Replace fire of the deep?

[Guzug]

I was considering replacing my fire of the deep (397) with the resolve of undying (403).

To keep ctc capped I would end up regemming some stamina gems to mastery. The exact number needed I'm not sure about... Maybe a loss of about 300-360 stamina in trade for 3.5ish % dodge.

I currently have 207k hps unbuffed, with about 17% each in dodge and parry and 63% block.

Thoughts? Advice? Warnings?

Thanks!

[learntotank]

I was considering replacing my fire of the deep (397) with the resolve of undying (403).

To keep ctc capped I would end up regemming some stamina gems to mastery. The exact number needed I'm not sure about... Maybe a loss of about 300-360 stamina in trade for 3.5ish % dodge.

I currently have 207k hps unbuffed, with about 17% each in dodge and parry and 63% block.

Thoughts? Advice? Warnings?

Thanks!

There's really no reason to.
First off you lose Stamina which is more valuable then Avoidance after having full combat table coverage.
Secondly you are losing another on-use which is valuable to have.

[shetan]

I posted this in another thread, and it comes from Theck, a person who backs up everything with many, many sims.

What generally kills a tank is spike damage. That could be a boss's special attack, a combination of a special and one or more melee, or even an unlucky string of melee. That's why "overall damage taken" is a meaningless metric. It isn't usually the throughput damage that kills you - your healers can keep up with that - it's the brief 5-6 second periods where they get interrupted and/or you take a big spike.

If the spike involves melee attacks, then stacking some dodge decreases the frequency of its occurrence, but it won't decrease the magnitude. The worst case scenario of X melee hits can (and will!) still happen. What you'd much rather do is decrease the magnitude, because that translates into buying your healers more time. If the burst is smaller, then you might survive that one second (or one extra hit) that it takes for the healer to recover and react.

That's what CTC does. You're guaranteeing that every melee attack gets 30% shaved off of it. While it's not strictly expressible in terms of effective health, I'm sure you can see the similarity - by reducing the maximum boss hit size, you're making sure you can take more of them in a row, just like you would by stacking stamina.

<edit> I should note that in situations where burst damage doesn't involve melees - such as Impale on heroic Deathwing - some tanks are giving up CTC for more stamina, because it no longer affords any smoothing benefit there. But that's the exception, not the rule.

Resolve of Undying is a patch too late to be any good. With the amount of unavoidable damage, you may use it in 1, max of 2 fights if you don't have any better trinket. My standard repertoire consists of Heroic Scales of Life and Heroic Spidersilk Spindle. That's what I use for the vast majority of fights now. I used to use Mirror of Unbroken Images on Warlord and Yor'sahj, but meh at this point. I switch Spidersilk out for Stay of Execution on Heroic Deathwing because the 57k absorb is quite nice for impales.

If I can ever get Indom Pride, I'll use that over Scales of Life and continue to maintain my 8% hit/26 exp while sitting at nearly 250k buffed, 18% dodge/parry and around 61.5% block.