HP vs Avoidance. A different perspective.

[Theotherone]

So, to someone saying they prefer to heal someone who stacks stam, my question would be "in what level of content?" If you mean that you prefer to heal someone who is wearing average ilvl 333 gear just starting heroics, my reply would be that I think you're nuts, as he is going to get hit for more than you can heal faster than you can heal it, if you are in equivalent gear. If you are talking about someone wearing average ilvl 346 beginning raids, then yeah you might prefer that they start balancing stam and mastery, so they don't get 2 or 3-shot before you can heal them up. And if you are talking about healing someone in average ilvl 359 gear, beginning heroic raids, then I absolutely agree that you would most likely prefer them to stack stam. The point is you can't generalize, which is why I think its important for tanks to understand this for themselves, so they can gear appropriately and adaptively as their content level changes.

Not a lot of gem slots on 333 gear and no one's really enchanting it anyway. I'm speaking raid content and I don't think it matters normal raid or heroic the basic tank survival reasoning carries through. Also, in this set of content, not really a lot of gimmick fights, so I'm told, that would require something like an Anub block set.

[Dedic]

I switch between 2 stam trinkets and 2 avoidance trinkets and healers seem to like the avoidance ones a little more.

Maybe your healers aren't "worth their salt" ;D

Seriously, tho. It seems like someone is confusing avoidance with mitigation. Block is not avoidance, it is mitigation AKA Effective Health. Let's use an example. Let's say I had 150 Health and zero armor. I also have zero dodge/parry but 100% Block chance (or 102.4% for the raid bosses). That means, not counting Holy Shield or misses by the boss, I have an effective health of 195 (30% dmg blocked). At least I think that's how it works.

Now you add dodge/parry, armor, miss chance, and reduce the block chance to something reasonable (say 50%), and it's not hard to see (even without the math) that the EH given by block will amount to something more desirable than pure stam.

Yes, with spell attacks, you want more stam, but on average, it's not the better choice, at least IMO. Unless you want to re-gem between fights, which doesn't seem feasible to me.

My real concern now is the number crunching behind the HoPo miss issue. It seems like we might want to get hit/exp now. I am experimenting with that myself, but I leave the theorycrafting to the masters and wait for enlightenment.

[cptwafflez]

Let me just clear the air so we know what the discussion I was intending to take upon was. I am in a 6/12 raiding guild, this is mostly for progression 10 man runs.

Great discussion so far, I am very intrigued.

[praetoria]

Maybe your healers aren't "worth their salt" ;D

Seriously, tho. It seems like someone is confusing avoidance with mitigation. .

as far as ive read, according to even the oldest posts available.... avoidance is a form of mitigation for the purpose of theory crafting.

[Aggathon]

Theotherone:

I don't have time to really get more into why my EHP thread is sort out outdated, but if you re-read the thread there are a few base assumptions that are assumed for current content in WotLK raiding.

1) Healer Mana is not an issue
2) Healers can heal the straight up damage intake

Neither of these appear to be the issue if you swap in a tank stacking stam over a tank stacking mastery/avoidance. I'll get more specific when I have more time, but I don't at the moment.

It is true that there are HP minimums for some fights. Overall I think trinket swaping between encounters becomes far more important than overall gearing.

[Loganisis]

as far as ive read, according to even the oldest posts available.... avoidance is a form of mitigation for the purpose of theory crafting.

I think the talk centers on reaching 102.4 avoidance/block. Avoidance/Block is ONLY mitigation on par with armor when you can reach 102.4 (97.4 from gear/etc, 5% from boss miss chance) when you can guarantee the incoming melee attack will be at least blocked.

If you are at say, 75% dodge/parry/block, you still have a greater than 25% chance (when you adjust the 102.4 to a 1-100% scale) of having an incoming attack being hit in full, with just armor reducing it.

72.4 for warriors is a 'soft cap' because when sheild block is up, you hit 102.4. During that period of time, dodge/parry/block is mitigation because all incoming melee attacks are reduced by at least the 30% of block (though it's interplay with armor means it's not really 30%, but that's another thread). The remaining time you are looking at ~25% of all attacks coming in unblocked/avoided.

So 102.4, if reached can function the same as guaranteed damage reduction, like armor, which makes it effectively EH, but only at that point. Until then there is still a chance it won't be so dodge/parry is still RNG avoidance and block is still RNG mitigation.

[praetoria]

thanks for clearing that up, logan

[Theotherone]

Theotherone:

I don't have time to really get more into why my EHP thread is sort out outdated, but if you re-read the thread there are a few base assumptions that are assumed for current content in WotLK raiding.

1) Healer Mana is not an issue
2) Healers can heal the straight up damage intake

Neither of these appear to be the issue if you swap in a tank stacking stam over a tank stacking mastery/avoidance. I'll get more specific when I have more time, but I don't at the moment.

It is true that there are HP minimums for some fights. Overall I think trinket swaping between encounters becomes far more important than overall gearing.

Thanks Agg - I picked up on that and a couple other premises, but I think in the end with regard to your basic conclusions we get to the same place .

I has said in an earlier post, that I felt mana was getting to be less of an issue; at least I'm finding that on my Disc priest. The biggest mana sponge at the moment are dps who don't avoid avoidable damage; topping off a tank with a nice health pool is not really an issue; I'm finding (shield, heal, renew - maybe a PoH to proc Aegis. Maybe once I get to heroic content I'll feel differently.

[Katzazi]

Healer mana still counts in beginning 5man heroics and beginning raids. (Don't know about heroic raids.) So how you gear can make a difference on healer mana. It definitly does in 5man content. (Don't look at it from the perspective of a lvl 359 geared healer healing a new tank, think about a 329 healer healing a 329 tank or anything in this regard.) But when you come near to BiS gear for the game lvl it get's less of a problem. (However a raid ready healer can still go oom on a raid ready tank when stuff is not going raid in 5mans, but that's probably because of bad execution.)


Anyway, people have to distinguishe between avoidance+classic/bc/wrath block and mastery (block)+avoidance. Those are two very different concepts. The "other side school" of EH in wrath was avoidance+old block. That is the kind Aggas post was about. It's not the same as mastery (block)+avoidance-school.

Old school avoidance + block was:
"If you have a high enough avoidance you only take so few hits that healers will have all the time needed before they can heal you up. If you are unlucky at least a little bit of the dmg is shaved of." Something like that. It was about dmg prevention most of the time. The downside was, that if you got unlucky too often (2-3 times in a row) you got more or less 100% dmg all the time (with maybe a little reduction because of block but that was only a fixed value).

Mastery (block) + avoidance is:
"When you have most of the dmg table covered with at least(!) block you gain a mostly reliable dmg reduction that scales with incoming dmg like armor does. If you don't block, chances are high that you avoid, wich is even better. Normal hits are so small that you can survive one in a row, chances to get more than one in a row are so low, that you can cover those situations with some kind of CD."

Sure there is also a rng involved. But it's a different one. It's not all or all none. It's about getting the mitigation as close to reliability as possible, with such a small probabiltiy to fail, that you can survive the worst case by using some kind of cd (or getting SB ready fast enough for warriors).

Don't think about block as avoidance. You don't avoid dmg with block. You GET dmg. You take MOST of it (at least if not critical blocked which is more or less sugar). You even convert avoidance into this form of mitigation. So its not about dmg prevention.

On the other hand don't forget, that EH is more than stamina. It includes armor (which is also mitigation - same as block) and resistance. So the "new" school of mastery(block)+avoidance is about EH and not about avoidance. Avoidance is just something you take to get as near as you can to this EH.


Consider a warrior with 10% dodge, 15% parry, 5% miss, 60% block raid buffed. That are realistic values for mastery stackers even at early raid levels. I probably should add armor, because it playes a big part for all of this, but since it is applied to all melee dmg, I skip it.

The most interresting part is to compare the worst case against the "normal" case. Normal case is that you just block a given row of hits. (Well that's probably not the average case - because the chance to at least crit block is over 50%, since we are interested at the uptime of normal blocks it should be ok.) So for every 25k hit the tank would get with a full hit (after armor) she only takes 17,5k. For every 50k hit, it's 35k. Instead of 100k hits, 70k dmg. Every raiding tank should be able to take two 70k hits, only the best geard stam stacking ones can maybe survive two 100k hits without using a CD. So this block does a big difference. As long as it is up, it increases the time to live for one additional hit for more or less all shield tanks in the same way as armor does.

The question is how big is the chance to get at least a normal block for said warrior. It's 30% avoidance and 60% block. So 90% out of 102.4% its at least a block. 12.4% out of 102.4% isn't a block. That's about 12.1% of the time.

Well a mastery stacker with early raid gear as I assumed may just not be able to eat one 100k and one 70k hit, but she will probably not see as big hit's anyway. You should have more or less full BiS normal raid gear before you see as big unavoidable hits. So it's probably save to assume that the tank in question is able to survive at least on full hit between block hits. So the question is how big are the chances to see multiple full hits in a row. Which may than kill the tank.

1 hit: P(non-block) = 12.1%
2 hits: P(non-block) * P(non-block) < 1,5%
3 hits: P(non-block) * P(non-block) * P(non-block) < 0.18%

So: Your chance to see two full hits in a row is 1.5% (about every hundreds hit) and less then every 500 hits you should see 3 full hits in a row. That's without considering SB.

But SB is there. With SB the chance to get one full hit is 0. SB is up 1/3 of the time. So the chance to see a full hit should be reduced to:
1/3 * 0 + 2/3 * 12.1% < 8.1%.

Again with SB on CD:
1 hit: P(non-block) = 8.1%
2 hits: P(non-block) * P(non-block) < 0.7%
3 hits: P(non-block) * P(non-block) * P(non-block) < 0.06%

Sure, you will see those rows now and again. But they are so seldom, that you can use a CD for each of them. (That includes health stones, pots and trinkets.)

Since the non-block row events are so seldom that they can be covered with CDs (even if you think only about the 1 non-block rows) it's not a bad assumtion that you have the block more or less ever. So the idea behind mastery(block) + avoidance is to add a fixed mitigation of 30% or more. Like armor. Everybody focussing on EH should consider to take such a big amount of armor (It's not really 30% because all the values were after armor, but it's a big amount anyway).

Additionally the mastery(block)+avoidance school have dmg reduction going on, but that's just additioinal (worthfull) sugar. But the remaining question is not about avoidance or EH, but about which kind of EH. Does stamina give you more for your EH or does block give you more. The answer to this question depends on gear, incoming dmg and size of them (And the other benefits of mastery should be considered, too). To answer this question you need much more detailed calculations than you could write in one post.



(Disclamer: I'm not a native speaker, so even while I can probably write some understandable english, I don't know most of the english math vocabulary, well. Stuff has just different names in german than in english, so even while the mathematical concepts are identical, it's hard for me to name them, so I try to avoid most math terminology.)

[praetoria]

the above post makes almost no sence at all

[Timberton]

the above post makes almost no sence at all

Tl:dr block is more valuable than stamina because is highly reliable, a unlucky un-blocked streak is unlikely (1 streak in 500 hits?) and in that case a cooldown will help stabilize situation. Healer will have used a lower heal/lower mana consumption in the attempt.

[praetoria]

Tl:dr block is more valuable than stamina because is highly reliable, a unlucky un-blocked streak is unlikely (1 streak in 500 hits?) and in that case a cooldown will help stabilize situation. Healer will have used a lower heal/lower mana consumption in the attempt.

thank you

[Katzazi]

Not exactly. I did not say that block is MORE valueable than stamina. But that it is not the old rdm number stuff. And because of the percentage damage reduction it can be a big part of EH. And it's not avoidance.

People stacking mastery are doing it (mostly) for EH reasons - like stam stacker stack stam for EH. Mastery stacking is something else than avoidance stacking.

Well there are people following the avoidance route. They are interested in reducing the incoming dmg as much as possible. They too use avoidance and mastery. But in most cases they would favore avoidance over mastery. That's because block is mitigation and not avoidance. It's considered as something different.

[MellvarTank]

I'm just going to add some things I've noticed in here.....

1-

avoidance is a form of mitigation for the purpose of theory crafting.

No, avoidance is avoidance. You AVOID the damage, mitigation is damage reduction. Block is mitigation, armor is mitigation, dodge is avoidance. You either take damage or you don't with avoidance.

2 -

Tl:dr block is more valuable than stamina because is highly reliable, a unlucky un-blocked streak is unlikely (1 streak in 500 hits?) and in that case a cooldown will help stabilize situation. Healer will have used a lower heal/lower mana consumption in the attempt.

Not so. Block is not more valuable than stamina, and if there was DR's on block similar to dodge/parry, we would not be stacking it the same way we do currently. Stamina is no more and no less valuable than it has ever been, ever try to take double hits on Chimaeron? You'll die if you don't have the health even if you block both hits. Stam is still very important, but with healer mana being a concern tanks have had to change their gearing strategies accordingly.

Would we max out stam/armor if we could and get away with it? Yes. Currently though, it is more about the healer mana pool than the tank health pool.