Mijae

While it might count as a spell, it seems that at least most bosses treat it differently. This is especially true for any encounters that actually relies on taunt rotations. With fairly low hit rating I only recall one resisted so far, it was on Gluth. I can't imagine how bad a resist on 4 horsemen would be.

Feral DruidStats spreadsheet
v3.2.0.0.xls - updated 8/4/2009

 

Snarley

Raid buffed I now sit at around 44k hp in a full set of survival gear. At this point in the content and gear level I think the extra HP buff only helps instead of hinders. Giving the healers some leeway to heal the raid as needed or help in those critical situations where DPS is going to die without heals is a good thing. It also seems to put them at ease when they know they have a buffer on the main tank (or at least in my experience it seems to) for those unlucky rolls of the RNG. However this is also in a raid setting where I have a very reliable rogue always dumping tricks on me as well as reliable hunters MDing me.

That said, I can *definitely* feel the threat bar being raised when I 5 man heroics with my top DPS'ers (between 3k-3.5k). I wouldn't dream of going overboard and wearing my survival set for heroics and even the 30k-35k I do end up in with threat gear worn seems like to much survival sometimes.

So to all those asking or seeking a specific drop dead number of HP to reach before going all out avoidance I would say to use your gut. Are your healers lacking? Could they use that extra buffer to pickup the slack of a bad healer or a lack there of? Then help them and stack your HP pool to give them some breathing room in case you take some nasty hits. If you're constantly kept up by a badass healer who you can always rely on short of some bad RNG, then I would definitely stack more dps centric stats to help down encounters (and also reduce the need for overall healing stress).

Sidenote: I am sure the math gurus here and all the great minds will come to a conclusion of numbers where the scales will tip on paper. But don't forget to try and gauge how to maximize your effectiveness as a tank. Observe the players in your raid and optimize your gear to best help the weakness of your specific raid setup (no paper math can replace your ability to reason).

 

Blazefire

44k HP raid buffed? Thats about 8k more than I sit at and I haven't had a problem at all tanking anything including Patchwerk's Hateful Strikes. It seems like a bit on the overkill side. If you need that much of a buffer for your healers, either you are running too lite on healers or they need to pick up the slack.

Once I found a good health buffer (about 36k), I went with as much agi as I could get for dodge and crit/threat. You could probably taper down a fair bit on your stam and still be more than fine with surviability, but like you stated, I guess its really up to how comfortable you are with your healers.

 

effekt125

You want about 50k hp raid buffed if you want to maintank sartharion with 3 drakes up, so no. It isn't overkill

 

rhave

Killed sarth with 3 drakes up with 44k health. How did you get 50k with your gear?

 

◊ Abradix

50k would be with Polar Set, but yeah, around 45k-ish is good enough for Sarth+3.

 

effekt125

I have a separate gear set for stamina.
[Slag Footguards] stam gem, +22 stam enchant.
[Handwraps of Preserved History] +18stam attachment
[Bindings of the Tunneler] +12 stam enchant
[Essence of Gossamer]

^This is what I used to drastically increase my health pool. Our first time doing it I was at about 42k or so raid buffed(I remember seeing 44k, but this would mean that i would have over 31k hp with the debuff, and I didn't). When the encounter started the debuff brought me to 30900 hp or so. The encounter went on and we were doing fine, then the second add came down and delivered the 100% fire damage buff to sartharion, this resulted in flame breath hitting me for 31k (one shot).

My answer was to simply stack stam as mentioned, while changing a few of my already existing gems. I currently hit 49k in this set without flasking, this does not make use of the polar set. I maintank 31000 armor and about 36% dodge as well. I said 50k because having 33k hp when receiving a 31k hit is not appealing to me. 50k would give you about 38k WITH the debuff, giving healers more leeway during the fight

 

Taudark

I very much doubt the miss chance of growl is 17%. Without the glyph it has missed once or twice for me in Naxxramas.

 

Farias

Over stacking HP>avoidance makes you harder to heal rather than easier.

The more you dodge the less they have to heal and the less chance you have of taking multiple hits in a row, especially on Patchwerk, though if your in max gear with over 40% avoidance then it probably doesnt matter that much considering the hardest challenge is Sarathon with 3 drakes.

When Ulduar comes out though you might wanna change up your gear depending on the encounters.

 

Magdan

I'm wondering if you have a formula to reflect this. The formulas you posted have linear returns on armor mitigation but still have near exponential returns for agi.

 

Pharmacon

Your RNG doesn't make the miss chance on a spell not be 17%. I don't have a link but I do remember there being talk in the old WotLK Feral thread about it being 17%. There's also the possibility as mentioned above that fights that rely on taunts have different susceptibility to taunt than other bosses. That being said, in one fight on Gluth I missed about 4 times. But I also don't have the glyph or have much +hit on my tank set.

 

• Falk

Best part about this sentence is the post you quoted (mine) said I had >50k hp just for that purpose. As people pointed out, depending on your strat, 45k is plenty.

If you reread my post, this is exactly what I said, except I said TPS -and- avoidance. My point is that the the required TTL across everything WotLK has doesn't require more than 35-38k hp.

Try shaving off as many healers as you can on Patchwerk for achievements, and tell me which ends up being a better tank, 50-55% avoidance, 40k hp raid buffed, or 40-45% avoidance, 48k raid buffed. Notwitstanding the extra agility does add to a significant amount of extra armor (~500+ish?)

Edit: Re: taunts, I'm probably going to spam taunt every cooldown on bosses this run-though just to add some data points on resist rates. I know I've never seen a 4hm taunt resist, but other than Gluth that's the only boss in WotLK that people use taunt on, really. I suspect the majority of bosses in the instance would have more normal taunt resist rates.

 

sarf

Remember that there are few buffs/debuffs that effect physical hit, but there are some quite common that effect spell hit (or am I wrong - does IFF / shadowpriest increase physical hit chance too?) + you will have *some* hit. 17% is the maximum and you are quite unlikely to ever have that, so with some good rolls of the RNG you could definitely avoid Growl missing for a long time.

I personally thought the glyph was meant to completely remove the hit issue from Growl so as to allow you to bypass gearing for hit early on in your raiding experience.

Be like a child - greedy, self-centered and immune from prosecution.

 

Smartiepants

Regarding fighting Sarth + 3, I would say that stam is the most important stat there, coming as a healer turned tank since I can stam stack more than our normal tanks being as druids do not have to worry about the defense cap. Especially on large spikes (patches inc) I would say that generally healers should not be counting on avoidance, and with the amount of overheal on both fights, generally a moot point. Using stopcasting macros means some of the overhealing is avoided, but generally a lot of heals still land, regardless of if the attack is dodged.

 

Aym

Could we come to some conclution to this? Im having a real difficult time to decide to gem for agility or for stamina, and i have found nowhere that shows a definite answer to what would be best. I have 2800 in bear form from my 8x 24 stamina gems, and i can change these to agility for 3% more dodge. I simply dont know what will be most beneficial.

Example one:

35.700 health
35% dodge
500 DPS from boss

65 hits, 35 dodges
32500 damage / 325 DPS

Time till death:

35700 / 325 = 109,85 seconds

Example two:

32.900 health
38% dodge
500 DPS from boss

62 hits, 38 dodges
31000 damage / 310 DPS

Time till death:

32900 / 310 = 106,13 seconds

From this, i see that i will take less damage with more dodge, obviously, but i will still die faster than if i had more health. Ofcourse, it doesnt matter if your healers can keep you up, and its only a few seconds in difference in this instance. But what to go for?

The numbers above are my own unbuffed numbers, by the way. A major concern for me is also that getting more dodge instead of health, doesnt help against spellcasters. Granted, many bosses do just melee damage, but my time till dealth will be higher with dodge over stamina.

 

◊ Abradix

The conclusion has been reached a long time ago, find a point where your healers are comfortable with your health and then go for avoidance. In your example, you'll still have close to 45k health in the second example, which by itself is enough for anything the game throws at you right now. So personally I'd go for avoidance if I were you.

 

Aym

I should have added, perhaps, that we do 10 mans only. That means that im not guaranteed a fortitude and kings. Right now, if i have my own mark and a fortitude on, i will be at 39,5k hp. I suspect if i have mark + kings on, it will be somewhere about the same. But unfortunately, i cant assume that i will have all buffs available.

Thats my beef, really. If we are missing both kings and fortitude (heck, even imp buff), ill be sitting somewhere around 36,7k health raidbuffed with my current gear. That is, ofcourse, worst case scenario, but its likely that it will happen in our guild.

With a risk of that, is it really sensible to drop 2800 hp for 3% dodge?

 

• Falk

If it works, it works. If healers aren't going OOM due to any fault of theirs, or DPS isn't having a problem with being threat-capped, then there's no reason to lose stam for other considerations.

 

Blazefire

I've never been a really big fan of the "If its not broke, don't fixed it" mentality. Just because it works doesn't mean it can't be improved. If you can safely lose some HP for some dodge, its worth looking into. Alternatively, if you can pick up some DPS stats without sacrificing a safe amount of survivability, it would be worth looking into as well. There is nothing wrong with killing mobs faster to help healer mana either ;-)

 

• Falk

Well, yeah, if you check most of my other posts, that's exactly what I'm saying as well. I'd be wary of dropping below ~35k, though it really depends on your healers and raid makeup. (And of course, players)

 

Ambiorix

My understanding is that beacon of light does not "work" on overheal. It seems like this might make having one lower mitigation (but higher stam) tank more appealing in a multi-tank fight as a target of heal spam while another tank has beacon.

Also, it seems like a simulation ought to somehow take into account how "bad" the healers are about healing other targets than their assigned tank if their tank hasn't been taking too much damage recently. I know I've played with many healers who do this.

 

• sordee

Sarth tank gear question:
For the second trinket slot, as I don't have access to any profression trinkets, what would you use? Defender's Code or an old world 45/50 Stam trinket?

(Assuming [Essence of Gossamer] in first slot.)

 

kalbear

For right now? Defender's code. It really depends on how close you are to the edge of gibbing in that setup, but chances are that 650 health isn't going to make as big a difference on your survival as taking off a fair amount of damage from his swings.

When 3.0.8 happens it'll be a different story.

 

humbe

Anyone have an accurate formula for calculating dodge?..

I've been trying to model damage taken to get TTL ratings used to create pawn ratings and judge how good stats are compared to each other.. ( World of Warcraft - Evaluating druid tank gear )

But my dodge calculations seems to be a bit off.. Currently I try to calculate dodge as follows:

Chance to dodge = Naked dodge + FS bonus + NR bonus + Dodge Rating * Dodge per dodge rating + (Agility - Naked agility) * Dodge per agility + Defense * 0.04 - (Mob Level - Player Level) * 0.2

Using mob level as 80, I would expect to get paperdoll values shown in game, which I don't..

I know defense should be rounded down to closest number and not used in a fraction, but to calculate the average value of adding one to any stat, I don't do rounding, but even if I enable rounding, I don't get the dodge value I see in game.

Wowwiki lists druid base dodge as -1.87%, which makes me calculate way too low dodge. So I've tried to use the 7.04 % dodge I had totally naked with no talents, but then I calculated too much. I settled using 4.105 as naked dodge as that gave me correct value for the current gear I was testing with at some time.

 

kalbear

Are you incorporating the diminishing returns?