Sorted now - I didn't realise I'd quoted it wrongly in the direct stats bit too. If theres any other mistakes, just pm/post and I'll sort them out. I still check this thread at least once a day to try and make sure I catch any errors anyone points out.
Edit: Kaz, you should be able to tell I still update the front page from the Changelog dates :p
A question I have still remains that no matter how many people I ask I never get a consistent answer.
I understand that there is a delicate balance between the two stats but which is better to stack (for sockets and ect.)
Agility or Stamina.
I use 12 stamina in almost every socket. I use a gladiator glyph to remain uncritable and an 18 stam gem on my helm. Every piece of my gear is enchanted for stam with the exception of a few to remain uncritable.
I rescently had a discussion with someone regarding the balance of these stats and which are better, I am now looking for an answer.
The answer to this in theory is quite simple: "as much stamina as needed, as much agility as possible". Why? You only need enough stamina to still be alive when your healers' heals impact. Depending on encounter and healers this is usual 2 non-dodged rounds of attacks. If I take the shaman add in the Karathress encounter as an example, you want to have enough stamina to survive 2 mh/oh and one frostshock, because this is the axmimum expected amount of damage with no heals in between.
This is because you don't have that much healers on you and they perhaps cancel out heals to conserve mana. Brutallus is quite a different example: you can expect to have enough healers on you, rarely (read: never) cancelling any heal, so you may expect to have any burst damage being healed before you take the next hit. The maximum amount of damage here is stomp + mh + oh. Essentially, if you have enough total hp to survive this worst case, you have enough stamina.
The tricky thing on this is: it varies depending on encounter, the number / type of healers assigned on you and (perhaps most important) the timing of your healers. I have not played a healer for a long time so I cannot say this for sure, but I think healers can raise your survivability with skill. This means, if you have good healers, you probably won't need as much hp.
So, this hopefully helps you to estimate how much hp is "enough". If you get to the point where you survive the worst case (again: depending on ecnounter AND healers), you can stack agility. So stamina is there to keep you alive long enough to be healed, agility (or avoidance in general) is there to keep your healrs from running oom.
But you should always talk to your healers when you lay out your gear and ask them for their preferences. I even heard from a feral from another raid that they had problems healing him. He had quite a high amount of dodge. So from time to time he dodges some swings in a row, his healers thought he is taking less damage overall and when he stopped dodging the incoming damage was too much.
I personally always socketed pure agility in ssc/tk/mh/bt and I switched to a lot of stamina gems when preparing for sunwell.
Agility also helps with TPS, and when it comes to high-end raiding (read Sunwell 4-6) having high threat generation is almost as important as having good survivability.
Agi/Stam is nothing but your own opinion... If you want to have more hp, socket stamina, the same goes for dodge/agi. The only encounter I can think of, where you cannot rely on many healers keeping you up, is M'uru and unsheeped zerkers - there dodge is highly important, since there is a capped heal-income.
My apologies if this has been covered in the thread; I searched under 2pt4 and bloodlust but did not find the specific answer.
I'm looking to find out what the typical energy return from the 2pt4 bonus is over x minutes. Right now I appear to be getting 200-240 energy over a 4-minute fight, which seems a bit low and doesn't seem to go well with the 100 or so DPS that rawr models it at. However, I'm also powershifting using the macros elsewhere, and I'm concerned that this is either reducing the number of chances at gaining bloodlust or removing its value.
At 200 energy for a 4 minute fight we're looking at essentially one extra shred a minute. Given my average value of shreds (about 3k when crits are factored in) this is a 50 DPS boost. Does that sound reasonable?
I've got a WWS of 29 minutes of boss fights with 88 procs of bloodlust, which is
~3 procs per minute, so
~60 energy per min, so
~1.43 shreds per minute, so
~4300 dmg per minute (assuming 3k average), so
~70 dps increase due to bloodlust
In Rawr, subbing my malorne shoulders with a dummy item with same stats but no malorne bonus, and my estimated dps changes by 68 dps. Seems accurate to me.
If you are basing your numbers off a single 4 minute fight, your results can be quite variable. Also, I don't know why you say Rawr values the bonus at 100 dps?
Sorry - it was multiple instances of the same 4-minute fight (Gorefiend). I did this because I wanted to compare relative DPS over the same fight. What I was concerned about was powershifting interfering with bloodlust procs. It doesn't sound like it does.
Sounds like I was just getting a bit unlucky in terms of proc rate, at least some of the time.
I had been using an older Rawr on this computer, hence the 100DPS gain. Rawr is reporting a 70DPS gain now.
Powershifting (with the macros) does *slightly* reduce the value of 2T4. It'll waste the Bloodlust proc during the latency time between when you tell the server to powershift and when the server responds. It's rare, but it does happen. It's probably a ~3-5% reduction in value of 2T4, certainly not enough to stop you from wanting to 2T4 and wanting to powershift.
I fully agree with the gearing theory you mention of "enough stamina to survive, as much agility as possible."
I do think it's a common misconception though that some healers or tanks have, that avoidance is about healer mana efficiency and long-term damage reduction, and survival is purely about stamina/armor.
Imo the real question to ask when minmaxing gear is how it affects your probability of survival.
One way to look at it is in terms of strings of however many attacks have the potential to kill you on a given fight - let's say 4.
Each of those 4 attacks has a random range of damage that it can take - the total incoming damage thus has some probability distribution.
Your incoming heals can be thought of as having some probability as well, depending on the fight and the type of healing. If you have full-time druid HOTs on you for example, you have a very accurate idea of the amount of healing provided by that over the 4 swings. Direct healing would be some min-max expected range, which you would want to think of pessimistically since you're gearing for the ability to survive the "bad" moments.
So when looking at any window of attacks, your total "effective" HP is your actual HP (ie stamina) plus some low estimate of the amount of healing received. The value of adding or losing stamina is dependent on the comparison of this effective HP and the incoming damage you receive. For instance, if your effective HP is comfortably over the expected value of 3 hits, but thousands below the expected value of 4, gaining stamina has little to no effect on your survivability. In contrast, if the expected damage range is somewhat lower, such that adding stamina gives you a chance of surviving 4 hits, stamina's impact on survivability increases.
On the avoidance side, people often look at a druid with 85% total avoidance compared to a druid with 70%, in terms of the first druid taking half the average damage over the course of a long fight, perhaps saving healers mana, at the cost of his lower HP "buffer", and thus higher chance to get gibbed (in common opinion). But this avoidance plays a key role in survival, not just long-term mitigation. If we look at a window of a finite number of attacks that has the potential to kill a tank, we can look at the probability of all of them landing. For 4 attacks, a 70% avoidance tank has a 0.8% chance of being hit by all 4. The 85% avoidance tank has a 0.05% chance, 16 times smaller (While these numbers may seem small, a raid night has many many such windows of attacks, so they do occur). Sometimes raid leaders feel "safer" putting the tank with the higher HP buffer on any hard-hitting boss, when in reality, on some fights the high avoidance tank is much less likely to die. Finding the proper balance of HP and avoidance for maximizing survival is very dependent on each boss, and each raid makeup. To use an example of my own, in most of my gear setups I have more avoidance and less HP than the other feral tank in my guild. On some fights this makes me more likely to survive, on Mother I usually OT or dps when possible because Sinister Beam and Fatal Attraction on top of the tanks are undodgeable damage sources, and the value of HP with respect to avoidance for surviving the worst-case scenarios increases.
Anyways I know this is a bit of a TLDR derailing based on some comments above, but I do think it's worth all tanks keeping in mind that stamina/armor are *not* the only "survival" stats. There's a very complex relationship between avoidance and HP that unfortunately simply could never be modeled without accurate damage ranges for all bosses, healing ranges for the particular healing assignments, etc. The "probability of survival" gained by adding marginal amounts of HP must always be weighed against the "probability of survival" gained with marginal amounts of avoidance.
Most people, including me, don't see it that way. You gear to survive, not to survive in 'most' situations. Who wants to tell their raid "oh we wiped to this farm boss because I didn't have enough health, but it was only a 0.05% chance to happen, what a coincidence!".
There's a very complex relationship between avoidance and HP that unfortunately simply could never be modeled without accurate damage ranges for all bosses, healing ranges for the particular healing assignments, etc.
I'd describe this as 'feeling comfortable' when you're in a role. The most important thing is to gear how you feel comfortable gearing which depends mostly on how your healers heal or how you get healed in general, or what role you take in raids. If you're mostly DPS/OT, go agility stacking with a bit of stam, if you're mostly MT I'd go for more of a half/half split, with a gear set for pure stam in case you feel you need it. Just make sure it feels right once you're actually in combat.
Well, if we take Brutallus as example, maximum amount of damage you can take in time between incomming heals is ~20k (stomp+MH+OH). Taking this in account you are safe with 21k if your healers are not slacking, if they are there is no way you can safe your life by stacking stamina (your need ~14-15k additional HP) and only "luck-based" avoidance can help you.
Most people, including me, don't see it that way. You gear to survive, not to survive in 'most' situations. Who wants to tell their raid "oh we wiped to this farm boss because I didn't have enough health, but it was only a 0.05% chance to happen, what a coincidence!".
To me this is the misconception - that stamina is somehow a "pure" survival stat and not a probability-based one, while avoidance only affects survival "some" of the time. My point above is stamina is also decreasing "probability of death", just as avoidance is.
Consider tanking some idealized boss with an 8-10k damage range, in a worst-case scenario situation of a period of 0 heals. Suppose you have a choice between a 21k HP setup with 80% avoidance, and a 23k HP setup with 74%. Both can survive 2 hits. Neither can survive 3 hits. If this situation were to occur, the stamina has effectively added nothing to the probability to survive it, while the avoidance would. This is obviously an extreme - as a fight progresses there are countless different scenarios of various levels of current HP and healing and attack rolls. In every scenario your max HP is providing you with some chance to survive each, and your avoidance is providing some chance as well. I feel that it's a bit of a simplification in most tanking theorycraft to simply equate "effective health" with survival, and treat avoidance as a mana-saving luxury. It vastly underestimates the contribution of healing to true "effective health" in raiding scenarios, and cannot take into account the probabilistic nature of HP vs boss damage. It is still a very important stat to consider, I just think it should be noted that survival is more complex than that, and avoidance plays an enormous role.
as a fight progresses there are countless different scenarios of various levels of current HP and healing and attack rolls. In every scenario your max HP is providing you with some chance to survive each, and your avoidance is providing some chance as well. I feel that it's a bit of a simplification in most tanking theorycraft to simply equate "effective health" with survival, and treat avoidance as a mana-saving luxury.
This is all definitely true. And the stamina advocates with the best understanding of the situation wouldn't argue differently; what they're really saying is that marginal return on Stamina is higher in most ordinary ranges. It's a difficult claim to support, since this would be very hard to model to a useful degree of accuracy.
Another confounding factor is that the effect of Stamina is very obvious and visible--when a tank dies, you can say "he would have survived with X more HP." But you can't make a similar claim about avoidance; its probabilistic nature means there's just no sensible way to do so.
All that said, I'm generally on the Stamina side of things. I could best articulate the reason like this:
If you were to graph a probability distribution of spikes taken at a given boss fight, it would like exhibit a steep dropoff in a certain range (based on the mob's attack size, attack speed, frequency of incoming heals, etc). This is the "maximum spike size" that people usually want to outgear with Stamina. It's not one point, but a range. In an and around that range, the payoff of Stam is high, and the payoff of avoidance is low. And it seems to be that most difficult boss fights place that value right around current tank HP levels. Like Brutallus and his 20k, for example. Brutallus spikes for "around" 20k--but in reality, anytime you're within maybe +/- 1000 HP of that, Stam is very useful, since each additional point eliminates a significant number of potential killing spikes.
Beta 15.1:
- Fixed Resistances in several models
- Added several resistance enchants, including glyphs, armor kits, shoulder inscription, and cloak enchants
- Fixed a bug with the cached values in the popup item selector not being reset on character loads
- Reduced the scale of thoroughness for the Build Upgrade List feature, in order to give results in reasonable times, compared to Optimze
- Added class restrictions to engineering goggles in armory lookups
- The Batch features now allows you to choose a different model for each character file
- Added a significant amount of (relevantly gemmed) items to the default itemcache for the new models
- Rawr.Bear:
- Fix for edge conditions with anti-crit and avoidance affecting damage taken
I was floating through the last 10+ pages, looking for a sample high avoidance gear setup for Muru adds. Unfortunately I've only found the link to Hoofhearted's armory profile, who has specced into restoration meanwhile.
Could someone provide me with such a sample gear?
Our druid is currently running at around 60-65% avoidance, and I was reading numbers like 80+% in here, while still uncrittable and pretty high armor. Trying to see if there's some room for improvement.
The above setup is just fine although i think you can change the blue neck and ring form some +hit, +expertise gear. For avoidance i don't think there is room for improvement (except SW gear, Felmyst legs and twins staff mainly).
Racial bonuses definitely need to be considered when gearing for the M'uru adds. I started with Hoofhearted's setup as a template, but swapped in a few higher stamina pieces, namely [Pendant of Titans], [Commendation of Kael'thas] and [Band of the Eternal Champion], mostly because in his setup I felt a bit low on stamina. 17-18k seems to be just enough to avoid getting an unlucky gib, from my experience. We got stupid lucky and had double Stanchions on our second Twins kill, which helps a lot.
I've tanked with no CC, killing the mage last and with stun-locking the mage and killing it first, and in both situations, I really liked the Commendation proc, which happens about every wave, usually when you need it most, and nearly halves incoming damage.
I wanted verify some research done about muru adds.
Now as a primary resto my feral-fu is abit rusty but I've been working to correct that recently.
The muru adds are lvl 71 and thus to reach arm cap and crit immune a feral druid would only need 33705 armor, and 2.2 anti-crit ( 129.5 def, 88 res ).
On our attempts we've had a few 'My swipe was dodged/missed/parried...' and someone(or 2) dies. Working to possible correct this and increase threat generation I looked at what could be done to stack some Exp and Hit.
For one feral it looked like he could get 106 exp and 72hit while staying crit immune and arm cap. Could probably increase this abit more but this would be all quick swap items like a resockets, new meta, and badge neck. This got hit around 40% dodge in Rawr vs a Sunwell Plat mob. (I didn't think they were DW so I left that off)
Now this is a feral thread but any resto's trolling here and healed a druid stacking alot of dodge like mentioned above?
Right now we have 1 resto shaman chaining through the ferals with myself rolling love on pali tank, the big tank, and the 1 add tank. The second tank has a 2nd raid shaman helping out occasionally. Now even with a silly high dodge amount the same max rank spells are going to be cast becuase you do not want a shitty RNG to wipe the raid. So does the high dodge really 'help'?
Oh to Hoof:
for p2 how is your DPS stats looking in that gear setup?
On the balancing avoidance/HP issue, I dug up a simplified version of some old code I had, for a different way of looking at this than a pure "rating" for gear like EH or mitigation. It works as written in MATLAB, but modifying it for any other program should be straightforward.
It's essentially a simplified simulator, which takes a boss fight consisting of a certain number of boss attacks (Swings), and runs it thousands of times (Trials), counting how many result in a death. The final number (deaths/Trials*100) is an estimate of the probability of death in that scenario. As written it only takes <1 second to execute, with accuracy and computation time increasing with number of Trials.
The boss is assumed to have a uniformly distributed attack range that can be set to whatever you like. There are no crushing blows in this example, though it would be simple to add if desired. The value of the variable "Heal" is how much healing you receive between each boss swing. In this simplified version it is simply a constant. One could think of many ways to make this more realistic - giving the Heal value some randomness, and making it a moderate function of current HP (i.e. if you dip below 40%, a raid healer is likely to toss you an extra heal). All such changes simply require upping the number of Trials to maintain a decent approximation to the probability.
The value of avoidance and HP can be compared by considering that one stam gem is worth 267.7 HP to a tauren, 254.9 HP to a night elf, and one agi gem is worth 0.77 avoidance. Varying either number by multiples of these amounts gives a picture of how much each decreases the probability of death for that simulated boss fight. (I'd recommend making large changes to each unless you want to run many Trials - the probability of death result falls within a confidence interval dictated by the sample size)
There are no sweeping conclusions to be made from an analysis like this, it all depends on the ranges you put in and the assumptions about healing, but it's interesting to look at. I think many people would be surprised at some of the results. For a particular boss fight, where you know its damage ranges from logs, and something about incoming healing, this way of looking at the issue of "what makes me least likely to die" yields some information that a gear-based rating alone cannot. Rawr is an absolutely amazing tool, but people who simply look at the "Overall rating" results in Rawr for a quick "which is better" answer need to keep in mind that this is making an inherent assumption about the relative value of avoidance and HP. The actual balance comes down to their effect on the most important "defensive" tanking statistic - probability of death.
avoidance=0.70;
MaxHP=21000;
Heal=7000;
Swings=100;
Trials=100000;
BossMin=7000;
BossMax=11000;
BossRange=BossMax-BossMin;
deaths=0;
HP=MaxHP;
for g=1:Trials
HP=MaxHP;
for n=1:Swings
hit=rand;
if hit<avoidance
damage=0;
else
damage=(hit-avoidance)/(1-avoidance)*BossRange+BossMin;
end
HP=HP-damage;
if HP<=0
deaths=deaths+1;
break
end
HP=HP+Heal;
if HP>MaxHP
HP=MaxHP;
end
end
end
deaths/Trials*100
I wanted verify some research done about muru adds.
Now as a primary resto my feral-fu is abit rusty but I've been working to correct that recently.
The muru adds are lvl 71 and thus to reach arm cap and crit immune a feral druid would only need 33705 armor, and 2.2 anti-crit ( 129.5 def, 88 res ).
On our attempts we've had a few 'My swipe was dodged/missed/parried...' and someone(or 2) dies. Working to possible correct this and increase threat generation I looked at what could be done to stack some Exp and Hit.
For one feral it looked like he could get 106 exp and 72hit while staying crit immune and arm cap. Could probably increase this abit more but this would be all quick swap items like a resockets, new meta, and badge neck. This got hit around 40% dodge in Rawr vs a Sunwell Plat mob. (I didn't think they were DW so I left that off)
That seems a bit low for dodge, even if you were assuming they're effected by Sunwell Radiance (they aren't). It's been said in this thread as well as the general M'uru thread that the armor cap really isn't that crucial, and as long as you're uncrittable and have some minimum health, everything else should go towards avoidance. I was worried about missing swipe, but over the couple of weeks we've been working on it, what I've noticed is the only time it's an issue is when someone is standing too close to the rally point. When the mobs run in, they run to a certain spot, stop, then run off to kill people. If someone is standing close to that rally point and takes some sort of threat generating action (Drums, Battle Shout, Lifebloom have all been culprits for us), the Zerkers will happily gib them and move on. If you ask people to stand off of the rally point, and make sure that there's some sort of slowing (Earthbind or Frost Trap) debuff, you should have plenty of time to get off two swipes. The real danger is when they continue to move through you and get behind you (no dodge = dead bear). Backing up as they stop and spamming swipe, which has a huge range, has been very successful for us. But it's been rare that we lose a mob due to miss/dodge/parry.
Originally Posted by spencerthomas
Now this is a feral thread but any resto's trolling here and healed a druid stacking alot of dodge like mentioned above?
Right now we have 1 resto shaman chaining through the ferals with myself rolling love on pali tank, the big tank, and the 1 add tank. The second tank has a 2nd raid shaman helping out occasionally. Now even with a silly high dodge amount the same max rank spells are going to be cast becuase you do not want a shitty RNG to wipe the raid. So does the high dodge really 'help'?
The configuration we've settled on has two rogues and an enhancement shaman locking down the Fury Mage. I stun it as soon as the Rogue stuns are done, and if necessary, taunt it as soon as Bash wears off. I have a tree Druid basically solo healing me, he's also able to keep HoTs on the Sentinel and Spawn tanks with some assistance from the Resto Shaman who's on that side raid healing. HoTs and the occasional Swiftmend are pretty much ideal for the pattern of damage I take. Having done the same configuration without GoA, those last bits of dodge make a huge difference, according the feedback I was getting from healers.
For Sunwell main tanking, am I pretty much forced to give up on all of my delicate crimson spinels and replace them with solid empyrean sapphires? Or is there still any degree of hope for the dodge bear?
I ask because we've been making Kalecgos attempts for a while, and my #1 cause of death both in the trash and on Kalec/Sathrovarr is an unlucky no-dodge spree, especially with Sathrovarr's Corrupting Strike. Thank you very much, Sunwell Radiance. Everywhere I've looked says that for Kalec, and later Brutallus, I'm just plain going to need stamina much more than dodge. I don't have the money, the spare gear, or really the time to build two sets, either, so it'll have to be one or the other.
Not to mention if I regem for stamina that will mostly put an end to my usefulness as a cat, since my T6 gear is shared out.
Many avoidance-heavy bears will definitely see more survivability with stam gems while Sunwell Radiance is active, but team composition has a lot to do with this. Do you run with an affliction lock and commanding shout? This can go a long way in letting you keep agi gems in your tier, which I do think you would regret losing further down the road if you think you're only going to have one set. As a Tauren you have a little extra breathing room as well.
Depending what offsets are available you should still be able to exceed 24k buffed HP with agi-gemmed tier, in a lock/warrior team.
Edit: Some "easier" options for you if people in your guild are still building their first tier sets are a 2nd belt of natural power with stam gems, badge pants with stam gems, and perhaps even badge gloves with a stam gem. Looking at your gear these seem to be the only straightforward additions that require no extra tier.
08/02/08, 6:34 PM
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