Sepulture

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

 

Base

You are confusing me a bit. On the one hand you say you want to know survivability with an unlucky string where you dont avoid, and next you plan to add avoidance like parry/dodge.

If you want to know the worst case scenario you can survive its quite simple imo. If you are looking at physical attacks its HP modified by armor and stance, if you are looking at magic its HP modified by stance and talents.

If you start adding all the other stuff, then I dont see what you are doing differently than tankpoints.

The way I do it is simply remember the hardest normal hit + special I get from a boss ever, and compare those to my HP. Worst case scenario easily follows out of those numbers.

 

Edghar

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?

 

galzohar

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.

 

Sepulture

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.

 

Kier

I believe the intelligent use of Tank Points (or similar) provides the ideal measuring stick of who is better for raid tanking. While it is clear that a tank who cannot survive a bad string of hits is not ideal, a good tank brings both high avoidance as well as high health and/or armor. Every raid encounter is going to require you not only to have the health and mitigation to survive the bad string, but the overall stats to survive the encounter. That means your healers have to be able to keep you up, too.

Your intentions seem well enough placed but, as has been said, I'm not sure you need a spreadsheet to do the single multiplication for you.

 

galzohar

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.

 

Sepulture

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.

 

galzohar

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.

 

Kier

What you fail to account for in the "stack stam, avoid avoidance" theory is the fact that healer mana is finite. Yes, strings of avoidance lead to overheal. Yes, strings of avoidance can catch healers napping and get you killed. But if your solution is to never avoid anything (hyperbole aside) so that there is no overheal then you won't be getting your boss past 90%.

Healers in end game don't heal reactively; they are constantly casting and canceling their spells. So what's the issue? If they are having trouble canceling then they can just let the cast go through each time. They're no worse off than if you didn't avoid the attack (although it will most likely take more than one healer to top you off) and overhealing has no downside from that perspective.

I know right now a lot of Warriors are on the stack stamina bandwagon. Personally I try to take more of a middle ground - I run just over 20k hp with raid buffs and have been stacking on the armor/avoidance since. About 30 seconds on any WoW forum will show you that a lot of people have a lot of different approaches to itemization for tanking.

I admit this thread has already become more interesting than I imagined

 

Sepulture

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.

 

galzohar

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.

 

Kier

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.

 

Crowl

The stam issue with warriors is more to do with gems than anything else, solid stars are usually a bigger overall boost than avoidance gems, I would bet that if there were other options that offered as much of a boost (larger amounts of avoidance or armour or weapon skill would seem obvious ones) then you would see more people using them.

You mention that you have reached a hp total that you are happy with and are then boosting armour and avoidance, a warrior that is stacking stam/armour is probably doing exactly the same thing, its just that it is their avoidance level that they are happy with. You both have similar aims you are just approaching them from different starting points.

 

galzohar

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.

 

CasT

To me these forums are all about optimizing and I think the OP is trying to get a way to do so. Not stacking 100% percent this or that. But rather finding the optimal solution of what to stack. Balance the three of TPS (keeping the rogues happy), Stamina/ block (keeping the spikes away) or Avoidance (aka. mana conservation.)

One fight ~300 inc hits, average hit of 2500 one extra percent avoidance is equal of 300*2500*0,01 is 7500 nontaken damage or equal to ~1 500 mana around 10% of a mana pool. To me there is definatly room for other theories than it's only stamina/ armor that keeps you alive.

Do not matter how much you play, you will never get the carrot.

 

Emily

Also, bear in mind that the majority of time (and the most critical period) spent on a fight is going to be spent "learning", ie. wiping at 80%, 60%, etc etc. For these situations, healer mana is much less important than simply staying alive for as long as possible (ie, not getting blasted down by burst damage).

The longer you stay alive for, the more time your raiders have to get used to the rhythm of the fight, movement, yadda yadda. Stacking HP allows you a larger "oops" buffer, and until your healers run oom it's the setup that will let you get more time on the boss and less time corpserunning when you are learning the fight. If your raid is wiping at 50%, it shouldn't be because your healers are running OOM due to your tank's low avoidance.

The only time that you should be favouring Avoidance over Stamina is when you are dying more often to healers are running oom, than to being bursted down. And even then, there are probably other aspects you can improve on to reach the same effect, such as figuring ways to increase raid dps, thus shortening the fight.

Aside from pure mathematics, there is the human factor that steady damage with a high stamina buffer is generally easier to heal than less frequent damage with low stamina, simply due to the fact that your healers WILL slack off if you avoid 6 hits in a row, then be slow to heal you when you get smashed down on the 7th and 8th hits.

 

galzohar

It's not just the slacking factor, it's also the fact that when your heals can heal for several thousands, you need to let the tank drop a certain amount for your heal to not overheal. When he doesn't have stamina, you have to overheal or downrank or let the tank go even more dangerously low, all of which mean healing is harder even though at the end you may be taking less damage total.

 

Balkoth

You also need to factor in debuffs.

If you have a warlock specced with Shadow's Embrace, that's essentially an extra 5% max hit points versus pure physical damage.

You could also try to factor in something like Demoralizing Shout. Since if it's up the tank will be able to take an extra hit, perhaps, or such.

However, debuffs like Scorpid Sting and Thunder Clap would not be counted.

 

Sepulture

Here is the cadillac version of my festiva:

Link from WoW Warrior Community-I don't have permission to link directly:
WoW Forums -> Effective Health & Shield Slam Calculator

This is an online effective health calculator with configurable mob levels and block value by Ciderhelm. It appears that the calculator must assume a static mob damage and attack speed in order to incorporate shield block value, but it's still very cool.

They could add in variables for mob attack speed and average damage, but that would ruin the K.I.S.S. value of the tool. I'm going to bookmark this one.

It would be grand if someone could discern the mechanics of -AP debuffs, and then estimate the Attack Power, attack speed, and damage of the most common bosses.

From there, it would be simple to create a true effective health calculator, specific to a boss. That would be quite a bit of work, and no one has convincingly deciphered the -AP mechanic that I have seen.

 

Mekkapiano

In particular, I don't think I've seen any work done to determine the boss AP-to-DPS conversion ratio. It's 14 for players, but it seems that it's not the same for mobs. For example, there always used to be a lot of talk about how Curse of Recklessness on Broodlord Lashlayer made his instants deal ludicrous damage, but I've never seen a statistical analysis that would say what the exact effect was.

It would be interesting if anyone has some long parses of various -AP and even +AP debuffs on bosses to see what the actual conversion is. It would make the debate about CoW and CoR on bosses a bit more exact, for starters.