[Insahnity]

Source: Edgewalker Except a huge amount of damage is magical in nature or happens in a form that is completely unavoidable. Stamina and Armor have the benefit of always mattering, avoidance doesn't, and thusly healers always heal like you aren't going to avoid anything. "So, to keep you up you need 3 healers at peak output spamming their heals. Easy, predictable, but even with the state of mana, I promise you your healers will strain." It doesn't matter how much avoidance you have... that's how healers HAVE to heal regardless. We had this argument a while back where people on this forum lambasted me for saying that healers generally don't reactively heal hard content, and that's still the case. It shouldn't be, it's poor game design, but that's just how it is.

Except that they have designed content such that even with absurd levels of stamina not possible currently, you can still die if you don't have enough avoidance. As I have posted before, ToC 25 raids are such that 35k + unbuffed tanks fold because they lack the avoidance to survive even with full time healers chain casting heal bombs, to say nothing of healer mana stamina. Just go look at the HALP forum archives.

[drae]

In my mind there is no better stat in HToCr then stam. The majority of "Shit That's Gonna Kill Me" is unavoidable and unmitigatable magical or bleed or knockdown/freeze (which is mitigatable, not avoidable) damage. I don't die from standard melee.

Sure I may die because I didn't dodge the melee that followed the impale, but only if my EH is not high enough to survive both; at 40k unbuffed HP there are almost no occasions where my EH is insufficient to weather a burst, dodging or not.

Massive levels of avoidance just lends itself to overhealing. My healers are spamming me, anything above the standard avoidance from gear tends to be overheals.

As for armor, it has it's place in HTOCr, but if I HAD to itemize for only one stat; it will be stam.

[Edgewalker]

Source: Insahnity Except that they have designed content such that even with absurd levels of stamina not possible currently, you can still die if you don't have enough avoidance. As I have posted before, ToC 25 raids are such that 35k + unbuffed tanks fold because they lack the avoidance to survive even with full time healers chain casting heal bombs, to say nothing of healer mana stamina. Just go look at the HALP forum archives.

No, they die because they have idiotic healers.
EH and avoidance don't help in the scenarios where tanks actually die...
the post right above yours is dead on in that statement. Armor is fine because it's still a static reduction off the burst, but avoidance isn't.
And yea, having 45K HP and 35% dodge will get you killed in ToC a hell of a lot more than 55K HP and 20% dodge. It's combos like impale+stomp+melee or freezing slash + leeching swarm + melee that kill tanks, NOT constant, non-burst damage.

People overuse math way too much and under use reality. Same conversation as why Unbreakable Armor used to be terrible. I think there is way too much mindset of "Well I put my numbers into an EH calculator on Tankspot and that's why Onyxia Blood Talisman is better than Brewfest Trinkets noob", or "Look at that noob stacking HP gems".

[Edgewalker]

Source: felhoof The problem is that while the base damage is usually physical, it's the non-base damage that (combined with base damage) kills tanks. Tanks don't die to Anubarak melee; they die to melee + slash + leeching swarm. Tanks don't die to Jaraxxus melee or Mistress of pain melee; they die to it + legion flame + lightning + other random aoe. Etc, etc. Similarly, a lot of times tanks don't die to a string of hits within a short time (other than Gormok). They'll die because they took a few hits, went down quickly, then couldn't catch back up as their healers tried to heal them up. One problem with EH is that it assumes constant and instant healing back to full, but the reality is typically heals are in a HPS situation and do take time. While stamina helps with bursts of damage, armor helps with both burst and lower hps. Finally, armor has another advantage that stamina doesn't on Anub'arak; stamina means more health, and more health means greater amounts of damage and greater amounts of healing on Anub'arak. Armor does neither of these things.

One of the few posts that actually understands, so I will re-quote it for emphasis.

[Edgewalker]

Source: Liar Why has noone mentioned Brutallus yet? :P

Because it is an archaic fight design we likely won't see again. I had a world top 5 on him (as a reference that my philosophy wasn't post-nerf), and my personal gear set used almost exclusively dodge gems with moroes trinket / shadowmoon insignia. The entire fight was a theory crafting dream, with the incoming damage and abilities on pretty consistent timers and a boss you kept completely still, and avoidance was too the point where the return you got on stacking it was unbeatable. There were no stuns, no burst or random magical damage, and all you needed was the stamina for a certain amount of swings, and beyond that you lost nothing with purely avoidance. If fights were still like Brutallus this would be a different conversation, but sadly they are not.

[Liar]

Source: Edgewalker If fights were still like Brutallus this would be a different conversation, but sadly they are not.

Yeah, I know. I just felt like it had to be mentioned atleast so people would realize/remember that there can be boss encounters where mindlessly stacking Stamina is not always the best option. Nothing else. ^^

[Meloree]

Comments:

Edgewalker: I don't think it's that fight design has changed since Brutallus nearly as much as that game design has changed since Brutallus. If a hypothetical level 80 Brutallus was released now, we'd all stack EH and use cooldowns through Stomp. There are any number of available cooldowns to use for that now.

Satorri: Some of your assumptions with which you napkin-math are terrible. 5k peak hps for a well-geared healer? You're off by a factor of 3 or more on peak single-target hps for a holy paladin, the traditional heavyweight tank healer of Wrath.

Insahnity: 35k unbuffed hp is massively undergeared for ToGC-25. If you're running with 35k unbuffed, you're not dying to lack of avoidance, you're dying to lack of health.

[Ropetown]

Source: Kojiyama Actually, Parry is by no means the worst avoidance statistic anymore--nor is the huge amount of Defense Rating on the trinket. In many endgame sets, Parry actually provides more point-for-point avoidance than Dodge, due to the extreme amount of Dodge Rating on most of the best all-around items. (e.g. if you look at Xav's Armor gearset, for instance, he actually gets about 8-10% more avoidance per point from Parry given his current level of Dodge Rating and need to clear out space for the Use: Glyph effect.) There is definitely a cross-over point that many high-end tanks reach where Parry is more valuable than Dodge. Defense Rating is also very consistantly good nowadays for Warriors at basically every gear level. Either way, Onyxia Blood Talisman is going to be worth around 2.3% avoidance (in addition to Block%) at many gear levels, which is pretty decent for an avoidance trinket.

You're wrong here, the point at which parry rating becomes better than dodge rating is at a dodge/parry ratio of 1.87:1. Meaning if a "high end tank" is around 20% parry, dodge would still be the more valuable stat until around 37%~. If tanks were over that threshold they would be using the parry/stam purple gem, not the dodge/stam.

[jere]

Source: Ropetown You're wrong here, the point at which parry rating becomes better than dodge rating is at a dodge/parry ratio of 1.87:1. Meaning if a "high end tank" is around 20% parry, dodge would still be the more valuable stat until around 37%~. If tanks were over that threshold they would be using the parry/stam purple gem, not the dodge/stam.

Actually, it would be 28.75% dodge, you need to take out the avoidance not affected by DR. The appropriate equation is:

dodge_crossover = 1.875*(parry - 10%) + 10%

Well roughly. That assumes 10% non DR dodge, which actually varies from race to race and class to class slightly.

[Zyffyr]

Source: Edgewalker Except a huge amount of damage is magical in nature or happens in a form that is completely unavoidable. Stamina and Armor have the benefit of always mattering, avoidance doesn't, and thusly healers always heal like you aren't going to avoid anything.

Just to be pedantic, Armor doesn't matter in many of the cases where avoidance doesn't - Magical damage. Stamina is the only stat that genuinely always matters.

[Edgewalker]

Source: Zyffyr Just to be pedantic, Armor doesn't matter in many of the cases where avoidance doesn't - Magical damage. Stamina is the only stat that genuinely always matters.

Er yea, that's what I meant. Stamina always matters, armor is always effective on physical damage intake, avoidance doesn't have the luxury of either.

[Kojiyama]

Source: Ropetown You're wrong here, the point at which parry rating becomes better than dodge rating is at a dodge/parry ratio of 1.87:1. Meaning if a "high end tank" is around 20% parry, dodge would still be the more valuable stat until around 37%~. If tanks were over that threshold they would be using the parry/stam purple gem, not the dodge/stam.

That is why I recently added alternate Parry/Stamina alternate gemming templates to Rawr in order to better see when this was applicable.

I've seen a number of tanks where Parry/Stamina would actually be more valuable than Dodge/Stamina. That said, it's a bit hard to eyeball this and varies from gear to gear. (The other issue is that it's harder to spot outside of raids when you are doing your gemming, since BoK/Totems affect your Agility and thus Dodge quite a lot, whereas Parry does not change at all in raids.)