I Got 490 Defense! Now What?
Well, you not risking your raid on the small chance you'll take a critical hit and be pushed to an unrecoverable point, so that’s good! From the start we are assuming you are talking about raid/heroic content here. The burning question now is: What do I go for? Stamina? Defense? Dodge? Parry? Block? Well, you mostly can't be critically hit now. You've probably got a nice health pool. You spam shield block and handily push crushing blows off the table while it is up. What now? Stack stamina, stack avoidance, or some combination?
Stack Stamina
This plan tends to go hand in hand with choosing high armour gear to maximise the effect of the stamina. The damage stream is fairly consistent over time. It gives you that buffer to take the big hits and not fold like a piece of paper when a crushing blow sneaks through. It also means your healers need to spend more mana to keep you going through the fight since there are less breaks in the damage stream. You take a bit of a reduction in dodge/parry/miss while Shield Block is up, slightly reducing the chance that the Shield Block buff will last for more than the next two attacks incoming. When you don't avoid something in a timely manner, you could take a string of hits that your healers can't recover from fast enough, and down you go.
Stack Avoidance
Working on the theory that if you get hit less often, your healers don't have to work quite as hard, and when a crush slips through it similarly won't be catastrophic since you're avoiding more damage to begin with. The damage stream is a bit spiky over time. The extra dodge/parry/miss is more chance that you'll do one of them while Shield Block is up and then Shield Block lasts longer than then next two attacks incoming. It also means that if the avoidance fails you, that crush followed by the big hit you didn't avoid might just wipe you out.
You also need to look at which avoidance to stack:
Defense
The big concern people have with more defense is that it stops working after 490 defense. This is not totally true. Easily testable in game to prove it to yourself. What does stop working in some way after 490 is critical hit mitigation, which is talked about here. We do know for certain that regardless of how critical hit mitigation works, you always get the other benefits from defense no matter how much you have. That means you always get +0.04% chance to dodge, block, and parry, and you reduce the mob's hit chance by 0.04%. The chance to block is a small bit of mitigation, not actual avoidance, so we'll ignore it mostly. That means you get 0.04% dodge + 0.04% parry + 0.04% miss chance, or 0.12% pure avoidance, per point of defense skill. That translates to 0.050% pure avoidance per point of defense rating (0.12% avoidance per defense skill / 2.36 defense rating per defense skill).
Dodge
Dodge gives you, well, dodge. 1% dodge per 18.9 dodge rating. That divides out to 0.053% pure avoidance per point of dodge rating.
Parry
1% parry per 23.6 parry rating. That divides out to 0.042% pure avoidance per point of parry rating. You might be wondering why parry costs so much more than dodge or defense. Good question. The answer is that when you parry, your time to next auto attack is reduced by up to 40%. Good for threat generation, not so helpful when trying to stack avoidance since it's more expensive than dodge.
Block
Not so much, unless you're going for passive crushing blow immunity. Still thinking that you need 25% block chance to push crushing blows off the table when shield block is up? Nope, wrong. Miss, dodge and parry take precedence on the combat table over block. You can see it happen by putting up shield block and seeing that you still dodge, parry and get missed while the buff is up! That means that if you have 10% chance to be missed, 10% dodge, 10% parry, and 2000% block chance... the combat table will be 10% chance to be missed, 10% dodge, 10% parry, 70% block. All the extra block chance is thrown away. You need 25% combined miss, dodge, parry, and block to push crushing blows off the combat table when shield block is up. You were at this point before you even hit 490 defense, in all likelihood. There are better things to choose, generally. This is not to say that you should never take block rating. This is to say there usually better choices.
The Great Debate
So, which one? It's a topic of great debate, and a lot of research, theory, and people going I feel has gone into it. In general, the argument comes down to two ideas: Effective Health and Avoidance.
Worth noting before getting into it is the paradigm shift that happens in the raid game. The experience a lot of people are drawing on is Karazhan and Heroics as they start their entry into 25 person raiding. In these places, your healers can use reactive healing for 99% of the content. This means that if you dodge an attack, they don't need to heal just yet. If you dodge 3 in a row, that's great since the number of healers is limited and running out of mana is bad. So far as most people can see this makes avoidance extremely desirable, and assume that this carries through all the way. However, once you get out of Karazhan and hit Gruul, the realisation starts to hit that reactive healing is no longer an option now. If healers try to heal in reaction to the damage the tank takes, or doesn't take, then the tank is going to die. The healers must be healing in anticipation of the damage coming in, in terms of keeping average healing per second higher than average damage taken per second. You can interrupt a heal when the tank is near full, but you're in a constant cycle of beginning casting and making the conscious choice to stop the heal or let it land. Mana tends to be much less of a concern at this point too, due to gear, shadow priests, innervate, the effectiveness of spirit, spreading the healing load amongst more healers, and so on. It's fairly rare a raid wipes because every healer ran out of mana.
As you progress through the endgame raids, you'll encounter other fights like Gruul where the hits are slow and very hard. Then you'll encounter Leotheras who hits very fast but not too hard, much like Prince Malchezzar. Crushing blows are going to happen in some fights no matter what you do, and are completely avoidable in others. Some bosses don't perform crushing blows, and so their normal melee is closing in on 10,000 health per hit on plate. Each encounter has its own quirks and tricks.
With all that in mind, let's look at the theories.
Effective Health
The basic theory of effective health is here: Effective Health Theory. Related to that is the relationship between armour and stamina, found here: Armour-Stamina Equivalence.
The extreme EH tank sockets [Solid Star of Elune] everywhere. The basis is the idea that each encounter has some minimum point of armour and health to be successful – the minimum EH requirement for the fight. You need to focus on armour and stamina to make sure you reach that point. You need to be able to take the worst case hits and not just drop dead. The first time you reach a new boss in a new instance, you are at the marginal gear level or even below that you need to win. You need gear to ensure you have that minimum effective health.
Here what is being said is that avoidance is indeed fine and well, and indeed saves you from taking damage. Except when it doesn't. Attribute it to Murphy's Law or probability as you will, but the simple fact is you will take back to back hits, or 3 hits in a row, no matter what avoidance you have. Sufficient Effective Health assumes you are going to take the hits, and ensures enough of a buffer to take them. Every bit of health and every bit more mitigation combines and amplifies to make you that much harder to kill.
The key concept here is this: It's not about taking less damage; it's about being able to take more damage.
Avoidance
The basic idea is that if you avoid more, you get hit less. The math is simple probability and statistics.
The extreme tank sockets only avoidance and hybrid gems that have avoidance, and gets the socket bonuses. The basis is the idea that placing primary emphasis on stamina and armour is too narrowly focussed and decreases the tank's overall survivability. By increasing avoidance, you greatly decrease the odds of having to deal with three or four hits in a row. Compare Tank A with 50% avoidance and Tank B with 60% avoidance: The chance of Tank A taking 4 consecutive hits is (0.5^4) 6.25%. The chance of Tank B taking 4 consecutive hits is (0.4^4) 2.56%. You need to gear to ensure you don't get those strings of hits that will kill you.
Here what is being said is that stamina and armour are fine and well, and allow you to soak up damage without being outright slaughtered. Except when it doesn't. Maybe it's a crushing blow that slipped through, maybe the healers were asleep at the switch, but sometimes you will be lined up for big hits that land and there's no way your health is going to keep you from dying. Avoidance increases the chance of getting that dodge, parry, or miss that breaks the stream of hits and lets the heals land to keep you going. Every bit of avoidance scales more than the last bit.
The key concept here is this: It's not about surviving the spikes; it's about minimising them.
So, which one?
The thing that really gets lost in these big arguments is that these are not mutually exclusive concepts. There has been any number of heated debates on this subject, and a lot of misunderstanding of positions on both sides. I believe the problem we are seeing in these discussions is one of extremes. Nobody is advocating stacking avoidance or mitigation to the exclusion of the other. You can't function without both; you can't have only one of them! Armour and stamina is no guarantee that two crushing blows won't come and overwhelm what you thought was enough Effective Health. People tend to go overboard with the idea of EH and pursue it to the extreme. All this does is shift the load to your healers because you are taking more damage overall, and they are the ones who have to deal with it. True, the more armour you have, the less damage you take per (physical damage) hit – but it’s not the same as avoiding a few hits entirely. Earlier on this is workable; later it is disaster.
Avoidance is excellent. In fact, it gets exponentially better the more that you get. The problem with this is that a fair number of people go overboard with their newfound love of avoidance and neglect Murphy. No matter how much avoidance you have you will get hit, and you will get hit multiple times in a row. If you stack avoidance (and by the same token, hit) to the point where you can't handle the multiple hits, then you are screwed. New tanks sometimes decide they want to be an avoidance tank. The mechanics of WoW and the law of Murphy do not support this single minded approach. You can build your avoidance to the level where you will almost never get hit, no problem at all. Murphy says: at some point you will get hit. No matter how much avoidance you have, Murphy also says you will get hit multiple times in a row on occasion. For the tank that is dedicated to avoidance, this often spells disaster. The key is to not look at avoidance for the sake of avoidance. Instead, look at avoidance as reducing your Effective Damage Frequency.
Instead, we look to combine Effective Health and Effective Damage Frequency to ensure you reach the minimum necessary Effective Health for a given encounter, and then reduce your Effective Damage Frequency to break up the strings of attacks that would otherwise test your Effective Health choice. There is no sense in giving up a lot of avoidance to gain some minimal amount of extra stamina or armour, any more than giving up a big chunk of stamina or armour for some tiny fraction of avoidance. Wanderlei reinforces this sentiment (and others) very well here: On Avoidance.
This begs the question: What’s the minimum Effective Health for Gruul/Hydross/Al’ar/Azgalor/Teron? Well, that’s a good question. In fact, it’s constant quest to try and quantify those numbers (
One thing that is fairly constant across encounters is this: when working on new content, at that point where your gear is marginal for the encounter, more Effective Health is, in general, going to serve you better than more avoidance. An oft-quoted argument is 1000 health won't save you from an extra hit. That statement in and of itself is indeed true. However, the dynamics of taking damage and getting healed is not divided into neat packages of 5000 hit, 5000 heal. A hit for 5000 may be followed by a heal for 2800, then a heal for 6000, then another hit for 5000, and so on. An extra thousand health can easily be the difference between struggling on a fight and winning. To borrow Ciderhelm's phrase, Effective Health is a progression-based theory. You will not often go wrong by choosing Effective Health until you understand how the damage you take from a given encounter lands on you.
The finding of that optimal balance is not exactly easy because it depends on your ability as a tank, the pieces of gear you have available, your healers, and so on. That's why we generally recommend erring on the side of EH for new stuff, because it generally is the safest route. Once you've experienced an encounter a few times, you are in a good place to start working on that optimal set of gear. As noted earlier, many people just stick with EH even after they understand an encounter. Through tier4 and tier5 content it isn't so bad to do so, but you’re breeding bad habits. Once stuff really starts hitting hard, it's really in your best interest to pay attention and gear appropriately for the encounter.
A quick digression about the best gear set for an encounter... Somehow, the concept of avoidance for farm content has worked its way into the common wisdom. Stop and think about that tidbit of lunacy for a moment. You have this content on farm status, meaning you beat it without any fear of failure. Presumably you as a tank, your healers, and your DPS have all gotten upgrades along the way that contributed to getting to farm status. Your gear is no longer marginal for the content, so maximising your Effective Health isn't critical. Yet people will tell you to "add avoidance to save your healers mana". How does this make any sense at all? Your healers can heal you just fine without extra avoidance! Not to mention, as we all know, warriors that outgear content are less effective at tanking said content. Yeah, let's add avoidance so I have less rage to keep ahead of the aforementioned upgraded DPS! For farm content, substitute threat into your gear.
The huge selection of gear available to tanks allows great latitude in picking what you wear for a given encounter. That's a key concept in and of itself: Multiple gear sets are a good thing; different gear for different situations. The tank's lot is one of bag space crises.
The badge gear that is available to you these days is fantastic, some as good as Tier 6 in the case of Sunwell badge gear. Tanks brand new to endgame raiding can step into their first Gruul raid overgeared for the encounter if they have enough badges to go around! As for customising that gear, you've got lots of gems to choose from so let’s speak to that a bit. There’s a natural break between the end of Tempest Keep (Tier 5) and Mount Hyjal (Tier 6) in terms of gearing:
Sockets through Tier 5
Earlier iterations of this article worked to the gear we had available to us and had recommendations suitable for that time. Not that long ago, filling all sockets with [Solid Star of Elune] was the way to do things. Coming in with Karazhan gear and a few of the original badge pieces, you basically had to do it that way or you were often in trouble with the coming fights. The problem was, the gear didn’t support the EH minimums of some fights without going the stamina route. That’s not so true anymore by any means.
Now, we’ll just start by reiterating one of the main keys of the successful tank: different gear for different situations. Grab up all the gear you can: EH pieces, avoidance pieces, expertise pieces, hit pieces, hybrid pieces. All of it! Fill a couple of 20 slot bags with all that shiny gear and create gear sets specifically for fights. If you're trying to create a one size fits all gear set, you are doing it wrong.
With all this fantastic gear that is chock full of the stats you want and need, you can often socket however you will with no worries and no regrets. You’ll typically have a solid amount of stamina no matter what gem combination you have. However, not all socket bonuses are created equal! And not everyone has 400 badges worth of Sunwell gear and a bagful of epic gems at 15 badges a pop.
One skill you need to pick up on early on is judging when to pick up a socket bonus or not. Consider a piece with red/yellow sockets and a 3 dodge rating bonus:
- You could socket 24 stamina to make a nice EH pieceThese choices are often the subject of holy war, but the correct answer is can I meet EH minimums if I gem this way?. The more gear you have to choose from, the more often you can say yes to that question no matter how you're planning to gem it up.
Learning how to effectively gem your gear to maximise your options is a crucial skill for a tank to have. Keep a good selection of gear and you’ll always be able to keep the EH minimums for your fights, then stack on the avoidance and threat stats as you need. You also won’t have a huge selection of gear to choose from to start, so learning how to gem effectively to work with what you’ve got will separate the great tanks from the rest.
Sockets Tier 6 and Beyond
The rules of the game start to change some in Tier 6. Bosses begin to hit really hard, and some don’t crush. The basic Onslaught + random T6-level pieces will put you at 20k or more health when buffed, which is plenty for any encounter – you’re hitting the EH minimum for most fights without even trying.
This is where avoidance and its ever-increasing usefulness shines. Stacking on massive amounts of extra Effective Health is unnecessary. Picking up more avoidance is now desirable, especially given the nature of encounters that stack a lot of raid-wide damage. But, don’t forget expertise and hit because your DPS is also ratcheting it up a few notches with their new toys! The throw another healer on the tank strategy isn't going to cut it anymore now. The more unnecessary damage you take, the less healing there is for everyone else. If your DPS is throttled because you have 5 expertise and 20 hit, you’re holding everyone back and making it harder to win. Gearing for the encounter is now pretty much your most important jobs as a tank, because you should be generating optimal threat rotations by second nature.
Should you socket for avoidance? It's becoming more common for warriors in Sunwell to reverse the old adage of 12 stamina gems everywhere, because 20k is easy. We’re seeing warriors with sets that are socketed for pure avoidance, forsaking socket bonuses for it. That’s a long ways away from when we often forsook the socket bonus for stamina gems! Of course, they still have EH pieces in their bags because as always, having selection means you can gear precisely for the fight. Some fights favour avoidance, some favour full-on maximum ability to soak up damage.
Enchanting
When it comes to enchanting, it's this easy: If you need defense to make 490, enchant something with defense. If not, enchant with stamina. I'd say that's it but of course there are some other considerations:
- Boar's Speed is generally a better enchant than Fortitude for your boots. Why? That speed boost gets you into position to save someone that much faster. In fights where you need to move about, you will generate more threat overall. For a loss of 3 stamina, it's definitely worth it.All This and Rage Too
Another thing that often comes up in these discussions is rage vs. avoidance. It can be a real concern. Avoidance means less rage - how much less depends on how much avoidance you strap on compared to how hard the boss hits. Less rage means less threat generated which means less rage to dump in heroic strike, and more management needed to do everything you need to do as you tank. Avoidance inevitably limits your performance to some extent.
If you just stack 65% dodge+parry+miss in Serpentshrine Cavern because you can then yeah, you are going to have troubles on some fights because the boss just can’t hit you enough, and when you do get hit you don't get much rage, relatively. You’ll be at 45 rage in an instant when a hit lands, then you’ll avoid the next 6 hits and your threat output will trickle off. Your DPS will curse your name and tell you how much you suck. Fortunately, we also now have access to expertise and hit gear. If you stack up enough hit and expertise, you can keep a standard (shield slam – revenge – devastate – devastate) rotation just from the rage you make on autoattacks. If you don’t have a lot of threat gear available, then balancing out that avoidance to keep threat flowing while not getting gacked is important.
Again, we come back to gearing for the fight based on the gear you have available to you. Part of understanding gearing is gauging how much avoidance is healthy compared to how hard the bosses hit. You can run with more avoidance in Tier 6 than Tier 5 because the bosses hit that much harder, giving you more rage to spend while you're possibly avoiding the next hits.