Avoidance / Health-pool

[Methical40]

Good morning people (at least for me)

I have recently acquired both: Eitrigg"s Oath & Burnished Quel"Serrar from their respective encounters. This got me thinking, as a raiding tank, am i being ignorant by simply making sure i am defence capped and then stacking stamina until it begins to ooze from my silly, pointy ears or is there actually any real value in avoidance tanking for paladins?

Maybe that question was too direct, of course there is value in avoidance tanking else there would not be so many items out there dubbed 'tank' items with no sign of stamina on. But really my question was this;

Do i have to, at some point, make a decision and be an avoidance tank OR a stam-pool tank. Or is it a case of simply building two differing item sets ?

What I was running with previously was the Essence of Gossamer and the Peacekeeper Blade and it just feels wrong to throw away the +185 Stamina + occasional dmg reduction for the sake of the occasional +100 def rating boost and the extra ~6000 armour.

Now i have always been a fan of ye 'ole block rating, it reduces the dmg i take and boosts TPS nicely with holy shield. BUT, i downloaded 'TankTotals' the other day to try and decide what setup was best for tanking raids. With Peacekeeper and Gossamer equipped i have about 180k effective health (i have about 35k self-buffed, growing to about 41k once raid buffed), with the Burnished Quel"Serrar and Oath trinket i only have about 175k effective health but when the sword procs, this shoots up to the low 200k's of effective health. Tank totals also says that with the stam-pool setup, i can survive a 5k dps output for about 17secs with no help but my own, with the Ony blade and ToC trinket, this increases so about 23secs. Now if TankTotals isnt a load of balls, then an extra 6seconds of unaided survival is AMPLE time for a nice bit of "omfgthetankthetankisdyingspamspamspamhim".

However, surely, SURELY my following assertions hold true:

• The armour bonus given by ToC trinket is only really going to benefit me in fights there the majority of dmg taken is physical. Now we only raid Ulduar, VoA and ToC on a regular basis and there are next to no fights where this is true.
  
  • Gormok maybe but the impale dots sting and more stam makes for longer survival through impales, you can't dodge or absorb with armour, bleed dmg.
  • Acid & Dread - They spit more than hit and constant dmg from poison and bile means again...more stam would be nice to soak this up as it cannot be dodged once its on you.
  • Yeti dude - Ok, actually quite a physical fight, but its right at the end and he seems to spend most of his time jumping about and breathing on people, VERY little time spent actually stood there hitting me.
  • Champions - Ok, maybe avoidance is more useful than stam here if you have a melee heavy enemy team but still, you'd want more stamina surely just in case a caster decided to show you his pimp-hand ?
  • Twins - Don't hit hard, the majority of dmg you are going to take here is overload & orbs, none of which armour or dodge is going to help....right ?
  • Anub - Ok, a decent amount of physical dmg coming out here, and also less health / more avoidance probably reduces the amount he leeches per tick by a minuscule amount.
• In-line with point 1, extra stamina, and we aren't talking about a single stam gem or something, we are talking near enough +200 stamina here. Surely this extra stamina is going to help you in ANY boss fight you do, as it absorbs (technically) both physical dmg, AND any type of magical dmg.

To compliment my assumptions, it seems that all tier 9 stuff, as well as the high-end tanking pieces seem to drop defence / avoidance and give you....more stamina.

So, someone feel like chucking their views in this thread. I have tried to research this on other threads but i can only seem to find ones as shallow as "avoidance tanking is cool ok!" or they end up being 3 pages of graphs and coefficients that i really cannot make myself understand. There must be SOME reason beyond DK's and Bears that has put all this avoidance stuff in the end-game and kept all the stam-heavy stuff in hc's and low-end raids.

P.S - This was only meant to be a 'few line' question, it's turned into quite the verbal vomit...apologies, if you are reading this far down, thank you for your attention and time.

[Momome]

The problem with avoidance is that you can't really rely on it. Any good raider should aim to minimise the amount of RNG he relies on to succeed, and this applies especially to tanks. What that means here is that, when the shit hits the fan, you have to assume that your procs AREN'T going to be up, because if you raid for long enough that's what will eventually happen.

That's not to say that avoidance is bad; far from it - the more hits you avoid, the better. But unless you're avoidubg 100% of all hits, at some point you're going to take a bunch of hits in a row. When that happens, health and armor are the only things preventing you from dying.

So, while there are certainly situations where you would favor avoidance and block (tanking multiple adds, for instance, and especially as OT for Anub'arak), for main tanking raid bosses, stamina is certainly king. If that argument doesn't convince you, check out the armory profiles of any top tank. All of them have massive health pools, and outside certain specific fights, they all have two stamina trinkets. The reason is simple - when avoidance fails you and you take several hits in a row, you are more likely to survive if you have a higher health pool.

[Nillo]

The dodge trinket is extremely bad unless you are fighting very fast hitters
1) Avoidance is only good against fast hitters, because it becomes rather reliable there (and stamina rather bad, because you will soak up too much dmg)
2) The trinket stacks pretty slow against hard hitters and thus the effect is not that noticable as you might wish.

-> It's good against Twins or Anub adds, but sux against An00b himself or any other boss in ToGC.

The Peacekeeper Blade vs Onyxia sword is a different matter though, because both of the provide a similar amount of stamina, the only thing you trade is passive RNG stats vs a RNG proc, that provides a decent reduce in dmg taken. -> I'd use Quel'Serrar, because it is _far_ better as long as the proc is up and while it is not up the Peacekeeper only offers a slightly better Avoidance value.

[MestHoop]

Just commenting on the items you got: the trinket by all means isn't that good :\
Most people (including myself) use 2 stamina trinkets and I suggest you get the black heart and a other stam trinket (some people use the brewfest ones, maybe you were so lucky to pick up a pair when it was up).

The weapon on the other hand is a different story. Some people hate the new Quel'serrars, I personally love em.
The uptime with just swinging plus a seal is around 75% and I've had it up to 95% over the course of a Gormok heroic fight.
The boost it provides is SUBSTANTIAL and should not be underestimated. Especially the 245 version should be taken over the ToC5hc blade.

[Spoonerism]

all I know is the best tanks on my realm have upwards of 40k hp unbuffed, albeit the ones I've seen running around with 41,500hp were warriors. in theory this isnt in the best gear available as Argent Dawn is not the foremost raid progress server there is(realm first celestial defender gained by a horde raid comm a couple of weeks ago for example), so I wont be suprised if someone comes up with simple math proving with all the most uber gear that alot more is possible.

I know the argument for druids is based on TotC encounters as you pointed out, and the fact that after a while stacking agi leads to too much diminishing returns on dodge so even bears start stacking stamina once they reach a certain level of gear.

[Methical40]

well replies greatly appreciated. In waiting for replies, i did go off and read about building an 'un-hittable' set for Anub (hc) but... we only JUST started ToC and i imagine by the time our guild gets bored of it, ICC will be about so I cant see myself actually needing such a set.

I was hoping some of you would come on and post some huge unknown, some over-sight to the sheer brilliance of the dodge trinket that I hadn't realised, sadly, it really is just utter turd, I passed up the tank wrists for this trinket...fail.

All the same, at least the fact that I had to sell my grandma to upgrade all gems (where possbile) to +32 stam ones was not in vein.

One more thing, on my travels, i read occasionally about a block-cap...indeed 'TankTotals' addon gives me a block cap rating, its coloured red and is at 65.8%. WTF is this ? Is it simply a rating at which BR is suffering too much from DR to see a benefit or is it something much cooler where like 50% of hits against you will be blocked ?!?

EDIT:

The Peacekeeper Blade vs Onyxia sword is a different matter though, because both of the provide a similar amount of stamina, the only thing you trade is passive RNG stats vs a RNG proc

Lest 'ye not forget, yes the two have similar amounts of stamina, but the Peacekeeper also has a gem slot, thus potentially +32 ADDITIONAL stamina.

[bawkbawkboom]

At the moment, with current content, stam stacking is the way to go. Unless your Anub25hc or Algalon tanking. But that is purely situational. The majority of current content involves alot of stam stacking.

When ICC comes out, however, things will change alot. (Read the ICC updates to find out more =D)

[Needonboots]

Note the unhittable set, while helpful, isn't necessary for anything EXCEPT Anub 25 hard. The other Anub encounters can be done without it.