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

[felhoof]

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!"

It's not a hard cap. It's simply making it so that the best theoretical gear, buffs, etc can only total to a certain value. In theory one can hard-cap armor currently, but it's not an issue because it's so difficult. You could simply remove the armor cap as it stands now and it wouldn't matter.

If you make it so that the best passive avoidance someone could get would be on the order of 50-60%, you could make avoidance somewhat valuable without it being broken - and that's entirely a function of gear itemization and stat scaling.

[Optimoos]

Well that's all well and good except that's precisely what Blizzard has tried to do in the past two expansions and look what it got them. We got avoidance DR in Wrath to deal with the problems in BC and everyone thought Wrath was going to be smooth sailing. Woops, that didn't work out so well.

You can plan a system with the best intentions but when a game is as dynamic as WoW and is continually changing, putting a "theoretical cap" on what you would see from stats is just going to get you in trouble (again). In a year and a half when Blizzard says "Ahh crap we're at 50% avoidance on this gear, but we don't want to go past that... well lets slap on tons of bonus armor and stam on this gear so it will actually feel like an upgrade."

This is obviously a devil's advocate argument - I'm just trying to point out that these solutions are things that Bliz has tried before and they haven't turned out well for them.

[Tankette]

Stacking stam is boring. It makes all the tanks fairly homogenous, which is also boring. It vastly reduces the need for tanks to have different gear sets for different encounters, which is boring.

Just about every PUG these days has a raid leader screening people by gear score. For tanks it is worse since we are only judged by our stamina.

I know the experts are right but I can't get myself to ignore every gem bonus and only stack stam gems. I still want to gem like we did in TBC where we went with the strength of the item when we gemed an enchated it and we walked around with our bags stuffed with gear.

[Kazeyonoma]

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!"

In this scenario, lets assume you meant in default prior to choosing stam stacking or avoidance stacking it takes 12 hits. If you grab some avoidance, that means you have a high chance you'll at least avoid some of them, and thus give your healer a chance to heal you. (if you avoid at least once out of 12--although likely it's still possible to not avoid any) Now instead I opt to grab more HP, and low and behold, now i can take 14 or say 15 hits before death, same net result, healer has more time to heal me back to safe levels, and yet, there is no RNG (whoops didn't avoid any of the 12). That's why EH wins almost always. Because it is constant.

[felhoof]

If you like, you can have an actual cap on total avoidance such that a boss will always hit you 25% of the time (or 50%, or whatever). Heck, that might be fun - get an avoidance cap that you can reach in the middle tiers of content and then have to juggle gear to keep that avoidance cap high (or emphasize block or parry or dodge depending). That would be more interesting than what we have now.

In this scenario, lets assume you meant in default prior to choosing stam stacking or avoidance stacking it takes 12 hits. If you grab some avoidance, that means you have a high chance you'll at least avoid some of them, and thus give your healer a chance to heal you. (if you avoid at least once out of 12--although likely it's still possible to not avoid any) Now instead I opt to grab more HP, and low and behold, now i can take 14 or say 15 hits before death, same net result, healer has more time to heal me back to safe levels, and yet, there is no RNG (whoops didn't avoid any of the 12). That's why EH wins almost always. Because it is constant.

Except you needed bigger heals to get back to full, which might mean more heals or more inefficient heals. And in a world where mana matters, that's a problem.

[Tankette]

In this scenario, lets assume you meant in default prior to choosing stam stacking or avoidance stacking it takes 12 hits. If you grab some avoidance, that means you have a high chance you'll at least avoid some of them, and thus give your healer a chance to heal you. (if you avoid at least once out of 12--although likely it's still possible to not avoid any) Now instead I opt to grab more HP, and low and behold, now i can take 14 or say 15 hits before death, same net result, healer has more time to heal me back to safe levels, and yet, there is no RNG (whoops didn't avoid any of the 12). That's why EH wins almost always. Because it is constant.

Don't forget that Blizz has said they will make healers work harder to not go OOM, so avoidance = less heals = healers not going OOM.

[Kazeyonoma]

I'm all for that felhoof, that'd be fun, so some people in early tiers can either push for "cap" or based on their healing comfortability they can go stam stacking and wait for the next tier to help bring up their avoidance closer to cap and eventually you reach a point where you're capped and can stack more stam, but new upgrades have lower avoidance sometimes higher stam or higher armor and you further have to rebalance.

It'd be fun, but i think part of the changes in cataclysm is that blizz WANTED us to not have to pull out spreadsheets everytime we want to get a new piece of gear to see if it's an ugprade or not because we have all of these "artificial caps" that exist. I think GC said something like, "who says I need to get 8% hit just to never miss, why does every boss only have an 8% chance to not be hit, that's crazy" (not a direct quote, it was something like that though).

[felhoof]

The solution to that one, Kaz, is the idea of boss expertise - something they're already planning on doing. In this case, you can get more avoidance and be 'okay', even if you've hit the cap for this tier.

Dunno. I personally really like the juggling, so that's something of a knock against me. I'm not the best judge here. I had a lot of fun trying to optimize gear sets for each fight and it actually mattering. It's one factor in making tanking less fun for me that it's gone.

[Kazeyonoma]

i like optimizing gear, i'd argue most of us here on tankspot do, we're math guys, but blizz doesn't want to force people to whip out spreadsheets each time an item drops just to see if it's an actual upgrade or not because now they aren't at some arbitrarily set cap.

[felhoof]

See, I don't remember whipping out a spreadsheet. I remember seeing a trinket drop and wanting it because it might be handy. Or going for a second set of tier gear just in case I needed to gem/enchant it differently. YOu did't have to calculate it then. YOu just needed to do homework at some point. And you would grab offtier gear just in case too.

But yes, point taken. People don't want to be so easily confused by stuff. Math is hard. Sigh.

[proudmoore]

Tanking isn't a role that involves that much maths, though. DPS aim for an expectation value in balancing linear and multiplicative stats, while tanks tend to aim for the worst case scenario. Worst case is usually fairly trivial mathematically, with eyeballing, and perhaps pen and paper in major gear shifts being enough.

If you get into probability theory and the deviation of avoidance (the average worst case scenario), on the other hand, the maths becomes extremely obscure, although not necessarily overly complicated.

[Fledern]

The problem with the original question is that it's not dependent on the tanks.

Say you have a hardcap - 35% somebody said. At what tier level? What is Blizzard going to do when they release the next tier?

The whole design of an encounter depends on the very real danger of a tank death. That's what encounter design has to provide. So you can bet that whenever Blizzard says "faster & smaller hits" it's still going to mean the bosses will still be hitting very hard.

A tank that takes 12 consecutive hits to die? For a boss that hits every 1 secs (super fast by today's design standards - that's Patchwerk level fast), that's still 12 seconds for the tank to die - time enough for the healer to have a sip or two of his beer before pressing the heal button.

A tank that can survive 12 consecutive attacks on average to die because he can dodge 1/2 of them? you can bet that, especially with the increased stam we'll be seeing on new gear, somebody will come up with rogues/hunter pets/hunters themselves tanking bosses, ending in strange nerfs & total chaos.

Lets change it around. Encounter introduces a mechanic that requires a healer to be out of action for 12 secs. The tank has to survive those 12 secs on his own. That's about the only way i can think of making a 12 sec duration dangerous to a tank. What sort of gear would you aim for? One that guarantees that you survive all 12 blows landing, or one that says you'll hopefully dodge half of those 12 attacks but get killed if you get hit by 7 consecutive attacks? Yes the probability might be low that you get for 7 consecutive hits but it's still there - and any decent tank will concentrate on making 100% sure he'll survive.

The only way avoidance can become anywhere meaningful is if tanks have to end up actively working for their healers mana management. And you can bet that that's never going to happen. Or rather, it will come already built in on the gear, meaning you'll rarely have to do extra on the work with gemming & enchanting.

Unless the whole concept of encounter design changes - as in you dont put a choke point on the encounter and name it "tank" - gearing, gemming & enchanting will always be based on "making sure" and making sure will always end up with EH planning.

Personally i would love to see a push for more balanced gemming/enchanting. But such a push in the ways i mentioned above, would require people to do math, open up doors of making "bad" gear/gem/enchant decisions, things that Blizzard is trying to get away from. So i'm not really hopeful.

PS: Wasnt there a mastery stat that scaled with the hp of the tank? I think that's a very clear indication of what to expect

[BruisedOoze]

Personally i would love to see a push for more balanced gemming/enchanting. But such a push in the ways i mentioned above, would require people to do math, open up doors of making "bad" gear/gem/enchant decisions, things that Blizzard is trying to get away from. So i'm not really hopeful.

It doesn't require math though. If you're causing your healers to run out of mana, either they have to be more efficient or you have to gem avoidance to take less damage. Extra health will only buy some extra time for the healer react, not make them use less heals or more efficient ones. The complicated math part would be whether you should gem dodge or parry which behave very differently in Cataclysm.

If avoidance doesn't matter come Cataclysm then I don't see how mana will matter either.

[Martie]

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

Why would you want a discussion about avoidance vs stam that ignores the single most important reason to stack stam?

2. I know I need to stack stam right now to be a good tank at this point in the game

Depends on the content you run - you don't need 50k hp for most 5man heroics, for example.[quote]

[Darksend]

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.

(points at my blog post a few weeks ago about making the "on-use" part of trinkets straight % so they actually feel useful again)

[thegreatheed]

What most of the poster in this thread ignore is that tanking doesn't happen in a vacuum. EH is a great tool, but in a real world raid environment, EH is not an effective single measure of a tank's effectiveness. Anytime you add in healing, cooldowns, specific boss mechanics, EH as a single measure tool loses it's power. In fact in today's raid environment, you really only need enough EH to avoid a worst-case damage spike, since healers have the mana and GCDs to spam heal you almost forever.

The tank/healing model will change significantly in Cata. The developers have promised as much, and for one, it's fruitless to ignore those design goals. In Cata, healers won't have to spam heal a tank to keep them alive, decently geared tanks will have enough stamina to not receive heals for 3 seconds and survive most things. This is a design goal the blues have specifically stated. They don't like the healing spam, and want to make sure it doesn't happen again. In addition to removing the need to heal spam, they are increasing the likelihood a healer will go OOM if they heal spam inefficient spells. This will further move the tank/healer model away from only needing stamina on your tank's gear.

Inside a model where tanks don't need spam heals, avoidance goes up in value. If healers have time to actually react to damage, instead of just preemptively spamming heals, then tanks who maintain good avoidance levels will significantly reduce the healer strain. If a tank takes 2 hits in a row in Cata, he won't be dead like he is now. Healers will have time to react and heal, and the tank will have time to reactively use defensive skills.

Inside this same model, tanks who avoid avoidance stats, crappy pun intended, will require much more healer attention and mana. In a world where mana isn't endless, this is a dangerous situation. Being a mana sponge may actually wipe the raid, as healers will run OOM.

In short, I agree with the OP, stam stacking is a bad idea in theory, and most likely will be a bad idea in Cata.

[Aggathon]

I thought the OP was talking about how he didn't like that we had to stack EHP, or was that other thread? As far as cata goes, imo, we'll see, I won't comment on that. However you should take a look at this: http://www.tankspot.com/showthread.p...g-mechanics%29 thegreatheed. For WotLK, stam stacking, or more specifically EHP stacking, is DEFINITELY a good idea.

[Trogdorrior]

The tank/healing model will change significantly in Cata.

Indeed. If you actually look at the new talents from the alpha leaks, you'll see that resto druids will have a proc that allows a instacast/free wrath. I think, from a logical standpoint that includes NO experience tanking at 80, that it is just better to have more health. I would much rather put my survival in the ability to survive more hits than actually hit than hope for a chance to dodge or block... but I don't know for sure.

[NewfieDave]

I think the answer to making a variety of stats attractive lies in encounter design. For example, want to make a fight where stam stacking is worse than avoidance stacking? Give the boss an avoidable attack that deals damage based on a percentage of the tank's health. It could tick for 25% of your health every 0.5 seconds over 2.5 seconds, but each tick would be avoidable. Giving bosses varying levels of expertise is another good idea for promoting variety. The same is true for hit caps; I'd like to see variety from boss to boss. There has to be some transparency in the system if they go this route though. You should know how much hit you need to be capped for a particular boss fight just by checking your UI.

Perhaps they could even incorporate some of this "boss research" into the lore and quests in the game. If you go into the fight without having done the quest chain for that boss, you get no info. But if you've done the research quests, you get to see some stats on the tooltip. Ultimately this info would all get posted online though, so I don't know how well it would work.

[Trogdorrior]

As it seems right now, they are actually going in the exact opposite direction as that, Newfiedave. It seems the cataclysm will aim to streamlike the tanking experience so that it becomes "more accessable" like everything else. In general, would you rather have 80 marbles and have 4 taken away every minute, or 60 marbles with a chance of only three marbles instead of four taken away every minute. That's how I perceive the stam discussion.