The Totally Rad Guild

(COPIED FROM MMO-CHAMPION THREAD)
As a rule of thumb, HP/Armor stacking is generally more effective for progression. Why? Because it relies less on RNG and healer skill. You may have AMAZING healers who know how to perfectly time heals through your inconsistent spikes, but MOST healers have knee-jerk spam reactions at best. This is the #1 reason for tank death in a raid, period.

I love the sample that Omen gave (what a charming fellow, btw). It is so accurate. Basically, according to his data, if you stack stamina, you will take 4/5 hits (20% avoidance! awesome). If you stack avoidance, however, you will tak 2/9 hits (77% avoidance! wow. I didn't think that was possible).

Now here's the thing about avoidance.
1. It has a cap
2. It relies on RNG
3. It only really fleshes out in HIGH-YIELD situations

What do I mean? Well our dear friend Omen gave Patchwerk as an example of where avoidance is especially key. Let's take a look at some cold hard facts.

http://wowwebstats.com/mcwqpcihrsd5q?s= ... &a=x25c00e

Not only does this guild fail miserably because they took 6:20 to down Patch (I took the longest duration fight available), but there is a really interesting thing that happened to the main tank.

He took 255/598 hits (57.4% avoidance). Forget the small detail that the average hit was 5200 (not 30k) and focus on the number of total hits for the duration of the fight. Anyone who has taken statistics will tell you that trying to argue a noticeable difference from a 1-5% occurance rate in 598 swings is just ludicrous.

In other words, you're going to get virtually the same results (total avoidance) whether your paper doll says 45% avoidance or 50% avoidance. The RNG does not decree that if you have 50% avoidance, you will take EXACTLY 299/598 swings, and if you have 45% avoidance, you will take EXACTLY 329/598 swings. The only time you will ever come close to seeing a noticeable difference in ~5% avoidance is when the sample size gets to be in the mid thousands.

And we are talking about the worst of the worst here, where simple fights take EONS. Want to see a real pro fight?

http://wowwebstats.com/liar3d4t2clsc?s= ... a=x1e87fa5

1:32 minute fight. 34/72 hits taken by the MT (52.8% avoidance). 72 swings. Am I making sense?

So what next? Hodir? Let's take a look.

http://wowwebstats.com/mnnhz1rrqkhza?s= ... 00013bbdf1

8:30 minute fight (well above hard mode). 73/157 physical hits landed (53.5% avoidance). 157 swings. Even +15% avoidance is completely irrelevant to 157 swings.

Oh, btw, there were also 62 Frost attacks for this parse, but they can't be dodged or parried. Remember when Omen was talking about those 40k hits? Yeah...frost damage...non-avoidable. Woops.

Now, you give me a boss with 1.0 attack speed, or a swing-applied debuff like Kologarn, and I will admit that avoidance is probably a good thing to stack....for THAT fight. However, as my first point indicated...

"As a rule of thumb, HP/Armor stacking is generally more effective for progression."

Ghostbeezy wrote:(COPIED FROM MMO-CHAMPION THREAD)
As a rule of thumb, HP/Armor stacking is generally more effective for progression. Why? Because it relies less on RNG and healer skill. You may have AMAZING healers who know how to perfectly time heals through your inconsistent spikes, but MOST healers have knee-jerk spam reactions at best. This is the #1 reason for tank death in a raid, period.

Can't say I necessarily agree. The main reason being what I quoted above.

I do not want to base my gearing decisions on compensating for bad healers.

Lately I tend to base my decisions on a relatively new line of thoughts among tanks called "TTL progression gearing." It is not avoidance gearing, but it is not stam stacking either. TTL means Time-To-Live or basically how long can you stay alive with minimal support from the healers. Having a lot of stam is a big part of this, but at the same time if you aren't avoiding hits you aren't going to last long either.

Your logic on avoidance is pretty flawed, you are telling me more avoidance means nothing because hits are determined by the RNG... by that logic 95% avoidance is no better than 5% avoidance because theoretically every hit could be a roll of 95 or higher... doesn't compute with me. When bosses are swinging for 25k hits you have to avoid the hits, end of story. Sure it sucks when 3 of them hit in a row and my armor is lower... but had I stacked more stam and had 45k health instead of 40k I still would get 2 shot.

Besides, you have to look at available gear as well, it is all going to have avoidance stats on it... when you are talking about stam stacking you are really talking about gemming. Armor is almost impossible to prioritize because (for me at least) it is all plate, there are very few items with armor bonuses.

I get that big health pools are good, I strive to have one. But I am never going to consider gimping my avoidance because consistent damage is easier to heal. If you just want to spam me, go ahead, at that point overhealing is just as effective as healing a hit that I didn't dodge.

this is the best study of avoidance WRT tanking i've come across
http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f200/372 ... sults.html

the real difference is that it's difficult to model healing. if a boss swings for 1000, would you want
99% avoidance, 999 health
or
1001 health, 1% avoidance?

it's essentially a more complicated (and difficult to represent) version of that (n hits landing in a window where healing cannot bring you back up). it involves latency, healer reaction time, HPS throughput, HPM, fight time, etc etc etc

for something like patchwerk OT, if hatefuls come in around 20k, the important HP points are ~20k, 40k, and 60k. if 60k is not attainable, then anything above 40k assuming perfect healing isn't really that useful. it would be better to minimize the chances that you take 3 hits in a row (i.e. work on avoidance) to give your healers more cushion.

tldr: get enough EH that you aren't in danger of being bursted down, then work on avoidance.