◊ Drauk

Because dodge is cheaper rating, almost twice as cheap. That is another odd thing in blizzard item formula, presumably due to a fact that parry resets swing timer.

Fun is for casuals

 

Kimon

Parried attack gives you full rage, dodged gives you nothing, thats why so much difference in item formula. Am i right in it?

 

Torque

As far as I know parry does not give full rage, it make your next attack to happen faster (40% ?). Plus I usually give up on the parry socket bonus because it is usually a very small bit of parry, like +3 parry and thats +/- 0.1% parry overall. Dodge on the other hand is much cheaper, and stacking a few socket bonus does make a difference.

(Sorry for the poor english, not my native language.)

 

Emeraude

Apparently if you take a swing at somebody and they parry you get rage for it. If that's true, I don't know, for all the combat mechanics I do research this one is dead last priority and not something I pay attention to. >_>

As far as I know from person experience, you doing parry/dodge/miss defensively don't give you rage. Block does talented, and a long time ago Blizzard patched it in so we and I quote the patch notes: "- Fixed a bug where rage was not being generated when normal melee attacks were parried, dodged, and blocked."

What this means, I don't know, I don't care, I've long given up trying to figure out what in god's name Blizzard's intention for Warrior rage is.

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norg

Not a whole lot wrong with your English there. As long as you don't lapse into the laziness of using "u" instead of "you" and similar traits, you'll be just fine.

 

◊ Anias

Here we go again.

In terms of effective life, solid star of elune provides more gains at any reachable level of avoidance/ac than the avoidance gems. Thus for MT Progression content, solid star of elune wins. For off tanks, who generally are assigned to much less damaging mobs, and have far less responsibility for the raid's wiping, avoidance may be valuable. In particular, parry is very good for a tank that will be tanking for a period of the fight and then going to beat on the boss (as parrying a cleave will give them a quasi-haste boost by resetting their weapon timer when they are dpsing)

If you have a healing team assigned to you, your job is not "minimize damage I take" your job is "maximize the healer's response windows" so that they can keep you alive. Avoidance gems do not stack up favorably to solid star of elune (because blizzard was stupid and changed the cost of stamina in their itemization formula, without changing the effective life benefits)

It's really cut and dry, and I've gone over the math in other threads. If you have a specific question I can re-illustrate it, but I honestly don't think we have more room for discussion about this.

12 stamina is simply more valuable than 8 dodge rating.

 

Dots

What is this anticrush? Unless you can cover the whole 15% crushing chance without using cooldowns, it is pretty meaningless. The chance of a crush is still there, and with your lower max HP, it will be a lot more dangerous. Until we reach that point (if ever), just ignore things like block rating, get more HP instead and rely on Shield Block.

As for sockets, I just compare the total stats with just 12 sta gems or socket bonus. Dropping 6 sta for 8 defense on that helm might be worth it. Wrynn Dynasty legs have the same socket bonus, but different socket colors make it a lot worse. Maybe it's worth it with the epic dodge/sta gem.

Edit: And no, parry isn't going to be as good as dodge for anyone that tanks for a considerable amount of time, at least not with current encounter design. If you parry a cleave, you are standing in the wrong place.
You get some rage when a mob parries your attack, but you dont get any rage when YOU parry, except for the tiny attack speed boost.

 

Plea

Actually, its funny to see that, after a full spin; we're exactly at where we started 2 years ago : "Hp is the king"

It's been discussed since EQ days. Tanks always preferred defensive stance over evasive, we dont want them to be gibbed in 2 unlucky hits; and thus it was pretty straightforward to go for hp and armor. So came the famous thread on conquest forums.

That thread was meant to say stamina diminishes severely by increasing value while armor effect does not. We saw that, for the first time, with increasing armor, 20% of your hp always costs the same mana to heal; also increases your lifetime by the same amount. It was there to discuss armor vs hp, and general opinion was to stack hp to some amount; and going all out for armor. Then someone came with the idea that avoidance may come with these 2 stats too. Everyone who tanked in EQ is against that; 50 dodges and 2 big hits, you would die. But they can be stacked together with armor in wow; actually they are meant to be.

On the healing cost point of view; HP is said to be diminishing by value, armor is somewhat constant, and avoidance is giving an exponential bonus. 10% dodge at 0 avoidance is 10% reduction, its 20% at 50% avoidance. It's more powerful than the other 2, yet unreliable in comparison. Stamina has become famous once again with the changes in stat costs; a bit more with Gruul the 'we heal anyway'; and tanking Hyross at 250% damage taken seems to have solidified that idea.

Up to now, we always believed in mitigation because it was blocking burst, and healers wanted to keep their mana safe. Lately it turned out to be HP, cause we learnt to play and started using every consumable possible, mana isnt an issue any more; if we were using a shadowpot and a firepot before engaging gehennas, and continue during the combat, maybe we wouldnt be discussing here. Not to derail into another big complaint about the game, but it looks like consumables did more than tripling dreamfoil prices.

But; if Hydross was at Black temple entrance, Doomwalker was inside an instance, and tuned in difficulty accordingly; would we still be saying that Hp is the king?

 

◊ Praetorian

That's a close call. You're still giving up 6stam to get, for example, 8 defense rating. I'd say 60hp is worth more than 8def rating, so yes, I'd suggest using three SSoEs there. Obviously, just as with the theory of stacking Runed Living Rubies in nuker gear, if a socket bonus is good enough and is attainable, then sure, socket the item to get it (e.g., if there were a blue/blue/yellow item with a +6stam socket bonus, then obviously you put an Enduring Talasite in the yellow socket).

But I do think that the relative value of basically everything does in fact drop off a cliff relative to stamina.

My personal hierarchy would be:
(Defense until 490) > HP > Armor > Block Value > Dodge > Parry > (Defense above 490) > Block Rating

Edit:

Yes, I think we would. On a potted attempt I cannot recall the last boss where tanks died because we ran out of mana. (On dry runs, sure, it happens -- healers aren't potted and aren't drinking mana pots proactively the way they would on a "real" attempt.) Until that happens, hp will remain king. Even if a boss can't two-shot you, you've never seen a tank die where afterwards when you examine why, the answer is, "Huh, I only got one heal for 5 seconds there..." because two of the shamans were redropping totems, anther two healers were moving out of some AoE damage at the same time, and the fifth was asleep on the job. More HP means more of a buffer before such things can wipe your raid.

 

suicuique

You obviously see that different. But for me more avoidance means the charges by activating shield block last longer. Hence the chance getting crushed by a fast hitting/thrashing mob getting lower.
And it does help on those occasions you cannot refresh shield block immediately (because of an emergancy issue like loosing aggro for a moment, of having to pull a mob to a different place because of environmental/AE effects etc)
You may rely solely on shieldblock +75% blocking chance to remove crushings ... I do not.

And not to nitpick, but your argument ("unless you can eliminate the chance at all, every % upgrade is meaningless") is seriously flawed.
We all play the game of chance in WoW ... all the time. And no STA/AC Stacking will help you get out of this. So why the denial to play the avoidance game (when it is appropriate .. I'm no avoidance freak at all).

 

• Morsexy

I just think that actually seeing a time and place when the 18 stamina advantage I detailed earlier in the thread will clearly be on display is as likely as clearly seeing your small % more avoidance also clearly on display.

I wish we would put to rest the broad sweeping "X tank has 15000 life and 40% avoid and Y tank has 36000 and 15% avoid" since they are just silly. The difference in tanks will invariably come down to Gem selection, 1-3 gear choices ( trinket preferences, avoidance ring vs stam\armor ring ). Telling us that you would rather heal the 36000 hps tank is obvious, and we would all like to be that tank. No one has proven to me beyond a doubt that 490 is still the crit cap since I am being crit more than ever existing in a plain far beyond the crit cap than I ever did in old WoW.

I am fully behind stacking +12 stam to a certain level, out of my 10 gem slots, 7 are +12 Stam. I just dont think its as simple as "Horde blue gems". Sorry for the bad joke I couldnt resist.

 

Emeraude

Well you also have to look at the gear, if you look at the gear available to you from Tier 4/Karazhan, while you're gearing tanks and tanks coming up, you have to realise that they're trying ot catch up to that "soft spot" for dealing with mob damage, is Nightbane what you would call normal raid boss damage? Is Prince phase 2 normal?

It's no different from when you went into say Molten Core for the first time in full freakin valor and wondered why it was so hard and why 3-4 hits from these epic bosses own you.

At one point, the gear is gonna start cutting off, and you're gonna maybe see the stamina not being so important and the avoidance looking a bit more attractive.

You talk about a 36000 hp tank, but we know that doesn't really exist, what you'll end up looking at is maybe a 1000hp difference, maybe even 2000, I don't know I'm not in the top competing guild anymore, but I can tell you this.

When I was in MC, I picked up Might, when I went to BWL, and got 8/8 Wrath, I remember gaining maybe 1000 hp give or take, upgrading all my armor, weapons, shields, etc.

When I went into AQ40, the "side-garde" instance, I found that in many cases the armor wasn't a stamina upgrade, and I could upgrade my avoidance to some pretty insane levels in comparison to our MT I had 8 more dodge while he had 500 more hp. I was the easier tank to keep up in Naxxramas for the longest time, because I kid you not when I say this my avoidance rating full buffed(And with a 25 agi potion, pew pew) was at or above 55-60%. My guild would groan when I wasn't there on Patchwerk, "Why are we losing?" "It has something to do with Emmy not here to avoid 3/5 of Patchwerk's attacks." "Why does our MT keep getting owned by Faerlina?" "Well gee, it's prob because he can't avoid her 6000 damage attacks, while Emmy avoids them" "Maex..." "Shut up, where's avoidance girl?" etc etc.

I have hope for the future of the avoidance tank(Druids may be the future!), and I wish horrible death upon stamina stacking. I am bias, rawr!

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Fellwraith

I'd basically agree with that, but I do worry about every incoming attack eating up all my shieldblock charges for fast attacking bosses. Even with a big hp buffer (13k unbuffed), I can still drop pretty fast with a crushing blow. The prince can be a particularly nasty example in stage 2. At some point you want a degree of avoidance to prevent the compound probability of 1/3 attacks in a 5 second window coming in without shieldblock up.

For what it's worth, you get a lot more mileage out of +def rating vs +parry rating from a pure avoidance perspective (0.05% per point vs 0.03% per point). Dodge rating is *slightly* better returns than +def rating (0.053% vs 0.05%).

I'd put it at something closer to:
(Defense until 490) > HP > Armor > Dodge > (Defense above 490) > Block Value > Parry > Block Rating

 

Insect

I agree with this but in my opinion adequate avoidance is supplied in the karazhan gear and there is no need to add anymore in sockets. Gauntlets of the Iron Maiden, Boots of Elusion ect, they're covered is avoidance. The tier sets are even more decked in avoidance. Personally I throw +12 sta in all my gear and let the gear itself give me the avoidance I need, and it does. Even with our terrible healers we usually 1or2-shot Gruul(when we don't it's because of shatter).

 

◊ Lord BEEF

Unless Blizzard starts making bosses that don't have a chance of killing your tank from full to zero in two seconds, stamina will remain king.

Check out my friend's bitchin' Lord of the Rings Art

 

◊ Praetorian

Really, the only exception to this rule has been Patchwerk pre-TBC. Surviving two consecutive HS with no heals was pretty much unattainable unless you had Imp LoH and such up for cap mitigation, so what killed tanks was two HS on the same tank without heals landing. If all three of your tanks failed their avoidance checks in a row, you faced your worst-case scenario, where you really hope that all your healers didn't just cancel a heal right before the HS. In that setting, avoidance did a great job, spread over multiple tanks, of minimizing the frequency of that occurrence.

If the gear had existed, though, to enable tanks to get 15k hp, then that would've been better than avoidance, since it would mean that even your worst-case scenario doesn't kill your tanks.

If you have a "you lose" scenario that hp simply cannot overcome, then you want avoidance to minimize its likelihood. But if you can eliminate the "you lose" entirely, that's better than relying on chance.

 

Dots

I totally agree that avoidance helps keeping Shield Block up. You were referring to block rating as 'anticrush' though, which does not help this at all unless you can cover some of the 15% crush chance with miss/dodge/parry/block. The SB charge will still get used up.

Praetorian covered this quite well in the above post.

 

suicuique

It does help on the occasions when refreshing shield block is not fast enough.
But this is a very marginal benefit and you are right, that it does generally not increase shield block effectiveness. I stand corrected.

 

Juno

I love getting avoidance. I'm a bit of an avoidance freak cause it's more fun to get upgrades for it than stamina stacking. I do however try to balance it a bit, because I know the insane amounts of damage a boss can do when lucky. I believe you can both balance it in terms of extending longevity(avoidance) and reducing the chance of being unlucky(hp/armor).
Right now I'm at 24.31% dodge, 17.68% parry, -6.76% hit, so that's a total of 48.75% avoidance unbuffed. I'm also sitting at 12634hp and 13564 armor. I got star of Elune on everything except my belt, (8 dodge & 4def 6sta), which I'll be changing in a bit, to 2x12sta to gain 180hp. My block value is something like 330 and 23.86% block for what it's worth.
I really thought, with increased hp values, that TBC wouldn't still have stamina as king, but after the first raid it was quite evident it'd still be the case.

What's more funny is the tanks I see with 4agi 6sta or 4str 6sta, completely worthless.

Edit: What pisses me off most is that while Blizz made stamina king once again, they put increased avoidance on T4 leggings and a lot less stamina than Wrynn Leggings. It's not an upgrade -.- But god I hate Lawbringer graphics.

 

Qrmu

Personally I would agree with (Defense until 490) > HP > Armor > Dodge > (Defense above 490). Block value, parry and block rating are below, but I can't put them in any particular order.

Normally I play fury dps offtank warrior, but this reset I was required to maintank a karazhan run. So I really had no choice but to respec prot and get out my half decent avoidance tanking gear.

Decent tanking gear since my miss+dodge+parry avoidance is slightly over 50%, buffed. But my unbuffed hp isn't even 12k. So we run through karazhan and we wipe to Nightbane. Why? Because healers were doing some lazy healing since Nightbane isn't hitting me and suddenly I get smoldering breath dot, cleave and crush at the same time. Pretty unlucky, but it was 12k damage in a second which was too much of a burst compared to my hit points. If I had 12 stamina gems in my gear instead of letting our real protection tanks have them, I wouldn't have died there.

On the other hand, I didn't see prince crush me once during killing him. I just kept evading his hits to keep shield block on all the time. I even had a lucky streak and had both shield block charges up when I refreshed shield block during the fight.

So like everyone else says: avoidance is nice, but you need the unlucky buffer before going for avoidance. :P

 

suicuique

If I'm not mistaken, mobs start with a regular 5% miss chance so your real avoidance rate should be north of 50%.

 

Louviel

It's my belief that you should always go for enough HP/AC so that you don't get one shotted like that.
After that, go for avoidance.
The problem is that when you calculate what the potential burst damage is for each boss.. You find that they can reach some VERY high bust damage potential, that makes Stam the safe bet in almost all cases.

 

Darkmgl

Stamina definitely seems to be the king of the gem slots. Many people say they like stamina because it increases survivability, I take the more mathmatical approach. We all know that Blizzard's item formula makes stats become more expensive on a curve as you increase the one stat, this is shown by an item with 2 stats that has a higher combined value of those two stats then an equal ilvl item with just one stat. This means that cranking on that +36 extra stamina onto items with high stamina is putting their effective ilvl through the roofs.

This methodology leads me to aim for items that have Stamina > Armor > Dodge/Parry > Block Value (I might switch Block Value and Dodge/Parry for a healthy boost to threat). Putting 8 dodge into an item with 0 dodge is barely denting it's itemlevel, you are wasting that gem slot. Putting 8 dodge into items with decent stamina and good dodge is going to leave your max health way too low.

It is alot easier to find an item that has mid 40s stamina, 24 dodge, and 3 socketed stamina gems then it is to find an item that has 70-80ish stamina and 0 dodge with 3 socketed dodge gems. You get the same final stats, but whens the last time you saw an item with that much base stamina? Sure you could socket your dodge into items and leave them at mid 40s stamina but when the dice aren't in your favor and you get two shotted by Magtheridon or a high growth Gruul, you are going to be pissed.

13,000 health is my safety number and I hate even being 300 points below it cause of some item changes, I wanna push back up towards 13,500 health as soon as possible. I would easily take 13,500 health with 22% dodge over the potential 12,500 health with around 26% dodge....

I've always wondered if someone out there has some sort of script or mod that allows them to calculate what something's ilvl would be with gems inserted, just to compare.

 

Lodi

I see no value, aside from curiosity, in looking at item+sockets in terms of the ilvl it would be were the gems' stats included in a socketless item. The choice between gem set A vs B has nothing to do with the stats on that individual item; only your *total* gear matters. Just compare directly the utility of your gear with gem set A vs B, ignoring ilvl, and you've made the right choice. You would logically want to view enchants the same way, naturally.

Unrelated: if you have another player ring enchant a boe ring, is it still boe? Can players without enchanting benefit from a ring enchant (say, they dropped enchanting)?

 

Louviel

Enchanting a ring causes it to become soulbound.