darkra

That's so true... for example none of the dps warriors of my guild feel like spenting 3 points on imp TC, so I have to do it on my own...

In the beginning the Universe was created. This had made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. - Douglas Adams

 

craenor

I was hoping to elicit some thoughts on how effective people might find it to tank in the S4 Gladiator's gear.

Wearing a Full Set of this, with a Merciless Gladiator's Shield Wall puts your Resilience at 181, add in defense gear on the rest of your item slots and you are easily uncrittable.

http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/...legear_set.jpg

Your avoidance will bite, but you should generate good TPS and it won't be too hard to fill the rest of your slots with Shield Block Value and Defense items.

At first the idea may seem crazy, but with the ridiculous amount of stamina and armor on this gear, if you're currently in a mix of Kara, ZA, badge, T4 and T5 gear, I think it might be an upgrade for you, even a big one maybe?

Thoughts?

 

Grizlock

Not to be rude, but it's a lot easier for you to Tclap every 4th rotation than for a dps warrior to switch out of berserker stance (losing all rage) and thunder clapping, then starting the rotation again. They should, however have 2/5 or 5/5 imp demo (if you use CoR).

Also if you are in a multi target fight fight you may not have a dps warrior on your target so it's a good idea to just spent the points on Imp Thunderclap.

 

Lambach

Man, you'll really have to link some wws. Cause, you just sound kinda ridiculous. You are avoiding sooo much, where is your rage coming from? As you say, these other tanks are taking twice as much dmg as you are, and are able to dump all their rage. It makes no sense, unless your dps is horrible, that you are able to hold agro and avoid 80%+ of the attacks. Not to mention, that when you do get hit, you get hit hard, and its a much bigger % of your hp pool. Avoidance style like that is just dangerous and asking for getting pwned.

But sorry, went on a bit of a rant. However I definitely would like to see a wws or two, because atm, you're just using hearsay to prove yourself.

 

Okijin

I'de have to do a more in depth look at it. However at first blush you are missing alot of crucial stats. While the resilience may or may not make you easily uncrittable you don't get the innate avoidance of Defense. That lack of avoidance is really the weakness in using S4. compared to even tier 4 tank gear (which in many slots is pretty sub par) you lose 93 agi (~3% dodge) 61 dodge rating (3% dodge) 29 parry rating (1% avoidance) 119 D (5% avoidance) along with block value all you gain is about 170 stamina, you are trading 1700 hp for a whopping 12% to avoid damage all together.

Sure you coudl feasibly build a set around season four gear, it might even be as good as a blue tanking set however you suggest it would be an upgrade from tiered sets and a cursory examination doesn't bear that out. If you want an easy minal pve tanking set pick up the badge gear it is awfully good.

edit: didn't click the season 4 link.

 

Xav

Well, to try and get the thread back on track...

Carmak, that's a great avoidance set. It's also amazing that you were able to obtain multiple Spinels for your tank gear, this is a luxury that most tanks wont have, and wont consider it worth it.

Avoidance VS Stamina has been covered a couple times now, this is probably going to be the 3rd or 4th time in this thread alone - I'm fairly certain Quigon even has a lengthy analysis and comparison in his original post.

Avoidance will absolutely make you take a LOT less damage, and is a very good stat to have. However, it comes at a cost, which generally is threat. (Only one, maybe two bosses I've ever fought have enough damage output/frequency to give you sufficient threat even at extreme avoidance levels; Illidan and Brutallus)

Avoidance will make content easier and allow you to drop more healers and add DPS once content is on farm. This is because you take less damage, people are familiar with the burst potentials, the boss abilities, and how they interact with you, and such.

Stamina allows you to survive more "worst case" scenarios - the type of scenarios you see ALL THE TIME in progress content, learning things the first few times. Since you disagree with this, I'll give you a pretty good example you'll see soon enough, hopefully

Kalecgos, first encounter of Sunwell. The demon form tank which you'll be on at some point has an instant shadow strike for ~8500 damage, which stuns you for 3-4 seconds I believe. Often you'll get hit 2 or 3 times, with a shadow bolt volley in there too for ~3500. The demon's melee swings are for ~5-6k with full buffs (ironshields) and debuffs (demo). Learning the fight, it's an extreme amount of burst to heal through, and any and ALL health helps survive it - because you CAN. NOT. AVOID. any of that damage, due to the stun. I got somewhat lucky on PTR and was able to pick up some massive upgrades - and was running that fight at 23800 buffed hp - way more than I've ever had on live, I felt like a tauren. And it was still very close at times - the combination of ~8500 strike + 4000 volley + 5000 melee is already close to 20k damage in about a second and a half, add another second or so and you're far over the 25000 damage range possibility. Undergeared tanks (mostly HP/armor wise) will find themselves dying to the demon far more often than heavy stamina tanks, simply because of the mechanics. These are what we're talking about when we say worst case scenarios. Other examples would be fights with a Silence mechanic or anything that forces healers to hold off for a second, or frontloads a ton of damage at you that you are forced to take.

Thus, generally you'd want to have two very different sets (not to mention the other many different tanking sets): High stamina/armor, and high avoidance. Not all tanks are done with content, and that is why stamina gemming is almost universally popular by tanks who aren't through with everything. I've already known this for a while, and it's why I'm just now getting my 3rd pieces of all of the T6 tokens (1st was normal tank set, second was DPS gear, third is...) for Avoidance gems.

Now when it comes to threat, regardless of your personal experiences, math will take you to the conclusion that in an ideal situation for both the DPS and the avoidance tank, your threat gen will suffer to the point of preventing you from keeping a full threat rotation up, on the vast majority of bosses in the game. If you're able to hold threat with 85% raid buffed avoidance on Gorefiend vs a raid going all out, I'm sorry to say, but your raid is probably holding back, or you're getting an extreme amount of external buffs to make up for your avoidance set.

As a side note, I have no idea at all what gear I was using when you saw my armory, but it's generally a random tank suit. I don't have Crimson Spinels with dodge in all my gear, and I'm missing 2 pieces of gear that either have never dropped, or I've passed to others for a massive upgrade (trial tanks), Praetorian's and the bracers from Naj'entus, but in the avoidance stuff I have available to me now it's something like 29xx dodge 23xx parry. Your comparison is still fine though, and is stuff we're all hopefully aware of, and I'll stick with disagreeing on using avoidance in your primary tank set; ie - first.


Other stuff....

On tanking macros: Again, yes, a "one button mash tank" macro will burn your rage if you're too lazy to hit the buttons yourself for maximum efficiency. A macro will never outperform an experienced tank knowing just when to hit the stuff, and when to stop hitting it. What if you don't want to heroic, but you do want to devastate? Too bad your macro includes it all anyway, wasting your rage, lowering your threat!

Season 4: Get the shield, at the very least. (I realize the weapons aren't out yet, but I think S4 is a long while away anyways and that was just a premature inclusion in the PTR for some reason). Then just get any armor piece that would replace a blue or a really weak epic, generally you'd rather have the balanced tanking stats and avoidance you really need at that level of gear (Undergeared tanks wont have any problems with rage since their avoidance is so low, typically). Swapping in a few pieces of the S4 stuff if for some reason you really need more threat though is a good idea, since as you said, it's loaded up with raw strength, crit, hit, and stamina with no avoidance, giving you all you need - high damage output, high incoming rage gain.

 

Carmak

I know that it is not exactly a new discussion, I've followed it in both this and other threads. I don't have any new math or new facts to add either, I just want to emphasize the specific situation. I'm not arguing that everyone should switch to avoidance for every situation, I obviously don't use the gear I listed in many cases, but in the cases I do use it I find it very helpful. I didn't use avoidance when coming into BT/Hyjal, the Kael'Thas fight had me very much on the stamina side, but hp just wasn't as useful in the new content. I didn't switch until we were ready for Illidan and it became clear that he was a good boss to use avoidance against, but I wonder how many other use shear immune gear against him.

I'm also well aware that things can change in Sunwell, but I'll wait until it is actually released before I change things. I do have things like Royal Gauntlets ready for stamina-gearing, so it is not something I consider to be a big problem. I'll also try to exploit my Tauren bonus in the avoidance/expertise direction, if a fight is tuned for a stamina tank I can easily drop 100 sta for a more balanced set with higher total itembudget and still have the same chances as all non-Tauren.

I also admit I like doing things differently. I've generally single tanked Al'ar in phase two for example, this was actually easier for us! After having some problem with tank changes in RoS phase 1 I also changed my gear around to tank both pre-enrage and post-enrage phases with a single other tank during the enrage. This made the boss a lot easier for us, but it's not completely stable, if I get unlucky or the dps is low a rogue might have to help out at the end.

As for my choice of your (Xaviera's) gear it was just to have someone with the same level of gear but different stats to contrast with, I didn't try to say anything in particular about your gear choices. I don't dispute the threat math in any way, our dps was never that impressive, but so far it's been enough. Brutallus will be interesting.

 

◊ Quigon

Xav's post really sums it up. I have nothing against avoidance, and the original post really exemplifies this - again as Xav stated. Tier 6 was really a mindset change for a lot of tanks, in how avoidance can become quite powerful, and the original post reflects this, as due NUMEROUS discussions of this topic throughout this thread (one of the first which I adamantly support my mitigation gear choices, which typically choose avoidance before stamina - but not necessarily in sockets).

You need to move away from generalizations and go toward situations. In particular, avoidance is great, but not always. Have multiple gear sets. Stamina/armor, avoidance, threat. Be able to mishmash, and choose accordingly. Much of the damage you take on many fights cannot be avoided - others, it can.

Remember, avoidance also doesn't become nearly as powerful until you're nearly done with the game (covered in the OP). Sitting in a pre-teron guild with 90% true avoidance (not shield block rating) probably means you have 14,000 unbuffed HP and are a disaster waiting to happen. Maximizing avoidance too early is really a recipe for disaster. Especially with the hard bosses that are now nerfed - stamina and armor simply reign king on bosses that burst hard. Avoidance merely reduces your chance to be bursted, but does nothing to protect you for the worst case scenario, it does nothing to lower that burst - and the boss will always get lucky with his worst case scenario - and sometimes add another hit to that. Now the bosses in tier 6 (like shahraz) have been largely nerfed, but having a decent HP pool was certainly important on her before. Now you can wear stamina gear, avoidance gear, full SR, no SR, threat gear, and be okay. Remember that avoidance does reduce your damage significantly. But look at the full situation. Avoidance was classically treated as a way to improve healer efficiency. Now adays it is so high that it is a realistic and practical tanking stat. But you can still never rely on it 100% - making stamina and armor king.

This ultimately comes back to the ORIGINAL tanking thread, by Itzlegend, that stated you setup yourself for surviving a worst case scenario, by getting stamina to a point where you cannot be bursted. Then you maximize your armor - and in patch 2.1 we started adding some avoidance because it became so powerful. But as stated in the OP, if you are facing a boss that hits 1% of the time for 30,000 damage, it will eventually instagib you. If you face a boss that hits 99% of the time for 300 damage, it will do the same damage over the long run, but I'm guessing you won't die. Don't get so enamored over a tanking stat, and rely on math, and what is killing you. This is all in the OP, and in multiple discussions contained herein. Avoidance in Tier 6 is a hugely inexpensive and exponential mitigation stat - use it appropriately.

I think sunwell is showing us that burst is once again becoming important - avoidance doesn't help much with burst (Especially as nearly all burst in WoW has spell components making up part of that "burst"). Socketting for stamina is a fairly cheap way to gain sta relative to the avoidance gains in the same slot - tauren or not. I mean people can bitch about Tauren racial, but it wouldn't change my personal gear load out one bit.

 

galzohar

Can 2-button tanking work though? I know a very very long time ago (pre-BC) on a friend's warrior I macroed shield block and prioritized revenge over sunder by simply having /revenge before /sunder and thus sunder would not be cast over revenge when possible. Now, though, it seems that if you macro 2 abilities it will never cast the 2nd one even if the first is not useable. Rotation sequences will not really prioritize but instead stick to a rotation as far as I know, so if you didn't have rage to use all your global cooldowns you'll end up doing a devastate over a shield slam since the macro sticks to the rotation rather than the priority.

Unless I was doing something wrong, it seems just impossible to make a macro that will tank as good as someone who just presses the right buttons at the right times. And I would never make a macro to do something if I can do it better by paying more attetion - I will only macro something if it will *always* do things in the best way possible - for example popping a dps trinket with another dps cooldown, or making a 1-click for multiple oh-shit cooldowns (but still keep the seperate ones avaiable of course so you don't *have* to use them all at once).

 

Xav

Yes, a macro will never work as well as an actual person doing it all themselves. The way people do it now I think is with castsequence or castrandom macros, all of which basically suck. If you want to be a sub-par tank, use decision-making macros. A Last Stand + Trinket macro is not one of those, nor is an Auto Blocker + Shield Slam macro. Those are simple macros that maximize some abilities/items potential.

 

galzohar

Macroing your autoblocker to shield slam is actually good if you still keep shield slam on your bars. That is if you do the same as you do now, but instead of autoblocker hotkey have a autoblocker+shield slam macro it'll basically do nothing but help, unless you actually ever want to block but not cast shield slam if shield slam is up. You didn't save hotkeys but when you do your block+slam you've saved a click. As DPS I used to have my cooldowns macroed to a different button but with the castign changes I simply added the dps spell to that macro while keeping the same hotkey setup. So you can still use your cooldown(s) wisely while saving time.

If you'd actually ever want to use autoblocker and not shield slam please correct me. But every situation I can think about that macro will not under-perform clicking seperately. Again I don't mean macroing the blocker to shield slam and saving a button, but rather macro the shield slam to the button you're already using for the blocker and keep your current "only shield slam" button.

Same goes for an "oh-shit" macro, although that would be more comlicated and less useful as by the time you have decided if you actually want to use that macro you could've already clicked the abilities seperately.


/castrandom is just silly since when you have SS and GCD up it would have a good chance to devastate instead of shield slam.

 

Xav

I think you didn't properly interpret what I said, I was stating (and we agree) that an auto blocker/SS macro would indeed be good, and almost always (99.9% of the time) a benefit. Not to be rude, but are you just posting for the sake of posting?

 

galzohar

I misread your post as ruling out blocker+SS macro. And in fact not having the ability to shield slam without using the trinket can be a problem on fights where burst threat is more imporatnt than sustained (such as pretty much any fight with aggro resets). I'm posting this becuase I think it's useful, although I suppose I could've kept it shorter. The first post I made about macros was to be sure I correctly understand how they work.

 

Carmak

I know that I'm not a native writer, and if you read my post as being about generalizations and accusing you of being anti-avoidance we have a communication problem and clarification is needed. I know that you're not anti-avoidance, I recall you explicitly stating that several times in this very thread. I have also read both this and the old thread and am familiar with many of the arguments. We don't actually use the same gear however, so I though I'd add a few thoughts from one of the few who actually went all the (spinel) way. This might have been a bad idea, but what's done is done. To clarify my post it consists of a few components:

- one part is to show that it is in fact possible, and not just theory. I'm for example interpreting Lambach's post as him suspecting that I'm actually just trolling. I guess it's also aimed at the helpful people in Orgrimmar who point out that anything over 490def is wasted, but they probably won't read this anyway.

- the other part is that your raid might be such that max tps is not as helpful as less damage taken. This depends on the situation, we are in quite different guilds and face quite different challenges. Me doing more tps might increase our raid-dps somewhat, but it was never very high, and that is one reason for my change. Another was a general lack of healers. From your (Quigon's) posts I have understood that you generally play with lots of healers.

- the last important part is the most controversial, you say "...if you are facing a boss that hits 1% of the time for 30,000 damage, it will eventually instagib you. If you face a boss that hits 99% of the time for 300 damage, it will do the same damage over the long run, but I'm guessing you won't die.". I agree that you eventually will, but I don't agree that the first situation means that the best solution has to be to boost your hp over 30,000.

To illustrate my point I interpret the situation as a variant of crit, 1% of the attacks will, if they land, do 30,000 damage. Let's say that the boss on average hits every other second for 20,000, and that it is a dps race that lasts for ~100 hits from the boss. Now, reaching 30,000 hp is not easy in our hypothetical scenario, it requires you to make huge sacrifices in avoidance. We say that you go in with 31,000 hp and 20% avoidance and I go in with 21,000 hp and 80% avoidance. I assume that the healing can handle the damage as long as you survice. I will still obviously just die in some of the attempts, and that doesn't sound good.

What I'm trying to say is that my solution still might be better despite this. The differences in the damage taken is significant, the safe tank will take ~8000dps and the volatile one will take ~2000... or die. Assuming that other people are taking damage and requiring attention the ability to both save mana on the MT and also possibly relocate healers to other targets that are in practice required to reach the dps you need. Your healing might not at the point you reach the boss even have the theoretical capacity to keep you up in the safe way. In these cases the fact the MT might just die in one out of five attempts is acceptable or even necessary.

I'm not sure if I make any sense to anyone else, but I could try to clarify further if anyone is interested.

 

Olon97

The only things worth macroing, in my opinion, are the cases where you can get multiple actions out of a single keypress.

Shield block and revenge for instance (shield block first since it's not GCD bound).

The solution to macroing GCD skill + heroic strike in one keypress burning range too fast (covered earlier in this thread) is making the HS part conditional on a modifier key (eg /cast [modifier:ctrl] !Heroic Strike).

They way I'm set up right now, if I'm over 60 rage, I simply hold down the Control key in addition to using my usual threat cycle, and heroic strikes are thrown into the mix without any additional keypresses required. Once rage drops below ~40, I simply release the Conrol key and go back to my normal efficient cycle.

 

◊ Quigon

I think you're just rehashing an old point, and one that isn't missed in the OP and in many other posts. The point is that avoidance decreases incoming DPS exponentially (there is a graph in the OP regarding this), and therefore improves HPS, and more effectively at end-game than other tanking stats. However, avoidance is lotto, and only diminishes the chance of a worst-case-scenario, it does not guard against it.

You find the happy medium. Which seems lost when you look at my example and try to expound on it. A tank facing Teron with 90% avoidance and 14-15k HP is making poor choices.

All this talk is really just talk. I think the math is well worked out and you can make your own choices when you face a particular boss. As to the comment about a lot of healers - we run a lot of healers if the fight benefits from it, and if it does not, we don't. Anyone who runs their raids otherwise simply doesn't have the choice, is caving in to pressure, or needs to buy a calculator/strat sheet. Who actually looked at the original Shahraz and said: Okay guys, lets look good and do this with as few healers as possible, with PvP specs, wearing as little SR as possible. ITS MATHEMATICALLY POSSIBLE - and in a few months everyone will be doing it anyway! Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity...
I'm also fairly sure 6 healers was standard for most of Tier 5 before nerfs, and 7-8 for most of Tier 6. 9-10 was fairly common for bloodboil and shahraz 9 months ago or whenever it was.

Having done this, as we all have, for over 3 years though, I honestly think that that point is neither here nor there.

 

Skyeh

I don't think even macroing the autoblocker and shield slam together is as good as doing it manually. I can think of plenty of times I like to use my auto blocker at specific times when having a SS/trinket macro would be inferior. Such times as right before a deaden on RoS phase2 to squeak out that extra aggro, or saving the auto blocker till 60% on P3 of RoS to get try to get a little more aggro benefit out of it. Also on situations like Illidan where you stop tanking sometimes. (Such as P2 and P4 switches.) Popping the auto blocker right before a phase due to a macro switch would seem pretty wasteful.

I think in the end, manual control will always be superior, as many have stated already.

 

szgeti

A bit offtopic, but I'm pretty interested to see what kind of levels warrior TPS can hit after a guild has been farming Sunwell a while. Combining 2/5 T5 with 4/5 T6 and the oodles of expertise and block value being added to items could make for some pretty ridiculous TPS, and I don't doubt exceeding 2000 average on a Teron would be possible at that point.

 

Fragged

I do the same I find it quite helpful on fights with a fair amount of movement where focus can't always be devoted to proper rage management (when running out of a flamestrike, only to have a blizzard on you and needing to find yet another safe spot, I certainly am briefly not looking closely at my rage bar, so being able to easily keep some threat abilities like revenge/shield slam up along with shield block while forgoing heroic strike is very useful.)

 

Arko

Just to prevent further confusion about the words: the benefit of avoidance gear scales hyperbolic, not exponential. "Hyperbolic growth" means the benefit approaches infinity as the avoidance approaches the threshhold value of one. "Exponential growth" means it the benefit doubles as the avoidance doubles.

You cannot get these values realistically. My guess would be 15k hp and 66% when you are at teron. I had roughly these stats when we were there and I had socketed and enchanted for avoidance. The hp goes to about 19k with buffs; no flask. I did roughly 650 tps (*cry*) without expertise rating or offensive support. I felt badly rage starved, but the basic ss, rev, dev, dev rotation is really cheap without shield block or heroic strike. Our shadow priest was threat capped (he used the vampirics), all other dd's were going all out. The kill time for a clean kill was about 5 minutes.

Now about that "disaster waiting to happen". No.

That was really the reason for this post. You are in fact trolling me succesfully. Well, I can show you all kinds of number, spreadsheets, whatever you like, but at the end of the day it just comes down to the question: Do you die? And *on teron* the answer is: no. It's never even remotely close. Trust me: 19k hp is more than enough for teron if you cannot be crushed (otherwise your rage starvation will prevent shield blocks and then you're hosed).

On the endless topic of stamina vs avoidance, I think one can only give two useful pieces of advice: 1. Have at least one tank of both styles and choose based on the fight. 2. And this is, after talking to another guild on my server which has in fact followed my first advice, how to choose:

Vashj, Najentus, Teron, Bloodboil, Illidan, Azgalor, Archimonde: Avoidance.
Kael, Reliquary, Mother, Gathios: Stamina.
Other mobs in hyj/bt: Anbody.

So, if there must be any further discussion in this dreadful undying topic, perhaps at least somebody who has seen both types of tank in practice can make a comment on where my list might be off. That automatically means a discussion in the context of a specific fight, and there might be some actually useful outcome from that. I would also love to see someones list on the sunwell content.

 

Carmak

I'm not saying the discussion is missing in the OP, I'm not saying the OP is incorrect or incomplete, and I'm not saying anyone in particular is making the wrong gear choices. As you say it's just talk, it's me trying to illustrate the impact of the avoidance graph for current choices, it's me talking about shear immunity or about how threat generation has worked out in various situations for me personally. While I now know that my post was beyond worthless for this thread it's still interesting for me since I completely failed to communicate my points.

I take your comment about Shahraz (if aimed at me) as saying that I suggest that you should tune your raid into having a 1% chance of beating her because it's possible, but that's even close to what I'm trying to say. I could turn the example around and say that both avoidance and resistance are lotto and if it's the worst case you are preparing for resistance gear will pretty much always be worse than regular gear. I assume you still used resistance gear, both because the worst case scenarios are unlikely and also because the boss wouldn't have been remotely possible with everyone having they worst of luck all the time.

My point is that this extends to tank gearing. Let's assume that you could gear in such a way that the nasty version of Shahraz couldn't take you from 100-0 in less than 2s (or some other acceptable margin). It could still be better to abandon this safety if doing so means that the probability of failure in other aspects of the fight is reduced more than it is increased by the unsafe MT. I'm not saying that this means that you should use avoidance gear against boss X, just that I disagree with the requirement to always play it as safe as possible.

In any case I'm sorry for wasting your time, I won't disturb the discussion any further.

 

Muggins

Mind explaining why vashj is listed as an avoidance tank fight when the main sources of burst damage are largely unavoidable(stun-shock, bowshots on a slow BoF, static charge, green piles of goo)?

The melee from either herself or the naga is pretty much not worth mentioning. The serious worry is when you get a root that isn't BoF'd immediately for whatever reason(not enough paladins for a proper rotation, out of range, palas died off) in a patch of goo then hit with a multishot, followed up by a stun shock and if you're seriously unlucky you might get a static charge. That sort of burst damage all in one go is absolutely sick and your avoidance gear won't help one jot as it all bypasses it.

edit: I thought i'd make it clear to save confusion, when i say 'unavoidable' I really mean 'Cannot be Dodged/Blocked/Parried'.

 

Fragged

When learning a fight, biasing for stamina really gives your raid two advantages:
1) It gives you a better feel for say the worst-case 6 second periods in the fight (and thus gives you a better feel for exactly how much healing you need on the tank.) Over a 8 minute fight the odds of these worst case moments happening is actually pretty high, which means you really need to be prepared for them.
2) It generally provides a steadier groove of damage to heal. What I've found is that the theoretical benefits of avoidance often are merely theoretical, because mostly healers need to anticipate damage, reactive healing isn't viable, and healing that anticipates damage often leads to significant over healing if/when you dodge expected attacks. If you're still getting healed, your avoidance isn't saving your raid anything.

No one is saying it's not possible to bias for avoidance and win these fights, it's merely that at this point there really aren't many fights with a significant advantage for avoidance. Obviously they can and have existed (Doomwalker's sunder being avoidable is a good example, having recently done him, at T6 gear levels it's amusing that you really don't need to worry about the sunders because he can't reliably land them on you and they just naturally fall off without stacking.) Bosses with stacking avoidable debuffs are fights that I think tend to favor avoidance, but the majority of the fights in the game currently are simply biased in favor of a mitigation+stamina strategy over an avoidance strategy.

 

Arko

If we had any tank death leading to a wipe on vashj, it was either right at the beginning of phase 3 or just before the end of the fight, never in phase 1, 2 or in the middle of phase 3.

The deaths at the beginning happened when we hat too many (read: 4) naga up, because we took too long on phase 2. The avoidance helps to reduce the damage input, especially on the naga tank, where the damage is smooth due to the high hit frequency. We usually didn't decide up front who tanks what, probably a very uncommon (read: stupid) approach. Vashj is still doable with 4 naga, however we aimed at 2 or 3 at that time. I'd say 5 is too much to handle for an ssc guild.

Tank death at the end of the fight happened, because phase 3 took too long (read: we had too many naga to kill) and healers started dying to the patches or going oom. With few healers up, you basically stay below 100% for the entire rest of the fight and hope she goes down first. You will die, if vashj can dish out more dps than your remaining healers hps. Chance of survival is better if you can reduce dps, not burst, in that case.

What you describe is a sudden burst, mainly consisting of magic damage (by the way, you usually get hit by autoshot as tank, not multishot - autoshot does a lot more damage and is only cast on the main tank). If that would be a problem, I should have died sometimes in the middle of phase three, and even in phase one. Now as you say, I *do* remember some cases were this happened. The second tank would pick her up immediately, as he is free and she is tauntable. We never had it happen two times in a single try, that means it kills a tank but doesn't wipe you. We also used a shaman totem to absorb the shock, that helps a lot.

Tauntable is a key point here. I never considered that tauntable mobs might make a difference, but it seems so.

 

• Jamor

Avoidance on Vashj and Naj'entus?

Vashj --- most of the burst is non-avoidable as people mention. Your excuse for using avoidance is because your raid failed, not because it was the right gear set to use.

Naj'entus -- I don't know about you, but if I used avoidance gear on that fight, I would NEVER have rage on it. He hits for so little that I can't understand why you think it's such an issue.