Dual Wielding DKs: Demystifying the Myth.

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Originally Posted by Satorri

I'd love to stop hearing this largely misunderstood comment being thrown around.


There is no magical point at which avoidance ratings start being horrible. They diminish at higher levels to give fairly consistent survival values as you keep adding rating, but even that isn't entirely the case. Much more savvy math/sim people than me have suggested it still has a slightly uphill trend meaning each additional bit of rating is a bit better than the last.

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I think it's more the fact that people see diminishing returns and panic. A lot of people see it as a waste after a certain point which is a common misconception.

Now the problem with people is that they have to throw out that idea that it's useless. It's not. It just takes more to get a percent out of your skill. So instead of saying that there's no magical point where avoidance starts being horrible, you might want to rephrase that as "there is a point where it becomes increasingly harder to get avoidance up due to the fact that Blizzard ramps their numbers up passed a certain amount. Aka it takes 15 points to get to one level, then it takes 20, 25, etc etc etc.

Just a clarification I think would be in order so people don't confuse that the avoidance stat is 'useless after a number'

Agreed. And at the risk of bumping this out-of-date thread a little more, I have a fun related story.

I was curious to see what I could do with my DK, that I wouldn't actually do live (the reasons will quickly become clear). On the PTR I regemmed everything, swapped around trinkets, and weapon runes. Basically all my gear is equal parts red and blue sockets, and currently (since Blood is my baby) I have Stam coming out of everything, heavily. I swapped my stam trinkets for Ony's Blood Talisman and my old dodge trinket (ilvl 200 still, yeesh), put the pure parry rune on my weapon, filled all my red sockets with pure dodge rating (including 3 jewelers dodge gems), and put dodge/stam gems in each blue socket.

The end result is, I went from about 38k health unbuffed with about 57% avoidance, to 30k health flat, and about 68% avoidance pre-buffing. I laughed quite hard at the staggering jump in avoidance (and the silly degree to which I was RS'ing). I am *not* advocating that people do this, but it is still worth appreciating just how much avoidance you can pick up without suffering the zomgAWFUL diminishing returns.

you did prove the point that you can still get decent returns off avoidance after DR if you stack enough of it, but unfortunately, I think it continues to ring true that until blizzard redesigns their approach to end-game content, there will never be a time when you would want to sacrifice stamina for additional avoidance, unless you're tanking alot of adds at once, where avoiding a bigger % of the smaller hits will arguably make you more survivable than just having a giant stamina pool, which is more for surviving big hits.

I will admit that my pet project right now is to get both versions of Quel Serrar, and use the procs in conjunction with the Onyxia Blood Talisman and the Sigil of Insolence to put together a mean avoidance set. It should still end up being viable for MT'ing as well, since at most, i'm sacrificing ~1k stamina for the trinket.

While I won't argue the value of stamina, and the comfort of a huge health pool, I wouldn't go so far as to say it's never smart to trade some health for some avoidance.

I think there is an ocean of potential methods that are not explored because this is a commonly held and highly uncommonly tested concept that is usually accepted in the tanking community. And by tested, I mean actually done, not just simulated.

The reality is the required range is hard to define. It's easy to conceptualize a single hit, and in current content if you have 35k+ health you will easily survive any hit that you can expect to take (barring the hits you should be specially mitigating, encounter specific procs). It gets a lot harder to reliably model and predict how hit chains play out along with the factor of heals, and encounter specific distractions, CD usage, etc. What you need and what you want are a bit more intricate than we usually tend to appreciate, and we favor the meat shield/mana sponge end of the scale as it is, at least, safe, if not expensive.

I'm digressing. =)

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Originally Posted by lyd

I will admit that my pet project right now is to get both versions of Quel Serrar, and use the procs in conjunction with the Onyxia Blood Talisman and the Sigil of Insolence to put together a mean avoidance set. It should still end up being viable for MT'ing as well, since at most, i'm sacrificing ~1k stamina for the trinket.

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This is what I too wanted to do originally, I just wish the quelserrars had more stats or a gem slot :(

In my particular case, I am losing somewhere around 200 stamina (losing 80 total from weapons and 120 from trinkets). I have actually considered switching over to Onyxia Blood Talisman from my Black Heart trinket, but I probably will hold onto it and just create some ridiculous avoidance set.

the blood talisman is a great trinket. but right now I'm trying to figure out if this set-up is still worth it given the Chill of the Throne avoidance debuff that will be in Icecrown : \

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Originally Posted by Satorri

I'd love to stop hearing this largely misunderstood comment being thrown around.


There is no magical point at which avoidance ratings start being horrible. They diminish at higher levels to give fairly consistent survival values as you keep adding rating, but even that isn't entirely the case. Much more savvy math/sim people than me have suggested it still has a slightly uphill trend meaning each additional bit of rating is a bit better than the last.

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I didn't say anything about avoidance becoming horrible. I just noticed the baseline % at which thee rating required are notably higher are 20% including 5% avoidance talents.

This penalty as i put it, gets bigger the more rating you get, and doesn't show in your stats window. If i thought it that "horrid" why would I myself play an evasion built DK tank?

Just saying the more you get the bigger effect DR has.

And I'm trying to point out the fact that the "bigger" Diminishing Returns effects are not impacting your survival value gained, only the change to numbers on your character sheet.


In other words, you'll see your dodge % increase by a smaller step, but the most recent 10 dodge rating added at least as much to your survival value/damage reduction as the first 10 dodge rating.

The problem is that avoidance IS horrible for a large amount of the content they design. Boss damage is either continually upwardly scaling, stunning, or can't miss. It comes in large bursts with large requirements for health, and then evens off to large individual hits. Healers spam heals without canceling, it becomes irrelevant if a boss misses or hits you, only what your armor and HP are so that you can survive what's being thrown your way.
Resistance, Armor, Stamina are constant. Avoidance isn't.

It's bad design, but it is the prevalent design, and the continuous argument fighting it or trying to worm around it seems to be a bit trite at this point.

Sometimes I wonder to what degree the current state of things is not simply representative of design, but of the common player reaction, the common aim of the community.

The design uses multiple tools to make for different ways to gear and play. Sockets and enchants allow for diversity. It has been popular theory that *the* best way to gear a tank is to stack health, as the most fool-proof method. As a result most of the population uses all their gem slots and as much of their enchants and trinkets often enough as they can to maximize health (generalization of course, not everyone sacrifices every value to do it, but that's the overall aim).

The result is that the typical tank has a very large health pool. When the dev's go about creating a new instance and they design damage, they try to match it to the general range of values such that it will present a certain requirement on the healers and the tanks to survive well. Because the typical tank has so much health, and because avoidance is so high, the bosses are designed to hit so hard that those stats then become necessary.


The funny thing is, bosses hitting so hard does not make avoidance a bad value, it makes it necessary. But again, the fights and gear are balanced such that you don't have to socket avoidance to get *enough* avoidance for it to be critical. If you were short 10% avoidance in ToC right now, you would feel it, very much so.


Tautology, perhaps, but it's something that bounces around in my brain every time people start talking about it.

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Originally Posted by Satorri

The funny thing is, bosses hitting so hard does not make avoidance a bad value, it makes it necessary. But again, the fights and gear are balanced such that you don't have to socket avoidance to get *enough* avoidance for it to be critical. If you were short 10% avoidance in ToC right now, you would feel it, very much so.


Tautology, perhaps, but it's something that bounces around in my brain every time people start talking about it.

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The flipside is that you would survive though. If you were to socket and gear in a way to make up that 10% avoidance, you would likely die.
Radiance is a step in the right direction, hopefully they rethink item budgeting in Cataclysm.
I miss how I geared in Sunwell :(

the other option they have is to start using the diminishing returns model for stamina as well, which would make all 3 of our primary tanking stats (stamina, armor, avoidance) subject to some form of DR, which would allow them to further balance boss damage accordingly. although taking this approach would open up a can of worms that I don't even want to think about.

Lyd, I don't think you understand something fundamental here...

Avoidance and Armor have diminishing returns built in so that they scale the same way as stamina. If you made stamina diminish, it would become a completely deficient item to stack.

There's nothing wrong with the design of the system, the point in the balance we've landed on is just not pleasant in its extension (i.e. bosses almost one-shotting a tank with every swing).

As I'm hoping my comments in other threads would indicate, I understand quite well how the DR on avoidance and armor affects scaling. applying a DR formula to stamina would create an entirely new relationship between boss damage and tank health, i.e. they would not have to inflate boss damage as much when balancing new content. I'm aware that this would be a different relationship than the one that currently exists with avoidance and mitigation.

What I'm trying to say is, if you diminish Stamina, that makes the stats no longer able to reach equity. Right now, everything works out to a linear value on survival, every bit you add helps as much as the last bit. If you make stam diminish then it will *actually* be what a lot of people seem to *think* is the problem with avoidance.

The reason boss damage is so high is because of the way avoidance mechanics work combined with the location we've landed on the total avoidance scale, changing the return from health wouldn't fix that, it would just make it harder for tanks to reach those high levels of health.

Or were you figuring that they would then tone down boss damage if tanks couldn't get their health as high?

Like I said above, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with the core of the design in the mechanism, we're just in an awkward place in the balance (balance gets hard to conceptualize when you're dealing with more than 2 dimensions, there are also multiple points of balance).

my point was this: if you are getting, say, .1 less hp per point of stamina for every 10 stamina you have past a certain number, up to , say, a DR cap of 5, that makes average max hp's of tanks drop. I don't think avoidance is the only thing inflating tank damage currently. I think stamina plays a role as well, because blizzard has to react to the tendency of tanks to stack stamina too. They have to balance the encounters in light of the gear choices they are offering players. the boss doesn't need to have their damage buffed as much if they don't need to hit for as much to take out the same percentage of a tank's health. that was my train of thought when articulating that idea.

it's obviously a ridiculous change that they wouldn't implement. but I could see it being considered, regardless of whether it scaled linearly or not.

In a way there is a minor demising effect on stamina. In stead of doing it based on a formula like avoidance and armour, each new tier has a smaller amount more then the last did over previous gear. Also the amount of items with serious stam on trinket wise that people replace there old stam ones with makes it a harder stat to come by.

Although on my realm far too many people swear by the brewfest trinkets with there almost worthless procs. My 3 favourite trinkets still remain; essence gossamer (if thats spelt right) from AN, Commendation on quel'thas from MgT hc and Black Heart. Nice amounts of stam, but all 3 have among the most useful procs you can find, either buffing evasion or reducing damage taken to a degree.

both the commendation and black heart will be mostly eaten up by DR with my current stats, but that also increases the amount of my stats that are un effected by DR during the proc buff, based on % values reduced and gained.

Sadly, while the proc is cool, I wouldn't equip the Commendation of Quel'thalas at 80 unless I hadn't gotten a level 80 trinket. I'd love to see a trinket like that, upgraded for 80 from the new content in Icecrown. =)

You can't beat the shield. The shield is like the very think that makes a tank. Shields ftw! You can't beat em.

I tank without shields, frequently. =P

I hug them thoroughly until they give up.


(Also to argue semantics, the purpose of a shield is to be beaten)