Why We Do What We Do (An in depth explanation of EHP and ICC 3.3.3 tanking mechanics)

[Kazeyonoma]

I talk to Hypatia often on Steam, no worries, I doubt he's offended.

[Satorri]

Well, a perfectly accurate simulation of raid environments could well produce output data that could, more or less, conclusively say that in X situation, adding Y Stamina is better than adding Z Avoidance.

The tricky part, always, of course is that it is not our inability to model that makes them hard to compare. They just plain do different things. We can create a standard based on assumptions (like burst time, time-to-live, etc), but those still have the earmarks of the assumptions we used to create the comparison. At best we can just create a reasonably commonly accepted basis for comparison.

I have no problem with that, but I will gladly poke and prod anyone into submission who wants to come to the forums and say, "Avoidance is terribad!" "Why?" "Because it just is, everyone knows that!"

If you want to make claims, support them. (Not directed at you Koji, lest my quoting you makes anyone think so =D)

[Hypathia]

Let's imagine a Wowrld where stamina would be equivalent to dodge with a perfect simulator which allows whatever we want with Wow mechanics fully implemented. I believe some configurations would be in favor of one and some other for the other. Now the question would be which criteria is the best to use ? The first that come in mind is the number of deaths in a 1000000 simulation runs with realistic boss. Unfortunately it's a bit flawed, because measures induces answers. The second criteria is mana efficiency and it has not very much to do with the previous one.


On the question of reductionism, you are perfectly right Satorri, both avoidance and EHC provides survivability and surely mana efficiency. We could argue that EHC is competitive with that as there could be less overheal but it's not my point. Survivability and mana efficiency are not reducible to each other. The weight is to be chosen and results interpreted.


In conclusion, we can say that the previous perfect world where stamina equals dodge is purely utopia as there's no way we can say we live in it.

[Martie]

On the question of reductionism, you are perfectly right Satorri, both avoidance and EHC provides survivability and surely mana efficiency. We could argue that EHC is competitive with that as there could be less overheal but it's not my point. Survivability and mana efficiency are not reducible to each other. The weight is to be chosen and results interpreted.

Here we touch to the main reason why I favor armor over avoidance so much.
On the toughest tank-damage fights out there, avoidance doesn't change healing efficiency much. You want to have a heal incoming every time you may take damage, since the boss hits hard enough for it to be nigh impossible to heal reactionary. Armor lessens this effect somewhat, avoidance doesn't.

[Kojiyama]

To be fair, that description is only true because healing efficiency does not matter right now.

If healing efficiency did matter, healers would abort heals on avoidance events or avoidance streaks--I did it for years prior to Wrath on my Priest. Cancel-casting was more or less required in TBC until you reached the point where you had enough Spellpower that you could just spam a lower-rank heal with the T5 and T6 set bonuses. However, that was pretty late in the expansion. Prior to that, one could never simply chain-cast a max rank Greater Heal. You would run out of mana in no time.

(In that scenario one doesn't cast reactively as much as they cancel reactively then immediately re-queue a new cast--which is very different.)

Avoidance did matter back then and I presume it will matter again once we get out of the era of 2-shots and infinite mana.

[Martie]

No, it has nothing to do with healer efficiency, Koji.

At the very extreme of the spectrum, there's 25man Sindragosa heroic mode. She has 40k frostbreaths, and her melee hits for up to 40k as well if you don't ap debuff her (up to 30k then). On top of all that, the melee can't always stand behind her, and she's parry hasted.

All that combined means that you can take upwards of 100k damage in three or four seconds, with a good chance of taking another 30k two seconds later, and your healers are being handicapped. You want a heal incoming before the damage hits, so it lands as soon as possible after the damage hits.

The fight-style I tried to describe is why avoidance isn't the top stat, and why armor and stamina are so important. It has nothing to do with healer efficiency, the length of the fights or anything else. It's purely based on boss damage output.

[Satorri]

That, I think is one of the slightly awkward fallacies right now. Avoidance is less meaningful as a survival tool right now because more health can give you a deeper pool within which to not die to a sequence/stack of damage without heals because it isn't an issue for healers to have to heal you more. *However* avoidance still absolutely is helping protect your life. Not taking a hit increases your chances of survival, it is simply the flavor of that where people feel it is less valuable, and the people who are simply following the herd extrapolate that to mean that avoidance is somehow a non-value now.

[Aggathon]

For a burst time scenario that is absolutely true martie, the argument is though that if you don't have enough avoidance to prevent enough of those 40k melee swings and if healer efficiency IS problem, then it wouldn't matter if you survived that attack combo 4 or 5 times, the problem would be that on the 6th time the healers would be out of mana and just couldn't heal it.

Edit: continuing on what Satorri said:

EHP = lengthens the amount of damage you can take in a worst case scenario

Avoidance = decreases the probability of a worst case scenario


Edit 2: hence my entire analysis of the OPs. IF healer efficiency was a problem and IF CotT wasn't in place to reduce the statistical likelihood of the X-hit string by such a significant amount then this would be an ENTIRELY different discussion (hence why the thread is aimed at ICC).

[Kojiyama]

Martie, I believe you have missed my point a little bit.

Because healing efficiency does not matter at all right now, players do not cancel heals. So, no, currently avoidance does not always increase efficiency--but that does not mean it doesn't have the potential to do so.

Yes, you want a heal incoming before the hit but there is nothing saying you need to allow it to land. There are plenty of ways to see when a tank or your current target avoids an attack, and in that scenario you could easily cancel your incoming heal and start a new one at a cost of zero mana. Healers generally do not bother doing this now due to the fact that it does not particularly gain them anything. Efficiency simply does not matter unless you are terribly undergeared.

This is unlikely to still be the case in Cata when efficiency and heal variety will actually make a difference. One is unlikely to be spamming the maximum-sized heal unless a tank drops--and avoidance will cause this to happen less and allow them to use smaller, more efficienct heals and/or cancel larger, less-efficient ones.

Wrath has created a scenario where healers have no efficiency choices due to spell selection, mana regen, and boss damage output and thus the percieved value of avoidance has decreased accordingly.

[Martie]

Hrm, true, I didn't consider cancelling casts, good point there, Koji.

And Agg, I found that if I gear to be able to tank that burst scenario, I can tank everything else as well. Hell, it even allows for certain tricks such as tanking both melee princes.

[Aggathon]

hence the "AND." It doesn't matter if you're a mana sponge because mana is coming out like niagra falls.

[Satorri]

I miss the world where cast-cancelling was possible, valuable, and the mark of a skilled healer (situationally, mind you).

Then again, I also miss my down-ranking where I really felt like I could target the needed healing size without losing pace, rather than risking a big heal that was more than needed, or a small heal that wouldn't get the job done. My shaman had the most elaborate macros using multiple modifiers to get a few different ranks of each of my spells... /pine

[Passive]

Then again, I also miss my down-ranking where I really felt like I could target the needed healing size without losing pace, rather than risking a big heal that was more than needed, or a small heal that wouldn't get the job done. My shaman had the most elaborate macros using multiple modifiers to get a few different ranks of each of my spells... /pine

In the case of priests this is being implemented by making the spell "heal" good again. Flash heal may take the same amount of time to cast as Heal but it will heal more, at a greater mana cost.

And Agg, I remember when I started to play WoW one of the things I was told about tanking was that you can't just be a "mana sponge". I haven't heard that term in a while!

[Aggathon]

I'm still perplexed as to why blizzard killed downranking then just made it so you could just spam your highest ranking spell without REALLY worrying about mana. I mean you still have to manage cooldowns a little but STILL.

[MellvarTank]

I didn't think druids had mana pools anymore... they just healed with no consequence whatsoever..... O.o

I think the important thing for a lot of people to realize is that we aren't saying we hate avoidance, we are simply dealing with the mechanics in the best possible way, which currently does not really involve avoidance gearing. This is just the math behind that conclusion.

[Kojiyama]

Yeah, honestly... Priest healing in TBC raiding from start to finish was one of the most fun things I've ever done in an MMO. Why they removed that model is understandable to a degree--it was a little on the hardcore side--but it certainly did take a lot away from healing.

If they succeed in bringing that back for Cata to a greater or lesser degree, not only will healing be more fun but I think tanking will also get a bit more complex as well.

[Itsover]

Is its more of a gear scaling issue? or just how the boss fights work?

[Satorri]

I'm still perplexed as to why blizzard killed downranking then just made it so you could just spam your highest ranking spell without REALLY worrying about mana. I mean you still have to manage cooldowns a little but STILL.

I think the issue was they tried to ride a higher margin in the hopes of making healing a little more fun and a little less stressful. In early tiers it worked alright and mana was still sometimes a concern, just not always. Like avoidance though, they set themselves on a path they couldn't really step off of without reworking the game in a serious way, so they ended up having healing skew to a point of near silliness.

That said, Heroic ICC has given my healers plenty of tests of their mana, at least when we were learning them. We take it for granted a lot, but mana still isn't totally unlimited, it is just less frequently a concern than it was in BC.

[sifuedition]

I have heard numerous opinions that stopcasting and downranking are fun. As a player who didn't get to start until wotlk, I have a hard time picturing those as fun, however. I map heals to mouse clicks and only have so many buttons. Additionally, due to latency or whatever, sometimes when I have attempted to stopcast, the cast still goes off. I have noticed this even with as little stopcasting as we do now. If it was an every-cast kind of thing that your mana required, I might be VERY frustrated by the end of a raid night.

[Kojiyama]

You have to keep in mind, most healers in TBC did not use Flash Heals or fast heals as their primary form of healing. Haste levels were not nearly as high, either.

The primary heal for Priests, for instance, was Greater Heal Rank 2 and max rank Greater Heal, which generally had a cast time of 2.1-2.3s or so. Canceling this was generally not a problem. Flash Heal was rarely used (it was extremely inefficient) and only generally considered an emergency heal on low-HP targets.

Canceling Flash Heals--which are now down to the 1.1s range and increasingly common--is next to impossible to do consistantly. Players regularly have much larger haste amounts than in TBC (especially with mechanics like Borrowed Time in play) so it's not hard to understand the difference in scenario.