The Church

My go-to source for tanking is the tankspot forums, and about every 5th thread is 'AVOIDANCE GOOD?' or something about avoidance vs. Effective Health. Consensus is that EH is good for everything, but an avoidance set can be useful in certain encounters, but throwing stam and armor at the problem always works.

Main theorycrafting board:
http://www.tankspot.com/forumdisplay.ph … Discussion

Example picked at random:
http://www.tankspot.com/showthread.php? … -Avoidance

I don't think people hate avoidance (I like it, personally). But EH has the benefit of never being the "wrong" stat to stack. It's always going to be the safe bet. EH never fails you, it never "doesn't work", it doesn't get ignored by certain mechanics or elements of the fights, it never really hits a hard cap or stops scaling or hits diminishing returns...it's just a great bread and butter stat. Fights also have EH "requirements" that generally must be met or else.

Last edited by Semeris (2010-01-30 16:59:02)

Theck from maintankadin has done all kinds of number crunching and graph posting that's become the basis that most people blogs and high end analysis.  I've posted the links to the main discussion thread a few times on our boards, but can't find them for the life or me right now :s  I'll dig it up again at some point and post it here too.

Edit: Holy shit, the "search" function of this board is AWESOME!  I can put in a keyword, and who made the post, and it pulls stuff up!!!  BRILLIANT

http://maintankadin.failsafedesign.com/ … mp;t=26831

a decent recap: http://pwnwear.com/2009/11/30/the-new-e … al-damage/

another break down: http://avengingwrathy.wordpress.com/200 … -headache/

Last edited by Kiku (2010-01-31 11:04:42)

from my own research, i found that in the area of gems for a tankadin, one should go for just the 30 stamina gems with the exception of one gem to fulfill the meta requirement. appropriate exceptions to that rule would be socket bonuses that when combined with the right gems, give you close to 30 stam with the added bonus of whatever avoidance stat the gem provides (ie: dodge/stam gem in my helm, i think its in my helm) i believe  that if you want avoidance, you should rely on gear and one or two enchants for that gear like the shoulder or the cloak chant and if your'e thinking trinkets, i use the ony trinket and the dodge trinket from toc 10 for max avoidance (brings me up to 106 with holy shield active).

because of the dodge debuff in icc, getting close to the avoidance cap isn't going to be easy. sure you can stack parry, but thats subject to a shitload of dr. you can only stack so much armor but even tho thats the only avoidance state not subject to dr, it only does so much and its only physical damage anyways(right?).  the one stat that you can really stack with no limit, no dr is stam. you cant possibly go wrong with stam, its not situational, its not limited to any type of damage and it makes healers love u.

my research on avoidance has been done while i was trying to get block-caped for the heroic anub 10 fight. during that research, done with the help of ej tank spot and enders, i came to the conclusion that you want to have two sets of gear, one for max stamina and one for max avoidance but the key point is that for the max avoidance gear, it relies on the gear, not the gems and with only two exceptions (three if you count weapon) not chants.

http://pwnwear.com/2010/01/19/best-gems … onsidered/

For paladins:
"    * Each point of Agility is 84% as effective as a point of dodge rating for avoidance. (i.e. 10 AGI ~ 8.4 Dodge rating ~ 0.114% Dodge)
    * Each point of Agility is 98% as effective at reducing average incoming damage as a point of dodge rating (you get armour from agility)
    * Each point of Agility also gives you almost 1 point of critical strike rating (bonus threat).

Note: after writing this I realised the coefficient for agility to dodge is worse for DKs to Paladins. I PM’d Theck to ask if he could advise what the impact is. I think it makes us 59% as efficient on the first point, not 84%. Don’t regem until we’ve got the final analysis from him.
"

The upper table is for paladins.  The "us" in the note is for dk

Last edited by Kiku (2010-01-31 16:40:36)

Dk related tank thoughts.

With the soon to be added stam buff to DKs, it really seems like Blood spec tanking and stacking stam gets better and better over the other specs in ICC.

Currently in frost, if my ring or trink procs armor and I pop UA, I hit max mitigation so I'm wasting some armor.  Also with 264 gear, the whole max miss cap becomes an issue with the frost reduced miss talent.  So it seems the frost talents are awesome, but become less and less awesome as tanks hit higher and higher gear?

It also seems that acclimation and the blood spell reduction talents really aren't worth it, even with the spell heavy fights, so much of the ICC stuff just hits you, no matter what.  The only spec I haven't tried is unholy.  Anyone tried it in icc yet?

I actually misinterpreted some of the data, when i said to only match sockets for 12 stam bonuses that is incorrect, ICC level tankadins should match bonuses for 9 stam bonuses as well. Make sure you read the chart instructions carefully.

ICC pallies should choose effective health.