[Elecktra]

The World is not flat?

Firstly let me say what a fantastic website with amazing contributions from loads of people. As a noobie tank I have spent many enjoyable hours reading, learning and sometimes trying to better understand the many topics covered. I apologise in advance if what I am about to write is wrong and total rubbish but I seem to have come to a mental block in my understanding of various things … please don’t shoot me down in flames. So as a noobie tank I’m am going to stick my head out and say I do not think the topics I have read and practiced in game about Effective Health, Avoidance and stacking stamina are correct in terms of the equipment strategies they promote.

My problems:

Stacking stamina and mitigation seems to be the most heavily promoted strategy, at the expense of avoidance - an auto calculator is even provided to help measure this in terms of effective health - but it totally ignores avoidance as if it is worth nothing. A person may have loads of stamina, and even reached the armour cap, they can absorb big spike damage, numerous hits and crushing blows etc … but this is no good if the damage taken is greater than what the healers can replenish the tank with. Get more healers you may say, but then the raid does less dps, the fight takes longer and thus you need more healing. You can't just keep stacking effective health and assume healing is unlimited.

So there is a flaw and a limit to this strategy, which is where the Avoidance voice starts to get louder. Avoidance combined with mitigation means less damage, less healing and is more mana efficient… but then this is also flawed because of randomness in hits received, the tendency to die from big spike hits that don’t get avoided, less rage generation and the fight takes longer etc.

Lastly there is the weak “Balance” voice I sometimes hear – this tends to get overlooked as its not inline with the max/min concepts that lots of people tend to push and importantly no one is able to say what balance means in measurable terms.

In addition – and although I am a noobie tank I have a fair amount experience as a raid healer, since the start WOW. As a healer we have many similar discussions and theories around Heal Per Second, MP5 v’s Spirit, Burst healing ability etc. To my mind the survivability of the tank and the healing capacity of the healers are 2 sides of the same coin … and thus my last problem is that these aspects are never factored and brought together in tanking discussions and most often are just ignored.

All the above bits seem OK in isolation, but there are obvious big flaws in each single strategy, but at the same time these appear to get addressed in the alternative strategies … the fact is that non of them are complete and thus they are inaccurate. I therefore believe there must be a “Universal” strategy that combines the above points. To do this is way above my abilities but the fine minds and experience base of the people that use these forums could develop and refine one.


However, as a very crude and simple starter for 10 – I came up with the following thoughts:

1. Determine the typical sustainable and burst heal per second that your assigned healers are able to provide – lets say its 1,500hps and 9,000hps respectively.

2. Determine the expected damage levels you are up against. Assume in this illustration the mob is hitting for 3,500 damage before mitigation and spike damage is 12,000 before mitigation.

3. Your minimum level of health should be set to cover a single max spike hit and allow the healers to replenish your health with a burst heal. I suggest this has to be done within a 1 second time frame, (remember even with pre-emptive healing you will still take the hit). As above the burst healing capacity of the healers is 9,000hps and a peak damage hit before mitigation is 12,000. In this case you need to be able to mitigate at least 3,000 to allow your healers to fully replenish you within 1 sec. Thus = min of 25% mitigation and 9000 health.

4. Sustainable base – this is the base level of effective health ignoring spike damage that will allow your healers to keep you alive over a sustained period of time. As above sustained HPS = 1,500 and DPS = 3,500 … and therefore a 2k mitigation value of 57%, (around 14.5k in amour). Which translates to an additional health of 1,500. Taking into account global cool downs, casting times and even with a pre-emptive healing strategy you are going to probably need 2 x times this value = additional 3,000 health.

From this we can see that we should set our armour level to around 57%. This will also reduce the spike damage further so that we are left with a health value at this stage of 3,000 + (12,000 x (1-57%)) = a total of 8,660 for melee based attacks. If these were totally magic based attacks with zero mitigation we would need 15,500 health.

However we also need to factor in periods when the healers are silenced or interrupted and are thus unable to heal. If we assume a safety margin of 3 sec and still only one crit or crushing type of blow we would need further health of 1,500 x 3 and thus 13,160 of in health total.

This strategy has so far has dealt with the situation of how much health and mitigation we need to have to cope with background sustained damage and 1 spike hit. We can also see given the assumptions used that we haven’t yet needed to use avoidance to deal with the damage taken. There are of course going to be times when spikes come one after another, especially when healers are incapacitated, or from boss parries. We can see that to deal with successive spike hits we need to make a big jump in health and mitigation to allow our healers to deal with it. Using the figures above with the same level of mitigation, (57%), to cope with an extra spike our health would have to be around the £18k+ …anything less would not help us. Even if we had £18k health we know that the healers would not be able to easily bring us back up to this full health level as it is beyond their immediate burst heal capacity and quickly depletes their mana. This therefore is where avoidance starts to come into the strategy – if we are unable to jump to the next levels of health and mitigation we should start to stack avoidance until we can. In this example if we think about handling 3 spike hits then only by avoidance do we stand a chance of survival. This strategy also seems to support the idea of “stam” up for new encounters if you can get to the next spike step and put the pressure on the healers, and with less demanding farm type encounters then more avoidance, less healing is better.

I’m sure the figures I have used are pretty way out – but just maybe the world is actually round and there is some mileage in this approach and the building blocks used in trying to bring Effective Health and Avoidance together and also factor in healing capacity. Maybe you can put greater facts and data around the approach and develop something more robust. If you got this far – thanks for taking the time to read it.

[shiz98]

I don't think anyone would disagree with your post in essence; nowhere on this site has it been said to stack EH at the expense of reasonable avoidance. The emphasis, however, is put on EH.

There are a couple reasons why this is so, to my understanding.

First and foremost, avoidance and armor do provide equal damage mitigation, theoretically. If you have a 1% chance to dodge, it's equal to getting 1% mitigation from armor.

Second, EH always works. Even if you have 99% dodge, you can (and will) be hit two times in a row, even though it's statistically improbable. Over these two hits, you have zero mitigation from your dodge chance. None. Had you stacked armor, you would have had the same mitigation throughout those hits, regardless of a roll of the dice.

So generally speaking, armor > avoidance, if we're comparing mitigation on a percent-to-percent basis.

The reason to stack health is to, as you say, provide protection from burst damage. However, it also provides perfect protection against periods where your healers are silenced or otherwise unable to heal you - if you have a big enough health pool, you can just outlast the damage.

In fact, having a large EH pool allows your healers to be more efficient. If you are dangerously low on health after every hit (rare as that might be), your priests/shammies will have to start dropping their fast, low efficiency heals on you. If you have a large EH pool, they can provide the big, mana efficient heals on you because you will survive additional hits, guaranteed.

Finally, consider that in raids like the Sunwell Plateau, avoidance has been nerfed.

As has been rehashed countless times, EH is better for new content where you need consistent damage intake and the ability to survive consistently. Avoidance is better for old content where your healers know the drill and can heal you effectively without trying to figure out how a given fight works (in this case, less damage through avoidance is nice for them).

[Ciderhelm]

There's a number of things that need to be addressed here. First, thanks for the post, and it's thoughtful, but you may have missed a few things on this site.

Stacking stamina and mitigation seems to be the most heavily promoted strategy, at the expense of avoidance - an auto calculator is even provided to help measure this in terms of effective health - but it totally ignores avoidance as if it is worth nothing.

Avoidance does not need a calculator; Effective Health does. Please take a look at our signatures, which are meant to be an overall display:

Lastly there is the weak “Balance” voice I sometimes hear – this tends to get overlooked as its not inline with the max/min concepts that lots of people tend to push and importantly no one is able to say what balance means in measurable terms.

The most common explanation used by myself, Roana, and I believe Satrina in relation to this:

Gemming for Stamina is not gearing against Avoidance. Warrior gear is already weighted very heavily in favor of Avoidance, and that gets progressively better with each tier.

In addition – and although I am a noobie tank I have a fair amount experience as a raid healer, since the start WOW. As a healer we have many similar discussions and theories around Heal Per Second, MP5 v’s Spirit, Burst healing ability etc. To my mind the survivability of the tank and the healing capacity of the healers are 2 sides of the same coin … and thus my last problem is that these aspects are never factored and brought together in tanking discussions and most often are just ignored.

Stamina/Armor gearing has always been based on healing strategies developed from healer feedback in Everquest and World of Warcraft. If I could just worry about being an uber tank without worrying about a healing strategy I'd never put a single Stam enchant or gem in my gear if there was an Avoidance alternative.

Until Sunwell, most of the top 10/top 50 guilds in the world have purposely used an EH gearing method when choosing gems/enchants/gear. Just by them doing it does not make it better, but it shows their reasoning was sound and they've been successful with it.


The post is good, the line of thought is good. The concern I have is that you're presenting this under the assumption that stamina-stamina-stamina is the only thing we've got on this site.

http://www.tankspot.com/forums/evil-...avoidance.html
http://www.tankspot.com/forums/evil-...0-defense.html
http://www.tankspot.com/forums/ts-po...tank-gear.html
http://www.tankspot.com/forums/gear-...gear-sets.html
http://www.tankspot.com/forums/gear-...avoidance.html
http://www.tankspot.com/forums/gear-...wow-2-4-a.html

[Radhja]

No educated tank would ever consider truly abandoning EH for the sake of avoidance on any fight. There is a balance that must be maintained, for one is worthless without the other. THAT, more than anything, is the simple-most important premise advertised by this site, imo. Finding that balance is the challenge.

[Elecktra]

Yes I think I maybe over did it on the "stam stam" at all costs point :P - although that is the overriding impression I get from the forums. However everyone posting in this thread does in fact promote the idea of balance .... the challenge I'm trying to address what is the right balance? how do you determine it given a specific set of circumstances or at least a method that consistently gets you closer? ... that is what i'm really trying to unlock with the simple approach i suggest.

[Alent]

You might consider, Elecktra, that avoidance in general "comes" with gear. the warriors in my guild (I be a fuzzy druid), seem happy with the avoidance they get from upgrades, always of course piling on the +sta gems and enchants.

This of course isn't a 100% guiding principle, but in general it's a rule of thumb that seems to work fairly well.

[Elecktra]

Source: Alent You might consider, Elecktra, that avoidance in general "comes" with gear. the warriors in my guild (I be a fuzzy druid), seem happy with the avoidance they get from upgrades, always of course piling on the +sta gems and enchants. This of course isn't a 100% guiding principle, but in general it's a rule of thumb that seems to work fairly well.

It doesn't seem sensible to me that on the 1 hand we have a pile of equations, stats and parse files and yet on the other side with an important stat like avoidance its just a rule of thumb - there has to be something more.

[Alent]

Don't misunderstand, I'm just saying, you'll get avoidance with all gear upgrades as a rule of thumb. Very rarely will you ever get an upgrade that ever lowers your avoidance.

[shiz98]

Disclaimer - I am not an tank in progression raids

The problem with trying to find a "balance" between tanking stats is that there isn't a finite number of them available to you. You pick up upgrades or sidegrades. With a sidegrade, you're probably building up a specific gear set (e.g. this item has good EH, so it goes in my EH set). If it's an upgrade, you're not getting "equal" stat balance - rather, you're getting more stats over your last piece. In some cases you might sacrifice a little EH for a lot of avoidance, or vise-versa, but overall it's a clear-cut choice, I believe.

Along this thought, it seems to me that tanks in progressing raids pick up items for their main sets based on what stats they need for the new bosses. If you're farming some of SSC, for example, and are working on Morogrim, your tank will probably be looking for avoidance gear, since that fight favors avoidance. The fights you have on farm status require less careful gearing, so the tank can use whatever his normal boss-tanking gear is without worrying about which stat to stack. You probably have a feel for how you're getting hit on bosses, which will tell you what you need to gear for more. If you think you need more avoidance, pick some up! If you progress later and are finding that you need more EH, you can aim to get some better EH gear.

Every fight is different; there's no one-size-fits-all tanking set.

How do you determine when you need what stat? Experience and analysis. Look at those combat logs and WWS parses. Why are you dying? What's the sequence of events before you die? What do the healers think? Personally, I find healer comments to be really helpful - they're the ones watching your health bar the whole fight. They can tell you if your damage is too bursty to heal through, or if you're just dying to fast (but steadily) to be healed through.

[Scargoth]

Source: Alent Don't misunderstand, I'm just saying, you'll get avoidance with all gear upgrades as a rule of thumb. Very rarely will you ever get an upgrade that ever lowers your avoidance.

Actually this happens quite a bit I'm finding at the T6 level, particularly when you consider threat stats.

I stack gems for stamina, all my gear has good stam/armor on it. The dilemma I always find myself in is balancing avoidance with threat. My goal is to be able to tank a boss with the most amount of threat gear possible while still being able to survive. I just feel that if I can survive a fight, then threat is the next big challenge.

To me the balancing equation has 3 variables (EH, avoid, threat), not just 2. I can push my health between 17-18k unbuffed and have 64-65% total avoidance, but I end up with like 10 expertise and 20 hit and 275 block value -- that just seems so unbalanced, my raid would have to hold back soooooo much.

My guild is 5/5, 7/9, and I've tanked all of that personally except for archi (we have a 2nd warrior MT), and our DPS is always riding right on my tail on threat. There are times I feel like I have plenty of EH for a given fight, I also feel like I may have plenty of avoidance for some fights, but I always feel like I could use more threat.

[Ciderhelm]

Source: Elecktra Yes I think I maybe over did it on the "stam stam" at all costs point :P - although that is the overriding impression I get from the forums. However everyone posting in this thread does in fact promote the idea of balance .... the challenge I'm trying to address what is the right balance? how do you determine it given a specific set of circumstances or at least a method that consistently gets you closer? ... that is what i'm really trying to unlock with the simple approach i suggest.

Elecktra, the part of your post that I didn't address (i.e. the bottom half) was not addressed because I agreed with you.

The goal with this site early on was to set up a minimum Effective Health rating recommendation for bosses. This was referred to as CCS rating, a field that used to be part of the calculator. Past the necessary CCS rating for certain bosses, tanks would have been advised to stack Avoidance.

The issue has been creating the database of boss damage. The reason we use a rule of thumb is because none of us -- myself included -- has taken the time to go and check boss damage, attack speed, specials, etc., and formulate a set of clear guidelines worth following.

Which goes back to what I said in my original response. I agree with you. I'm just concerned that you might not realize I agree with you.

[Elecktra]

Source: Ciderhelm Elecktra, the part of your post that I didn't address (i.e. the bottom half) was not addressed because I agreed with you. The goal with this site early on was to set up a minimum Effective Health rating recommendation for bosses. This was referred to as CCS rating, a field that used to be part of the calculator. Past the necessary CCS rating for certain bosses, tanks would have been advised to stack Avoidance. The issue has been creating the database of boss damage. The reason we use a rule of thumb is because none of us -- myself included -- has taken the time to go and check boss damage, attack speed, specials, etc., and formulate a set of clear guidelines worth following. Which goes back to what I said in my original response. I agree with you. I'm just concerned that you might not realize I agree with you.

Cool - love your site btw - I'm hooked on it :P

[Foolishness]

When i started reading these guides and forums, i too got the same feeling as the OP, as if stam was everything and avoidance was bad, so i can totally understand where you are coming from. In fact, i made a post on the same topic (on the wow forums), although mine was much more immature, uninformed, angst filled and accusing.

After having more of an in-depth read, these guys are not saying its bad, and they often comment on how effective it can be. However, these comments are more hidden. From my point of view, there is a subtle but undeniable bias towards gearing for EH.

After becoming a more experienced tank, it makes more sense, and its apparent that these guys are not saying 'avoidance is bad', but they are saying 'don't stack avoidance before everything else at the expense of having a gimped max HP'.

My guess is that this is because plenty of new tanks think its cool to start putting def and dodge gems in all their gear before they even have 12k HP, which IMO is suicide.

You cant really go too wrong stacking stam, but you can go horribly wrong stacking avoidance.

Stacking avoidance at the right time can make certain fights 10 times easier, but it can also make it impossible if you don't have the required EH.

If someone is only an average player, then by stacking stam they can still generate threat, and be kept alive by the healers for most fights while wearing the same armor, follow the guide and any dummy can tank.

If you want an optimum tanking performance, if you want to take minimal damage, if you want to drag your casual guild with inconsistent and new healers through the new content, you will need to do your research and rely on heavy avoidance and EH for the tough fights. In my experience, sub-par healers cannot keep a low avoidance tank up on most big hitters.

My conclusion:
By stacking stam without knowing what you are doing you can easily create a strong viable kit for most of the content. Foolproof.
By stacking avoidance without knowing what you are doing, you can easily becoming a totally gimped and rubbish tank.
Hence, when writing a guide or advising new players on how to gear, don't tell them avoidance.

By the way: If you read this cider, i'm very interested in your choice of enchant on your unbreakable will, mainly because i'm at the stage where its become available to me. I was thinking along the lines of; use my mallet for threat and my unbreakable will for EH/avoidance. Why have you put executioner on the will? Is the extra weapon damage enough to make it more viable as a threat weapon?

[Ciderhelm]

Since our sigs are down so much of the time, I decided to have at the calculator.

TankSpot - Calculator

[Ciderhelm]

Source: Foolishness By the way: If you read this cider, i'm very interested in your choice of enchant on your unbreakable will, mainly because i'm at the stage where its become available to me. I was thinking along the lines of; use my mallet for threat and my unbreakable will for EH/avoidance. Why have you put executioner on the will? Is the extra weapon damage enough to make it more viable as a threat weapon?

Have never seen a mallet. Mallet is superior.

[Joeker]

I was starting to wonder the same thing. I have the Mallet as well as Kings Defender and The Sun Eater. I mainly use my Mallet all the time and hardly use any of the others. What would you suggest Cider.

[Throng]

Excellent thread - I feel I've learned a few things today. Thanks!

[Tharr]

I gem everything for stamina, and so far it's only Sunwell, and especially Brutallus where I needed to gear for extra avoidance. I have 56% avoidance in my trash/BT/Hyjal tanking set, and it works.

The problem with avoidance is it's chance based, u might or might not avoid the next attack. That means healers have to heal u regardles if u avoided it or not, because if u take it u might or might not avoid the second attack, and if healers is still trying to get u up from the first attack u might find yourself on very low hp. This is why gemming/enchanting for sta/armor works. Yes, u will take more dmg, but that dmg is allready healed, with avoidance it would have been overhealing.

Avoidance is very good, but u get what u need from the gear. For fun I tanked Azgalor in the same gear I tank Brutallus, Azgalor hit me 33 times during 5min25sec, but they still needed to heal me, incase I got the next 2 attacks followed by a silence, so all that avoidance only resulted in massive overhealing.

So my point is, stamina and armor works, but don't be stupid about it and forget your avoidance because u still need it. But so far it's only Azgalor and Brutallus where I have geared for more avoidance. For every other boss since ssc I have had between 55-60% avoidance and it has worked so far.

I hope that made sence.

[Horacio]

At the Kara/T4/T5ish level you can go bananas on EH and essentially turn yourself into a statue. Raiding as a resto druid has relegated my prot warrior to an 'alt' and such is his fate. I can't avoid anything but I can take a beating. It generally means I'm pretty well situated for the content I'm on and I usually swap a few pieces off my EH set because I'm not fighting progression raid bosses as a tank.

As you get deeper into end game, the scaling on Blizzard's itemization is much 'better' for avoidance. In other words, it will be there.

Extreme amounts of avoidance cause rage->threat issues.

And, beating a dead horse here, what goes up, must come down. Law of averages will bite you in the ass eventually and if you can skip out of 65% of incoming attacks, 35% of them will rock your world. That avoidance stacking that got you there came at the expense of EH.

As I mentioned above, I raid as a healer these days so I have a little bit of a unique perspective. Healers are more able to deal with more damage that is flatter and consistant than deal with spike damage. If you stack avoidance, when you do get hit, is will take more of your health bar. Nothing pre Sunwell hits hard enough that quality healing cannot handle. Its the details, the gimmicks, the little things that make/break raids.

In summary: as a healer, I have less issue healing larger damage but at a consistant rate as opposed to spike damage, even if over all, its less.

[Kream]

I've been throwing this idea around in my head for a while now, but I lack the time/statistics knowledge to turn it from half-baked into full completion.

The background:
EH gearing is all about surviving the worst case scenario (something like 4 hits in a row with no heals)
Avoidance gearing is all about making the worst case scenario extremely unlikely (ie if you have a certain % of avoidance, taking x number of hits in a row has a very low chance to occur and you can get away with the health required for x-1 hits)

One method is about mitigating the worst case, the second method is about avoiding the worst case. The true measure of a tanks survivability lies with both.

Instead of gearing for the worst case scenario, a tank with high survivability would gear for the likely worst case scenario.

An example:
I am going to tank a boss that hits for 5k against my current armor. I have 22k health raid buffed and 50% avoidance. So my worst case scenario is 5 hits in a row which will probably lead to my death. What is the best way to make this not happen?

The probability of 5 hits landing in a row on me in my current gear is 3.13%.

How much sta would I need to survive the 5th hit?
I would need to hit 25k health raid buffed to survive the 5th hit. I would have to add 260 sta to take the 5th hit without dying.

How much avoidance would I need to survive the 5th hit?
I'm going to say that 1% chance of taking the killing hit is an acceptable risk for me. So .01 ^ (1/5) ~= 40% hit chance = 60% avoidance. I need to add 10% avoidance (190 dodge rating) to survive this last hit.

With some more advanced statistics you could figure out your chance to take the killing combo over a period of time (say 10 minutes) and tune your gear based on that. Also keep in mind that you could survive an otherwise killing combo by using Last Stand or Shield Wall so an acceptable risk might be 2 kill streaks over a 10 minute battle.