Sadly the reality is that the Gear pool is just WAY too shallow for much variation to occur. Tanks at equal progression will generally not vary any substancial amount to allow you to say one is definitively better then the other.
While gems provide minor customization, what it has really done is allow people to stack more stamina to help minimize the "insta-gib" factor that many bosses have.

Wouldn't it be nice to have several sets to choose from with a variety of neat set bonuses?? Instead we are all stuck with the same 1-2 items that are minor upgrades or simple sidegrades.

I know Blizz probably prefers to keep it this way because it makes balancing easier then if there was 10 times the amount of armour to select from... but a guy can dream right?

It is a bit difficult to calculate, but using both Shadowmoon Insignia and Autoblocker is compromising both your threat and you survivability, since you sacrifice 600 (or 1200) health to gain minimal threat and leave yourself open to both good and bad avoidance streaks.

An autoblocker adds about 61 damage per shield slam, or 269 when activated (taking 20 % mitigation as mob armor). That means you add 22.3 tps by wearing it.
This means that if you miss as little as 3 heroic strikes per minute due to taking in less rage, you have already lost this advantage.
There is not a single fight in the game for which I could justify such a build. Either you take a load of damage so that rage is a non issue, like say Shahraz or Illidan, or you need threat, like for example on Kaz'rogal or Reliquary.
Even worse is when you face a boss that adds elemental damage, which means a burst is reduced to hit/hit/nuke rather than hit/hit/hit, greatly increasing the value of stamina again.

The point of the leatherworking patch on gloves is good of course, but in large part due to the attached level of the enchant. 15 agi vs 8 sta is never a good deal, but if it were done properly it would be 15 agi vs 22-23 sta, and that would take some more consideration.

While I agree with the general premise that stacking HP/Armor is a good way to increase survivability, I do think that you are underestimating the value of passive uncrushability. The worst-case scenario for a tank that is not passively uncrushable involves getting hit at least 3 times in a row (in most cases), whereupon the first two hits eat your shield block charges leaving a very good chance of suffering block/block/crushing combos. By becoming passively uncrushable, you do give up some armor and stamina, but your "worst case scenario" is now about 15% less bad.

This, admittedly, as some adverse effects on rage generation (or so I've been told by my guild's MT), but unless your DPS is threat-capping regularly, I would argue that it's at least worth investigating if you can reasonably put together a decent crush-immune set. If you can't, of course, the above advice re: sta/armor is certainly the way to go. But if you can, it's defenitely worth considering.

I have long thought what provides the highest survivability, avoidance or stamina.

Someone stacking stamina will take more damage, but had a bigger buffer. so stacking enough healing and it should be fine, was for long my conclusion. So to test this I made a simulator. basic setup was that there was a mob hitting, and a tank with dodge, block and parry and miss rating (taken from our MT buffed profile and WWS logs). I then modelled the mob did a 4000-6000 magical damage attack every 30th second (not avoidable). I modelled earthshield ticks, lifebloom ticks, flash spamming and a NS emergency heal available every 20th second. the emergency heal also had a 5% chance not to trigger. The MT was also assumed to use Shieldblock every 5th second.

Basically pretty close to what I consider a real raid MT healing situation.

All numbers where derived from WWS data.

the sucess probability I got from 1000 simulated fights with the numbers I put in, gave me about 95% chance of success. I tested adjusting some numbers and it seem pretty spot on.

Anyways what I found was that increasin dodge rating was more efficent than hp in respect to itembudget (ie 10 dodgerating = 15 stamina).

A closer examination showed many (not all of the death happned like this):

3 hits in under 5 second makes the charges on the SB to go resulting in a crushing blov, coinciding with a concurrent magical attack = death.


lets assume the tank uses SB every 5th second and has 68% avoidance, and the mob has an attackspeed of 1.66 (3 strikes in 5 sec) probability for 2 attacks to remove the SB is then 10.24%.

a tank with 3.5% higher avoidance (100 stamina equivalent) has a probability of 8.12%.

the tank with 68% avoidance has thus 25% more crushing blows!

if we assume crushing blows + special attack is the major threat to tank death (rather than lots of damage spread out over time, but that requires more healing rather than a better geared tank). we will get in to a lot more (25% more) dangerous situations, each situation is less dangerous though. according to my simulations it was better to have less of those dangerous situations than having more and a better chance of survivng them.

I absolutely don't want to say this is conclusive in any way, I did this at 3 o click in the morning very tired, but I do think avoidance and SB loss should be considered more. An perhaps stacking stamina is slightly too empazised.

good night