Regarding being GCDed... yes, that was the sum total of my argument. If you need EH, then Hand of Morchok gives more.

As far as burst time goes, it's still a less important metric than EH. Having a lower chance of experiencing a tank-killing burst is inherently less valuable than being able to survive that burst no matter what.

And on the subject of the 5%, my point was that you were comparing 5% of the output of 5-18 DPSers or 2-6 healers to 5% of a single person's health at random intervals.

On that same subject, Hand of Morchok will increase your buffed HP by slightly over 6k health, on average. At least, that's what the difference was for me when I regemmed everything in chardev to account for the extra CTC. That's going to wind up being about a 3% increase to EH, give or take a little depending on what your current maximum health is.

So basically, you're arguing that an RNG heal for 4.2% of your health is better than a permanent 3% EH increase. The fact that the EH is always there means that it's going to be able to save your life FAR more reliably if you're looking at situations where it's the last few percent of your health that you're down to.

Going back to the tank stat priorities I mentioned earlier: step 1 is met due to vengeance and high threat multipliers. Step 2 will vary depending on how geared you are and which bosses you're doing, but can still be problematic. Step 3 is trivialized by high mana regen.

The reason that I recommend Souldrinker for most tanks is because you can generally fulfill all three requirements with it, and move on to the unspoken fourth step, which is "do whatever else you can to help your raid", which in this case means push out more DPS.

Can't really be measured this tier, since every single boss has something that really screws with measuring DPS output. Morchok has Black Blood phases, Zon'ozz has the increased damage taken, Yor'sajh spends long periods of time without giving you revenge procs, Hagara has ice/lightning phases, Ultraxion has 100% shield block uptime, Blackhorn lets you cleave to both adds, Spine is weird, and Madness has AoE and times without revenge procs.

You can use a tool like Mew to simulate your expected DPS, but you'll never actually see that number on any of the encounters for the reasons I outlined above. But in basically all situations, Souldrinker will be a substantial increase.

@Muspel:

This is not wraith. Bar a few specific mechanics, like electrocute and impale, most content this entire expansion is built around much larger BT windows than before. You rarely go from max to 0 these days, and when you do - its usually your own fault.

You are rarely topped on progression now. And much more often you go from 70-60% to zero because healers were struggling to top you up in time. It takes a chain of bad events to happen in order to bring a tank down, not just one thing. It takes time. This is why Souldrinker shines. If we were still in wraith model, it would be about useless.

And one minor thing you keep overseeing is that it scales with LS/RC, ie when you need it most.

What you're not realizing is that the heal on Souldrinker is too small to make a meaningful difference, considering the relatively low procrate. It's similar to how Seal of Insight isn't really a survivability gain for paladins, because you can't rely on it when you need it and the healing is too tiny anyways. (And, for what it's worth, Souldrinker actually heals for even less than SoI over the course of a fight).

Furthermore, you still haven't addressed the issue of magnitude. Like I said earlier, you're sacrificing 3% EH for an unreliable 4.2% heal. If the gap were significantly larger, then that would be different. But even for the scenario you're describing, where you go from 70% to 0%, it still means that your hp at 70% is higher with HoM, as opposed to with Souldrinker, where you might not get a proc.

It depends on your gear. If you're just pushing into hardmodes, odds are that it'll be closer to 3%. If you're pushing the later bosses, or have the whole instance on farm, then it'll be less.

I don't really understand if you're trying to make a point with those logs. What should I be looking at?

I believe you should be looking for "unreliable" and "insignificant" heals.

In both of those logs, I'm seeing periods of ~20 seconds where no procs are occurring, making the heal "unreliable." As for how significant the heals are, it's much more difficult to prove that a proc saved your life because a healer could have just used one global for the same or better effect.

Question on Heroic Spine. How the hell are warriors posting 45-50k+ dps?

I've checked the logs that our out there at the speed we're killing it (10:45ish) and everyone is bursting the same amount (within 10ish bursts). Is it # of bloods let respawn? Is it a button push thing. Or is there some trick I'm missing?

I smash H. Deathwing and do decent on Morchok, but my numbers for H.Spine are way off.

Compare (similar length):
World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis
World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

Chapajai @ Minahonda - Game Guide - World of Warcraft
Note: My tank gear is 397 valor belt, I run Fire + Spindle for trinkets, rings are 397 valor and 391 rep and gear is itemized for block (run 5x 410 + 410 boots / bracers). Shield is 384 LFR (fml) and weapon is 403 sword.

By having 50 million hp worth of bloods spawn, instead of your 30 million.

That's what I was figuring but couldn't figure out how to cut log data to figure out total number of spawns. I could see the difference in damage done, but figured that's just because we have a crap heap of bloods up at the end.

That's because your pally tank isn't ctc capped.