That's silly and actually shows the flaw of developing items solely on the basis of itemlevel.

For instance:

Take 2 items:

Helm
+45 Stamina
+8 Dodge rating
Yellow Socket
Socket Bonus 4 spirit

Gloves
+15 Stamina
+48 Dodge rating
Yellow Socket
Socket Bonus 5 spirit

Here you have two items, according to your philosphy you should obviously stick the stamina gem into the helm, and a dodge gem into the gloves to boost its itemlevel.

The flaw with that thinking is that if you were to switch those gems around and put the stamina gem in the gloves and the dodge gem in the helm you would have exactly the same stats.

Sure the second method has a lower impact on iLVL. But the overall stats are exactly the same.

What you need to do when you are evaluating gem choices is purely look at the value of 12 sta vs 8 dodge, plus whatever bonuses you get from the socket bonus if you can fulfill it.

I think the real issue is that 8 sta is much closer to being competitive to 8 dodge in terms of utility for the most part. But when they decreased the cost of stamina on objects, they didn't decrease the cost of other defensive stats.

So basically since a) bosses can easily 2-3 shot tanks and b) stamina is severly undervalued relative to other defensive stats, IMO a warrior should put sta gems into every socket until socket bonuses mean that losing 4-5 stamina means gaining 6-8 defense/dodge.

For paladins it's a bit trickier because if we want to tank anything that crushes we need significantly more passive avoidance, but for a warrior, get to 490 defense and then shove in sta gems.

The other thing I don't like about avoidance is: The more avoidance you have, the more frequently the healers will cancel their heals. And then the more frequently they'll cancel when you need it the most. Or just start getting lazy.

A few times I've seen:
Dodge
Dodge
Parry
Parry
Dodge
Miss
Dodge
Parry
-4800
-4400 (207 Blocked)
-4500
-2700
You Die.
+3000
+*5000*

"OMG How did you die so fast!"

... healers were just picking their noses because of a long string of avoidance.

Less avoidance and more HP means that the healers are a) more often healing you, less often forgetting that mobs do damage, b) maybe given another hit worth of time before they realize, wow I should heal.

I guess I put it in a bit of a silly way too. I really don't care about raising the levels of my items, it is more that as you pump a stat to extremes you are getting more out of those gem slots. Just take the basic principle, that it is alot easier to pump stamina on solid stamina items and find dodge/parry on the base stats then it is to find items with extreme stamina and pump dodge/parry via gems. There are no items that have dodge with 70+ base stamina out there, but theres tons of items that have respectable amounts of dodge without terrible stamina that you can turn into amazing items with stamina gems, yet if you used dodge gems you just not have enough health.

Keep in mind, there are no items with stats along the lines of the low stam high dodge example. All tank items have high stamina, thats why I look at stamina gems as giving the most bang for the buck. Blizzard seems to lean towards not piling on tons more stamina then items have now (Tier 5 is a perfect example) instead they add on avoidance and block value. This goes along with what I said about it being much easier to find items with avoidance then it is to find items with incredibly high stamina. You will never find items with significantly more stamina then what we are finding now unless Blizzard radically changes their item design. If the items had much stamina naturally, then avoidance gems would be more of an option.

I think if there were more socket bonuses with a +stamina effect it would help alot too. Right now tanks really have no motivation to lose hundreds of health just to get 4 parry....

Although the Title says [warrior] I didn't think this post was worth its thread and it blongs here more than in the Paladin thread i think.

It puzzle me, even if paladins needs higher avoidance to remove crushes.. perhaps its still worth to put +12 stam gems in every slots reguardless. Is a paladin better geared to tank with 103% miss/parry/dodge/block and 13k hp, or a total of 90-95% avoidance and 15k hp?

I think you're rating Defense above 490 a little low...

Looking at these values (courtesy of RatingBuster)

2.37 Defense Rating = 1 Defense Skill
18.92 Dodge Rating = 1% Dodge
31.54 Parry Rating = 1% Parry

We also know that 1 defense = 0.04% chance to dodge, parry, block and be missed.

Let's start with Defense vs. Dodge:
18.92 / 2.37 = 7.98 Defense / Dodge
7.98 * 0.04 = 0.32% Dodge, Parry, Miss and Block
That would be 0.96% complete avoidance and a bonus 0.32% block compared to 1% dodge.

Let's check Defense vs. Parry
31.54 / 2.37 = 13.31 Defense / Parry
13.13 * 0.04 = 0.53 Dodge, Parry, Miss and Block
That's 1.60% complete avoidance and an extra 0.53% block compared to 1% parry.

Of course fractional ratings aren't possible, but it works for comparison's sake. My math may be wrong here (correct me if I am), but to me, defense seems better than both of them.

That hydross - doomwalker switch example was to emphasize sunder armor from doomwalker.

Hydross is one extreme encounter where armor doesnt matter anything, only resist as mitigation and hp as buffer. Switch it from elemental damage to applying sunders, give a 40k base mortal strike, make it spawn 4 ads every time it changes target; and everyone would love the possibility of avoiding 5 sunders in a row, which would possibly drop the debuff.

Not that i disagree with your stance on stamina but the Temporus fight isn't really the best example to use to prove it.

It may be that in the second group you had a mage/shaman to remove the haste buff that is the main problem of the fight, or that you got lucky on an avoidance streak at 6 stacks or so, whereas in the previous case your avoidance was higher overall but more spread out or even that your healer was more experienced the second time around and kept you topped up through the lower stacks or perhaps increased DPS from the second group.

Theres too many variables to praise the stamina increase as the factor that swung the fight in your favour.

Apologies for the late reply but I wanted to be in a position to somewhat replicate the conditions I tanked Magtheridon with, hit "c" and simply screenshot it all. The only thing I didn't have for Magtheridon that I had for this was Barbed Choker of Discipline (1% dodge) and Grace of Air totem (+77 AGI, unsure of conversion off top of my head).

There are 17 solid stars of elune on my gear.
When bosses can deal 15-19k damage in an instant you want as much stam as you can get.

I'd say the lack of Demo Shout is a big part of the reason you died there.

Play it how you want but the fact is, when you run out of hitpoints you die.

Yeah, I'm a Troll, and every Tauren out there is at 21k when I'm stuck at 20k but I have my combat regeneration!

I've been a def/avoidance guy since back in MC passing on loot that was a "downgrade" because it lacked stacked defense. Makes for lots of fun in LOLitcanthitme, and certainly useful in a lot of specific situations. My general assumption was stam and armor will come with the gear naturally, and +def/dodge/parry was the right place to stack, unless you had an HP threshold for a fight. It worked pretty well for me for a long time...particularly in the days where healer OOM was a common reason for a wipe.

So I followed this thread with interest, because the general consensus from the raiders with significant progression seemed to be the exact opposite of my approach. And it is (was) pretty common to go a long while w/o taking a hit....which seemed to be goodness. But the combat log string of miss/dodge/parry/dodge/miss/dodge/7400/6500/7100/you die...well, that started to show up because they were just staring at the screen waiting for something to happen.

Funny thing is, I never asked my healers what they wanted. And as it turns out, for the same reason reaching the crit-immune cap is good (no spikes) they really don't like the avoidance at all. They would prefer a deep HP pool.

Thanks for the thread, I'm a believer now.

Simple answer?
Take one set of gear for Trash + Fast hitting/low Damage Bosses (Prince, Morose)
Take another for Slow but Hard hitting bosses with High damage Specials (Grul, Mag)

It's harder on the healers if you have high avoidance and they have to keep esc'ing out of their spells, but super healers will do that anyway. If you have subpar healers and aren't in Kara, Stack Sta. I won't be giving up my +34% dodge (with Mongoose up) anytime soon though.

For Prince you can either stack up stam to take more hits so you stay alive when healers have to move around but also take the risk that your healers go oom or you go for max avoidance and take in any parry/dodge item you got so you evade as much as possible but maybe get instagibbed due his thrash procs.

If your healers got endless mana, stacking up hp (if the difference between gears is larger than 500 to 1000hp) is the way to go. Why avoid something when you can easily take it without going oom?
If it's an encounter where you need to avoid something (Sunder Armors or Mortal Wounds e.g.) go for more dodge/parry so the sunder armor stacks or whatever may run out

I just had a thought cross my mind.
Most of the reasoning here goes like: tanks dont die because healers go OOM, they die to spikes.

Having just thought of our last weeks raiding, I'd say my experience is different.
(JFYI we're a midrange progression guild, having killed Magtheridon and Hydross ... so keep in mind I cant speak of any encounters beyond that).

My experience is, I dont die to "regular" spikes either. I die when shit hits the fan and my healers are decimated or distracted (have to heal clickers on Magtheridon, run out of AE effects, reposition on Gruul in high growth states etc).
And in some of these occasions the heal per second throughput of the remaining healers just is not high enough to counter the incoming damage. At least I suppose thats the reason. The last weeks I died to two spikes on magtheridon (one of which was my fault as I was getting crushed two times in a row) ... and this was when I had 19+ K HP pool, which I dont consider underbudget for magtheridon.

Why do i bring this up in this thread? Because I'm not so sure if the reasoning "higher HP pool -> less wipes" is a valid one, considering that HPS throughput is often a bottleneck in such "shit hits the fan" situations. I wouldn't count out avoidance streaks as a valid tool to counter these situations ... activating my pocket watch brings my total avoidance rate to 70+% on Maghteridon (for these 10 seconds) and IMHO this does help in these situations a lot more than having another 1K HP would.

But this is not meant to be an argument for avoidance and against HP stacking. Just personal observations.

So, when you think about it, what did cause your raid-wiping-inducing-tank-deaths (read: the wipes where the tank died first) in the last weeks.
Was it having to few HP?
Or was it chaotic situations where your healers were not coordinated enough?
Or was it even your healers going OOM?