Note: I want to start this off with a note that I didn't want to put this into the class theorycrafting area since I'd like it to keep the focus of tanks in general, even though the example below are from Druids.
I've tried a few times in the past to make a topic that really gets people thinking, and last night my guild came up with a theory (that we admittedly couldn't pin down) of which is better at which point.
We had previously been discussing armor caps, and when it's more beneficial to start adding dodge to a tank. We're still fine tuning our tanks for SSC/TK, and I know a lot of people will laugh at that. We've recently restructured and hopefully have the forces enough to make progress this time around.
My rel question for the math heads, is, at which point does dodge become more effective over AC in regards to diminishing returns? When a tank gets to a vertain % mitigation, when should those other directions be focused on? Can these other directions be focused on viably?
Most notably we have two VERY opposite Feral Druids. I use these because I'm more familiar with their design. One is currently sitting near the AC cap (34ishk) and has 74% mitigation and 37% dodge. The other is at 22k armor, and 67% mitigation and 48% dodge.
Is there a fair way to even compare these two? Are you always going to take one over the other, or are there situational instances where either one of these characters are going to be a head and shoulders above the competition?
Given that I don't have all of the +hit stats, but both hover right around the same 1900 ATP while in Bear form, their rage generation from DPS is roughly the same, and both are stacking around the same amount of crit on their gear as well. What I don't want to turn this topic into, is a "Pick one or the other, lawl!" But I'd rather like to hear what others feel like each takes to the table, and where it would be more effective to use one over the other.
I appreciate your guy's time. I did try to find any topic discussing mitigation on armor, and what "mitigation" is really considered, but didn't see anything.
My final question would be regarding that last statement. What do you consider mitigation? Is it an amount of damage that is not done to the target over a certain period of time? What counts as mitigation, can dodges be mitigation (even though 100%, they are still a swing timer) and if so, how would the math work out for that? Would it be a roll to see if it's a hit/miss, then a second roll to see damage done or if it's a crushing? I think that we had been unsure about which to classify as which.
You left out one other very important thing, whats their health?
Personally my opinion as a tank is that you shouldn't necessarily be looking to avoid more attacks; but rather minimize your chance of dying when shit hits the fan. Even with the 26% dodge, 19% parry, 12-13% miss I have; theres still times when a mob like Shahraz, Teron, or Archimonde decide to unload into my face. When that happens, the best thing that keeps me alive is stam and armor.... Being able to take 4 or 5 bad hits in a row from a hard hitting boss without dying is way way safer to me then "maybe" dodging a bunch of hits in a row. Whats good is you can still get very respectable avoidance on top of high armor, looking at warriors sitting at 18k unbuffed armor and still knocking 25% dodge 20% parry, 12% miss rates is pretty sweet. If your druid is really sitting at 22k armor, why would you even use him over a Tier 5/6 warrior who has even higher avoidance, almost the same armor if he chugs a pot, and doesn't get crushed to boot? Dodge also really really sucks if something stuns (Kaz'Rogal, lots of trash in BT)
Pretty sure both our feral druids either wear extremely high armor/sta gear for MTing and depending on what they're offtanking they'll mix some dodge/dps gear on if they can get away with it for threat and cat DPS (Reliquary, Supremus, Gruul, etc.).
Druids definitely get the advantage in that they really can pump their avoidance if they feel like it, I personally start to suffer from rage issues on many non hard hitting bosses if I crank it up too high. I think on some of the weaker bosses where the druids "might" have to tank if something goes wrong they tend to wear high dodge gear; but thats cause they can do decent cat dps in that gear if they don't end up tanking.
As for my opinion of Mitigation, Mitigation is simple to define. It is whatever gets you through the fight in the safest manner possible. Whatever can keep you alive through anything a mob can throw at you (chain parries) while putting as little stress on the healers as possible. This gives me the flexibility to save Last Stand/Shield Wall for really really really bad situations like an ugly fear on Archimonde or if all my healers get Ghosted on Teron, rather then having to use them early because the dice didn't roll my way on avoidance hits.
Also don't hold me to this but I'm pretty sure that awhile ago people agreed that its a one hit combat roll, meaning that as your avoidance goes up; the number of hits that land will lean more towards crushing since they get pushed off last:
ALA 0% avoidance = 15% crush 85% hit
50% avoidance = 35% hit 15% crush
85% avoidance = 15% crush (every time you don't avoid a hit)
Dunno if peoples thoughts on that have changed over the last month or two, I can tell you with my dodge/parry/block/miss totalling 75-80% if a hit goes unblocked, its almost always a crush on me. Sure I'm avoiding tons of attacks, but it also makes the healing really really streaky if it happens alot. Shield block negates those odds thankfully, but for a druid if you're at 75+% avoidance and get a bad string of hits, its really gonna hurt unless you've got 73+% armor. None of this is saying dodge is bad though, just dodge should be secondary to a stamina/armor foundation in my mind. The healers should be ready to heal you through every hit landing on you anyways, so its really just a small bonus to avoid those extra hits.
Mitigation > Avoidance in all cases that I can think of. Avoidance has bad streaks, that's simply in it's nature whereas mitigation is always reliable.
Obviously a very simplistic model, but it shows a few things. In this case, tank 1 has a total of less damage taken. More importantly though, you can see very well where tank 2 takes the majority of his damage. In the crushings. So besides tank 2 taking more overall damage, it's far more spikier aswell. The "oh shit, 3x crushing in a row" moments have the exact same chance of happening on either tank, but if tank 2 gets it, he takes ALOT more damage from that oh shit moment.
Personally as a feral druid, I try to be fairly close to the armor cap aswell, because we cannot avoid crushings, and 2-3 crushings in a row will happen once in a while. But with 22k armor, I wont survive that, with 35k I might. Now I know health isn't factored in here, and if there is a huge health difference then that may tip the scale, but I honestly don't recommend any feral walking into SSC/TK with 22k armor.
EDIT: Forgot to add miss, it's in the numbers now.
Mitigation > Avoidance in all cases that I can think of. Avoidance has bad streaks, that's simply in it's nature whereas mitigation is always reliable.
I would argue the exception is on certain bosses which can themselves be streaky. It depends on the numbers. If you're comparing mitigation/stamina build A which means it takes 5 hits without a heal to kill you vs. avoidance build B which means it takes 4 hits without a heal to kill you, on the surface, the mitigation build looks better - less streaky.
But you also have to look at, is it more likely I'll take 5 hits without a heal with build A or 4 hits with build B? At 30% avoidance, the chance that all 5 hits hit is ~16.8%. (.7 ^ 5). At 36% avoidance, the chance that all 4 hits hit is ~16.7%. So you'd be better off with that extra 6% avoidance (this assumes that the time to take 5 hits = the time to take 4 hits - a longer time to take 5 hits obviously allows more time for a heal to hit)
At the other end, if you're comparing 2 hits to 3 hits, 30% avoidance is a 34.3% chance you'll take 3 hits, getting down to that with 2 hits takes about 42% avoidance.
If your mitigation tank is often dying to streaks of fast hits, then an avoidance tank might be better - he's less likely to get those streaks in the first place, potentially enough less likely that even the shorter streak required to kill him is less likely than the longer streak required to kill the other tank.
The fact is we as raiders deal with the RNG on a semi-daily basis, and the vast majority are loathe to introduce yet another RNG to some already [albeit seemingly, perhaps honestly] random encounters. I will always favor higher AC over avoidance.
It would be nice if there was a clear choice (like I wish there were equally viable high-end Mage specs, but I digress), but in this case, I don't see how anyone can disagree with eliminating randomness as opposed to encouraging or perhaps relying on it.
Mitigation > Avoidance in all cases that I can think of. Avoidance has bad streaks, that's simply in it's nature whereas mitigation is always reliable.
Could you argue that Avoidance is a type of Mitigation since over time you are taking less damage?
As an example - taking attacks that are 3,000 damage every 1.5 seconds. Tank and spank encounter with no spcials, etc. Doesn't happen in TBC really, but just try to stay along my thought process.
With 0% dodge, 0 Armor, and an unlimited amount of HP, over a 5 minute fight.
- They will take 40 attacks per minute (assuming no parries which increase attack haste)
- They will take a total of 200 attacks
- They will take 600,000 damage over that two minutes with 0% mitigation from armor
With 28% dodge, 34k Armor (~74% mitigation) unlimited hp over a 5 minute fight
- They will take 28.8 attacks per minute (assuming no parries which increase attack rate)
- They will take a total of 144 attacks
- They will take ~112320 damage @ 74% mitigation from armor
With 48% dodge, 22k Armor (~67% mitigation) unlimited hp over a 5 minute fight
- They will take 20.8 attacks per minute (assuming no parries which increase attack rate)
- They will take a total of 104 attacks
- They will take ~102960 damage @ 67% mitigation from armor
This is incredibly basic, as I haven't even added the 15% crushing that you will deal with if you're a Druid, but I was just trying to show the actual damage done. Looking at the exact same fight over 5 minutes, the tank with more dodge takes roughly 9k less damage.
By the very definition of mitigation, in making something less, that dodge has just mitigated the damage (made it less) hasn't it? I think this is where my guild has debated semantics of what "mitigation" really is and how avoidance can be included into mitigation, as it DOES equate to a % less damage over a period of time.
Yes, as said one should maximize the chance to survive the "oh shit" moments when everything simply goes wrong. You do this by maximizing stamina, then armor (in that order because stamina scales better and armor doesn't protect against magical damage). Evasion stuff is something I only have by "accident" because of the way itemization is done. Doing this I still end up with over 50 % total evasion quite easily. This will also work for almost every fight, although in some combats I really like using evasion based gear such as Gurtogg Bloodboil.
In essence, dodge/parry/miss is unreliable and often just increases overhealing. The total damage a tank takes over longer periods of time is almost irrelevant, as healers going out of mana is rarely a real problem (if it happens it's usually just the first times you do an encounter and probably because they haven't really got the hang of it yet).
Perhaps it would be different issue if regular gear didn't already give you loads of evasion, but with the items we have now the choice seems pretty clear.
Taking less overall damage simply means you're saving healers mana. It's the spikes that kill tanks. When spikes hit, your best way to counter them is to have more armor and health. Getting more avoidance simply reduces the frequencey of these spikes, but it takes one spike to kill a tank and lose.
I'm of the opinion to stack armor and stamina until my healers start having mana problems, which is yet to happen.
Could you argue that Avoidance is a type of Mitigation since over time you are taking less damage?
No one really cares about overall mitigation unless you are in some freak tank and spank fight where healers are in danger of running out of mana over an extremely long amount of time, in which burst damage on that tank isn't a concern (not to mention one where healers can heal perfectly, i.e. cancelling heals and no overhealing).
What matters to raiders at any moment in the fight is: Is my tank going to take too much damage before I can heal him (realistically 3 seconds)? In other words, if my tank can survive any incoming situation for 3 seconds, that's what I want. Dodge introduces randomness, which may mean less damage taken over 5 minutes, but also may result in VASTLY more damage over 3 seconds, if they are losing AC in place of that dodge.
Also note as a corollary that the higher your dodge is, the less you're getting hit, which equates to less rage (and hence less aggro generally at the very high end of dodge). So that just compounds the problem further.
This is incredibly basic, as I haven't even added the 15% crushing that you will deal with if you're a Druid, but I was just trying to show the actual damage done. Looking at the exact same fight over 5 minutes, the tank with more dodge takes roughly 9k less damage.
That's also the reason the above maths give skewed results. Tanks generally die due to spikes, and unless you have over 85% avoidance, you're going to get crushed just as often. So an avoidance tank takes such insane crushing spikes compared to a migitation tank. I honestly wouldn't let a 22k armor druid tank anything more then Void reaver, just because you'll run into situations where you have to say. Hmm, 3 crushings in a row for an unbelieveably stupid amount of damage. Well shit happens, lets go again.
For overall damage taken, migitation is slightly better, but its not a huge difference between Migitation and Avoidance. (Unless the difference is huge, obviously). But streaks kill tanks, thus it becomes a question of how much do you want to depend on luck, if you can build in a bit of safety.
My bias is toward AC and HP in almost every fight for my character. There are very limited situations (like one or two hits will kill me Razuvious) where avoidance really shines. However, you also do not want to be so heavily weighted toward one stat or the other that you "pay-up" for it in the itemization formulas (excluding gem choices, which don't penalize you for stacking one stat).
1) I think this is a very different discussion depending on what type of tanking class you play. An increase to AC increases the returns you get from Block Value and the returns you get from higher stamina. Druids don't block, so the only benefit they get from AC is higher effective stamina.
2) Each class has different dynamics in terms of how they generate threat.
• A warrior really needs to get hit in order to maintain their highest threat cycles and to make sure they won't get crushed when they eventually do get hit.
• From what I understand (correct me if I'm wrong), Paladins generate a lot of passive threat by getting hit and reflecting damage back to their attacker. They generally need to be getting hit in order to maintain their mana pool and maintain an adequate amount of threat generation.
• Druids are a bit more forgiving, they don't need to get hit as much to have the rage to generate threat (which is part of the reason they make such good offtanks).
3) You cannot dodge a crushing blow. The best case scenario is that you push it off the attack table by exceeding 85% total avoidance. AC will soak a crushing blow. In a vacuum, that means AC is going to possibly prevent the spike damage that will kill you, when avoidance generally will not (ignoring itemization costs and diminishing returns).
4) Your role in a fight should dictate what gear you wear. A maintank who is getting hit every time, all the time, needs to make sure he can take every single hit. In general an offtank is picking up the third or fourth add. In this situation, healers are stretched and mana is presumably stretched. When that happens, you need to start thinking about ways to buy healers time and preserve their mana. Avoidance can do that and should be part of a balanced set for offtanking.
5) Avoidance is well-suited to dealing with elemental melee attacks (like Hydross adds). AC and block are worthless in these situations and your gear should reflect that.
6) You cannot dodge if you are stunned or incapacitated. Warstomps happen frequently enough that you don't want to be wearing paper when that happens.
Until we start seeing fights where the MT healers can simply run out of mana with most of the DPS doing their jobs, Mitigation always trumps avoidance. Maybe we just have good healers but I really haven't seen that happen yet
Quite obviously the 74% mitigation, 37% dodge is the far better tank. Even if you just took the pure average of damage intake, you would have 26% * 63% = 16.4% damage taken versus 33% * 52% = 17.16% damage taken. In total the second tank is taking 17.2/16.4 = ~5% more damage overall.
Likewise, dodge is a dice roll, and can be streaky, and does nothing to cut down on maximal burst. Straight up all - or - nothing avoidance like dodge leads to overhealing, as it's not predictive, while armor leads to a more predictive damage reduction.
For instance, a mob hits a 0 armor target for 10k every 2 seconds. The 74% druid will be taking 2600 damage per hit. The 67% druid will be taking 3300 damage per hit. A good healer will notice this, and typically use spells that restore about the amount he loses when the hit lands. Since you can't predict when a dodge is going to happen, if the dodge occurs, that healing is pretty much wasted, but unless you're healing reactively, it will probably land anyways.
Likewise, a druid avoiding more hits is generating less steady rage as well, a bunch of avoided strikes will leave the druid rage starved.
As well, I find that high avoidance means that healers often underestimate the spike capacity. For example, if you're avoiding every other hit for a long time, your healers get used to you taking half the potential damage you can take. This means that when a mob decides to land and crush with every single blow for 4-5 hits in a row, your healers aren't ready for it.
In terms of what do I consider mitigation. I consider mitigation the amount of damage reduced on a normal swing. Shield block value, armor, defensive stance and improved Righteous Fury. Consistent elements that lower the maximum amount of damage you can take. I might even include things like demo shout, CoW and thunder clap into this.
I consider random roll-of-the-dice damage nullification avoidance. Dodge, miss, parry, these all occur randomly, and can not be predicted or counted on. Even with high values they are mostly luck based. And in my opinion they make a fight less stable due to damage rate fluctuations on the tank.
As for how would the math work out, there are a lot of posts on that. An empty combat table of a 73 or boss mob consists of slightly more than 5% chance to crit, 15% chance to crush and the rest as a chance to hit. Your miss and dodge take up chance to hit. Your defense skill and talents reduce the chance of crit to be chance of hit. If your miss and dodge consist of enough of the combat table to remove hits completely, then it starts to remove crushes. This is pretty much impossible for a druid as it means more than 85% chance to avoid a hit.
There is no second roll. There is one single roll. And in fact, the higher your chance to dodge, the greater the chance that a landed attack will be a crush.
For instance, if you have 30% chance to dodge or be missed, that means 55% chance to be hit, and 15% chance to be crushed. That is to say 27% of all hits that land are crushing blows.
Lets say you have a 55% chance to dodge or be missed, that means 30% chance to be hit, and 15% chance to be crushed. That is to say that 66% of all hits that land are crushing blows.
I think the only time as a MT I consider avoidance over stamina/mitigation is when it comes to trinkets. The avoidance trinkets (notably scarab of displacement and lucky pocket watch) have on use effects that stamina trinkets (notably the darkmoon cards, violet badge, etc) really don't have.
On some fights this means that the additional "oh shit" buttons they provide actually add more worst-case scenario survivability than more stamina would.
Could you argue that Avoidance is a type of Mitigation since over time you are taking less damage?
As an example - taking attacks that are 3,000 damage every 1.5 seconds. Tank and spank encounter with no spcials, etc. Doesn't happen in TBC really, but just try to stay along my thought process.
With 0% dodge, 0 Armor, and an unlimited amount of HP, over a 5 minute fight.
- They will take 40 attacks per minute (assuming no parries which increase attack haste)
- They will take a total of 200 attacks
- They will take 600,000 damage over that two minutes with 0% mitigation from armor
With 28% dodge, 34k Armor (~74% mitigation) unlimited hp over a 5 minute fight
- They will take 28.8 attacks per minute (assuming no parries which increase attack rate)
- They will take a total of 144 attacks
- They will take ~112320 damage @ 74% mitigation from armor
With 48% dodge, 22k Armor (~67% mitigation) unlimited hp over a 5 minute fight
- They will take 20.8 attacks per minute (assuming no parries which increase attack rate)
- They will take a total of 104 attacks
- They will take ~102960 damage @ 67% mitigation from armor
This is incredibly basic, as I haven't even added the 15% crushing that you will deal with if you're a Druid, but I was just trying to show the actual damage done. Looking at the exact same fight over 5 minutes, the tank with more dodge takes roughly 9k less damage.
By the very definition of mitigation, in making something less, that dodge has just mitigated the damage (made it less) hasn't it? I think this is where my guild has debated semantics of what "mitigation" really is and how avoidance can be included into mitigation, as it DOES equate to a % less damage over a period of time.
Thats true, but the RNG never quite works like that.... Lets say both druids are having the unluckiest day of their lives and take 4 hits in a row (Mathmatically painful, but goddamned you'd be amazed how often it happens). Once again I will leave out crushes, but crushes only amplify the effects here to be worse so keep that in mind....
Druid A would take 3120 damage
Druid B would take 3960 damage.
Druid B takes roughly 27% more damage in a hit spike (believe me too, this crap happens alot). You made a boss that hits for 3000 base damage, lets be more realistic and make him hit for 15,000 base damage, which is a fairly average hitting boss.....
Druid A took 12480 in his spike
Druid B took 15840 in his spike
Step it up further to a Teron or Shahraz with CoR level damage of 21000 base and you get
Druid A: 21840
Druid B: 27720
With parries, those 4 hits can happen in under 2 seconds, and it usually happens to me at least once a fight in any decent length boss. Like I said before, you didn't post stamina levels but I'd be shocked if Druid B doesn't have alot less stam then druid A in dodge gear.... Also keep in mind the one roll combat system, if a druid has 48% hes more likely to take a crush or two in his 4 hits then the druid with 28% dodge. On a mob with realistic damage, Druid As chance of surviving that is exponentially higher.
Its no good if you can shave off 5 -10 % more damage over a fight if you die the moment the dice don't roll right. Healing another 30 or 40,000 damage over a 5+ minute fight is no problem, healing another 10k+ in under 2 seconds on the other hand is damned dangerous. Luck is nice to have, but you cannot rely on it; especially over long periods of time as your odds of bad rolls happening keeps going up.
It all comes down to this simple concept: Would your healers rather be healing more damage on a target with less health through burst, or less damage on a target with more health? You're just way more likely to survive sitting on that armor and health pool when this stuff happens.
The only time I would ever consider wearing an avoidance set is with a boss that uses a physical-based debuff on me that is really nasty, but doesn't have much burst damage. Void Reaver is one example (although I wear a spell damage set, Warriors tend to wear Shield Block sets, and Druids tend to wear DPS gear) and Temporus is another. They're the only ones I can think of, though.
In any situation where you expect to be bursted down, having more Stamina / more Armor means that your healers need to overheal to make sure you're topped off considerably less, that they have more time to react, and that they're going to be less likely to underestimate incoming damage, so you are more likely to have that next heal incoming.
I tend to run with 17k armor and a base of 13k HP as a Paladin, and if I were a Warrior, I'd be stacking them even higher. (Things like Thoriumweave Cloak would be distinct possibilities.)
A Druid with less than 30k armor has sacrificed his biggest advantage - that ability to take constant hits and reduce them down to a manageable value - over Warriors and Paladins. I'm over 50% avoidance in pure t4 gear, I get a flat 6% reduction in damage taken from Imp. Righteous Fury (a Warrior would get 10% from defensive stance), and I can reach 20k armor easily with an Ironshield potion. At that point, the only big advantage the Druid would have would be higher Stamina - which could probably be discarded once you account for eating crushes.
Avoidance is a pretty nice thing to have, and it can compete with armor/stamina, but the focus should be on watching for armor/stamina first. Avoidance is the side appeal of your gear. A tank with 10% dodge 10% miss and 10% parry would be kind of brutal, but a tank with 14k armor and 11k HP is literally impossible to heal through all sorts of things, even if he does have 20% dodge, 20% parry, and 15% miss.
Tankspot has some really good information regarding effective health and other topics, although primarily geared for warriors. Basically in the end, stacking stamina and armor (but not totally forgetting about avoidance) up to the cap for level 73 mobs will always be better for progression fights, as it will give your raid more time to learn the encounter in addition to the fact that armor gives linear scaling capabilities to the potential of stamina.
I don't really see the reason for this massive delta between sets. The appropriate tank gear for your progression level has quite a bit of avoidance, armor and stamina built into it (warrior at least).
But when I want to stack stamina (Kael'Thas) I end up having to use rather poor tank items in general. Maiden Gauntlets, Solarian boots, etc, that only really have stamina going from roughly 60%+ actual avoidance to maybe 40% actual. I gain about 1.5k health in this transition but lose massive amounts of avoidance and armor, though I gain some decent shield block value.
Thus my main set of 4/5 T5 (no chest), boots of elusion, nightbane chest and so forth has about 14.5k health base, and 26% dodge, 19% parry, ~12% miss, and 32% block before any Black Temple/Hyjal items. This is what I use for Morogrim. This is what I use for everything not Kael'Thas.
This might be a druid only issue perhaps? I don't really see much of this occuring for warriors because your highest armor items will always have the additional better tanking stats for "free" from the higher ilvl as bonus armor is a very rare stat for plate items in general.
It is easy to say mitigation is always better than avoidance. 1% mitigation will almost always be better than 1% avoidance. Spikes are bad and they do happen, but avoidance still makes it easier to heal the tank in the long run too. So the real question is: where does it break even? When is x avoidance better than y armor or z stamina?
Like I said it all depends on the fight. Though I'm curious to know what some other tanks use as a good sta to avoidance ratio in fights where you don't necessarily need all the stamina you can get.
It is easy to say mitigation is always better than avoidance. 1% mitigation will almost always be better than 1% avoidance. Spikes are bad and they do happen, but avoidance still makes it easier to heal the tank in the long run too. So the real question is: where does it break even? When is x avoidance better than y armor or z stamina?
Like I said it all depends on the fight. Though I'm curious to know what some other tanks use as a good sta to avoidance ratio in fights where you don't necessarily need all the stamina you can get.
Its kinda ironic Dots, in the fights where I could crank up my avoidance safely and live, I can't do it anyways since it absolutely obliterates my already low rage generation since those bosses hit for so little. Stuff like Naj'entus, Rage Winterchiil, Anetheron, even Kaz'Rogal definitely don't require the health/armor levels that Teron, Archimonde, Shahraz, and Bloodboil do. They're also the hardest fights to manage rage in and I generally wear my threat gear (capped hit, 700-900 block value) for them for just that reason.
Our druids seem to follow that philosophy too. If they don't need max mitigation for an old T4, T5, Karazhan, or weak hitting T6 boss they crank up their agility for the threat/dps and just take the dodge as something thats there as a bonus.
Consider effective health:
Max Health / (1 - mitigation%) = Effective Health
[mitigation% being dmg reduction via armor, as described a few posts above)
A tank with 75% dmg reduction effectively gets 4x their max health. A tank with 66% mitigation gets only 3x their max health.
Now say that Mit/Stam tank has 22k health with 75% mitigation and only 30% dodge. Thats an effective 88k health. Tank B has only 19k health with 66% mitigation but 50% dodge. Thats an effective 57k health.
Now say both get a chance to tank a boss hitting for 15-25k pre-mitigation (pretty standard in high-end encounters). What gives you healers a longer time to react? The AC/Stam tank taking 5 hits, or the Avoidance tank taking 3 hits? Now assume this was a damage spike with no dodges/misses - which tank pulled through long enough to get a heal, and which cost you 10g in repairs and wasted consumables?
If your healers are concerned about the AC/Stam tank taking 10% more damage over a 10 minute period, get new healers. Damage per 10 minutes can always be healed up. Its damage per 2 seconds that'll kill your tank.
I like how this guy put it:
Its no good if you can shave off 5 -10 % more damage over a fight if you die the moment the dice don't roll right. Healing another 30 or 40,000 damage over a 5+ minute fight is no problem, healing another 10k+ in under 2 seconds on the other hand is damned dangerous. Luck is nice to have, but you cannot rely on it; especially over long periods of time as your odds of bad rolls happening keeps going up.
One thing to add about the spikeyness of avoidance is that you're more likely to see strings of avoided hits. It varies from guild to guild, but I've definitely seen situations like "oh, the MT isn't taking much damage (really a dodge/parry string). oh, raid healers need a hand, so I'll heal so-and-so. oh crap, crushing blow while I was mid-heal on someone other than the MT. MT dies." So in addition to relying on luck more with avoidance, if your healers are still learning, it's another thing to learn to deal with.
Also, it varies from healer to healer, but I know a number of healers that don't cancel heals anymore cause they're worried about spike damage. I think mitigation works better with healers like that, since they could downrank a little or trade +healing for mp5.
Since the question is about the tradeoff between the two, I think I'd prefer a tank with 73% mitigation, 35% dodge over a tank with 74% mitigation, 30% dodge. But I think the tradeoff comes very close to 75%, where you might have to trade huge amount of stats and such to increase AC.
Its kinda ironic Dots, in the fights where I could crank up my avoidance safely and live, I can't do it anyways since it absolutely obliterates my already low rage generation since those bosses hit for so little. Stuff like Naj'entus, Rage Winterchiil, Anetheron, even Kaz'Rogal definitely don't require the health/armor levels that Teron, Archimonde, Shahraz, and Bloodboil do. They're also the hardest fights to manage rage in and I generally wear my threat gear (capped hit, 700-900 block value) for them for just that reason.
For most of those fights I actually use a passive crush immunity set with about 62% 'real' avoidance against level 73. It is quite a success, threat is not an issue because of the much easier rage management as well as the extra rage from not having to use Shield Block at all.
09/11/07, 11:46 AM
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