Printable View
I'm a Warrior Tank and have almost 40k hp unbuffed using the 170stam trinks [Bitter Balebrew Charm] and [Bubbling Brightbrew Charm] But is it best to use these or the ONY head tanking trink and Toc [Eitrigg's Oath] dodge trinks
Stam or Avoidance? I'm well over 540D
Been wondering the exact same thing. Personally, I like equipping the stam trinks, then swapping one of them out for the Ony head :)
This subject has been shot, hung, peed on, run over by a buick, burried, dug back up, burned, scattered to the winds, and then called back from the dead via Ouija board.
There are a lot of threads talking about Effective Health versus Avoidance from this site and many others, when to gear for each, relative values, etc., try this link
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=EH+vs+Avoidance
Afterwards, we can help explain some specifics.
I would just go with the stamina trinkets, almost everything that can kill you in ToC is unavoidable or unpredictable physical burst where EH is by far favored over avoidance not to mention that the Eitrigg's Oath proc isn't really anything special that would make it anymore useful than the Brewfest Trinkets.
Choose the right one for the right situation.
There's no "answer" beyond learning the what situations benefit one or the other.
It's like asking "whats better a snowboard or a surf board?" Well if your in the Rockies chances are a surfboard aint gonna help, and snowboarding in Hawaii is not advised.
But ToC is pretty much stamina land atm.
You might want to hold onto your Ony trinket though, for your unhittable set when you get up to Anub Heroic.
I also would personally delete Eitrigg's oath. It actually dropped the other week and I wanted to get it just to take a video of me deleting it and posting said video of me deleting it. But the raid leader took it for his offset tank gear instead... poor fool...
Keep the ony trinket for anub if you plan on tanking the adds.
It depends on what your role is and what you are tanking, I think. I generally stack more avoidance than stam since the majority of the time I am on adds or something other than the "main boss." If I was on the main boss I would stack stam. The adds in anoob are a good example on a situation where I'll do avoidance > stam.
The ony trinket is worth keeping in case you ever need some quick defense.
Anyone here who tells you that ToC is mostly unavoidable damage either hasn't ran ToC or just isnt looking at the facts. Take a look at these wws parses showing that in fact the majority of the damage received from ToC is in fact physical damage.... that is avoidable:
Northrend Beasts and Lord Jarlaxass:
Physical Damage received - 79%
Fire Damage Received- 20%
Frost Damage Received - 1%
Twin Valkyr's and Anub'Arak:
Physical Damage received - 76%
Shadow Damage received - 15%
Fire - 1%
Unknown - 8%
I personally stick with a Stam trinket (Black heart for extra armor as well) and also the ony head quest reward trinket. A bit of exstra stam and bit of extra avoidance. I have had no issues with survivability in 10man normal toc, 10man heroic toc, and also 25man normal toc. However if 25man heroic toc is what your asking for I cant offer advise there as I have yet to start on that.
While there are a few specific encounters that require you to stack stamina to survive, none of the bosses in ToC are in that group (excluding heroic25 which again I have yet to delve into).
As also mentioned by someone else in this thread the debate over stam vs. avoidance has been drug through the mud and debated for many years and there is no concrete evidence that supports one is better than the other definitivly in every single situation. Based on this my reccomendation to you is that you try to keep you defence as high as possible to reduce your incoming physical damage through misses, dodges and parries... while at the same time ensuring you have enough stamina to survive at least two back to back hits and a damage debuff with no heals. If you can balance your stats to do that then you will be fine.
It isn't that much of the damage isn't avoidable, it's that the lethal parts aren't. Northrend Beasts for example. Impale and it's bleed. Both of which are considered physical, neither of which can be avoided. Icehowl constantly stuns the tank, eliminating all avoidance for that period of time. There goes a large portion of your argument.Quote:
Originally Posted by Purinna
Jaraxxus doesn't hit hard enough to warrant more avoidance. It's idiots standing in fire that kills.
For Anub'arak the lethal part is Freezing Slash (which also eliminates all avoidance) and melee swings while frozen, particularly during Leeching Swarm. The caveat to this fight is that the more health you have the more healing you do to him, so using that avoidance trinket instead of a stamina trinket is technically more ideal so long as you reach the minimum threshold.
Twin Val'kyr is probably the one fight in ToC that more avoidance is generally fine since 75% or more of their damage is from *melee*. That's the key word you need to differentiate with. Lumping everything in the "physical" school as avoidable isn't always right, particularly with a fight like Northrend Beasts or Anub'arak where there are bleeds or you get stunned/frozen.
And yes, the strongest advocate of stacking Stamina is the heroic mode right now, especially 25-man, as the spike damage you take that can't be avoided can be pretty huge.
I really dont want to start a pissing contest over stam vs. avoidance but take a look at the actual numbers on just one boss. Not more cause I'm busy at work and dont have time to post all that info.
Northrend Beasts:
Total damage received: 2,141,712
Total damage from impale: 1,011,067
Total Damage from Staggering Stomp: 765,583
Total damage from Mele swings: 291,452 (actual 981,217)
Total misses, dodges, parries: 71
Total Damage negated from MDP: Average dmg is 9715x71= 689,765
Add in the 689,765 to the Mele Swing damage of 291,452 and that comes to melee incoming damage being at 981,217.
While staggering stomp and impale numbers are higher than the melee damage numbers whats important to note is that the damage mitigated by dodges, parries and misses is a huge chunk of damage (689,765) that would have to be healed through had we not kept our avoidance stats up.
Now the tricky part here is trying to determine how much of that mitigated damage (the 689,765) that comes from misses, dodges, and parries actually comes from the onyxia trinket. Without a perfect test environment the numbers are always going to be different hence the never ending debate of stamina vs. avoidance.
By posting these numbers I am NOT trying to prove that the onyxia defense trinket is better than two stam trinkets. What I am trying to show is that if you neglect your avoidance stats by only focusing on stamina you will take more damage than is necessary.
As I said in my last post as well:
"Based on this my reccomendation to you is that you try to keep you defence as high as possible to reduce your incoming physical damage through misses, dodges and parries... while at the same time ensuring you have enough stamina to survive at least two back to back hits and a damage debuff with no heals. If you can balance your stats to do that then you will be fine. "
Purinna,
You are missing (pun intended ftw :p ) the point completely.
From your numbers:
Total damage received: 2,141,712
Add to it the "avoided" damage:
Total Damage negated from MDP: Average dmg is 9715x71= 689,765
We got a total "possible" damage of 2,831,477.
Now, the unavoidable damage from that is impale + staggering stomps = 1,776,650
Which in turn represents no less than ~63% of the total possible damage.
Giver or take a few more % due to RNG, it would not be fool to assume that this can be averaged to 65% or so.
So why on earth would you invest on avoidance for a tier where 2/3 of the damage you take cannot be avoided?
I think your missing my point as well. All im saying is that to neglect your defense/avoidance by focusing on just stamina is bad. I am unable to look at the OP's stats as I cant go to the wow armoy from my vpn at work so thus I made the reccomendation for him to look at his own stats and make the decision for himself by keeping in mind that low defense with the sacrifise of too much Stamina is "just as bad as" high stamina if your sacrifising too much defense/avoidance.
Example...
If he is sitting at 550 Defence (+/- 5) then he should be focusing on more defense and less on stamina (provided he can survive two mele hits and a 1 debuff tick with no heals), but if he is sitting at 570 (+/-5) then he should be focusing on more stamina. Those numbers aren't indicitive of any mathmatically proven soft caps or hard caps but just an example of what to look for when trying to decide if one trinket is better for you or worse.
At the same time for someone to say that the simply because 2/3 of the damage received in an encounter is magic pewpew damage and thus we should pump up our stamin to compensate for it is incorrect. Dont forget the 600k missed, dodged, parried damage. Im not even including the blocked damage which is just a headache to calculate. If you forget about the white damage and focus on just the 2/3 magical damage then your melee damage intake is going to go way up causing more stress on your healers.
The idea is for someone to learn how to balance their stats on thier own instead of always coming to a sight where you run the wrisk of getting misleading information. Isn't there a famous quote or something about this ....
New healers often wonder if they should focus on intellect or spell power/crit/haste. And the answer is simple - If they're running out of mana, get more intellect. If not, focus more on spell power/crit/haste.Quote:
Originally Posted by ExtremePain
The exact same thing applies to health vs miss/dodge/parry. If you're running out of life, get more stamina. If not, focus more on miss/dodge/parry.
If you're simply running heroics and Naxx, there's no need to have 40k health and you'd make things easier on everyone by using some avoidance trinkets. But if you're tanking heroic beasts, Gormok will wipe the floor with you unless you have enough health to survive an unlucky string of hits, dot ticks, and stomps.
Ultimately you're asking a question which can't be answered - which is probably why it keeps getting asked again and again and again. The only answer you or anyone else can get when they ask this question, is:
It depends.
Honestly, my avoidance is solid these days even while stacking stacking stam for encounters like beasts. In my beasts gear, my dodge is pushing 30% and my parry is in the mid-20% range without using any avoidance trinkets or gemming/enchanting for it. As it is, I already have rage problems on Jarraxxus (using threat trinkets) so I'm not sure what tucking dodge/parry gems into my gear would do for me to be honest.
I did a little analysis of your WWS, since the numbers you used were off. I used only the numbers from you, as you were the MT and would be the one that would have to survive the highest bursts. Just to clear it up, for Northrend Beasts alone you took 1,809,184 damage total (Counting all sources and types of damage). There was 121 melee swings against you, of which 62 hit you and 59 were avoided (~49%). Your average melee hit taken was 11,129 damage, meaning your avoidance nullified 656,611 damage (Slightly more if you take the average swing vs. avoidance for the 3 individual bosses, but within 3%).Quote:
Originally Posted by Purinna
The highest burst damage you took from Gormok was a melee swing for ~12k, Impale for ~13k, and a tick from Impale for a bit over 7k in one second, for a total amount of ~32k (Up to ~40k if you count the ticks of Impale just before and after those 3 events). Not threatening, at all. The most dangerous part of Dreadscale would be his enraged Molten Spray, which is generally handled by cooldowns, so I won't use that bit. Looking at Icehowl next, the highest burst you'd take is from Ferocious Butt + Melee. Based off the average damage from those, the burst is ~30k damage (~40k if you look at melee + ferocious butt + melee). Still not threatening.
Now let's bring into play the trinkets. Let's say you're using one stamina trinket, and the Onyxia trinket like you are. The trinket adds 2-3% avoidance pending your gear level. For Northrend Beasts you were running roughly 50% avoidance due to the various stuns, as I've already shown, thus you're already not even getting full benefit from the trinket for this fight. Being generous and saying you avoided 6 attacks (5%) due to the trinket, you took a total of ~67k less damage as a result of the trinket. I can't see healing done from that WWS, but I can tell you right now taking 67k less damage over the course of a 10 minute fight is hardly doing much. That's a total of a little over 100 damage taken per second. Amazing.
End of the day, for normal it makes very little difference if you abuse Stamina stacking or if you use two avoidance trinkets right now. Even without stamina trinkets, tanks for this level of content are easily above 40k health buffed threshold normal-25 has. Keep in mind that tanks currently have anywhere from 55-65% avoidance right now, without the use of avoidance trinkets (barring stun/freezing mechanics, although it's those mechanics, along with unavoidable damage bursts, that suggest stacking stamina (or armor for melee intensive scenarios)). You get more than enough avoidance strictly from normal gear, you don't particularly need to worry about getting more from gems or trinkets. Also take into account the state of healer mana right now. It's hardly much of an issue so they can quite easily be a bit spammy on tanks. If you look at numbers from 25-heroic, 50k health buffed is a great number to aim for, and even then you can still get killed, from 100% to 0%, almost instantaneously from RNG, and even using the avoidance trinkets, RNG will still happen (especially with a stun or unavoidable burst mechanic), which is why EH is generally the way to go and why people advocate it so strongly. It gives more of a cushion for those moments.
Also, that GIF Aggathon linked is amazing.
I'd just like to say, excellent post tuffmuffin, bravo.
OK well that was a lot of info....
Thanks for the advice I think the best was about swapping trinks for off tanking ads in toc. I am up to Htoc10 Anub
I have a lot of avoidance already I'm not neglecting it... its just that I find it hard to justify using trinks for +2-3% avoidance when I can get 3.5-4k health(i mean its not like my healers are running out of mana).... its not a choice between having stam and being weak its a choice between having MORE stam or avoiding 2-3% more.
PS.
With the Dodge Debuff they' adding to the new instance... doesn't it become a stam stacking race again?