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

[Kazeyonoma]

lol just walk away for a bit agg, just calm down, don't need to lose your cool, people just want to make sure your work is accurate is all. =]

[Insahnity]

Agreed, it was quite long, and quite good. I'm just trying to put some caveats that may not be obvious to some.

3) I am FIRM believer that regardless of what your threat stats are if you are having threat issues you are doing something fundamentally wrong.

It is possible to have threat issues and not be your fault. I just don't think you have ever been in that situation, which is why we will have to just agree to disagree for fear of derailing the thread.

There is also absolutely ZERO reason why a tank that stacks EHP would somehow become squishy, even in a "non-optimal" raid environment. And if their healers are doing something wrong, well then that's the healer's fault, not the tank's, and a tank gearing for something other than EHP will not help that and in fact may hinder it.

You went from start to finish and skipped everything in between. A tank is only as good as the raid behind it. If the raid is dead, you are dead. Is this your fault? Likely not, because the DPS was too stupid. Again, these are not progression raiders.
If the healer does something wrong, then they aren't ready for progression raiding.
A tank who EHP stacks at the expense of threat stats will see your words "there is never a time when you have to worry about threat" and then not understand why the raid wiped and they got benched unfairly. Again, not a progression Raid Leader.
In these situations, threat has value to tank TTL as the DPS will have finished the job before you even approach tank minTTD (or minTTDwH). If the DPS slow down to do things like reduce threat or let the tank regain aggro, that increases the required minTTDwH. A tank's job is to hold the line for the DPS to their job; if you are trying to gear to hold out indefinitely, then you are approaching the comical point that Cider talks about where future raids consist of tanks and healer only. Just as you covered how you considered at what point avoidance looses its value, which we naturally get from our gear, there is a point where threat looses its value to tank TTL, namely if your threat outstrips the ability of your DPS match your TPS, which we can naturally get from our gear under ideal circumstances. For those non-ideal situations, either your rely on threat misdirection tools or you compromise by gearing for threat.

But this site is not just for the upper echelons of WoW. A lot of people from all walks of WoW Life read this. That is all I am trying to say. People don't willingly misread/misinterpret your work, they come here just not knowing any better.

You can only gear for EH or Threat, gearing for avoidance has been beaten to death. Obviously, gearing for threat detracts from the healer cushion, but if your DPS is dead because they pulled threat, then I submit you aren't in a progression raid, go back to the previous raid and gear up. Because you assume you are probably geared when in fact you also have to consider at 3.3.3, we have people going from heroics to ICC pretty quickly, and they don't always have the requisite threat stats innately built in. They can mitigate this somewhat with threat stats, until they do get the gear to support it. That's the whole point of introducing gems and enchanting. However, if you are indeed in a true progression situation, threat gearing is a waste, I would agree, and even in near-progression situations you are not hindering things, you are merely masking another problem.

As for that second paragraph, I have no idea what you are talking about, or it's relevance in this thread. That and I also think you're completely wrong about a progression raid being able to function perfectly with 4 resto druids and a disc priest. I also do make the ending conclusion that the math breaks down at some point due to the granularity and discrete nature of healing and incoming damage respectively. Even HoTs are granular. That's why I say DPS is Science, Healing is Art, Tanking is Strategy.

I will admit I know the least about healing mechanics, however I have talked this over many times with my Holy Pally GM and he has confirmed every word of it.

Are people actually reading this or just taking little nick pick things and assuming I don't cover it because I didn't word it exactly the way they wanted me to?

Yes, we are reading this. I don't think people disagree with the premise of the work, but as Satorri pointed out the game is a pretty dynamic balance, it's not difficult to wander into the "But what about this...?", with the consequence of making this much larger than you either intended or have the stomach for.

Where I was going with this was the relative value of discrete heals vs continuous heals on EHP. Instinctively, yeah, it's a pretty bad idea to take a 4-tree battery into a progression fight, but the point I was trying to make is that when you are dealing with a large health pool, Rolling heals become MUCH more powerful. With a small Health Pool, not only are large heals generally wasted as overheals, the value of a HoT goes down as it basically does nothing. But with a small health Pool, a Druid will struggle to hold up a tank while a Holy Paladin manage to do so (until he possibly goes OOM trying to keep up the tank, depending on the Pally gear and skill). With a larger Health Pool, the Nuke healer is still overhealing due to the discrete nature of the heals, but the HoT healer is now truly healing at maximum potential because all the heals are not being wasted. The only reason why in practice this may not work is sheer throughput rate of a HoT heal on a single target, which is why they druids got hasted HoTs, to address this issue (and the reason why in Druid T9 they experimented with critting Rejuvinates in 4pcT9). You can further split this down to stamina and mitigation, where the stamina gives you the cushion to roll more HoTs on the same target without overhealing, while the damage reduction components help bridge the gap between high incoming damage rate vs the relatively slower healing rate coming in from HoTs. Avoidance, even at high levels, would result in wild swings on HP which a HoT simply cannot compensate for. You alude to this by talking about the "stochastic nature of incoming damage" and saying that incoming heals is also granular and not continuous, but in point of fact, taking it to the extreme you CAN make healing damn near continuous with enough rolling HoTs (think sawblade profile of tank HP over time, as compared to a square wave with a discrete healer). I've watched tank HPs litteraly zoom back up with the speed almost matching a discrete heal with 3 druids stacking full HoTs on a tank, but with the added benefit that its nearly effortless to maintain even in a moving fight.

Incidentally, what do your Druid healers say about this? I bet they have some interesting perspectives as well.

[Aggathon]

I'm trying to figure out a way to word this nicely and carefully...

I have raided with threat stats that are ridiculously low, with weapons that are not optimal for threat. With the exception of maybe 1 or 2 10expterist/15stam gems that match +9 or +12 socket bonuses, I have never gemmed or enchanted for threat... ever. And I can guarantee that the top of the line, decked out DPS that I have raided with do FAR more TPS (and DPS) than any PuG raid. I am below expertise cap, way below the melee hit cap, and still easily pull 10k+ TPS. Back in Ulduar I was easily pulling 8k+ TPS. In ToC25 I ran with hit as low as 22, and never ever had threat problems. And again, we had monster DPS that did tons of threat and were ranked in WoL. I am exceedingly confused as to why you are so dismissive to the idea that a tank won't have threat problems if they are doing things correctly and am further confused by the statement, "It is possible to have threat issues and not be your fault."

I have looked at Armory after Armory, dealt with case after case, looked through thread after thread, combat log after combat log, and have never once come across a case where someone had a threat problem that was "doing it right."

There have been extensive threads on this matter, and if you would like me to point you to them, I will gladly do so. It is NOT necessarily to gem and enchant for threat. The way that you can do your job most proficiently to help out the raid, is by doing your #1 job the best: surviving. If you die, the raid wipes, end of discussion. If other members of the raid mouth breathe it up and die, then that is there problem and is completely irrelevant to this thread.

As far as HoT healing goes, I can agree to an extent, however I don't think HoTs can do enough single target HPS to overcome some of the damage done in hardmodes (i.e. progression). I will agree that increasing the number of HoTs on the tank makes healing appear less granular. I can also agree that HoTs definitely make EHP better, but I don't necessarily see the need to state specifically that, since ultimately the best and most optimal tank healing is more granular. I also don't really get what the "point" is other than HoTs are good, which I definitely agree with, and I think that's well implied with the arguments about being able to survive 5.1 hits instead of 5 or something like that.

Again, this entire thing is based on progression. If you want to be a better tank and you don't outgear the fights, this is what you do. At the point in time you just flat out gear it to the point that you could gem spirit, then none of this really matters.

I'm also a firm believer that this is what PuG tanks should follow too. I have zero gear from hardmodes, I have very few pieces of gear that a PuG cannot either get or get something better than (even though I have 258 gear, there is accessible 264 gear that a PuG can get, I just never saw it drop). All the rest of my gear I got from frost emblems or PuGs, since I have retired from raiding full time. And when I do PuG, I have zero problems holding threat, being healed, or anything. My gear setup, or a setup that is better, can be attained without doing anything more than a general PuG is capable of, with the exception of probably my weapon and H-Jug's Vit and H-Band of the Twin Valks.

Our druid healers are usually more focused on raid heals, but keep HoTs rolling on me, btw. They like it, but it is not their primary concern.

Like... if I actually have made an error in the advice I should give, then prove me wrong, but so far you have no proof other than to say "well some tanks have threat issues."

I would contend that any issues secondary to why EHP mechanics work the way they do can already be answered in either my prot war guide or a various smattering of posts already existent in these forums.

And yes, I do not want this thread going outside the scope of the why behind EHP. If you want to make THAT thread and deal with THOSE issues, then be my guest. I think what I've written is more that sufficient.

[Airowird]

As a healer (and even healing leader back in tBC when the designated officer was 'missing'), I can back up Agg here.
I've done raids with nothing but 2 Shamans, 3 Druids and a Holy Priest and it worked perfectly fine. In fact, you can probably heal any raid with a single class setup for healers, even Paladins if they know how to play.

That and the fact that you state the healing style needs to be considered, but at the same time argue that all healers will be pitching in, thus spreading out the healing over time (rather than big bursts like Holy Light spam). Therefor, there IS no healing style anymore, only a healing setup, which matters very little, as a good healing team can back eachother up perfectly well.

[Bodasafa]

Sorry if this is derailing Agg, but I would like to help clear this up.

@ Insahnity

I have to respectfully disagree with your comments.

-Tanks will read this and think threat is not an issue so they will produce poor threat. Tanks can have threat issues and it not be their fault.
The latter part could be because of a stupid hunter or rogue using externals like ToT or MD on the wrong target or a DPS that does not know how to read a threat meter, those are the only situations I would find the tank exempt from fault. However, outside those cases threat is the tanks issue 100% of the time and its their own dam fault if their not holding it. I would submit that if a tank is having threat issues its largely a "learn to play" issue, not a gearing one.

We could just add this in here and call it a day then:

The facts about Expertise and Hit in the current game.

Look its not that Expertise and Hit do not increase your threat, they do. However they do so on a much smaller scale than people realize.

How all tanks generate threat (Listed from the highest source to the lowest):
1) Using your abilities properly. This is paramount, nothing increase your threat more than this.
2) Spec and Glyphs.
3) Proper use of external abilities such as TotT and MD.
4) 26 Expertise Skill.
5) Hit rating.

So I should just mindlessly stack stamina?
Stacking stamina is not mindless unless you do not understand why you should be doing it. Tanks that do not min/max their survival by stacking stamina (or armor where available) through gems and enchants are only doing their raid a disservice. There have been numerous reports from highly respected community members here on tankspot, in world ranked guilds that tanked Heroic ToGC 25 with as little as 40 hit rating and are now also in Heroic ICC 25 with as little as 16 expertise rating. These tanks are working with DPS that are pulling 10k+ on most fights and doing just fine without reaching the hit cap or the expertise soft cap.

If a tank is having threat issues no amount of expertise or hit is going to correct that, see #1 & 2.

-Healing
I'm very confused why your bringing up strange "what if" healing situations involving 4 druid healers and healers going OOM (which does not happen with people properly geared for the content they are doing). Just because you can do something in this game does not make it optimal and that's what theory crafting does: look for the most optimal way to do something. Which means providing information where it matters: progression raiding.

People don't spend hours theory crafting to find out what happens in a heroic or a out dated 10 man raid, or a PuG when your dealing with people unable to play their class properly and gear their toon effectively.

I apologize if this came off harsh and perhaps I miss understood your points, but to me it came off as a uninformed "what if" spin on a well written article.

[Kazeyonoma]

I think the easiest way to keep this discussion on topic is that this guide, while very well written, is not for the faint of heart. It is useful to tanks of all caliber and content, but is most useful and was intended for progression raid tanking. Yes, sometimes you get bad heal setups, yes sometimes you'll have 5 man tanks that take literally 10% the damage an EHP tank took because he got lucky, but that's not the point of this thread, it exists to explain WHY EHP is the best option for tanking content that matters. Any further discussion not directly tied to this fact will be removed by myself or Satrina. Remember what sub-forum you're in, this isn't the HALP forum, this isn't the General Discussion forum, this is the Theory forum where we assume you're coming here to discuss at a high level the mechanics of the game, not what Joe-average does.

[The Hoof]

Great stuff. I gave it a scan, but it will take a while to fully digest everything. I'm not in a progression guild, so it's maybe directly applicable to me, but definately good education. I really appreciate folks like you putting all the effort into these kinds of docs.

[Satrina]

Progression is a funny term. Someone looking to kill Heroic Lich King this week is certainly in progression. Is someone in a guild who is just reaching Festergut for the first time this week progressing any less? The first person was still progressing when they hit Festergut for the first time, so why would the second person not count themselves as progressing (and hence find this article very relevant)? The only difference is time.

[Satorri]

1.09 is for the warrior modifier for hit points (9% increased stam from vitality) and this number changes based on your class. For paladins it is also a 9% modifier, for blood DKs it is 1.03*1.08 (which is 1.1124), and for druids I’m pretty sure for the number here it is 1.06*1.1*1.02*1.25 (6% from survival of the fittest, 10% from heart of the wild, 2% from imp MotW, and 1.25% from bear form)

First, small math adjustment, not terribly significant, but to be sure we enumerate:
For all DKs Frost Pres is 8% increased Stam. For those who use Stoneskin Gargoyle or two Nerubian Carapace runes on their weapon(s), they will have an additional 2% Stam (1% if it is a dual wield tank with only one NC rune). Blood Tanks will get a further 3% from Vot3W. So a Blood DK with SSG rune will have 13.4648% increase.

[Satorri]

I really don't want to diminish your work because you've pulled a lot of data together and gotten a lot of the issues on one page. That is an admirable endeavor on its own.

That said, I don't feel like you've really added much to the discussion beyond our own (experienced) opinion that EHP is the thing to go with. That's fine, like I said, the info is worth having in one place and it isn't redundant in this section of the forum (though Satrina has covered a lot of the fundamental math in http://www.tankspot.com/forumdisplay...-Empire-Guides, but that is neither here nor there).

That said, if I can take the liberty, I think we can reduce a lot of the back and forth to a simpler state by recognizing assumptions and the resulting value systems.

First, what are our choices?
For most considerations we do not pick between gear piece A or B, though there are some choices, maybe 2 per slot in t10. The distinction is usually extra armor at the expense of Defense, Hit, Expertise, or Dodge/Parry. Not hard to value the bonus armor when you see 2% reduction all the time or 2% less damage on average from the occasional avoided hit.

What do we choose? Gems and Enchants. Most enchants are not up for variation, the only exceptions that I can think of are Stam/Resil vs Def/Dodge on Shoulders, Armor vs Agi on Cloak, and Health vs Stats on Chest. Gems are the major variation with basically a health, avoidance, hit/exp, or other threat stats. So, generally speaking, the decision is between health and avoidance if you are looking for maximum survival value.

So there is the point of decision: Health or Avoidance.

We don't need a conversion rating right now (which is a nightmare to try and make, because the operate so differently in practice) because of our assumptions. The assumptions in your work that make the Health vs Avoidance decision a no-brainer, and are (not stretching) not terrible assumptions.

Assumption #1: Healer Mana is not a factor.

This is pretty reasonable. While Healer mana is not *actually* infinite, most any healer can go full-till for most of the duration of most fights without running out of mana, provided they use their tools effectively. That said, it *is* possible for healers to heal themselves out of mana, and not every healer is spamming their largest HPS heal on every GCD at all times. For the sake of tank healing, it is possible, and it may happen (especially with healers born in WotLK), but most longer experienced healers won't do this most of the time because they don't need to. These experienced healers will also be prepared for the periods when they will need to, so for all intents and purposes we can resolve the assumption to say, "smart healers will be able to manage their mana just fine, and in the course of any given fight the tank's survival stats will not decide the difference between a healer running out of mana or not."

Assumption #2: You will always have a significant incoming flow of healing that can match or surpass the damage taken.

This assumption has two portions that have nuance but validity. First, if the incoming hps are not greater than the dtps, you die, period. In other words if the healers don't give you more health than the enemy knocks off of you, you net loss and it is only a matter of time before you die. The balance of healing output currently is easily such that healers geared for a tier below the tier you are on are capable of putting out higher HPS numbers than anything you will encounter will demand in damage. The second portion assumes that healers will be available to deliver that healing and will respond with that healing fast enough that it will be there when it matters. This too is a fair assumption if you are tackling hard content with friends and regulars. If you have reached the hard content with them, they almost certainly have the experience to know how to deliver the healing required when it is needed.

The important distinction on both parts is that:
A.) Your healers are human, and required to jump through hoops with the rest of the raid. That means that they will not always be able to deliver uninterrupted healing, and they will not always be able to deliver peak healing.
B.) If you are not applying this to regular healers in peak performing groups (which conveniently is another stated assumption of this guide), the quality, scale, and timeliness of delivery of that healing will be worse for the tank, and it is possible that mana will become an issue.


So long as we accept the above assumptions, the chain of logic is simple:
You cannot take too much damage to surpass A.) Healer mana capacity or B.) Healer output capacity.
=therefore=
Taking less damage is not important, all that *is* important is that healers have sufficient time to deliver their healing.
=therefore=
Deciding between health and avoidance, health will more reliably create a longer window in which you will not die on a per-gem-invested basis, and often otherwise.

So, health is the obvious choice. Your assumptions answer without comparison.

The reason that it is hard to create a minimum required health level for a given fight, or more importantly to establish the saw teeth, is that there are no fights where you are only taking one source of consistent and rhythmic damage, and the flow of healing is *not* constantly pushing you to full health the moment your health drops.

The reality is that each hit drops your health by a portion, and those drops come in variable sizes and from multiple sources. Heals come in less consistent sizes. Sometimes they crit, sometimes not, different healing classes and gear setups will deliver heals in different sizes at different intervals. To that end you can't say X health will result in 3 hits to death when you're factoring heals because of these varying factors (mmm pulsatile). *If* you had a fight where you only took hits from a single source, *and* you had heals that really did land the second you took the damage filling you to full, then it would actually be possible to establish the saw teeth values of health where adding more health would be meaningless until you reach the next peak. The irony is that because those are not sound assumptions in real acute survivability windows, you cannot accurately set a health value *or* definitively bench the value of added avoidance.

I don't think any of this really definitively defeats the value of playing "balanced" survival stats or stacking avoidance, it just illustrates that the current state of things *allows* pure health stacking to work just fine. It is also easy to describe, without math, that if you do add too much avoidance at the expense of possible health buffing (the range of swing from gems in t10 gear is significant, upwards of 15-25k health after buffs) you get increasing chances of "gibs" or moments where the tank just dies and no amount of healing could save them because of the rate/window at which it was taken. Increasing health increases that window for healers to not deliver instant healing and keep the tank alive. That means that an extreme of stacking avoidance is *risky*, not definitive death, whereas extreme stam stacking and "balanced" stats do not have that risk. The irony is that you cannot clearly establish that cutoff point for the same reason you cannot illustrate the minimum stam required, the almighty RNG.

Reality is that we live in a world of grays. The cut-off is not fixed, solid, or definable, and absolutes only work "best" under supporting assumptions.

So, the point is that none of this holds up the supremacy of pure stamina stacking, it only provides that it will not kill you. =) When healer mana is no longer an issue, we won't have a single-ended scale, but a safe zone of gray within which we can play with varying results. I may make pretty pictures later for the visual folks (because I am one).

[Satorri]

Also, major props for helping my brain evolve its understanding a step further. Your inspiration is awesome. =)

[Kazeyonoma]

Progression is a funny term. Someone looking to kill Heroic Lich King this week is certainly in progression. Is someone in a guild who is just reaching Festergut for the first time this week progressing any less? The first person was still progressing when they hit Festergut for the first time, so why would the second person not count themselves as progressing (and hence find this article very relevant)? The only difference is time.

Hopefully I didn't portray this incorrectly in my post, but yes, progression is up to the individual group running it. Just because you're working on Saurfang now doesn't mean he isn't progression. If he's the boss your guild hasn't tackled yet, then he's your progression, and this method of gearing is ideal for those situations.

[Bodasafa]

Progression is a funny term. Someone looking to kill Heroic Lich King this week is certainly in progression. Is someone in a guild who is just reaching Festergut for the first time this week progressing any less? The first person was still progressing when they hit Festergut for the first time, so why would the second person not count themselves as progressing (and hence find this article very relevant)? The only difference is time.

Hopefully I didn't portray this incorrectly in my post, but yes, progression is up to the individual group running it. Just because you're working on Saurfang now doesn't mean he isn't progression. If he's the boss your guild hasn't tackled yet, then he's your progression, and this method of gearing is ideal for those situations.

Exactly. This information is useful for tanks who want to understand why EH is going to maximize their chances of successfully surviving new content a.k.a. progression raiding. It dose not matter what boss it is. New is new.

[Aggathon]

Satorri - thank you VERY much for your post. I feel that my weakness in all this is that I don't know the healer angle that well. I am very well versed in the tank side, but only have limited knowledge from various conversations with my holy pally GM about the healing side of things. I'm going to be going through and updating the post (fixing the survivability spreadsheet, fixing some typos and stuff, Word apparently doesn't like me typing TEH and auto corrects it to THE) and I am actually going to make a direct link to your post at the end of my "assumptions" area for a more healer oriented look at the debate.

And yes, that is what I mean by progression. At one point I too was working on saurfang and festergut, and still used EHP strategy, and my healers loved me for it. In fact the first time we wiped to festergut, at 1% our ret pally goes, "nice 1 shot guys!" and then he enraged and killed everyone at 0% (literally the health bar said zero %). On the second attempt we beat the timer by 45 seconds, lol. When we went back through the logs, there was a section of time where I took 100k dmg in less than 5 seconds. My healers applauded me for stacking so much armor and stam and said that if I hadn't I surely would have died and we would have wiped.

It doesn't matter what level of progression you are on, the fact of the matter is that it is progression and EHP is going to be the way to go. (with the notable exception of add tanking on H-Anub25, of course).

[Kazeyonoma]

It's times like these that it frustrates me that they even made a boss like H25 Anub... cuz we always now have to throw in that exception in our discussions!

EHP is WIN! (except for h25anub).

[felhoof]

EHP is WIN! (except for h25anub).

It was still win there. The important part there was to consider that block could be viewed as mitigation (and indeed when things got behind you so you couldn't block, it was a wipe) and that the pattern of damage was small hits in a rapid fashion that would be best dealt with by large, static mitigation values. EHP doesn't directly calculate this, true - but it certainly won compared to avoidance, which is usually what the comparison goes with.

Really, the argument is probably better served as 'survivability vs damage taken', where survivability is simply what you can take for a given n seconds (EHP in some cases) and damage taken is an averaged value of what you could expect to take in a fight. EH is one factor here and it's a good way to think about it, and was the right way for adds on Anub even if you had to get there in a sort of sideways direction.

[Satorri]

I had an interesting thought fragment, actually.

If you wanted to find a way to value these survivability bits with incoming healing in a nearer-to-real model, perhaps there is an improvement in a time delay factor. Accounting for the pulsatile nature of heals and damage as they are out of phase, i.e. you take the damage, then you get the heal, and the space in between is where danger happens. If you have instant and full health restoration none of the survival stats matter provided you can survive one hit from health/armor/stance. If you find a way to account for the time disparity for healing delivery it might add a nice factor.

[Hammerfists]

Wonderful work Aggathon. Going to bookmark it so i can post it on the guild site.

[Aggathon]

It was still win there. The important part there was to consider that block could be viewed as mitigation (and indeed when things got behind you so you couldn't block, it was a wipe) and that the pattern of damage was small hits in a rapid fashion that would be best dealt with by large, static mitigation values. EHP doesn't directly calculate this, true - but it certainly won compared to avoidance, which is usually what the comparison goes with.

Really, the argument is probably better served as 'survivability vs damage taken', where survivability is simply what you can take for a given n seconds (EHP in some cases) and damage taken is an averaged value of what you could expect to take in a fight. EH is one factor here and it's a good way to think about it, and was the right way for adds on Anub even if you had to get there in a sort of sideways direction.

I don't really agree with you here, though to be quite honest, it's just a semantics debate and it probably doesn't belong in this thread. If you would like to discuss it more in PMs I would be glad to.

[Airowird]

EHP is WIN! (except for gimmicks).

Fixed for all future references

Gimmicks = All fights where an usual fight mechanic can be countered by creative use of game mechanics. In your specific example, that would be the way Block is calculated before damage modifiers (more specificly: the damage taken increase debuff the adds do)