Tanks should never stack stam in Cataclysm. (Actually, it's a question.)

I read this, and we actually discussed on my guild forums the exact same thing.

Avoidance stacking, for classes without block (dk & bear tanks) makes you feel "squishier" to healers because of the current inability to reach over 50% avoidance, so essentially you are taking between 30 and 60% of all incoming damage, mitigated by armor and resisitances: shield tanks can hit that 102.4% number to mitigate or avoid almost all incoming damage, and with smart cd usage and a good tank will feel more consistent and less "squishy" to the healers because of that 30% damage reduction from block.

I will tell you what I told my guild - has a prot pally and a bear as their main tanks. The pally stacked stam and mastery, the bear stacked stam and dodge. No hit, no expertise...and they are done with all normal content and moving to heroics. Can you really argue a right or wrong in the face of their continued and unquestionable success?

Healers need to learn that tanks don't always need to be at 100%; and that smart heal timing is far superior to keeping them topped off.

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Ok, so here's my two cents.

I play a warrior tank, startet at the beginning of bc, and right now, we're at 11/12 normal mode, with only nef missing.

From what i've experienced, stamina's gotten pretty much useless. In WOTLK, it was awesome, because healers had unlimited mana and the ability, to bring you from 5% to 100% in quite no time, and stamina had the astounding ability to make the difference between a one- and a twoshot.

But now, things have changed. Everyone has a shitload of health. When i am tanking the boss, it feels like this:
The boss hits me for an certain ammount of damage per second. If i fail to block, dodge or parry a streak of these hits, i drain my healer's mana. If i block, dodge and parry a few hits in a row, my healers are able to conserve their mana, channel mana hymns, do what so ever to regain some of it. Having 10k HP more or less never seemed to make a difference. 3% block on the other hand sure does. With every point i stack in avoidance and mastery, i get closer to being unhittable, i increase the chance to block, dodge, parry in a row, and my healers are being grateful for that.

Sure, there's not much except stamina you can do against magical damage. But the Tol-barad Trinket, with its on-use-400-resistance on a 1 minute cooldown helps a lot. Needless to say, that stamina doesn't reduce the incoming magical damage anyways. And from what i've experienced, the magical damage on a tank is never high enough to be really dangerous. At least i've never run into any situation, where more stamina would've been that helpful.

In addition, the more you avoid from the bosses incoming melee damage, the more you can focus on how you have to time your cooldowns to minimize incoming magical damage, and the more mastery you have, the more efficient shield block becomes.

Just one or two thoughts from me, open for debate.

Good night, everyone

If your a warrior and you not stacking mastery with stam your doing it wrong, but always mastery greater then stam. Simple as that. 25% chance to avoid something is silly and cannot be relied upon. Having a 55%-80% chance to block 30-60% of incoming dmg (80% chance every 30 secs for 10 secs with the normal avoidance you get from gear you are basically unhittable every 30 secs for 10 secs) with the HP pool to back it up is amazing. All warriors should be pushing for Passive unhittable through mastery not through dodge and parry.

So if my maths is correct stacking mastery means your unhittable for at least 1/3 of the fight if you use shield block on CD.

As a Death Knight tank, I also advocate the priority of Mastery Rating of Stamina. The M.R. bonuses much outweighs the stamina.

On the other hand, I try to match gem colors accordingly to get the bonuses. From another thread I saw in Theory and Mechanics: Red: Parry, Yellow: Mastery, Blue: Stamina.

Livion you basically got the words out of my mouth.

Now about this:

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I have pretty much found the opposite to what the OP is saying, 2 days ago I changed from majority of stam stacking to mastery/avoidance and dropped around 8-9k hp in doing so ... going from around 194k buffed in a raid to around 185k buffed and I had lots of trouble staying alive after this change I was constantly calling for heals and getting complaints from my healers that i was some reason a lot harder to heal then i was a few days ago

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Can I just ROFLMAO? You lost 9k hp, gained avoidance and you got HARDER to heal? Please explain me what private server you are playing on then. Probably there avoidance has a minus in formulas.

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Originally Posted by Arekkusul

Livion you basically got the words out of my mouth.

Now about this:


Can I just ROFLMAO? You lost 9k hp, gained avoidance and you got HARDER to heal? Please explain me what private server you are playing on then. Probably there avoidance has a minus in formulas.

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was meant to be from mastery/stam staking to avoidance stacking ... mixed em round, my bad

All warrior tanks should be stacking mastery/stam ... no question about it.

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Originally Posted by TitaniumGene

As a Death Knight tank, I also advocate the priority of Mastery Rating of Stamina. The M.R. bonuses much outweighs the stamina.

On the other hand, I try to match gem colors accordingly to get the bonuses. From another thread I saw in Theory and Mechanics: Red: Parry, Yellow: Mastery, Blue: Stamina.

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:) Atm im going

Red: Fine Ember Topaz, 20 parry + 20 mastery
Blue: Puissant Dream Emerald, 20 mastery + 30 stam
Yellow: Fractured Amberjewel, 40 mastery

Heres my take on this topic. but first, heres a little of my experience. Ive been playing a Paladin since shortly before the release of BC. ive been raiding since about 3-4 months after BC came out as a holy paladin, ive also tanked raids as a paladin. In lich king i tanked and healed with my pally through Tier 7 then primarily played my DK tanking all the way up to 11/12 heroic ICC 10.

I would like to say that i do love stacking avoidance as a tank, however, it is only good in certain situations. on a magic based fight, avoidance is pointless and effective health is the only thing that really matters. now regardless of the type of fight, there are other factors. first of all, what class is the tank? as a Death knight, mastery gives me a melee damage shield based on how much i just healed myself for with death strike. now this is obviously pointless on a magic fight, however death strike is also a heal that heals for an amount equal to the amount of damage ive taken in the past 5 seconds, at a minimum of 7% of my maximum health. So, with that, the more health i have the more i can heal myself for, and on a melee based fight, the higher of an absorption shield i can have durring times that i avoided damage, but am anticipating a damage spike from either a bosses CD or just based on RNG.

i dont know exactly how mastery affects the other tank classes, but my point is just that the class of the tank does play a big factor.

Also, avoidance is way to random. yea if you have 50% parry/dodge/block, over a long fight will probably come out to be right around that. however on either a shorter fight, or during specific parts of the fight, even at 50%, you are not going to block parry or dodge every other attack, since each attack is independent of the last. This fact makes Stamina and armor a fixed modifier that will always be there, other then in the rare situation that a debuff reduces either of these. in my experience, effective health (stamina and armor) is the most effective tank set up for progression fights. as you start to overgear a fight, avoidance becomes a little bit better in terms of making the fight easier, but this is in part that you will likely have the same health that you had before, and also more avoidance.

There are generally so many factors in a raid that being able to take as many hits as possible without getting a heal is better then leaving it to chance whether or not you avoid a hit ata critical moment in the fight.

im not really a theorycrafter, im just giving you my point of view of what ive seen from both healing and tanking, and this is how things always worked best in my experiences

I've been tanking since Molten Core. Despite all the changes the warrior class has gone through over the years, i've always ended up with the same numbers that made me "comfortable". Mind you this is subjective. 20+ to 25% dodge, 20% parry and 40% block. Below those ratings i always found stacking avoidance + stam comfortable. Above those numbers i always found stacking stam comfortable.

These days, the avoidance values are way below my comfort line. This means that - inevitably - i will get spike damage. This is the point where stam becomes handy. Case in point - Halfus at the start of the pull with his frenzy buff. Very easy raid fight except the initial pull. The incoming damage is insane until Nether scion makes him reasonable. This is a case i prefer a large health pool because even if i had 5% more avoidance, i'll still be getting hit for tons along with the healing debuff. I'd rather wear double stam trinkets, blow the dodge on-use and pop some cooldowns than go in with avoidance trinkets. Similar things with high magic damage flying around. For this reason i prefer stat+stam gems mostly.

Now i've reached a gear level where i'm sitting at 160K unbuffed. This level feels comfortable. From this point on, i will consider upping my avoidance to my comfort zone before i start stacking stamina again.

As a tank, my thought process is: "stay safe & alive through the spike - THEN start thinking about healer mana". Stamina & armor is the "safe" choice. Avoidance is me thinking about your mana. Again, i'm not saying we should stack stamina but it's not as easy to switch to full avoidance/mastery as you might think. Mastery stat, ease & abundance of defensive cooldowns has made letting stam slip in importance a lot easier yet, but not completely.

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Originally Posted by Sirloinsteak

If your a warrior and you not stacking mastery with stam your doing it wrong, but always mastery greater then stam. Simple as that. 25% chance to avoid something is silly and cannot be relied upon. Having a 55%-80% chance to block 30-60% of incoming dmg (80% chance every 30 secs for 10 secs with the normal avoidance you get from gear you are basically unhittable every 30 secs for 10 secs) with the HP pool to back it up is amazing. All warriors should be pushing for Passive unhittable through mastery not through dodge and parry.

So if my maths is correct stacking mastery means your unhittable for at least 1/3 of the fight if you use shield block on CD.

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shield block makes you unhittable even if you completely ignore all avoidance/mastery in favor of stam. Passive unhittable is impossible for warriors until heroic tier 12 gear maybe, stam is better.

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Originally Posted by Arekkusul

Livion you basically got the words out of my mouth.

Now about this:


Can I just ROFLMAO? You lost 9k hp, gained avoidance and you got HARDER to heal? Please explain me what private server you are playing on then. Probably there avoidance has a minus in formulas.

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Less max hp you have, more vulnerable you are to magic. If you go from 150k to 40k, your healers are going to use inefficient heals, go from 175k to 65k, and you're still pretty safe.

Not only magic attacks, you are also vulnerable to unblocked hits. magmaw can hit a tank for 80k unblocked, a block on this swing would only do 60k noncrit without a holy shield mod. You need stamina to cover for the inevitable unblocked hits you will take.

It shouldn't be stamina or mastery. It should be enough stamina then going for mastery. The question is what is enough stamina and that depends on the content you're doing can differ from encounter to encounter and might even depend on how good your healers are.

Whenever this debate happens, and unlike in wrath I do think it's a debate worth having now, I always think it's worth talking about the practical implications and real decision points rather than just saying "stamina is good" or "mastery is good". Let's break them out:

- Gem choices. The most obvious. There are a few options within this. You could go for a traditional approach, stam or stam+stat in every socket. Alternatively, you could go for a mastery oriented strategy, putting mastery in yellow, mastery+stat in other colours. Given current gear levels and the flexibility offered by reforging, probably want to match socket bonuses.
- Trinket choices. If you are lucky enough to have them, you can achieve similar swing in stats by switching trinkets as you can with gemming choices. Symbiotic Worm + Vial of Stolen Memories vs Mirror of Broken Images +1
- Profession choices. I believe only Jewelcrafting and Blacksmithing have mastery (or dodge/parry) as options for your profession bonus.
- Other gear choices. Very much down to the luck of the drop, but you might have to choose between a variety of pieces in different slots. Reforging makes this less important than in previous expansions, and no slot will ever give you as big a relative swing as a trinket.
- Reforging choices. Very powerful gear customisation tool.

It seems to me there aren't really many choices to make at the moment with regard to enchants. I guess you could go back to some wrath enchants if you were keen on stamina (stam on bracer for example).

Initially, I have been going with stamina and stamina hybrid for my gems. I can switch from double stam trinkets to double mastery trinkets, and I've socketed up a belt with mastery gems (including 1 of my JC gems in the buckle), allowing me to shift around 16k hp -> 10% block with 3 changes (although one of those mastery trinkets is either the JC dps one or the ilvl 333 boe). So far, my healers have not formed an opinion on which they prefer.

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Originally Posted by Sirloinsteak

I have pretty much found the opposite to what the OP is saying, 2 days ago I changed from majority of stam stacking to mastery/avoidance and dropped around 8-9k hp in doing so ... going from around 194k buffed in a raid to around 185k buffed and I had lots of trouble staying alive after this change I was constantly calling for heals and getting complaints from my healers that i was some reason a lot harder to heal then i was a few days ago.

What I think is that the avoidance stats are just to low atm to be relied upon in any way shape or form to keep you alive, I mean I am in almost full 359 atm and I have 11% dodge 15% parry and 51% block after dropping stam for avoidance and it is just not working, from what I have seen at least for a warrior tank I think avoidance stats should almost be ignored and we should go for massive health pools with tones of mastery because it really seems to work especially in heroic 10 mans. Id much rather have a 55-60% chance to block 30-60% of the dmg backed up by a large health pool then around a 25% chance to avoid physical attacks only.

There is almost no raid bosses in the game that only attack with physical dmg and that is the only thing avoidance with protect you from where as a large health pool with protect you from dying to magical attacks.

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While I can agree with there being few bosses in the new content that hit with purely physical damage I can not agree with 8-9k HP making a HUGE impact on why your damage taken was increased. 8-9k HP loss imo would hardly be a reason you would have a problem being healed all of a sudden. You didn't state which class you were so I can't really take that into account, but as a protection warrior myself I can say that any fight which warranted spell mitigation from the boss would ideally be left to a class with the proper spell mitigation. I will not go as far as to say stamina is at all a "bad" stat, however I for one will not be putting any 60 stamina gems unless it's for a socket bonus(even then I would probably use a purple/green gem in its stead). I've tanked about half the new raid content and haven't had any complaints. The fact is a warrior/druid aren't good at spell mitigation so yes you could argue that's in fact the reason they need more stamina. I would say that Warriors/Bears shouldn't be given the task of high spell mitigation roles in the first place anyways since there are better options for that role in the first place.

As for the OP I would have to say I highly agree with most if not all of what both Chasey and malakii have posted. They seem to have a well informed opinion on the matter and understand the shield classes to some extent.

When it comes to warriors/bears and spell mitigation it's just not a role you should be placing on them. However should they have to for certain fights proper cool down use is what would be the determining factor imo.

Good luck and I hope you find what you were searching for.

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Originally Posted by gacktt

shield block makes you unhittable even if you completely ignore all avoidance/mastery in favor of stam. Passive unhittable is impossible for warriors until heroic tier 12 gear maybe, stam is better.

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No it doesn't. http://www.wowhead.com/spell=2565/shield-block

Just to throw a couple of other things in:
- A lot of this is about perception. Having a larger hitpoint pool can give you and your healers a perception of being 'easier to heal' or 'in less danger' if you dip below 20% less, or because the individual swings or attacks appear to take a smaller proportion of your health off (remember most people look at proportional healthbars).
- An armory browse of warrior tanks in top guilds like method and paragon shows an awful lot of stamina gemming and stamina trinkets. Now that's not to say they are better informed or easier to heal than others, hell they might not be in main tanking roles for all I know, but it does illustrate that the stamina heavy route is probably at the very least 'viable'.

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Originally Posted by Sirloinsteak

I have pretty much found the opposite to what the OP is saying, 2 days ago I changed from majority of stam stacking to mastery/avoidance and dropped around 8-9k hp in doing so ... going from around 194k buffed in a raid to around 185k buffed and I had lots of trouble staying alive after this change I was constantly calling for heals and getting complaints from my healers that i was some reason a lot harder to heal then i was a few days ago.

What I think is that the avoidance stats are just to low atm to be relied upon in any way shape or form to keep you alive, I mean I am in almost full 359 atm and I have 11% dodge 15% parry and 51% block after dropping stam for avoidance and it is just not working, from what I have seen at least for a warrior tank I think avoidance stats should almost be ignored and we should go for massive health pools with tones of mastery because it really seems to work especially in heroic 10 mans. Id much rather have a 55-60% chance to block 30-60% of the dmg backed up by a large health pool then around a 25% chance to avoid physical attacks only.

There is almost no raid bosses in the game that only attack with physical dmg and that is the only thing avoidance with protect you from where as a large health pool with protect you from dying to magical attacks.

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Give us numbers on the avoidance and mitigation.

Otherwise we can not make any objective observations about the situation. If it was mostly avoidance I can understand why, if it was mitigation then that just does not make sense unless you got some really bad RNG.

You should be easier to heal unless you are in a magic dmg heavy fight, which case stam is the way to go. I think your healers are off their rocker.

You won't need much stamina stacking early in the raids but it becomes significantly more important as you approach the end of normal modes and begin to venture into the hard modes. At that point it's back to the old EH route where the tank is getting creamed and needs to be buy their healers some time.

Sure we might gear for effective health later in the expansion, but this is more likely going to be because we get a much larger amount of avoidance/mastery from gear anyway... and even after getting passively unhittable (even without shield block up), mastery is still going to increase our critical block chance. I think a lot of the people advocating effective health gearing in current content aren't thinking about it from a healing perspective and the way healing interacts with damage taken, especially in the new healing design.