Bear Tanking - STA vs AGI
 

I'm aware this topic is a dead horse, and this thread is pretty much a stick with which I poke it, but after going through various gear sets in Rawr over the past few days, I was hoping to get some opinions on what people's own thresholds are for balancing these two stats. There are people that will stack agility, and people that will stack stamina. Then there are people that try to find that perfect balance between the two. Personally, I'm a stamina person. Why? I simply like the bragging rights of having a huge HP pool. It's fun for me, as long as my healers don't complain.

However, first and foremost... let it be said that Agility at the current attainable gear levels is in fact overall the better stat for tanking. The difference is so minimal though, that going either way won't make much difference (if any at all) in the long rung. To start, here are two examples of gearsets I've been playing around with in Rawr.

Best in slot gear per Rawr's "Overall" setting.

56% Dodge
94% / 1869 Savage Defense
42.6k HP
3.6k DPS
7.8k TPS

Best in slot gear per custom setting ("Overall" setting, set to show top 5 gemmings for each item, and choosing the highest item on the list using a STA gem)

49% Dodge
89% / 1867 Savage Defense
56.5k HP
3.5k DPS
7.6k TPS

Now, the first thing that stands out to me is the threat. Why? Because in my current Stamina set (pre-Ulduar) I have trouble holding threat on certain fights, such as Maly, Loatheb, etc., and also vs Ulduar-geared DPS. However, at the T8.5 level of gear threat and DPS are about the same regardless of the way you choose to gear, making this a non-issue.

The second thing that stands out (probably moreso to people not worried about threat) is the tradeoff between Dodge and Hitpoints. The Stamina build has a whopping 14k more HP, at a loss of only 7% Dodge. By this, you can roughly assume that 1% Dodge = 2,000 HP if you wanted to swap around a few items and fine tune those numbers a bit (i.e., could probably swap around to get say 52% Dodge and 50k HP.) Now, this same itemization pre-Ulduar put 1% Dodge at about 1,000 HP (based on doing these same gearsets before most Ulduar loot was added to Rawr. v2.2.2 I believe.)

Based on this, it seems we're hitting the point in gear where the value of Stamina is increasing much more than the value of Agility (most likely due to DR on Dodge, but it also appears a lot of the Ulduar gear has very high levels of STA). With that in mind, I now would like to ask a few questions.

Would people that stack Agility consider switching some of their avoidance into EH, if the rate of transfer was around 1% <> 2,000HP? And would the people that currently balance or stack Stamina continue to do so, or do they feel that Agility is becoming more important with Stamina easier to attain?

And most importantly, what direction do you feel Druid tanking will be heading with the upcoming 3.2 patch? We can already come within 6k armor of the armor cap, and pushing over 60% avoidance. According to Rawr, we're already at close to 93% total mitigation... do you feel Blizzard will push us more towards Stamina (if they aren't already) in order to avoid overly high avoidance and mitigation rates as seen in Sunwell?

If this topic is frowned upon by mods, please delete. Otherwise, I just want personal opinions based on theorycrafting and/or personal experience as to the direction you think Druid tanking is going, and perhaps even where it currently might be in terms of the value between Stamina and Agility.

Loatheb threat, was that a joke?

Anyways, you should also consider that the stam build should have more consistent TPS... due to a lower chance of stringing avoidance at the beginning of the fight.

Overall the stam vs agi question really depends on fight, but in general I'd probably aim to be around 45k HP, a tad over the softcap I have seen to take 2 hits without a heal.

I think that this discussion is relevant primarily because of the reasons you've stated... we're getting dangerously close to a need for another Sunwell Radiance type debuff in Icecrown to keep us from being too close to all of our caps.

One thing to keep in mind is that the Agi/Stam debate is entirely dependant on each individual fight. Looking at BiS gear is all right when looking forward to Icecrown, but when discussing current content, it's largely irrelevant. If you're in all BiS gear, then you probably aren't going to have a hard enough time with any encounters and the Agi/Stam debate is largely worthless.

When it comes to my personal gear choice, I try to have both Stam and Agi gear available in my bags. I tend to focus on Agility for my better pieces of gear since I'm an off-tank and use those same pieces to DPS on half the fights in Ulduar. I definitely keep second pieces of T8.5 gemmed/enchanted for heavy Stamina in my bags as well, and even the full Polar set, for when a specific fight would require a larger health pool.

For some quick examples, I stack full Stamina+Polar gear for Thorim hard mode. The Unbalancing Strikes and possible crits easily put you in 1-2 shottable range without it. The polar gear is acceptable to me because of number of frost attacks it helps to mitigate from Sif. The loss of avoidance is easily made up for by the resists. Threat is not an issue on Thorim. Hodir, on the other hand, benefits from high Stam and frost resist, but threat can be a huge issue on that fight.

On the other side, stacking purely Stam on bosses that don't hit particularly hard, like XT-002, can be a bit of a waste. You will still want to be at a "soft cap" on Stamina, to the point where healers don't feel like they're constantly bringing you back from the brink of death. 55k HP would be a bit overkill for that fight though.

To sum it up... gear for your progression. Get an idea of how hard the boss is going to hit you for, and put a healthy buffer on that for your health pool. Check with your healers, since a lot of it is going to depend on your healer class composition and their own personal healing styles. If they feel like they are dumping heals into you, but you never spike too low, maybe swap out some Stam for Agi. If they feel like your damage is too spiky and they're constantly saving you, throw in some Stam.

Rawr has some excellent options to apply these "soft caps" to Stamina in the tanking module. Learn to use them and try to keep a good variety of gear on you at all times to fit each unique situation.

Sorry, not Loatheb. I didn't sleep last night :)

As far as soft capping, I keep hearing about how hard mode bosses and whatnot hit for 25k+ a hit. Wouldn't anything under 50k EH be under capped for those? I would assume that 3.2 raid content would require even harder hitting bosses, thus valuing Stamina even more for those bosses.

Some hard mode bosses definitely hit hard enough that you HAVE to stack Stamina to survive. If you are main tank for your guild, and progressing through hard modes, Stamina is your best safety stat. Trying to learn a boss fight while your tank is getting 1 or 2 shot is definitely not easy. If you get to the point where you aren't in danger, but your healers are going OOM, you can drop Stam for some more avoidance/mitigation.

How do you feel this will translate into 3.2 raiding? As mentioned before, we're getting close to the issues of Sunwell, and it seems to me that hard modes have given Blizzard the perfect band-aid fix to that problem; forcing Stamina stacking. Granted, as you also mentioned this can be somewhat devalued once you're "farming" content, but that obviously will not be the case with guilds trying to progress through the 3.2 raid, and future Icecrown Citadel as well.

Something else I think that should be noted is that with Rogues and Druids sharing gear, and Kitty/Bear sharing a lot of gear as well, Blizzard is somewhat forced to load up AGI on gear in order to progress Rogue and Kitty DPS (alternatives being massive AP and/or Crit Rating on gear). Due to this gear sharing, it's safe to assume that Bear avoidance will naturally increase a fair amount, and given how close we are to the Sunwell situation, I can't imagine Blizzard allocating much item budget to AGI/Dodge on more tanking-focused items like Rings, Necks, Cloaks. Without completely screwing over Druids by increasing Parry, Shield Block, etc they would need to increase the Stamina on these items.

Anyway you look at it, it appears that Stamina will see a large increase in usefulness, or gear will progress as it is and we will receive some form of band-aid "fix" to overly high avoidance levels.

From watching recent blue posts, there are two areas that Blizzard seems ready to make some tweaks on that both relate to this. First, they are not quite satisfied with Block as a mechanic. Any changes to this MAY roll over into Savage Defenses, and we may see an increase in usefulness in Crit/AP as a tanking stat. This would allow us to spread out our itemization a little bit more. This was one of the intentions of Savage Defense originally, but the effective return on Crit/AP as a tanking stat on hard modes is virtually nothing.

The other change we are already seeing parts of is with healers. Here's a recent post from GC:

With the idea that tank avoidance needs to come down, we're looking at either a core mechanic change (i.e. Agi->Dodge ratio or a steeper curve on diminishing returns) or a sharp change of direction on itemization. Without retro changes on previous tiers of gear, the change in itemization would probably leave us still using Ulduar gear in 3.2 and even beyond. Whichever way it's done, a drop in tank avoidance will push all tanks towards Stamina as the go-to stat. This reduces the "gib" factor that the developers aren't happy with, and also allows healers to be more conscientious of their heals. Having mana-sponge tanks and healers that could go OOM if they bomb their highest-output spell could definitely make healing a bit less of a power spell spam-fest, and I think that's probably the direction they'll start pushing. I also wouldn't be surprised if we DID see some form of "Sunwell Radiance" implemented in Icecrown, if not in the 3.2 instance.

Note that GC stated that tank avoidance would come down "along with many other long term changes" - the implication that avoidance won't be coming down in this expansion.

While stamina is key, it doesn't have to be. For instance, if there is no real danger for a tank of dying in 4-5 hits (or 8 seconds or so) or less, stamina is much less valuable. If mana is an issue or if the amount of healing is an issue, stamina is less valuable. We've seen fights like this already in Ulduar; there's no reason to believe that this can't be emphasized in the future as well.

In any case, the primary reason I'd emphasize stamina over agility for bears now is simple: stamina is by far the best-scaling stat that druids have right now. Instead of being a balanced tank, you might as well just go for the full-on unbalanced and OP HP tank. If you need threat, swap out some of your cat gear. If you need avoidance, you're probably looking at a fight like Vezax anyway, and because of your cooldowns and abilities you might as well go to another tank.

But at those dodge levels, losing 7% dodge increases your damage taken by nearly 16% (15.9%, to be precise). While you're increasing your hit points, for soaking that damage, by 32.6%, and so you're clearly increasing your survivability, you're also draining your healers' mana significantly faster.

I use an avoidance-focused build rather than a HP-focused build. The guild I was raiding Ulduar with last night had far more problems running OOM than they did with me dying to multiple hits. In fact, there were several times during the night when the healers got busy healing raid damage, were reminded over Vent that they still needed to heal me, switched back to me, and landed heals on me--and I was still alive for the heals to land. Some of that is wise use of cooldowns on my part, but a bigger part is that I simply wasn't dying very fast.

But if I'd sacrificed that 15% or so of avoidance for hit points, there's no way their mana would have held up through the fight.

This may just indicate that our healers need better gear, or our DPS need better gear, so that mana lasts longer or fights are shorter. But I'm fairly confident that once you're well above the two-hit soft-cap for a fight, AGI is the right course, regardless of how tasty the high hit point numbers are.

P.S. I've been trying to figure out how to modify Rawr to (for example) ignore threat when ranking gear, and just give me the avoidance/mitigation ranking. Can someone point me at a resource for that?

The easiest thing to do is to go to options, pick 'threat value', choose none. That should do what you want it to.

This is a bit fallacious. Using bigger heals on you is not always the worst thing that can happen, and often has better synergy and can be more mana efficient. It's really impossible to say given one anecdotal experience whether their mana would or wouldn't have held up, but in general you're right - avoidance saves a healer mana. Whether that's important for any given fight or not is really up to your raid.

That being said, trading 7% dodge for almost 14k health is a pretty easy trade most of the time, as long as that health is useful. It wasn't in Naxx, for instance.

I think if it comes in the next xpac it will be partially solved by a harder gear reset. Letting Sunwell gear be valid for Naxx set the bar too high for just about all relevant stats.

Another option is "filling out" the Icecrown gear with more threat stats and implementing a lot more of the gimmick style dps buffs in encounters. Ulduar has already set a pretty decent precedence for this. A fight that combines the kind of hits you take in Thorim Hard mode with the crazy raid spikes in threat you see on Hodir would be pretty intense. This allows for small vertical growth, but pretty decent horizontal growth as far as our gear ceilings go.

Fascinating point--thank you! Yes, it did seem that they went a little far in letting pre-expansion gear advantage you into the new expansion. In TBC, as I recall, BWL-level gear started getting replaced around level 67/68, and by level 70, even pre-Heroics, you'd replaces pretty much anything you entered TBC with.

Then again, TBC Heroics were seriously difficult, even with top pre-Heroic gear. While I don't particularly want to go back to the days when taking a Mage along was mandatory for completing a Heroic, the current "AOE everything down" non-challenge Heroics (and, to a lesser extent, the easy-mode that is Naxx raiding) really do reduce the degree to which Blizzard can afford to give significant upgrades from those tiers of content.

A lot of people seem to neglect every thing agility adds for us, Agility adds armor the more armor the less dmg we take it does add up, increases our SD up time, SD does negate a good 2k per absorb with raid buffs.

So really Agility value is higher than 1% Dodge=2000 hp, preferably you want to try and balance the 2 stats, Agility as the main, and stam when the total stam gained is worth the minor loss of agility, usually I work with a 3:1 ratio (3 Stam per 1 Agility.) of when to stack Stam>Agility.

I think when they add new gear and epic gems then it will start to make a difference on the scale of Agility to Stam.

I am usually the cat in the raid, but on fights like Iron Council, Hodir, Thorim and Vezaxs. The healers and tanks ask me to take the MT spot. Our Warrior tank is sitting at round about 41-43k HP but still Vezax is two shotting him, so we decided to take it on with me in the tank spot. I am at 50k HP and I try to maintain this level by causiously upgrading my gear around the Polar stuff and may be replaceing it when enough Stamina is collected via the other items. I am above 40% dodge so everything I am adding is dodge while I try to not loose the Stamina.