Originally Posted by
kaiadam
Regarding pure survival, crit is more or less worthless. More crit means higher elusive brew uptime, but there's only a limited amount of time during an encounter where elusive brew is useful. Uptime higher than that amount is essentially wasted - just from agility and random amounts of crit you'll find on SoO gear, you're well beyond that point already. Even if crit does add useful evasion, you're basically converting crit rating to dodge rating with an exchange tax, no less. No intelligent guide in the history of WoW has ever advocated stacking avoidance for tanks beyond far outgearing the content.
If you were to assign a numeric value for how much each point of a particular stat adds to your overall survivability, my approximate educated values would be something like:
Crit - 1
Haste - 1.5
Agility - 3
Hit/Exp- 15 (assuming not at cap, of course)
Mastery - 12
Stamina - 10
If you're interested in survival and nothing but survival, the answer is abundantly clear - meet accuracy caps, then gem/reforge into mastery or mastery/stamina and enchant stamina when mastery is not available. Unequivocally, that is the best survival setup, any other argument is fallacious.
While the "try out [insert setup] and adjust mastery after seeing results" strat seems to be a good plan, it's subject to the most heinous of errors: confirmation bias. In other words, if you think you'll be able to survive without mastery, no matter how many times you die, you'll rationalize it as the fault of the healers, and if you think you're struggling to live, you'll remember every dangerous spike that came close to killing you even if you never die. Take a good look at your raid, go through previous logs, compare deaths, and if you're dying more than you think you should, then go mastery/stamina. Also, don't go back and reassess after one week's worth of data, try for a month for statistical significance.
Don't fall victim to the belief that your gear is fine for "only normal modes" and that you're overgearing it already. People throw out the "overgear" key term a lot, but the actual amount is relatively fluid depending on your current raid setup. If a guild right now is barely killing Garrosh with ilvl 570 gear, does that mean they are overgearing the encounter compared to top guilds which cleared SoO normal with an average ilvl of 530? Objectively, sure, but given that both guilds barely squeaked by the kill, doesn't that imply they are at the same relative level, ie. ilvl 570 is *just right* of a gear level for the first guild to kill Garrosh, so how is that overgearing?
If you're having difficulty surviving in normal modes, treat it like how I and other top brewmasters did for progression week(s): full-on survival mode. Progression is never going to behave nicely and throw you consistent, smooth damage that you can recover from easily. The fact that you're struggling implies that situations will get out of hand and you'll be hit with instances where you'll be glad you had the extra survival. *points to the 4-5 first kills for the past two tiers I've been tanking where we killed the boss -through- 15 seconds or more of enrage because I was able to survive 900% extra damage*
PS. I have 8k haste because my loot luck sucks. Ideally I'd roll with 0, but alas, that's not possible so I settle for what I have.