Also, though he had two druid healers on him, there are no Swiftmends to be seen. Those two hits that ate his SB charges should've shaked his healers awake, as it was a burst for over 60% of his hit points (13.3k or so), yet, you can't see anything even remotely reactive in there.

Those two hits dented him for over 60% (actually, closer to 65%), and then the next hit (12k crush) is also another ~60% blow, it should've raised all sorts of flags to the healers.

Let's assume you had 20.6k when the first two hits landed (both blocked)

Current HP: 7231 / 20600 (-13369 burst)
Heals prior to the next hit: 6454
Current HP: 13687
Current HP: 1506 / 20600 (-12181 crush)
Heals prior to deathblow: 7606
Current HP: 9112 / 20600
Deathblow: -311 / 20600 (-9423 crush)

Time elapsed between the bolded hits: Over 1.5 seconds (more than a GCD)

You see, from going over the WWS log, the fact you survived the first crushing tells me, or at least gives me the impression that you were pretty close to topped off when the first 2 hits (that ate your SB charges) landed. You were at least 93% hp when it happened. Had you been completelly topped off, you died because of 311 damage, had you been at 93%, You would have died because of ~1750 damage, both scenarios could have been prevented with a single Swiftmend, sure, your healers can't see into the future, so they could've been cautious and not used it after the initial burst because they didnt want to kill 2 HOTs on you, but after the 12k crush, their imediate reaction should've been a NS+HT or a Swiftmend, also, there was enough time for you to Last Stand, but I won't go in there because honestly I haven't checked to see what was on a cooldown and what wasn't, either way, Swiftmending would have saved you, and there was a window of time at the last round (by round, I mean, a time frame where you can make a meaningful action) for they to do so, but they didn't.

Healing fault, in my opinion, and only serves to show me that in a scenario where you had sacrificed HP/AC for more avoidance, and had avoidance failed you, you wouldn't even have given your healers the chance to Swiftmend, you would have been a goner at the 12k crush.

To all those having doubts about that example from Fellwraith:
He *maybe* could have survived by using the right "oh shit" buttons, which warriors tend to have (the lack of shield wall, consumeables and last stand for ferals is a pretty big disadvantage when shit hits the fan), or by his healers doing the perfect NS or whatever. But I still find that example "good enough" to draw conclusions.

You want to minimize situations where potentially lethal burst damage occurs (as you only have so many emergency buttons) and just as avoidance delays your shield block charges from being eaten it will lower the chance of situations occuring where you get hit 4 times within 2 seconds, assuming this will be lethal in full HP/Mitigation gear (thanks to parry haste).

As long as there is *lethal* burst damage contained in the encounter parry and dodge have a meaningful role in survival beyond exponential gains close to 100% and you have to put a *somewhat* more balanced weighting between stats for maxing out survivability. Thus, there is a practically relevant breaking point, which suggests to not sacrifice large amounts of avoidance for small amounts of stamina/mitigation.

This still won't tell you wether tank x should be using khorium destroyer or rifle of the stoic guardian on encounter y, though and while I'm sure many good tanks will make the right decision parsing their combat logs, others won't.
As lord beef asked for a protection warrior threat I'm not quite sure if something along the lines of "a good tank knows what to wear in each situation" would be enough to not have more threads like this pop up every once in a while.
I wouldn't call this art, though. From my view, at least, art is not rule based (institutional) but something you do "naturally". However, there are quite a few rules that a tank uses to draw equipment conclusions (in the sense of an "educated guess"), they just haven't been listed in a comprehensive way, as far as I can tell.

The purpose of my post was to illustrate the amount of damage we're talking about and what "spike" or "worst case scenario damage" really is for the people who haven't seen it.

1) I'm well aware of the benefits of ancestral healing and Inspiration. You'll notice there aren't any holy priests in our raid, that's because all 3 of ours were MIA that night. We usually don't cancel the raid because we're missing one class type if we have enough healers.

I'd also add that you don't want to be in a position where you absolutely have to have a proc up in order to survive. Relying on it when you don't have very many healers capable of providing it and when your healers will be taken out of the fight is relying on luck just as much as relying on avoidance to save you. There were two healers with ancestral healing in our raid that night, and one of those should have been taking advantage of chainheal's mechanics when the raid is taking recurring and consistent damage from doom blossoms.

Yes, you want to maximize the proc's uptime with smart use of cooldowns and by stacking the people who can proc it, but it will still never be 100%, especially in a fight like this. People have to be prepared to deal with RSTS incinerates, getting taken out of the fight at random, etc.

2) While I agree with your point, this is a dps race as I'm sure you're aware, Vohbo. I can trade threat generation stats for more stamina in a fight where I will steadily lose healers and dps; however, I don't think that's prudent. I should have been in a position where I had more than enough mitigation and "soaking potential" to survive. Subsequent attempts this week when we had our regular raid group on him and when I was using ironshields with 2 holy priests seem to back that up (our biggest issue is that some people aren't very good at handling the ghost form).

You can stack more healers to compensate, but that's going to come at the expense of DPS. You and I both agree that it was slow reaction time that caused my death, but you should factor some of that into your gear decisions too. People have laggy connections or don't always pop things the instant they need to. 1.5 seconds is a very tight window if people are in the middle of a global cooldown. My mistake was shying away from using last stand that early in the fight because I was expecting a heal to land. I usually like to save the bigger cooldowns for later in the fight when healers start to disappear.

3) Galzohar, your assumptions are faulty. First you aren't giving the warrior the benefit of defensive stance. Second, you're assuming the druid is AC capped, but then you don't give the warrior the benefit of imp Devotion aura and the T5 bonus. Both of these close the gap with an AC-capped feral druid.

The purpose of this thread was not to derail it into another feral vs prot warrior vs prot paladin argument. That conversation has been beaten to death so many times on these forums, I doubt we'd get anything from revisiting it. Suffice it to say, there's good reasons why people usually use warriors to tank this fight.

I figured I must be forgetting something... Oh well maybe I'll re-do the math when I have the time.

Bottom line is that preventing your death wouldn't really even require a NS or swiftmend, simply having the other paladin helaing you (or someone take over if he was disabled) would give you just enough heailng to survive. Had you equipped more avoidance and less HP, you would require a lot more than that (exaclt 1 more healing for each HP lost...), and enough HP loss would make you not even survive the first crush.
IMO this example shows more why you should stack stamina/mitigation, not avoidance, as the burst you've taken was not at all impossible to survive.

That was done all in 1.3 seconds, and you actually had 6 heals hit you in that time. Of course you didn't have 22k+ health to survive that. I think this is what people are trying to show. That sometimes you can be gibbed pretty much instantly. And there isn't a whole lot you can do about it sometimes other than hope avoidance carries you through.

The point is, no matter how much avoidance you have, it can still happen, while it's so much easier to keep you alive through it when you have more stamina through the "healing needed to survive that burst", which avoidance doesn't affect.
Was this burst completely unsurvivable? hard to tell. It looks like it was right the start of the fight - I would definitely look at what the healers were doing. Also 1.2s attack speed? I don't know but to me it looks like either a parry or a WWS error, although I would love to hear other possible explanations.

When you can't survive the physical damage from the best hp and mitigation alone avoidance plays an important role, I never disagreed with that, actually I said it myself.

Now before someone comes here and tells me how these kind of encounters are the norm, one has to factor in that there are raid instances beyond BT/MH and the OP was asking about gearing in SSC.

What makes the latest example nasty, is how the sabre lash hit 0.35 seconds before the killing blow. 1,3 seconds is plenty of time if you have a finger ready on your shieldwall/last stand/trinket/pot... but 0.35 seconds factoring in latency isn't.
Counting 5 Hot ticks and a PoM for 6k HP combined six heals is kind of missleading, though, and don't forget, that these examples also show how avoidance failed the tank. Additionally I can't see Nathanos tanking gear on the armory as he is currently in farming mode.

I think the point is clear, though, and we don't need additional examples like this one as Shahraz burst damage is infamous and you need resistances on that encounter as well so I think it's a very specific tanking encounter.

You keep talking about the visible worst case scenarios, but what you still don't seem to understand is how much more often they could happen, depending on your avoidance. Just because you can't easily see the effect doesn't mean it's not there.

There is really no point to those two Shahraz WWS, neither tank had Ironshields, Demo/CoW or preemptive Inspiration/AH procs going.

To Nathano / Acx:

That sort of damage simply doesnt happen without a parry. If it wasn't your attack that was parried by Mother, then it was someone elses. Ive actually had a look at her attack speed, and its somewhere in the range of 3-4 seconds. Which is why parries are so devastating in this fight.

On a side note - an even more extreme version of this is the last few 'bog lord' type mobs before the Black Stalker in heroic Underbog. They hit for around 8k melee, but have a 6 second attack speed. You don't want your attacks getting parried here either!

Since 2.3 is approaching, I'm also currently at a crossroad on where to develop my tank. Taking the new items into consideration which are available for heroic badges in the upcoming days, my way is going to be less avoidance and more stamina/block. However it is very interesting how all the different players in the game have their own take on those matters and also read about it here.

One fabulous tank I know of always stacked stam (even before TBC) and got to very good results (Naxx etc.). In contrast, one of the most successfull tanks on our realm went completely into the avoid-direction, and is currently on the way to kill Illidan. So I wonder how much of the topic we talk about here is actually a matter of taste and skill. I know that you guys are very deep into numbers, logs and analytics. But on the final day, it also boils down to the group setup (which heal classes) as well as to the skill of the whole raid. Number crunching has its place, but sometimes I'm not even sure if we're talking about an actual mistake by choosing the wrong path (stam or avoid) but perhaps also about bugs in the game.

An example from my last raid in Karazhan showed that instagibs can not only happen in BT but also fighting Nightbane although I'm already a bit overequipped for that encounter. The fight went like this: Junos touches black urn -> Nightbane approaches and lands -> Junos triggers block to counter possible deadly blows in the beginning -> Nightbane hits Junos twice in about half a second and Junos is dead. I didn't even get a flash-heal/hot - our paladin, druid and holy priest were absolutely stunned. And that with a pool of 17k of hitpoints, and a quite decent item selection for that encounter. There was no parry, I was the only one standing near Nightbane. So what happened?

Theorizing about game mechanics always has a big flaw. And that's that we're assuming that EVERYTHING in the game works as it is supposes to. Thanks to guys like you we KNOW that most things, especially in the introduction of new content, doesn't at all work as it should. I remember situations where Nihilum stated that Lady V. in SSC was nearly impossible to down because of horrible bugs in the encounter at an early stage. So how do we know if the problems you're trying to solve are actually because of bugs in the game, an unlucky day or a problems with your setup?

The conclusion that I draw from the discussion is that avoid- as well as stam-driven tanks do have their fair share of valid arguments on how and why they arrive at their goals. I think that both ways are an entry to experience high end content, since I've spoken to so many people over the year doing exactly the same encounters successfully and that with so different item-setups. If you're looking for a golden road, there isn't one. I think what's making you a better tank is not even actually getting items and choosing a setup, but to find out what works for you and your fellowship of healing minions That's 2 cents worth.

Combat log timers do seem to be extremely messed up.