Except that tanks basically never die due to healer OOM these days, unless something else has gone horribly wrong with a given fight. Healers know to proactively use consumables if going OOM is a danger, plus every druid has innervate for cases when healers misjudge and end up OOM with their cooldowns not yet up.

Tanks die to spike damage. Spike damage isn't necessarily going from 98% to 0% in an instant. Spike damage can be over the course of 3 seconds, as two healers cancelled big heals a split second before a nasty crushing thrash, and then by the time they start new heals, and those heals land, the tank has taken two more bad hits or a special attack of some kind and is dead. "Spike damage" can be the result of a distraction that diverts attention from the tank for a few seconds (Vek'lor Blizzard, Faerlina Rain of Fire, etc., being primary examples). As a healer, I can say for sure that more hp is everything. I wish we had more tauren tanks (or BoK!) and I love it whenever our tanks have special HP buffs. The one time our MT showed up to Patchwerk happening to have a Hakkar buff by coincidence, I was absolutely giddy.

Yes, having 25k hp rather than 20k hp, hypothetically, would not matter. But within the realm of realistically attainable results, hp remains unbelievably important.

An instant death is when the tank takes more damage in a round then he has total hitpoints. If a tank has 10k hitpoints, an instant death would be getting hit for 10k damage or more. Patchwerk only critical hits for 4k, less with better gear.

10k - 10k = instant death
10k - 4k = not an instant death

It takes several rounds of damage for Patchwerk to kill you, granted with his attack speed they come fast, but it still requires multiple rounds to kill you which means there is a break where you can heal the damage. In order for an additional 2k damage on one hit that happens extremely infrequently anyway to result in a death, it means you would have to be going under 2k damage after a series of rounds (no healing for a few rounds of attacks). If you are reliably going under 2k that a critical hit usually kills the tank that sounds like the problem to me.

Usually at this point raid leaders think, well if the tank had 2k more hitpoints, he would've lived so obviously stamina is the best stat for tanking or if he had 440 defense, he wouldn't have been critical hit, so obviously defense is the most important statistic for a tank and unfortunately mindlessly jacking up those stats at the cost of others, generally gimps the tank.

Thankfully, there aren't many choices for tanks in terms of gear, so if you choose to jack one particular stat up at the cost of others, you are only slightly worse then a tank who equipped themselves in a smarter fashion and the difference is small enough that you can still tank the bosses regardless.

Hmm. Perhaps this is reflective of where we are in the game. My guild has just downed Ony and is collecting FR gear for Ragnaros. I suppose we haven't fought any really vicious spike-damage bosses yet (except I guess Ony), and for us, healer mana is still sometimes a problem (although this is partly to do with raid composition, which can vary wildly week to week).

My personal experience of this relates to me gearing up to try to tank Jin'Do as a druid. The first time I tried it I had around 9000 armour and I went down fairly quickly because the paladins assigned to healing me just couldn't keep up with the incoming damage for long enough.

My armour is now almost 13,000 and I have a much higher dodge score as well (it's gone from about 12% to around 16%). This has all come at the cost of about 500 buffed raid hp, and I've been wondering if that's a good trade-off. I think in this case it is, since Jin'do is unlikely to be able to kill me with spike damage due to his being a pussy.

MC is a simple dungeon. Other than Ony/Rag, there really isn't much spike damage yet, as long as your tanks have some defense.

AQ40 and beyond is where you can run into crazy spike damage (which is why Life giving gem/Last Stand is so good).

I may be mistaken, but I believe Vek'nilash's Unbalancing Strike (and for that matter, Razuvious') can crit...

I don't have a combat log handy... anyone know?

No it can't. That would make no sense at all.

Thank you for this excellent insight, I certainly couldn't have figured that one out on my own.

I think when people refer to "instant death" they aren't talking about getting killed in precisely one round, but getting killed in a span faster than 2s. Which given global cooldowns and latency, for all practical purposes is instant death.

440 defense reduces the burst potential, which in turn reduces the chance of instant death. What happens if Gluth frenzies and crits you? Chances are you die.

The problem is that the second of these doesn't seem to work out in practice (I think). So the model need updating, but nobody knows exactly how.

The first case does work exactly as advertised, however.

It really is a result of the communication disconnect between healers and tank. Take the OP for instance. He is more concerned about taking the least amount of overall damage over a given boss fight. However, it is the exact opposite for healers. We want to get into a sync with the other healers and maximize our efficiency. It is no wonder that some people covet bear tanks with their constant yet higher rate of damage.

From my personal experience I have found that parries and dodges do little to effect healing anyways. If the tank is full HP, I will let my heal cast right through rather than cancel it at 80% and run the risk of a tank getting hit hard in the last 20%. No real way for me to know if it is a dodge/parry or a delay in reporting.

I always thought max avoidance was the way to go. I dont tank much so I have not collected alot of the items in the my profile under dodge, nor do I know how well it would work for mting nax. 28% dodge and 16% parry seems neat tho : o

Well I saw the threads, could have simply been lag honestly. There is ton of evidence supporting the fact you cannot get crushed while shield block is active.

We know there is a to hit order and we know it work like that. Devs have said it, it's logical it's the case, etc.

Everything I've seen says that you cannot get crushed while shield block is active if you have 25% or more base block%. That's the source of all the trouble.

The whole point is that a critical hit from Patchwerk is not an instant death. The reason tanks die to it is due to a gap in healing and the minor spike damage(2k more) is enough to kill the tank before the next round of heals hit.

There are 2 obvious solutions to the problem.

1) Fix the gap in the healing so the spike damage does not kill the tank.

2) Increase the defense of the tank so that the spike damage does not occur.

The problem with option 2, is that usually when you focus on raising one stat specifically, you do so at the cost of other stats. For example if I put on my Wrath breastplate over my Conqueror's Breastplate I would gain an additional 5 defense, but I would also lose several hundred armor and over a full percent of dodge. The damage is more reliable by an extremely small amount, but now I am taking more damage.

If you simply fix the gap in the healing, then the tank isn't dying to the critical hit, and the tank is taking the lowest and most reliable amount of damage possible. If you can fix the gap in healing so the tank doesn't die to spike damage, it becomes the much better option.

This is the exact reason why armor is one of the most important statistics for a tank. Once you have enough hitpoints to tank the mob, then you should focus on your armor so that you get hit for less and you require less healing to keep you alive. The main advantage is that armor is a reliable reduction in damage. Avoidance does allow you to take less overall damage, but because it is not predictable, the healers can not assume that a dodge will occur. With that said though, avoidance is extremely helpful in fixing any gaps in the healing and delaying the damage so that the healers can get the tanks hitpoints back to full before the tank dies. What's the difference between a critical hit for 4k / dodge or 2 hits for 2k each? In terms of damage taken, there is no difference.

That's generally how you should equip your tank. Take the best bang for the buck. If two upgrades have different statistics, yet one is a much bigger upgrade then take the bigger upgrade. If the upgrades are equivalent, generally go for stamina first until you have enough, then focus on armor and lastly avoidance assuming that the upgrades are equivalent. Taking the best bang for the buck piece, you're generally going to be pretty well rounded in every category with high stamina, high armor and high avoidance.

Avoidance is great for saving healer mana. The problem with that is that healers can just cast Gold Tap more and not run out of mana. If you had a tank with 100k health, no mitigation, and no avoidance he'd be trivial to keep alive, but there's no way you can farm enough gold to do that every fight as a healer.

Avoidance doesn't really stop you from dying, though. If you have 10k health and the boss hits for 10k, 50% avoidance would give you a 50% chance of surviving, while 50% mitigation would let you survive as long as you were being healed.

For general purpose tanking, I'd consider Stamin = Armor > Avoidance. Armor has the nice effect of also reducing the healing you need in addition to increasing your chance of living, but not everything is mitigated by it.

1. Survive - stamina, armor, defense
2. Improve - avoidance

Simple as that.

Long time lurker, first time poster... Great forum, great reads, great posters.

I'm just curious as to the 2nd scenario and how it doesnt work out in practice. Also, if it does work out, wouldnt having a lower %block and higher %avoidance (parry/dodge) work out for the better? In the second scenario the tank has 18.8% chance of recieving 0 damage, as apposed to a tank with a base of 25% block who will get 100% to block with Shield Block activated?

Thanks in advance @ replies ;]

If you are capable of getting to 440 defense, it is relatively trivial to acquire 25% or higher base block percentage (assuming you are specced "correctly") and, in this circumstance, you will NOT be crushed by a block.

My guild has recently been working on the Twin Emps, where blocks are obviously at a high premium. Our first kill, I was fury/prot, no imp shield block, and mainly got by with a high unbuffed HP pool (which many high end tanks would tell you trumps absolutely a high avoidance build). Luckily with current itemization raiding warriors don't have to choose HP or mitigation gear under most circumstances - higher level gear increases these stats in a relatively linear fashion. I have recently respecced to full prot, and my healers report that on Twin Emps and other fights I take much less spike damage. /shrug

Bottom line is that the amount of damage you block is one of the less significant parts of actually getting a block, since your HP and buffs make the 250 block damage kinda useless. Having a high block is good because blocks themselves mitigate high-damage hits, and therefore strength is far, far behind stamina and agility in tanking builds.

Thx at attempting to point out the logic to me, Arawethion ;] I still dont quite understand it due to the unlogic of certain exceptancies in a simple system, but I guess its been tested before ;>

As for the OP's question on agility, I personally like to stack up on agility too. I'm not often an MT but instead I OT most of the time, and at that point the agility also helps me land some critical hits (20% crit in OT gear) to activate Flurry and give a larger proc chance for my Thunderfury. I think agility is quite a viable stat to focus on somewhat more for OTing but it should never be too much at the expense of your main stats; Stamina Armor and Defense ofc ;]


Edit: SP

It's important to understand the distinction--"blocks cancel high-damage hits" is not true. A 100% chance to block cancels high-damage hits. If you never popped Shield Block, you'd roll along blocking 25% of hits, but you'd still get crushed/critted exactly as often as somebody without a shield on.

Over how many swings?

If his attack speed is 0.8 (that's the number I've heard), then it's 1.0 with Thunderfury. You get to have SB for 2 of them out of every 5 seconds. Another 1.5-2 every 5 seconds miss or avoid. But only avoids with SB up actually matter for this purpose (because they leave SB up). So let's say 40% of his attacks have the potential to crit.

At 432, you should be getting critted at 0.32%. So you'll see "real" crit rate of just over 0.1%. At 400 or so swings per attempt, you'll easily go whole attempts with a crit. But 10 attempts? Probably not, unless something else is going on.

With improved Shield Block you can get away with tanking any mob with significantly less than 440 defense. I tanked Gluth for both of our kills so far with 404 defense. My defense is so low because this toon has only been 60 for maybe 9 or 10 weeks, I rerolled from my paladin and am now the guild's 2nd tank. Honestly I run into very few problems being critted while tanking bosse,s even at just barely over 400 defense, although I'm up to 411 defense now (WTB Styleen's :( ).

Improved shield block is the best talent point you'll ever spend, I can't imagine tanking without it now.