I'm also going to give frost a whirl this week for non HM putricide, but was wondering what the optimal time would be during the phase three tank switches to pop cooldowns?

That sort of depends on your rotation strategy. We use a 3 3 4 stack strategy for taunting, so each tank is holding onto professor a little longer, but only takes him once so each tank can chain their cooldowns. As frost I usually take him last, the 4 stack tank, and I lead with UA and activate IBF towards the end when raid damage is at the highest.

Actually, the simplified formula for figuring the EH relationship for stamina vs armor on a level 83 boss is dA=12.1264*(A+16635)/H -- where A is your current armor and H is your current health.

The math for my paladin's gear fully raidbuffed (which, granted, isn't amazing) is 12.1264*(37569+16635)/54256 = 12.11 armor per 1 stamina. To get to the 9 armor per 1 stamina you claim, I would need over 73k buffed health. The armor I would gain in the process of upgrading my gear would push that figure even higher.

On a side note, paladins don't block every hit in ICC thanks to the dodge debuff (hence why block value is not in this equation).

For reference, the calculation with raidbuffs on my considerably lesser geared DK still comes out quite close to the same: 12.1264*(31086+16635)/47281 = 12.24 armor per stamina.

Edit: I loaded your character from Armory into Rawr and assigned full raid buffs, coming up with 38072 armor and 56428 health raidbuffed. This leads to 12.1264*(38072+16635)/56428 = 11.76 armor per stamina. I'm curious how you arrive at your numbers, since you didn't actually post any math (again).

I think the 12.1264 hp to stamina ratio in this formula should be 10*1.1*1.08= 11.88 for nonblood tanks and 10*1.1*1.08*1.03= 12.2364 for blood tanks.

Also when comparing armor as a stat on items I believe you need to adjust for our armor increasing abilities by dividing the total armor by 1.6x1.1x1.02= 1.7952 for non-bonus armor and 1.1x1.02= 1.112 for bonus armor.

non-bonus armor for Unholy and Frost is dA=11.88*(A+16635)/(H*1.7952)
bonus armor for Unholy and Frost is dA=11.88*(A+16635)/(H*1.112)
non-bonus armor for Blood is dA=12.2364*(A+16635)/(H*1.7952)
bonus armor for Blood is dA=12.2364*(A+16635)/(H*1.112)

You could compare the health gained vs armor gained by the character using da=(A+16635)/H which would be simpler I think than comparing stamina to armor on items.

Using your DK as an example, if he is Frost or Unholy 1 stamina is worth 6.679 non-bonus armor and 12.247 bonus armor and he is if Blood 6.879 for non-bonus and 12.615 for bonus armor. Or if you prefer one health point gained is worth 1.009 armor point gained.

I didn't post any math and won't post any now because it's being done in a spreadsheet I made when I first created my Death Knight and it's annoying to cobble together and clean up the excel equations into something meaningful. Anyway Theck's equations completely ignore armor modifiers, despite Satrina mentioning it in the derivation he references in that EH post.

Unfortunately when checking your numbers I did find an error in one of my variables so yea, the Glyph is inferior to Satrina's for EH purposes, only the Unidentifiable Organ contends depending on how you value the proc. Armor still remains the obvious choice in every other slot and the magic damage:stamina/armor plot on maintankadin still unfairly equates predictable, usually low damage magic attacks with unpredictable, high damage, high damage range melee attacks.

Thanks for catching my mistakes! The correct calculations are as follows, then:

On my paladin: 12.1264/1.112*(37569+16635)/54256 = 10.89 armor per 1 stamina

On my DK: 11.88/1.112*(31086+16635)/47281 = 10.78 bonus armor per 1 stamina

On Lethalia: 12.2364/1.112*(38072+16635)/56428 = 10.67 bonus armor per 1 stamina

DK calculations assume of course that any slot where we would be interested in making such a comparison is bonus armor (feel free to correct me if I missed something there).

I'm not sure what's unfair about it. EH is focused on worst-case scenario (aka avoiding nothing) so unpredictability is not a factor. Pointing out that the magic attacks are low damage and the physical is high damage is no different from saying that 20% of the damage is magic and 80% is physical - which is exactly what the graph does and no more. In a TTL scenario (which is what EH is all about) DTPS is DTPS, and mitigating only a portion of it will only increase your EH for that scenario by the percentage which you did mitigate.

On a side note, I can only think of one place other than trinkets where you can trade stamina for armor, and that's your glove enchant.

I think the issue is that it's not clear where exactly the X% physical / Y% magical numbers are coming from. Specifically, the obvious place (to me) where one would get that kind of number is by simply adding up damage taken during the fight and splitting it based on school. If you do it that way, however, you're not measuring anything remotely useful.

Say there's a constant damage aura ticking for 5000 every 3s and the boss hits for 20000 every 3s (and these can synchronize). You have 50% avoidance. In this situation, if you simply measure by total damage taken you get 33% magic / 66% physical, but the numbers that actually relate to effective health are 20% magic / 80% physical.

It seems to me like various people are simply assuming one method or the other is being used and thus comparing apples to oranges. In the first method, the 'predictability' of magic damage does indeed make the comparison unfair. But the second method (at least to me) seems not entirely obvious to someone who has not first considered and rejected the validity of the first, and I'm a bit confused as to why the proponents of Theck's ideas aren't specifically pointing out that this is how you do it - the first reason that comes to mind as to why they might not point it out is because perhaps they are actually doing it wrong.

Actually if you read Theck's post you'll see that he notes the problem of not having access to unmitigated damage values, and thus runs the calculations from the point of view of post-mitigation damage; this means the graph as posted would apply to a WoL parse directly (e.g., if WoL shows that 20% of the damage you took was magic, that means that in EH terms armor was 20% less effective for that fight).

Lanlaorn is completely correct about Theck not including talented modifiers for armor though, so keep that in mind if you delve into his post in-depth.

I honestly wish Glyph was a little more competitive, because I miss having a dodge clicky (CSK's clicky makes me gag).

It's not mitigation that's the issue, it's avoidance. Well, avoidance and the relative frequency/size of damage taken from each source. Effective health is a measure of the worst-case scenario - as such, avoidance does not factor. But if WoL shows that 20% of the damage you took over the course of a fight was magic, that is factoring in your avoidance for physical damage. The number from WoL ends up being entirely irrelevant for effective health. You can certainly use Theck's math to your benefit - but to do so, you need to actually look at what the worst-case scenario is, not just assume that the worst-case is like the average-case only bigger.

I can't find a highest damage taken from [ability] on WoL, just average, so I'm just picking single high-looking numbers out of the log, but from our last Festergut-10, I see a 22929 melee swing and a 8111 Gastric Bloat. That's a potential of 26% magical damage occurring in a simultaneous burst, or 15% magical damage if you assume (as is probably the case) that you can't really count on a heal landing between any two given melee attacks because they're so fast at this point. However, if you look at damage taken by source throughout the entire 3-stack period, it's only 7% magical. And if you look over the course of the entire fight, it's 29% magical. If you use 15% with Theck's math, you will get an answer that is as close to right as you're going to get for this particular dataset. If you use 7% or 29% - as it seems some people are suggesting - then you are putting in garbage data and getting garbage results.


Edit: Another factor that may favor armor more than the math suggests is that, as with Festergut's Gastric Bloat or any raidwide damage aura, magic damage really tends to be predictable. There's usually some kind of DBM warning or it's always happening or what have you, so your healer is already compensating. There's no raid warning or cast bar for bad avoidance strings. So even if you get slightly more 'effective health' from X stamina than Y armor, mathwise, your actual chance of dying (the measuring of which, I remind you, is the entire purpose behind effective health) is going to be coming from the physical bursts more often than the numbers would suggest. Add in the fact that armor is mitigation as well, which is not entirely worthless, and you start to see that choosing between armor and stamina trinkets (or glove enchants) purely based on an effective health conversion ratio is a pretty bad idea.

Satrina's is still better than Glyph though.

Toughness (as well as Thick Hide for the druids out there) and the 2% Armor Meta do not affect bonus armor. This is easily testable in game by equipping/unequipping an armor ring or neck.

You do have to divide by the armor multipliers for non-bonus armor if you want to try and convert it to EH, but the amount of times where that's an issue will be relatively small as generally higher ilvl items are already higher EH before taking into account their non-bonus armor advantage.

This is incredibly startling to me, although we all remember when they changed Frost Presence and Bear form to not work on trinkets/rings/bonus armor, they absolutely did not mention the meta or talents in this regard. Also, effects that exclude jewelry armor, etc. tend to specifically state "armor from plate, mail, etc." while the meta and toughness/thick hide lack this wording.

I believe you of course, but I wonder if this is intentional or a bug? You're correct in that cases where a lower ilvl item has greater stamina (and so you'd have to convert armor to stamina for a fair comparison) are uncommon.

I hate quote splitting, however I'm not going to get into a discussion about whether or not the 15% HP buff is of any use, given the ability is almost exclusively a reactive ability rather than a pro-active one: How likely are you to use VT at 100%? Because if you wait to use it at a bad time that 15% will do aproximately nothing.

The discussion we were having was between Black Heart and the Brewfest Trinkets. Neither Satrina's, nor Skeleton key are comparable, obviously.

If you use it at a bad time a mitigation cooldown like UA or IBF will do approximately nothing too. That's not really relevant. The point stands that increased healing received + increased hitpoints = reduced damage taken. It sounded like you're suggesting that VB is substantially different from a mitigation cooldown when it plainly is not.

Whether you're looking at brewfest trinkets or the higher end ones black heart doesn't have any EH value beyond the stamina on it, which is still a good 45 behind a brewfest trinket, nothing to sneer at. The armor proc on it offers the same kind of survivability boost that some passive avoidance would. In both cases nothing is close to guaranteed, but if you get lucky the proc or RNG on the avoidance may line up with the RNG on the bad hits and save you.

I don't understand this. Under which circumstances are you using VB in a reactive situation? The best time to use any cooldown is before a known potential large boss hit or lag in healing, eg. a tank swap, or in a chain of cooldowns, eg., when Festergut is huge. VB is no exception to this.

I am getting the sense that you are trying to make a valid point, but you are using the wrong terminology. You can certainly demonstrate some math or show some logs to back up your assertion, but in the vast majority of situations, popping VB won't reduce your incoming damage. If Mr. Boss Monster is hitting you for 20K before you pop VB, he'll hit for 20K after you pop VB too, you will just have more HP and your healers will be more effective during that time window.

I think this phrases it better. Increased HP + Increased Healing Taken is equivalent to less damage taken. It produced the same net effect via a different method.

I'm fairly sure that VB, when activated, gives you HP equal to 15% of your max HP. If you're at 5000/60000, you don't go to 5000/69000, you go to 14000/69000. Thus even used "reactively" you still get most of the value.

You will often have the choice when choosing between a lower tier gear piece with bonus armor and a higher tier gear piece that does not have it. For example, when do you replace Crusader's Glory? Do you equip the heroic Bonebreaker Scepter over it? It has more stamina, but no bonus armor. Or let's say your guild is 25-man only and you don't have 10-man heroic access. The 277 Bracers of Dark Reckoning drop. Do you replace your 251 Gargoyle Spit bracers for them or not?

What do you mean you don't understand this? Do you predict each and every occasion when you need a CD on? Festergut, yes, you can predict it. Mostly. Get a badly timed streak of beating in other cases, and you use it reactively. Perhaps one of your healers is disconnected, busy healing a cloth with Mark of Blood, mentally retarded or just too slow at responding. When non-designated MT healers see an MT close to death they'll often drop what they're doing and give a small, fast heal that aims at giving the MT healer more time to land his slow, big heal. VT is much more useful in that scenario, than pro-actively activating it right before a phase when you know you'll take a beating (and so does every other healer, who are prepared to face it and therefore are spamming you anyway.

I don't intend to start an argument of pro-active versus reactive use of CDs because it's subjective, impossible to prove and pointless. I do however maintain that no CD we have is exclusively pro-active or reactive.

In actual fact, I'd argue that UA is much more pro-active than VB.

I'm not too sure, though it's easy to check. I assumed your ratio stays the same, effectively meaning you gain 15% of whatever you had before. Easy enough to check: Go to target dummy, strip gear off, wear again, keep autoattack (to prevent healing) press Vampiric, see if % goes up (meaning you're right) or stays exactly the same (meaning I'm right) or goes down, which is unlikely, meaning it only gives max capacity.

Both upper and lower numbers adjust as a result.

I'm not totally understanding the VB ~ Damage Reduction thing

Gonna do some random napkin math:

Tank Maximum HP = 50,000
Tank Maximum HP w/ VB active = 57,500
Net Gain in HP = 57,500 - 50,000 = 7,500hp

Assumptions:
lvl 83 Raid boss Melee Hit (after any mitigation) = 20,000

healing received for 1 heal no VB Active = 10,000
healing received for 1 heal with VB Active = 13,500


No VB Used:
50,000hp - 20,000damage = 30,000hp remaining
30,000hp + 10,000healing = 40,000hp
So,(40k/50k) 80% full HP

With VB Active:
57,500 - 20,000 = 37,500hp remaining
37,500 + 13,500 = 51,000hp
So,(51k/57.5k) 88.69% full hp



My question is, are you equating the ~8.7% gain in hp in a linear fashion to 8.7% gain in DR or does it follow a curve like the previously listed EH equations?
(assuming curve, since armor damage reduction follows logarithmic curve)

Something that bothers me with this is that even at 51k/57.5k Your hp will drop to 50k/50k after the 10s/15s (gylphed) uptime.
Are you basing the damage reduction on the current VB active increase or the increase after VB ends?

**edit** Added some thoughts after considering 10s/15s active time for VB

Does putting Mark of Blood on Blazing Skeletons at Valthiria make her gain 4% life?