Armor vs Stam: Effective Health

[Vah]

You gentleman are making an assumption that there is one 'BEST' trinket (or in this scenario second best) out there. If you know anything regarding tanking you already know multiple pieces of gear are often times swapped depending on the fight.

Let's beat this dead horse more:

Magical damage = Stamina > Armor

We can stop posting that now.

There is an amazing trinket from ICC that will replace Indom/192stam scarab and this conversation will be null in 2 weeks.

[Satorri]

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?

That was done first. You quoted the second post I did on the topic to show the other end of the spectrum.

[Edgewalker]

You gentleman are making an assumption that there is one 'BEST' trinket (or in this scenario second best) out there. If you know anything regarding tanking you already know multiple pieces of gear are often times swapped depending on the fight.

Let's beat this dead horse more:

Magical damage = Stamina > Armor

We can stop posting that now.

There is an amazing trinket from ICC that will replace Indom/192stam scarab and this conversation will be null in 2 weeks.

You are dangerously close to wearing my exact gear set, minus Fleshrender's hate of dropping for us.

[Xenix]

You gentleman are making an assumption that there is one 'BEST' trinket (or in this scenario second best) out there. If you know anything regarding tanking you already know multiple pieces of gear are often times swapped depending on the fight.

Let's beat this dead horse more:

Magical damage = Stamina > Armor

We can stop posting that now.

There is an amazing trinket from ICC that will replace Indom/192stam scarab and this conversation will be null in 2 weeks.

Heh - with the proc only happening on hits and not avoids, its uptime won't be 100%, sadly. Strangely enough, Icecrown Radiance actually makes that trinket better because it increases how often you get hit so there's less chance you'll get an avoid streak and have the stam go away.

Oh, and Magical damage does not always = stamina > armor. It depends on the exact amounts of stamina, armor and magic damage you have (I'm sure you realize that already - there is no overall statement like that that's true without knowing actual values.) That's what the "new" EH formulation over on Maintankadin was designed to consider - it's an EH formula that does not assume all the damage that killed you is melee hits (although works for that too), so if you care about maximizing EH you can get an exact measure of it for the specific set of abilities that you are worried about dying to. The author of Tankpoints is adding it into his next release version of the add-on as well (alpha version has it in now).

[Insahnity]

Comments:
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.

HPS, not Heals. They can bomb a 20k heal, but it's not one per second. Taking the holy pally, you will get 10k bombs with the interspersed 20k crits, and it takes 2 seconds to cast the HL.

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.

People in the HALP forum are not doing ToGC25, they are doing ToC25. And if you read my post, I said 35k unbuffed on ToC25 (note the missing "G"). 35k is doable for ToC.

Oh, and Magical damage does not always = stamina > armor. It depends on the exact amounts of stamina, armor and magic damage you have (I'm sure you realize that already - there is no overall statement like that that's true without knowing actual values.) That's what the "new" EH formulation over on Maintankadin was designed to consider - it's an EH formula that does not assume all the damage that killed you is melee hits (although works for that too), so if you care about maximizing EH you can get an exact measure of it for the specific set of abilities that you are worried about dying to. The author of Tankpoints is adding it into his next release version of the add-on as well (alpha version has it in now).

Also, I'd like to point out most people fail to consider magical mitigation. Felhoof made a nice post where he tanked in NR gear, to showing how he stacked resistance to the point of saving 6k of heals on Anub.

Magical Damage = Stamina AND Resistances
Physical Damage = Stamina AND Armor AND Avoidance.

As a side note, anybody got a pointer to physical damage which is mitigated by armor but not by avoidance? I seem to recall Patchwerk's Hateful Strike fell into that category, but not sure. I am wondering where Edgewalker is getting the idea armor mitigates things that avoidance does not avoid.

Finally, I was in an interesting Ony25 yestarday as a Holy Priest. The pally tank was adequately geared (45k buffed health), and there were 5 healers, 2 trees and 3 holy priests. Predictably, on P1, the tank was HoTted to wazoo with 2 druids as well as 3 renews, with one priest keeping up ProM. The other interesting thing was that our DPS just SUCKED. Nobody broke 4.5k, and over half were at an abyssmal sub 3k. So this resulted in a painfully long Ony run, and a very boring P1. But I actually got to *see* avoidance at work. Each swing that connected would take down the tank's health by 40-45% (40% if blocked and/or inspiration proc, 45% if not blocked). And every time, between the rolling hots, a bouncing ProM, and one of the 3 Flash Heals that was well correctly timed with respect to server latency, the health would go back up instantly. Of course, with the 40+% avoidance, this happened every 4 seconds.

What was different here was that this went on for a VERY long time due to bad DPS, and with geared healers and a tank, it became a slow and boring spam while we waited for DPS to get there. Usually, phases go so quick you rarely get the chance to stop and pay attention to it in real time. Also, the stacking of HoTs ensured that tank was never in danger even due to latency, as the HoTs kept ticking, which I don't normally see, I am used to a holy pally/disc/shaman sniping the heals with their direct heals.

[Bodasafa]

There is an amazing trinket from ICC that will replace Indom/192stam scarab and this conversation will be null in 2 weeks.

Which one are you talking about please?

[Xenix]

Also, I'd like to point out most people fail to consider magical mitigation. Felhoof made a nice post where he tanked in NR gear, to showing how he stacked resistance to the point of saving 6k of heals on Anub.

Magical Damage = Stamina AND Resistances
Physical Damage = Stamina AND Armor AND Avoidance.

As a side note, anybody got a pointer to physical damage which is mitigated by armor but not by avoidance? I seem to recall Patchwerk's Hateful Strike fell into that category, but not sure. I am wondering where Edgewalker is getting the idea armor mitigates things that avoidance does not avoid.

The EH formula I was pointing you to includes resistances as well. I believe that Theckd even derived a resistance-stam equivalence similar to the armor-stam one for pure physical damage. Not only does it include armor/health/resistance, it includes the fact that you can have different damage reductions against each type as well as flat damage reductions that only affect one damage type.

As for physical effects that aren't mitigated by armor, the major thing that falls under that category is bleeds. Spinning Pain Strike from the mistresses on Jaraxxus and Big Bang on Algalon are a couple more examples.

[Vah]

You are dangerously close to wearing my exact gear set, minus Fleshrender's hate of dropping for us.

No no, actually you are dangerously close to wearing 'my' exact gear set, minus the 272 cloak :P

<3

[Vah]

Which one are you talking about please?

Unidentifiable Organ - Items - Sigrie

[jere]

As a side note, anybody got a pointer to physical damage which is mitigated by armor but not by avoidance? I seem to recall Patchwerk's Hateful Strike fell into that category, but not sure. I am wondering where Edgewalker is getting the idea armor mitigates things that avoidance does not avoid.

Think Anub'arak. When you are frozen, you can mitigate damage via armor, but cannot dodge, parry, be missed. Same for bosses that do knock downs (Icehowl) or stuns (Maexna).

[Xenix]

Oops, yeah - I misunderstood what he was asking. Another couple examples would be Gormok's impale ability (the attack that applies the DoT) and Thorim's Unbalancing Strike (although US can still miss).

[Wars]

There are certain times in an encounter where Blizzard wants us to take physical damage but have it be completely unavoidable.

Those are the situations that jere describes above. As such, armor is a very valuable deterrent for death in many encounters.

[Insahnity]

Think Anub'arak. When you are frozen, you can mitigate damage via armor, but cannot dodge, parry, be missed. Same for bosses that do knock downs (Icehowl) or stuns (Maexna).

Thanks Jere. Too bad swarm bites are nature damage.

[Xianth]

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.

#


This is not logically correct.

Let's use the same scenario of damage and you have the choice between a trinket that gives you 2000 HP or an armor trinket that reduces physical damage by a further 5% (roughly equiv to the glyph).

Now, lets say you try the stamina trinket first, unless you find yourself below 2000 HP then the stamina trinket has not helped you one single bit (apart from say, minor things like if you use a %HP based self heal or something). Whereas if you had the armor trinket you would have reduced the damage you take in that fight by 2.5% every time.

So, an armor trinket will help you 100% of the time for a varying, but significant amount, whereas it's RNG whether that extra stamina is of much use at all. If course, i'm not saying stamina is shit, it's just that it's usefulness lies in it's overall level and not the choice between two items.

[jere]

Well even if armor works on every hit individually, that doesn't make it better. Whichever of the two gives more EH will technically still win. Sure if you never use that 2000 HP it was useless. But if you took a tank in a situation where 2000 HP would be useless and switched his gear so that he lost the 2k health and got the armor, then if the EH from the armor was less than the EH from the HP, then the damage reduction, though used every hit, would still be useless because it was never needed in the first place. The tank would have survived the same streak of hits without the damage reduction in place.

[Aradril]

It's clear that the stam trinket provides more EH, but as you cannot rely on EH only, and needs mitigation as well, the choice remains very uncertain as armor is mainly a mitigation stat, and the Glyph of Indominability provides a lot of avoidance as well.

It's all about balancing EH vs mitigation and if there's a solution to that, it has to be one balancing corresponding to each encounter. For my part I would prefer the armor trinket in most physical situation and the stam trinket in most magical cases. Still I would eventually prefer the stam trinket for some extremely hard hitting bosses because of the spikes dmg. But the frontier remains uncertain.

[Reev]

It's clear that the stam trinket provides more EH, but as you cannot rely on EH only, and needs mitigation as well, the choice remains very uncertain as armor is mainly a mitigation stat, and the Glyph of Indominability provides a lot of avoidance as well.

It's all about balancing EH vs mitigation and if there's a solution to that, it has to be one balancing corresponding to each encounter. For my part I would prefer the armor trinket in most physical situation and the stam trinket in most magical cases. Still I would eventually prefer the stam trinket for some extremely hard hitting bosses because of the spikes dmg. But the frontier remains uncertain.

Aradril, Mitigation is part of Effective Health. Effective health is the total unmitigated damage you can take before you die. Increasing either your total health or your total mitigation increases the amount of unmitigated damage you can take before death. Do you mean mitigation versus health?

[Satorri]

^^ What Reev said.

The point of this calculation was to illustrate that in terms of physical that can be mitigated, you can actually directly correlate the value of health and armor depending on how much of each you already have.

In other words, if you're trying to get the best "Effective Health" you want to know how much more your health is worth when you add more armor, and how much your current armor will increase each additional spot of health you add.

[Aradril]

I know mitigation is part of EH, of course.

But when I'm thinking about my global mitigation (including fixed or absolute mitigation : armor & stance etc, and statistical or variable mitigation : avoidance, block and other variables), I'm considering whether I will require more a less heal at equal damages taken per second. On the other hand, when I'm thinking about EH, I'm considering how big would be the stronger hit(s) I can survive in one, two, or may be three times in a raw, before any heal can reach me. It's definetely two different ways of thinking, two different considerations.

That's what I meant in my precedent post. The stam trinket is ubber in term of EH for most tanks, that's a fact, and at same ilvl it's likely it would always be like that between a stam and an armor trinket. But if you're considering mitigation, then it's evident that the armor one is better. And now if you're considering the EH logic and the mitigation logic, trying to find a balance, then there is a conciliation to make, and the solution will depend on the fight you're thinking of, whether you've already got the EH virtual cap for the fight or not. Isn't it ?

Anyway it was worth doing the maths. And if I agree with it, it's not because it's that evident but because I checked that too (with Tankpoints and Rawr, not being myself godlike in maths lol).

[jere]

I know mitigation is part of EH, of course.

But when I'm thinking about my global mitigation (including fixed or absolute mitigation : armor & stance etc, and statistical or variable mitigation : avoidance, block and other variables), I

That's the thing. Avoidance is not mitigation.