Glyph of Indominability

Honestly, the Glyph of Indominability is far better than the brewfest trinkets unless you are on Mimiron or one of the few other boss fights where magic damage is the main killer.

TBH, when I see a tank with dual brewfest trinkets in their default strutting suit I assume they are either new (and hence haven't had much access to trinkets) or don't know much about tanking.

Now if have both and whip them out in the right situation then more power to you. If you just wear them all the time because it makes your HP look better, then meh.

At my current gear level: Unbuffed, the brewfest trinket wins out by 1000 EHP. But raid buffed, the glyph pulls ahead by 500 EHP or so. So the glyph is the right choice (for me, at least) except in extreme no-armor-mitigation situations. That's not even counting the click effect.

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Originally Posted by Aggathon

Also: Dodge trinkets do not even out your damage, they actually make it more spikey which is one of the reasons for Icewell Radiance in the first place. Even then, normal damage taken is fine, you want the EHP for the extra survivability against attacks that can't be avoided.

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Yes and no. The arms race between higher levels of avoidance and trying to design raid bosses that continue to threaten a tank at higher levels of avoidance has resulted in harder and harder hitting bosses, resulting in insane damage spikes that occur when you fail to avoid successive hits, BUT, the dev's do not step into the game and increase the per hit damage even more when you proc a dodge trinket, so gearing with one will reduce your spike damage because it will reduce the odds that you will take successive hits.

The spike damage problem that you are talking about is an issue of game design versus the average end game tank, but it is not true that adding avoidance will make an individual end game tanks spike damage worse. In fact it will make it more rare.

Adding avoidance decreases overall damage taken. The more avoidance you add, the more powerful it is. That stated, increasing avoidance can make the damage a tank takes seem more spikey. Going three to four seconds without getting hit and then taking three attacks in a row can make healing an avoidance-heavy tank feel unpredictable. The avoidance tank will take less damage than the one just stacking stam.

For me, glyph replaced the black heart and was a major EH upgrade. Remember the tankspot mantra, "Gear for the encounter" and use what works best for what you are doing.

Let me clarify, more avoidance isn't bad. More avoidance while sacking EH is bad and makes tanks seem more spikey. So getting 2% dodge and dropping 170stam or w/e, while yes, might decrease overall damage, but it will make you seem spikier.

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Originally Posted by Aggathon

Let me clarify, more avoidance isn't bad. More avoidance while sacking EH is bad and makes tanks seem more spikey. So getting 2% dodge and dropping 170stam or w/e, while yes, might decrease overall damage, but it will make you seem spikier.

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Anyone else confused by the logic behind this statement?

What he means is that you will get hit less frequently, but when you do get hit it will take a larger percentage of your health away, therefore seeming, "more spikey."

This is similar to the logic Blizzard is using for the Icecrown Radiance debuff.

No, it makes sense.

You can smooth out your overall damage taken during a fight by adding more avoidance. This is true, because over an entire duration of the fight, your total avoidance will be more accurately represented.

1000 swings in a fight, 60% avoidance leads to 600 swings avoided in the long run give or take. So adding two percent avoidance on top of that leads to 62% avoidace and 620 swings avoided. That's less damage taken OVERALL.

However, if you sacrifice EH or in this case just Stamina, to gain that 2% you're still reducing the OVERALL damage taken over the fight, but due to having a lower HP pool, every hit that does land makes you take more considerable damage. (20k damage to 30k health versus 20k damage to 32k health) This gives this impression of being "spikier" to yourself, raiders, and especially healers. You seem to jump from 100% to 30% quickly as opposed to jumping from 100% to say 37.5%. Also most content that can kill tanks isn't about overall damage taken, it's about bursts of damage taken, and in those event, commonly avoidance doesn't help.

I see it more as a per-fight calculation.


If you simplify it a lot, it's somewhat like this.
Say a boss hits me for 25k, and I'm on 51k buffed health. It'll take three successive hits to kill me. At this point, choosing 2% dodge over 170 stamina would be better, since you reduce damage taken and make the average time between the first and third connecting blow longer.
If that same boss hits for 26k, I will die from two successive hits. At this point, 170 stamina will push me to about 53k health, allowing me to survive an additional blow, so here stamina is clearly better.

Of course, it's never quite that simple, but it helps a lot if you carry a few trinkets around to change your gear by a bit for every fight. Auriaya's cats are a lot easier to tank with more avoidance, for example. Hodir and thorim require vast health pools. Freya hits weakly enough for avoidance to be preferred. Most bosses give slight advantages as one vs the other.

Of course, if you are working on content that is pushing the limits of your gear, I'd go with stamina almost all the time - that extra health buffer is too valuable to pass up on.

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If you simplify it a lot, it's somewhat like this.
Say a boss hits me for 25k, and I'm on 51k buffed health. It'll take three successive hits to kill me. At this point, choosing 2% dodge over 170 stamina would be better, since you reduce damage taken and make the average time between the first and third connecting blow longer.

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Adding more stamina isn't just about surviving 3 hits in a row though. More stamina also means you have to be healed less to survive the next hit.

Granted, your healers probably keep you topped off whenever they can, but that might not always be the case.

So if you're topped off and that boss is hitting you for 25k and you have 51k health and you get hit twice, your healers have to heal you for 24,001 hp to keep you from dying to the next hit. But if you had, say, 58k hp then they'd only have to heal you for 17,001 to keep you from dying to the next hit.

Sure, that's a bad-case-scenario that maybe your healers shouldn't be in very often, but it can make a difference.

The Glyph is an excellent trinket, depending on what fight you are in. As an earlier poster said, it works wonders for melee heavy fights, it stands above other trinkets by a long shot on fights like Gormok and Yogg+0. In fights like that I use my Glyph and also the 258 Satrina's Impeding Scarab. Otherwise I would use Satrina and Heart of Iron for less melee heavy fights e.g. Firefighter.

Also as another poster said earlier, don't be lazy, swap your trinkets for different fights.

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Originally Posted by Bovinity

Adding more stamina isn't just about surviving 3 hits in a row though. More stamina also means you have to be healed less to survive the next hit.

Granted, your healers probably keep you topped off whenever they can, but that might not always be the case.

So if you're topped off and that boss is hitting you for 25k and you have 51k health and you get hit twice, your healers have to heal you for 24,001 hp to keep you from dying to the next hit. But if you had, say, 58k hp then they'd only have to heal you for 17,001 to keep you from dying to the next hit.

Sure, that's a bad-case-scenario that maybe your healers shouldn't be in very often, but it can make a difference.

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But then we're going into the realms of timelines of events, and you being hit before big spike means you need to be healed up, but avoidance means you have less chance to take that hit in the first place OR take a hit soon after without being able to be topped fast enough (say only one healer gets a heal in before another 25k melee hit comes). This sort of estimation also only works for certain damage/healing before next hit/damage of next hit combos, and isn't a scalar chance of survivial. Not only that, but there's so many variables from the incoming healing that the only real accurate judgement of your HP is topped or not topped. In 25 man you will be topped alot of the time because of plentiful healers dropping constant heals on you and the only deaths come from the "trick" moves that are put in as a tester (like impale, freezing slash) so you die within the space of 0.5 seconds.

EH is there to greatly increase your survival against the main risk factors of certain fights and eventually you reach a point where you EH is enough to deal with those spikes. After that you will only die if you are not topped or near enough topped, but realistically finding a gap between dealing with the 50k spike and 80k spike+hit combo isnt gonna happen by just stacking more health and hoping the healers get the right amount of heals in between (even just 5k HP difference doesn't seem that much but it's stilll A LOT of stamina). It's much easier to see the affect of avoidance for damage timelines in 10 mans (well, hard modes) where you usually have one tank healer, if you take 3 hits in a row you will die if a big spike move comes after (or even say, 2 more melee hits) cause eventually your healer can't ahead of the damage to keep you up to full HP with all those constant tanks hits. Anub 10 is a case and point of this, because hit/slash/hit won't kill you outright even in just 226/232 gear, it's being low before from taking several hits or taking 2/3 successive hits after that will.

Of course, once you reach the magic level of EH to survive the spikes, what you do after starts to get pretty academic because anything after that is just damage limitation methods to ensure you're always at or near enough full health when the big spike comes.

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but avoidance means you have less chance to take that hit in the first place OR take a hit soon after without being able to be topped fast enough (say only one healer gets a heal in before another 25k melee hit comes).

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It's much easier to see the affect of avoidance for damage timelines in 10 mans (well, hard modes) where you usually have one tank healer, if you take 3 hits in a row you will die if a big spike move comes after (or even say, 2 more melee hits) cause eventually your healer can't ahead of the damage to keep you up to full HP with all those constant tanks hits.

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The problem with that is that you're assuming that the tank would die if he took all those hits, and if that's the case he WILL die eventually in the fight no matter what. The avoidance is going to fail him eventually.

Of course, that would only be the case if they weren't at the required EH level to survive, and you already addressed that, so I'm a little lost as to where you were going with that. =) Unless the healers are really stressing with keeping the tank up through normal hits, then it'd be an issue with healer throughput much of the time.

In any case I still stand by my comments about stamina/EH. Even after the EH requirement point, and before the "survive another hit without heals" point, that buffer in between can be helpful to the tank and healers. Even in your example where the healers are stressing with keeping the tank at a high enough HP to survive an incoming burst, that extra EH buffer means that the tank will need less healing after a normal hit to survive the next incoming burst spike.

Of course avoidance has its role in that too. I'm just so jaded against it nowadays. It helps tremendously with lowering overall incoming damage over a fight, but it's always going to fail you in those real crisis situations in current raid design. =(

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Originally Posted by Bovinity

The problem with that is that you're assuming that the tank would die if he took all those hits, and if that's the case he WILL die eventually in the fight no matter what. The avoidance is going to fail him eventually.

Of course, that would only be the case if they weren't at the required EH level to survive, and you already addressed that, so I'm a little lost as to where you were going with that. =) Unless the healers are really stressing with keeping the tank up through normal hits, then it'd be an issue with healer throughput much of the time.

In any case I still stand by my comments about stamina/EH. Even after the EH requirement point, and before the "survive another hit without heals" point, that buffer in between can be helpful to the tank and healers. Even in your example where the healers are stressing with keeping the tank at a high enough HP to survive an incoming burst, that extra EH buffer means that the tank will need less healing after a normal hit to survive the next incoming burst spike.

Of course avoidance has its role in that too. I'm just so jaded against it nowadays. It helps tremendously with lowering overall incoming damage over a fight, but it's always going to fail you in those real crisis situations in current raid design. =(

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I'm not saying using EH as an extra buffer doesnt work, but as discussed it can prove to be similar to avoidance in that it only benefits you X% of the time but the RNG is damage/healing/time-before-spike instead of a dice roll. I'm just trying to bring a more level playing field to the discussions with regarding to gearing after you've got the magic level of EH. Also, I think an additional problem with avoidance is you don't know when it saved you, only when it failed you.

I think there's a commonly held, and very intuitive, but incorrect assumption about healing/tanking that seems logical, but isn't necessarily true at this point in time, and that is that Avoidance makes a tank EASIER to heal. Now there is absolutely no arguing that over the course of a fight you will take less damage, but we're talking about a small portion of a fight when we talk about healing when a tank dies, and more avoidance actually leads to less consistent damage, even though it is less damage overall.

The answer is right in our face: Do healers say that druids (the raw EHP tanks) are harder to heal than warriors (lots lower EHP, but about 15-20% increased avoidance)? The answer: no, a lot of healers LOVE druids because they view them as easier to heal. They have huge HP buffers and their damage is more predictable. Goto the HALP! forums. Go count up how many warriors there are wondering how they can survive gormok, then count up the number of druids wondering.

Yes, obviously there are a LOT more variables in here than just EHP and Avoidance due to class mechanics and also different situations, but I mean... that much more EHP and THAT much less avoidance should account for something, yet people are saying the best tanks to have right now are druids or pallies (both have the highest raw EH values, esp if you start running funky calcs with AD).

Do I agree that druids are better than warriors? No, but I also think that a druid or DK is the best class to tank Anub in heroic 25. I def. think a warrior or pally could do it, but the druid just has the EHP for it to make it more survivable.

A lot of avoidance arguments are what ifs, and perfect scenarios where a dodge actually occurs, but I've found that in practice, having a bigger buffer for your healers, however small or large it may be, increases survivability given the current content.

When this changes, I will stop stacking EHP, until then, I'm keeping my EHP trinkets.

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The answer is right in our face: Do healers say that druids (the raw EHP tanks) are harder to heal than warriors (lots lower EHP, but about 15-20% increased avoidance)? The answer: no

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Actually, it really depends on what you're doing. Healers often say I'm harder to heal on Algalon compared to the warrior/DK that does it, for instance.

Healers often say that druids are much harder to heal than other tanks in 5-mans, and voted that druids were their least preferential tank.

If you're claiming that DKs are better than paladins to tank Anubarak that's reasonable - but if you're doing it because of EH, you're insane. Paladins have a very large lead in EH over DKs right now, and AD is very, very good when tanking him. DK's big advantage is the large amount of resistance they can get, which has nothing to do with EH.

The people that are saying druids and paladins are the 'best' tanks are the ones who are also saying that EH is the be-all, end all of tanking. It's a tautology.

Finally, this was profoundly silly:

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Goto the HALP! forums. Go count up how many warriors there are wondering how they can survive gormok, then count up the number of druids wondering.

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Count up the number of posts on this entire site that are about druids at all. Then divide the help questions by that value. Tankspot has always been a warrior-centric site since its inception. Using that as an indication that druids are somehow advantaged is ignorant to the extreme.

To compare, if you go to my blog and count up the number of warriors asking for help, you'll find only a couple. That clearly means that warriors are doing just fine, because I get plenty of requests from druids asking for help, amirite?

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Originally Posted by felhoof

If you're claiming that DKs are better than paladins to tank Anubarak that's reasonable - but if you're doing it because of EH, you're insane. Paladins have a very large lead in EH over DKs right now, and AD is very, very good when tanking him. DK's big advantage is the large amount of resistance they can get, which has nothing to do with EH.

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Resistance is to EH against magic damage what Armor is to EH against physical damage. Just as when calculating EH against a melee swing you take into account both health and armor, when doing the same for magic damage you must take into account both health and resistance.

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Resistance is to EH against magic damage what Armor is to EH against physical damage. Just as when calculating EH against a melee swing you take into account both health and armor, when doing the same for magic damage you must take into account both health and resistance.

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Okay, but then he's using the wrong term. MEH is commonly used for magic effective health. No one says that DKs have more EH right out of the box.

And heck, if you want to put it in those terms, you might as well say that LWs and Alchemists are the best tanks on Anub'arak because they have the most EH.

All of that is a silly argument anyway, because it isn't the effective HEALTH part that matters on Anub'; it's the resistance means no healing. It's like saying that having a block set increases your EH; it's using EH in an insane way that isn't what you think it means and certainly isn't what's written here.

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Originally Posted by Aggathon

Yes, obviously there are a LOT more variables in here than just EHP and Avoidance due to class mechanics and also different situations

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^ I figured this qualifier would have been enough to count for the class specific variables, but I guess not, and once again I've gotten people all uppidy.

Also EHP is effective hit points, MEH is magical effective health, and PEH is physical effective health, EHP encompasses both, but most EHP convos are talking just about the physical side. Also: it really depends on what spec of DK. Our DK offtank usually is dps, so he doesn't have very good tank gear, but he is almost as high as our pally as blood, and frost DKs have tons of armor iirc, but I will VERY readily admit that I don't know jack about DKs. That's the class specific thing I was talking about.

My healers have never had a problem keeping up our druid through impales. when we were first doing the fight, both me and our paladin had problems at first (though the pally got a freebee b/c of AD a few times =P ). And while a lot of people say they needed lots of avoidance to do general hardmode, pre-nerf we had a druid stack massive amounts of HPs and solo tanked the fight.

I read the first page.. and some posters talking about avoidance.

I know avoidance isn't useless. I understand the theory behind avoidance making 2nd, 3rd, 4th, x number of strikes to have a less likely chance to hit you consecutively... but... isn't it a fact, that the 2nd, 3rd, and everything else, STILL has the exact same randomness as the 1st? If you have 60% avoidance, and you get hit, that next hit doesn't miraculously have a 70% chance to miss because you were hit by the first... it's still 60%.

So... that's where the argument falls flat on me. It's still random.

As for the armour trinket - I'm glad people have found it to be useful even over a similar level stam trinket for certain fights. I guess I was one of the ones who made the mistake of just relying on the stam trinkets after seeing they were more EH, but now I kinda wanna pick it up just because. :)

And the use on the glyph is really helpful, especially when used in conjunction with another dodge or parry use trinket. But... I really think the use effect on an armour trinket should be a health bonus, as it would compliment the armour provided more than.. well, dodging, would.