Need Help Understanding Stam

[Satrina]

Not seeing how 500 dodge rating is any better than 500 hitpoints if you're not completely unhittable by gaining that amount.

It's a completely subjective assessment. I'm sure there are some that would agree with it.

[Theotherone]

Okay, re-gemming and re-enchanting of my DK is done (lots of emblems); Pally is next. I've now reached just about 45.5K unbuffed health in Blood Tank Spec and 33k armor (Frost Presence) and much to my surprise I remained above the expertise soft cap, my hit is at 220 and I had no threat issues whatsoever and was as sturdy as ever in raid last night. So now the question becomes, other then "why did I wait to do this", do I craft the Pillars of Might for the extra 1200ish armor or be content with Legguards of Lost Hope and work on my Pally tank/heals who, in fairness, needs the gear more.

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-s...cn=Theotherone

[Dreador]

Is the DK your main? If so, craft the Pillars. The only time you really don't want to use them is heroic 25m Lich King, where you'd want the heroic Lost Hope for the added stam.

[Aggathon]

Well, you'd use them on magic heavy fights, LK is one of them, probably Sindragosa and LDW would be amongst those. Legguards of Lost hope also gain value from the extra stam if you have the 4 set bonus as a warrior, but I don't even know what the DK 4 set is, lol.

But yes, Pillars of Might are sex.

[ironsides]

Not seeing how 500 dodge rating is any better than 500 hitpoints if you're not completely unhittable by gaining that amount.

As much as I love EH id prolly argue that one, thats alot of dodge... and 500 hitpoints for me at this point is like nothing, but irrelevant anyway.

edit: Only the first part was at Dreador, I was just summing things up before the post got locked.

What it really boils down to, the only thing avoidance is really good at is lowering total damage taken in an encounter, of course EH does this as well, but avoidance in theory if you took an entire fight and averaged out the damage the avoidance tank might take slightly less damage. What you need to understand is that while that avoidance tank took less healing in the end to keep up ( which doesn't matter because he should be taking constant heals) he will take much more spike damage. How often do any of you die during a fight because your healers are oom from having to heal you to often... You don't is the point, the only times I EVER die is Spike damage or healers messing up. EH prevents that spike damage, an EH tank takes much smaller hits and with constant heals is easy to keep up, but an avoidance tank can be killed in an instant, and constant heals is much less likely to keep him up if he gets RNGed. Kaz said it the best, EH is king just do it.

[Fledern]

I'm a tank that traveled from the world of balanced stats to EH stacking. Back in vanilla and most of TBC, i was a "balanced" tank. I'd very carefully plan out my gear to reach hit/expertise cap along with becoming "unhittable" (ie, no unblocked hits).

My healers loved me. They could take their eyes off me & work on other people. Or watch the fight instead of healthbars. I could stand up for ridiculous amounts of time even with zero healing. I was the prime candidate for tanking Prince phase2 or Janalai. But you know what? i still died. I wasnt aware of the EH arguments back then, so every time i died we went "oh damn, that was unlucky". Beating the RNG was part of our strategy for beating the boss.

Sometime into late TBC (close to WotLK release), i got wise. By then we had all the wotlk buffs & gear so even without replanning we still facerolled everything. However, right into WotLK, i switched to EH stacking.

There was a howl from my healers. I endured. Initially i died a lot. It turns out that while i changed my mentality, my healers didnt. They still expected me to beat the RNG. Then they switched their mentality too and suddenly everything started going well. Since then we've yet to have a wipe due to "bad luck". This time, when there's a wipe, we all know exactly why it happened and we fix it for the next try.

Just for kicks, i tried going the balance route with my DK tank alt. Since it's not getting prime time raiding, i thought it wouldnt matter much. And yes, it didnt matter much. I could just tank fine, healers didnt have heartattacks over my health jumping up & down.....Until it came time for me to tank the Lich King. I had to bite the bullet, go buy the expensive crafted legs. Suddenly i'm a good tank again. Even though my hit is no longer capped or my expertise nice like it used to be. So i end up trying multiple times to apply my diseases. So what? i can still keep aggro and i dont die to RNG.

As for choosing gear.... any tank gear drop will serve decently enough if you gem & enchant it properly. But if your tanks arent ready to spill blood to get their hands on that bonus armor piece that just dropped, you need to educate your tanks. Stacking stam gems is something every tank can pick up just by looking up on armory. Actually planning for your bonus armor is the true indicator that says your tank knows his business.

[Satrina]

As much as I love EH id prolly argue that one, thats alot of dodge

If you have 0 dodge rating, adding 500 takes you to 10.22%. If you add another 500 on, you get to 18.31%. Don't forget, though, that all the dodge you gain from agility and defense are factored in here, so you'll be getting less than that. For example:

100 agility, 540 defense (689 rating), 0 dodge rating -> +6.72% dodge
100 agility, 540 defense, 500 dodge rating -> +15.52% (gain 8.8% dodge previous)
100 agility, 540 defense, 1000 dodge rating -> +22.60% (gain 7.1% over previous)

Is it really "alot" of dodge? Some will say yes, some will say no.

Of course, we can't forget that in terms of item budget, you would generally get 3 stamina in exchange for 2 combat rating, so the 500:50 comparison is silly to begin with.

[Aggathon]

There's a dropoff point. 500 dodge rating is better then 50 stamina. 200 dodge rating is worse then 200 stamina.

As talked about before I've been writing an article that tackles these issues from multiple angles to try and give people a better understanding of how these mechanics work.

I'm at 591 dodge rating atm, if I increase by another 500 after DRs it will give me roughly 8.5% more dodge. Good, right?

Well in ICC when you lop off the 20% dodge it puts me at a total of 15.05% chance to dodge.

When calculating out the odds of not being hit 3 times in a row in a boss fight, the % chance (not decimal, percent) that I won't dodge 3 times in the fight is 0.00008175051855502%, this is up from 0.0000000010271571301%. While it is a massive increase it is still negligible in the long run, statistics still break down and you're going to get hit a lot.

Running the odds with the added dodge rating for various % times to avoid:
4: 0.083691%
5: 2.59622%
6: 14.9717%

Running the same odds without the added dodge rating:
4: 0.000169%
5: 0.0387789%
6: 0.90867%

As one might expect, adding that much dodge DOES decrease your chances of getting hit X times in a row, however if you're banking on a 14% chance that you won't get hit a 6th time in a row, you may want to re-evaluate your strategy.

Now this is still a work in progress, I have a couple other people helping, working on some stats work, people are double checking my spreadsheets, and we're trying to find a way to equate this to the EHP gains.

However just simple ilevel tradeoff comparison, 500 dodge vs 50 stam is not a tradeoff you will ever see, probably not even 200 dodge vs 20 stam. Rather you will see 30 stam tradeoff with 20 dodge rating (based on gemming, obviously this is a loose number and changes per gear selection, but with gemming this is what the tradeoff is roughly, not counting socket bonuses). So to gain that 8.5% dodge (500 rating) in terms of gem level, that is giving up 750 stam. Me? I'll take the extra 10k hit points to the 8.5% dodge.

Edit: oh ya test parameters:
This was based off of my current avoidance values in ICC
This gives: 11.2% chance to be missed
6.55% chance to dodge
20.57% chance to parry for a total of 38.32% avoidance

This is based on a boss fight where a mob swings at you 89 times (taken from a parce of H-Blood Princes25)

If anyone wants the spreadsheet as it stands, PM me your e-mail or something or if I can attach it via PM I'll be glad to send it to you.

[felhoof]

I'm not sure I quite understand. Isn't it more relevant to look at it as what are the chances of being hit X times in a row, since an avoided attack will allow your healers to catch up?

[Aggathon]

I'm not sure I quite understand. Isn't it more relevant to look at it as what are the chances of being hit X times in a row, since an avoided attack will allow your healers to catch up?

For an individual chance yes, but that assumes it only happens once on a boss fight, in reality it can happen several times, and even if you beat the RNG odds a 3 or 4 times, the 5th time is what will kill you.

[Theotherone]

Is the DK your main? If so, craft the Pillars. The only time you really don't want to use them is heroic 25m Lich King, where you'd want the heroic Lost Hope for the added stam.

Tough to say who's my main anymore; my hunter and DK are equally geared - my Pally needs some love; while the other two sit at around 5800+ gs; the pally is at just why of 5600 in both tank and heal gear; the Pally has the worst luck for drops.

But I want to thank everyone especially Agg and Dread for all the help/explanation on EH; I'm kind of obsessed with it now. We downed Purtricide for the first time last night (granted we had the 15% buff); but even when he'd take my health down, I always seemed to have the luxury of Vampiric Blood waiting or Rune tap available because my healer had more breathing room with my heal pool, could keep me at a reasonable level without spamming anything . In fact, I asked my main healer (a Druid - we were two healing it) if the stam stacking helped and he said "yes" he was just putting 2 HoTs on me and then watching the raid.

That said we went to the Blood Princes and got our butts kicked; first time in there; but they'll go down.

[felhoof]

For an individual chance yes, but that assumes it only happens once on a boss fight, in reality it can happen several times, and even if you beat the RNG odds a 3 or 4 times, the 5th time is what will kill you.

So...you're asking given a sequence of x hits, what the probability is that you'll have y hits in a row given avoidance z? That seems reasonable to me, but I'm not sure that's what you're doing. The 'the % chance (not decimal, percent) that I won't dodge 3 times in the fight ' is what's throwing me.

And yes, RNG can kill you, but you can choose to accept a reasonable RNG chance and enhance specific chances by doing other things such as using trinkets and cooldowns when needed.

[Aggathon]

And yes, RNG can kill you, but you can choose to accept a reasonable RNG chance and enhance specific chances by doing other things such as using trinkets and cooldowns when needed.

I agree, but what I'm saying is that avoidance doesn't give you good gains, even over time. It's better to go for EHP. EHP makes your cooldowns and trinkets more effective too (see shield wall and last stand, for example).

[Martie]

The numbers I chose weren't randomly chosen.
The first one, 500 to 50 is an overdrawn example of "yes, if you get enough of it, dodge rating does become better."
The second one, 200 to 200, was chosen because stamina trinkets give little more then 200 stamina at ilevel 264. Dodge trinkets give a little less then 200 dodge rating.

Of course there will be people running around claiming they'd rather have two stamina gems in their gear then thirty dodge gems, but those people I tend to ignore because they a) don't think about what they are saying, b) don't know what they are saying or c)say it for no other reason then to disagree.


It's part of what I call smart stam stacking. People who call avoidance bad are wrong. Avoidance is good. Really good, in fact. I want as much of it as I can have. Stamina, however, is better. When given a choice, I'll almost always take stamina over avoidance. Note the almost. I'll go for many 12stam socket bonuses, even if it means putting in an avoidance gem. Why? Because the choice is between 3 stam or 10 rating. At those numbers, the ratings start getting cheap enough to be interesting again. Of course, if I need hit or expertise, those win out.
It depends on your gear, a bit on your preferrences, and the content you run - avoidance is not bad, and should not be ignored.

[felhoof]

I agree, but what I'm saying is that avoidance doesn't give you good gains, even over time. It's better to go for EHP. EHP makes your cooldowns and trinkets more effective too (see shield wall and last stand, for example).

It certainly doesn't currently. That isn't to say that it can't ever, or it hasn't in the past.

In the past, cooldowns were used primarily not when you were about to take a large hit (that's the model today) but when you had an unlucky streak of avoidance or healers were having issues (out of range, silenced, killed, whatever). They weren't a requirement of encounters. They were used reactively to survive low parts of fights. In this situation, cooldowns are enhanced by EH, but it's not important, as EH isn't solving the issue. In those situations it was better to avoid more, as it made it more likely that you wouldn't need to use a precious cooldown in the first place.

With the WotLK model, cooldown rotations on tanks are common place. External cooldowns and a proliferation of personal ones have combined for this kind of notion that the only way to challenge tank damage intake is to have huge hits at certain intervals. In those situations, cooldowns aren't being used reactively. They can't be. They're used on schedule, and as such avoidance doesn't matter; you'll need a CD regardless. That tanks die in two hits is another factor.

Anyway, my point on RNG is that there are times where you can do the fight more easily if you take a risk. If you can cut one more healer because the healing throughput on you is reasonable given your avoidance intake, it might be better to do so than it would be to survive more reliably. If you're going to die in 4 unavoided hits no matter what, it might be better to maximize the chance than 4 unblocked hits doesn't happen, rather than decrease your O:number when you do die on that 4th hit. That really isn't the case right now because hits are so hard and healing doesn't care about mana, but that doesn't have to be the situation.

[Winterburn]

I agree, but what I'm saying is that avoidance doesn't give you good gains, even over time. It's better to go for EHP. EHP makes your cooldowns and trinkets more effective too (see shield wall and last stand, for example).

I suppose a better way of doing it would be calculating the chance of getting hit x times in a row, and substract that number from one to find out the chance of not getting hit x times in a row. Otherwise you miss out the chance to get hit 1/x, 2/x... up to x-1/x times and the resulting chance doesn't really mean anything in practical terms unless the healer needs you to avoid this many hits in a row while he scratches his back or something.

However, I don't really think that inferiority of avoidance needs any more proof. Every time Blizzard seems to let tanks decide what stats to stack with gems and gear and then in the top raid instance they suddenly see all the problems with high avoidance. So they improve the situation by kicking avoidance in the balls, throwing it to the ground wih a jab and beating it up with heavy boots untill it stops bleeding by one huge nerf to avoidance. Although they say it is only done for the good of the healers, it doesn't really make any sense, since healers still pretty much have to spam their largest heals on end game bosses anyways. One would have thought they would come up with something smarter after Sunwell Radiance, but I guess we're in to see some sort of "Cataclysmic Heat" yet... or whatever it will be called then.

[Dreador]

Unfortunately the combat table would not allow calculation of a chance of getting hit x times in a row. It's random. That's because your % chance to avoid is separate for each and every attack.

[Sirloinsteak]

replace ur officer ... u may have passed on some awesome tanks due to this advice ... he is wrong in just about everything he said and plainly lied with the examples and did 0 research, he just decided to have a rant because other tanks were doing things differently to him (the right things) you should only ever go for hit and expertise if ur threat is bad ... which it shouldn't be if your using the right rotation, he is plain wrong with the avoidance relying on rng to save your tank is a stupid concept, most eh tanks these days have (raid buffed) over 70k hp and 35-40k armor (99% of good tanks also take a indestructible potion before the pull and one during the fight) and can survive 3 unhealed full on boss hits in a row without cooldowns.

There is a heap of avoidance on most of the bis EH gear anyways, even as a full on EH tank for most fights Ive seen some epic dodge/parry/miss streaks. Making avoidance ur primary survival tool is a stupid concept compared to having it as a sweet bonus while still being in full EH gear. But as i said before either replace him or send him to these forums so he can do some actual research instead of spouting his unfounded wrong opinions on your guilds tanks.

have fun

[Martie]

Unfortunately the combat table would not allow calculation of a chance of getting hit x times in a row. It's random. That's because your % chance to avoid is separate for each and every attack.

Please man, just stop trying to give people advice on this. You don't understand the math or principles of chance.

[Dreador]

Please man, just stop trying to give people advice on this. You don't understand the math or principles of chance.

No.