A healer's question to the Tank comunity

[DrgnDancer]

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.

Yes, but the poster he quoted reversed the mechanic completely. That post was therefore completely wrong. Granted it would have been more helpful to the conversation had he corrected what the poster said, rather than just making a flip remark; but in truth, he was right, and the poster he quoted completely wrong. I'm a Druid tank and I know that much.

[xGLxAnubis]

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.

Reread for clarity. The person he quoted basically said: If you parry the boss, he gets parry haste.

That is NOT how a boss gets parry hasted. So yes, he was correct in telling the person to stop being so wrong.

[Shoryu]

Reread for clarity. The person he quoted basically said: If you parry the boss, he gets parry haste.

That is NOT how a boss gets parry hasted. So yes, he was correct in telling the person to stop being so wrong.

parry haste occurs when the boss parries you. thats why expertise > hit for war tanks.

[Citaxis]

To answer your question straight, as people above have posted, block does very little against any sort of real boss damage, and parry suffers from greatly increased diminishing returns over dodge, which is why dodge is the best avoidance/mitigation stat to gem for, until you've reached, approximately, dodge chance that is double parry chance, at which point they return to equal diminishing returns.

As far as stacking stamina goes, that seems to be an interesting trend started by GC and Tankspot, which confuses me, since a tank has two jobs. First, is to hold aggro. Stamina used to do this for paladins, doesn't anymore, and never did for any other class. Second, is to minimize the amount of incoming damage/increase survival rate. After all, if you didn't care about minimizing incoming damage, you could Defense-cap a clothie and tank like that.

The most reliable and effective way to minimize incoming physical damage is armor, which is why people don't tank with clothies (). Unfortunately, there are no armor gems, armor suffers from massive diminishing returns as well at tank levels, and agility gives so little armor per point that you might as well roll a troll and stack spirit for Hp5.

The next best way to minimize damage is damage avoidance, which is parry, dodge, and miss chance. This is quite easily done through enchants, gems, and Defense in general.

The worst damage reduction comes from block. The chance is high, the damage removed is extremely low. Not much math there.

The reason I didn't list stamina in any of those is because it DOESN'T reduce incoming damage. In two tanks with equal damage avoidance/mitigation, if one has 30k health and one has 40k health, both tanks will be taking equal damage, and will require exactly the same healing. Sure, the 40k health tank can eat an extra hit or two without heals, but it still needs to be healed back up. So you still require the same HPS. As long as a boss isn't two-shotting you, stacking stamina is the same as stacking intellect and haste rating for survival...It provides no reduction to required HPS at all.

Also, just for the record, a boss is "parry hasted" after parrying ANY raid member's attack (which is why DPS attack from behind, to avoid boss parry), which decreases the swing time of their next attack by 40%, but cannot be reduced below 20% (which means only two parried attacks between boss attacks cause parry haste). YOU parrying a BOSS attack will not parry haste yourself.

[diox990]

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

lol'd

[Xenryusho]

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.

Shoo troll. The DK forums are that way, they'll probably have an easier time thinking a healer wants them to stack block then us.

[Demoness]

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)...

You seriously have your facts all wrong. When you parry, YOUR swing speeds up. The boss can only get parry haste by attacks from you that the BOSS parries. I am saying this in the nicest way possible: Read a fucking FAQ about tanking.

[Ganoes]

Sure, the 40k health tank can eat an extra hit or two without heals)

Which is EXACTLY why you gear for stamina.

[Melonberry]

You seriously have your facts all wrong. When you parry, YOUR swing speeds up. The boss can only get parry haste by attacks from you that the BOSS parries. I am saying this in the nicest way possible: Read a fucking FAQ about tanking.

When your swing speed increases, that increases the chance that you'll be parried in the long run. So technically, yes...it does have a chance of parry hasting the boss.

[Ganoes]

When your swing speed increases, that increases the chance that you'll be parried in the long run. So technically, yes...it does have a chance of parry hasting the boss.

Hurp durp don't use fast weapons for tanking because the boss will parry more often hurp durpdie durpdie doo.

[Denaka]

Stam > All imo Ima healer and id like for my tank to be stacked with stam but i dont ant him taking every single blow

[MestHoop]

Which is EXACTLY why you gear for stamina.

Gormok the Impaler hits you for 19268 Physical. (Hit)
Gormok the Impaler's impale hits you for 28541 Physical. (Hit)

I'm always glad I'm sitting on 52k raid buffed hp when that happens...

[Tholl]

Hurp durp don't use fast weapons for tanking because the boss will parry more often hurp durpdie durpdie doo.

um, this is way tanks have high expertise, so that they cannot parry the tanks attacks.

[Deleted]

The most reliable and effective way to minimize incoming physical damage is armor, which is why people don't tank with clothies (). Unfortunately, there are no armor gems, armor suffers from massive diminishing returns as well at tank levels, and agility gives so little armor per point that you might as well roll a troll and stack spirit for Hp5.

armor is actually one of the most linear scaling stats in the game gonna give you an example here to how it works it takes twice as much armor to reach 75% damage reduction than it takes to reach 50% but with 75% damage reduction you only take half the damage that you would with 50% damage reduction.

so the way it scales is very linear the same amount of armor will always equal the same amount of extra time you stay alive regardless of your current armor.
if it scaled so that say 1000 armor always was 5% damage reduction it would then increase the calue of armor the more armor you had.

a quick example at 0% damage reduction from armor 1000 armor would be 5% damage reduction but at 90% damage reduction from armor 1000 armor would be 50% more damage reduction since going from 90% to 95% effectively halfes the damage you take.

[Azyoulike]

armor is actually one of the most linear scaling stats in the game gonna give you an example here to how it works it takes twice as much armor to reach 75% damage reduction than it takes to reach 50% but with 75% damage reduction you only take half the damage that you would with 50% damage reduction.

http://www.wowwiki.com/Armor

As you can see from the wowwiki article, it's closer to 3 times the amount of armour to reach 75% as 50%. You're confusing the linearity of increase in terms of time to live with linearity of reduction of incoming damage.

This comes about because relative TTL starts at 1, and ends at 4. At halfway therefore I need more than 50% reduction, and indeed 25k armour gives me 60%, and hence a TTL of 2.5.

When you change variables like this linear things become non-linear and non-linear things become linear.

[Pieterman]

bla bla bla stamina is best stat bla bla bla

in reality, i completely agree with you. even tho i do put stamina in all sockets its not always all stamina, i use expertise/parry combined with stamn and hit/def with stamn aswell, whichever i slack. i also have brewfest trinkets which i rarely use since the avoidance on onyxia's talisman is great, and i dont need a sick amount of health for the content im in atm (toc 10/25 non heroic).
on some bosses it will be necesary but on the majority off the bosses your better off with abit of avoidance/threat stats aswell.

guess some ppl will always stack one stat cause its 'the best stat' but to me, its like only eating apples all your life cause they are considered healthy.

[kinghong1970]

damn,...

firstly, us warriors, despite the lack of "intellect" in our stats, we're bunch of smart-asses... ;D

i was bored once, slapped on some avoidance gems/gear/trink and ran some heroics... it was kinda fun at the start...

"boy, i love you.. you're easy to heal" was one of many comments of the sort...

but then, i was rage starved... felt i had to overwork to maintain aggro in today's zerging everything mentality of pugs...
and when i applied as a tank for a raid guild,... i had to answer lots of questions...

now stacking stam... and tanking is more fun as it used to be... and hardly these days, you find an incompetent healer... so long as you know what you look for in a healer... but there have been exceptions...

[Superawful]

As many have said, the stacking of stamina isn't necessarily a mindless following of what people want. In fact, other players want the high stamina tank because quality tanks did this before, just your hunter raid leader might not truly understand the reasoning behind why EH is generally better than avoidance.

In fact, the gearing of tanks has changed significantly even in WotLK. In Naxx, the variety of stats on gear was varied very well, resulting in tanks using tier, 25 man, and 10 man content gear together. I know I had a block set, an avoidance set, and an EH set. The reason behind this was that Naxx had old raiding mechanics on its bosses still so that tanking gear was still situational. Loatheb was a great example of where a block set significantly reduced the amount of damage you took. Now, the mechanic is generally to make tanks sustain a giant hit or two in succession, and make healers spam them to ensure they get a heal off before a 2nd or 3rd hit kills the tank. In addition, gear is much more linear in improvements, such that you gain x amount of armor, stamina, dodge, defense and parry by upgrading to a higher ilvl of gear, as opposed to deciding whether the increased armor and stamina and block were worth the loss of defense and dodge. The compensations in ICC should help return things to a more balanced state where reasonable avoidance, decent mitigation, and sufficient health pools should be much more common than pure stamina stacking for all situations.

There is definitely much more to this discussion, such as EH is almost always best for a progression fight, but if you really want to better understand how to heal a tank, try tanking as an OS or on an alt. Also, tankspot.com is a much better place to educate yourself than these forums.

[Ganoes]

um, this is way tanks have high expertise, so that they cannot parry the tanks attacks.

You do know I was making fun of that guy right?

[Crusader Vermiliel Mauritius Dawnguardian]

Take a look at current end game tanking plate gear and tell me how much block rating/value you see on it. Go ahead, I'll wait...

Answer your question?