Protection and you! - Page 35

JulianMaiev · 12/14/07, 2:32 PM

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 · 12/14/07, 6:36 PM

Originally Posted by 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.

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 · 12/14/07, 7:25 PM

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 · 12/14/07, 10:24 PM

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 · 12/14/07, 10:46 PM

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 · 12/14/07, 11:46 PM

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 · 12/15/07, 1:18 AM

Originally Posted by Gunn

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.

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.

JulianMaiev · 12/15/07, 11:01 AM

Originally Posted by 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.

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 · 12/17/07, 4:57 AM

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 · 12/17/07, 12:49 PM

Originally Posted by Eir

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

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 · 12/17/07, 3:49 PM

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

Tilted · 12/17/07, 4:26 PM

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 · 12/18/07, 8:44 AM

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 · 12/18/07, 12:36 PM

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

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
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.
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 · 12/18/07, 1:15 PM

delete please - site errored and reposted data