I made this simple spreadsheet to calculate effective health. Effective health is the raw, unmitigated physical damage a player can take before they die without heals. This is a valuable thing to know, because it affects your ability to survive "unlucky" strings of blows that weren't avoided, or were crushing.

Tank points does too many things for too many classes, and the end result is a bad indicator for raid tanking.

http://www.freewebs.com/baalzebub/Ef...e%20Health.xls

I want to add in factors for block, block value, parry, dodge, and block rating, but this basic model is really valuable for tanks. I haven't seen one anywhere.

Is there a more sophisticated (but still useful) spreadsheet out there?

Thanks,

Sepulture

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Tankpoints does exactly what you are describing, but includes all available stats in its calculation. How is it a bad indicator?

You don't need a spreadsheet for that - all you gotta do is EHP=HP X (1 + armor * C) where C is a constant based on the enemy level which can be EASILY derived if you play around with the basic "armor damage mitigation" formula. Last time I checked C was something like 1/10500 but I don't remember the exact number, although the error I got (by making a graph of EHP vs HP based on armor values) had a VERY small error. Of course I got the C from the character's sheet which is probably based on lvl70 mobs, so you'll have to find it for a lvl73 too, but it should be extremely simple to calculate once that constant is found.

After all, I saw the complicated mitigation formula and remembered that war3 had a very similar thing - but if you just calculated EHP you would've gotten a very simple formula that was consistent with the armor formula. From there all I needed was a simple graph that showed me WoW works the same. Again I forgot what C was but it was ~10500, and you can easily check what it is if you know the mitigation formula for lvl73. After that making a spreadsheet for EHP is way overdoing it as all you gotta do is plug your armor in a simple linear formula.

I think you mean hp modified by resistance, stance, talents for magic.

A good point, adding in the other factors (beyond block value and some sort of increased crush factor for druids) would give you a markedly inferior excel version of tank points.

To the other poster, tank points is a poor indicator because here is how it calculates melee DR:

totalReduction[MELEE] = 1 - ((mobCritChance * (1 + mobCritBonus) * mobCritDamageMod) + (mobCrushChance * 1.5) + (1 - mobCrushChance - mobCritChance - blockChance * blockedMod - parryChance - dodgeChance - mobMissChance)) * (1 - armorReduction) * meleeTakenMod

There are too many "luck" variables in the equation. The only constants that you can depend on to mitigate raw damage all of the time are armor, health, and possibly block value.

Probably the point is not only tanks tend to die due to no healing during a steak of bad luck, that being able to take that is more important than taking overall less damage on average over time, but also dodging is likely to increase overhealing while having more HP is likely to actually reduce it. My 61 priest could solo heal ony for the simple reason the tank had so many HPs I could use my biggest heal and go out of the 5-sec rule. Try casting a GH on a lvl60 tank when he actually needs one and he'll be dead before you land the heal.

That's precisely it-and I am in full agreement. MTing a boss encounter that is at the limit (or just beyond) the level of your gear has very little to do with avoidance.

It's not about how much damage you can avoid, it's about how much damage you can take without dying.

During these fights, your healer cannot heal reactively to conserve mana; indeed, they must heal predictively, or more accurately, a percentage of them must spam heals and not interrupt them regardless of whether the health bar appears to be full.

This is because the risk of incoming damage during the lag + reaction time delay while interrupting a heal could cause a wipe when the amount of incoming damage is so severe.

Avoidance can even cause wipes during these fights, because healers think that the incoming damage is less severe during a string of partial dodges or parries, and all of a sudden WHAM-WHAM-WHAM dead, the tank doesn't avoid and takes a massive spike.

For the people who don't appreciate the value of the simple spreadsheet, it's not meant as a substitute for tank points. It's meant to compare how much armor is worth how much health at different armor and health levels when itemizing for a boss fight like the one described above. It's a tool for mitigation MT boss fights to swap around and itemize yourself properly. Sure, you could type it out on a calculator, but why not use a spreadsheet that allows you to change the numbers quickly as you swap gear?

Edit: once you have the effective health to safely tank the encounter, then avoidance can become a wonderful thing, because more of your healers can heal reactively-which allows you to up your dps ratio as the boss goes on "farm". So yeah, avoidance isn't a waste, but if you don't have the basic effective health to safely tank the encounter, you shouldn't be stacking avoidance.

Even when you have "enough HP" stamina may still be better - it lets you take an even bigger burst increasing the probability of surviving the encounter and lets your healers to overheal even less. Granted somewhere on the way to 50k HP there's probably a breakpoint where avoidance becomes more useful, but I believe (at least in theory now which is probably true) that you cannot possibly have "enough HP" for the encounter you're learning even if you have every single piece of gear obtained UNTIL that encounter. It just shouldn't be practical.
Just like for many classes one spec scales better with one stat while the other scales better with the other, but the amount of that stat you need to have to actually make or break which spec is better isn't obtaineable in reality.

There's another side of the story-and a rhetorical one at that, but I have a talent for noticing the obvious.

There is a dichotomy within the phrase "effective health" that is not exposed through any of the write ups I've seen-and it has to do with mana efficiency.

It's been missed so far in this thread as well-perhaps because it's so obvious.

80,000 effective health brought to you with 8,000 stamina and no armor is MUCH harder to heal than say...

80,000 effective health brought to you with 2,000 stamina and 35,880 armor.

As you can clearly see, it is 4 times more mana efficient to heal the tank who has armor equipped-that tank will take 25% as much damage. That's why I'd rather have EH from armor rather than stamina for physical fights.

Yeah that is kinda stating the obvious and should've been mentioned, for ease of healing armor is king, but what would be the balance between armor and HP then? Again let's say X armor increases your EHP the same as Y HP. X armor is on one hand just as good as Y HP in terms of "how much can I take before I die?" when you start talking about armor values lower than X you start swimming towards the "avoidance or HP/armor?" boat. So a general guidline for maximizing your ability to take big hits is to look at what gives the most EHP, then if you actually get the choice where it's rediculessly close (which is really the rare scenario with the current itemization), might as well pick the armor for pure physical damage.
Of course when you start mixing damage types armor becomes... not as good ;p but we all know that.

This is further confounded by the fact that armor only mitigates one of many damage types (something you Warriors love to rub in our faces ). Finding a balance between armor and health is not only finding a cushion between high mitigation and the ability to survive busts of damage, it is also about mitigating physical damage vs magic.

Anyway, not a bad idea in general. Personally I prefer a more complex model of survivability to gauge my ability to tank (specifically I use tank points as well as Jesus "hugehoss" Christ's very own model). There is definitely something to be said for simplicity, though.

Most warriors I know just don't give much of a damn about avoidance compared to sta/armor. After all what kills you is lack of stam/armor more than lack of avoidance. A lot more. Avoidance only saves a bit of healer mana which might keep you alive, but not if you die to a spike... Not to mention the TPS lost by chain dodging, which with high avoidance is quite likely to happen, and while threat generation of a good tank should generally not be an issue, high avoidance can make it one.