After hearing lots of "arguments" for and against socketing avoidance / stamina I decided to write my own simulation tool to see what gem gives the highest survivability.
Results first:

Stamina wins so my gut feeling was right, hehe.

The tool simulates a boss fight against hardhitting Bosses like Gruul / Magtheridon.
The Boss has a 2.0 second swing timer with 6500 BaseDmg (after Armor) and cleaves for 1.5*BaseDmg every 11 seconds.
The combattable is just plain avoid or hit (unmodified at 0.5 avoidance).
Heal is modelled as 2 full Stacks of Lifebloom ticking every second for 1.8k, a 4.5k greaterheal every 3 seconds and a flash heal every 2 seconds. Both of the last two heals have a 10% chance of not being cast due to AoE Silence / Brainlag whatever.
The MT has 18.2k HP and the fight continues for 10 minutes.
It is evaluated over 200.000 tries for each socketing option(15 slots assumed), and the output is the percentage of wipes.

Any comments would be appreciated.



And thanks again ej for hosting such a nice forum, I gained a lot of insights reading it.

Bye Berthold

p.s. If anyone is interested in the code I can send the VC++ project.

please model patchwerk next tia

Bye Berthold

It is well known that hard hitting (spike damage) encounters favour high hit-point tanks over high-avoidance tanks. A more interesting question would be to find under what conditions a high avoidance/mitigation tank comes out on top.

I suspect it is under multi mob tanking conditions, where many potentially fast hitting mobs are being tanked, and the risk is not that the tank is spiked down while healers have mana, but that the healers run out of mana.

There could come a point (perhaps one that TBC gear/encounters will never reach) where more stamina is irrelevant, and more avoidance/mitigation is what makes a fight feasible.

In theory.

Nice graph though!

The only fight where avoidance will trump stamina (in the ratio given to the two stats in game of 8 dodge rating vs 12 stam) is a fight with a severe mellee applied debuff. Think pierce armor, mortal strike, or something similiar. In such a fight, the time spent outside of the debuff for the avoidance tank could potentially outweigh the lower effective life total.

One of the reasons not often highlighted that stamina comes out ahead as often as it does in TBC is that 12 stam is more effective life than 8 dodge rating, for the same itemization budget, at 70. Blame the pvp change, but in terms of itemization points, you gain more from stam than the other (non armor) stats. Stupid? Yes. Reality? Yes.

That's a result of your initial values =P

Class Mechanics and Theorycrafting

The problem with this (and the problem with most people that theorycraft mass stam > avoidance always) is that you assume the only way to wipe is your main tank dying to spike damage. The less damage the tank is taking, the more heals you have free'd up for whatever else is happening in the fight. Most of the time (from my experiences) you wipe for reasons other than a tank death, usually something to do with a non tank taking some amount of damage, and not getting healed quick enough before he dies. If the MT is sitting at 100%, that rogue that dips down to 5% and is about to get killed is a lot more likely to receive a power word shield/ns heal/flash heal etc than if your MT is taking very consistent damage. Additionally, assuming your healers are perfect and mindlessly spamming you for the entire fight is also an incorrect assumption, at least for my guild. Just because you can theoretically survive a "maximum burst" from a boss doesn't mean you're going to get the amount of heals you expected in said time period, and doesn't mean the next hit won't potentially finish you off.

It should also be known that defense is the best avoidance stat, better than dodge and parry point for point, which I assume is why he used defense. Has nothing to do with the defense cap, even if you're capped its still your best stat avoidance-wise.

All that being said, I still stack stam in every slot, but its mainly because of --
"One of the reasons not often highlighted that stamina comes out ahead as often as it does in TBC is that 12 stam is more effective life than 8 dodge rating, for the same itemization budget, at 70. Blame the pvp change, but in terms of itemization points, you gain more from stam than the other (non armor) stats. Stupid? Yes. Reality? Yes."

These numbers look excellent to me, and give you a very good idea of how to gem your gear, and choose gear...if you have 50% avoidance, 18.2k HP, and are constantly being healed by healers who have infinite mana.

I'm sure he could model it for different levels of gear and fight lengths on request. Stop giving him such a hard time

To possibly save you an infraction since your post was cool, you may want to edit all of the posts you've made thus far to have full proper caps and punctuation, etc.

Then you may want to change the aim of your post to be "Graphing Tank Damage / Life tables" or something, and then ask for input and suggestions on situations to graph visually and post here for us to see.

For example, do the same type of stat comparison for a fight that has a fast hitting boss for like ~3000, etc.

Slight derail:

Edited the title and moved the thread to somewhere more appropriate.

As to all the nae-sayers, shut up and stop shitting up the thread.

Thanks!