Armor vs Stam: Effective Health

[Insahnity]

Except a huge amount of damage is magical in nature or happens in a form that is completely unavoidable. Stamina and Armor have the benefit of always mattering, avoidance doesn't, and thusly healers always heal like you aren't going to avoid anything.

"So, to keep you up you need 3 healers at peak output spamming their heals. Easy, predictable, but even with the state of mana, I promise you your healers will strain."

It doesn't matter how much avoidance you have... that's how healers HAVE to heal regardless. We had this argument a while back where people on this forum lambasted me for saying that healers generally don't reactively heal hard content, and that's still the case. It shouldn't be, it's poor game design, but that's just how it is.

Except that they have designed content such that even with absurd levels of stamina not possible currently, you can still die if you don't have enough avoidance. As I have posted before, ToC 25 raids are such that 35k + unbuffed tanks fold because they lack the avoidance to survive even with full time healers chain casting heal bombs, to say nothing of healer mana stamina. Just go look at the HALP forum archives.

[drae]

In my mind there is no better stat in HToCr then stam. The majority of "Shit That's Gonna Kill Me" is unavoidable and unmitigatable magical or bleed or knockdown/freeze (which is mitigatable, not avoidable) damage. I don't die from standard melee.

Sure I may die because I didn't dodge the melee that followed the impale, but only if my EH is not high enough to survive both; at 40k unbuffed HP there are almost no occasions where my EH is insufficient to weather a burst, dodging or not.

Massive levels of avoidance just lends itself to overhealing. My healers are spamming me, anything above the standard avoidance from gear tends to be overheals.

As for armor, it has it's place in HTOCr, but if I HAD to itemize for only one stat; it will be stam.

[Edgewalker]

Except that they have designed content such that even with absurd levels of stamina not possible currently, you can still die if you don't have enough avoidance. As I have posted before, ToC 25 raids are such that 35k + unbuffed tanks fold because they lack the avoidance to survive even with full time healers chain casting heal bombs, to say nothing of healer mana stamina. Just go look at the HALP forum archives.

No, they die because they have idiotic healers.
EH and avoidance don't help in the scenarios where tanks actually die...
the post right above yours is dead on in that statement. Armor is fine because it's still a static reduction off the burst, but avoidance isn't.
And yea, having 45K HP and 35% dodge will get you killed in ToC a hell of a lot more than 55K HP and 20% dodge. It's combos like impale+stomp+melee or freezing slash + leeching swarm + melee that kill tanks, NOT constant, non-burst damage.

People overuse math way too much and under use reality. Same conversation as why Unbreakable Armor used to be terrible. I think there is way too much mindset of "Well I put my numbers into an EH calculator on Tankspot and that's why Onyxia Blood Talisman is better than Brewfest Trinkets noob", or "Look at that noob stacking HP gems".

[Edgewalker]

The problem is that while the base damage is usually physical, it's the non-base damage that (combined with base damage) kills tanks. Tanks don't die to Anubarak melee; they die to melee + slash + leeching swarm. Tanks don't die to Jaraxxus melee or Mistress of pain melee; they die to it + legion flame + lightning + other random aoe. Etc, etc.

Similarly, a lot of times tanks don't die to a string of hits within a short time (other than Gormok). They'll die because they took a few hits, went down quickly, then couldn't catch back up as their healers tried to heal them up. One problem with EH is that it assumes constant and instant healing back to full, but the reality is typically heals are in a HPS situation and do take time. While stamina helps with bursts of damage, armor helps with both burst and lower hps.

Finally, armor has another advantage that stamina doesn't on Anub'arak; stamina means more health, and more health means greater amounts of damage and greater amounts of healing on Anub'arak. Armor does neither of these things.

One of the few posts that actually understands, so I will re-quote it for emphasis.

[Edgewalker]

Why has noone mentioned Brutallus yet? :P

Because it is an archaic fight design we likely won't see again. I had a world top 5 on him (as a reference that my philosophy wasn't post-nerf), and my personal gear set used almost exclusively dodge gems with moroes trinket / shadowmoon insignia. The entire fight was a theory crafting dream, with the incoming damage and abilities on pretty consistent timers and a boss you kept completely still, and avoidance was too the point where the return you got on stacking it was unbeatable. There were no stuns, no burst or random magical damage, and all you needed was the stamina for a certain amount of swings, and beyond that you lost nothing with purely avoidance. If fights were still like Brutallus this would be a different conversation, but sadly they are not.

[Liar]

If fights were still like Brutallus this would be a different conversation, but sadly they are not.

Yeah, I know. I just felt like it had to be mentioned atleast so people would realize/remember that there can be boss encounters where mindlessly stacking Stamina is not always the best option. Nothing else. ^^

[Meloree]

Comments:

Edgewalker: I don't think it's that fight design has changed since Brutallus nearly as much as that game design has changed since Brutallus. If a hypothetical level 80 Brutallus was released now, we'd all stack EH and use cooldowns through Stomp. There are any number of available cooldowns to use for that now.

Satorri: Some of your assumptions with which you napkin-math are terrible. 5k peak hps for a well-geared healer? You're off by a factor of 3 or more on peak single-target hps for a holy paladin, the traditional heavyweight tank healer of Wrath.

Insahnity: 35k unbuffed hp is massively undergeared for ToGC-25. If you're running with 35k unbuffed, you're not dying to lack of avoidance, you're dying to lack of health.

[Ropetown]

Actually, Parry is by no means the worst avoidance statistic anymore--nor is the huge amount of Defense Rating on the trinket.

In many endgame sets, Parry actually provides more point-for-point avoidance than Dodge, due to the extreme amount of Dodge Rating on most of the best all-around items. (e.g. if you look at Xav's Armor gearset, for instance, he actually gets about 8-10% more avoidance per point from Parry given his current level of Dodge Rating and need to clear out space for the Use: Glyph effect.)

There is definitely a cross-over point that many high-end tanks reach where Parry is more valuable than Dodge. Defense Rating is also very consistantly good nowadays for Warriors at basically every gear level. Either way, Onyxia Blood Talisman is going to be worth around 2.3% avoidance (in addition to Block%) at many gear levels, which is pretty decent for an avoidance trinket.

You're wrong here, the point at which parry rating becomes better than dodge rating is at a dodge/parry ratio of 1.87:1. Meaning if a "high end tank" is around 20% parry, dodge would still be the more valuable stat until around 37%~. If tanks were over that threshold they would be using the parry/stam purple gem, not the dodge/stam.

[jere]

You're wrong here, the point at which parry rating becomes better than dodge rating is at a dodge/parry ratio of 1.87:1. Meaning if a "high end tank" is around 20% parry, dodge would still be the more valuable stat until around 37%~. If tanks were over that threshold they would be using the parry/stam purple gem, not the dodge/stam.

Actually, it would be 28.75% dodge, you need to take out the avoidance not affected by DR. The appropriate equation is:

dodge_crossover = 1.875*(parry - 10%) + 10%

Well roughly. That assumes 10% non DR dodge, which actually varies from race to race and class to class slightly.

[Zyffyr]

Except a huge amount of damage is magical in nature or happens in a form that is completely unavoidable. Stamina and Armor have the benefit of always mattering, avoidance doesn't, and thusly healers always heal like you aren't going to avoid anything.

Just to be pedantic, Armor doesn't matter in many of the cases where avoidance doesn't - Magical damage. Stamina is the only stat that genuinely always matters.

[Edgewalker]

Just to be pedantic, Armor doesn't matter in many of the cases where avoidance doesn't - Magical damage. Stamina is the only stat that genuinely always matters.

Er yea, that's what I meant. Stamina always matters, armor is always effective on physical damage intake, avoidance doesn't have the luxury of either.

[Kojiyama]

You're wrong here, the point at which parry rating becomes better than dodge rating is at a dodge/parry ratio of 1.87:1. Meaning if a "high end tank" is around 20% parry, dodge would still be the more valuable stat until around 37%~. If tanks were over that threshold they would be using the parry/stam purple gem, not the dodge/stam.

That is why I recently added alternate Parry/Stamina alternate gemming templates to Rawr in order to better see when this was applicable.

I've seen a number of tanks where Parry/Stamina would actually be more valuable than Dodge/Stamina. That said, it's a bit hard to eyeball this and varies from gear to gear. (The other issue is that it's harder to spot outside of raids when you are doing your gemming, since BoK/Totems affect your Agility and thus Dodge quite a lot, whereas Parry does not change at all in raids.)

[dotJEM]

I did this math a long while back on request, comparing the Emblem of Triumph armor trinket to the Black Heart on passive equipped values. I wanted to re-post and revisit it.

Here's the original math:


The math holds up pretty well, and in general, but to add a small bit of flavor I wanted to update the numbers slightly for a 245 level stam trinket, and show the different relative stam multipliers for the different classes.

Satrina's Impeding Scarab = 192 Stam
Warrior (Scarab) = 2035 health
Paladin (Scarab) = 2198 health
Bear Druid (Scarab) = 2798 health
DK w/ 3/3 Vot3W (Scarab) = 2096 health
DK w/o Vot3W (Scarab) = 2035 health

None of the classes have a modifier that will change the 1792 armor from the emblem trinket on the baseline (only CD buffs).

In lieu of calculating the value for each class, I'll use 2100 as an average value as the tilt will be very small, even for bears. It will only be on the magnitude of a couple hundred effective health difference for all but bears, and ~1k for bears.

The new math suggests:

• If you have 42k health, the Armor Trinket is better until you have over 19.2k armor.
• If you have 45k health, the Armor Trinket is better until you have over 21.8k armor.
• If you have 48k health, the Armor Trinket is better until you have over 24.3k armor.
• If you have 27k armor, the Stam Trinket is better so long as your health is less than 51.1k.
• If you have 29k armor, the Stam Trinket is better so long as your health is less than 53.5k.
• If you have 31k armor, the Stam Trinket is better so long as your health is less than 55.8k.

So, even without considering magic damage, against physical damage, the stamina trinket will give you more effective health than the armor trinket at most reasonable tank stat values.

Why use the iLvl 245 trinket as comparison?... as i see it i have to trinkets to fill, one of them will obviously be the Impeding Scarab in either Heroic or Non-Heroic version, so what we need to consider for know is what should our 2. trinket choice be?... Black Heart/Heart of Iron/Glyph of Indomitability...

Wouldn't it make more sence to make the second comparison against the second most stamina packed stamina trinket still widely available?... or is that just me?

[Vlad]

Personally I'm at 52k health (buffed), 30k armour and 60% avoidance and I have SIS and a balebrew charm (yeah yeah it sucks but I've never been lucky enough to have anything else drop).
Rawr currently tells me the BiS list above my charm (SIS is BiS) goes in this order:

1. Glyph of Indom
2. Heart of Iron
3. Black Heart
4. King Lane's

So this is in fact utter bollocks.
The reasons for me (without getting out a calculator) are:

• Armour doesnt mitigate magic damage, and fight "generally" consist of somewhere between 25-50% magic damage, in my mind any TC needs to remove 25-50% EH calcs when looking at armour trinkets. (pure avoidance trinkets are crap and better converted to gold at the nearest vendor)
• TC doesn't always take into account the increased effectivess of class abilities being further enhanced by larger health pools like death strike, VB, last stand, AD, frenzied regen and survival instincts.
• Nor does TC take into account some classes just get more from higher health pools, as a blood DK tank I'm dropping DS into my rotation all the time to get death runes, the side effect of doing that is heals over 11k when I'm VB'd, the higher my health pool the bigger my heals are

Lastly the biggest reason for me has to be I am always.. ALWAYS the last guy to die, all the other tanks will be beat down but I'm still rockin until the last healer is dead, no I'm not usually MT.. thats left to our warrior, I just get to clean up the mess.

Sure I believe in mitigation/avoidance, it was hard to me to get rid of my saronite plated legs.. but muchero experienceo tells me health=win.

[Bovinity]

Armour doesnt mitigate magic damage, and fight "generally" consist of somewhere between 25-50% magic damage

That's a pretty huge estimate on the amount of magical damage in a fight. Only fight I can think of that has such a large magical element would be twins and the magic damage there is really never a threat to the tanks. Every other fight has a massive amount of melee damage compared to non-melee.

[Xenix]

That's a pretty huge estimate on the amount of magical damage in a fight. Only fight I can think of that has such a large magical element would be twins and the magic damage there is really never a threat to the tanks. Every other fight has a massive amount of melee damage compared to non-melee.

You should go back and consider the damage spikes that can kill tanks. Take ToC for example:

Gormok: Melee + Impale + Bleed. Bleed unaffected by armor, can be anywhere from 10-30% of incoming damage depending on how many stacks your tanks take. Fire if you're really unlucky too.
Worms: Melee+Breath. At least half of this spike will be from the breath, which is nature or fire damage.
Icehowl: Melee+Ferocious Butt. All affected by armor
Jaraxxus: Melee+Chain Lightning (or Fel Fireball). Insignificant melee damage. About the only thing your tank will die to here is a self-buffed fireball or CL (or standing in fire). Never seen a mistress use Spinning Pain Strike on the main tank, but that ignores armor too.
Twins: Mostly magic damage.
Anub'arak: Melee + Freezing Slash + Leeching Swarm. Leeching swarm is nature damage, freezing slash is froststrike (magical). Up to 50% magic damage, sometimes more.

[Bovinity]

We weren't talking damage spikes. I'm aware of the situation there, I was replying to his assertion that 25-50% of incoming damage in a fight was magical.

[Xenix]

We weren't talking damage spikes. I'm aware of the situation there, I was replying to his assertion that 25-50% of incoming damage in a fight was magical.

Depends on which part of the statement you're talking about. Keep in mind that EH is a method for measuring how much raw damage you can take without healing for a series of attacks.

The part where he said "TC needs to remove 25-50% EH calcs when looking at armour trinkets" is fairly accurate, but yes, the part where he said "fights "generally" consist of somewhere between 25-50% magic damage" is inaccurate if read at face value.

Since the thread is about EH,though, I assumed he just meant to add "over the damage spikes we would consider EH for" as a given, since average damage over a whole fight has no meaning when talking about EH.

[Lilithium]

I think that an idea being hinted at, but never directly stated in this post, is that clearly different encounters will demand different focuses of stats.

For those of us who are solely tanks, and are afforded the luxury of several sets of tanking gear and specs, we can optimize ourselves to the situation at hand. For an encounter like Beasts, then yes a heavy stam setup is clearly superior, considering how devastating Gormok alone can be.

Likewise, for encounters like Anub, a more armor-centric focus should be considered.

It's unfortunate that the really interesting defense stats like parry and dodge (and Block, for those it affects) tend to get downplayed primarily on their unpredictability. Granted, in a hypothetical universe, a 100% avoidance rating would be worth a heck of a lot more than stacking armor or stam through the ceiling, as even the shoddiest healer would be able to keep a tank up through magic bursts alone.

But back to the point at hand, speaking from a DK's point of view (as I am rusty on paladin/warrior and bear talents), having a secondary spec that perhaps focuses on a more magic defense-heavy spec may be worth considering. Talents like Spell Deflection, Acclimation and any of the UH talents one would normally take anyways (Magic Suppression/AMZ) really help to mitigate the crossover damage of physical and spell a tank could take all at once.

If you, as a tank are unable to handle the incoming damage in a given situation, especially with an optimized spec for said situation, then it's likely you're just not ready for that encounter. To add to that, know your healers and knowing their healing style can really help to know what you're able to tank as well. Odd, though it sounds you can be an ace tank with all the right gear, gems and talents in the right spot, but if you roll into ToGC with two healers who are generally raid healers, spectacular though they may be, they will be unaccustomed to the amount of direct damage you as a tank are taking, and you'll die.

As an example, one of our guild's top healers is primarily a raid healer (holy Priest). Quite capable of keeping a raid from dropping, even in the most hectic and harried of situations. Given the task of keeping a tank alive though, his mentality of CoH, PoH, PoM and renew spam goes out the window, and tanks die.

While one could argue, as a proficient healer he should be able to keep you up no matter what, the point I'm trying to make is for those of us taking on the more challenging content, we owe it to ourselves and the raid to make sure that not only are we geared and prepared, but so are the 9/24 other people in there with us.

I think, perhaps I have digressed a bit much.

[Vlad]

That's a pretty huge estimate on the amount of magical damage in a fight. Only fight I can think of that has such a large magical element would be twins and the magic damage there is really never a threat to the tanks. Every other fight has a massive amount of melee damage compared to non-melee.

Well you're right of course, 25-50% is a generalization.. perhaps if I said generally 25% magical and can go up to (and over sometimes) 50% of all incoming damage.
The point is say a boss is doing 50/50 (a simple value a mathematically challenged person like myself can understand) a stam trinket will assist with survival 100% of the time, and an armour trinket only 50% of the time during that fight... making it worth say 25% of the value of the stam trinket? Given pretty much every boss fight has an element of magical dmg the EH weighting given to armour trinkets needs to be thought about with this in mind.
Personally I feel this makes them far less useful.