Why I think the idea Stam stacking is a bad idea (a hypothetical discussion)

[Shico752]

I've been playing the game a long time now, I have 3 80s marks/bm hunter resto/kfc druid and a prot/fury warroir (newest 80 and still gearing) and I've been looking at tanking in WotLK and I don't like the stat stacking witch is just plain stamina no Avoidance stacking at all. To me it is much better to want to dodge, block or parry an attack then take it so I just with in cataclysm Blizz finds a way to make stacking Avoidance.

1. please no EH debate you want that go somewhere else
2. I know I need to stack stam right now to be a good tank at this point in the game
3. this is just a hypothetical discussion on ways blizz could Avoidance better or equal to stam stacking

any ideas are welcome
IE dodging spells dmg or for every 5k of health you get 3% avoidance just ideas

[Optimoos]

It's pretty straightforward. Unless you are in a very specific gear set, avoidance is never guaranteed. Yes, it is wonderful to dodge/parry an attack and have zero incoming damage. However, if the RNG gremlin bites you in the ass and you don't avoid 10 hits in a row, that's going to be an awful lot of damage. Armor and health are ALWAYS there to soak up those times when RNG-bad-things happen.

Then there's the whole bit where avoidance does nothing for magic damage (unless you're a blood DK with magic parry).

Blizz cannot "solve" this without making avoidance incredibly overpowered. In Cataclysm, if avoidance is too good, you'll just never take damage. Enter Sunwell radiance and Chill of the Throne. My humble prediction is that with the future of raiding being large health pools and smaller hits from bosses you will see Stam stacking become even more prevalent. Why avoid a small hit when I can just stack enough stam to not actually die during an entire fight? Okay, that's a mythical example but imagine a well geared t14 tank in Cataclysm heroics - not unlikely that this might be the scenario.

[The Hoof]

The problem is that if you make avoidance too powerful, you get things like this:

http://www.wow.com/2008/05/20/the-ta...-5-mans-gruul/

[proudmoore]

I was thinking about this the other day actually - chiefly, on the subject of Sindragosa, where I was testing out the whole Frost Resistance thing. As it happens, I think Blizzard got there before me with the cataclysm changes, but hear me out.

What if (one of the types of) avoidance changed to become much more like magical resistance. You have a guaranteed percentage reduction on every attack, and a chance for even more. In the case of the frost breaths, I had 380 FR, which means 30-50% resistance of every Breath. Even at a cost of 5-6k health, the relative changes to effective health came down firmly on the FR side (something I'd been suspicisou of before I actually tried it and saw the numbers scrolling up my screen).

However, as melee damage is universally a significantly higher fraction of incoming damage than magic (even on a boss like normal Sindragosa where the magical damage is the killer), it would have to be a significantly smaller fraction. Say... 5%, with a chance to avoid another 5% of a melee attack in normal gear, increasing to 10%/15% if you stack it Or something. What is the difference from armour, you ask? Well... not much, really. Just that occasionally, instead of getting damage reduction equal to your armour reduction, you'd sometimes reduce melee damage by a little more than that.

An alternative is to push avoidance through the roof (of the order of 70-80%), have "standard" boss damage be magical, and turn melee damage into the spike - massive melee attacks landing fairly infrequently. That would represent an absolutely major shift in design, though, and I cannot see it happening at all.

As it happens, this appears to be something along the lines of where Block and parry are going in Cataclysm. They're not going all the way, i.e. they won't be guaranteed (or I expect them not to be), but the Parry change in particular significantly changes the dynamic of how useful it is. Or it might do, it'll depend entirely on what designs Blizzard come up with.

In my suggestion, the difference between avoidance and sta/armour blurs, to the point that neither can be considered particularly more "interesting" than the other. Perhaps neither is more interesting now (although I find the concept of "omg stamina!!11!" to be somewhat tedious and trivial). I don't think Parry or Dodge becoming the new stat to mindlessly stack would be any more "interesting" (for a given definition of). If Blizzard can get the balance just right, so that healer mana does matter enough to care about the damage we don't take, rather than how much we can take, I think that would be the best step forward at all, since you then have to weigh the benefits of avoidance against effective health.

Whether Blizzard can get that balance right is, of course, another discussion entirely.

[Shico752]

I think proudmoore as a good idea and I don't think it sould be "stamina!!11" or "avoidance!!11one" is a closer balance to much to ask "avoid-mina?"


and nice to see your input Dreador, :P

lol

[gacktt]

Wait till cataclysm.

Gimpass healer regen + tons of tank hp = baby hits that still make healers go oom, so u don't stam stack.

[MellvarTank]

I'm a little confused....

Why I think the idea Stam stacking is a bad idea (a hypothetical discussion)

1. please no EH debate you want that go somewhere else
2. I know I need to stack stam right now to be a good tank at this point in the game
3. this is just a hypothetical discussion on ways blizz could Avoidance better or equal to stam stacking

With that thread title, it is GOING to be an EH debate. However I'm going to give you a few points:

Stam stacking is NOT the same as EH gearing. So yes, Stam stacking is bad for any fight that is not magic based. You are correct, and everyone will agree. (Aggathon got me thinking about what this means, so here is an example that they are fixing for Cataclysm: You equip a DPS plate piece, because it has more stam than the equivalent tanking piece, and you are still crit immune.)

Stam stacking does not make you a good tank.

If Blizz wanted to make avoidance viable they would change it so that 20% dodge meant you dodged 20% of attacks period. Unfortunately this would make it so overbearingly OP that it won't ever happen. There is no solution.

[felhoof]

I really wish that avoidance or other stats were more relevant as well. While I know that TBC was broken at the highest gear levels, before then there were some very interesting choices that tanks made in gearing that would help fights. Avoidance on Gurtogg was great, for instance. Block on RoS P1, avoidance on Archi, armor on Morogrim, etc. You could go all stam - but a lot of times you simply took too much damage in too short a time for healers to deal with you easily, and you'd die.

It also meant that on use avoidance trinkets weren't horrible. They were downright awesome.

Then there was threat - threat mattered, so you'd have another gearset that would maximize threat. That too was fun.

With threat not particularly mattering (and there not being a whole lot you can do about it anyway) and avoidance being essentially useless in terms of gearing + the overvaluation of stamina, gearing...is kinda dull most of the time. I love Anub'arak because it did encourage special gearing, but most folks feel that was a mistake of design.

[Satrina]

1) Lots of new tanks feel that avoidance "should" be the way to go. The math doesn't support it except in extremely limited application (See felhoof's post above for examples.) As others have mentioned, it is not very easy to make avoidance highly useful without overpowering it completely (in the current model WoW uses.)

2) I'm pretty sure we'll see very low total avoidance levels in Cataclysm. I wrote a thingy on that a few months ago.

3) Everyone behave. Don't make me lock this thread.

[swelt]

I don't think stacking stam or stacking avoidance are fundamentally better than one another. I think the ideal system would have people fine tuning their gear, using a mix of skill/math/experience to get the absolute best performance. This is how socketing and enchanting works for some dps & healer classes. It doesn't for all, nor does it work for tanks.

Thing you could do to make tank socketing more interesting:
- Make hit/expertise caps more appealing.
- Have armor as a blue gem option, meaning you could choose to socket armor OR stam in a given item. (For RP purposes, perhaps it would be a blacksmith crafted "rivet" rather than a gem)
- Make most socket bonuses be bonus stam (or armor), encouraging hybrid gem selection
- Add a new meta with a compelling bonus but that has red/yellow requirements

[Loremaster Roht]

The benefits of stacking stamina are very well defined at this point, but I agree on the point that the focus is a little too heavy on the stat. Yes, it is necessary to stack stam to survive the ludicrous amounts of burst damage every boss puts out. Combined with the fact healers never run out of mana these days despite the fact they never stop casting and threat outputs were made easy...... there's no other options or leeway. There's only the option to stack stamina.

Now this isn't to say Blizz should do away with tanks stacking stamina altogether, but it'd be nice to have something else to focus on for once. Cataclysm aims to solve at least one problem, by not making bosses hit too hard. The new healing model requires several heals to get a tank up to top health (from low health), 4-5 hits to kill a tank compared to the 2-3 these days, and 4-5 casts to today's one cast. There's probably still some fine tuning in there needed, but you get the idea.

Because dying won't happen quite so quick in Cata, there probably should be some wiggle room. You can have the option to throw in some more avoidance (make you easier to healer overall, if a bit random), some more threat (hit & expertise mostly, and this also doubles as more DPS as a tank), or maybe just a bit more stamina because you feel like it. While understandably we don't want to do calculus to figure out which stat is best for us, I'd really rather not have just one stat to rule them all.

Maybe it's just me, but stacking only one stat isn't my idea of a fun game mechanic.

[Aggathon]

You might be interested to read the post I just made here: http://www.tankspot.com/showthread.p...897#post408897

[Bigbad]

I find the current way of stam stacking to be boring in wotlk but its the way to go, gearing my offspec fury is way more interesting with arp, hit and expertise cap and throwing in a leather/mail piece with good stats here and there.

Cataclysm will be more interesting to see how block (30% reduction) vs parry (2x 50% reduction) vs dodge (1x 100% reduction) will turn out. I'll assume there will still be some sort of softcaps for EH you want to reach for certain encounters before you gem for avoidance but it will be more interesting at least.

[Theotherone]

Stam stack, you'll get more then enough hit, expertise, and avoidance from the high end gear.

Theotherone = Stam/EH convert - zealot

[swelt]

Most of you aren't reading past the title. This isn't about what a player should do now, it's about what would be a good system for the future.

[Optimoos]

Most of you aren't reading past the title. This isn't about what a player should do now, it's about what would be a good system for the future.

... and the point that many have made is that you simply can't do more with avoidance as it stands otherwise you end up with Rogues tanking, Sunwell Radiance/Chill of the Throne, and other silly mechanics to deal with it.

Making avoidance "better" would pretty much require a revamp of the combat system, so if you want to discuss something that is entirely based in hope/fantasy/whatever for a future release, that's fine. At this time, Blizzard has made no indication such a radical change is happening in Cataclysm that I am aware of.

[Shico752]

Most of you aren't reading past the title. This isn't about what a player should do now, it's about what would be a good system for the future.

thank you

all I'm staying is stam gem stam gem stam gem stam ench stam ench stam ench is boring
I wish there was more things we could do, you know? or else just give tanks stam take out avoidance in cat we have 1000k hp and 2% dodge IMO thats where we are going

[felhoof]

.. and the point that many have made is that you simply can't do more with avoidance as it stands otherwise you end up with Rogues tanking, Sunwell Radiance/Chill of the Throne, and other silly mechanics to deal with it.

As it stands? Kinda.

One of the problem is the way avoidance scales with gemming and enchanting. Which is of course what people want; they want to be able to make a difference with their gearing choices. But this can be solved in a few ways; the notable one is to make gems not subject to DR. Instead of dodge rating gems, why not dodge % gems? Dodge rating would still appear on gear, so everyone would have the same baseline. But you could still modify your chance to dodge by 10% or so given a full dodge component of gems.

Another solution is to reduce the possible dodge value limit significantly. If the most avoidance anyone could ever possibly have, without special tricks, is like 50%, it's not that big a deal if they go to 60 or 70% via a trinket.

Another solution is to focus on attacks that do a lot of small damage each and that happen rapidly. As you get more and more attacks over time avoidance streaks and RNG tend to even out. You see this on Algalon and Brutallus, where the speed of attacks is simply very high. In this situation you can depend on dodging some of them. As an example, we saw that 6 hits above has a certain value of not happening over x attacks. But what if instead of 6 hits to kill you it was 12? What are the chances of not avoiding 12 attacks in a row? They're significantly worse, making dodge much less RNG prone.

[Loremaster Roht]

Making avoidance "better" would pretty much require a revamp of the combat system, so if you want to discuss something that is entirely based in hope/fantasy/whatever for a future release, that's fine. At this time, Blizzard has made no indication such a radical change is happening in Cataclysm that I am aware of.

This is where the changes to healing come in, they affect tanks as well. Significantly, I'd say.

Tanks will no longer be two-shot if we don't receive heals, it'll take several hits to bring us down. Quite simply, bosses won't hit quite so hard in proportion to a tank's health pool. In addition, it will take several heals to bring us back up to full health. These changes do add a bit more weight to avoidance, while still random having a higher chance to avoid damage means healers will *probably* be given more time to heal us. This is still hypothetical, but chances are avoidance will be a bit more relevant in Cataclysm.

They're also cutting down the avaiability of avoidance somewhat, aiming for 30-35% I recall. Compare that to today where tanks are packing almost 50-60%+ without gemming at all for it. The same happened towards the end of TBC, albeit with people actually gemming for it.

Blizz is changing quite a bit about the combat system, though rather than focusing on how tanks work.... it appears they're working on the other aspects. Tanking will always be a bit touchy-feely in terms of mechanics, a slight tweak to something can make it completely overpowered or utterly useless. The whole of Cataclysms design could be to move away from the extreme burst (100%, 10%, 100%, 10%, etc) to somethings more stable (max health, 85%, 75%, 50%, 80%, 65%, 95%, 85%, 75%, 100%, etc). It should be a bit more controllable and could focus a bit more on the fun aspects (fight mechanics), rather than focusing on absolutely and utterly perfect execution.

[Optimoos]

But what if instead of 6 hits to kill you it was 12? What are the chances of not avoiding 12 attacks in a row? They're significantly worse, making dodge much less RNG prone.

This is something we will likely see in Cataclysm, with more health and smaller hits being something that Blizzard has talked about already. However, while the likelihood of it happening lessens, RNG is RNG and the possibility still remains that you eat 12 hits in a row rather than avoiding any of them.

If you truly hard cap the most avoidance anyone could ever have, then doesn't this just come full circle to gemming for stam again? "Well, I'm at the avoidance cap, what's left? Time to gem stam!"