Hi team!
During this expansion I decided to re-roll to Tank since our MT had to step away. I've been reading/watching all resources I could on tanks, but one thing that I found particularly hard to find was information on tank mitigation. This is complicated to generate since: (i) it's situational, so statistical analysis are of limited use; (ii) it's affected by player skill and choice, where a player may choose to take damage and prioritize DPS.
But nevertheless, for those players that prefer to optimize their character for "tankiness", I thought it would be good to have a resource to look at data. And since I coulnd't find any, I ended up doing my own analysis with patch 9.2 data. I wanted to share it in case it's useful for anyone.
1. Methodology
I took the top parsed tanks for healing from Warcraftlogs in M+25 Fortified dungeons, and controlled for DPS (they had to be 98% + in both). I tried to do this with the same affix but there wasn't enough data. So bear in mind that the data is anecdotal, it should only be used to get an indication of what each class is capable of. However since you are taking the top ranked parses per spec, even if it's a sample size of 1, you are taking the best of each class.
Then I looked at the key variables per tank:
- Mitigation: How much damaged they reduced for each source, then averaged. I have the split per skill in the excel link below, but I'll only share the average below for simplicity. Take into account that while this number summarizes the average mitigation for all skills, some attacks are far more common than others. Melee hits account for 65-70% of Mythic+ damage, so I've broken that out.
- Damage Taken Per Second: This is interesting as it determines the maximum damage spikes. However, since we are averaging it, it's possible that specific skills hit harder than others (i.e. Magic vs Melee).
- Self-Healing Per Second: I restricted healing to the tank only, and averaged it. Again, this can be tricky since it can say that a tank is great at healing itself, but may not have big heals to save themselves from a big hit.
- Net Damage Taken Per Second: Calculated as DTPS - SHPS. This should give us guidance on how much help the tank needs from the healer in average.
- DPS: Damage per second, again in average.
While I have been reading the forum for a long time I only recently decided to start posting so I can't share links to the work yet, but this is the summary of the results:
2. Results
Mitigation
- DH: 49%
- DK: 30%
- Druid: 42%
- Monk: 53%
- Pala: 42%
- Warrior: 46%
Melee Hits Mitigation (% -- average hit)
- DH: 72% -- 8,894
- DK: 62% -- 12,999
- Druid: 77% -- 7,464
- Monk: 84% -- 5,024
- Pala: 81% -- 5,923
- Warrior: 86% -- 4,419
Damage Taken Per Second
- DH: 12,909
- DK: 20,192
- Druid: 10,738
- Monk: 15,644
- Pala: 10,216
- Warrior: 8,002
Self-Healing Per Second
- DH: 9,840
- DK: 17,129
- Druid: 8,381
- Monk: 11,302
- Pala: 6,871
- Warrior: 6,003
Net Damage Taken Per Second
- DH: 3,069
- DK: 3,063
- Druid: 2,357
- Monk: 4,342 -- Accounting for Celestial Fortune, this goes down to 2,512
- Pala: 3,345
- Warrior: 1,999
Damage Per Second
- DH: 10,761
- DK: 12,372
- Druid: 10,291
- Monk: 12,402
- Pala: 12,360
- Warrior: 8,915
The Excel file is here (copy and remove the spaces): https: //file.io/VNaB6605dtEG
3. Insights
Understanding Tank Damage throughput was tricky for me at first. You need to first understand how much damage you can avoid through Parry/Dodge, then how much you can mitigate (Block/Absorb), in the case of monks how much you can delay (Stagger), and then how much you can recover from yourself (Self-Healing). DTPS gives you a decent combined metric for damage intake, and Net DTPS allows you to account for self-healing.
So now that I had the data I could basically try to understand better the feedback that guides/resources and Pros were giving me. Doing a small summary per class:
- Monk: They probably have the best overall avoidance and mitigation. Net DTPS is middle of the pack, but thanks to Stagger it's the most stable. And since they have plenty of CDs and a big absorb, they can deal with most situations bettter than anyone.
- Druids: Their melee mitigation is high, but their average melee hit is larger than you think. They will struggle with magic and dots, where only their high HP pool will help you. While they technically mitigate less than the warrior, the ability to self heal gives them more flexibility than them. And their high HP makes them more forgiving.
- Warrior: While on paper they have the best melee mitigation and some of the best overall mitigation, the lack of a pure self-heal penalizes them. Most of their SHPS are Ignore Pains, which only reduce 50% of the next hit by a medium amount. This means that while warriors overall take very little damage, they are incredibly vulnerable to a moment where one of their defensives drops off or if they eat some mechanics.
- Paladin: They have good melee mitigation when all their defensives are up. But the chance of getting hit without them up, combined with a relatively low self healing capability leaves them exposed. You need to plan ahead very well to make the pala tanky. In average, it makes the pala feel weaker than Druids, and usually weaker than warriors, although with more resources than warriors to save yourself if you get in trouble.
- DH: This is the only class I have not played at 60 and the data has surprised me. Their overall mitigation is higher than I anticipated thanks to their magic mitigation, and while they are more vulnerable to melee hits, their self-healing let's them survive things that the prior classes wouldn't be able to withstand. Definitely a higher skill level tank, with high risk, high reward.
- DK: No surprises on the DK data. It's the highest risk-reward class. Takes in a ton of damage, healds for a ton of damage. Not a great class if you like to mitigate as much as possible, but super versatile and capable if you are ok with the reactive healing gameplay (which still requires plenty of proactive planning to have deathstrikes available to respond to damage).
One of the things I was trying to understand with the data was why Warriors were doing so bad. I mained a warrior in Castle Nathria and Sanctum of Domination Heroic in progression, and it was clear that I was getting destroyed by things other tanks didn't suffer as much with. And the data basically shows it. Warriors don't have a big enough gap to other classes with their defensive toolkit, and their lack of healing and very limited absorb mechanism doesn't let them catch up. They aren't bad, the rest are just better. Add to this that in raids you have more magical and dot damage than M+, especially Sanctum, and can understand how that advantage in melee mitigation basically disappears. IMO, they either need to get more baseline mitigation to make the class make sense, or Ignore Pain's design needs to be reverted back to it's original concept of a pure absorb with larger caps.
- - - Updated - - -
FYI I did a similar analysis on Rygelon Mythic for Raid but I've learned to clean data a bit more since then. I'll try to update it. If you are curious it's here (remove spaces for the link to work): https: //twitter.com/gerdelgado/status/1530290076281753601