I think mana is perhaps more of an issue than people are giving it credit for. What happens in effect is that healers downrank their heals to save mana. When tanks die it is quite often a combination of a spike plus the healers not using their best HPS heals.

With an avoidance tank healers that cancel their heals would save mana and could perhaps safely uprank. For example if myself, a fol-spammer and a tree are healing a tank I will heal by casting GHeal rank 2 and cancelling near the end of the cast unless the heal is needed. If the tank were taking sufficiently reduced damage so that the FoL and Lifeblooms were enough for most of the fight I could have a max rank GHeal in the pipe instead.

Just because healers still have mana when tanks die does not mean we don't have any mana considerations.


One other point I'd like to make regarding luck. It seems quite often to be assumed in these discussions that the less variance the better. That seems a logical fallacy to me. A tank who will survive a particular progress boss one go in 5 but will get owned the other 4 times is MUCH more useful than a tank who narrowly fail to survive 5 times in 5. I'm not necessarily saying that avoidance will make a tank occasionally survive fights that a stam tank would die on but simply that arguments that it is better if your tank takes predictable damage simply because predictability is desireable are false logic. I'm sure any raid guild will take a new boss kill where they simply got lucky.

Brista your conclusion is partly right but this has been covered before. If you can't survive by stamina and mitigation alone, avoidance suddenly plays a huge role in survival.
The assumption that predictable damage is better is not wrong, it's just incomplete. You have to take into account that you can't pass the ceiling you are able to tank. But to find that out on a given encounter you might want to start out testing wether your "guaranteed" tanking potential is high enough and if it is not it will be more promising to go for a more avoidance heavy approach and "hope for the best".

I think warriors could benefit a lot from a tanking thread where the OP summarizes it all as even simple things like how avoidance scales better when tanking multiple mobs aren't common knowledge. I know many tanks who just keep one set of physicaly tanking gear and don't even think about adapting their tanking gear to the encounter (baring resistance fights).

By the way: Making a plain wrong assumption is in itself not a logical fallancy.

No I think the fact that he has experienced the fights as a main tank through all current content shows validity to his argument. It has nothing to do with status, it has to do with experience. Equating the two is pretty silly. I really have no idea why you are making responses with situations or setups that don't exist in this game, or making stupid historical parallels that bring nothing to this discussion. I never said we had to tank a boss that did 50k in one hit. There doesn't exist such a boss (pre enrage anyway) and there is no point even discussing it. However in the real WoW world, mana is a constrain, heal cancelling is a big thing that allows healers to stretch their mana out, and a blocked hit, parry enhanced crush and a special are something that tend to happen quite a lot.

Now sure if one could get a set of gear that one could never be 3 shot, than yeah it might work to use it, although due to the extremely low avoidance you'd have to bring along more healers, which would further stress their mana because less dps means the fight goes longer. But honestly there is not that much a tradeoff to be made. Going from pure high end avoidance gear with avoidance gemming to the pure high end sta gear with sta gemming would be like 3-4k health. There is no 30k health, 0 avoidance gear out there. So what it comes down to the end after making the sensible decisions of going with 15 sta over 10 dodge is whether to go for a few hundred more health or signifigant amounts of avoidance by doing things like using the BT trinket, KoT head enchant, agi to gloves, etc.

Do you mean a fight where healers simply spam max rank heals because the fight is so short?

In my limited experience I haven't come across a fight I can heal without either downranking or else cancelling heals.

Your mind got stuck 2 years ago...

You obviously enjoy reading your own writings, but seriously wake up, we're in fall 2007 and times have changed.

This is another way HP add to your mana efficiency:
Say the biggest burst possible would be 10k damage. That means the tank need to be kept above 10k HP at all times. Now if your tank had 11,000 HP, every time he'd drop down to 10,000 you'd have to drop a 1k heal, which would obviously mean you'd overheal (and to take out hots for the equasion, let's say he was under 10k HP and the HoTs healed/will heal him back to 10k so you still need to overheal that 1k). Now if the tank had 13k HP you wouldn't have to heal when he dropped to 12k but rather 10k, which would let you overheal a lot less as needing to heal 3k results in significantly less overhealing.

Just another example of the many gains you have as a healer due to tank having higher stamina.

I'm getting rather bored with all the stamina vs. mitigation discussions, simply because, there is no right answers. There's 3 sorts of encounters basicly. There's encounters that require a large HP-pool (let's say 50% of the encounters), there's ones that require avoidance gear (<10% of the encounters, if not phases) and the remaining encounters are discussable of what set is preferred above the other.

Now an interesting discussion would be about those remaining 40%, to see on which boss stacking up a certain amount of mitigation doesn't get your rage-starved but also doesn't get you too low HP so you can get burst down. The problem you see now is people either saying "in x fight you x amount of HP or you get oneshotted" or otherwise "more avoidance equals more mana for healers!". Obviously both parties are right, but that's because then you take tanking, or itemization for that matter, in a too broad way.

The relation from tanking gear to mana efficiency (or even more problematic "difficulty of healing") being an issue of its own is actually the main reason why I wanted to keep it out of the tanking discussion in the first place and just assumed a world of unlimited mana for simplification. As one starts to try and work this into the equation he will have to deal with the skills, talents and gear of 4 additional classes on top of all the other issues.
We all know in the end this can't be completely ignored, but it might be better to deal with it seperately for reasons of expedience.

If we take an approach from a pure "safe survival" direction we can make a rule along the lines of "When tanking a single Bossmob stack HP and mitigation unless you are *still* being instagibbed by burst damage even with an appropriate gear level. If you are still being bursted down at that point stack avoidance instead, but keep a certain baseline of stamina and mitigation in order to not get killed by normal (=nonburst) damage".
I know this isn't perfect and does not sound very practical, but something like this is can be quite helpful for a tank wanting to start out raiding as it helps him understand what kind of gear he needs in a certain kind of situation.
Now if we are analyzing the healing efficiency in a similar way we can make this rule more precise, or just add another rule, but it might be too early to add something along the lines of "avoidance helps the MT healers mana efficiency by X more than Mitigation and/or Stamina does" as the Healing part isn't uniform either. Next, one can try to include resistances and so forth.

In the end this becomes rather complicated, but it should still be helpful, as it helps one to make a rational decision on what gear is best for a certain encounter.

I haven't seen good enough info on tanking that would actually let one decide the perfect gear for a given encounter anywhere, yet, so I think there is still work to do getting to that point. As it stands right now it appears to require a lot of wild assumptions to make a graph showing the sweet spot for a given encounter. Maybe the effort is futile as there is too much to take into account whereas you can easily tell the new enhancement shaman to "use slow weapons with windfury enchants in both hands and base your gear on AEP values" and he is pretty close to being perfectly equipped for any given encounter. Of course this isn't entirely true, but I think it shows how it is quite different for warriors.

Now of course we could take a different approach and only look at "what has worked in practice from experience" but this also means, consequentially, to throw all the useful spreadsheets and theorycraft and their reasoning assembled in this forum out of the window and instead basing our actions on hearsay or case-by-case testing, which isn't necessarily worse in every case and seems to have worked fine so far when it comes to tanking, but it appears less rational and forces one to ask around or do testing for himself, whenever something new comes up. Plus there is always the small chance that the experienced one who is asked for the info is wrong.

I'm sorry that some people seem to be offended by me, having only experienced raiding in Karazhan in BC, participating so much in this discussion, but during my active raiding days I always wanted to be able to make more rational decisions when it comes to tanking gear and I'm still playing WoW from time to time over at my friends' (who used to raid with me and is actively playing warrior), so I'm still interested in this topic.

The thing is in the current state of the game if you stack stam, while still choosing the most efficiently itemized pieces (ie: gems, patches encahnts ect) you can only barely get above the burst cap.

for example because i am a tauren and value stam I can stack to the point where i can absorb a Kael pyro with only a power word shield. this makes cleaning up caperinian infinitely easier in p4. This type of luxury come sin hand y on a few bursty fights. Kazrogal's 10k cleave + a crush and a parry flurry still doesn't kill me.

This isn't to say that avoidance isn't key just that you will inevitably get avoidance. But when you are making your deiscretionary gearing choices (gems ect) you shoudl choose stam to give your healers the longest reaction time since its not possible to get much past the highest bursts you will encounter.

And this is for the most part the way I look at it. Avoidance is great for avoiding a hit or 2 in a burst chain, however if the dice roll against you, and eventually they will however rare that spells death for a tank. However having stamina means you will be able to take the burst and not die, yes requires slightly more healing but at least the raid didn't wipe because the dice rolled wrong.

Given that you generally don't have your choice of every possible tank item in a slot, and that there are a pretty limited number of options for each slot at any point in progression, most tanks at any point use the same items.

The usual debate comes down to gems and enchants.

A couple of specific questions I'd like to ask are:

1) Do you ever socket any item for pure avoidance (+parry or +dodge) and if so what specific items did you do so on?

2) Do you ever socket for pure +hit and what items did you do so on?