A healer's question to the Tank comunity

[Verzerrung]

Lately i have been noticing a lot of Warrior tanks gearing and gemming straight stam and dodge with very little focus on Block and parry. It seams to be more than a few players gearing wrong so my guess is its an agreed on tactic. Now it just seams like they take every hit and get hit harder. I don't know what the math or the logic is behind this recent change to a druid style tanking but personally as the healer i think it is a bad change.

I have heard some tanks say they do it because people wont let them tank because their gear is not good enough based on their unbuffed health so they go out and pad their health with stam to make Nax gear at a glance look like they have Ulduar gear just by looking at their health. Yes thats a bad way to judge their gear but it seams like the tanks are bowing to the masses ignorance.

So could someone please tell me why there has been a shift in gearing away from block and parry? If your not going to use the shield go pick up a 2H and help dps

P.s. This is not a Warrior only thing so don't flame me for saying this to you directly.

[Royal]

who's perry ?

[Rohak]

who's perry ?

Apparently someone of small importance, if all the warrior tanks are avoiding him.

[thrizie]

You sir have done zero research, little to no thinking and have not asked any friends who might know what they're thinking.

Please leave quickly.

[Ganoes]

Stam stacking is the optimal gearing strategy for all tanks, not just druid tanks. You can't dodge an Impale from Gormok. You can't parry it. You eat it. And the only thing that makes eating it better? More EH to cushion the blow.

Gemming for avoidance is fail. If you see a warrior tanking doing that? He's fail. Unless he's some ToGC 25 geared warrior tank that has 42k unbuffed hp despite avoidance gems and then he's got enough stamina so why not?

of course, this is not true for tanking Anub's adds in hard mode. Then you'll want to reach a passive unhittable state which requires a unique set of gear but that's one role for one fight so for the sake of talking a general gearing strategy? Gear for stamina. Use stamina trinkets over avoidance trinkets. Gem straight stamina except to meet metagem requirements or if the socket bonus is a sufficiently high level of stamina that the avoidance / threat gained comes at a very small stamina loss (like gemming a +10 hit / +15 stam gem in your 245 ilevel triumph helm with the yellow socket and +12 stam bonus).

Not sure if you've played a tank or not, but in Trial of the Crusader stamina is the most valuable tank stat, hands down. Am I gonna parry Anub's frost cleave? Am I gonna dodge a non-interrupted fireball from Jaraxxus? Hell, bosses like Icehowl and Anub stun the tanks. Don't know if you know this or not but you can't avoid anything while stunned.

[Merlinsback]

All tanks are leading more towards hp... plan and simple like you said, pugs are formed by idiots, and would take a tank with 40k ub hp and 0 avoidance over a tank with 35 hp buffed and 100% avoidance... I've bn tempted myself to stack pure stam.

As for the dodge, it's the best avoidance to stack... block only takes a few thousand off the boss hit... and parry increases the attack speed of the boss on his next swing (used too anyway)...

Another point is hp and armor are static... where as avoidance is RNG... yes it is possible to get hit 3x in a row and die if u stack avoidance... but if u stack stam u have more of a chance to survive those 3 hits in a row...

[thrizie]

and parry increases the attack speed of the boss on his next swing (used too anyway)...

Please try to be less wrong in future.

[Ganoes]

All tanks are leading more towards hp... plan and simple like you said, pugs are formed by idiots, and would take a tank with 40k ub hp and 0 avoidance over a tank with 35 hp buffed and 100% avoidance... I've bn tempted myself to stack pure stam.

As for the dodge, it's the best avoidance to stack... block only takes a few thousand off the boss hit... and parry increases the attack speed of the boss on his next swing (used too anyway)...

Another point is hp and armor are static... where as avoidance is RNG... yes it is possible to get hit 3x in a row and die if u stack avoidance... but if u stack stam u have more of a chance to survive those 3 hits in a row...

Some points. I like how you implied that taking a tank that stacked stamina over a tank that stacked avoidance makes the raid leader an idiot. Nope, it actually makes him informed and smart. Stacking avoidance is fail.

Next, block is not avoidance. It is mitigation.
Furthermore, you completely misunderstand parry haste. If YOU parry a bosses attack, then YOU attack faster. If the boss parries YOUR attack, then the boss attacks faster. Get it now?

Your last point is right on the money though.

[Verzerrung]

Ah so its a more of a focus on stable mitigation that hopeing to not get hit?

And thank you Ganoes and Merlinsback for actually being helpful

[thrizie]

Stop asking stupid questions with obvious answers.

Unless you can get to 100% avoidance (you can't, like someone said block is mitigation) stacking more health and armor is better because it's reliable.

tanks gem for dodge rather than parry because parry gives less avoidance per point because it gives a slight dps increase through hasting your next melee attack. Tanks dont care about the dps boost so they go for dodge over parry.

[Yahweh]

who's perry ?

Perry the Platypus?

[chir0n]

Tbh (as a healer) I'd rather have a tank with more stamina then dodge/parry etc otherwise I would get bored of healing easily.

So tanks having a lot of stamina and less avoidance is like a good thing for me

[Amaricre]

block only takes a few thousand off the boss hit...

speaking as a healer, there are plenty of times then a few thousand HP can make a huge difference, like if the tank gets nailed right at the end of a heal b4 it gets off. is a pain in the ass /sigh

[LanToaster]

They gear for STAM and Dodge because you need more parry for 1% Parry. And Block doesn´t do much when you get hit for like 20K.
Example, i have 60% Avoid unbuffed, while another tank has 50% but almost Double Block. In almost every case where he died, i survived.

Someone told me once: If you raid Naxx, you take Block equip, if you raid Ulduar you take as much HP as you can get and Avoid.
I for myself did go firstly for 40% Avoid, then i gemmed Stam and Avoid, after 50% Avoid i startet only gemming Stam in blue, Stam-dodge in Red, and stam-Defense in Yellow. If i run into Aggro problems i could regem for Hit or Expertise (Thats what iam lacking so far) but i dont usually raid with the kind of people who make that much Aggro.

But to get anywhere now you must Stack Stam at first. I hate it, i get a Tank with 32K HP unbuffed, think its geard for ony, and then he gets owned big time by Ony because his best Item something from Naxx, and if i send him for the whelps i can look how the whelps sloughter my Healers. Fun times.

@chiron:
My Healer is most times in Bored. But if i would eat twice the hits, with more HP it wouldn´t make mor fun because its not more intresting if you just need to make a heal every 2 seconds instead of 4.

@Amaricre:
Never had the problem that i died right before the heal was through, most times i die is when i get whole 10 seconds on 50% no heal. I can watch my HP go down. And thats not because i dont block 600DMG more. I think there goes something very wrong if 600-1000HP is needed to safe the Tank.
For that Cases the tank can: A: Take Potion/Healthstone B: Use a Cooldown, and iam Honest, everytime i feel the need to drink a potion or healtstone i die anyway.

Most Healer self have cooldowns/skills for that problem.

Block will be intresting in Cataclysm. But i think even then i wouldn´t go to much in Block.

[wolfwood888]

Because the diminishing returns on parry are so retardedly high that gemming for it is simply inferior to dodge, and blocking an extra 1k off a 20k blow doesn't do much, you are much better at avoiding it.

[Shoryu]

block wont save you from 28k hits
dodge and parry have dmr and you cant dodge/parry magic attacks
dodge is getting butt raped in ICC

stam will let you take the extra hit without all the RNG bullcrap.

[MestHoop]

speaking as a healer, there are plenty of times then a few thousand HP can make a huge difference, like if the tank gets nailed right at the end of a heal b4 it gets off. is a pain in the ass /sigh

Gearing for block over stam is suicide though.
In my Anub add tanking gear (where you need to stack block) I have about 29k unbuffed hp and 3k unbuffed block value (goes up to 3.6k self buffed... I'm a paladin).
In my main tanking gear I have 42k unbuffed hp. Do you see the massive difference in hp between those 2 sets? My main tanking gear also has a shitload more armor and more than enough avoidance.

Of course the block gear isn't gemmed/enchanted towards stamina, but even then the gap would be immense. Trading 2.5k something damage off each attack (that CAN be blocked) for 11k extra hp in fights where bosses melee for 20k. Easy choice made, no?

[Bömbel]

Stacking Stamina and Armor is way more reliable than stacking avoidance or mitigation

my personal opinion is, Block sucks for Warriors.
in my current Raidgear i do have 42K Life, 27,5% Dodge, 24% Parry and 16,1% Block
Buffed this round up to 29%, 25%, 17%
I'm blocking about 1500-2000 damage IF i block
if i'd use my block gear, i'd have about 30K Life, 18% Dodge, 17% Parry but about 40% block
i'd get up to 37K~ Life FB, this does let me take 2 unmitigated Bosshits (lets not talk about Impale, Lightings and Vortexes, they would just kill me)
IF i block, i could survive a single hit more (to the max)

Therefore: EH+Armor for hard hitting bosses (So, All current bosses)
Block for Low-Hitting Bosses/Adds
Avoidance is a nice to have, i'd NEVER gem for it except i would gain a compareable socketbonus

[greysin]

all that matters is that in ICC you'll have all those stats -20% chance to dodge

bosses will hit hard but in a more even, predictable nature

the problems have always come from the big 25+k hits, and there really is nothing a tank can do in those situations but have more than enough hp to soak it up and then hope the healer isn't afk

in icc, gemming for pure stam is probably not the best idea since block will probably be more useful than ever, but not sure at what point that is true/untrue

paladins are going to be op in ICC because of all the block they'll get from talents/skills and because hp levels are high enough that it's really not an issue, assuming they have the same amount of incoming damage in smaller, more frequent attacks. takes pressure off the healer and allows big heals the chance to hit before you get 1 shot down to 1% hp and then die

[Curata]

Please try to be less wrong in future.

Actually you try to be less wrong. Parry haste is STILL a used mechanic in wow, however for bosses that it really matters on its turned off to prevent tanks killing themselves. Regardless of this fact, parry haste IS still around and even though the form it takes now is very different to previous expansions, it makes you wrong.