For a long time, primary tanking theory has revolved around EHP. The concept is simple; Stack Armor and HP so that you have a large buffer zone. That way, if your avoidance fails and you get hit 4, 5, 6 times in a row, you won't get destroyed because healers have enough time to react to the drop in HP. I have always been a huge fan of avoidance tanking. In BC, the major issue with avoidance tanking was rage starvation; As a warrior, if you don't get hit, you don't get rage, and thus you don't get threat. EHP guaranteed that you would be hit often enough to retain solid rage levels and thus solid threat. The second issue was spikiness. Even with high levels of avoidance, it's still possible to be hit repeatedly. With EHP, you have a solid buffer for those situations, whereas avoidance tanking requires healers to watch for spikes and get quick heals off.

There's no question whatsoever that you take less damage when avoidance tanking than when EHP tanking. However, healers have no issue right now maintaining high mana levels while pumping huge heals, and thus people consider the HP buffer to be more important than the decrease in damage brought on by avoidance tanking. The proposed changes to healer mana regeneration may be enough to push more people toward avoidance.

It's relatively well known that avoidance scales exponentially with respect to itself. For example, going from 0 avoidance to 10% avoidance is a mere 10% damage reduction. However, going from 70% avoidance to 80% avoidance is a 33% damage reduction. Because of this fact, as your avoidance increases, avoidance becomes a better stat to stack. And because avoidance works as a multiplier on HP, as your HP goes up, avoidance becomes a more powerful stat to stack. Which means in the long run, everyone will be stacking avoidance, eventually. To combat this, and in an attempt to prevent people from reaching the mythical and oft-videod 100% avoidance, Blizzard implemented diminishing returns on avoidance. As your avoidance gets higher, you need more and more rating to add an additional percent. However, there's a serious latent issue with the DR calculation. Diminishing returns on avoidance excludes anything that gives a % value. For example, a talent that adds 5% to dodge does not affect diminishing returns.

The previous three tanking classes were all equal in terms of avoidance from talents. Warriors and Paladins receive 5% each to Dodge and Parry, while Druids receive 10% to dodge (since they are incapable of parrying). However, Death Knights can receive a whopping 22% avoidance that is unaffected by Diminishing Returns; 5% to Dodge from Anticipation, 10% to Parry from Blade Barrier, 3% to boss-miss from Frigid Dreadplate, and an additional 4% Parry from Runeforging.

At low gear levels, say 20% avoidance from gear, this isn't a HUGE deal. If a warrior has 30% avoidance and a DK has 42% avoidance, The DK is taking roughly 17% less damage. This is a number that could easily be made up for via things like the ability to block, the innate damage reduction on Defensive stance, or a number of other factors. However, when we reach the extreme end of avoidance, say 55% from gear, we're in dangerous territory. A warrior at this point would have 65% avoidance, while a DK would have 77% avoidance. The DK would be taking 35% less damage than the warrior. As avoidance available on gear increases, the gap widens even further.

The issue of spikiness can be mitigated two ways. First up is the talent Vampiric Blood, which I still hold is wildly overpowered. The general rule is that an avoidance tank will have significantly lower HP than an EHP tank, and thus has less of a buffer zone. Vampiric Blood allows you to have 15% more HP for 30 seconds out of every minute. My standard high-avoidance set has 27k HP, while my high-HP set has 32k HP (both unbuffed). Vampiric Blood raises the avoidance set to 31k, drastically reducing the difference in buffers.

The second manner in which spikiness is reduced is the talent Will of the Necropolis. WotN can actually be considered to be additional HP, based on your current HP. For example, from 100%, your HP is increased by roughly 17%, as an attack dealing 117% of your HP will be reduced to (117 * .85) = 99.45% of your HP. The vast majority of the time, the talent will act as between half and a third of that value (5-8% effective increase in HP).


So, anyway, the whole point is that DKs can have way more avoidance than other classes due to talents that give us undiminished avoidance. Also, the spikiness issue is reduced by some exceptionally powerful talents. And lastly, DKs suffer no penalty from not being hit, and thus the only meaningful reason NOT to stack avoidance is threat concerns which are, honestly, laughable right now.

To test my theory that avoidance-based DKs are exceptionally powerful, I gathered a few friends to do some testing on Patchwerk. Not a kill, just 6 minutes of 1-tank, 1-healer PW.
Video: YouTube - Patchwerk 10 (High)
Healer was in about half blues ( Armory Link )
Final screenshot of recount showing avoidance levels: http://www.saichotictech.net/WoW/PatchwerkAvoidance.jpg
70% avoidance from regular melee, 73% from Hateful Strikes. As time goes on, it'll only get worse. Either Talents must be added to diminishing returns, or DKs need to have their avoidance talents nerfed significantly. Otherwise, we'll be pushing 100% avoidance with almost no concerns whatsoever come Ulduar.


On a side note, if any boss is ever given the DW attack penalty in WotLK, avoidance tanking will be even more hilariously overpowered.





Comments? Questions? If anyone can show me that this isn't in fact getting ridiculous and that other classes' unique mechanics make up for the lack of additional avoidance talents, I'd love to see it. Also, if anyone of any other class has solo-tanked PW for an extended period, I'd love to see that too. Video of doing this on 25man will be available as soon as the WW server lets me get my damn Immortal title.

Um, I'm not sure there's anything more to say about the avoidance scaling issue now. Just looking at your gear, which is comparable to mine, but combined with your chosen professions of bs/jc pushes the avoidance into the ludicrous numbers as you say. Even my modestly gemmed/enchanted gear has me pushing 65% avoidance in important fights.

My only problem with stacking avoidance has always been that it makes incoming damage unpredictable. Ideally healers won't be waiting for you to get hit to heal you, so in the end even if you are ultimately taking less damage, you aren't receiving any less healing. If the healers do slack off and the big spike comes, thats when things go awry. That said, minimizing incoming damage is definitely the goal of a tank. My philosophy has always been to try and stack EH to where you have enough to soak a few hits and then go all avoidance.

Of course the thought that stacking EH > avoidance is based largely on the idea that doing so sacrifices your other stats, which isn't as true for a DK tank as it has been for other tanks in the past. As you say, the amount of avoidance DK tanks can get is ridiculous. We get tons of avoidance from talents, and we get TONS of EH from frost presence so neither is really an issue as long as you aren't in low level gear. Add in the fact that a DK tank will have some sort of cooldown active most of the time to cover hits that do/would have gone through, and you pretty much have your bases covered without having to look too closely at gear. A DK tank can easily have 65-70% avoidance by accident, just from maintaining 540def.

In general avoidance is a tricky thing just because it is exponential as you say. 22% avoidance talented is obviously a lot, but new tanks need it, and even geared tanks would be pretty crippled without it I think. That 22% makes the difference between barely being able to tank an add on Anub'rekahn or feeling like you could die at any moment in a heroic, and comfortably main tanking bosses without a worry, for me. But of course adding a static amount to a non-linear stat can be problematic, and while I think DK tanks are in a pretty good place right now, it does seem like it could be a bit much come Ulduar.

Not being a full-time tank in Wrath I'm not familiar with how exactly the avoidance DR works or how talents interact with it. I would think that its possible that you may need so much avoidance to get any benefit past a certain point that its not worth stacking, but thats for someone familiar with the formula to say. My thought is that (assuming it isn't already the case) perhaps the static value from talents should be the starting place for the DR formula and all avoidance past that is diminished. That way everyone benefits from the talents equally, but more geared tanks have more DR to face to get the same benefit. I could probably explain that better but I'm not so good at the mathulation.

I agree that it's an issue; because of the raw avoidance bonus over the other tanks, we scale much better with avoidance gear while still scaling nearly as well (druid) or better (warrior / pally) with stamina.

One easy but interesting solution might be to change Blade Barrier. Instead of giving it an effective free 100% uptime, perhaps change it to use a Blood Rune for 5 seconds of +10% parry? Sacrificing threat for survivability could be an interesting option, and it should be reasonably well balanced between the three specs (Blood gets more damage from their BR, but also have more available).

Unbreakable Armour is being changed in 3.1, so it shouldn't be a worry anymore.

Lichborne probably also needs a nerf. With decent gear, it's pretty close to saying "Makes you immune to melee attacks for the duration". Then again, on a 3 minute cooldown perhaps Blizzard isn't too concerned about it.

No, there's no Sunwell Radiance in Naxxramas. The changes to diminishing returns were suppose to be the "fix". Sunwell Radiance was the "patch". So to speak. A stop gap measure, basically.

This. And it would have worked, if not for those meddling kids!

I mean, those talents that ignore diminishing returns.



I don't like the idea of making Blade Barrier a clicky ability. DKs have a lot of clickies as is. I feel like if the avoidance runeforges were removed or placed on DR, and Blade Barrier had its Blood Rune requirement removed and was just a flat 5% parry, it'd be more balanced. It'd be a straight nerf, it'd be boring and normal, but it'd be balanced. Right now, it isn't.

I understand the concept. And we are powerful characters but lets not forget that pallies, warriors, and druids get special things too and we need that extra avoidence from our talents to compete with the rest of the tanks .

Warriors and pallies both get shields and actual tanking weapons. So a geared tank has 60%+ avoidence just from dodge parry and block not including miss. Druids don't really have to worry about def and only have to worry about one avoidence tree and have a lot more HP then all the other classes.

Most DK's dont have the ability to use Swordshattering enchant because of the low def on higher level items. So.....

It is easy to hit 540 with 213 gear if you use the Gargoyle rune but you would either have to use [Repelling Charge] or [Seal of the Pantheon] to stay at 540 and use the Swordshattering rune. (excluding the def you can from the icy touch def sigil or roll without one of the DEF trinkets (listed above) and hope the Icy Touch/Def Sigil brings you to 540 and you don't have any down time) Or option C stack def gems and nerf your hp and avoidence.

If you do use one of the DEF trinkets above you then you now lack 1 trinket slot. For, atleast myself, i like having the ability to switch out trinkets. I can stack stm with Eseence and Monarch Crab or i can stack avoidence with Rune of repulsion and Valor or War dodge trinket.


To sum it all up and the point im trying to make is that with warriors pallies and druids ability to tank is very different from ours. I guess we should say we are in a class of our own when it comes to tanking and because of that the WOW gods don't seem to subject us to the same laws as the other tanks. (Another good point to back-up that we are in a class of our own is that we are the only tanking class that doesn't need to be hit to generate or version of "Rage")


When it comes to physical Dmg, imo, all the other classes have a step up on us. When it comes to magic dmg tanking. Then id say there is a unbalance

My Avoidance with 10/51/10 spec, in combat while fully raid buffed, is 69.9% (including base miss + defense miss).

Why are you calling BS?

From a healer perspective, I have never understood this avoidance scales exponentially point. While yes I understand your example of how the percentage avoided is difference between 70-80% and 10-20% is different, the amount of actual damage reduced is still the exact same.
Say a boss hits for 10k every 2 seconds (5000 dps), and you have 10% avoidance. You avoid 1 hit every 10 swings on average, putting your damage taken at 4.5k dps. You bump your avoidance up to 20% and now take 4000 dps, a 500 dps difference.
Now let us say you have 70% avoidance, you'll be taking 1.5k dps. At 80% you'll be taking 1k dps, still a 500 dps difference.

Maybe this viewpoint is due to me being a druid healer, so healing is more of a how much hps do my hots need to do to cancel out a predicted dps income, so if anyone could point out what I've missed, it would be much appreciated.

Another possible solution might be to change the implementation of such talents to be "first in" rather than "last in", so that they substitute for pre-DR ratings rather than post-. Alternately, have them grant a number of rating points scaling to the level of the character, rather than a fixed percentage.

I agree that it might be a concern in the futur, if healer's mana is a problem again.

But right now, it's not; cause like you said, right now the HP buffer is more important. And before it become one, DK will probably be a lot different than now (since our trees and abilities are reworked almost every patch).

But yea, in a hypothetic mana-short fight, DK are superior as of now.