Life AFter 490 Defense - What Do I Do Now?

Got 490 Defense! Now What?

Awesome, you now are not risking your raid on the small chance you'll take a crit and be pushed unrecoverably low in health. Good stuff. 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's left? Stack stamina, stack avoidance, or some combination.

Stack Stamina
This is a very popular option with a lot of raid tanks. This plan tends to go hand in hand with choosing high armour gear to maximise the effect of the stamina. Go through the armoury and you'll find plenty who get to 490 defense and then fill every socket with a +12 stamina gem. 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.

Stack Avoidance
Also very popular. 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. 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. 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. You also need to look at which avoidance to stack:

More 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 or fashion 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 autoattack is reduced by 40%. Good for threat generation, not so helpful when trying to stack avoidance.

Block
Why are you even thinking about this? This has been gone over a million times now. Still thinking that you need 25% block chance to push crushing blows off the table when shield block is up? You Don't Need It. Miss, dodge and parry take precedence on the combat table over block. This has been explicitly verified by Blizzard. 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 far better things to stack, generally. This is not to say that you should never take block rating. This is to say there are better things to take, given a choice.

The Great Debate
So, what to do? First and foremost, let's lay out what we're talking about here: This is meant to speak to you, the warrior who is tanking new content. To borrow Ciderhelm's phrase, it is a progression-based theory. This is something that seems to always get lost in the huge debates that are always coming up. For content you've already mastered, you know what you need to do and your gear is almost certainly past the plateau of necessary and sufficient (like the 20k health tank looking at Gruul.) You should be well-equipped to judge what you should and can wear for it. Add to this that there are going to be fights where putting on your avoidance gear is just the smart thing to do (fast hitters, dual wielders, etc.) This is a nuance of the gearing game that is often overlooked. All that to say this: Multiple gear sets is a good thing.

Nobody is advocating stacking avoidance or mitigation to the exclusion of the other. You can't function without both; you can't not have both! 490 defense and 5/5 deflection guarantees that you'll have over 30% dodge/parry/miss. With basic heroics/5 man gear and no gems or enchants, you're sitting at something like 11k health, 12k armour, and probably 35% avoidance. If you have Karazhan gear, again without gems or enchants, maybe 12k/13k/38%. This is your starting point.

Now, onto the debate. In this corner: the stamina/armour theory.

What I am saying is that once you're there, you have enough avoidance. There is no need to go out of your way to get more. It's time to focus on armour and stamina. The differential in avoidance between straight 490 defense and 40 extra dodge rating, and 505 Defense and 80 extra dodge rating is about 4%. 1 time in 25, you will get a timely avoid to extend your shield block that you wouldn't have otherwise gotten. 4% higher chance to avoid something that you would not have otherwise. This is not a huge difference here, the difference is not 0-26% dodge. It's 22-26%. If you stack more avoidance than that, you maybe make it 8%, or one in 12 on shield block. But it's still a random variable. And you keep your health lower because of it.

The experience that a majority of people are drawing on is Karazhan and heroics. 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, great! Mana efficiency increases with your avoidance, and that's great since the number of healers is limited. So far as most people can see this makes avoidance very desirable, and in this context it is. If your tanking game is Karazhan and Heroics then avoidance is your friend (though Nightbane is a good fight for high stamina/armour due to his hard hits).

However, because of the game mechanics, Stamina and armour is the only real choice - when you're looking at new content. Why? Because of healing and rage.

Most people don't look at the bigger picture of the raid's mechanics.

Let's move into Gruul's Lair now. High King Maulgar hits like a truck in autoattack, and adds three special attacks into the mix (your healers consider the Whirlwind that pulses for 6000-ish damage each to be time for a breather here.) Gruul starts out hitting hard, and only gets harder as the Grows stack. 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. It really is as simple as that. The healers must be healing in anticipation of the damage coming in, in terms of keeping average healing per second higher than average damage per second. There is no break, and no point where you are not healing. You can interrupt a heal sometimes when the tank suddenly pops to full, but even that is a gamble against what the next hits are going to be. At this point, excess avoidance is a wasted thing, because all it means is that you got overhealed. Avoidance does not increase your healers' mana efficiency here. They are almost always casting those heals regardless of whether you avoid or not. If they don't, you die. This only gets more and more true as you move past Gruul to Magtheridon (9k cleaves and 5k normal hits) and beyond.

This is where stamina and armour stacking come in. We've all read armour-stamina equivalence by now. This has three effects:

When the burst damage comes, avoidance leaves it to chance whether you will dodge one and be okay. Combined high stamina and mitigation makes it a constant to absorb the damage and leave enough time for the heals to come. Every extra hitpoint and every bit more mitigation combines and amplifies to make you that much harder to kill, and does it in a consistent fashion. There are fewer streaks where nothing happens to your health at all, and fewer streaks where you go down super fast. Everything is steady and predictable. There is enough time to heal, and you win.

Then there is rage. Avoidance means less rage. Less rage means less threat generated, and more conservation needed to do everything you need to do, like put shield block up. Less threat means longer fights, and the chance of someone pulling aggro is that bit higher. Less rage can mean you sit there hoping that you take a hit after the fourth dodge, so that you have enough rage to put shield block up! It's a trite old saying, but it is true: if you can't spend all your rage, even on a raid boss, you are doing something wrong. Avoidance limits your performance. This is my personal number one reason for disliking avoidance. I'm always looking for rage. If you're sitting there thinking "I always have enough rage, and I never lose aggro". I invite you to go find a well geared DPS and have them light it up to 1000+ threat per second while you're tanking. You need to understand how much they hold back normally. To be fair, on some fights this is not as much of an issue, but on others it's painfully evident.

If by adding armour and health you can make that damage stream consistent enough, lower the magnitude of the incoming damage per second, and increase your overall time to live from full to zero, then your heal team can start to use more long cast heals and fewer short cast heals. Not to mention that bigger health pool makes overheals that much less likely. This is what creates mana efficiency. This is the least of the effects since healer mana isn't usually an issue anyway, but given the changes constantly coming it may become more important (and it may free a healer to do something else anyway.)

The BIG key concept here is this: It's not about taking less damage; it's about being able to take more damage. Once you wrap your head around that, it all makes sense. This is why you don't care so much about avoidance in the context of the 25 man raid boss, which is a much different game than Karazhan. If you're tanking Karazhan and heroics, knock yourself out with avoidance. However, it's a safe bet to say that the further into the endgame you go, you will ultimately find you want to choose gear with the best combination of high armour and high stamina. Get battlescar instead of elusion (and get some avoidance anyway!) Use maiden gloves. Socket with Solid Star of Elune (don't be cheap, it's imaginary money in a video game!) and enchant for stamina. Take an increase in the constant buffer instead of a reduction of the random. You'll have plenty of avoidance. Regardless of what theory you believe for socketing, warrior gear tends to be overitemized for avoidance and underitemized for stamina. Add to that the extra armour and health, and it makes your healers' lives less stressful.

Anye questions please whisper me.

Huntres