• Snowy

It's not quite a myth for us. There's occasionally a healer or two (usually a paladin) who will queue up max rank heals and cancel. Usually there are HoTs on said tank and another paladin spamming FoL, for example. More avoidance means that paladin cancels more heals, and then lets that big fat heal land when a spike happens, smoothing the gap. I know we definitely do this at Mother Shahraz, as one example, and I think in general there's one healer on the MT who is following that philosophy.

But that just may be the way it plays out for our guild, and certainly may not be the case for other guilds.

Paladin: Pyla
Mage: Pylah

 

Gunn

Did you guys read my whole post or just pick out the part you wanted to second guess me on?

I am the one who gets the healing aggro and the birds come straight for me. When they get there I consecrate and hold aggro easily. Why have another pally do what a protection pally can do just fine. We use the same strat for the Morogrim fight and it works splendidly.

My point is Healing Aggro NEVER misses and AS can miss. for fights such as Al'ar and Morogrim it's the tankadins best strat for adds.

 

Denogran

Grrr, you keep missing the point. If you're in full tanking gear (pally or warrior), with anywhere under 500 spell damage, healing will A) suck your mana like there's no tomorrow and B) have a chance to actually be out-healed by a priest or druid throwing big heals around. You make up for this by taking more damage - but all this does is throw the burden onto your healers, and means if a healer or two dies because they mess up you're toast.

Avenger's Shield + Righteous Defense + Misdirect mean that if you're missing those mobs you're really screwing up. If you run with a hunter, have them save MD for an o-shit situation where you couldn't grab them. AS and RD used to be a lot more unreliable, but with the changes to precision and taunt mechanics, they're pretty good nowadays.

Listen, I'm glad it works for you, and if it does and everyone in your guild is ok with it then more power to you. I can't recommend this strategy to any new paladin tank looking to off-tank on Al'ar that comes reading this thread. Your strat requires extreme mana-use, cooperative and very competent healers, a helpful 'lock(having a lock life-tap on your schedule will reduce the effectiveness of their dps cycles as well, but if they're relatively competent it won't be by a ton), and a collection of high damage gear.

My strategy requires a semi-competent healer, and an occasional emergency misdirect( assuming precision, your shield and righteous defense have ~6% chance to miss. That means there is a less than 1% chance that both miss either of the two adds that are up ). It just makes the fight a lot more stable. The incoming damage is less, taxing your healers a lot less. You don't need a pocket warlock and they don't need to watch out for you. You're wearing tank gear, so a bad bunch of spikes (or even back to back explosions) won't mean certain death.

As for Tidewalker, healing aggro is your only strat due to the number of mobs, and the fact that they hit decently hard. You can't shield + Righteous Defense more than 6, and you really can't afford for them to be beating on a clothie for even a second. So you're forced to go to a highly mana inefficient scheme in order to draw aggro. I hated that fight when I first started, because I was forced to chug mana pots the whole time to keep up. Al'ar only has 2 adds though, and our tanking tools are designed extremely well to handle that.

 

Tilted

I see this brought up a lot in the effective HP vs. avoidance discussions. I don't feel that it's a myth at all. The thought that your healers don't stop healing you implies that your priests do nothing but spam GHeals all day with the occasional renew or PoM, or that your paladins blindly mash their FoL buttons 'til they're blue in the face. Quite frankly, that's bad healing. The concept of priest cancel-cast GHeals to sustain a fight accomplishes two things: it allows the heals that do land the ability to greatly reduce the risk of tank death from damage spikes when (not if) they do happen, and it allows them to get out of the FSR on occasion to substantially increase their mana regen. Paladin healers can be more reactive, and break out their top rank Holy Light when they know a GHeal won't be enough. There are tons more healing synergies than just this, but it's an example of how smart healing and teamwork can play to your avoidance and use it as a method of sustaining healer mana bars.

Ultimately, healers need to know that 40+% of the attacks that come your way will miss. Streaks will happen, both good and bad. If your healers are falling asleep at the wheel just mashing 1 or 2 buttons repeatedly, that's a flaw in your healing strategy that should be fixed.

On a side note, I've seen a lot of strat writeups that say certain fights need more healers than they really do (i.e. Morogrim "needs" 9-10 healers, and we usually kill him with 7). The sloppy healing I described above combined with screwups leading to more raid healing is most likely why people think more healers are needed than what you can truly get by with. Tanks and DPS are required to do their homework to become the best, most efficient machines they can be... Why not healers as well?

 

◊ Cathela

I picked out the part that I wanted to comment on. Doing so shouldn't be construed as a personal attack on you or your tactic, so please calm down.

And my point is that if you have a modest amount of +hit (i.e., Precision), the chances of both RD and AS missing is close enough to zero to make no difference, and even if they do both miss you can minimize the downside by having another paladin be the one who gets aggro anyway. Since you do presumably need a healer while you're tanking the things, why not just use that healer as the aggro magnet? The holy paladin can heal more efficiently, and thereby generate far more healing threat than you can. When the adds get to you, a ~150 mana RD gets you all of that healing threat without you having to spend a ton of mana doing the healing yourself.

And if you use AS, that's going to generate a ton more threat than healing. What do your heals land for when you're wearing tanking gear? Perhaps 3k each? Paladin heals by default generate 25% of the healing value in threat, so at base you're generating 750 threat. Multiply that by Improved RF and it's 1425 threat. Unfortunately, healing threat gets split among all mobs in range; since this typically includes Al'ar plus two embers, you're only generating 475 threat on each ember. Meanwhile a simple non-crit AS would easily generate 1k threat on each ember. It also casts faster and costs less mana.

Healing aggro works great on Morogrim, because there are far too many targets to pick up by other means. But for a 2-3 mob situation, AS is far better.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

◊ Cathela

Sure, smart healers are cancelling instead of blindly spamming. But there's still a substantial difference between getting hit for, say, 1/3 of your health on a fairly regular basis, and getting hit for 1/2 of your health on a much less regular basis. The second case is much more stressful for the healers, even if the overall damage taken is lower. Once a healer cancels a heal and then sees your health take a sharp dive immediately after cancelling, he's going to start second-guessing his cancels every time and go into "shit, I'd better let this one land just in case" mode.

Look at the difference between a feral druid and a prot warrior on a high-damage boss like Morogrim or Azgalor. The prot warrior takes less damage overall, but healers will consistently tell you that the feral is easier to heal because the damage is much more regular.

[quote[On a side note, I've seen a lot of strat writeups that say certain fights need more healers than they really do (i.e. Morogrim "needs" 9-10 healers, and we usually kill him with 7).[/quote]
Who the hell ever said Morogrim needed 10 healers?

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

kalbear

And if that's the difference you're talking about in avoidance vs. mitigation, that's fine. I don't know of too many bosses that you can actually stack enough mitigation to make that 1/3rd vs. 1/2 health of a difference. I think that you're overstating how avoidance and mitigation really compare to each other.

I'm starting to look at it more as an overall benefit than anything else based on average damage stopped. For instance, on a mob that hits for 5000, 1% avoidance will effectively be equivalent to 50 mitigated damage. It certainly is better to do 50 mitigated damage on every hit instead of prevent one hit and take 99 others, I agree, but then the question becomes how much better is it? Even if you say that the equivalent avoidance is worth only half that mitigation, we're talking 1% avoidance vs 25 mitigation, and that's somewhat hard to come by as it relates to gear; the itemization costs of block value are too high relative to dodge, and it's not as common to begin with.

So no, I don't think avoidance is better than mitigation after a certain point, but I think you can reasonably find an equivalence that allows you to compare gear and make a reasonable decision, especially based on the encounter. And as the above indicates, bosses that physically hit for less make mitigation more valuable on a per-point basis. Bosses that hit for more make avoidance more valuable on a per-point basis.

 

Foofu

Honestly I don't even think the prot paladin doing the healing aggro is a good strat for everyone. We use holy paladins to pull them in. I AS and taunt, and they survive consistently (we've never wiped due to losing a holy paladin) with only a little extra HP gear. (Our better one doesn't even use HP/PvP gear, she just has that nice of gear).

This has 2 major advantages.

1.) It's almost impossible for the other healers to out aggro the top geared holy paladins (which is a real concern for our guild, we would be wiping every week if we had to rely on our slower healers remembering not to heal while the murlocks were out and not in cons).

2.) This also lets me put up a consecration 5 seconds early, so even if I do get graved I get most of the murlocks running to me, instead of mobbing a healer. I've been graved on most of our kills and it has never been an issue.

 

Denogran

Well on TW there's no reason not to heal - I just go for the warlocks and can usually get aggro after 2 heals. But I do have the other paladins stand with me just in case. Like I said, you don't want the murlocs hitting a clothie (or even leather or mail really). But if they hit a holy pally once or twice before my consecrate gets their attention, that's certainly not the end of the world. But if you're not healing, you're just standing there looking pretty. Might as well get as much aggro on them as possible, even if that only means you pull them off your pally healer friend 1 second earlier.

(Using Cathela's math from earlier, and assuming your holy friends heal 3 times what you do, they're gaining ~150-200 threat per mob per heal, while you're much closer to ~100. So with 2 heals by them, and none by you, you're ~350 threat in the hole, or around 2-4 consecrate ticks to pull aggro. If you heal as well, you're only ~150 threat in the hole, or 1-2 ticks to pull aggro.)

 

◊ Cathela

I'm exaggerating for effect, sure. The point is that while people cite avoidance gains as benefitting healer endurance, mitigation does so as well.

1% dodge is 18.9 dodge rating; a point of block value only costs 0.65 item points, so 1% dodge is worth roughly 29 block value, which I don't think is very shabby at all. And that's 29 block value as listed on the item; Shield Spec makes it 38 block value per 1% dodge. And I haven't found block value very hard to get, at least at the T5-6 level.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

JulianMaiev

This is obvious, but BV also scales insanely as the packets of incoming melee damage get smaller (and conversely is worse when they're bigger).

Ardent Defender has essentially the same scaling characteristics, and the interaction is *very* powerful.

That said, it's against really hard-hitting mobs that you're in the most danger of getting bursted down, and the way to keep that from happening is to stack hard mitigation stats like armor/sta/BV.

 

Gunn

I did not think you were personally attacking me, I felt you were second guessing my threat generation without taking into account that I would be the person healing.

With RF active +some spell damage gear which also helps me hold threat it is nearly impossible (if not downright impossible, without someone purposely trying to take aggro from me) for me not to have more threat on add's then anyone else. 2 big heals and the adds are mine, i throw up some FoL until they get to me and consecrate. Also of course all other healers have Blessing of Salvation on, so my heals are easily generating more threat then theirs.


As many people have stated most Protect have multiple gear they wear for certain encounters. For Al'ar I use less protection without losing stamina and add more +spell damage.

I suggest watching the video I posted to see how well it works and perhaps you will see how easily the adds come.

I am not questioning that having a Holy pally get the aggro for me, and then I take it away, is not also a valid way to do this, I'm merely suggesting that this is perhaps the best way to utilize protection paladin goodness on the Al'ar fight. If you can do it with 10 murlocs on Morogrim, you can easily do the same with 2 adds on Al'ar. The heals from other folks easily get my mana back to sufficient amounts without me going mana pot crazy.

 

Remraf

Has there been math done on the exact equivalency points (like a rogue's AEP) for certain stats? I see in the first post you compare the mitagtion points to 1% to uncrushable, but what about things like stamina, intellect, mp/5, and spell damage?

I'm looking for something I can use with the Pawn addon, which assigns a certain point value to each stat, and then adds it up - it's an easy and fast way to tell what gear is best. I believe there's a mod called 'tank points' or something, that's similar.

From the OP I divided 1 by each of the values needed to get 1%, and then multiplied by 10 so they're a bit bigger than hundreths of a point (so something with a block value of 18 is seen as more than .03 higher than a value of 15)

BlockRating=1.26
DefenseRating=0.6
DodgeRating=0.5
ParryRating=0.4
Agility=0.4

Now, who's done the math that says 'X' stamina will increase your survival as much as 'Y' armor? Where do I rate Stamina, ArmorRating, SpellDamage, Intellect, MP/5, etc? I'd like to know, for example, at what point does higher armor become better than the defense on an item. Should I drop 22 defense for 15 block rating? Etc.

I've searched this thread, I didn't see anything under 'pawn string', 'tank points' or 'equivalency points'...

I understand that we're stacking to a goal, and the closer you get to said goal, the less a certain is important. However, just as a general guideline...

 

galzohar

Defense, dodge and parry don't do anything for your burst survivability, as "burst" by definition is "a string of hard hits during a short period of time", which means none were dodged/parried/misses. Granted more avoidance will reduce how often it happens, but not affect your ability to survive it. Eventually it's generally agreed on that what decides if you live through the fight or not is your stamina/armor/block value, since these DO affect how much burst you're able to take before you die. Stamina works always, however armor/block value's effect depends. Armor depends on what portion of the burst is magical, and block value depends on how many blockable attacks the burst included. Figure these out and you can find armor->stamina and block value->stamina conversion values based on your current stats and definition of "burst" for the fight you're tanking.

For example if "burst" means 2 normal attacks and a magical instant attack, 1 block value (after talents...) equals 2 HP, 1 stamina 10 HP.

With 15k HP somewhere around 12-13k armor, 1200-1300 more armor will give about 1500 more HP equivalent against non-magic attacks. If your burst dmg taken is 2/3 physical, it would give 1000 HP equivalence. (see protection warrior thread for accurate values, as well as other threads around discussing armor).

Of course these are just very specific examples to show you how to actually calculate the stat values when you actually know what boss you're fighting against and what kind of burst you're trying to survive.


avoidance and mana conservation
While dodging more will generally result in more heals being canceled and more mana saved, this isn't a straight up conversion. For example a 50% avoidance tank will take quite a lot more than 1/2 the healing of a 0% avoidance tank. This is based on the fact that not all heals can be canceled in time and sometimes you just have to let them fly due to latency, minimum human reaction time, and any other reason I hadn't thought about.
In addition, when you take 1 big hit and the next will come before the heal lands, the healers will assume it will land and cast an appropriate size heal - and overheal if you dodge because they don't want to risk a tank death by canceling a heal when the tank isn't full HP.
All of these factors and any other I didn't think about greatly reduce the value of avoidance for saving healers mana, however obviously more avoidance = more healer mana. It's just not nearly as much as you think.

On top of avoidance not being a major mana saver for healers, increasing HP also helps healers save mana... The bigger buffer you have the bigger choice healers have for which heals to use and suddenly they will be able to cancel the heal from the above example because they don't really have to keep you 100% anymore. So more stamina also results in more healer mana, which makes me wonder why ever gear for avoidance to save healer's mana, when stamina both saves healer mana and makes you able to survive fights better. While math needs to be done about it, I can bet stamina will give at least similar values to avoidance in terms of healer mana saved in a fight.

So since healer mana is not an issue, and avoidance is very possibly not even saving healer mana more than stamina/armor/BV do, and eventually you will encounter a situation in which higher stamina/armor/BV could've saved you for sure while additional avoidance would only maybe save you, why bother discussing avoidance over just stacking the stats that actually matter?


Short version:
While avoidance saves healer mana, it doesn't save as much as the % number says, as well as stamina/armor/BV saving healer mana as well both via dmg reduction and via higher buffer.
Avoidance will eventually fail. Stamina will never fail, armor will never fail against physical non-bleed damage and block value will never fail against any realistic melee boss.
While you may be able to figure out how much avoidance is as useful as how much burst survivability, you'll probably get some crazy values that will require a LOT of avoidance to make up for very little stamina/armor/mitigation loss, and even that would have to assume your healers are capable of running oom due to tank damage taken.

 

JulianMaiev

To my mind, avoidance as a mechanism to save healer mana is a pretty unpersuasive argument. Healers don't go OOM anyway, and if they are you give them a SP; plus, it's *very* hard to measure how successful cast-cancelling actually is, which makes me distrust it.

However, the big thing that avoidance does is reduce the impact of healer error. Healer casts FoL when they should have gone for the home-run HL? Avoidance might save you. Healer out of position or healing another target? Avoidance might save you.

And that's valuable, too, especially if you don't trust your healers or if there are other stresses in the fight that might interfere with their ability to heal you like movement or a silence or whatever.

 

galzohar

That's the thing about avoidance. It *might* save you. Stam will definitely save you if you get enough of it. The way I see things now, unless you have so much HP that the only death would be some extreme "boss won the loterry and parried 3 times right as he used a special attack" or pure healer slack, I wouldn't be looking at avoidance.

 

◊ Cathela

And to be blunt, I'm telling you it's not the best way. Avenger's Shield is simply a cheaper, faster, and stronger way to build threat on two mobs than healing.

You may be getting enough mana back from SA to make up the difference, but if that's the case you could be wearing much better mitigation gear and using AS/RD to grab the adds, making things easier for your healers.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

JulianMaiev

It's *much* more expensive to stack enough stamina to take another hit, in many cases, than it is to accept a % failure rate contingent on a bunch of other things going wrong. Maybe your healers are on the ball 90% of the time; it's only 10% of the time that you need one "lucky" dodge/parry/miss out of 2-3 attacks to make you survive.

Avoidance is not without value. You are absolutely correct that it isn't reliable in all cases, and also stamina has incredible scaling for us due to our +16% sta talents and AD, but given that we are much less vulnerable to having our aggro/shield block screwed by an unlucky evasion streak than a warrior tank is I think it's a bad idea to slavishly avoid avoidance in all cases. Dodge and parry do have value over and above attaining uncrushability.

 

Eir

At the amount they cost, I would gladly trade a ton of avoidance for mitigation. Unfortunately, that's not really a choice we get to make often. I have a ton of avoidance now(56% pure avoidance) and it's pretty striking how much less damage I take than when I only had 35 to 40% avoidance. Not something I aim for, but you'd be crazy to think so much additional avoidance isn't noticeable by my healers.

So, in short, mitigation > avoidance, but healers spamming doesn't make avoidance worthless, either.

Now Stamina vs. mitigation/avoidance is a more interesting decision. Quite frankly, I wear 2 Stamina trinkets instead of Stamina + Autoblocker or Stamina + avoidance trinket for the hp epeen value. That and the fact that it doesn't really matter what I wear at this gear level. :P

 

Tilted

This discussion is really the only discussion worth looking at for non-druid tanks, since warriors and paladins don't have near the flexibility of trading armor for avoidance. The more I look at the numbers, the more I look to push my effective HP as high as I can while keeping the risk of taking a crushing blow low (I've stopped trying to be crush-immune in favor of more stamina). There are a number of reasons for this:

* At 12.6 HP per point of stamina, this is one stat that scales extremely well.

* Burst damage isn't near the threat it could be (yeah, yeah, beat to death already, but including for completeness).

* Max HP is our only true defense against attacks that ignore armor (elemental attacks, bleeds, etc), short of the occasional resist-based fight.

* LoH scales with your stamina.

* Though not really a tangible benefit, your max HP is the only defensive stat that can be seen by your raid members, leading to a positive psychological effect on your healers.

* While you technically do take more damage than an avoidance-based tank, healing input will be similar as discussed earlier, and this leads to more mana for you to dump into threat generation.

* And probably most important is the fact that Ardent Defender's usefulness grows with your max HP.

This last point is something I've been looking at a lot lately. Specifically, the amount of incoming damage needed to completely leapfrog AD is much smaller than people might realize. The equation works out to be Max Health * 35% / (Normal Damage + (70% * Normal Damage)) = 0.35MH / 1.7D, or D = 0.206MH. So if your target(s) hits for less than 20.6% of your max health or less, AD guarantees that you'll take at least one extra hit before dying. The less you get hit for in comparison to your max health, the more AD does for you. Stacking stamina is an easy way to make AD more useful.

Another thing to look at is the effectiveness of block value with AD active. Though I haven't actually parsed any logs to truly prove this, it appears that the 30% reduction in damage taken is applied before the damage reduction from blocking (if anyone has proof that this is incorrect, let me know and I'll delete this). What this means is AD's effectiveness skyrockets against lesser-hitting targets. Take murlocs on TW for example that hit for around 700 or so normally, and assume a block value of 400 just for argument's sake. When you're above 35%, each blocked attack lands for 300 damage, but when you're below 35% that value drops to 90 damage -- a 70% reduction in damage taken per hit. That is a massive difference, and it allows your healers a lot more leeway when they need to pop their oh-shit buttons to get you back up to full.

 

galzohar

You don't block all attacks when AOE tanking though, do you?

 

Tilted

No, but even if you block half of the attacks that land, you're still looking at a substantial boost to your survivability while AD is active.

 

Maccam

I think... because they have only two charges on their shield before crushing blows can occur... warriors tend to stack more avoidance than we do - they try to push as many shield blocks off the table as they can.

I know I don't have an ongoing issue with crushing blows, I know I don't mind getting hit as the mana is appreciated for casting as long as its in sustainable chunks. I tend to tweak my boss-tanking gear towards more hit points as soon as my defense or avoidance starts to climb much over the 490 defence and uncrushable levels.

Given this kind of environment... I suspect pali's will soon be known for having more hit points than warriors, while warriors are known for needing less healing.

As someone who spent a lot of time on his priest healing... I also tend to prefer tanks with large stamina pools over high avoidance numbers when it comes time for boss tanking (though on mobs - which a warrior doesn't do well anyway - high avoidance is better). It let me have more margin for error and lets me use the biggger, more efficient heals. It's much easier and much less stressful if as a healer you can have a rhythm to your healing, vs. living constantly on the edge of terror as you weigh the opportunity costs of wasted mana (and a wipe later?) vs. an immediate wipe; large stamina pools help a lot in this respect.

I really do wish there was a way to choose to gear for more armor. Right now the [Glove Reinforcements] and Improved devotion aura are about the only real decision I can make to favour armor.

 

Gunn

I was going to post about this before and it seems relevant to do so now.

Avoidance and the best for paladin tanks in following order

1. Block Rating - increase chance to block a physical attack. Everytime you block you do much more threat generation then any other stat. Also Paladins are blocking machines with imp. holy shield and redoubt. I believe they block more than any tanking class for any type of physical damage mob.
   
   I can not get over that the more often we bock, the more we block for, the better we are at tanking. also Itemization in block rating gives us a much better ratio to our avoidance stats which give us more chances to add to Stamina, then defense.
   
   Blessing of sanctuary requires a Block to deal holy damage against attacker
   
   Holy shield + redoubt= Both buffs combined equal a 60% increased block chance. More blocking
   
   The other avoidance stats
2. dodge - will give us a greater chance to "dodge" an attack and thusly gives us no threat generation. However, it may give the healer a temporary break.
   
3. Parry - increases threat by hitting back on targeted mob, however no passive threat generation from missing

However by looking at trinkets that add Block Rating, you'll find they're all of 3 and 2 of them are lvl 60.
So I'm guessing we need to get our blocking from other pieces for tanking on bosses.

Multi-mob Paladin trinkets
Figurine of the Colossus

Darkmoon Card: Vengeance

Boss tanking trinkets
Moroes' Lucky Pocket Watch
- Some disagree with this choice, but I find myself virtually unhittable when I "use" this trinket.

Darkmoon Card: Vengeance +51 stamina and Chance when hit gain more threat. This is most likely best for paladins who can hit avoidance and defense caps and just need more HP.

Now for both multi-mob and boss trinkets Gnomeregan auto-blocker 2000
is effectively giving a Paladin an additional damage reduction of 157 and when used that's another 600 reduction in damage. each pt in block value = 3 damage reduction. I have not used this trinket, yet. However it may be my next badge purchase to test some theories with actual use. I know it's best for "warriors" and shield slam, however with as much blocking as we do this seems like a great trinket for reducing damage of physical attacks on every successful block and activated that's another 600! If I'm doing the stats right that does seem substantial.

[I'm going to find some nice block rating gear for pre-Hyjal pallies and post in a bit]

 

Gunn

delete please - site errored and reposted data