Tons of avoidance on those pieces, in addition to high EH. They are great pieces. And adding more avoidance is never bad, and its benefit does not diminish.

[Forklift]

Kerg, absolutely. The conventional wisdom that avoidance diminishes to near-uselessness or even just inferiority as you get more of it is wrong. Each avoidance stat gets better the more of the other you have, and gives you just as much benefit the more of itself you have.

The problem is, of course, it's not all that great to begin with.

(Although I disagree--we're often choosing between avoidance and stam. Socket bonuses are the biggest example: would you trade 6 stam for 8 defense? What about 3 stam for 6 dodge? Also you choose between armor and avoidance often, rings, Saronite Plated legs, etc.)

[jere]

Yep. I think people just have a hard time with absolute versus relative values when it comes to stuff like this. The DR only applies to the absolute value, but when you look at the relative value, you see you got a nice increase, regardless of the DR on the absolute.

[Kerg]

Source: Forklift (Although I disagree--we're often choosing between avoidance and stam. Socket bonuses are the biggest example: would you trade 6 stam for 8 defense? What about 3 stam for 6 dodge? Also you choose between armor and avoidance often, rings, Saronite Plated legs, etc.)

Yeah, I agree, gems are the biggest example.

But on the 8 armor slots, usually same level gear has the same armor (Saronite Plate Leggings being the exception), and roughly similar stamina. Most of them have defense, too, in similar quantities. The main differing factor on those pieces (and those are by far the highest stat pieces) is usually they pick 3 of the following stats: Dodge, Parry, Block Rating (lawl), Block Value, Expertise, or Hit. That's what I was referring to.

For rings, cloaks, and necks there are a handful of high armor pieces so you can trade one of the above for more armor, which is an EH vs. avoidance choice. Stamina on those pieces is fairly similar, though.

So I still say the majority of the time when you're talking about trading bulk stats, it's threat vs. avoidance, not EH vs. avoidance. And I see people stacking threat stats through the roof at the expense of avoidance (maybe because they believe avoidance is gimp due to diminishing returns), when in all of WotLK threat is a joke in all but 2-3 fights, Vezax, Hodir, and maybe Malygos, and that is due to the hyper buffs that the dps gets in those encounters. For the rest of the fights, there are a lot of wasted threat stats people are stacking that would be better used for avoidance, IMO.

If you're not close to getting threat pulled off of you, more threat stats are 100% useless. And even in fights where it is, it's often easy to solve that problem by telling your hunters/rogues to throw you some misdirects/tricks. Easier than telling your healers to play better. At least that has been my experience...

Here is my armory if anyone is interested in how I gear...

The World of Warcraft Armory

I doubt anyone would call me an avoidance tank. But I do usually go for the gem bonuses with Regals/Endurings if I can't cheat out of it with a JC gem (won't be possible in 3.2).

[Satorri]

While I disagree with using it as justification that EH is somehow better, I think Nadir's point is a very important one.

I took a couple of holy pallies to a 10m Vezax, they hadn't done it before. You become immediately aware just how much holy pallies do NOT have to be remotely careful with their mana to be most effective. Blizz is making a big move to fix that (halving Illumination), I hope it does some of the trick. Having been a healer and a tank, loving both, and being a game mechanic nut and strategist, it pains me that the most effective Holy Pally method is to spam to the tune of 60-80% overhealing.

All said, I trust to Blizz. They don't always get things just right the first time (who does?) but they're always trying to course correct in a good direction, and more often than not they do so in a pretty careful way.

PS PEESE BLIZZ DON'T TAKE ALL MY HEALTH!! TAKE ALL THE ARMOR YOU WANT, BUT SPARE MY HEALTH!

>ehem< 'scuse me